BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR, YOU JUST MIGHT GET IT. The Kerry Spot covers a speech by former Speaker of the House and former academician Newt Gingrich, in which the Speaker Emeritus suggests academic tenure provides no protections academicians would otherwise enjoy.

You don’t need tenure in this country anyway. The idea that he would be oppressed without tenure is nonsense. There are 75 whacked-out foundations that would hire him for life. Dozens of Hollywood stars would hold fundraisers for him. His life will become a film by Michael Moore.

The question here, is ‘What obligation does society have to fund its own sickness?’

We ought to say to campuses, it’s over…We should say to state legislatures, why are you making us pay for this? Boards of regents are artificial constructs of state law. Tenure is an artificial social construct. Tenure did not exist before the twentieth century, and we had free speech before then. You could introduce a bill that says, proof that you’re anti-American is grounds for dismissal.

Ouch. Donna Shalala or Stanley Fish might have different ideas about what is anti-American than would Newt Gingrich. Set up no machinery of repression you would not entrust your most severe critic to operate. (By the way, there is no such thing as an "artificial" social construct. Institutions evolve to reduce transactions costs. The question before the house is, are there more efficient ways of achieving the desirable outcomes of academic tenure, with fewer of the bad features?)

The next Kerry Spot post offers some followups. A Poliblogger post (and I wish I had met the owner of that site, who works at Troy, before December 30), calls for quotation and commentary in detail.

There already exists a great deal of resentment towards universities in the public, and Churchill has become the poster child for that resentment. Still, I find it ulikely that there will actually be a major movement to utterly do away with tenure. Although I will note that there has been a diminution in the number of tenure-track jobs in recent years, and that fact has nothing to do with public pressure.

Setting aside the issue, for a moment of whether tenure is a good thing or not, I find Gingrich’s stance to be stunning. Yes, Ward Churchill has said, and will continue to say, hateful thing about the United States, yet how in the world does Mr. Gingrich propose operationalizing the concept of “anti-America” and thereby codifying it into law? And do we really even want to do such a thing? Do we want to unleash a witch hunt in our universities to weed out those who don’t think and speak “the right way"? To what end? What will we, as society, gain from such a process?

Amen. And to what extent might the existing "diversity" machinery be co-opted into this process with only the objects of hounding changed? And Poliblogger is correct that it would be very easy to weed out the "anti-American" formerly tenured faculty and enhance productivity, badly measured, at the same time.

I will say this: a lot of university administrators would love to get rid of tenure. It would allow them to cow the faculty, because any uppity professor who dared to challenge the administration would know that their job was on the line, meaning that there would be a whole lot fewer uppity professors to have to deal with. Doing away with tenure would take away the ability of the faculty from being any kind of check on administrations, who often do not make decisions based on the best academic/educational reasons, but rather looking solely at financial considerations. Further, doing away with tenure would allow administrators to create more jobs like this one, noted by OTB’s Leopold Stotch, which has the long-term effect of turning universities into the 13th, 14th, 15th and 16th grades. The tenure system, which requires more than just teaching, helps to guarantee that professors are, indeed, area specialists–i.e., experts in their fields who engage in career-long learning and contribution, not just teachers who get four years of training and then teach essentially the same thing their whole careers.

This is true up to a point. It is not always clear that tenure is recognition of scholarship already done, or anticipation of research yet to come, and administrators like to exploit tenured faculty by seeking to make them serve on proliferating committees, or become department chairmen, or otherwise spend less time either on original thinking or on revising their class notes, or seeking a clean proof that a function is linear if and only if it is concave and convex. (That's not as easy as it looks. Prove it from first principles, without taking derivatives or asserting it as a definition.) This conclusion, however, is correct.

On a more minor notes, Gingrich statement “Tenure did not exist before the twentieth century, and we had free speech before then.” is a non sequitur. For one thing free speech, per se, isn’t the underlying issue, academic freedom is, which is a related topic, but not the same thing. Further, whether or not there was free speech (or academic freedom) pre-20th century raises questions about the quality of that speech at that time, as well as the nature of the university system in the 19th century.

Really, conservatives make a major mistake in making Ward Churchill representative of the entire academy. Further, he is more effectively an argument against affirmative action hiring, rather than an argument against tenure or some generic critique of the academic world.

Yes. Freedom of speech, narrowly defined, applies to political speech. Private universities, strictly speaking, can restrict speech without running afoul of the First Amendment. But private universities that do not encourage the continual and fearless sifting and winnowing by which alone the truth can be found, which is the essence of academic freedom, limit themselves to parroting work already done, while adding nothing to the understanding or the development of that work. (It is true that some tenured professors are equally guilty of that, but the blame for that rests on the professor himself as well as on the tenure system. It is also true that sifting and winnowing includes, but is not limited to, the questioning of the existing order of things.)

GOOD EVENING, HOCKEY FANS, AND WELCOME TO THE DANE COUNTY MEMORIAL COLISEUM. As I went through my archives pulling out some keepsakes from the Milwaukee Hamilton 1972 state basketball championship, I came across an article from Sports Illustrated, sometime in January or February of 1973, headlined Wisconsin on the ice: hullaballoo! Here's the way things used to be.

The house specialty is reserved for a Wisconsin goal. At 8:15 of the second period Dennis Olmstead, son of the NHL immortal Bert, scores. His is the first of 41 shots at the Michigan State goalie to get through. Still, to the gathered faithful the goalie is obviously full of holes, like a sieve, which explains what follows.

The noise begins low down near the ice, from a few voices, clipped and quick: "SIEVE, SIEVE, SIEVE," and then spreads quickly, the tempo slowing: "SIEVE . . . SIEVE . . . SIEVE," sonorous and heavy, continuing as play resumes, on and on, accompanied by a forest of raised forefingers, all shaking and pointing derisively at the visiting goalie in tempo with the chanting. The boos had been a blessing in comparison, and the din has hardly abated when Gary Winchester scores Wisconsin's second goal.

Wisconsin had the best sieve-chant anywhere in hockey, EVER, in those days. The seating capacity of the Dane County Coliseum, where smoking was not permitted in the seating section, was 8,431, and the fans would boo the announcer if the night's attendance was a number less than that.

In Madison, hockey fans may be excused if they ask, "What hockey strike?"

Maybe the best way for America's dwindling core of [NHL] hockey lovers to look at things is that the game isn't dying, it's just away getting an education.

While the pros were throwing themselves under a Zamboni last weekend, the Kohl Center was selling out twice as the University of Wisconsin split with first-place Colorado College. More than 30,000 people were content to let the conglomerates fuss while they watched the collegians check.

But Wisconsin's coach, Badger national championship veteran Mike Eaves, aspires to do better.

They've sold out their last five games in the Kohl Center, lead the nation in attendance, are a lock to make the NCAA tournament, still have an outside chance at winning the league title and will lose only two seniors after this season.

In other words, hockey is doing fine at Wisconsin. But it used to do better and should again, according to the coach. Eaves played on one of the Badgers' five national championship teams, and he thinks it has been too long since the last one came around in 1990.

"We should be in that mix every year," he said.

That certainly wouldn't hurt the gate, but then Wisconsin already is averaging just 2,000 a game short of a sellout, which is another area Eaves plans to improve.

"We'd like to get to the point where basketball has evolved, and that's a tremendous goal" he said.

Two thousand short of a sellout. Back to Sports Illustrated.

No boos were ever like the Coliseum's -- none so oppressive, so incessant, so nearly evil. They reverberate so thickly they seem to form clouds, to rain down millions of little b's and o's onto the bowed heads of visiting teams.

But presumably no longer, and no longer on the announcer who reports that 8,431 people are in attendance at the somewhat larger Kohl Center.

How things change. In the early 1970s, the basketball team floundered while the hockey team played the Soviets in Madison on New Year's Eve and made regular appearances in what was not yet called the Frozen Four. The basketball program has made great strides,

A reminder of how tremendous will come in a couple of weeks, when Wisconsin has home ice for the first round of the WCHA playoffs but will get bumped to the Dane County Coliseum while high school basketball takes over the Kohl Center.

Where, I hope, the reported attendance will be no less than 8,431. And I hope to hear of some good sieve-chanting.

The coach has a bit of a problem, however, as the Badgers are in the middle of a late-season swoon. They have to make up five points with three games to play, which means they'll need a little help from the other teams in the league.

ON DEALING WITH ADVERSITY. Florida State rises from ACC, personal depths.

Sue Semrau, in her eighth season as coach at FSU, has found a way to win despite a five-guard starting lineup.

"You can develop a real character about you if you really believe and commit to going through pain," says Semrau, whose team rebounded from a 28-point loss Thursday to No. 24 North Carolina State to post a 94-83 triple-overtime win against Virginia Tech two days later. "Obviously, we've been through that."

As Women's Hoops Blog notes, it has been a lot to go through. The players and the coaches didn't let the early expectations or the adversity get to them.

Understandably, expectations for FSU were low. The team was picked eighth in the 11-team ACC, and even that would've been considered an accomplishment in some circles.

"From the outside looking in, I would've thought the same thing," Semrau says. "But we had to find a way to make this work."

While many will cite the Seminoles' upsets of Maryland and North Carolina as the catalyst, Semrau looks back further.

She believes the second game in November, when Linnea Liljestrand, who averaged 3.1 points as a reserve the previous season, scored 20 in a 72-62 win against Florida, was the key.

"Being able to beat our archrival, a team we hadn't beaten in 16 tries, was huge," Semrau says. "The kids began to see the reward."

The result was a school-record 12-game winning streak that's led to the first 20-win season in 14 years.

That's such a refreshing contrast to this.

SNAKES ALIVE. Kimberly at No. 2 Pencil has linked to my post about common spelling and interpretation errors. There are several good comments in her comments section. Those individuals, and other No. 2 Pencil readers, are welcome to participate in bull sessions here. The coal stove is near the tool crib, and the coffee is hot and strong. There will be some racket from the boiler shop and occasionally the drop forge will make itself heard. Explore safely, but do have a look around.

ALMOST ENOUGH INSPIRATION. Several members of the 1972 Milwaukee Hamilton state basketball championship team made it back for the Friday night game and the post-game party at a nearby saloon. The current basketball team, which has no seniors, took Milwaukee North to overtime before bowing, 65-68.

THINGS THAT MAKE YOU GO HMMM.... Atlantic Blog asks a good question.

For some reason, I keep encountering football players majoring in the subject and women's studies directors who teach in them. Coincidence?

No. Symbiosis between two fictions. His post focuses on the fiction of oppression. The other is the fiction of the student-athlete.

KUDOS. Betsy's Page takes a blogging sabbatical to take a quiz bowl team to the Big Dance.

AUDIT THE INTERCHANGE REPORT. Prof. Blogger's Pontifications reminds readers that his service is different from Professor Blog, who appears to have embargoed his service toward the end of last year. Mea maxima culpa.

SUPERHEATED STEAM. Sometimes it can be preserved. Sometimes it has to be reconstructed. There's one very interesting preservation project going on in Argentina.

This is Argentina, the first design project of Livio Dante Porta. Some British steam enthusiasts have discovered it, in a poor state of repair in an obscure engine terminal, and organized a fundraising drive to return it to running order.

Put simply 'Argentina' is one of THE most important steam locomotives of the 20th century. How so? At the age of just 27, Argentine engineer L.D.Porta oversaw the design and production of his very first locomotive. In the process he produced one of the most striking and memorable locomotives of all time. On test 'Argentina' matched or bettered just about every efficiency record that stood.

In Britain, steam locomotive preservation has become steam locomotive re-creation, with a Great Western Saint (don't you agree 2929 is well-named?) being built using components from a Hall (reversing the creation of the first Hall from a Saint) and this magazine noting a project afoot to create a Great Western County (I have a fiendish plot for a model of N^o. 1027) from scratch, see also this. There is also a new Peppercorn A-1 a-building in Darlington.

My candidate for a re-creation in the States? Let's start with the Hiawatha F-7 Baltic, and once one is built, let's turn it loose on the C&M to see how fast it will go.

MAINTENANCE MATTERS. New York Metro reports that, although the subway is still in good shape, the current budget raises the spectre of future decay. Back to 1975?

A sidebar offers some suggestions to improve the subway, borrowing the best ideas from other cities. One proposal suggests that the way to prevent passengers from being nudged into the way of arriving trains is to equip each station with sliding doors that open opposite the car doors after the train has stopped. The article borrows this idea from the Paris Metro.

The city that does this really well is Piter, where the sliding doors are most practical in the depths of the Russian winter, when the sun barely gets above the horizon and there may be thirty degrees of frost in the tunnels.

London Underground -- and now Washington Metro -- countdown signs to the arrival of the next train get rave notices as well.

DIE SCHNELLSTE DAMPFLOK. Nothing is quite so charming as a pointless argument about the greatest achievements of an out of date technology. But I do commend this site, which makes the provisional argument that the steam speed record belongs to a German streamlined Baltic. Here is that candidate.

Baltic 05-002 leaves Hamburg.

The author's thesis is as follows.

A comparison is made with UK A4 class pacific Mallard which is said just passed the 124.5 mph of 05 002 on 3rd July 1938, as Mallard's designer, Sir Nigel Gresley only counted the 125 mph as the true maximum. But Mallard's dash was down Stoke bank against 05 002's near level track epic, and Mallard failed with an overheated big end bearing immediately after its top speed. The comparison will ask if horsepower calculations support the partly erratic dynamometer car speeds recorded for Mallard, and whether railway "politics" or national pride influenced the speeds reported for that loco.

The achievements of the USA's Milwaukee "Hiawatha" A class Atlantics and F7 Hudsons will be examined: locos recorded at speeds very close to the European records. Did one of these locos have the capability and opportunity to set the world speed steam record?

The site is quite well researched, although the author has not yet analyzed a footnote in Baron Vuillet's book that refers to the 125 mph an F-7 maintained over five miles with a test of a 1938 Hiawatha consist.

And let's compare and contrast the test trains. The German trains never exceeded 255 Imperial tons on the drawbar. That's a five coach Milwaukee Express. A real Hiawatha looks like this.

Swift of foot was Hiawatha
With each stride two miles he measured.

Note that regular service Hiawatha trains put 450 Imperial tons plus on the drawbar. In the case of any ties, the honors ought to go to the locomotive that could move a heavier train at the same speed. Anybody can build a sports car or a jet sled to go fast. But to build something that can pull a serious train at those speeds is a real accomplishment.

The site offers one interesting nugget about the large German Pacific 18-201, which holds the speed record for steam in the 21st Century.

This locomotive began life as a large 4-6-6T (did the Germans have a case of Boston and Albany envy?) But doesn't that partial skyline casing and the smoke deflectors give at least a nod to the Boston and Maine P-4a Pacifics?

SOMETIMES THE CRAZIES COME WITH WARNING LABELS. There won't be much posting on academic follies today, but I couldn't resist linking to this gem at Tears of Things, who has been devoting much more energy than I care to to the Ward Churchill story. But I love this invented spelling.

Identifying as Xican @ --written with an "X" and with an "@" symbol as a progression of the term Chicano-- has become increasingly complicated and hybrid since the rise of cultural empowerment and nationalist movements during the 1960s and 70s. Twenty-first century diversity and hybridity of Mexican-American experiences --Mexitaliana/o, "Jewsixcana/o," Native-Chicana, Salvadoreña-Chicano, Chicana/o-queer, etc.-- have greatly expanded the terms on which we can identify as Xican @ s. What has remained a constant, though, is that Xican @ identity is steeped in social and economic justice, race, gender and sexual equality, cultural progression and decolonization under a shared, albeit diverse, Mexican-American experience, history and cultural origin.

Got that. I shall give the same wide berth to devotees of Xican@ that I do to people who insist on referring to females as "womyn."

COMING TO THE READY TRACK. Too much grippe, too many lower back pains, too many drab overcast days, stacks of bluebooks, stacks of homeworks add up to little time for the railroad and little energy to work on it. But relief is on the way, and look what K-Line Trains are doing in O Scale.

Pay no attention to that out-of-scale track.

North American railroads didn't have many tank engines, as the distances between water tanks tended to exceed the capacity of the tanks. This locomotive, employed in commuter train service on the Riverside line of the Boston and Albany (now a branch of the Green Line streetcar network), is the guts of a J-1 Hudson in a package capable of running around on a short tail track, and offering the crew a clear view when running bunker first.

In British nomenclature, this engine would be classed 8P (it's too big for the British loading gauge, despite that short stack and those flat domes.)

TWIXTERS. University students and recent graduates are considering the implications of having many choices to make, while discovering what the choices are under uncertainty about what the consequences will be.

Between-time for undergraduate and graduate school has lengthened because students are taking more time to understand exactly what their chosen profession entails...

As Lev Grossman recently noted in TIME magazine, "twixters"- those making the transition from education to career- are not lazy although they may still live with their parents and have unstable personal and professional lives.

One student recognizes the tradeoff.

"You can make all the money in the world, but if you’re miserable for 30 years, what’s the point?"

Photon Courier has also noted the phenomenon, and offers a suggestion.

And one of the reasons why we spend such vast sums of money and human energies on higher education is precisely to give the students an exposure to a cultural framework extending behond the popular culture of the moment.

Yet, it's probably true. For most college graduates, the popular culture probably remains the only culture.

It seems to me that university professors and administrators should either disagree with this statement, or be profoundly disturbed by its truth.

True enough. To expose students to something resembling a common culture, let alone a higher culture, would be to challenge many of their preconceptions, as well as to call into question much of the mindless "inclusion" rhetoric popular with educational "theorists." However, the recognition by students that doing what somebody else thinks is right, no matter how miserable it makes you, is a healthy development.

SEPARATING EQUILIBRIUM. Thomas C. Reeves has been thinking about strengthening the high schools.

Those not going on to college see no reason to be forced to read, write, and calculate on an advanced level. Many planning on college know they can be admitted to the great majority of the nation’s institutions of higher education with mediocre credentials. And once there, they can major in Mass Communications, Police Science, Film Studies, Peace Studies, Recreational Management, and the like.

Of course, the picture is not entirely bleak. A great many private high schools advertise their high educational quality, and so do some public schools, especially those competing for voucher students. In Pewaukee, Wisconsin, outside Milwaukee, the public school system runs a newspaper ad boasting of its superior academic scores and its “rigorous and challenging curriculum that surpasses state high school graduation requirements.”

In that direction lies the road to prosperity for some, to ruin for others. Many of the majors Professor Reeves mentions are in the Division of Cooling Out The Mark.

And it's time to lay to rest this myth.

If the raising of standards leads to many student drop-outs, so be it. There are many avenues available for such people to learn trades and skills, and their absence may well enhance the learning environment of the schools they have left. People who cannot or will not learn are often disruptive; their frustrations can be, understandably, acute. We should concentrate in high school on those who truly want to learn—or who can be persuaded to learn.

But let us think more carefully about how the schools allocate people to "trades and skills." There are many fine colleagues at Northern Illinois, excellent scholars, great conversation buddies, but they couldn't carry my calipers and I don't want them anywhere near my Unimat, especially when the milling machine is set up. You think somebody who has trouble with "want fries with that?" is going to be able to interpret the calipers or set up the milling machine?

This conclusion, however, is correct.

It may be that, in time, if we can raise the high school standards, we can then turn much-needed attention to the nation’s colleges and universities.

There is, however, another route to the same outcome. But it would require great fortitude on the part of all the colleges and universities. Imagine a national policy of "no remediation." No four years of composition and literature in high school? Fuhgeddaboudit. No mathematics through pre-calculus? Fuhgeddaboudit. No foreign language? No Charlotte Simmons experience for you. No lab science? No way.

Unfortunately, some institutions would see a way to bring in additional student fee money to retire revenue bonds by defecting from the agreement.

THE LIMITATIONS WHICH TRAMMEL INQUIRY. Jeff at Quid nomen illius? and Professor Blogger have weighed in with reactions to my question about the state of academic freedom.

I think Jeff is teasing, but there's an edge to it.

Professor Blogger suggests all academics have freedom, but some have more freedom than others. He gives three reasons for anonymity.

1. In order to be honest about some issues otherwise generally taboo (such as the lecherous minds of faculty).

OK, I'll keep reading his site with this in mind. Perhaps economists aren't that randy, or perhaps my own mind is sufficiently lecherous that the lecherous minds of others make no impression. This site tends to be G-rated anyway.

2. Out of a sense of loyalty to his school. If Prof. Blogger wishes to kvetch about a particular administrative decision, for example, he thinks he owes this institution enough that he should not bring public disgrace upon it (unless some wrongdoing of such magnitude occurs that he cannot maintain silence in good conscience).

Different styles. The Superintendent believes in naming names. The Superintendent also conjectures that the public disgrace will be greater, the longer the lag between the wrongdoing occurring and the wrongdoing coming to light.

3. Because some of his posts would be professionally suicidal. While the Professor has not made such an ass out of himself as Ward Churchill, he has certainly made more provocative statements than the mild Larry Summers.

The followup to this observation is telling.

In a side note, the Professor would like to write a book from a conservative perspective after he completes his current projects. When he mentioned the idea to his chair, the chair said, "Someone needs to write that book. Don't you start on it until after you get tenure." For those students who do not understand the Byzantine world of academic hiring, the (simplified) translation: "That is an excellent idea that would get you fired."

Put another way, academic freedom for the untenured is the freedom to hold the party line, or to leave. Now consider this mix: the prospect of lifetime employment is likely to attract disproportionately many time-servers, risk-avoiders, and conformists in the first place. Now reward those behaviors with tenure and promotion. Is that the proper foundation for engaging in continual and fearless sifting and winnowing once the congratulatory letter from the trustees arrives?

That's a point Academic Game made some time ago (in a series of exchanges with Professor Blogger.)

Academia, through academic feardom, prevents people from speaking the truth lest the speaker offend someone and turn that person into a powerful enemy. On the other hand, for those who have real power and abuse it on campus, practically nothing can stop them in the name of academic freedom.

This was before the Churchill and Summers stories broke.

HOW OTHERS SEE US. George Neumayr writes an essay for American Spectator that is unsparing in its criticism of the academy.

Time and again, the post-1960s university has chosen politics over truth, "equality" (which, let's face it, means hiring incompetents to teach illiterates) over academic excellence, and petulant professors over students seeking a real education.

Students always come last in these controversies. Whether they get a good education is irrelevant to tussling academics. In fact, faculty ideologues would prefer students not receive any deep, comprehensive knowledge from the curriculum as that makes them more difficult to manipulate.

To see how fundamentally uninterested they are in the academic welfare of students, look at the endless energy faculty ideologues spend on "diversity" demands, a blatantly political, not academic, goal.

Well, sometimes they spend energy on assessment of the obvious, or on wrangles over how to divide the niggardly sum the administration consents to make available for merit pay. Or they redefine curricula so as to keep more credit hours in-house and away from more demanding departments.

Methinks Mr Neumayr does not quite grasp the difficulty of finding good teachers who are also original thinkers.

If every female teaching candidate Harvard interviewed were like Marie Curie, Harvard could hire them all and have 100% female representation. Would that be "diverse"? No, but it would guarantee that Harvard students received brilliant instruction. Similarly, if every candidate were like Albert Einstein, Harvard could hire all male mathematicians and serve its students.

We don't know that. Are there excellent teachers and researchers who were advised by excellent teachers and researchers who were advised by Professor Einstein, or by Professor Curie? If memory serves, Professor Einstein once estimated that perhaps six people could grasp his general theory of relativity. (Correct me if I've misstated this.) Does that say something about his ability to teach, which involves rendering the unfamiliar familiar, and the familiar strange (any thought experiment involving a train getting shorter as it goes faster would do that.)

DO YOU BELIEVE IN MIRACLES?

On Lake Placid ice, the embattled skaters swirled
And fired the shot heard round the world.

Was it really 25 years ago that the U.S. Olympians beat the Soviets to earn the right to face Finland for the gold medal? Mitch at Shot in the Dark and Superhawk at Right Wing Nut House have some observations about the state of life in the U.S. (although President Carter never said "malaise," he was dressing in sweaters long before that became a European way of shilling for the Kyoto treaty; he was generally being pessimistic, when not being chased by swimming rabbits. And you've had some kind of mushroom ... no, wrong song.)

The victory was so newsworthy that Detroit's classical music station, WQRS, announced the score between two performances, which ruined the surprise (my plan was to work and listen to the radio station least likely to give a hockey score and catch the tape-delayed game without any information.) I watched the game and enjoyed it anyway.

And while the Minnesotans are right to take pride in their Coach Herb Brooks keeping that team together, I like to think of that 1980 Winter Olympiad as the Wisconsin Games, with Eric Heiden and Sheila Young winning speedskating events, and current Wisconsin women's coach and Badger forward Mark Johnson, son of legendary Wisconsin coach Bob Johnson, scored the go-ahead goal against the Soviets. It would be anachronistic to call the Reds the "Evil Empire," as The Empire Strikes Back was released in April of 1980.

A SHOUT OUT. Bogus Gold has been interviewing members of Minnesota's Northern Alliance of Blogs. The most recent interview is with King of SCSU Scholars, who says kind words about Cold Spring Shops. Check out the rest of the interview.

PEOPLE RESPOND TO INCENTIVES. The administration at a high school decides to strike a blow against obesity by removing candy vending machines? (Candy vending machines?? The powers-that-be at Milwaukee Hamilton resisted the idea of a student lounge, available for pool or ping-pong in the second half of lunch hour; there were no vending machines in the lounge; and I'm not sure anybody had the disposable income for such goodies anyway. The basketball team managed to win a state tournament despite such oppressive conditions. But I digress.)

Efficiency is the identification and exploitation of all possible gains from trade. Enterprising high schoolers recognize the gain from trade implicit in the removal of all the vending machines. A Constrained Vision details what happens next.

THE HIRING SEASON. Michael at Wormtalk and Slugspeak provides a rundown of the search and tenure procedures at his college. His primary message:

Lack of transparency is everywhere a problem, but it is particulary bad in academia, and particularly bad within academia at large institutions and state-run schools.

Why is that true? At tenure time, decisive sets and blocking coalitions are possible.

There can be administrative veto by any number of Deans up the ladder to the Provost. The Provost or the President can also veto, and they don't need to give any reasons. There are also in-department vetoes at some places (we don't have one officially, but it is unlikely that someone would be tenured if their entire department wasn't behind them), and by this I mean that there are small committees, controlled by single individuals or small groups, that can effectively veto a candidate.

This varies among institutions. The Northern Illinois University bylaws require the Provost and University Council, and the President and Trustees, to approve any recommendation that has the support of the department, the department chairman, the college promotion board, and the college dean. A written explanation (which can be cursory) is supposed to accompany any negative recommendation.

Where can there be corruption and malfeasance? Obviously at any stage where there is a veto that doesn't need to be explained. The next most obvious places are with the selection of outside referees. Due to super sub-specialization, it is at least theoretically possible for people to choose their friends or obvious supporters and for the Provost and Tenure Committee not to know that this has happened. If there isn't an obvious paper trail, the Provost and President won't see that the possible conflict of interest. People do look out for their friends and political fellow travelers. And the biggest problem of all is that nobody really wants to be a bad guy. So once someone gets to the tenure process, it's very hard to stop it from happening. Referees don't really want to write negative reviews. Faculty members don't want to write negative letters (they'd rather just ignore the whole thing in many, but not all, cases). Most people are only willing to be negative when it appears to be safe--thus the over-emphasis on any hint of certain politics.

I'm not sure what that last sentence communicates. Perhaps economics is different. Note, however, that those reviewers are evaluating published research -- sometimes, in the case of tenure candidates, working papers that are still being evaluated at a journal. And there is one source of the error rate John In the Shadow of Mount Hollywood notes.

I challenge both Jim and Michael to explain the error rate, the assistant profs who are hired whose accents are too thick for sophomores to understand, whose mastery of the material in the 101 course is dodgy, who lecture with their backs to the class, who break out in tantrums at students, who assign soap operas instead of readings, who stay out for a week with a toothache. . . how can this happen with a formal procedure that appears to be so rigorous?

Um, because the formal procedure doesn't evaluate teaching that carefully. That's the message in several of the posts describing the "job talk," which is a presentation of current research. Very rarely does a job candidate get called upon to guest-teach an introductory course. I might have just confessed that the research mission dominates the teaching mission in many searches, but as long as the incentives are for promotion to depend on research and for research to be funded, and as long as evaluation of teaching is limited to student surveys and assessment of the obvious, and as long as administrators use student credit hours per faculty member as the metric of teaching productivity, that is going to be your reality. (Oh, as an aside to John: K-Line have just announced a Suburban Tank in O 2-rail. Thus endeth today's rail content.)

It also remains true that searches can be conducted for reasons unrelated to performance as a teacher or as a researcher. That remains the common thread in the Ward Churchill and Larry Summers stories. Stanley at the Corner suggests that Harvard's president is being mau-maued for telling an unpleasant truth.

Summers calls for research on whether affirmative action does what it claims to do. Do diversity searches really find top quality professors who were only being verlooked because they are minorities, or do these searches only yield professors of middling or low quality? Summers also points out contradictions in what diversity advocates are asking for. Some of them want faculty picked on purely objective criteria like number of papers published. This will supposedly eliminate subtle hiring discrimination. But other diversity advocates want the opposite. They call for choosing minority candidates based on subjective considerations like potential and collegiality, supposedly to overcome the discrimination built into “objective” criteria. Summers asks, which is it? He also wants data to back up the choice of strategy. So in this talk, Summers is subtly but clearly exposing the contradictions and secrets of the campus diversity industry. By calling for objective proof that diversity searches really produce faculty equal in quality to color blind or sex blind searches, Summers is laying out a standard that he knows diversity proponents can’t meet. And the contradictory criteria thrown up by diversity advocates are just different ways of getting to the numbers they want. By calling for objective studies of which strategy actually works, Summers is exposing the failings and contradictions of the whole diversity enterprise. I think this is the deeper reason why Summers is in trouble.

We shall see. It is true that administrations can interfere with searches to force departments to expand their pool or to interview individuals the diversity industry has identified as potential hires. I continue to maintain that many of the shortcomings of hiring identified in the other posts are consequences of the deteriorating working conditions and pay packets, which push ambitious people away from their academic vocations.

HOW BAD IS IT OUT THERE? David at The Torch gets a report on the intellectual climate on a college campus that he is reluctant to post, at the request of the author of the report.

Last week, we received a long and thoughtful e-mail regarding political uniformity at major universities as well as its consequences for students. The author, a professor, closed his message with the following statement:

[P]lease don’t print this—I have too much fear of what would happen to me if my name became too prominent.

As a result, I will not print any excerpt of his substantive remarks lest anyone recognize the argument and attribute it to him, nor (of course) will I print his name. I wanted to note the closing comment because it is representative of dozens of similar messages I’ve received since I joined FIRE. There is a real climate of fear amongst those who challenge the perceived campus orthodoxy—a fear that is grounded in countless speech codes and countless examples of censorship.

Am I fortunate, or just obtuse, that such things have either not happened to me or that I have not noticed?

And what are others up against?

SOME GOOD NEWS. King at SCSU Scholars has been following a number of stories involving heavy-handed actions by academic administrators. There is one bit of good news. The mau-mauing of Professor Hoppe at Nevada-Las Vegas (motto: no felon with a jump shot refused a scholarship) has ended with the non-reprimand reprimand expunged from the professor's file. His request for a year's research leave as compensation for time lost in the show trial remains under consideration.

SOME GOOD NEWS. Cold Spring Shops has been your one-stop-assessment-mock site, complete with a jaundiced view of holistic rubrics.

We are pleased to bring to your attention a positive development at Marquette University (motto: snipers and warriors are insufficiently Catholic.) Marquette Warrior reports that the assessment industry has been mugged by reality.

Over the past three years or so, the most nettlesome and oppressive bit of bureaucratic nonsense imposed on the faculty has been “outcomes assessment” – the requirement that each of us that taught a core course had to collect (or invent) data specific to our course in order to prove that students had achieved some defined educational “outcomes.” Just pointing to the fact that they take tests and write papers and do projects and we grade all of those wouldn’t do. Apparently, that didn’t create enough bureaucratic busywork.

This has been nettlesome because of the amount of work involved, and oppressive because of the realization that Marquette would do something so dumb.

This is priceless.

All of this was supposedly done at the behest of the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools, which has been demanding “assessment” from Marquette. But when the North Central Association came to evaluate the University, they were unhappy with the assessment they found.The problem became obvious when [two REMFs] sat down and went through the data that course based assessment had produced, and tried to find some common metric that would allow aggregation and produce an overall measure of what a Marquette education had achieved. There was none. The data were useless.

And the North Central Association, when they saw it, concluded pretty much the same thing.Bloom says the attempt was “well-meaning” and not the result of anybody being stupid, but that the “sense of pressure” from the North Central and the fact that “not enough people really understood learning assessment” created this fiasco.

Put another way, Evaluator Curley had read Professor Shemp's article in some journal in educational "theory" advancing the argument that "outcomes assessment" was an important metric for judging the effectiveness of a curriculum, and Administrator Moe, without taking the time to read and understand the journal article to discover the absence of empirical support for Professor Shemp's argument, convinced Provost Curly that Marquette had to have "outcomes assessment" across the core curriculum.

Perhaps the administrators at Northern Illinois will reconsider some of their assessment follies in light of Marquette's experience.

LONG, LONG TIME AGO. A relatively new Milwaukee high school won the first Wisconsin Class A boy's basketball championship. There were state champions before, but the field mixed large and small schools.

That high school was, for a number of reasons, quite sports-obsessed. But only now is Milwaukee Hamilton dedicating a banner hailing that 1972 state championship. The celebration is this Friday.

LIFE IS TOO SHORT TO MAKE THE SAME MISTAKE TWICE. That is, unless one is coaching a basketball team mired in losing ways.

Ohio (11-13 overall, 7-6 MAC) outscored NIU 27-6 from the free-throw line as the Bobcats converted 22-of-25 from the line in the second half.

"That is a huge free throw disparity," NIU coach Carol Hammerle said. "We shot 50 percent from the floor, had more steals, less turnovers. How else are you supposed to make up 21 points at the free throw line?"

Apparently recent practices have not incorporated any lessons from three weeks ago, when the team also committed a lot of fouls.

QUOTE OF THE DAY. David Frum explains why critics of the university establishment ought take no glee in its follies.

The corruption of the universities is a terrible shame upon the United States and a cause of profound sadness among American conservatives. When we complain about the abuses on campus, it is not out of glee at scoring a point against an ideological opponent, but out of terrible regret that some of the most essential institutions of this great country - the institutions at which learning and inquiry ought to be honored and served - have so often perverted their best natures to serve bad causes.

America suffers from a dangerous separation of its mind and soul. Its elite intellectual institutions are too often hostile to the country's culture and founding values. As the Journal reporters mention, Harvard continues to ban ROTC from campus for fear of offending the university's militant gay lobby; as Samuel Huntington details in his important book, Who We Are, elite institutions like Harvard regard themselves as multinational, multicultural enterprises independent of the nation and the people that created, sustain, and defend them.

This separation serves nobody. It makes places like Harvard effete and irrelevant. I had lunch a little while ago with a representative of another prestigious school. "We see it as our mission," he told me, "to train leaders." But how can you do that, I asked, when you are instilling your leaders with an ideology that is despised and mistrusted by their potential followers?

At the same time, it badly disserves America to lose the services of places like Harvard.

(Via Milt Rosenberg.)

SECOND SECTION: David at Left2Right has thoughts of his own about Mr Frum's essay, and about the Diversity Boondoggle crowding out other goals of the university.

This comment to that post raises a useful observation about the campus culture wars.

Frum and others are referring to the best universities and liberal arts colleges, and non-religious ones at that. His criticism does not apply as readily to community colleges, lower-ranked state schools, and other schools where education consists primarily of communicating the basics to students who are underprepared for college. That's the kind of institution I teach in, and I can assure you that we don't have time for wallowing in political ideology. Nor do we have the strange sorts of courses that conservatives complain about. And yet we educate more in number than the elite institutions do. ... There the conflicts are between liberal arts professors and those who favor a purely practical education. Perhaps the need for some basic education in the history of philosophy, literature, political science, history, etc., are things we can all agree on, both liberal and conservative.

True in part and false in part. Isn't it the case that the mid-majors have also renamed the employment office as a "Diversity Resources" or something similar? Don't such universities and colleges have majors for cooling out the mark? And to what extent is the preparation problem this commenter notes a consequence of misnaming "admitting unprepared students" as "access?" Isn't that misnaming at the hands of the Diversity Boondoggle?

MORE ITEMS NOT ANTICIPATED IN GRADUATE SCHOOL. I'm finishing a stack of blue books. There were sufficiently many spelling errors that I posted the following announcement on the class website.

I don't want to deduct points for spelling errors.

On the other hand, I expect juniors and seniors to have a basic understanding of the meanings and spellings of simple words.

"There" means "in or at that place."
"Their" is the third-person plural possessive.

"Affect" is a transitive verb.
"Effect," in most circumstances involving economics, is a noun. There is a transitive verb form of "effect," but it leads to cumbersome constructions such as "I expect students to effect improvements in their spelling and punctuation."

A firm that has expenses in excess of revenue "loses" money. The NIU womens' basketball team loses a lot of games. Note that "a lot" are two words.
"Loose" is the command to release a pack of dogs. It can also be used as an adjective to describe Paris Hilton.

"To" is a preposition.
"Too" is a conjunction.

Oh, and it's "i before e, except after c."

Plurals do not take an apostrophe. Contractions and possessives do. Note in the preceding sentence that both nouns are plurals, hence no apostrophes.

Got that?

Editorial comment: can these students sue their high schools for malpractice?

GET BEYOND GRIPING. Katie at A Constrained Vision visits the Conservative Political Action Committee gathering and has some suggestions for students to get beyond making fun of the Last Marxists.

I worry about some of these conservative student activists. They get too caught up in feeling oppressed and always fighting and attacking that they lose any chance of getting people to listen to them. Duke's conservative student magazine, for instance, often seemed more concerned with being snarky and making fun of professors and administrators than trying to make a reasoned case for conservative philosophy that would win people over to their causes. The occasional conservative columnists or letter-writers in the daily paper often seemed to delight in being outrageous and controversial rather than thoughtful and persuasive.

And a lot of these student activists seem to have the attitude that the left is strident and partisan, so we should be too.

That is only the first step. The next step is to offer evidence and propose changes.

Roger Kimball suggests that it is time to get going.

How long will we continue to pay for so-called higher education that abdicates its intellectual responsibilities for the sake of leftist claptrap about "social justice," "structural oppression," "race, gender, class, sexual orientation, disability, xenophobia, imperialism, environmental issues, etc."? Ward Churchill did us the courtesy of issuing a wake-up call, however inadvertent. Let's hope that parents, college trustees, and college donors heed the call.

His post links to the St. Cloud State position announcement that I greeted with great glee, and it's generating lots of spillover traffic (thanks, King!) so come in, the coal stove is hot, the coffee is strong, and it's time to get busy on some positive action. Consider, for instance, what sort of "justice" is served by admitting unprepared students and calling it "access" and what sort of "oppression" is perpetuated by cooling out the marks with un-rigorous area-studies programs that offer degrees of little or no intellectual or commercial value, but high grade-point averages. Or call the public's attention to retention and graduation rates that make Amtrak's timekeeping look good.

REMAIN BEHIND THE YELLOW LINE UNTIL THE TRAIN STOPS. This Boing Boing post featu