RECOVERY EFFORTS CONTINUE AT GROUND ZERO. The Deutsche Bank building in downtown Manhattan was too badly damaged on September 11 to be economically repaired. Cleanup crews preparing the building for demolition continue to find human remains.

ERICSSON GOULASH. More information about the Austro-Hungarian monitors.

The k.k. Naval Architect-Inspector Josef von Romako, brother of the famous Biedermeier painter, received orders to design a modern warship for the Danube. He resolved this task brilliantly by orienting himself along the Monitor design but opening new venues in regard to technical equipment. Two years after founding the I. Ungarische Pest-Fiumaner Schiffbau A.G. (Elsö Magyar Pest-Fiumei Hajógyár R.T.), in 1870/71, the Austrian Navy's first two-screw Danube monitors ­Maros and Leitha­ were built there. For the first time an Austrian warship was propelled by two fast running, vertically standing, high pressure engines. One has to know, that in those days common steam-engines were slow-turning low-pressure engines with huge horizontally arranged cylinders. Only after introducing fast running engines and having two engines for propulsion, it became possible to get along with small propellers, imperative, since it was impossible to accommodate bigger screws due to the ships' low draft. For the first time Bessemer steel plates were used for the belt armor, Leitha also got an armored deck--the k.k. Navy's first ships with steel protection. Another new introduction was the arrangement of both guns placed in a revolving deck turret. Advantages of turrets vis-à-vis casemates were lower weight of armor, wider firing angles, and full protection of its gun crew. Two rifled 6in (15)-cm breech loaders, System Wahrendorf, were mounted on fixed sledges. Crude lateral direction was obtained by manually turning the turret, fine tuning was arranged by the ship's maneuvering. It became a tradition from the beginning, that all monitors were named after tributaries of the Danube.

That's thinner but tougher plate than Monitor's iron, and twin screws to Monitor's one. On the other hand, Monitor mounted 15 inch muzzle-loading Dahlgren guns. Ericsson intended breech-loading guns, but the Navy would have none of those, in part because of a fatal accident in which an Ericsson breech-loader exploded, perhaps owing to mishandling by a traditional Navy artillerist. Fire control by aiming the ship was common in the U.S. Navy at the time.

REMIND ME WHY HIGH-STAKES TESTING IS A GOOD IDEA. One of the fringe benefits of being on the "why am I here?" committee is that I receive the weekly missive from the State Superintendent of Education. The missive just before spring break was not pleasant.

State Superintendent of Education Randy Dunn today announced that Harcourt Assessment, a company that had contracted with the Illinois State Board of Education to deliver Illinois Standards Achievement Test materials to Illinois school districts, has failed to meet its contractual obligation with the state.

Harcourt isn't playing well in Peoria.

House Republicans want state school Superintendent Randy Dunn to appear at a legislative hearing and answer questions about a testing company's blunders in delivering materials that students need for the Illinois Standards Achievement Tests.

They're not making many friends in the land of the Burlingtons.

School administrators across Illinois, including in Riverside, Brookfield and North Riverside, hit the panic button last week when materials for the Illinois Standards Achievement Test (ISAT) were late.

Most schools began testing Monday in grades three through eight, but by Thursday many school districts hadn’t yet received their test booklets and other materials students needed to complete the tests.

By Monday, districts in the Landmark coverage area had, indeed, begun testing for all students, but there were plenty of tense moments, even into Monday morning.

There's trouble in River City. (It starts with a T which rhymes with T and it stands for "Tests.")

The most important standardized test that Illinois students take each year is arriving late or with incomplete or incorrect information to several school districts, prompting not only significant stress for educators, but also questions about whether the tests will be valid.

The Illinois Standards Achievement Test, which determines whether a school is on the federal No Child Left Behind watch list, is causing problems specifically for administrators and teachers in Rock Island and East Moline.

Reports of Illinois's troubles show them in Missouri.

State testing in Illinois got off to a rocky start last week after school districts across the state discovered missing and flawed tests.Teachers were angry. Administrators were frustrated. In districts that were forced to postpone the tests, students, who had spent months preparing, felt let down. Illinois officials questioned whether they should fire Texas-based Harcourt Assessment Inc., the company hired to administer the
tests.

Perhaps Illinois officials ought to read some weblogs. A search of the archives at testing guru Number 2 Pencil reveals several stories about Harcourt's troubles as long as four years ago.

To follow up my recent skepticism about standardized tests for colleges ... let's not talk about any market tests for high-stakes testing until the testing companies working with the common schools start passing their market tests. Alternatively, if you're going to introduce standardized tests in some colleges, I volunteer for the control group.

HERE THEY GO AGAIN. Summer is construction season, whether it's a highway, a railroad, or a university.

The replacement of 1,472 windows and outside doors in Reavis, Watson and Zulauf halls will take place this summer, costing about $3,150,000 according to Bob Albanese, associate vice president of Finance and Facilities.

There might be reason to recover the cost with ten years' reduction in heating bills. But I'm looking at the current windows and blinds and expecting the missive (clean up your desks and such lest stuff get trampled or sucked out) implying more disruption of work.

Replacement will begin in May and end in October, but the bulk of the work will be done by August. However, the 1,047 summer courses, according to Registration and Records, offered in various campus buildings will not be affected.

We'll see about that. The space grab the deans started about this time last year is still not finished. A number of offices are still awaiting number plates, and the directory downstairs still shows the deans and assorted functionaries in a number of locations. Perhaps our current acting dean was being honest about being short-staffed, lacking the resources to plan the move properly as well as lacking the resources to measure his departments' efforts properly.

A thought about construction season. Sure, some people view the summer scale-back of school and college efforts as wasteful. But it does offer opportunities for refit and renovation with less disruption of operations, if they're properly managed. Compare that with summer vacation on the roads. Chicago is about to rebuild the Dan Ryan Expressway under traffic. (Years ago, when the Interstates were being built from scratch, the only traffic disruption was coming to the end of the finished stretches and back onto the existing roads.) Railroads do track work as well, and detouring trains is a bit more of a challenge than detouring vehicles that have steering wheels.

LEARNING CURVES. The hall light at the top of the stairs at Cold Spring Shops headquarters shows signs of impending failure. Remove housing. Unscrew light. Remember those original compact fluorescent lamps that resemble the burrito as big as your head? Yup ... that was what came out. It must have gone in there sometime in the last century. Original cost about $12. The replacement ... a 75 watt equivalent that will fit any space your standard Edison bulb will go, for under five bucks. We'll see how long it lasts.

A CHEESEBOX UNDER THE DOUBLE EAGLE. In the course of researching the Confederate commerce raiders, I learned of a noteworthy preservation effort on the banks of the Donau.

The Dual Monarchy commissioned some river monitors in the 1870s, and the hull of one, Leitha, is the focus of a preservation effort in Budapest. (There is at least one of the Hungarian railroad system's streamlined Suburban Tanks in preservation ... must consider another trip that way.)


The preservation effort envisions restoring it as an Ericsson Battery, with a little help from its friends. (There appears to be a way to send Yankee greenbacks.)

TO CATCH A PIRATE, THINK LIKE A PIRATE. I mentioned Tom Chaffin's Sea of Gray, which I recently had time to finish, and herewith Book Review No. 8. This is a great yarn about the efforts of the Confederate consul in Liverpool, one James Dunwoody Bulloch, a.k.a. "Uncle Jimmy" to Theodore Roosevelt, to procure merchantmen for the Confederacy to convert into commerce raiders and the efforts of Union consul Thomas H. Dudley to ferret the efforts out and encourage H.M. Government to live up to its obligations as a neutral. Re-flagging and doctored bills of sale were common, for Yankee merchant ships and Rebel privateers alike.

Once the raider puts to sea, the story becomes more compelling. The last Rebel ship afloat (as events transpired), C.S.S. Shenandoah, was advanced for her time, with a stowable screw propellor to reduce drag when she was under full sail, although that wasn't very often as her captain feared being able to jury-rig repairs with a jury-rigged crew. (Sometimes the crew was less makeshift. The Rebels were somewhat clever at re-crewing on the fly.) Her mission was to disrupt the whaling fleets operating near the poles. Along the way, the captain concludes a treaty with a Micronesian king (on an island referred to at the time as "Ascension," not to be confused with the South Atlantic neighbor of St. Helena, under British administration) whose island hosts the thirteenth-century works of Nan Madol. (That sentence notes several things I learned from reading the book and researching the review.) He later tells a Yankee whaler that the Confederacy had formed a mutual defense pact with the whales. Along the way, his Southern officers learn some hard lessons about the effects of snow and ice on running rigging, as well as the traditional sailor's lesson that there are many days best described as "yesterday, today, and tomorrow," in which nothing of note happens. Those days take on particular importance after Shenandoah speaks a British merchantman out of San Francisco that finally persuades her captain that the Confederacy is in fact lost, and the privateer -- whose status would have been even more dubious had the United States signed on to an agreement among the European powers to abolish the practice -- was in the eyes of the European powers now a pirate ship. But not so much a pirate ship not to be celebrated by Liverpudlians upon her return there, after which several of the officers went into exile in Argentina.

The memoirs of several of the ships crew show some familiarity with Jules Verne's later Around the World in Eighty Days (1872), particularly where the International Date Line divides the whaling grounds, and Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea (1873), where the ruins at Nan Madol are concerned. (Verne also wrote a less-well-known work, The Blockade Runners, about the more glamorous but less effective Rebel efforts on the high seas.)

There's more, much more, to this story. Shenandoah made her way safely to Liverpool, and the officers ultimately benefitted from "with malice toward none, with charity toward all." But you'll have to read the book to understand my choice of a title for this post.

A BAD PARODY OF ISO 9001. That has been my characterization of the teacher-education accreditation exercise we're going through, and it now turns up in comments to Jim at SCSU Scholars, similarly frustrated with accreditors of the business program.

IN THE EVENING CAN THE DAY BE PRAISED. The first warm day of the spring semester. Furnace off, windows open to air the house. One can even understand, without condoning, the low turnout in at least one late-afternoon class.

WHAT IS SEEN AND WHAT IS UNSEEN. Inside Higher Education runs yet another "take this job and shove it" column.

There are an awful lot of people out there who live their lives in a constant state of low-level despondence: They have too many papers to grade, their colleagues are not interested in their work, their colleges are in constant crisis, they didn’t get promoted, they live in the middle of nowhere, they can’t find a date in the middle of nowhere, their partners live hundreds of miles away.

With the usual incomplete list of reasons for the unhappiness.

Some of this unhappiness, I would suggest, is endemic — those repressed details — and some is particular to the conditions of academe at this moment in time — the job market, the decline in education funding, the increasingly corporate university.

Regular readers of Cold Spring Shops ought to be able to identify the omitted important influence behind the "constant crisis" and the "decline in funding."

New readers: stick around. I found another column at Inside that provides more grist for the regular mill. But not tonight. First some rest so as to be fresh for the students; then some after-hours therapy shuffling boxcars. See you in the evening.

THE FOUNDATIONS OF PROSPERITY. I have on occasion suggested that the role of the G.I. Bill college benefits in the emergence of a large, comfortable middle class in the U.S. has been overstated. My interpretation comes in part from reading the history of the large business enterprises and the promoters who created them. These subjects never lack for controversy. The latest reading, Book Review No. 7, is Charles R. Morris, The Tycoons, which credits Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, Jay Gould, and J. P. Morgan with "inventing the American supereconomy." Author Morris attempts to position his book differently from Alfred D. Chandler's The Visible Hand and Scale and Scope, both of which provide excellent background on the strengths (abundant products made cheaply by a few firms) and weaknesses (abundant products made cheaply by a few firms) of industrialization. He also takes a somewhat different tack than many writers, portraying Andrew Carnegie, endower of libraries, somewhat less favorably (he comes off as indecisive and easily swayed, and his obsession with productivity -- hard-driving the steel furnaces -- as the solution to any and all ills almost wrecks his properties), and Jay Gould, issuer of watered stock and hirer of private armies, somewhat more favorably (he understood the advantages of friendly railroad connections coast-to-coast rather than community of interest pools, even if he didn't understand that railroads required proper grading and maintenance.) The central story in the book is the transition of the U.S. economy from Jefferson's yeoman farmers and Lincoln's skilled artisans to a factory system in which the machinery augments the productivity of the man in such a way that a man of even modest talents could make a valuable contribution to the assembly of a high-value product. Toward the end, Mr Morris is scornful of business theorists who would honor time-and-motion expert Frederick W. Taylor, timing to the split second the swinging of a hand-shovel, over tinkerer Alexander Holley, inventing a machine to augment the man's hands. It is in that invention of such machinery that the objective conditions favoring a broad middle class emerge. That the contemporary equivalent of such machinery makes more highly-educated people more productive gives rise to the college premium. (Thus a mass entitlement of higher education does more than slow the re-entry of demobilized soldiers to the labor force; without the objective conditions that is all the entitlement would achieve.)

Although the tycoons did engage in conduct that both inspired enactment of and later required enforcement of the antitrust laws, Mr Morris suggests that their legacy included those objective conditions for prosperity, persisting despite policymakers and management consultants alike putting too much faith in Mr Taylor's "scientific management" rather than Mr Holley's induced innovation.

The appendix inadvertently pays tribute to yet another wrong lesson. Consider this passage.

The Carnegie Co. was a holding company formed in April 1900, comprising:

• The Carnegie Steel Co., its dominant property, plus other holdings previously held on the books of the Steel Co., including
• The Frick Coke Co. The Steel Co. previously held a 29.55% interest in the Coke Co., but the Carnegie Co. bought out the other shareholders shortly after it was organized, so its interest increased to 100%.
• A five-sixths interest in the Oliver Mining Co., which held large ore leases in the Mesabi ore range.
• A variety of railroads, steamship lines, and Great Lakes docks, many of them newly developed and used primarily by the Carnegie subsidiaries.

Tyranny of the four-bullet slide, forsooth. As an exercise, rewrite that as a single paragraph without colons, maintaining proper sentence structure.

MORE STUFF TO READ. This evenings guests on Milt Rosenberg's show were John Franch, author of Robber Baron: The Life of Charles Tyson Yerkes, and John Wasik, author of The Merchant of Power: Sam Insull, Thomas Edison, and the Creation of the Modern Metropolis. These tycoons are respectively the creator of the Union Loop, financier of the London Underground, and donator of the Yerkes Observatory; and the organizer of Chicago's power network and electric suburban railroads, and donator of the CIVIC OPERA HOVSE. They both had brushes with the law and led tormented and sometimes isolated personal lives. One of the authors noted that although Citizen Kane might be about newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst, star Orson Welles groomed himself like Samuel Insull, and some of the scenes in the movie are out of Insull's life. I will likely acquire these biographies and get around to reviews in due course.

PROMISES, PROMISES. Democrats Pledge to 'Eliminate' Osama.

In the position paper to be announced Wednesday, Democrats say they will double the number of special forces and add more spies, which they suggest will increase the chances of finding al-Qaida's elusive leader. They do not set a deadline for when all of the 132,000 American troops now in Iraq should be withdrawn.

I don't recall a Democratic deadline for eliminating poverty. Perhaps some policy goals are beyond anybody's ability to foresee meeting them, desirability notwithstanding.

WASN'T THIS THE TROUBLE WITH TRIBBLES? Surgeons Remove Two Fetuses From Infant. It really isn't funny.

Surgeons operated on a 2-month-old Pakistani girl Tuesday to remove two fetuses that had grown inside her while she was still in her mother's womb, a doctor said.

The infant, who was identified only as Nazia, was in critical condition following the two-hour operation at The Children's Hospital at Pakistan Institute of Medical Science in the capital, Islamabad, said Zaheer Abbasi, head of pediatric surgery at the hospital.

Abbasi, the chief doctor who led the operation, said the case was the first he was aware of in Pakistan of fetus-in-fetu, where a fetus has grown inside another in the womb.

"It is extremely rare to have two fetuses being discovered inside another," Abbasi told The Associated Press, adding that he did not know what caused the medical abnormality. "Basically, it's a case of triplets, but two of the siblings grew in the other."

It's a rare event, occurring about once in 500,000 births.

OF HILLTOPPERS AND WILDCATS. Cold Spring Shops, your one-stop first stop for obscure sports news. Tonight ... the women's National Invitational Tournament, which takes place at the home courts of participating teams. Funnily, two teams with the home court are the finalists. Former North Star Conference member Marquette, now of the Big East, won the Big East consolation game, defeating Pitt. The location of the home court for the final game is now known, with Kansas State, coached by onetime drinking buddy Deb Patterson, defeating Western Kentucky by one in overtime. (No, they did not go scoreless in regulation.) The tournament final is this Friday at 7 pm, in Manhattan.

PLOTS WITHIN PLOTS. Greater DeKalb resident Rick at Right Wing Nut House has the latest "24" summary up. The show gets weirder and weirder. Apparently a precondition for a security clearance at the Counter-Terrorism Unit, let alone at the LaSalle and Bureau County Railway (or whoever is stealing the unit one boxcar at a time) is you have to be some kind of a fruit loop. But leave that aside. Focus on the latest postponed terrorist attack. I know just enough about gas works to be dangerous, and the act of going into a locked room with containers of nerve gas, that, once opened, mix with lower-pressure natural gas that goes through that room, then out a not-well-marked gas main bothers me ... those bad guys should either have suffocated or triggered an explosion starting the timers on those less convincing canisters.

Never mind, it's fiction.

Now consider Mr Moran's prediction.

It’s Henderson vs. Jack with the future freedom of the United States hanging in the balance. The Greeks would kill them both off at the end. Let’s see what Fox comes up with.

They won't come up with it early in next week's show. At the end of the just-ended hour, protagonist Jack Bauer has terrorist squad leader Bierko (who reports to a renegade former Penn Central, er, Counter Terrorism Unit, official) in a submission hold just as the gasworks goes boom right on top of them. The upcoming hour starts opposite the tip-off of the men's collegiate finals. Expect Jack, or a corpse, or the ghost of Robert R. Young, to appear at the end of the hour.

MARKET TESTS TAKE MANY FORMS. Economist John S. McGee once described markets as "environments in which powerful and appraising evolutionary forces are at work." Keep that in mind, then read this Philadelphia Inquirer report on pressure to introduce standardized tests into universities, and University Diaries' comments thereon. (Take the time to visit the sandhouse.)

One paragraph stands out.

[Former Texas system regent Charles] Miller dismissed the comparison [to No Child Left Behind, crowding out learning every day]. The states, not Washington, should take the lead on collegiate testing by requiring it at public universities, he said. Once the big state systems prove its value, he predicted, testing will be swept by market demand into private schools.

Market tests can also provide proofs of something's uselessness. Consider "New Coke" and football in a cage. And therein lies the real test for higher education. What happens when a major employer says "enough" to decoding inflated grades at the job fair and recruits out of high school? Neither the internal assessments the defenders of the status quo nor the taught-to standardized tests will be of any use.

THINGS THAT CHANGE, THINGS THAT STAY THE SAME. I recently finished David Riesman's Academic Values and Mass Education, a 1970 study of the evolution and travails of Oakland University and Monteith College at Wayne State University. A book is not old if it hasn't been read, and herewith Book Review No. 6.

Oakland University came into being as a Michigan State University project to create a high-powered undergraduate college serving a commuting population. In the Sputnik era, public recognition of a knowledge gap between U.S. youngsters and their overseas contemporaries (sound familiar?) led to public commitment of resources to develop more scientists and technocrats (before the cost-benefit ratios were known.) But rather than set up yet another Albion or Oberlin, let alone another land-grant university, Oakland's founders envisioned something at once elitist and accessible. For a number of reasons (Oakland admitted a local valedictorian whose college boards placed her in the third percentile nationwide being symptomatic of one, the temptations of suburban life providing another) the original experiment did not work well, and Oakland added dorms and athletic teams (their women's basketball team received the Mid-Continent Conference automatic bid Northern Illinois once earned during the time Northern Illinois reconsidered its ambitions to be a major independent) to become yet another suburban-specific public college.

Monteith College at Wayne was an application of the ideas of integrated liberal studies within an urban comprehensive university. Professor Riesman characterized the mindset of Monteith's creators and faculty as "anti-departmentalism." The idea continues to appeal ("The world has problems. The university offers departments.") The execution is another matter. Integrated liberal studies proved popular in the heady 1960s, when the reward to a college degree during the Great Society inflation was high, tenure was a matter of course, and anything-goes criticism of The System was in flower. By the time I arrived at Wayne in 1979, Monteith was being phased out as a college. In some ways the fate of Wayne since then has been a foreshadowing of the academy's fate elsewhere. My position as a specialist in public utilities and industrial economics followed Leonard W. Weiss and C. Emery Troxel. I may not have performed up to the standards they set. On the other hand, my colleagues made me look so good that Northern Illinois made me an offer I couldn't turn down, and in those days Northern Illinois had academic ambitions commensurate with their athletic ambitions. How quickly things change.

But what doesn't change is the questing for a mission for higher education. In 1970, Professor Riesman could still speculate on the end of the Vietnam War changing the educational treadmill, such that ambitious people with a blue-collar bent could prosper without spending the money or the time in college. He could cite legislators pressing for higher teaching loads to preclude professors from using their research time to foment revolution, and revolutionaries pressing for higher teaching loads to preclude professors from using their research time to support the military-industrial complex. Conflicts over curriculum and standards are nothing new, and the 1970 arguments are very much like today's. I found this passage depressing and illuminating.

Deans and presidents of primarily undergraduate institutions are constantly complaining that they have to hire Ph.D.s who have little experience of teaching and little interest in it. In the large universities that emphasize graduate training to do research, T.A.s are thrown into the (usually lower-division) classroom with little grounding in their subject matter and even less development of self-awareness as college teachers.

Currently, much propaganda and a few new structures are being devoted to the efforts to develop a greater interest in teaching on the part of prospective college teachers. One proposal is to create a new degree, the Doctor of Arts, which would be a teaching degree, as against the Ph.D., seen as a research degree. Conceivably, as its proponents hope, the Doctor of Arts degree would not be a second-class degree for those cooled out from Ph.D. programs, but a first-choice degree for those whose commitment would be to college teaching and whose doctoral program would be as demanding as but different from a more research-oriented one. It would include consideration of problems of teaching and learning, practice teaching, and work outside one's immediate field of specialization. Yet, unless major universities hire men, including their own graduates, with Doctor of Arts degrees, it is likely that in fact it will be a less valued degree, somewhat limiting the opportunities of its possessors. Moreover, while deans and presidents of colleges want to hire teaching-oriented faculty, a department chairman may be more ambitious for national visibility -- or vice versa. But beyond such considerations, we think that the emphasis on the purity and virtue of the college teacher who does no research can be overdone.

Whew. Summarize in one paragraph several Cold Spring Shops themes. On one hand, here appears to be a track to what Duke calls "Professor of the Practice of ..." On the other hand, here comes the College of Education bringing its untested notions of pedagogic cosmic justice into the practice of economics.

Some passages in the book tell me more about Professor Riesman than they do about the travails of the experimental colleges. The Monteith faculty were able to obtain cooperation more readily from social scientists other than the economists, although he notes that development economics offered a more congenial set of questions for the other social scientists to engage. The development economics of those days was a curious blend of technocratic statism that failed to deliver lasting prosperity anywhere it was tried, although it made wanna-be technocratic statists in other disciplines comfortable with their prejudices. (Other versions of technocratic statism, such as Russia's instant privatizations and Britain's fragmentation of the railroads failed to perform much better.) Elsewhere, he offers one interpretation of a set of facts that well might be interpreted differently. But overall, he leaves the impression that the current tussle over the role of higher education and the proper balance between teaching and scholarship, let alone access and excellence, is neither new nor likely to go away soon.

A CORRIDOR WORKS BETTER WITH GREATER FREQUENCY. Destination: Freedom notes Illinois legislators planning to spend more money to run more trains.

In the past some Amtrak routes between Chicago and downstate cities have been threatened, but this year legislators want Amtrak to operate two additional round-trips between Chicago and St. Louis.

They are willing to triple what the state pays Amtrak in order to do that.

The proposed increase also would fund one extra round-trip along the Chicago-to-Carbondale route and another round-trip between Chicago and Quincy.

This fiscal year, the state is paying Amtrak $12.1 million. Identical bills in the Illinois House and Senate would increase that annual support to $35 million.

“This proposal is building up a head of steam, and it will likely be altered in the coming weeks to reflect the financial capabilities of both the state and federal government,” said state Sen. Jeffrey Schoenberg, D-Evanston, a bill sponsor.

The extra money would be needed to employ additional crew members, print new schedules and add rail cars.

More trains to Southern and to Western and additional calls at Illinois State, even as tuitions rise and the research missions shrink ...

Transportation bills do require the governor's signature.

A spokeswoman for Gov. Rod Blagojevich said he has not yet decided whether to support the legislation.

The governor has taken some stick for maintaining his household in Chicago and maintaining an office there. He might have to extract a pledge that critics not call attention to additional morning and evening trips into Springfield that would allow him to put in a full day there.

CONTEMPLATING THE TRADEOFFS. Immigrant-rights protests continue as Congress debates competing proposals.

The Senate is set to begin debate Tuesday on the first comprehensive rewrite of U.S. immigration laws in a decade.

“We're facing a difficult situation, because we have approximately 11 million undocumented aliens here and we've got to find some way to deal with them,” Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter, R-Pa., said Sunday on ABC's This Week.

Tackling that problem has been one of Bush's priorities since his first term, but it poses a political challenge or him: He must balance the demands of conservative Republicans who want a crackdown on illegal immigration, business leaders who say the nation needs more immigrant workers and Republican Party operatives, such as national Chairman Ken Mehlman, who have been wooing the Hispanic vote.

The president expressed concern last week about the political fallout. “This could be a fractious debate.”

Fine. Consensus is for easy problems.

RESPECT THE BOX. A soon-to-be released (to journeyman economists like me; the Recognized Pundits rate advance copies) book titled The Box : How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger draws a great deal of attention.

I read a review in The Economist.

WHEN the MSC Pamela sailed into Felixstowe, Britain's biggest container terminal, on her maiden voyage last year, Hutchison Whampoa, the port's Hong Kong owners, took a deep breath and renewed their efforts to build more deep-water berths. They were looking to the future. At 1,053 feet (321 metres), and able to carry the equivalent of more than 9,000 containers, Pamela is the world's largest container ship. But not for long: leviathans with twice that capacity are on their way.

The point of all the media tributes is the ostensible 50th anniversary of the international shipping container, which offers two advantages, reduced handling and reduced pilferage, over traditional transloading methods.

Consider the economics. Loading loose cargo, a back-breaking, laborious business, onto a medium-sized ship cost $5.83 a ton in 1956. McLean calculated that loading the Ideal-X cost less than $0.16 a ton. All of a sudden, the cost of shipping products to another destination was no longer prohibitively expensive.

This opened up all sorts of possibilities. Instead of manufacturing goods locally, a company could afford to replace its overcrowded multi-storey factory in Brooklyn with one in Pennsylvania, where taxes, electricity and other costs were lower, and then ship its goods to New York in a container. Later the factory might move to Mexico; it is now probably in China.

An article I recall contrasted traditional shipping with containerization by using the example of a cask of olives. At each transload, a few got crushed and a few got eaten. Normal costs of business and all that. Virginia Postrel's farewell column at the New York Times (her new print medium port will be The Atlantic) notes the change.

Just as the computer revolutionized the flow of information, the shipping container revolutionized the flow of goods. As generic as the 1's and 0's of computer code, a container can hold just about anything, from coffee beans to cellphone components. By sharply cutting costs and enhancing reliability, container-based shipping enormously increased the volume of international trade and made complex supply chains possible.

She links to a Spiegel article that observes the half-century with musings about the latest generation of ships to round the Horn.

Vessels that accommodate 6,000 to 7,000 standard containers -- or TEUs ("twenty-foot equivalent unit") as they are known in the industry -- are becoming a common sight on the high seas. And designers have already dreamed up huge freighters capable of accommodating 13,000 TEUs.

According to one rule of thumb, a single medium- sized ship can move as many containers as are transported on a typical German autobahn during a whole day. When goods are shipped in such vast quantities, the transport costs become negligible.

These ships are too big for the Panama and Suez canals, let alone the St. Lawrence Seaway. What happens when they hit land? Back to The Economist, with more on the challenges facing port authorities (the government agencies that own the port facilities and have the responsibility for providing the infrastructure that companies in Dubai and elsewhere manage.)

As to the future, the author looks to ships that will approach the “Malacca-Max”, the maximum size of a vessel passing through the Strait of Malacca, the shipping lane between Malaysia and Indonesia. Some container ships are already too big to get through the locks in the Panama Canal. The future giants will be a quarter of a mile long, 190-feet wide with their bottoms 65-feet below the waterline. They will be able to carry enough containers to fill a line of trucks 68 miles long. Hutchison needs to get digging.

A quick calculation: 13,000 TEUs = 6,500 40 footers = 3,250 standard well cars = 26 standard stack trains. It's more manageable that way. But The Superintendent's favorite expert on Pacific port operations notes that there is currently no direct rail access to quayside at Los Angeles or Long Beach: anything headed east is rubbered to the railhead. And when those 26 extra stack trains converge on Greater Chicago (which includes the Union Pacific yard at Rochelle -- there are a lot of short cuts of well cars, bare-table moves, and light engine movements through DeKalb now) they're adding to growing congestion on the rails.

Elmhurst, Illinois, 16 June 2002.

The train-spotters are awaiting the arrival of a steam locomotive, No. 3985, which, as is often the case with special events, arrived just as a rain shower ruined the exposures. The train is a bare-table move (empty well cars) reflecting the loads east, empties west (it's sometimes cheaper to sell the container to a scrap metal merchant than to find a westbound load for it) traffic the articles reference. In Chicago,

After 90 years, the railroads finally have run out of excess capacity. That in turn has restored their ability to raise rates, according to James Valentine, a research analyst for Wall Street giant Morgan Stanley.

"These positive trends in pricing and better returns are likely to continue for years, maybe decades," Valentine said.Because "all roads lead to Chicago," he added, the region will get a generous slice. "It should receive a disproportionate benefit from the railroads' resurgence."

Union Pacific's western competitor, BNSF, expects a near-quadrupling of container traffic from 2004 to 2007.

Memo to university administrators: growing demand is often evidence of greater willingness to pay. Railroads are finally in a position to earn the opportunity cost of capital (reported profits in previous years often fell short of that opportunity cost; any distribution to the stockholders is effectively liquidating the company.) But getting there hasn't been half the fun.

Major freight lines once numbering in the dozens combined into the mere half-dozen left today. Employment plunged from 458,000 when Congress approved [the] Staggers [deregulation act] to 165,000 as of 2005.

That difficult period left scars, including strained relations with workers and ultracautious management.

And, despite "productivity" measures that may be the rail equivalent of scan-tron sheets and on-line instruction, crew exhaustion is still a potential hazard sufficient to bring additional rulemaking. And some consumers are discontented.

Some coal and chemical shippers, feeling burned as the railroads flex their newfound power to raise freight rates, have started complaining to Congress. It's a struggle that has flared on and off for more than 150 years, and it could flare anew as these old companies continue shifting into a higher gear.

Ah, yes, all those common and joint cost problems again. (Higher education suffers a similar problem. Is it the well-to-do legacies or the merit scholars or the athletes that are the most price-sensitive traffic?)

AUTHENTICITY, OR SELLING OUT? Chicago Tribune columnist Dawn Turner Trice calls readers attention to an academic conference.

"That's just what we need, more mainstreaming of the pimp-gangsta-thug lifestyle."

What irks me so much about this type of rap music isn't that it's so negative and denigrating and, well, vile--but that there just isn't enough positive stuff to serve as a counterweight.That lack of balance with rap music is just one of the topics V.P. Franklin, Ortique professor of politics and history at Dillard University in New Orleans, will be discussing on Wednesday when he provides the opening address for a four-day conference at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

"Race, Roots and Resistance: Revisiting the Legacies of Black Power" will commemorate the 40th anniversary of the black power movement. (The conference is free. For more information, call 217-333-7781.)

Performance can be a way of making a statement. Performance can be a way of making a living. Hence the tension.

My focus here is the arts segment of the movement because I look at what's happening today with rap music and I worry that its power--its profound reach and influence--is far more destructive than constructive.

Many of the artists who aligned themselves with black power saw a connection between the arts and the other struggles of the day."The art would serve the larger cause of black liberation," Franklin told me. "The paintings, the poetry, the dance, the song lyrics would raise the consciousness of people of African descent and show them what they could accomplish in solidarity."

But those of us who came of age in that era recall that "sell-out" was an insult. Among white kids, the sell-out would imply acceptance of corporate America. Hence yuppies.

Apparently the tension is present in African-American music as well.

"Now [rap music] is much more individualistic," Franklin said. "Once hip-hop became commercial, then the artists felt they had a broader audience. And, in order to please that audience, they had to do certain things that didn't necessarily uplift the black community.

"Three decades later, rap artists use their voice, their power, most often to attain the "bling" rather than to further some cause.

Franklin believes the new artists undermine artists committed to creating more positive work and images that benefit the collective.

But does art or music have to benefit a collective? Why can't rap artists sing what they want and present the images of their choosing?

"The problem is we no longer have any control over the images or the styles," Franklin said. "A lot of young people don't see the alternatives. There's just one way of dressing, of speaking, of behaving--the negatives are being validated on so many different levels."

But is entertainment -- whether it be music or painting or sport -- the sole instrument of validation for anybody?

WE. WANT. MORE. In three overtimes, Wisconsin 1, Cornell 0. Do you remember the spring of 1973? After two periods of a national semifinal game, it's Cornell 4, Wisconsin 0. With 18 seconds to go, Dean Talafous ties the game at five ...

I like the tournament field.

Wisconsin takes on Maine in an NCAA semifinal April 6 at the Bradley Center in Milwaukee. Boston College and North Dakota will meet in the other semifinal.

At one time, there was an alliance between the Western Collegiate Hockey Association and Hockey East. All four of the teams playing in Milwaukee ... hey, another Hiawatha ride? ... are members of that alliance.

SIEVE!

Badgers are also effective Gopher hunters. The women's team denied Minnesota a three-peat, with a 3-0 win in the Cities.

SIEVE! SIEVE! SIEVE!

ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION, PRO AND CON. Virginia Postrel expresses a preference for an immigration policy that can separate the dishwashers from the terrorists. I doubt that anyone would gainsay that. But designing such a policy is harder ... does anyone even have a guess how many terrorists might be masquerading as dishwashers? She links to a Dallas Morning News editorial (I'm going to quote freely before this goes behind the firewall) that pursues multiple goals.

The Judiciary bill would offer the 11 million to 12 million illegal immigrants in the U.S. a chance to earn citizenship. They would have to show they have a job, pay a fine, pass a background check, get their taxes in order and go to the back of the line to apply for citizenship.

Let us repeat that last part, because it often gets misread as amnesty. Illegal immigrants who do the above would not cut in front of anyone else applying for citizenship. They'd have to line up behind everyone else seeking the same citizenship that many legal Americans' own immigrant ancestors sought.

Operationally, it is an amnesty. Irregular workers become regular workers and pay taxes. Citizenship and voting rights are for another paper. Here's a harder problem.

The nation's security is far stronger if we know who's here to frame houses, change linens, bus tables and build microchips – and who shouldn't be here to profit from true criminal activity or worse.

Although now you have a Bayesian inference problem. Does anyone have a subjective probability that a putative dishwasher is a sleeper agent?

There's also a resource allocation problem.

A citizenship plan also makes sense because we simply can't enforce existing laws and send the illegals back where they came from.

That refrain, a staple among some readers and on talk shows, would require rounding up a population the size of Ohio. We don't have enough border agents, police officers, holding cells, judges, courtrooms or buses to make that happen.

Paying several billion dollars to do something of that scale would be fiscally imprudent.

What are the opportunity costs?

The committee would be best served to go with the idea presented by Sens. John McCain and Ted Kennedy, who would allow as many as 400,000 foreign workers each year to receive three-year work visas. They could earn two three-year visas before returning home or earning U.S. citizenship.

That number matches the estimated annual flow of illegal immigrants. If we take those workers and give them forge-proof, biometric ID cards, we ease the burden on law enforcement agents. They will know immediately who's here legally and who's not.

Is there such a thing as a forge-proof identity card? On the other hand, if the authorities knew who was here legally, wouldn't it be straightforward enough to deport the equivalent of the population of Ohio?

Illegal immigrants make up about 5 percent of our workforce. Yank all of them out of the economy, and we have a serious financial problem. You can't punch that big a hole in the workforce without upending industries, farms, manufacturers and the hospitality industry – not in today's nearly full employment economy.

Yes, fewer American high school dropouts have jobs today, but even the authors of a recent study about this admit there is no evidence that illegal immigrants have their jobs. It's more likely that many jobs would go overseas or disappear altogether if immigrants didn't do them.

Um, how big is the job churn in a "nearly full employment economy" and how does one send Vermont's cows or Las Vegas's hotel rooms to India?

In related commentary, InstaPundit received a favorable report on Chicago's illegal immigrants' rally and links to a local source that had a less favorable impression.

ENOUGH IS ENOUGH. Indiana's William Becker delivered the Presidential Lecture at the Midwest Economics Association. His message: teach the controversies. He's not happy about the attempts of legislators and administrators to introduce K-12 thinking into higher educations.

Doing in universities what is arguably legitimate for high schools is remedial education and not higher education.

Amen.

MASSACHUSETTS LIBERALS USED TO BE MORE RESOLUTE. I've taken delivery of Sea of Gray, a story about Confederate commerce raider Shenandoah, a fairly advanced merchantman purchased from the British to be used as a privateer against the whaling fleets, to persuade Yankee abolitionists to contemplate the price of their principle (sound familiar?) The ship remained at sea after April 1865, continuing to prey on Yankee whalers, despite the protestations of captains that the Southern Rebellion was over. It has been some time since I last provided a book review. This will be among the next few releases. The politics I started with aren't interesting. The adventures are. In keeping with good sea stories, you could start this one with "no s***, this really happened."

I'LL NEVER LACK FOR WORK. The editorial board at the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel weighs in on illegal immigration.

In proposing tougher enforcement standards and a guest worker program, the president simply got the facts right.

Borders must be secure, employers should have the means to discern legal residency and much of the economy would have some difficulty surviving without immigrant workers. But he seemingly recognized also that those already here have been doing yeoman-like labor to keep the economy humming, and he saw also the basic injustice in the country both demanding these workers' presence and condemning it. This speaks to the need to give guest workers a shot at permanent legal residency.

The president must foster compromise and break the congressional logjam. A country that speaks proudly of its immigrant past needs to act to remove the contradictions and injustice existing in its immigrant present.

What contradictions? The policies are completely coherent. In the face of a pool of uncredentialed and low-skilled individuals willing to provide a cheap labor subsidy and able to cross the border in both directions (I told you that Midwest Economics Association conference was productive) the occasional regularization, or periodic offering of in-state tuition for college-age kids, or amnesty by some other name, is optimal.

WE WANT MORE. Wisconsin 4, Bemidji 0 in Green Bay. Cornell is a worthy second opponent. For a different perspective on Wisconsin hockey, go here.

Gotta give this one to Wisconsin. Plus it's in Wisconsin....well, not that that matters for Wisconsin fans.

Indeed not. The legend lives on from Beantown on down of Elroy Hirsch buying for all the Badger fans in Providence. It really happened. I was there. Wisconsin had just lost the 1978 consolation game to Bowling Green (yeah, Northern Illinois nemesis Bowling Green. Midwestern Axis of Evil Bowling Green.) Mr Hirsch plunked $500 on the bar and said "Serve anybody wearing red."

There is no joy in Dinkytown, as Holy Cross eliminated Minnesota in overtime. A few years ago, I remember a Minnesota team that was much stronger on paper being taken to overtime by Harvard in the finals, and Harvard got a lucky bounce in the second overtime.

SIEVE! SIEVE! SIEVE! SIEVE!

THE NEW, THE OLD, AND THE SAFE COURSE. Although I have reported on the Elburn extension previously, here are the first pictures. These date from my Milwaukee trip at the beginning of Spring Break. Very little had changed today, when I made a trip to Chicago for the Midwest Economics Association.

The Elburn coach yard is now the terminal for all trains, including a few weekday trips that load their first passengers at West Chicago. (There are no interlockings between West Chicago and Elmhurst, precluding the onslaught of zonal expresses the Burlington unleashes.)


The Elburn station has only one platform, on the south side of the tracks. Here is the empty stock for the 8.25 Saturday departure backing into the station.

The Union Pacific Metra operation won a safety award. This polished locomotive bell is on display in front of the station master's office at North Western Station.


The sign reads

This bell represents the 2005 safety efforts of more than 1200 Union Pacific Commuter Operations employees in and around the Chicago area.

Not only was their safety effort good enough to win this prestigious award, it was also the best safety percentage ever achieved for a service unit in the Union Pacific Railroad's storied history.

The North Western Station is now the atrium of an office tower. I believe Chase (the old Chase Manhattan combined with a Chicago banking house) now owns the upstairs. CORRECTED 26 MARCH ... The building is now the CITICORP CENTER.


Get off the trains on the second floor, ride one of two escalator sets to street level, or spend your money in the various clothing stores on the first two levels first, or eat at the food court. (The food court is out of the line of traffic. Eating without getting trampled, what a concept.) It doesn't look much like a train hall, but there's more light coming in than is the case at Union Station just to the south.

Commuters can avoid some climbing by passing through the riverside entrance of the old Chicago Daily News building, walking up a ramp past some coffee shops, and emerging at track level. The passageway from the Daily News to North Western Station crosses Clinton Street, and the current owners of the building have thoughtfully left this link to the past in place.


The North Western stopped being the operator of record in the early 1980s and merged into Union Pacific in mid-1995. Look for this sign in a museum eventually.

That's the end of the train riding for conferences for a while. (But I do have a weekend pass and my mental health could use a boost ...) The conference proved to be a productive one. There's an open bottle of Sprecher Winter Brew receiving the Wisconsin treatment as a reward.

FRIDAY'S MODELS ON SATURDAY. Once the conference crush is over, I'll get back to this project. I have to work out the bracing for the cab floor in order to secure the rear of the cab to the tailbeam.


The cab sides have the numbers and Soviet railway emblem attached, and some detail parts that the kit designer left out are being snipped out of brass pieces elsewhere.


Taken together, it looks something like this.


Friday morning, at the conference, the topic of economists indulging in excess rigor accompanied by oversimplification came up again. The point of modeling is to come up with a believable representation that captures the essential elements. I'm thinking of a non-cumbersome way to suggest that such criticisms are tantamount to replicating the real thing, rather than this brass miniature.

SHE'LL LOOK BETTER IN RED. The Chicago Sun-Times discovers that getting into the University of Illinois is not easy.

Stacey Kostell, director of undergraduate admissions, acknowledged the school had gotten more competitive this year but said admission criteria haven't changed and that she still expects to accept close to two-thirds of students who apply. She said last year, the school saw an uncharacteristic decrease in applications; this year was closer to levels in the recent past.

"Students who had traditionally been admitted didn't always get admitted this year, not because they weren't good students, but because we had this very large increase without additional space, especially in the business program," said Kostell.

And although the school does plan to increase its nonresident enrollment in the future, she said that wasn't a factor in more residents getting denied. "We've had just as many upset out-of-state students call," she said.

Illinois admits applicants by college. A high school senior who declares an interest in the business college competes in a different pool of applicants from one who declares an interest in engineering who competes in ... I'm not sure I like that idea. Sorry for going Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain again, but one reason to attend college and deal with gen-eds is to get some sense of your strengths and weaknesses, which is why junior year is for declaring majors.

The young lady features in a sidebar about the calls the admissions committee at the College of Business made.

Allison Seymour and Brad Terry seem like students any college would want.

Seymour, 18, of Lincolnshire, had a 3.74 grade point average on a scale of 4.0, scored a 31 on her ACT college admission test, including a perfect math score, took six advanced placement courses, and played volleyball and ran track for four years. Terry, 17, of Buffalo Grove, had a 33 on the ACT and played varsity baseball. Both were student council members.

But both also were rejected by the University of Illinois College of Business this year.

Shed no tears.

Terry, who said U. of I. was supposed to be a backup, said he is leaning toward attending the University of Michigan. Seymour, who got scholarship offers from the University of Iowa and Indiana University, says she plans to attend the University of Wisconsin.

SIEVE!

DOING IRISH MILWAUKEE STYLE. Kodachrome provides sharper pictures but there's still that matter of sending them to the lab and waiting for them to come back. Here is the visual accompaniment to this post about the Milwaukee St. Patrick's week and selection show parade. First, a bit of a contrast. Yes, that is a Chinese band practicing. The local supporters of Falun Gong received permission to follow the parade as an unofficial extra unit, trailing a local step dance group that earned some sort of national honor.

In the background is the Wisconsin Electric Power office building that occupies the site of the 1886 Milwaukee Road station. Question for my Milwaukee area readers: is the Wisconsin Avenue facade of the Midwest Express Center inspired by the roofline of that station?


I don't recall what was once at the corner of Plankinton and Wisconsin. Mo's Irish Pub is a recent addition. The banner is counting down ... six days to St. Patrick's day (by which time all but one of the Wisconsin-based basketball teams that were celebrating on Selection Sunday were free to drink the green beer.)


Along both sides of the street are the replica harp-case streetlights the city has been installing. Milwaukee, you're overdoing it with those streetlights. The originals were on side streets and somewhat further apart than these replicas. The tall pole with a single streetlight is correct for Wisconsin Avenue. The lamp housing is the same design as the one for the harp-case lights, but the more austere bracket was the design of choice on the main streets.


Milwaukee is the home of Harley-Davidson, and no Milwaukee parade is without an escort of Harleys. The Prussian helmets are on the Germania building that was built as the Germania building and renamed the Brumder building in the Great War era. I didn't see any bikers wearing Prussian helmets. But I did see a trolley that never got anywhere near the original Cold Spring Shops.


Parade participants were tossing candy to the kids, providing the policeman with opportunities to engage in patient crowd control. And yes, the weather was changeable, with occasional raw sou'easters and rain squalls off the lake, and sunny and fine by day's end.

THE MIDWESTS ARE IN THE CITIES NEXT YEAR. This year, a hockey tournament is there. The Lady Badgers defeated St. Lawrence 1-0 and will face off against Minnesota for the national hockey championship on Sunday. SIEVE!

MOVING THE MASSES. This morning, I presented a paper at the Midwest Economics Association conference in Chicago. Session starts at 8.15 am. Path of least resistance: the 6.07 Naperville Zephyr.

The morning rush hour on the Burlington involves loading long trains at four or five outlying stations and running them non-stop into the city. Here is the situation at 6.20.


I have shown the path of my train, which will load at Naperville and leave at 6.25. Ahead is No. 1214, which might have crossed over at West Lisle to leave Lisle at 6.26 and follow my train from Downer's Grove Main. No. 1218 has run empty stock from Aurora to Fairvew Avenue to make all stops between Fairview and Hinsdale. Off screen, No. 1216 will begin accepting passengers at Highlands. These four trains will reach Union Station between 6.58 and 7.12, and the next arrival will be the next Naperville Zephyr at 7.18 participating in a similar cycle. It's quite the kick to watch all this when it's working properly.

Y'ALL COME BACK NOW, HEAR? I go away for a conference and it's hit after hit after hit ... Max Speak looking for a new Washington Post columnist who is honest and readable but not "too wonky." That's how I earn my modest living, being wonky. University Diaries looking for a quotable quote. (Quotable wonk? Max, you wanna reconsider?) The dean at Anonymous Community suggests there is a downside to faculty governance out of the Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain era. Perhaps so, but the past 30 years of administrative usurpation of faculty discretion has not brought forth a flowering of great scholarship and innovative teaching. Our president, John Peters, is a fine man. But I'd really rather hear Co^l. Chamberlain assuring me, "Got your back, Steve."

(Here's a history quiz. Category: Incompetent Mississippi leaders. Assignment: Compare and contrast P. G. T. Beauregard with Shelby Thames.)

Thanks, all, for looking in. To quote from Rip Track, "Check it out, and see if your brain benefits from an overhaul in the Cold Spring Shops." Come on back. Post a comment. The virtual Sprecher is flowing.

EATING THE SEED CORN? Craig at Division of Labour links to a University of Pennsylvania self-study that reports the modal undergraduate lecture or seminar is taught by a tenured or tenure-track faculty member, although the majority of such courses have a lecturer, graduate assistant, or other staff responsible. His observation.

With more press like this, we will all be on four-four teaching loads sooner than later.

Chris at Signifying Nothing links and notes,

Confidential to parents: drop the 40 large per annum on a liberal arts college education for your kids instead.

Or check out a mid-major. The money outlay is smaller and the faculty participation in the undergraduate program greater.

WITHOUT COMMENT. Read and understand.

THE GENESIS OF THE GENSET. The first of Max Essl's patents for a diesel locomotive with modular power units is No. 2,249,628, granted July 15, 1941. The narrative to the patent asserts an improvement in the prior art in being able to quickly remove and replace a small power unit for repair at a workbench, rather than have the locomotive out of service while one large prime mover is being repaired or replaced.


The elements of the genset are in this figure.


Subsequent patents No. 2,299,420 describe improvements in the modules to permit some servicing to be done by a maintainer while the locomotive is in use (Mr Essl would probably not appreciate me joking about the real Centipedes requiring an "oiler" and a "wiper" in the nautical mode), and No. 2,317,849 is recognizably a Centipede, with further improvements in cooling systems, ventilation, and balance.

VOTES OF NO CONFIDENCE. According to USA Today,

Universities are in a tug of war pitting traditionally powerful professors against a new generation of business-savvy presidents hired to control costs, boost research and make classes more relevant in a global economy.

There are two themes to the article. One is the conflict between what trustees see as businesslike methods, with a president as primary decision maker; and traditional faculty governance, with a president in the Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain mode.

Harvard's departed president Larry Summers is mentioned in the article, but he declined the invitation to comment. Kentucky's president Lee Todd, recruited out of IBM, [is that like hiring an AT&T guy to run Penn Central? Behave yourself.] is more talkative.

Professors felt Todd had not been deferential enough and failed to communicate well with them, says faculty [senate] chairman [Ernie] Yanarella.

Easily Distracted has been thinking about whether a more clearly defined hierarchy is superior to shared governance. There are several different themes there. I'll limit discussion to this.

There have been times where I would have preferred centralized control or at least a greater weighting on centralized authority in various decisions at Swarthmore. That has something to do with a perception on my part that I would have agreed with what I took to be the preferences of various leadership figures. That, of course, is the first simple problem with centralized leadership in any institution. It’s fine as long as you’re happy with the leaders, not so fine when you’re not. If a more decentralized model tends towards collective outcomes that don’t suit you, at least you can usually opt out or evade those outcomes in your own autonomous domains. Not so with strong centralization.

That dynamic is where many of the academy's troubles began. Drop consistent standards in the service of some notion of justice or compensation without much in the way of debate and as long as no Ward Churchill shows up, you're fine. But I have to wonder whether Professor Yanarella's colleagues on the faculty senate might not have acquiesced in many an administrative usurpation as long as it was a usurpation on the side of the senate's angels only to discover that their moral and procedural authority (they are different) had been surrendered by default?

The other theme is the mission of Mr Todd and other recently hired university presidents with business backgrounds. The article mentions research emphases and economic development. The subtlety ... which a newspaper reporter can be forgiven for missing ... is in the nature of that research. We're no longer talking about disinterested inquiry into whatever seems interesting whether the outcome will have any lasting effect or not. We are talking about inquiry into projects that have a commercial payoff. The compromise that might be emerging is one in which legislatures might provide additional real resources while changing the roles of their state schools. Thus Mr Todd might receive some help for technology commercialization at Kentucky, but departments at Kentucky that don't do that kind of research, and entire campuses elsewhere in the state, might receive more explicit orders to phase out the research programs. (A similar dynamic might be at work in Illinois, but neither the legislature nor the administration of any comprehensive university has come out and said so. Legislators have conflicting visions. Presidents and provosts are reluctant to voluntarily reduce the scope of their universities.) That might entail what the dean at Anonymous Community describes as "retire the euphemisms and face reality," as well as moving toward his Easter Bunny treat, "So Flagship U could keep its doctoral programs, but Eastern Teachers State U couldn’t. Faculty at Eastern Teachers State U would actually have to teach undergraduates. Graduates of Flagship U would eventually actually have chances to get jobs."

That compromise might be honest, but it might also be unsustainable, for a different reason. Here is the current Faustian bargain at the Upwardly Mobiles, again, from the Easter Bunny post.

There are very, very powerful incentives for individual institutions and departments to “raise their academic profile.” A department that ‘moves up’ gets lighter teaching loads for incumbent faculty, more graduate student labor to do the scut work (freshman composition, survey courses, lab work, etc.), more prestige, and more money. Faculty in that area are freed from tedious undergrad courses, and allowed to teach graduate ‘seminars’ in which they essentially have talented, eager-to-please apprentices to help them do their research. What’s not to like?

Institutions that move up gain prestige (which pays off in a higher caliber of undergraduate, which leads to higher retention rates, which leads to higher tuition revenue…). They also gain research funding, but most importantly, they gain cheap labor. The big state universities couldn’t survive if they paid full-time salaries to everybody who teaches freshman comp.

Let me rephrase that slightly. The Upwardly Mobile recruits ambitious Ph.D.s who might not be doing the currently most fashionable or currently most difficult or currently most fundable work. "Help us establish our visibility. Compete in the profession. Publish your way out if you can, we understand." That might be sufficient compensation for teaching the service courses to individuals who think of Upwardly Mobile as a safety school, or as something that was there when the mugging by reality happened, or as a great place for underage drinking. And thus the cynicism.

OK, tell the truth instead. Drop the pretense of "competing in the profession." Hold-up the existing tenured faculty to teach more classes if their scholarly work is not commercializable. But do so quickly, so as not to recruit any more ambitious Ph.D.s under what is now clearly a false pretense.

Now for the reality check. People who have a vocation for teaching and more modest research aspirations have avoided the Upwardly Mobiles for years. Does Newly Honest Safety School (properly, a four year community college with a climbing wall and good parties?) improve its chances of competing for those people? It is likely to be more difficult to give away economics Ph.D.s under those circumstances. Perhaps a university can deal with its enrollment-impacted departments in the short term by holding-up the existing tenured faculty. Replacing those people in the long term might not be as easy as "Graduates of Flagship U would eventually actually have chances to get jobs," because fewer people will attend Flagship U. with the circumscribed prospects the end of the Faustian bargain implies.

Might there be reason to develop an alternative to the Ph.D. as a credential for college teaching? That's an old idea, one that I wish to address in the future. I would be reluctant to encourage anybody with an academic vocation to act on it in the face of a market for ... state subsidized summer camps where little learning takes place?

A COMMUTER RAILROAD THAT DOES THINGS RIGHT. Greater DeKalb expat Passenger Rail praises Metra.

Another routine performance this morning. I had to judge the Fed Challenge, at, no surprise, the Fed. Two more punches on the ten-ride, with a fast ride in on the 7.07 Naperville Zephyr and out on the 4.28 Nai-Mev-Org Zephyr.

THE EVOLUTION OF THE SYLLABUM OMNIUM. It's probably over the top to mention the "Ashley rule" or the "Justin clause."

"I began teaching at NIU in 1991 and my syllabus contained few, if any, rules," said Scott Short, a mechanical engineering professor. "Since then my syllabus, unfortunately, now contains a long list of rules."

Those rules, however, usually are the result of an individual student's behavior, Short said.

"Most of the rules were 'named' for a particular student who tried some funny business," he said.

The students, however, see the benefit of the rules.

"As far as the whole cell phone thing goes, I think it's really annoying when a cell phone rings during class," said ... a freshman undecided major. "Once in speech class, a cell phone went off during someone's speech and it completely threw the guy off."

Yup. Sometimes there are side benefits to active learning projects. I helped a colleague with a math education class project and the day's presenters were a bit miffed that some of their classmates took advantage of their presentation to take a nap. They may encounter worse in the common schools.

CARTELS IN THEORY AND PRACTICE. Northern Star columnist Jessica King discovers that the city council has been restricting output.

The DeKalb City Council has repeatedly voted to keep the number of Class A liquor licenses at 16, despite the growth of the city. This trend is a long one. In fact, according the original DeKalb liquor policy from more than thirty years ago, there should be two more Class A licenses in town.

The DeKalb City Council raised the minimum population needed for another liquor license twice, without a good cause.

Oh, but there is a good cause.

In addition, there is no reason why current bar owners should receive special protection from competition. They should have to feel the pressures of the market, just as the owner of a candy store or clothing store should. If new bars close down because they can't attract customers, then so be it. If old bars have to close because the newer bars have better prices or pool tables, so be it.

Reason, meet cause.

Yes, I have been following this liquor cartel kerfuffle (Kartuffle??) for years, and it never ceases to offer material for public policy classes.

The column quotes the mayor, a retired economics professor, advancing a public interest argument for limiting the number of bars. Presumably there is also a public interest argument for limiting the number of outdoor events at bars to not exceeding one per day. I leave that to the reader as an exercise.

CARNIVAL CALL. The Education Wonks have hoisted the bannerline for Carnival of Education No. 73₍₈₎.

WHY GENERATIONAL MORPHOLOGY MISLEADS. The local coffee house has been helping a used-book seller liquidate his inventory. One of the titles on the rack is part one of William L. Shirer's 20th Century Journey. I flipped through it. Let me quote from the opening chapter, for the further edification of those who might think the world-view of the parents might shape the world-view of the children.

Paris loomed as paradise, the City of Light and Enlightenment, the Center of Civilization, after our growing up in the American wasteland. We wanted to get away from Prohibition, fundamentalism, puritanism, Coolidgeism, Babbittry, ballyhoo, the booster antics of Rotary and the Chamber of Commerce -- all the cant of the bourgeois who dominated our land and made it, we thought, such a mindless, shoddy place to live in.

We had grown up in our college years, despite the efforts of our teachers to keep our minds off current literature, on the novels of Sinclair Lewis, Main Street and Babbitt, and the thunderings of H. L. Mencken in The American Mercury against the homo boobiens of the American hinterland. They had rubbed in what we knew all too well from our young lives: the cultural poverty of the Midwest small town; the tyrannical pressures to conform to a narrow, conservative puritan norm; the hollowness of the small-town booster Babbitt businessman; the worship of business and profits and financial success by our sanctimonious and churchy Christians.

Leave aside for the moment that a septuagenarian Mr Shirer would describe the era in those terms. Abstract from the contemporary Culture Wars division in which the puritan norms might be the sexual strictures of the Christian Right or the pleasure strictures of the Environmental Left. And don't dwell on Mencken's subsequent adoption by the libertarians. Consider instead the strength of self-reinforcing structures of conformity in a pre-television, pre-Internet, pre-Civil Rights, pre-Super Power United States. If ever the correlation of forces would have favored the parents replicating their own norms, one would expect them to have been at work in the early 1920s. All the same, the worldview of Mr Shirer and his co-cosmopolitans had a non-trivial effect on the culture to come.

PLAYER WITH RAILROADS, AND STACKER OF DERIVATIVES. The Economist offers a favorable survey of Chicago. The full text is behind a firewall. I purchased a copy the old-fashioned way. Dan Drezner has observations and some recommended reading. Let me focus on the rail content.

A town of 20,000 souls with not a mile of railway in 1847 had ten years later become the centre of the country's entire rail system.

Yes, and the first miles of railway (the Galena and Chicago Union) were laid from Chicago west with the expectation of moving minerals and the reality of moving agricultural products to the Lakes. The eastern trunk lines that became the Baltimore and Ohio, Erie, New York Central, and Pennsylvania reached the Lakes in the late 1850s to connect with an existing railroad network that was the beginnings of the Chicago and North Western, Chicago Burlington and Quincy, Chicago Rock Island and Pacific and the Wabash. (The Illinois Central was projected as a Freeport to the Ohio River and ultimately New Orleans -- those minerals again -- with the Mattoon to Chicago segment an afterthought.) And thus The Economist's interpretation of history misleads.

The antitrust laws that stopped any one railroad from carrying goods from coast to coast ensure that Chicago is still the place where freight is transferred to other carriers. Logically, St. Louis would have made a better transfer point, but the people there were loth to pay for railway bridges across the Mississippi, so Chicago grabbed its chance and became the nation's entrepot.

Bad history. Rate regulation became national policy in 1887, with the Sherman Antitrust Act signed by President Cleveland three years later. The reluctance of St. Louis to permit bridges is a matter of record, but the bigger problem confronting the eastern trunk lines was that an alliance, say, of the New York Central with the North Western would subject the Central to the vagaries of the harvest in northwest Illinois and Wisconsin as well as putting the Central at a disadvantage soliciting traffic off the Burlington or the later-developing Milwaukee. The eastern trunk lines preferred to compete for the long-haul traffic out of Chicago and leave the hard work of soliciting the agricultural traffic to the existing railroads running west. That choice was not without consequence; for many years the nation's "railroad problem" was the weakness of the farm-belt railroads, with the Burlington, North Western, Milwaukee, Illinois Central, Wabash, Chicago Great Western, and Rock Island all offering occasionally tenuous connections between the Union Pacific at Omaha and the eastern trunk lines around Chicago.

Thus, a location somewhere near the Great Lakes is the best location for a connection between the farm belt railroads and the eastern trunk lines. Had that connection been established near Hammond, Indiana, or Hegewisch, Illinois, the traffic might have avoided a thirty-mile jog around the foot of Lake Michigan. A thirty-mile mistake using the information available to railroad promoters in 1857 isn't much of a mistake.

St. Louis as the gateway instead? The Nickel Plate and Wabash attempted to combine agricultural and long-haul traffic out of St. Louis with varying degrees of success, but the Baltimore and Ohio, New York Central, and Pennsylvania lines to St. Louis via Terre Haute and points south were at least two lines too many.

POSITION FILLED. Chris at Signifying Nothing accepts a temporary assistant professorship at St. Louis University. Persevere.

A LITTLE AHEAD OF ITS TIME? You're looking at a Baldwin Centipede, generally viewed as an evolutionary dead end from the early days of the diesel era, when "diesel-electric" involved more emulation of electric locomotive technology than current best practice does.

Photo courtesy North East Rails.

The production Centipedes mounted two turbocharged inline-eight 1500 hp diesels for a freight engine the equivalent of a cab and booster set from Electro-Motive or Alco, or a passenger engine with 1.5 times the power of those builders' standard passenger unit. Had it been a reliable locomotive (those early turbochargers and big cylinders posed lots of engineering problems, and Baldwin's pipefitters never figured out that joints in lubricating lines ought be kept at a distance from the wiring harness) it would have allowed economies in dieselizing many passenger trains that were a bit much for a 2000 horsepower diesel but overpowered at 4000. (Yes, fantasize about one of these babies storming through Sturtevant at 110 with nine on the Afternoon Hiawatha.)

But the Centipede was an attempt by Baldwin to salvage some of their investment in an even more ambitious project, to pack 6000 hp into a single diesel carbody. The plan envisioned mounting eight 750 hp modules comprising a normally aspirated V-8 turning a small generator, with the electrical cabinet and radiators mounted on the same skid with the engine and generator. These modules were to be installed crosswise, instead of the usual longitudinal axis configuration on single- or double-engine diesel-electrics. A Swiss-born engineer, Max Essl, developed the modular concept for Baldwin.

I think in contemporary usage we'd call such a module a "genset" (referring to the engine-generator-electronics on its own skid.) And Union Pacific has purchased some 1400 hp switchers powered by twin Cummins gensets from National Railway Equipment Company, with some 2100 hp triple-genset ... Union Pacific calls 'em yard engines, but they look like ... road switchers on order.

The advantage of the small gensets is that with modern control systems, the engines can be fired up or powered down as required, reducing the emissions compared to the standard single-engine driving one alternator. Mr Essl didn't have that technology at his disposal.

And then the irony ... Union Pacific was negotiating with Baldwin for a large order of Centipedes, until word of the units' troubles on Pennsylvania filtered back to Omaha. Union Pacific instead replaced its big steam with gas-turbine electric units that were fine as long as exhaust and noise emissions weren't problems. But perhaps the last laugh will be Baldwin's, if the genset technology can be scaled up to an eight-pack of 750 horses, although the package would probably look more like one of these.

Clinton, Iowa, 26 March 2005
Courtesy Rail Pictures.

ABOVE ALL ELSE, INTEGRITY. The Quote of the Day comes from physicist Carl Wieman, leaving Colorado for British Columbia.

"Forefront science is a tough game," Wieman said. "Rather than be a third-rate physics researcher, I just figured it made more sense to put my full effort into (science education)."

This from a researcher who with Eric Cornell won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2001 by creating the Bose-Einstein condensate.

One would expect that someone conversant with laws of conservation at the sub-atomic level might recognize laws of conservation on a larger scale. Economists call them opportunity costs.

"If you want to have any sort of large-scale education initiative, where you're really focusing on education, you need people at the highest levels to put thought and attention into it," he said.

"If our Board of Regents spent half the time on discussions of how to improve the education for students that they do on athletics, it would be a very different university," Wieman said.

The recent CU football recruiting controversy was a major distraction that diverted attention from the classroom, Wieman said.

"My personal view is that there's a considerable overemphasis (on athletics) that takes time and attention away from what we could be doing to improve education."

Via University Diaries, who mocks administrative attempts to spin the professor's comments.

REVEALED PREFERENCES. Northern Illinois rearranged some of the traffic patterns on the west campus, closing a through street and relocating a bus turnaround. The land scraped up for construction allowed the creation of a hillock, just the right size for hanging out, or, during less trafficked times, tossing a Frisbee.

But that isn't what the landscape architects intended, oh, no. So this morning a fencing company is at work installing decorative fence posts, preparatory to closing off the short cuts that have emerged on the hillock and rendering casual Frisbee-tossing hazardous.

But there are no resources for enrollment-impacted departments.

IT'S PRIMARY DAY. Illinois allows voters to pick a party ballot on the day of the primary. I want to say "a plague on all your houses." The Republican gubernatorial hopefuls are giving the Democratic governor all sorts of material. There is a particularly nasty Republican race to find an opponent to first-term Democratic Representative Melissa Bean. Fortunately, that is not my district.

What really annoys me, however, is all these promises to "fight" for this benefit or that law. Come off it. We all understand that the purpose of an omnibus appropriations bill is to put all the pet projects into one authorization along with sufficient sweeteners to build a veto-resistant majority. Some fight, that.

A QUICK BASKETBALL UPDATE. DePaul had too much bench for Tulsa, reeling off most of the points at the end of the game to advance. Stanford ended Florida State's run.

The Ray Meyer farewell continues. But some of the tributes got me thinking. A broadcaster on Saturday said something about associating Ray Meyer with DePaul, or was it the other way around. Consider DePaul. Consider any basketball school in the Big East (by definition, that's all of them.) Name a Nobel Prize winner or other great academician in the lot.

SPORTSCASTERS SCOOP THE NEW YORK TIMES. Saturday's post mentioned Liberty University's debate team, with me mentioning chancellor Falwell's interest in raising a cadre of persuasive witnesses for The Cause. Sunday's New York Times had a longer article on ... Liberty University's debate team. Bill at Atlantic Blog has some fun imagining the latte-sippers reading about the country's top-ranked debate squad, with "intensely competitive" coach Brett O'Donnell.

He is a political junkie with autographed photos of Karl Rove, Oliver North and Newt Gingrich on display in his small office. His heroes are Jesus Christ and Ronald Reagan — closely followed by the 79-year-old Penn State football coach, Joe Paterno, whom he admires for his work ethic. In 2004, Karl Rove brought O'Donnell in to help the Bush presidential debate team, and O'Donnell expects to be working with Republican candidates again this year.

The article offers some insights into a different kind of speech code.

"A few years ago," O'Donnell recalls, "the topic dealt with the right of privacy. That means, among other things, abortion. The question arose, can we let our students argue the pro side of the case? Some conservative Christian schools decided that they couldn't argue both sides of certain issues. Bob Jones University wound up dropping policy debating."

O'Donnell took the matter to Falwell. "Doc decided that if we wanted to compete, we'd need to accept the rules," O'Donnell says. That season, by special dispensation, Liberty's debate practice rooms became the only place on campus where students were free to argue in favor of Roe v. Wade.

"Not all the Liberty debaters are all that pious," says the George Mason coach, Warren Decker. Decker was raised in a Christian home in Kansas, but he has long since traded his Sunday-school innocence for a marked skepticism. "Besides," he says,"debate is a liberalizing activity. I doubt that Falwell is producing a lot of people who, when they finish at Liberty, are going out to spread the
Word."

O'Donnell disagrees, mostly because he says he doesn't fear the power of secular ideology. "If there's a challenge to belief, it's better that the kids face it now," he says. "We don't need to shelter them. We want them to know the best arguments they will be up against. What determines how they ultimately fall out on this is their relationship with God."

It's also the case that the more conventional colleges have attempted to marginalize Liberty's team.

Liberty is not currently ranked at the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education's Speech Code project.

THAT GRIM CALCULUS. The liberation of Iraq began three years ago. Read and understand "Sacrifice, fear, and hope" at Iraq the Model. It offers a balanced look at the invasion and the aftermath. As a good news, bad news couplet, the invasion can be summarized thusly. "First the good news: Saddam is gone. The bad news: the friends of Israel did it."

The efforts by Jim at the Volokh Conspiracy to compare the total war deaths in Iraq to one bad month in Vietnam (or one bad day in France) are less impressive. I read the biographies of the war dead and wonder what I was doing in my early 20s that was so important, and I deplore the calculus that puts such men and women at risk there in order that we continue to avoid another September 11 here.

A Gateway Pundit post comparing the worst-case scenarios of war opponents with the historical record is more instructive.

For the most part, I have left the war coverage to others. For the record, here is where I stand.

First, I do not want to have to explain to my nephew why he has to pray with his nose pointed at Cudahy and his butt in the air because a few querulous people insisted on standards of evidence far beyond what peer review, or a court of law, would demand.

Second, I have little patience with critics of the war effort who would note that the Second World War was over by December 7, 1945. That comparison leaves out the British, who were in it for two additional years, and the Soviets, who absorbed most of the German fury. Yes, Sgt. Karlson and a lot of other green kids were thrown into the Ardennes with little seasoning. But it also took the pattern-bombing of German and occupied European cities and the nuking of two Japanese cities, with a bluff to deliver more nukes, to expedite the job. John Pina Craven's The Silent War, reviewed here, recalls that in December 1941 the submarine commanders were expecting the Pacific War to go on for at least ten years. And the griping about "the tallest man in Afghanistan" evading capture for four years similarly fails to impress. Al-Qaeda operates in somewhat more hospitable neighborhoods than der Organisation der ehemaligen SS-Angehörigen did (does? -- yes, there was a movie about it, and it may have arranged a car bombing as recently as 1979.) And "Adolf calibration man" (the real one, not a bond trader for Cantor Fitzgerald -- internet translation engines are so cute sometimes) was at large until 1961, with several other prominent Nazis dying at large.

The Superintendent continues to note with respect and regret the deaths of our soldiers, sailors, air forces, Marines, and Coast Guard postponing, if not cancelling, further attacks on the United States.

This site will leave the day-to-day discussions of the war effort and geopolitics to others.

JUST SLIGHTLY AHEAD OF MY TIME? USA Today has a story on a rails-to-trails-with rail project in Atlanta, and a sidebar on other rails-to-trails efforts. I can't claim to have invented the railroad right of way as a bike trail, but abandoned stretches of the Milwaukee Electric's Muskego Lakes Division and Lakeside Belt Line near my house were sufficiently well-graded that I could ride my coaster-brake bike on them, making interurban noises as I accelerated.

A graphic in the print edition of the article compares Atlanta's 7.8 acres of parkland per 1,000 residents with Milwaukee's 16.1 acres and Jacksonville's 67.6. If memory serves, Jacksonville includes a great deal of unimprovable land best left as nature preserves. Milwaukee's is a legacy of the "sewer Socialists" we were talking about last week.

CARNIVAL CALL. Casey Software hosts the Carnival of the Capitalists. Take the time to read and understand Ripples on the Friday downsizing ritual.

Has anyone seen an instance where repeated layoffs have saved a company and put it back on track?

But because everyone else was doing it, it must have been the right thing to do.

EXPECT TRAIN MOVEMENTS AT ANY TIME, ON ANY TRACK, IN EITHER DIRECTION. Sad news from Texas.

The reigning Miss Deaf Texas lost her life last Monday while walking next to the Union Pacific tracks, struck by a snowplow that extends about 16 inches on both sides of the tracks. The accident happened about 2:30 pm in South Austin, according to the Austin Police Report.

With the tracks better maintained, the ground-shaking that used to alert people to the presence of a train isn't always there.

Austin police said McAvoy had text messaged her mother just minutes before the accident happened. The 18-year-old said she was going to take a short cut down the railroad tracks to meet her mom at work.

“We believe she may have been sending text messages to friends and family as well during that time,” [Austin Detective David] Fugitt said.

That’s a factor, plus her deafness, police said, that could have kept her from noticing the train.

The railroad track is NOT a short cut, even if you have full use of your senses and are not preoccupied with your electronic shackles. Kindly be governed accordingly.

WE COULD DO OUR JOB, IF WE KNEW WHAT OUR JOB WAS. The dean at Anonymous Community is not impressed with Strapped. (Apparently neither are many of the volunteer reviewers.)

It is to the dean's smackdown of a stupid statement about community colleges that I wish to speak.

“Unlike universities, community colleges aren’t geared solely to the needs of undergraduates.”

That was the stupid statement. On to the smack-down.

Although it’s only March, this is a strong contender for Howler of the Year.

If you’ve ever been to a university, you would have noticed graduate students. You also would have noticed faculty who only teach graduate students, and graduate students who teach undergraduate students. You would have noticed faculty jockeying to avoid lower-level undergrad courses like the plague. You would have noticed gargantuan sums of cash going into football stadiums, and research labs, and student centers with climbing walls.

If you wander around your typical community college, you would find actual faculty teaching lower-level undergraduate courses. You would not find a football stadium. You would not find substantial research labs. You would not find climbing walls. You would also find much lower tuition levels, reflecting the no-frills atmosphere and allowing the non-wealthy to attend.

What the dean has confirmed, indirectly, is that the hardest job in higher education is being a professor at a mid-major (in the old Carnegie classifications, a "public comprehensive.") The mid-majors tend to have aspirations, sometimes realized, more frequently frustrated, for national prominence in research and the performing arts, as well as the occasional bracket-busting or appearance in a BCS bowl. My own biases may have placed these items in the wrong order.

Why do I make this claim? Start with that "If you’ve ever been to a university, you would have noticed graduate students. You also would have noticed faculty who only teach graduate students, and graduate students who teach undergraduate students." Certainly true of the Ivies ... some of them are so well-endowed and so well plugged into the grants machinery that the undergraduate program is window dressing. The academic stars can be characterized as "trained bears" that put on the odd performance in an undergraduate class (I saw that metaphor someplace but can't recall for the credit) while the undergraduates are often self-motivated or parentally guilt-tripped enough to synthesize the material in coffee house or tavern with an encyclopedia behind the bar. The state flagships often credit a star professor with multiple courses for showing up before 800 people in an auditorium plus others watching on television, and they make promiscuous use of graduate assistants to conduct "discussion sections" and grade the papers, that is, if the assessment hasn't been converted to quickly-graded fill in the bubble exams. Faculty in the mid-majors might not receive that sort of support (put another way, their universities might not get away with that sort of neglect of teaching) but they're competing for journal space and grant money with their more favorably-treated colleagues at the private Research Is and the flagships.

Then consider the football programs and climbing walls. Herein lies another source of frustration. On one hand, some administrators and some legislators have ambitions to convert their public comprehensive into something more highly thought of. (Northern Illinois, for example, at one time received an infusion of state money to strengthen several graduate programs. The athletic department had visions of replacing Northwestern in the Big Ten -- that despite Northwestern recently ending a long football losing streak with a non-conference win over a California Bowl-bound Northern Illinois team.) On the other hand, there are administrators and legislators that view their public comprehensives as community colleges with climbing walls. (If you're at a public university not named for a cardinal compass point, you probably have sensed this for some time already.)

That tension makes recruiting faculty, let alone maintaining faculty morale, difficult. The faculty at the Research I know what the mission is, as do the faculty at the community college. At the mid-major, a department might advertise for faculty with the expectation that they will be competitive as scholars. But that might not be the future mission of the university.

CAN'T GIVE A PH.D. AWAY. I received a message today from an economics e-mail list.

Does anyone have a promising student that is looking to pursue a masters or doctorate? We still have slots open for next year's class of students and financially competitive assistantships are still available.

I'm going to withhold judgement on this missive as the website for the department in question offers scant information about its faculty publication performance or the placement of its graduates. (And it would be mean to identify the department. Sorry.)

But it does shed some light on why there is no industrial reserve army of unemployed economics Ph.D.s. Apparently admission to a doctoral program, ANY doctoral program, is not that great a prize.

TONE-DEAF, AGAIN? It's supposedly the first day of spring, although there's a howling blue norther and apparently enough of last week's dry air in place to keep Nebraska's snows south of Interstate 80. It's also the first day back from spring break. So whoever is responsible for programming the electric carillon decided this would be a great day to ring out the Song of the Volga Boatment. Just like the last cheery occasion.

ON THE READY TRACK. The State of Maine Northern recently took delivery of some GP9s from Atlas. The undecorated models come partially assembled, with a variety of optional fittings included in the box. In these pictures, I have not removed some of the foam padding from the original packaging. I am likely to read the manual for the final assembly instructions, then disassemble them for painting, and put them in service as painted. These are smooth running engines that will run well at low speeds.


Here, they have delivered a load of coal to the cement plant at West Gloucester.


Next, they are setting out a load of sides at the Swift distribution center. The boxcar will be placed on the team track.


The engines have now run around their train to work the facing-point industries on the east end of Gloucester, but first they must clear the time of the first-class train with the mail and express for Rockport. The Gloucester Branch is close enough to the sea at this location that a lighthouse is not excessive artistic license.

THE VALUE OF THREE MAIN TRACKS. I had some business in Chicago a few days ago, and elected to run-down my ten-ride ticket by using the Naperville Zephyr. The train I was riding, No. 1262, is due out of Hinsdale at 9.55 with additional stops including La Grange Road at 10.03. If the eastbound Illinois Zephyr is on time, it uses the center track to West Hinsdale, crossing to the south track ahead of 1262 and making La Grange Road at 9.54.

When the Zephyr is a few minutes late, it gets interesting.

The Zephyr overtook our train around Western Springs on the north track (as there are no platforms on the center track, it cannot use that track at Naperville or La Grange Road.) In the illustration, Chicago is to the right of the diagram. I have shown tracks cleared for 1262 as far as Brookfield, but the Zephyr will not be able to leave La Grange Road, as there is a westbound hopper train coming at the Congress Park home signal on the center track. There are grade crossings to the east that are not supposed to be blocked with stopped trains. I have shown the center track signalled for the passage of the hoppers.

The Zephyr cannot continue east on the north track as there is a welding crew working on the rails west of Clyde Yard. The best solution for the dispatcher: hold the Zephyr at Congress Park for the hoppers, then cross it over to the center track, where it makes a fast run into Union Station, arriving ahead of 1262. All in a day's work on the racetrack.

The ten-ride will likely get a few more uses. Although a different train line comes within 15 miles of DeKalb, its service is primarily all-stoppers. The Naperville Zephyrs will get me to Aurora fast enough to compensate for the longer drive time.

YOU CAN BUY TRAINS IN COLD SPRING. I noticed several hits looking for something called the "Cold Spring Train Works." It is a hobby shop in Cold Spring, New York, not far from Carmel and Patterson, where my forbears embarked for Wisconsin some 150 years ago. Might be worth a look on my next swing through New England.

GRANGE HALL. In the Corn Belt, that would be the location of potluck suppers and populist politics. In England, it's one of several locomotive conversion projects currently under way. The Great Western Railway had a penchant for assembling several different types of locomotives from fairly standard parts. With the right source of components, it's possible for preservationists to create a believable reproduction of a class of locomotive that had gone for scrap. One such project involves a boiler from a Hall and the running gear of a Prairie Tank to recreate a 6800 series "Grange" engine.

An English friend came west for the O Scale show in Chicago and he brought this picture of a project at the Didcot Railway Centre.

The locomotive is still recognizable as a "Hall" mixed-traffic locomotive with six foot driving wheels. But the first "Hall" was a re-fitting of a "Saint" passenger locomotive with 6'8" drivers. It makes sense, then, to take a Hall, of which there are sufficiently many that the movie makers can paint one of them red and run it out of Kings Cross Under, and re-re-fit it as the Saint project.

There is also work afoot to create a "County" class out of assorted parts as County of Glamorgan in honor of the scrap merchant whose staff cut up easier-to-scrap rolling stock, allowing numerous steam locomotives to be rescued for preservation or to serve as parts bins for the various replica projects.

And with that project comes an incentive ... roll my 1027 County of Milwaukee onto the ready track before the full-size 1014 County of Glamorgan is in steam.

SWEEP AT HOME? The college hockey tournament field is being announced, with Wisconsin receiving the overall No. 1 seeding and a first game in Green Bay against Bemidji State. SIEVE!

OPPORTUNITY COSTS. Counterfactual analyses are difficult, particularly where war is concerned.

General Patton to General Bradley, in the movie version of the Sicily campaign: "What would our casualties had been if we had still been slugging it out on that road?"

Michael Barone (via the rejuvenated Betsy's Page) links two studies attempting to quantify the consequences of leaving Saddam Hussein contained (assuming the no-fly zone and the oil-for-food embargoes could have been enforced?) but still grooming his sons for the succession and paying survivors' benefits to human bombs. One, commissioned by the American Enterprise Institute, is the work of three top-notch economists. (What does it say about the academy's valuation of economists that a Clark Medalist is supplementing his income writing policy papers?) The other is a newspaper column.

CONTINUITY. In the women's tournament, Florida State defeated perennial power Louisiana Tech. If memory serves, State's Sue Semrau was a first-year assistant at Northern Illinois when higher-seeded Louisiana Tech came to DeKalb to play the Huskies. Northern Illinois won that game. That "higher seeded" was not a typographical error. Northern Illinois had its hosting bid in on time. I chatted with some Tech fans who made the drive north, and they told me that the responsible persons at Tech did not get the paperwork in in proper fashion.

Michigan State plays like a pro basketball team. They play at half-power for most of the game, then put together a sufficiently good run to overcome most opponents, including Wisconsin-Milwaukee. We shall see how far that gets them in the upcoming rounds.

The local TV coverage showed DePaul avenging last year's loss to Liberty. The DePaul players had reason to be emotional with the recent passing of legendary coach Ray Meyer, who helped develop Doug Bruno. A TV commentator ... this was a particularly well-briefed group, complete with knowledge about Liberty's debate squad (apparently Chancellor Jerry Falwell understands that God Helps Thofe Who Help Themfelves, and he wants well-spoken advocates for public policy) ... noted that several of the DePaul players had lost grandparents during the season. The Lady Demons play at full power for the entire game.

FOURTH TURNING ALERT. Foreign Policy published an article by reverse-Malthusian Phillip Longman of the New America Foundation, who also provided a USA Today condensed version.

What's the difference between Seattle and Salt Lake City? There are many differences, of course, but here's one you might not know. In Seattle, there are nearly 45% more dogs than children. In Salt Lake City, there are nearly 19% more kids than dogs.

This curious fact might at first seem trivial, but it reflects a much broader and little-noticed demographic trend that has deep implications for the future of global culture and politics. It's not that people in a progressive city such as Seattle are so much fonder of dogs than are people in a conservative city such as Salt Lake City. It's that progressives are so much less likely to have children.

Conservative commentators have made much of Mr. Longman's prediction.

It's a pattern found throughout the world, and it augers a far more conservative future — one in which patriarchy and other traditional values make a comeback, if only by default.

(I'm a bit late in noting this; check the past few weeks of Best of the Web.)

Dan Drezner and Kieran at Crooked Timber demur. For that matter, Mr Longman demurs in part in the longer article.

Patriarchy may enjoy evolutionary advantages, but nothing has ensured the survival of any particular patriarchal society. One reason is that men can grow weary of patriarchy’s demands. Roman aristocrats, for example, eventually became so reluctant to accept the burdens of heading a family that Caesar Augustus felt compelled to enact steep “bachelor taxes” and otherwise punish those who remained unwed and childless. Patriarchy may have its privileges, but they may pale in comparison to the joys of bachelorhood in a luxurious society—nights spent enjoyably at banquets with friends discussing sports, war stories, or philosophy, or with alluring mistresses, flute girls, or clever courtesans.

Women, of course, also have reason to grow weary of patriarchy, particularly when men themselves are no longer upholding their patriarchal duties. Historian Suzanne Cross notes that during the decades of Rome’s civil wars, Roman women of all classes had to learn how to do without men for prolonged periods, and accordingly developed a new sense of individuality and independence. Few women in the upper classes would agree to a marriage to an abusive husband. Adultery and divorce became rampant.

Often, all that sustains the patriarchal family is the idea that its members are upholding the honor of a long and noble line. Yet, once a society grows cosmopolitan, fast-paced, and filled with new ideas, new peoples, and new luxuries, this sense of honor and connection to one’s ancestors begins to fade, and with it, any sense of the necessity of reproduction. “When the ordinary thought of a highly cultivated people begins to regard ‘having children’ as a question of pro’s and con’s,” Oswald Spengler, the German historian and philosopher, once observed, “the great turning point has come.”

In short, we're stuck with the same old generational morphology, even without the down side of the traditions that second paragraph catalogs. Parents may expose their kids to a preferred way of life, but it doesn't follow that the kids have to follow. (University of California president Clark Kerr did not anticipate any troubles with the large cohorts of students arriving at Berkeley and the other campuses late in the 1950s.)

QUOTE OF THE DAY. King at SCSU Scholars understands compensating differentials.

That's a bit unusual, for in many other places there is a competitive process whereby one offers a plan for study, grantwriting or other academic endeavor to be done during the sabbatical. It's not being paid to sit on your duff but to be reassigned for a year to something outside the classroom. This is of course expensive, but then most of us faculty in fields where there are ample private industry opportunities work at a substantial discount, for which sabbatical, tenure, and June, July and August are repayment.

To reiterate: redefine the job description and see what happens. I suspect my dean didn't take too kindly to my remark at a recent meeting that two months of salary for three months of work was insulting, particularly under the modified Demsetz auction that the university has been using to allocate the summer teaching "opportunities." On the other hand, I'm not happy with the public perception that all academic fields have the same sort of industrial reserve army that criticism and history do.

DEAD-UCATION. Joanne Jacobs locates an essay by Peter Wood, my favorite college administrator, who has left Boston University for The King's College in New York City.

I announced that the college would discontinue its undergraduate bachelor’s degree program in childhood education. I met with the freshmen who had expressed interest in the major and explained that to offer an undergraduate education degree in New York meant having to comply with state regulations. These regulations mandated that we offer dozens of intellectually vapid courses far below the College’s standards for the rest of the curriculum. Moreover, I pointed out that while New York (and many other states) sets all manner of requirements for undergraduate education degree programs, New York (and many other states) has also rendered these programs redundant by requiring every teacher to earn a masters degree in education to be eligible for “professional certification.” (A student who graduates with an undergraduate degree in education may receive “initial certification,” which confers permission by the state to teach in public schools for no more than five years, during which time he must earn a masters degree or leave the field.)

Why?

Schools of education mis-prepare would-be teachers in many ways. They deprive those would-be teachers of the opportunity to learn more important, substantive things during their undergraduate years; they require students to take hugely time-consuming courses of dubious intellectual value; and they inculcate would-be teachers in the educrats’ pernicious ideology. It’s an ideology that insists that virtually all of America’s social problems derive from institutionalized prejudices; that most knowledge is “socially constructed;” and that children are best taught by allowing their natural creativity to flourish, rather than by actually trying to teach the habits of self-discipline and mindfulness. Substantive knowledge and real skill in areas like mathematics, reading, and writing are clearly tertiary concerns at best for most teachers, because they are less than tertiary concerns for SOEs.

Tell us what you really think.

A message to fellow provosts, college presidents, deans, and college trustees: let’s ring down the curtain on the SOEs. You have nothing to lose but your least-promising students and a cohort of faculty members who veer between giddy and grandiose ignorance. The students and faculty members worth keeping can find their places elsewhere in your college.

That would also mean the end of the faux-ISO 14001 exercise called passing the NCATE audit.

WISCONSIN HOCKEY. On any given day, any team can beat any other team. Wisconsin surrendered a two goal lead to lose the semifinal to North Dakota (bringing back memories of a blown lead in the 1992 title game) while St. Cloud State outshot the Gophers in overtime. The Fighting Sioux (is that now or will it be an abusive or hostile mascot?) won the tournament and secured the Western League's automatic bid. Wisconsin 4, Minnesota 0 in the consolation game. Or was that the real title game?

With the victory, the Badgers may even vault past Minnesota in the computer rankings used to determine seedings for the NCAA tournament. Many expect Wisconsin (26-10-3) to be the No. 1 overall seeded team when the pairings are announced at 10 a.m. today (ESPN2). That would mean a trip to Green Bay for the Midwest Regional, where two victories would get them to the Bradley Center in Milwaukee for the Frozen Four.

If ever home ice mattered ... SIEVE!

OFFICE POOLS, CORRUPTED. It's the round of 32 and no Big Ten team has yet advanced to the "sweet 16." The Illini were bitten by a husky. Gonzaga disposed of Indiana. Ohio State is yet to play. Jim at Blogs for Industry live-blogged LSU's buzzer-beater win over Texas A and M; scroll around his site for other tournament coverage. Sean at The American Mind covers the collapse of the better-known Wisconsin teams. The Panthers could not get past Florida tonight. Former Milwaukee coach Bruce Pearl, now at Tennessee, has been excused by Wichita State out of the Dust Bowl Missouri Valley conference. (That would be a spectacular outcome in the women's tournament, with Pat Summitt apprentice Jane Albright, now at Wichita State after stints at Wisconsin and Northern Illinois, excusing the master.)

CROCODILE CALL. Tim at Where Worlds Collide weighs in on European and North American crocodilian locomotives. The Swiss would prefer that a "croc" have a jackshaft drive and articulated hoods.

If you like your crocs a more manageable size, there is a Czech company, E.T.S., that will sell you a replica 1/45 actual size, set up for three-rail or two-rail operation. If the inner motor is geared to the jackshaft, one could make the case that it is as believable a representation of the real thing as the live steam operators make for their pet projects, particularly if you wire it to draw power from the pantographs. But you then have all the joys of maintaining model trolley wire...

CARNIVAL CALL. Carnival of Education No. 72₍₈₎ returns to Education Wonks, who were kind enough to mention the poster contest announcement.

COMPLEX ADAPTIVE SYSTEMS WILL DO WHAT THEY PLEASE. Last week, the consensus among the weather models the radio and TV forecasters rely on was for a serious snowfall on March 16. My neighbor was busy putting the plow on his pickup truck as well as attaching the salt-shaker to the rear. He even staged a dump truck with plow attached as a reserve. The television forecaster was expecting the snow to start around 3 am.

I was up and about around 7 am on the 16th. Open the shade, look outside, nothing happening. A few flurries around 9 am. Weather Channel radar has the ugly pink band (freezing rain or similar pleasures) directly over DeKalb. Nothing hitting the ground. Check the university site for an update.

WHAT'S ON MY MIND: Dry air from Canada means bye-bye snow. Radar clearly shows it evaporating around 3,000 feet and below as the system brings in air with humidities around 40% in the lowest 3,000 feet of the atmosphere. That's just drying up the snow after it leaves the clouds. The snow IS heavy; in fact, I can tell looking at satellite imagery thundersnow is trying to get going. But, it is so dry halfway below cloud base that it is just evaporating it before it hits ground, except in the heaviest snow showers. So, I will reduce amounts to a dusting to 2". The amount of dry air coming into this system is very impressive. And needless to say, forecasts are busting badly all over the place. I expect the NWS to cancel their warning shortly.

Which is what they did. Around 4 pm some snow started sticking, but that amounted to maybe a quarter inch, all of which had melted by mid-morning Friday.

STARTING SOME NEW TRADITIONS. Florida State earns a tournament bid. Good going, Sue, thanks for keeping me in the loop.


The university decides to expand its illuminated-spear ceremony beyond football season.

Since its dedication in 2003, the spear has been set ablaze at sunset before FSU home football games only and it burns until sunrise the morning after the game. The new policy means the spear will be lit when FSU wins an Atlantic Coast Conference team championship in any sport, or an NCAA individual championship in any sport. In addition, the spear would be lit the night an FSU team is selected for NCAA Championship competition and will burn for 24 hours.

No word on whether this honor will be offered if a Florida State graduate rides the Space Shuttle or if a faculty member wins a Nobel Prize.

BYPASS OPPORTUNITIES MATTER. Jake of Tufte's Economics Class picks up an old Argmax article describing Coca-Cola's research into a smart vending machine that would lower the prices on cold days and raise them on warm days.

There's just one little detail missing from the story. Some twenty years ago, Coca-Cola decided to change the formula for its cola. New Coke quickly went from being the sole offering to sharing with Coke Classic before being mercifully put aside. Pepsi hired Bill Cosby to have some fun with the competition. "This is the new product, which we told you was the old product last week," or something like that. It's not too difficult to envision a similar campaign. "Pepsi. Same Price, Different Day," or something like that.

THE LIFE OF THE MIND. University Diaries reacts to perceived sabbatical leave abuse in Michigan.

What makes it even more difficult to justify sabbaticals, it seems to me, is the obsolescence of the professor-as-intellectual, the professor as essentially a monkish pensive type. Traditionally, the professor was not a publications-generating, conference-organizing, grants-getting, newspaper-quote-issuing dervish. She was intended to do the world’s slow and careful thinking for it, and her primary function was to share the fruits of that thinking with students and colleagues within the walls of the university.

No one questions the need for contemplatives to sit atop mountains and reflect to no particular end. But everyone questions the need of non-reflective careerists to reflect. To the extent that university professors look more like non-reflective careerists than old-fashioned contemplatives, they can expect people to wonder why they get to drift off to subsidized wanderjahren.

Fine, Michigan (or Illinois, where some of the same dynamics are in play.) Redefine the job description and see what happens.

NEVER SMILE AT A CROCODILE. The most recent Monday Train Blogging, which author DoDo notes will be offered intermittently in the future, focuses on crocodilian Alpine electric locomotives. Any electric locomotive with a center cab and long machine housings at each end suggests the eyes and snout of a crocodile, or in the United States, an alligator.

The crews of the North Shore Line referred to this motor, purchased secondhand from the Oregon Electric, as "the alligator."

Photo from Daves Rail Pix.

The original Swiss crocodiles illustrate several steps in the evolution of electric locomotives. The latest issue of BackTrack includes an article by R.A.S. Hennessey on "A Century of Electric Classification." (BackTrack's publisher charmingly continues to operate without benefit of a web site, let alone online content.) It focuses on the varying ways the engineers would design locomotives as well as classify them. The main design problem is housing the machinery. As Mr Hennessey puts it, there are two "main faces of electric traction morphology," which in North American parlance are "'steeple cabs,' with the driving cab centred between two bonnets;" and "'box cabs,' with a cab at both ends." The crocodile is clearly of the order "steeple cab." (The body has a passing resemblance to the roof line of a North American school house or church with a belfry.)

The variants of crocodile in DoDo's post illustrate a somewhat more challenging proposition, classifying the machinery. The canonical Swiss Ce6/8 has a guide axle at each end and two pairs of three driving wheels connected by siderods and driven by a jackshaft. That imitation of steam locomotive technology poses a somewhat simpler counterbalancing problem than a steam locomotive with both reciprocating and rotating masses. In When the Steam Railroads Electrified, William D. Middleton explains that early electric motors of sufficient power could not be made sufficiently small to fit under the frames. A larger motor above the frames also raised the locomotive's center of gravity, which improved its tracking ability. There were some very large applications of the jackshaft principle in use by the Virginian and Norfolk and Western in the Appalachian coal fields, as well as the Pennsylvania Railroad's DD-1 (the classification is simple enough: a 4-4-0 steamer is a Class D; if you couple two of them back-to-back you have a D-D, even if the engineers will call it a 2-B+B-2) that made Penn Station possible. One example is in preservation at Strasburg, Pennsylvania.

The locomotive is of the order "box cab."

Another design variant in the early years involved putting the armature of the traction motor directly on the axle, the famous "gearless bi-polar" design. Imagine your basic science fair motor with one field and a two-pole armature, but the armature must be free to rotate relative to the axis of the field. (The whole axle must rotate at a constant speed going around curves. Railroad wheels are smaller at their outside diameter than they are at the flange. The axle tilts on curves, with the smaller outside diameter turning as fast on the inside rail as the larger diameter at the flange is turning on the outside rail. There will be a quiz later.)

Despite the technical shortcomings, the bi-polar motor was used successfully by the New York Central's S-motor, which the National Museum of Transport notes, "was the prototype for thousands of Lionel and Ives model electric trains" (including models currently available.)

The picture shows the motor at St. Louis. Another is in the Illinois Railway Museum collection.

The other application of the bi-polar concept served the Coast Division of the Milwaukee Road, a mountainous stretch with few opportunities for fast running. The locomotives also provided inspiration for Lionel, Ives, and American Flyer, although with a bit more artistic license in the rendition.


One bi-polar is in preservation, also at St. Louis. The BackTrack article uses it as an illustration of variations in wheel arrangement descriptions. I shall simply use 1B+D+D+B1, in the North American fashion, with each grouping of wheels pivoting independently. Lionel and the other electric train makers of the 1920s often scaled their "Bi-Polars" down to two powered axles so the engine would go around the Christmas tree. Most were painted orange or black. The real ones finished their careers painted Milwaukee's Union Pacific-inspired yellow with red trim.

North American railroads also discovered what DoDo noted about the safety margin those machinery hoods provided. The Pennsylvania Railroad modified their P5a motors from box cabs to what we call "streamlined steeple-cab" design after a fatal grade crossing accident. The modified version has crocodilian features.

Support the Fallen Flags site.

The better-known GG-1 was designed from the beginning as a streamlined steeple cab type. A few remain in preservation, including one at the Illinois Railway Museum that has been repainted into proper Pennsylvania pinstripes and given its proper number 4927 back.


But is it correct to refer to any steeple-cab locomotive as a "crocodile?" In the United States, the steeple cab design dates to the earliest days of electric railroading, with a plant switcher built for the Ponemah Mills of Taftville, Connecticut, in preservation near New Haven.


Steeple-cab locomotives still provide electric freight service for the Iowa Traction, and less frequently for the East Troy Electric Railroad.

Emery, Iowa.

On shed at East Troy, Wisconsin.

But are all steeple-cabs crocodilians? The Bernina crocodile, although it looks like East Troy's L-8,


also a snowplow motor, the Bernina crocodile clearly has equipment hoods that pivot independently of the cab.

If the standard for crocodilian electric locomotive includes snouts that pivot independently of the cab (adding to the reptilian nature of the beast,) there is a North American candidate, the Illinois Terminal Class D freight motor.

This picture, from Dave Mewhinney, illustrates the articulation perfectly.

(Cross-posted at European Tribune)

QUOTE OF THE DAY. Wisconsin transportation secretary Frank Busalacchi.

Actually, I was kind of addicted to passenger rail even before I went to Spain. Because, quite honestly, this Amtrak service that we’ve got between Milwaukee and Chicago is one of the biggest success stories in the entire country.

Yes.

DEVELOPING YOUR JIVE DETECTOR. The more things change, notes Stanley Katz, the more clear some fundamental truths become.

We are also increasingly uncertain about what counts as liberal education. On the one hand, we seem to have too much to teach; on the other, we worry about offending some students (and their parents) by speaking openly and honestly about controversial matters. And, although this is hard to substantiate, it seems to me that we Americans have a fear of asking too much of our adolescent children (at least academically, if not in terms of all the other demands we make on their time and energy that sap their focus), and so we have deferred to college the kinds of aggressive and searching education that our youngsters need for their full intellectual development.

(Via Milt Rosenberg. Read and understand.)

ICE DANCING. Wisconsin's women's hockey team secures an automatic bid with a 4-1 win over Minnesota. SIEVE!

CARNIVAL CALL. This week's Carnival of the Capitalists calls at Pro HipHop. The proprietor illustrated the carnival with an Editor's Choice from the Poster Contest. Thanks!

COMPANY MAIL, OR OPPOSITION RESEARCH? National Review launches Phi Beta Cons, which it bills as "The Right Take on Higher Ed." The first few posts appear to be judging much of higher education by the radicalism of some education colleges and the industrial reserve army in the humanities.

CREATIVE DESTRUCTION. Take the largest corporations, ranked by capitalization in 1959. Set aside the oil companies. How many of those corporations are in the 2006 top ten? Only one, and its 2006 product line is very different from its 1959 offerings. Oil is another matter; apparently the Standard Oil Trust of New Jersey will be reborn sometime after the Second Coming of Ma Bell. King at SCSU Scholars has some pertinent questions for those who would interpret the numbers as heralding the decline and fall of the U.S. economy.

DO YOU HAVE THE TIME TO LISTEN TO ME WHINE? Marginal Utility hosts the Second Whining Carnival, including one arcade devoted to academic whines. It appears as though observers of the basketball tournament are also engaged in whining about the snubbing of certain large conferences and the seeding of certain underachieving teams.

CONTEMPLATING THE NEXT FIELD TRIP. The former Chicago and North Western station in Racine has been rebuilt (Flash video) as a bus terminal. There is a line of the Racine bus system that connects, loosely, with the Hiawatha at Sturtevant. The new Sturtevant station continues to take shape. Perhaps when the new station is open there will be an opportunity to report on the public transit in Racine.

RECONSIDERING SOCIALIZATION. In Racine, school administrators would like to dilute the poverty rate among any school's students.

"Studies have found that the positive benefits of racial integration, in terms of achievement by blacks, came not from black children sitting next to white children, but from poor children being exposed to the culture of a predominantly middle-class school," Richard Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at The Century Foundation and author of "The Remedy: Race, Class, and Affirmative Action," wrote in Principal magazine in May 2000.

Gosh, somebody might recognize that "bourgeois" isn't a dirty word.

STINKBOATERS ARE CERTIFIABLE. That's obvious to any Laser sailor. This proposal is somewhat more serious.

Many thousands of future boaters would be banned from driving powerboats and personal watercraft unless they complete state-sanctioned boating safety courses under legislation awaiting Gov. Jim Doyle's signature.

The impetus for the legislation is a fatal accident on Lake Delton in which an inexperienced Illinois jet-skier ran down an inner-tuber. Yes, I know, "inexperienced Illinois jet-skier" is a long-winded way of saying "parvenu." But therein lies the problem. Will Wisconsin's lake safety patrols be able to enforce such laws against, say, youngsters operating powerboats with an IL or MC prefix to their hull numbers?

SWIFT OF FOOT IS HIAWATHA. It's Spring Break. I want a mental health day. Solution: drive to Elburn to pick up the 8.25 all-stopper to Chicago. The train fills up with families, many wearing green. Chicago is going to make St. Patrick's Day into a week, apparently, with both the downtown parade and the South Side parade stepping off. A number of the kids wanted to see the city put the orange compound into the river to turn it green (next you'll tell me that Green River starts with Fanta Orange as a feedstock.)

I had different plans. A somewhat late-running local (and some people may have been left behind even at that ... not everybody has twigged to the fact that the old C&NW lines run left-handed, and there were a few freight trains in the way) and a bit of dilatory service at a coffee shop make for an exciting connection to the 10.20 Hiawatha, train 333. Consist: Genesis diesel 76, Horizon leg-rest coach 51001, Horizon high-density coaches 54527, 54000, 54510, cabbage car 90200. On time start. 85 minutes later, I'm stepping down onto the platform in Milwaukee, and I wasn't the first person off the train. The sound of bagpipes fills the air. Although Milwaukee is about as Irish as Fred Usinger, the locals are getting ready for a St. Patrick's Day parade, doubling as the warm-up for the selection show parties that will occupy Sunday and Monday? I stick around and watch. Lots of locals are wearing green, often with PACKERS on it. A kid who was a three year old playmate and sparring partner has grown up to become "Irishman of the Year." Good on ya, John. The media sponsors include The Shepherd Express, the latest upholder of the left-indie newspaper tradition in Milwaukee, and The Onion, which, despite moving the editorial offices to New York City, still sells enough local advertising to warrant free distribution in the Milwaukee area, including at Real Chili. The local issue of The Onion included the parade announcement, and news that Milwaukee also attempted to turn the Milwaukee River green. Couldn't tell. Let the flatlanders do that. I bet neither of the Chicago parades had an advance guard of Harleys. (I took the real camera along. There may be illustrations later. Film has to go to the lab first.) The showpiece of these parades is the local Irish dance academies. It's Wisconsin, so some of them sport warmup suits in cardinal and white, and others are wearing what resembles Prussian blue. But what's with the ultra-frizzy hair, girls?

I did get some writing done, as well, in the Frank P. Zeidler Reading Room at the Milwaukee Public Library. The biography of Mr Zeidler, who served as mayor from 1948 to 1960 on the Socialist platform, does not mention that he was instrumental in organizing the Model Railroad Club of Milwaukee, a pioneer O Gauge organization.

The equipment from 333 made a round trip to Chicago and return and was waiting for me to board the 5.45 Hiawatha, Train 340. I took advantage of the opportunity to nap, thus no detailed time log. Despite occasional rain, the rail was dry at departure time, with the Allen-Bradley thermometer reading 50 degrees (F). Light load with little traffic on or off at the airport or Sturtevant. On-time departure at 17:45:00 by my watch, Glenview 18:45, stop Chicago 19:08:46. Time to check out the Elephant and Castle on Adams and grab a quick supper at North Western Station, then head home. Union Pacific still having trouble keeping freight trains out of the way of commuter trains. (Might the rest of the railroad run more precisely if the dispatchers and freight crews had more respect for "must clear the scheduled time of first class trains?")

THE MORE THINGS CHANGE. The current president of the Lionel Corporation comments on the ongoing legal battle between Lionel and K-Line. I have not been following this very closely, although Lionel have obtained relief for K-Line's use of Lionel technology.

YOUNGSTERS CLEAR ON THE CONCEPT. One of the pleasures of operating the Office of Economic Education at Northern Illinois University is the opportunity to run the annual Economics Concepts Poster Contest. The winning and honorable mention entries in the 2005-2006 Regional competition are now available for your viewing pleasure.


Do we have some future game theorists among the winners?

THE RETENTION POND IS POLLUTED. The Fordham Foundation's Chester Finn wonders why taxpayers should pay for high school twice. (Via Joanne Jacobs. The comments suggest they are beginning to catch on, at a mid-major no less.) In higher education,

Lots of faculty and staff members have jobs that depend on the persistence, even the growth, of remedial (or “developmental”) courses, and plenty of university revenues derive from state subsidies and tuition payments for those programs. Uncle Sam contributes as well, via a host of programs (e.g., the TRIO programs) that underwrite remediation, and the private sector, too, contains many companies that make money by coaching, tutoring, and otherwise helping equip their clients with the skills and knowledge that the regular schools have failed to impart.

In the common schools,

[S]tate officials are understandably nervous about toughening K-12 academic standards at a time when there’s plenty of grumping (including from leaders of minority groups) about how hard it is to reach today’s standards, how many kids are dropping out, and how punitive it would be to expect tougher standards.

Constrained Vision suggests that affirmative-action efforts in higher education are doomed absent precisely those standards.

If you want more black students in college, you need better K-12 education. You need to fix the inner-city school districts where three-quarters of black boys fail to graduate high school. Colleges may be able to soften their admission criteria to admit blacks with lower GPAs or SAT scores, as Wesleyan has done, but they can't relax their standards enough to admit high school dropouts.

Given the shortcomings of the common schools, it's not clear to me why universal college ought be the objective, as Mr Finn appears to believe.

[D]espite ample evidence to the contrary, poll after poll shows many Americans unconvinced that everybody needs to be ready for college. Hence the continuing popularity of high-school vocational education and the reluctance to install a true college-preparatory program as the “default” curriculum. (A few states, such as Arkansas and Texas, have tried to do so anyway, although their notion of college prep may only superficially resemble their universities’ expectations.)

Many university administrators notion of college only superficially resembles their faculties' expectations. But perhaps the state legislature that first votes not to subsidize remediation in college will have the same salutary effect the first employer to bypass the job fair and hire directly out of high school rather than attempt to make sense of inflated grades will.

How much paying for the same material twice is there? King at SCSU Scholars attempts to quantify his university's mathematics arithmetic remediation efforts.

We admit about 2200 new entering freshmen a year, so you can see that about a third need at least some remediation ... So taxpayers are paying nearly $650,000 for getting these students up to a level of math that would let them take ... general education math at a college level, which is more than a bit short of calculus. Students not completing these classes -- a significant percentage -- must retake, and pay again, as does the taxpayer.

Were there graduation exams in high school written as tests of college readiness, it would put out of business programs like our Division of General Studies. When universities have a harder time filling their entering classes with qualifying students, it's not unusual to see DGS enrollments grow.

And memoranda alerting faculty to the existence of the support services proliferate?

I repeat: the public outcry over the failure of the universities to provide the higher education WILL be our undoing. Ward Churchill and Eve Ensler? Sideshow. Research delays the grading of papers? Big deal. Despite remediation, graduates are unable to perform simple tasks? Trouble.

THE VIRTUAL UNIVERSITY. Unlocked Wordhoard discovers a little-known rider in the latest Deficit Reduction Act that might open up the door for more provision of distance learning. In his view, there might be some sweet revenge by the adjuncts who will be the providers.

In my own experience, I find the students who have taken the prerequisites online are even less prepared than those who transferred the credits from community colleges. It is tempting for cyber-adjuncts to load up on classes, signing up for impossible loads at multiple schools, then doing the bare minimum possible to avoid being fired. I've heard rumors of cyber-adjuncts pulling down six figures through playing the system at multiple schools, but I cannot confirm these stories. Of course, adjuncts could always abuse the system, but given the limitations of time and geography, they have traditionally been the recipients of abuse.

The post offers additional prognostications.

My conjecture: absent any attempt by the universities deploying more distance learning without enhancing the value of the signal their degree confers, the positional arms race among parents to buy a better-known credential (note, I did not say better credential) rages as before.

BRATWURST WEATHER APPROACHES. Just another reason for some people to hate me.


Cox and Forkum published this two weeks ago.

E PLURIBUS UNUM. Downtown Chicago was the site of a large rally for immigrant rights today.

Alex Garcia and about 10 co-workers from a Joliet commercial sign company rode a Metra train to Chicago's Union Station and then walked about 12 blocks to Union Park, then re-traced their steps as they headed back to the Loop.

Garcia, whose company installs signs for McDonald's, Burger King and other fast-food restaurants in the Chicago area, said, "Most people don't realize how much work we do, but it's part of their daily lives. We are putting up all the buildings and cooking all the food. Today, they'll understand."

Anticipating the big turnout, critics of illegal immigration held a preemptive news conference this morning in Grant Park. They predicted the rally would backfire on its organizers, stoking the anger of other Chicagoans that illegal immigrants were arrogant enough to demand increased rights.

I do have that paper on parallel immigration tracks to get in shape, and sehr schnell, for an upcoming conference in Chicago. The policy implications have some relevance.

Today's events come at a critical time in the immigration debate. Congress is weighing competing proposals over how to treat the nation's 11 million undocumented immigrants.

Rally organizers said they oppose H.R. 4437, a bill approved in the U.S. House of Representatives that would drastically strengthen immigration enforcement, including the construction of a fence along the Mexican border.

Instead, they back a competing bill that would provide legal status for most undocumented immigrants and make it easier for legal immigrants to bring in relatives. That legislation, sponsored by U.S. Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Edward Kennedy (D-Mass), also would expand temporary work visas.

The more difficult one makes legal entry, the more determined the illegal residents will be to obtain regular status.

A subplot of the day's events, organizers said, was the Chicago economy's reliance on immigrant labor. Organizers encouraged participants to leave work, with some calling for a "general strike" today to underscore the workload shouldered by immigrants, including those without legal status.

Around the area, business owners weighed whether to give the march their blessing or to resist the employee exodus. Several Mexican box boys in a Montclare grocery store said they saw the march as a chance to affirm their dignity. But their boss Gus Labrakis, a Greek immigrant, was annoyed about how their participation might impact his business.

"I don't think this is a good idea," Labrakis said. "They're inviting even more hate against them. The real problem is at the border. If they keep coming by the millions, where will this lead?"

To an even more productive USA compared to the rest of the world? I wonder if there are enough parameters now to calibrate a numerical analysis. That "subplot" is precisely the "apprenticeship" argument upon which much of my current research rests.

THE HAVES AND THE HAVE-LESS. Or is it the have-nots? The Wall Street Journal hosts an exchange between Heather Boushey of the Center for Economic and Policy Research and Russell Roberts of George Mason University and Cafe Hayek. Topic: poverty and inequality. Arnold at Econ Log solicits your comments on the relevance of inequality, particularly his perception that Big Media discover it when other economic news is good.

WHY AM I HERE? It has been some time since I posted anything on the antics of the committee I was conscripted into for reasons that remain unclear. There was a February meeting that ended immediately before I intended to leave for points north; look for a longer comment on dispositions next week. The March meeting was earlier today. It ended just in time for me to hear the Wisconsin collapse on the radio.

But I'm beginning to figure something out. The committee, which might have been strengthened on the basis of some recommended practice of the National Council on Accrediting Teacher Education, appears to be more concerned with having the proper procedures in place for that accreditation audit. It reminds me of ISO 9001 or ISO 14,001, but we don't get to hang a fancy banner at the loading dock.

Here is an indication of the current state of teacher preparation. The State of Illinois requires that all seekers of a state teacher's certificate undergo a criminal background check, with fingerprints. This committee devoted about a half hour this afternoon to fretting over whether Northern Illinois University grant partial faith and credit to background checks conducted elsewhere. For now, no.

SWIFT OF FOOT. I investigated the Lionel Corporation website. The image on the catalog cover is timeless.


Lionel's version is capable of a higher scale speed than the prototype!

SPRING BREAK. Thanks for looking in. I do have some book reviews and mini-dissertations in mind for the upcoming week. Maybe some brass craftsmanship for your viewing pleasure as well.

REVEALED PREFERENCES. Another memorandum from headquarters.

As you are aware, we initiated a campus-wide effort (Early Alert) during the fall 2005 semester to assist our new freshmen with their transitions to our university. This initiative is focused on identifying and assisting freshmen who are at risk or are experiencing difficulties in adjusting to the university experience. The help of our faculty is critical to our success.

As. If. The. Mistakes. Of. Admissions. Are. My. Problem.

I am asking for your continued assistance in identifying freshmen students who may be experiencing academic adjustment issues. You may also choose to recommend upperclassmen that may be experiencing academic difficulty in your classes.Your 2005 fall semester efforts produced 500 referrals.

What's the cost-benefit ratio?

Students will be referred to various campus academic service programs such as tutoring or academic counseling. In addition, because you may be in the best position to assist your own students, they will be encouraged to meet with you to discuss any difficulties with class material.

I may be in the best position to assist my own students? Thanks. Isn't the whole point of letting the newbies know that office hours are available for consultation sufficient? We have to hire an army of counselors to reinforce the obvious?

The memorandum helpfully offers advice.

Do any of your students demonstrate the following?

poor class attendance
sleep in class
perform poorly on assignments
perform poorly on examinations
not turn in assignments or homework
seem disconnected or overwhelmed

Students demonstrating these behaviors may be at risk for poor academic performance.

Often, these students are not aware of services and programs that can enhance their academic success.

Marvelous. The problem isn't immaturity or irresponsibility, it's ignorance of the hand-holders.

What can faculty do?

Identify and refer at risk students to the Early Alert Program
Keep posted office hours and encourage students to visit for assistance
Provide feedback and grades for students throughout the semester
Assess student performance prior to the midterm withdrawal deadline

Students that are conscientious enough to take advantage of the latter three good professorial practices (which some of us have been doing for long before anybody conceived of an Early Alert Program -- am I really reading a revelation about this university's preferences for temporary faculty?) are unlikely to have such lax life-management skills as to demonstrate the so-called at-risk behaviors. Those that are not? Well, they are adults. I am not aware of any public outcry about the universities being excessively demanding, although this service, recently and repeatedly, has called attention to public outcry about a failure of the universities to be demanding.

I DID MENTION ECONOMIES OF AGGLOMERATION. Somehow, though, the votes from town meetings at Newfane, Brookfield, Dummerston, Marlboro and Putney, Vermont (via Best of the Web) do not seem likely to reverse the reversal of agglomeration economies the Green Mountain State has been experiencing. (What would Calvin Coolidge or Ned French say?)

SWITCHING OUT THE SCRAP LINE? It appears as though Cassandra at Villainous Company has quietly resumed posting. (There appears to be some potentially nasty script on the site, however.)

THE INSTA-CELA EXPRESS. A left-handed compliment.

ON THE ACELA to NYC, and for the moment at least the wireless is working. I'm pretty sure that the economics don't work, but you can't fault Amtrak on the service. As I've noticed before, the folks who work on these trains take pride in what they do, and they do a good job. The Acela comparison makes flying seem even more like taking the bus than it already does.

I noticed no follow-up post grousing about the common boarding foul-ups at NYP (Penn Station, for those of you in Knoxville), perhaps another good sign.

But let's tackle the economics for a moment. Are the four-wheelers attempting to get around the trucks on the New Jersey Turnpike, let alone the open-access bits of Interstate 95 in Delaware and Maryland, more subsidized, or less subsidized than the Business Class (Acela using the old British dodge of renaming "Third" as "Second") passengers quaffing coffees at intermittent sprints of up to 130 mph? Extra credit for working out the net contribution of the Conrail Shared Assets Area using the Corridor in the Linden-Metuchen section.

Once you've worked out whether socialism works on the roads, evaluate the explicit and implicit subsidies to the operators of those flying buses.

WORKING YOUR WAY THROUGH COLLEGE? Some people have a good problem that enables them to pass on posing for the art students. Others are not yet there.

BURSTING BUBBLES. The Lady Huskies had a halftime lead against recently promoted to the top 25 Bowling Green, a team that did not rest on its press clippings in the second half. The men got behind early against Toledo and time ran out before they could get ahead.

Around the neighborhood, [Wisconsin]-Milwaukee's men and women already have their automatic bids in hand, the women with a little help from Illinois-Chicago [Circle], and well ahead of expected dual participants Duke, Connecticut, Ohio State, and Tennessee (the men with an assist from Milwaukee.) The Golden Porcupines, er, Chickens, er, That Other Milwaukee Team That Will Never Schedule the Panthers will be waiting for a 'phone call on Sunday. The Badgers? If not, North. Dakota. State.

RESPECTING DIFFERENCE. There is a coffee house in central DeKalb that serves a great jumbo mocha and it offers a panoramic view of the Overland Route. (An economist, as you know, is an organism for converting espresso shots into sufficient conditions.) The coffee house also offers live entertainment of various kinds. (I had to bail on Saturday as they were setting up for Eve Ensler's talkative privates and I was contemplating an envelopment of a different kind.)

That same weekend, a Christian theme band decided not to play a concert there, as the art exhibit for the month featured some nudes.

"Right now I'm working through what is an appropriate venue for us," said Keslinger guitarist Seth Deming. "[The nude paintings] were a gray line and since it was a gray line, we decided it would be better if we didn't play."

Members of the band asked management of The House Cafe to remove the paintings. The House Cafe did not comply with the request.

"We agreed to showcase the artists' work, and could not compromise their gallery time by taking down the paintings," said John Ugolini, booking agent for Kickstand Productions. "[The House Cafe are contracted and bound to an agreement with artists that showcase their work at the cafe. We are not permitted to take down artists work without the consent of the artist."

[Painter Gary] Schirmer was not informed of the situation at the time, but said he understands how some people could have been offended.

"I know that there's probably people that are offended by nudity in general I suppose," Schirmer said. "But look at the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel and that's really where my work is rooted."

Notice that there were no torchings of art galleries or gripes about fundie-fascists.

ON THE READY TRACK. Sorry not to have posted any modeling progress for some time. Here is a progress report.

I was able to secure one of the few Suburban Tanks K-Line delivered before legal troubles overwhelmed them. Thanks, Norm. (And yes, I am seriously researching a proper digital camera.)


From time to time, the Locomotive Workshop kit of the same engine has turned up in my pictures. Here it is, laid out, if not yet soldered together. (Soldering is something better not done tired, and I have been tired a lot lately.)


Side-by-side, the engines are comparably proportioned. The cast-in details in the K-Line will be a bit clunky compared to the soldered-on brass details, but I clearly have my work cut out for me.


More model pictures as time and energy permit.

CONTEMPLATING THE ACADEMY. University Diaries recommends a Camille Paglia essay that, well, could use work on the internal consistency. On the one hand,

The ideological groupthink of Harvard's humanities faculty does patent disservice to the undergraduates in their charge, but it is the faculty alone that should properly determine curriculum and academic policy, a responsibility that descends from the birth of European universities in the Middle Ages. Over the past 40 years, there has been a radical expansion of administrative bureaucracies on American college campuses that has distorted the budget and turned education toward consumerism, a checkbook alliance with parents who are being bled dry by grotesquely exorbitant tuitions.

To repeat. That. Is. Not. The. Main. Problem. The administrative expansion allows the expansion of the coreless curriculum while providing the climbing walls and big time sports to sugarcoat the indoctrination.

[Departing president Larry] Summers's strategic blunders unfortunately took the spotlight off entrenched political correctness and changed the debate to academic power: who has it, and how should it be exercised? Nationwide, campus administrations faced with factionalized or obdurate faculties have in some cases taken matters into their own hands by creating programs or reducing and even eliminating departments. The trend is disturbingly away from faculty power.

I've seen that done for budgetary reasons, sometimes to well-established departments. On the other hand, the proliferation of what I have referred to as programs for Cooling Out the Mark pack the faculty governing bodies with reliable sycophants for the administrations, to the detriment of learning.

IT now remains to be seen whether Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences is capable of self-critique. Will its members acknowledge their own insularity and excesses, or will they continue down the path of smug self-congratulation and vanity?

Clearly not. Newmark's Door suggests the smugness infests a somewhat younger private college with a weaker hockey team than Harvard's, where a faculty committee decided that an arts degree was required for economics because, well, all the other arts and sciences departments had an arts degree.

"Since every department in the College of Arts and Sciences offers the A.B. degree, and most all departments offer both degrees, that option should be available to students in the economics department," said Alvin Crumbliss, professor of chemistry and chair of the [Duke Arts and Sciences] Curriculum Committee.

That's despite the Duke economics department being enrollment-impacted. If the powers that be at Duke are opting not to match positions with enrollment, what hope do we have? (And what is this phenomenon telling us about any plans to community-college-ify economics departments? Does anyone seriously expect to find sufficient new Ph.D.s in economics willing to teach four or five courses of fifty to 100 students and grub for grant money?)

Back to Professor Paglia.

If Harvard cannot correct itself in this crisis, it will signal that academe cannot be trusted to reform itself from within. There is a rising tide of off-campus discontent with the monolithic orthodoxies of humanities departments. David Horowitz, a 1960's radical turned conservative, has researched the lopsided party registration of humanities professors (who tend to be Democrats like me) and proposed an "academic bill of rights" to guarantee fairness and political balance in the classroom. The conservative radio host Sean Hannity regularly broadcasts students' justifiable complaints about biased teachers and urges students to take recording devices to class to gather evidence.

These efforts to hold professors accountable are welcome and bracing, but the danger is that such tactics can be abused. Tenure owes its very existence to past intrusions by state legislatures in the curricular business of state universities. If politicians start to meddle in campus governance, academic freedom will be the victim. And when students become snitches, we are heading toward dictatorship by Mao's Red Guards or Hitler Youth.

No kidding.

I submit that the abuse is beginning. Consider John Fund's attempt to hound a former spokesman for the Taliban out of Yale.

Shouldn't people of good will, both left and right, ask both Yale and the Bush State Department that issued his student visa if something is wrong with this?

No. We have a better chance to get him thinking differently about the world than he would if we packed him off to some madrassa. Does nobody remember Admiral Yamamoto Isoroku's reservations about sailing against the United States? A few more cosmopolitans in the Imperial General Staff and the unpleasantness might have been avoided.

But that does not absolve the faculty committees and the administrations of the responsibility to ensure that the higher learning is higher and includes learning.

GOOD EVENING, HOCKEY FANS. Sorry, King. Wisconsin 1, St. Cloud 0 Friday. Wisconsin by 3-1 on Saturday.

Those four consecutive home losses to close January seem like ancient history now.

The best news is in the footnotes.

[S]ellout crowd of 15,237.

SIEVE!

RIDING THE RAILS. DeKalb, Illinois, is fifteen miles from the west end of the Metra suburban train line at Elburn. There are two well-maintained mainline tracks of the Union Pacific, as well as a classic steam-era depot downtown and flat land near campus that could relatively easily be converted to a suburban train terminal with all the proper safety features.

Milwaukee, Wisconsin, is thirty miles from the north end of the Metra suburban train line at Kenosha. There is one track, kept in shape for the Oak Creek power plant, as well as a less-well cared for industry lead north into Milwaukee. The steam-era depots at Racine and Cudahy are in rough shape, and the interlocking leading from the former Chicago and North Western to the Milwaukee Road at Washington Street could use work.

Put your money on Milwaukee getting an extension of Metra service before DeKalb does. Owen at Boots and Sabers notes that a Greenfield legislator seeks to protect the commuter trains from a tax-limitation amendment being contemplated in Wisconsin. I'll leave the Wisconsin politics to Wisconsinites and focus on the proposed trains.

A Southeastern Wisconsin Regional Planning Commission study committee has recommended extending the Metra service from Kenosha to Racine and downtown Milwaukee, with additional stops at Cudahy, South Milwaukee, Oak Creek, Caledonia and the Town of Somers. Planners are now conducting a more detailed study.

Sometimes the fallout from public policy changes takes a long time. These sound like limited-train stops on The Milwaukee Electric Railway and Light Co. The pairing of "Railway" with "Light" was proscribed by the 1938 Public Utility Holding Company Act. But I digress.

There were stations at South Milwaukee and Cudahy almost up to Amtrak, as well as local stops at National Avenue on both the North Western and the Saint Paul. A Bay View station? I don't recall any such thing, although the idea of unloading from a train to walk to Three Brothers or DeMarini's has some appeal.

CONTEMPLATING HIGHER EDUCATION. Dan Drezner has a number of links. InstaPundit has been following a comparison of Harvard with General Motors at its most oblivious. Although there is potential for other institutions of higher learning to provide what Harvard has been failing to deliver, more difficult days are likely to precede that transition. Let me refresh your memory about a review of Killing Thinking, a book I am contemplating buying. The problem we face in the trenches is that until the people who run the universities, particularly at the mid-majors and the four-years, stop thinking about the diploma mills as the competition and mindlessly proffering "access" and "diversity" as higher goals, the positional arms race to get into the Harvards for fear of otherwise not being able to make any social connections as well as not learning anything will continue.

CRUNCHY CRUNCH CRUNCH. Via Betsy's Page, news that "Go West, Young Man," is still sound advice in Vermont.

Vermont, with a population of about 620,000, now has the lowest birth rate among states. Three-quarters of its public schools have lost children since 2000.

Vermont also has the highest rate of students attending college out of their home state — 57 percent, up from 36 percent 20 years ago. Many do not move back. The total number of 20- to 34-year-olds in Vermont has shrunk by 19 percent since 1990.

Research project: how do those numbers compare with Pittsburgh, or Milwaukee, or Cleveland, to think of cities with comparable populations and possibly one Congressional district.

The back-to-the-land influx of the 1960's, 70's and 80's, which once had Vermont growing faster than the country as a whole, has dissipated, [University of Vermont] Professor [and Cold Spring Shops reader Art] Woolf [who inter alia directs the economic education efforts for Vermont] said. Vermont may have lost some cachet for the people often referred to as "flatlanders."

Wait a minute here. "Flatlander" is the kinder way of saying F.I.B.

"If you live in New York or Boston and you want to get away from it all, these days it's just as cheap to fly out to Boise, Idaho, or Montana," Professor Woolf said.

Fewer babies are being born in part because Vermont has few immigrants, who tend to have larger families. Vermont has also lost many good-paying jobs, driving away many well-educated young people and further discouraging businesses.

Airline deregulation on one hand, the exhaustion of Sixties nostalgia on the other? Read on. There's reason for me to keep working on my current research.

The worker shortage recently forced Mr. Douglas to say he would not drive out illegal immigrants working on Vermont's dairy farms.

"I respect the laws of the United States, of course," [Governor Jim] Douglas said. "But the cows have to be milked."

There is also a serious housing shortage, with mountains and environmental restrictions barring building in many places.

The Last New Ager will be able to watch the sun go down behind Lake Champlain content that there will be no light pollution from a Wal-Mart and its attendant parking lot.

The article also suggests that the competition between elite private colleges and flagship state universities for prime students is getting hotter.

Vermont has the most colleges per capita in the nation and is full of out-of-state students who leave after graduating. But Vermonters often find tuition lower elsewhere because Vermont's colleges and universities get less state financing.

And there are consequences to declaring your neighborhood a nuclear-free zone.

Jennifer Black of Walden, Vt., now in Stoneham, Mass., said she contemplated returning, with two children for Vermont's schools. But jobs for her husband, a defense industry engineer, are "hard to come by" in Vermont, as are some conveniences.

"When I'm up there visiting, I think I would love to live up there," said Ms. Black, 36. "The air's so fresh." But, she added, "you have to drive half an hour to a grocery store. I can walk to a grocery store from here. There's a place where my kids can take swimming lessons readily available here."

Yet another research project: what happens when the economies of agglomeration work in reverse?

GOING FALCON HUNTING. The Lady Huskies withstood a Miami rally at the beginning of the second half to take both halves and earn a trip to Cleveland. The newspaper noted the contribution of this team's juniors. This site has noted the previous coach's success at recruiting players. Developing their talents was another matter. Other Northern Illinois teams also had a successful Saturday.

GOOD SNOWMAN SNOW. December colder than usual, January warmer, February close to the average if with little snow accumulation, now two inches of wet snow suitable for snowmen.

THE SOUND OF ATLAS, SHRUGGING. University Diaries has some fun with the observations a recently-fed-up professor somewhere in the Northwest (conjecture: Portland State) published as a "Goodbye to All That." Let's focus on the economics. The fed-up professor, first.

My president had just announced to the community at large that I was lazy and doing a bad job. I was now going to have to keep up with the for-profit Joneses. Internet classes. Saturday classes. Satellite campus classes. Night classes. What we needed was enhanced customer service with a side of more publications, please. You see, Almost Metropolitan State is almost a research university and suffers from a transitional identity disorder.

Oh, and don't forget that the research has to be sponsored. We hear the same stuff here.

I concur in part and dissent in part from University Diaries.

When your institution has no self-respect, no sense of itself as a university rather than a market-driven information delivery system, it makes sense to bail.

The real market test is not the challenge offered by the on-line diploma mills. The market test higher education is failing is its delivery of higher-level skills. Tightly Wound takes us part of the way.

Academics should be worried, and not about David Horowitz, because it seems to me that--fair or not--we're heading toward a place where "learning for its own sake," no longer justifies the expense, and the consequences will be dire indeed--and not just for the academics.

That is, if there is any learning going on.

When barely half the nation's kids don't read well enough to understand first-year college reading assignments, when they know more about The Simpsons and American Idol than they do about rudimentary aspects of the US Constitution, when kids are being told in school that George Bush is a "war criminal," that he is "eerily similar to Hitler," or that "capitalism is at odds with humanity," something is very wrong.

When kids don't have the math skills to balance checkbooks, or figure out restaurant tips; when the Defense Department has trouble finding qualified public school students to recruit; when barely half of Chicago Public School students graduate, and if they do, 75% to 95% must take remedial reading and math classes in junior college; when two-thirds of New Orleans public school fourth graders "do not have basic competence in math," something is very wrong.

And most of the cheese-moving the administrations at the Upwardly Mobiles have been engaging in does not position the faculty to better be able to correct these deficiencies in their charges' performance.

Meanwhile, the administrations and their apologists in the faculty seek to deflect legislative micro-management and whipped-up popular opprobrium by appeals to perceived anti-intellectualism. Professor Bainbridge dissents.

The function of scholarship thus is not always a critical one, seeking to expose faults, but rather can (and, I think, should be) a respectful one, seeking to grope towards understanding through science, history, myth, fable, custom, and tradition.

Indeed, while one social function of scholarship is to provide empirical observations about the current state of the world, an equally critical function is to situate those observations within the customs and traditions of society.

Read and understand.

IT HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH MONEY. Mid-American Conference teams, including Northern Illinois's football team, suffered most of the scholarship recisions under the new National Collegiate Athletic Association academic performance guidelines. The Mid-American's guidelines are somewhat more stringent than the Association's.

The director of athletics at Northern Illinois came close, this afternoon, to confirming that none of the Mid-American's November football games would be played on Saturday. That takes students out of the classroom or away from their studies on school nights, but it enhances the television opportunities for football.

WHAT IS HEADQUARTERS THINKING? The department and the dean had a frank and open exchange of views earlier this week. There has apparently been a change in the way the university allocates resources. Departments that are what headquarters calls "enrollment-impacted" might be eligible for additional faculty to offer additional sections of classes, but there's no presumption that those resources will be available. There's also reason for headquarters to study some economics. The university currently has a tuition-protection plan under which students who stay registered in good standing will pay the same rates for nine semesters. Headquarters understands this commitment as a constraint on their ability to raise additional revenues. The way the dean put it, if the state rescinds some of the moneys that were budgeted, the university cannot make good their losses by raising tuition. That evaluation is incomplete. On the one hand, there might be more students enrolled under the expectation of a constant tuition than under uncertainty about further increases. On the other, there might be more continuing students under that expectation than there would be with an increase. Thus, the effect of a tuition increase might be to reduce revenues to the university.

JUST LIKE FOOTBALL. The Northern Illinois men defeated Western Michigan, at Western Michigan, to earn the Mid-American West title outright and a trip directly to the field of eight in Cleveland. The schedules I'm hearing suggest contemporaneous use of the old Gund Arena for men's and women's tournaments.

I AM THE EGGPLANT. I AM THE WALNUT. For a change of pace I attended part of the American English performance at Otto's Niteclub. (Unlike Liverpool's Cavern, the concert used the first floor stage area, rather than the basement.) The performances are quite faithful to the music as I remember it from my road-trip collections, and a few of the tunes jogged some memories. The younger set is not quite so prone to screaming as the fans I recall from the Beatles' 1964 tour of the States, although they're quite receptive to the Sgt. Pepper and later era works, including the proper howls at the Eggman. Something there is about the visual effects for "Yellow Submarine" and "Octopuses' Garden." Put "GERITOL" in big letters behind the band and you're looking at Lawrence Welk for the 2020s.

OUR STUDENTS GET JOBS. In their fields. Good going.

LET FREEDOM RING. Rally Friday to show solidarity with Denmark.


Via Atlantic Blog off Kesher Talk.

GRAPPLING WITH COMPOUND SENTENCES. Perhaps my charges are no worse off than their elders.

Only one in four Americans can name more than one of the five freedoms guaranteed by the First Amendment (freedom of speech, religion, press, assembly and petition for redress of grievances). But more than half can name at least two members of the cartoon family, according to a survey.

Perhaps I'm engaging in rivet-counting, but one could parse the First Amendment in several ways.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

Here are two additional divisions of the rights. The "or" distinguishes freedom from religion (anti-anti-disestablishmentarianism?) from the free exercise of religion. That expands the list of rights to six. But notice the "and," which in the survey interpretation creates a second right. The previous items are separated by "or." Doesn't it make more sense to treat the petition for redress as a modification of "peaceably to assemble?" The Framers were unlikely to view a lawn-bowling assembly as a gathering of subversives. The Amendment protects the rights of people to gather and sing "We shall overcome."

The correct list of the five freedoms: freedom from religion, (public policy is non-sectarian), free exercise of religion (no belief system excluded), free speech (individual criticism of the government), free press (paid criticism of the government), and free assembly to petition (collective criticism of the government.)

CUE THE DANCE MUSIC. The Northern Illinois men's basketball team will do no worse than tie for first place in the Mid-American West. A win this Saturday, at home, secures the title outright. The women will host a play-in game for the tournament that evening.

RUNNING EXTRA. The men have to win on the road.

PRAISE FATHER, SON, AND CROLY GHOST. The newest print edition of Reason arrived at Cold Spring Shops headquarters this evening. The first letter to the editor is from Company Mail source Don Boudreaux of George Mason University and Cafe Hayek. I'm quoting it in full.

Asked why he wrote only about the Republican war on science, Chris Mooney replied, "Democrats have no constituency that compels them to deny something as fundamental as evolution." ("Unscientific Methods," January.)

The evidence contradicts Mooney's claim. Democratic ranks, like GOP ranks, bulge with people proclaiming that legislated minimum wages benefit low-wage workers and that goods in short supply are made more affordable by price caps. These people, in short, deny something as fundamental as supply and demand. More generally, the faithful of all political creeds imagine that the lives of 300 million diverse individuals can be successfully run by a handful of strangers who pose and pontificate beneath soaring marble domes.

These are egregious superstitions, immune to evidence and reason.

One can use the theory of complex adaptive systems to make sense of life forms, and of commerce, where order emerges without conscious planning. There is room to debate the dissimilarities. A shark does not think about its carnivorous essence. A trader can think about the nature of the trades he gains from.