LOOKING FOR A MARKET TEST. Richard Nokes's Unlocked Wordhoard has surveyed a number of posts on viewpoint diversity, or lack thereof, in higher education, in such a way as to provoke a spirited bull session with extensive rebuttals by one of the posters so surveyed. But it is to the root of all evil that he digs.

In my field, for example, we could offer lots of reasons that the study of English literature is a romper room from leftist politics, and many of those reasons are probably simultaneously true. At the end of the day, though, it all comes down to money. The path to financial success is easier for leftist literary scholars, and so many more pursue that path.

But why? His post offers no explanation on that score.

Let me suggest one: the market test for scholarship is incomplete, and it corrects errors in resource allocation slowly. Had leftist literary scholars continued to teach close reading and tight writing at the same time that their research considered different ways of interpreting literature, their disciplines might not have faced the problems they currently face. That, however, is not what has happened. I find myself frequently suggesting that the Economics Department time-slip the English Department for all the basic writing instruction we are doing, which has apparently been neglected in freshman composition and in the common schools. And I'm not alone. Here's a gripe by John Jay of Chicago Boyz. (Spend some time at the site for more on the same theme.)

This is not true in the Academic Humanities, by and large. One of the greatest crimes against scholarship perpetrated by the Boomers is their popularization of Post-Modernism, which tends to take ideas that range from the sophomoric to the idiotic and wrap them in impenetrable prose. Recently, I ran across an excellent article skewering that tendency:

For those ideas, in the main, are quite simple, and often anything but revolutionary in essence. What is genuinely remarkable about them is not their novelty, or their complexity, nor even the fact that a professor should harbor them; it is the astoundingly grandiose and rococo manner of their statement, the almost unbelievable tediousness and flatulence of the gifted headmaster's prose, his unprecedented talent for saying nothing in an august and heroic manner.

So the humanities types can't write well, but by virtue of their current positions, they are gatekeepers for their university presses and their journals. Thus elephantine and content-free writing accumulates in the library stacks and the curriculum vitae of the select get longer and the prestige and prizes accumulate.

Professor Nokes recognizes the self-referentialness of academic publishing.

Imagine, for example, a conservative literary scholar has managed to navigate the shoals of graduate school, freshly-minted with Ph.D. Now comes the time to publish that dissertation. Now Jane Scholar finds herself trying to find a publisher, and discovers that not many academic publishers are friendly toward conservative scholarship. Eventually, though, Jane Scholar manages to find a publisher, a few tiers down from the top.

On the basis of her book, what kind of job does she find? If her politics are conservative, she probably can hope for little more than to have her book ignored; if it gets reviewed, the reviews will be hostile. She'll find herself scrambling for work in a tough market, near the bottom of the academic heap.

That's apparently irrespective of the quality of the argument the dissertation makes. (I'm skeptical about that dimension: there is no better evidence of the weakness of the market test for humanities research than the prestige that has attached to Theory devoid of theorems or of testable implications. But I digress.)

Professor Nokes's suggestion: create viewpoint diversity in research by creating new publishing houses.

One thing, and one thing only, will change Academe -- money. See your mouth? Put your money in it's current geographical location. Fund some well-paying named chairs. Create some conservative academic publishing houses (Regnery is not enough) and publish some first-tier scholarship. Fund some swank academic conferences in desirable locations. Create grants for research. In other words, put up some cash!

You would think that conservatives would understand the motivating power of money. If scholars could sudden publish openly conservative work, could get their travel funded and their research supported, and found themselves getting tenure and promotion because they were able to publish prolifically, you would have a lot more openly conservative scholars in Academe (and probably some fake conservative scholars as well). Until then, all things being equal, liberal ideas will win out in the academy, because liberal ideas can get people published, tenured, and promoted. Conservatives outside of Academe need either to put up some cash or stop the griping.

Oh, come. Regnery will never be enough with its editorial staff of polemicists who consistently use excessively provocative language when plain English will work. But will additional publishing houses really facilitate a renaissance in conservative scholarship in the humanities? Or will the self-referential gatekeepers view the upstart presses as ideologically correct vanity presses for individuals whose work is insufficiently rigorous (yeah, right) or of insufficiently general interest (ditto) to merit consideration by the prestige presses? There's also the little problem that the prestige presses are resource sinks at the universities where they live, which is stimulating some interest in puncturing the research myth that these presses perpetuate.

IF YOU WANT TO BE A BADGER just come along with me to Carnival of the Badger by the bytes of Sequence, Inc. The management will link to Wisconsin-relevant submissions by expatriates.

CARNIVAL CALL. Carnival of the Capitalists presents an extensive bannerline at Business and Technology Reinvention. If you're following the Wal-Mart wars, this Scatterbox post might be a useful companion to my entry at the Carnival.

The concluding paragraph suggests there might be two systems of belief about the role of business.

But for all the rhetoric bombs and finger-pointing, Wal-Mart still handles some 140 million customers every week representing more than 80 percent of the American population. It’s reasonable to think that many Americans are oblivious to the whole commotion. And it's almost certain that many more are just plain ambivalent about it.

Why? Because in the real workaday world, these millions of people are consumers, not constituents. And consumers go Wal-Mart to get good prices on things they need – not to support a particular political party or public policy agenda.

First belief system: Civilization progresses by expanding the number of tasks people can do without thinking about them. I think that's Mises, feel free to correct me. Under this belief system, Wal-Mart evolved to make a wider variety of cheap stuff available.

Second belief system: The personal is political. Human interaction is inherently a negotiation over the allocation of resources and power. Although Wal-Mart well might have evolved precisely to make a wider variety of cheap stuff available, left unstated are the reasons why "variety" and "cheap" matter, and that's prior to any discussion about how Wal-Mart goes about achieving those things.

Does it follow that people can shop at Wal-Mart without contemplating politics or policy? Yes. Can Wal-Mart exist independent of politics or policy? No.

PLAYER WITH RAILROADS. The August Roundhouse Roundup is on the Call Board at The Thomas Institute. If you've ever thought it might be fun to have a piece of railroad equipment as a guest room or cottage, be sure to read this, particularly if your fantasy includes having it on a stretch of track.

WHAT'S OUR PURPOSE? The Washington Monthly has issued its own college rankings, which they offer as the anti-U.S. News.

Of the top 10 national universities in the 2006 rankings of U.S. News, only two, Stanford and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, make it onto our top 10. Harvard, first with Princeton on the U.S. News list, occupies only 28th place on our list, mainly because it's weak on national service. MIT takes first place, while four state schools take spots two through five: the University of California, Berkeley; Pennsylvania State, University Park; University of California, Los Angeles; and Texas A&M University.

Their ranking algorithm, which they are a bit coy about, values a number of attributes that U.S. News does not.

Emory, 20th on the list of U.S. News, comes in at 96th on our list. It ranks lowest on our list of any of the U.S. News top 25, and it's a full 42 spots behind runner-up Carnegie Mellon. Its social mobility score puts it at 104th place. (Its number of Pell recipients is low, its SAT scores are relatively high, yet its graduation is relatively low.) By spending its money on recruiting applicants with high SAT scores (a way of boosting one's U.S. News ranking) Emory has apparently decided reaching out to poorer students is a low priority. Nor does it do especially well in public service or research. That's not great for a school with an endowment of $4.5 billion, the eighth-highest in the nation. Boo, Emory.

The rankings view the California publics and the Big 10 favorably.

But what do the national university rankings tell us about the Illinois publics and the Mid-American? Illinois-Chicago comes in at 92nd, just above Emory (on an aggregate score basis; how different are the individual index entries?) Kent State leads the Mid-American at 56th, just ahead of Iowa. Same question. Illinois State is at 141, Southern Illinois 160, Northern Illinois 180. How different are the aggregate scores and the individual index entries? No doubt we will hear from our office of institutional research.

It's also tough to act on an urban mission. Wayne State is 204 and Wisconsin-Milwaukee 243. Does it console anybody that onetime public elite college aspirant Oakland is 244th and Alaska-Fairbanks is Feedlebaum? What do those rankings say either about the Monthly's weighting of outreach to poorer students or Milwaukee's efforts to become more of a research university in the Madison mold?

TOO CLEVER BY HALF? I'm a little late reacting to the latest Beloit College mindset list, which Inside Higher Ed posted last Wednesday as "What Your Freshmen Don't Know." Let me offer a few quibbles. Take

Madden has always been a game, not a Super Bowl-winning coach.

Please. Madden has been the guy with the Thanksgiving turducken. Or

Television stations have never concluded the broadcast day with the national anthem.

That's evidence the Beloit College folks aren't staying up all night thinking about these. To be sure, a lot of cable stations never sign off, but there is at least one State Line area station that still plays the National Anthem before going to a tower-cam, rather than a test pattern. Yeah, I can hear it, what's a test pattern? (I had to do a bit of Google mining, so should you!)

FIVE YEARS AGO. Sentimental Journey, which flew out of DeKalb last Tuesday morning for Madison (I heard but did not observe its departure) last paid a visit to Madison in 2001.

The plane will be available for the public to view through Monday (Sepetmber 10) at Madison's Truax Field.

If the plane was making short hops only by day, did it get caught in the ground stop on the 11th?

PROJECTS. On a recent visit to the Illinois Railway Museum, I had reason to think about the upcoming model-building season. (Classes are back in session, it's getting dark before 8 pm, and we're supposed to be free of the heat and humidity eventually.)

In the back of a bus barn is a Pullman-built trackless trolley, Milwaukee & Suburban's 350, in somewhat rough shape.


A Wisconsin transit enthusiast commissioned a series of models from the St. Petersburg Tram Collection, including the 350 in 7 mm = 1 foot.


There may be a way of engineering a drive system for this, although it was not built with a removable floor. Perhaps a magnet underneath it and a moving magnet underneath a diorama?

Under roof and receiving some attention is the experimental aluminum Chicago streetcar 4001.


Chicagoland Hobby had a series of these built by St. Petersburg in O Scale. The model has a removable floor, and powering it is a possibility. As with the museum, the issue will be budgeting time and money to work on it.


In another barn, Milwaukee Electric parlor car Menominee, which has received a cosmetic restoration.


Walthers made sides for this car, which I used as a steam railroad coach for a while. I have the components to build the parlor car, again, time permitting.


I had a clear view of Milwaukee Electric dump car D13, which has been used in work service at the museum. It came from East Troy, Wisconsin, where it was the spare motive power for the electric freight railroad.


A little fettling, a little gluing? I have the components for the cab interiors. It would be a shame not to put the control and brake stands and a stool in such plain view.


The first Electroliner has been out of revenue service for some time, to receive further mechanical work as well as repairs on the interior. (The museum removed the extra doors Philadelphia Suburban cut into the train, and now has to return the seats to those locations.)


Here's a Locomotive Workshop kit of the Electroliner as built for the North Shore Line.


While I was taking these pictures, it occurred to me that the museum has a number of Layout Design Elements that one could apply to a British-style layout. The movement of cars on the demonstration railroad is end-to-end, making it completely honest to have cars or trains go to the end of a track and reverse direction. Better, most of the operating collection is under roof. One could conceal the fiddle yard in a car barn, and simply shuttle cars back and forth on whatever schedule seems suitable. That most model railroaders have an excess of equipment, some of which is anachronistic to whatever one's principal interests are, makes the creation of a museum-themed layout even more attractive.

NOSTALGIC FOR THE OLD INDUSTRIAL STATE? I recently took delivery of and quickly read through Wal-Mart: The Face of Twenty-First-Century Capitalism and hope to put together a coherent Book Review No. 26. I say "hope to" as I am struggling to integrate several recent columns on Wal-Mart, which has become a political football for the Democratic Party, as well as thirty years of studying industrial organization and the political economy and policy implications therein. And thus my first struggle. Wal-Mart is an unrefereed conference volume, in which several social science professors, several dissertators, and some union organizers had their papers edited by Santa Barbara's Nelson Lichtenstein into the book. It would probably not be difficult to obtain sufficient sympathetic faculty members to serve as anonymous referees, but I don't want to go after this book as a symptom of a left monopoly on campus. Rather, I want to consider both the evolution of populist political economy and the possibility that some people would just as soon pen "critiques of capitalist production" for their own sake rather than to argue a consistent theoretical position. But that might just be my training as an economist coming through.

Consider one theme of the book. At one time, conference participants maintain, there was a middle-class-friendly economy in which large manufacturing firms produced goods in unionized factories. Wal-Mart is the leading edge of a proletarianized economy in which large retailers squeeze those manufacturers while doing everything possible to drive down wages. Tapped's Ezra Klein spells out those behaviors in more detail.

Perhaps I'm showing my age, but at one time the populist political economy saw those large manufacturing firms as building blocks of a monopoly capitalism that practiced conscious parallelism, which reduced efficiency by restricting output and raising prices, and the unions as accomplice residual claimants to the monopoly profits thereby obtained. The retailers of the era were complicit in that monopoly capitalism, with a concentrated food packing industry and often vertically integrated supermarkets profiting by the inflated price of bread, although, again, food and commercial workers' unions participated as residual claimants. Because firms could practice conscious parallelism without calendars to keep track of the phases of the moon or meetings in the back room at Dirty Helen's, antitrust action could do nothing about the resulting inefficiencies, although Wal-Mart could.

But when Wal-Mart goes after those inefficiencies, that's bad. Mr Klein summarizes in a few sentences what several chapters of the book spell out in more detail.

In action and effect, Wal-Mart is an active monopsony -- a seller able to dictate the price to its producers. They've forced Coke to change their secret recipe, Kraft to lay off thousands of employees, and Vlasic to declare bankruptcy. And because Wal-Mart so obsessively pursues the lowest possible prices, they're not only depriving their own workers of generous benefits and compensation, they're making it literally impossible for their producers to do so, as Wal-Mart won't abide by the minor cost differences that on-shore production and respectable benefits demand.

(The book concedes that Kraft and Vlasic committed other errors and declines to blame those companies' troubles solely on Wal-Mart.) An article by Barry Lynn, which appears in Harper's, suggests that the presence of Wal-Mart as a major buyer of groceries restores conditions reminiscent of the Great Depression in food distribution.

Kraft has announced plans to shut thirty-nine plants, to let go 13,500 workers, and to eliminate a quarter of its products. Most reports blame soaring prices of energy and raw materials, but in a truly free market Kraft could have pushed at least some of these higher costs on to the consumer. This, however, is no longer possible. Even as costs rise, Wal-Mart and other discounters continue to demand that Kraft lower its prices further. Kraft has found itself with no other choice than to swallow the costs, and hence to tear itself to pieces.

In a "truly free market," a seller can stick to the equilibrium price secure in the knowledge that another buyer who is willing to pay the equilibrium price is out there. A buyer can hold out for the equilibrium price secure in the knowledge that another seller who is willing to ask the equilibrium price is out there. Perhaps Wal-Mart is behaving like a monopsonist, compelling Kraft to lower its prices or sell nothing at all. But for that to work, there has to be another vendor who is able to sell at the price Wal-Mart asks, and under those circumstances, a true monopsonist is able to inefficiently reduce output of cheese and pickles. (But Wal-Mart's sin is in selling larger volumes at lower prices.) If there is no such vendor, the bargaining is repeated bilateral monopoly, a somewhat more complex proposition. (Looking for a dissertation topic?) There appear to be other vendors. Sometimes those vendors have factories in developing countries, which the authors of Wal-Mart view as more evidence of globalization-as-immiserization. Michael Strong's "Forget the World Bank, Try Wal-Mart" on Tech Central Station works as a companion piece, should you be considering Wal-Mart for your course outline. There's also potential for comparing repeated bilateral monopoly with antitrust action as countervailing power at work. Again, Mr Lynn has the short form, there are longer forms of this theme in the book.

The text of the Sherman Act itself is famously vague, but the Supreme Court's decision in the 1911 Standard Oil case was based flatly on the assumption that the need to ensure robust competition sometimes outweighs the benefits of near-term efficiency. Standard's roll-up of the oil industry cut the cost of kerosene by nearly 70 percent, and yet the justices shattered the firm into thirty-four pieces. For many legislators, this was not nearly enough. Three years later, Congress greatly strengthened the rules against inter-firm price discrimination, in the Clayton Antitrust Act. Then in 1936, Congress did so again, even more resoundingly, by passing the Robinson-Patman Act. Wright Patman, the Texas Democrat who was the main force behind the bill, made sure everyone understood Congress's intent. "The expressed purpose of the Act is to protect the independent merchant," he wrote on the first page of a book he published to explain the law, "and the manufacturer from whom he buys."

For discussion: is it a proper function of government to support our right to pay higher prices to buy locally? Wal-Mart repeats the complaint that local merchants tend to spend a larger portion of their receipts locally. But those merchants cannot exist without suppliers elsewhere. Is a larger share of a smaller volume of business necessarily better?

A second theme of the book is the evolution of public attitudes toward chain retailers. Although the Robinson-Patman act targeted A&P, and conference participants are groping toward some analogous taming of Wal-Mart, the first self-service supermarkets were Piggly Wiggly's in Memphis, and Wal-Mart is a scaling up of Butler Bros. Ben Franklin dime stores. Sam Walton ran one, and a craft store still trades in Sycamore, a Wal-Mart supercenter in Schaumburgmore notwithstanding. Local shopkeepers understandably didn't like distant competitors, particularly those offering more stuff at lower prices. (Superior efficiency is never popular?) Advocates of local control didn't either. Neither did nativists. As I noted, populist political economy has a tortured history.

A third theme of the book is possible regional differences in attitudes toward the New Deal consensus. One author noted Wal-Mart and other new business models growing up as it were in the cracks of the New Deal consensus. (Open markets are environments in which powerful evolutionary forces are at work?) Another found a blend of old-style social norms with modern management methods. (Page 80):

The company could win an employee's bedrock loyalty by accommodating her hours to her children's school day -- a perk few parents would take for granted in any field. In the context of small towns, extended families, and long-term marriages, women compared Wal-Mart's stable, sociable hourly jobs to the lonely monotony of ironing or chicken processing, not to the brutal schedules and constant mobility of Wal-Mart's well-compensated male managers. And while it took a federal court battle to force Walton to pay even minimum wage to his stores' staff in the Ben Franklin days, many employees from Wal-Mart's biggest growth years found the pay competitive if not munificent. Moreover, the constant stock splits rewarded the same stability that they valued themselves. Raised on farms that were rapidly losing their viability, many women of Wal-Mart saw the company's terms as a reasonable bargain that allowed them to stay close to home and accorded with their own essential conceptions of their responsibilities.

Those managers? Generally recruited from nearby state universities, most likely not the flagships. No Harvard MBAs or Kellogg quants here.

The book is a conference volume out of a humanities symposium. So What Is to be Done? Here, the book falls flat. The concluding chapters are by union organizers. Guess what? The participants appear to have left tendencies. Wal-Mart is a very centralized corporation (cash registers will be turned off if Benton discovers a cashier has not taken a break required by hours of service laws) with a lot of planning and budgeting. Curiously, nobody recognized the potential for applying one of the old syndicalist arguments and simply taking control of the means of distribution (which have sufficient cost controls over the means of production) on behalf of the workers and shoppers. The essays that focus on conditions of work in the States suggest Wal-Mart is instrumental in fostering income polarization, while those that focus on the company's overseas efforts suggest Wal-Mart's focus on the lower-middle-class will not work well in developing countries where there is real polarization. Several essays note the company's high labor turnover rates, but none of them recognize those as symptoms of weakness both in the company's business model and in the conference's prior belief that the company is a monopsonist capable of immiserizing its workers and its suppliers.

NORTHERN ILLINOIS UNIVERSITY, 40 MILES TO HARVARD. Unless you're riding Metra, in which case you must go to Elburn, ride a train to Chicago, and ride another train to Harvard. The Chicago Tribune sent its "Ends of the Line" team to Harvard for today's report, which ran sans pictures. The dairies have pretty much gone away, and a Motorola plant the town pinned its economic development hopes on has opened and closed, but Harmilda the Plastic Holstein still taunts arriving Wisconsinites with her "milk center of the world" motto.

COMPETING IN THE PROFESSION? Richard Vedder, an emeritus professor of Economics at Ohio University, reports that his colleagues voted to go from a 2+2+2 course per quarter teaching schedule to a 2+2+1 schedule, ostensibly to obtain more research visibility. He's skeptical.

My prediction is the departmental output of articles may rise from 15 to 16 or 17 a year - roughly 10 percent. Is it worth $100,000, bigger classes, and more closing out of students in classes to publish perhaps two more papers per year, each one of which will probably be read by a best a few dozen readers? Is anyone doing a cost-benefit analysis of the advantages of this move? The answer, of course, is no. Universities simply do what they want, namely the things they like (writing papers which help get faculty promoted and tenured), rather than the things the public that is paying the bills thinks is most important, teaching students. No one is accountable, the decisions are hidden from the public, and the returns on many of those decisions are very low in relation to the costs.

His analysis, like that in his book, is incomplete. Is it the number of articles, or the quality of the articles? Will the Economics faculty use the reassigned time to polish their work so as to make it more attractive to Journal of Political Economy or Economic Inquiry or Economics Letters, or will they simply be ensuring that Rivista Internazionale Numere Due di Bovini will be able to meet its production schedules? If the latter, perhaps the decision will inefficiently allocate resources. But what's special about the former journals? Publish in the former journals and your department moves up in the disciplinary league tables. Why does that matter? Because the league tables color the impression observers have of the prestige of a university. So what? People engage in positional arms races to get into universities with a lot of prestige.

Ultimately, then, the responsibility is on the public to quit spending money on getting their kids into "prestige" universities with brilliant research faculties that spend no time with undergraduates, particularly not with freshmen, and on the public to quit recruiting their entry-level employees from those universities. But until there are changes in those behaviors, it is not an error on the part of the Ohio faculty of Economics to offer working conditions more like those prevailing at the "prestige" campuses. Ohio might secure a recruiting advantage thereby, and some Ohio faculty might publish work that attracts the attention of a department higher up the academic food chain.

It might well be the case that a student will do just as well out of Ohio as out of Harvard, and the research mania is nothing more than expense-preference behavior on the part of university employees. Professor Vedder, however, does not suggest how his colleagues might act to exploit that reality rather than becoming more like Harvard.

He will be appearing on a Fox News special report on college costs, currently scheduled to air Sunday at 7 pm (Central; 8 pm on the east coast, that's some clout preempting Col. North.) We'll see how precise his reasoning is.

FINDING THOSE MISSING MEN. In City Journal, veteran teacher Gerry Garibaldi explains How the Schools Shortchange Boys. Money quote:

A female teacher, especially if she has no male children of her own, I’ve noticed, will tend to view boys’ penchant for challenging classroom assignments as disruptive, disrespectful—rude. In my experience, notes home and parent-teacher conferences almost always concern a boy’s behavior in class, usually centering on this kind of conflict. In today’s feminized classroom, with its “cooperative learning” and “inclusiveness,” a student’s demand for assurance of a worthwhile outcome for his effort isn’t met with a reasonable explanation but is considered inimical to the educational process. Yet it’s this very trait, innate to boys and men, that helps explain male success in the hard sciences, math, and business.

And he suggests that the kind of internalization of stereotype as character traits, which discrimination researchers have documented in the case of ethnic minorities, is permissible when it comes to boys.

The notion of male ethical inferiority first arises in grammar school, where women make up the overwhelming majority of teachers. It’s here that the alphabet soup of supposed male dysfunctions begins. And make no mistake: while girls occasionally exhibit symptoms of male-related disorders in this world, females diagnosed with learning disabilities simply don’t exist.

Bundle that with the Harrison Bergeron world in which the Grand Handicapper provides accommodations for recognized afflictions, and what comes next ought not surprise.

For a generation now, many well-meaning parents, worn down by their boy’s failure to flourish in school, his poor self-esteem and unhappiness, his discipline problems, decide to accept administration recommendations to have him tested for disabilities. The pitch sounds reasonable: admission into special ed qualifies him for tutoring, modified lessons, extra time on tests (including the SAT), and other supposed benefits. It’s all a hustle, Mom and Dad privately advise their boy. Don’t worry about it. We know there’s nothing wrong with you.

The message, however, isn't lost on the boys. They intuit that they're not wanted.

For several decades, white Anglo-Saxon males—Brandon’s ancestors—have faced withering assault from feminism- and multiculturalism-inspired education specialists. Armed with a spiteful moral rectitude, their goal is to sever his historical reach, to defame, cover over, dilute . . . and then reconstruct.

In today’s politically correct textbooks, Nikki Giovanni and Toni Morrison stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Mark Twain, William Faulkner, and Charles Dickens, even though both women are second-raters at best. But even in their superficial aspects, the textbooks advertise publishers’ intent to pander to the prevailing PC attitudes. The books feature page after page of healthy, exuberant young girls in winning portraits. Boys (white boys in particular) will more often than not be shunted to the background in photos or be absent entirely or appear sitting in wheelchairs.

The underlying message isn’t lost on Brandon. His keen young mind reads between the lines and perceives the folly of all that he’s told to accept. Because he lacks an adult perspective, however, what he cannot grasp is the ruthlessness of the war that the education reformers have waged. Often when he provokes, it’s simple boyish tit for tat.

I wonder, though, whether Mr Garibaldi's conclusion is correct.

Boys who get a compartment on the special-ed train take the ride to its end without looking out the window. They wait for the moment when they can step out and scorn the rattletrap that took them nowhere. At the end of the line, some, like Brandon, may have forged the resiliency of survival. But that’s not what school is for.

It's not? Do a quick search on "helicopter parents" and ask whether the youngsters are sufficiently reliant, or not?

COLLEGE, THE NEW HIGH SCHOOL. Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley wants to make that a policy.

Mayor Daley suggested Thursday that high school be extended for a fifth year to defray college education costs now squeezing working poor and middle-class families.

Unless something is done to loosen the college tuition collar, Daley warned that the “birth rate will go down in the United States and our knowledge-based economy will not grow.”

Okaaaay ...

“America had better come to grips with this….If we’re a land of opportunity and we want to be a knowledge-based society and we want to compete against India and China, we had better educate our children. These young kids should not be worried about financial assistance — all worried in the [senior] year. Every principal will tell you that. They’re in their offices trying to figure out,
‘Can I get $500? Can I get $1,000, $1,500?’ We have to set our priorities and our priorities should be giving everyone an opportunity to go to college….I hope in 2008 there is a huge national debate on that issue alone.”

Daley had no shortage of ideas when asked what he believes should be done to bring down the rising cost of a college education.

“Well, I think we better reevaluate what college could be all about, maybe — whether it’s four years or should it be three years? Whether, basically, we should look at high schools and extend high school for a fifth year and basically have that fifth year through the state — that one year to really help them through the state system. There’s a lot of ways you can look at it,” he said.

“Now, we have students in senior year who are qualified who are taking college courses and get credit for that. That’s what you’re looking at. There’s a lot of different avenues to look at…There’s experts out there. We have all the experts you want in higher education. They should evaluate that and look at it…We have studied elementary and high school. You’re going to hear from principals saying, ‘Why don’t we study higher ed? Why can’t they do a better job?’ ”

Why not make senior year optional for advanced placement students, who are probably happy to get away from the time-serving status-anxiety hell that high school often is? For that matter, why not make the Chicago high schools more effective? With six in a hundred Chicago high school freshmen finishing college, Hizzoner Boss Da Younger is asserting it's higher education that ought to be doing a better job? Mightn't it be the case that the high price of college is driven in part by a positional arms race among parents desperate to get something resembling a proper college education, or at least the possibility of interacting with other motivated youngsters, rather than to have their childrens' future diminished because of all the remediation those Chicago graduates are imposing on Illinois public colleges? If the issue is matching the calculus preparation of Indian and Chinese students, more of whatever passes for public secondary education is not likely to be the resolution.

THE THINGS YOU LEARN. Goat breeders do not dock their animals' ears. These seem to be getting along well enough despite their very different ears.


In a nearby pen, at the Kane County Fair, another goat with even larger ears. I was sufficiently intrigued by the difference in goat anatomies that I asked about the phenomenon. There is a simple enough explanation, which will occur to readers with a bit of introspection.


In the Corn Belt, there are still opportunities for people to show horses. These are Percherons with carts (I'm sure there's a special term for these carts but it escaped me.) The center team driven by the two young ladies won this judging.


After the show, they tidied up the horses for the ride home.


There was also a judging for Percherons pulling these beer wagons, which, however, were not laden with kegs of Schlitz or Kingsbury for a real test of strength.


There was a petting zoo at the Ogle County Fair, which, in addition to the usual lambs and bunnies, offered this simulation of milking a Holstein. (A rubber glove is a mutant facsimile of an udder. Why?)


What always impresses me about the local county fairs are the 4-H projects. At Ogle, the names "Huskie" and "Badger" are popular for the chapters.


The theming for the Lincoln Highway chapter in Kane County is imaginative.


Many 4-H participants raise prize animals. The sign indicates this pen would be auctioned off on the last day of the fair. As it's a pen of barrows, the price they sold at was probably already determined in the futures market, which makes contracts on barrows and gilts.


I work very hard at keeping the bunnies out of my Victor E. Garden, but some people work very hard at raising bunnies, in this cage "Flake" and "Henry" who are prize-winning blue-eyed Polish rabbits.


Some of the science projects are pretty good. Here's a door circuit built by a ten year old.


At Ogle County, one contestant scratchbuilt a pogo stick, complete with a notebook of engineering calculations.


Another contestant at Ogle County might be a comer in a future Punkin' Chunkin' competition.


I also discovered something called the 4-H Cooperative Curriculum, which includes projects on money management and personal finance. This display won a prize for Kane County.


At Ogle County, there were several displays, some of which used the "Checking It Out" activity and some of which used other materials. I discovered that these projects were popular with chapter treasurers.


This bratwurst stand at Kane County was a tasteful distance from the swine barn. Again, it's serving my favorite bratwursts, and the proprietors understood that a bratwurst is eaten with sauerkraut and horseradish mustard. We will know that the State Line has become an integrated economic region when proper mustard becomes a standard option at sausage shops south of the Cheddar Curtain, most of which labor under the misapprehension that that bland yellow stuff is mustard.


And at Ogle County, a corn stand with a name that hasn't been completely lost to history.


The National Grange of the Order of Patrons of Husbandry, for the uninitiated. (When I'm feeling wicked, I contemplate teasing my Great Western Railway friends with a sketch of a four-cylinder, six-foot drivered, double chimneyed mixed-traffic steamer called King County Grange Hall, which could refer to a real P of H chapter.)

FOURTH TURNING ALERT. At Chicago Boyz, John Jay suggests there are going to be plenty of opportunities for bashing first-wave Baby Boomers. First a disclaimer followed by an anecdote.

Perceptions of the prime Boomer generation by late Boomers and Gen Xers tend to be highly selective. I’ll give you an example. I was in the Mall the other week. I was dressed in my normal business casual – slacks and a short sleeve button down shirt. I happened to glance over at a guy about 70 or 75 years old. He was dressed almost the same as I, save for a baseball cap that proclaimed that he was a veteran of Chosin. Holy cow. I gave him a smile and a nod. Walking up the stairs between us was a guy about 55 or 60. Receding gray hair worn long and in a pony tail wearing shorts, a tie-died Grateful Dead t-shirt with the colorful dancing bears (one of whom was toking on a bong), and socks with sandals (for which he should be whipped with lederhosen daily). The image of two adults two generations apart looking at an overgrown child with gray hair between us has stuck in my mind for over a week. I’m sure that I saw numerous other Boomers that day, but it’s the bozo that sticks in my mind. Selective perception.

After some reflection and qualification, a prediction.

Quantum Shift Coaching and the Hidden Messages in Water are just the sort of New-Agey crapfests that I associate with the Boomers. But let’s be fair. There’s a significant segment of my generation that would go for this crap, too. The junior positions in consulting firms are staffed by Gen X and Gen Y parasites. It’s just that in absolute numbers, the Boomers so dominate idiotic vocations such as life coaching that I tend to associate the evils of such activities with that generation. Selective perception of the segment. Confirmation bias.

If there hadn’t been so dang many of them relative to other generational cohorts, a lot of this youthful idiocy would have slipped into historical obscurity. And if they had not been born into a period of relative affluence, a lot of them would have shed their youthful misperceptions and become fully-fledged adults. But the economy (at first) did not demand all that much from them, and there were an awful lot of them. The Boomers are like the great Dane in the room who knocks vases off of the shelf when he wags his tail. A generational cohort bigger than either the preceding or succeeding one warps the social space-time continuum around itself.

With potentially dire consequences (particularly when the Social Security contingent liabilities turn into real claims on resources?)

As I said above, while the Boomer generation is somewhat skewed left and New Agey, I’m not sure that its character is hugely different from other generations, past or present. I’m pretty sure it’s shifted a bit left of my generation, but the Boomer demographic segment is so large that its flaws tend to be written in fire on the wall rather than in the fine print of history books. And when that demographic finally comes to the end of its productive years and beginning to draw a significant degree of wealth from younger folks, the perceptions are going to get more and more selective.

More potential for social upheaval.

SUGGESTIONS FOR AMTRAK. Passenger Rail offers some suggestions to Amtrak upon meeting passengers off the Southwest Chief (see trip reports Los Angeles - Albuquerque, Albuquerque - La Junta, Kansas City-Chicago)

The trains were reasonably on time. We say reasonably because both delays were none of Amtrak's fault. Train 3 was delayed by a freight train engine failure, and Train 4 by wet roadbed resulting from the record rains in New Mexico.

Are recovery margins of the order of an hour Amtrak's fault, or good planning?

The personnel we met were courteous and helpful, and my family reported that service enroute was exemplary. Even food service was praiseworthy, and that's saying a mouthful.

Station personnel were equally to be praised. The station agent was happy to describe his understanding of delays, and the baggage clerks were pleasant and communicative. No secrets were being kept, or at least one didn't get that impression. Amtrak take note! These are the loyal personnel of the Albuquerque station.

Those observations square with mine.

Amtrak needs to break out only a small fraction of what they will spend for locomotive and car maintenance, for track maintenance, and for new equipment over the next few years and spend that money on dunderhead cities like Albuquerque. The station is a disgrace, and the dunderheads that run Albuquerque have seen fit to highlight the disgrace by sandwiching it between the brand new city transit station and the brand new city bus station. Both are less than magnificent unless stood up against Amtrak's hovel. Then they become palatial.

Yes, we know it was about forcing Amtrak's hand, but Amtrak and Albuquerque both dug in for a battle and both lost. Now the arriving passenger gets a bad impression, not of Amtrak, but of the City of Albuquerque, because by the time the passenger gets there, he/she already knows Amtrak is trying.

So get out of your foxhole, Amtrak, and put up a few bucks and build a decent station waiting room, ticket booth and baggage handling area. One that doesn't look like the roaches are going to eat the luggage as soon as the lights are turned off. The dunderheads that run Albuquerque will never do it.

As bus stations go, Albuquerque's isn't bad. But perhaps Albuquerque's city government could do with an infusion of Sewer Socialists. Wisconsin money has paid for new stations at Mitchell Field and Sturtevant for Racine, and the renovation of Milwaukee's quickly-dated-Space Age downtown station is now underway. The money to restore the Hiawatha line to 110 mph standards (albeit without the semaphores or the Super Atlantics) is being negotiated among the Great Lakes states and the national government.

What else? Amtrak should refuse to pay New Mexico to use the tracks until they are upgraded to a standard that doesn't look like a branch line from the 1930s. Now that New Mexico owns the right of way used by the Chief from Raton to Isleta, Amtrak should have the right to demand decent track or withhold enough payment to do it yourself. (The washout wasn't anybody's fault.)

Amtrak, playing second fiddle to state legislators for funding of many of its routes, needs to get some nads and be ready to put some feet to the fire when a state doesn't deliver. We have suggested before that using the right-of-way for free should be New Mexico's contribution to Amtrak's subsidies.

There are some divided responsibilities here. If Four is delayed by the washouts, that's Santa Fe's, now BNSF's, responsibility most of the way west. The state also has to decide whether to rebuild the Raton Pass line to the cab-signalled 100 mph speedway it once was, or not. I'm not sure New Mexico and Front Range traffic densities are ready for that yet.

EIN PROSIT. Division of Labour's Craig Depken is a bit skeptical of the latest "Places Rated," this a Forbes survey of drunkenness. The top five cities: Milwaukee, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Columbus, OH, Boston, Austin, TX. Four capital cities that are also home to major universities, and a city whose Brewers play in Miller Park. To be sure, this is a censored sample.

To determine the rankings, we started with a list of the largest metropolitan areas in the continental U.S. Thirty-five candidate cities were chosen based on availability of data and geographic diversity.

Each city was ranked in five areas: state laws, number of drinkers, number of heavy drinkers, number of binge drinkers and alcoholism. Each area was assigned a ranking in each category, based on quantitative data, and all five categories were then totaled to produce a final score, which was sorted to produce our rankings. ( Click here for the complete methodology.)

The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel coverage notes that residents have reason to be skeptical of such surveys.

Residents may be quick to dismiss such rankings based on other awards the city's seen - from fifth Fittest City in America by Men's Fitness magazine in January to 17th Best City for Singles by Forbes last month.

But Milwaukee does have other undeniable drinking statistics. In the city of Milwaukee, there are more than 1,000 outlets for beer, wine and liquor, according to the city's License Division. These include about 978 locations with Class B tavern licenses. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, Milwaukee in 2002 had 261 taverns and 67 liquor stores. Those 328 businesses generated more than $148 million in sales, or about $250 for every man, woman and child who lived in the city that year. And that doesn't include alcohol that was sold at grocery stores, gas stations or restaurants.

The proliferation of taverns is for real. Do your own research. Go to Thirteenth and Becher, behind the old Mitchell Street Sears. Go west on Becher. Count the taverns on the street corners between Thirteenth and Sixtieth. (Many of them are five-stoolers with a collection of softball and bowling trophies behind the bar. Use your own judgement about stopping to sample.) Go north on Sixtieth, which becomes Hawley Road, to Greenfield Avenue. Keep counting. (Some of your count will be in West Allis and West Milwaukee. Small detail.) Go east on Greenfield to First. Now that you've finished your count, find a Walker's Point watering hole to your liking and toast your efforts. Na zdorovje!

MY VERY EARNEST MOTHER JUST SENT US NEWS. No plutocracy can preserve Pluto's planetary pretensions.

Pluto, a planet since 1930, got the boot because it didn't meet the new rules, which say a planet not only must orbit the sun and be large enough to assume a nearly round shape, but must "clear the neighborhood around its orbit." That disqualifies Pluto, whose oblong orbit overlaps Neptune's, downsizing the solar system to eight planets from the traditional nine.

Under the new definition, Neptune is now obligated to invoke the Law of Gross Tonnage and clear the dwarf planet known as Pluto out of its orbit when that overlap produces a near collision. (I think there's a fixed point argument that assures the existence of such an event, and I bet some astronomer has already calculated its timing.)

Astronomers have labored without a universal definition of a planet since well before the time of Copernicus, who proved that the Earth revolves around the sun, and the experts gathered in Prague burst into applause when the guidelines were passed.

Which gives Poliblogger a moment of Schadenfreude.

And the hard science types make fun of us social scientist because we argue about definitions….

But, as with any other debate, there is No Final Say.

Pluto and objects like it will be known as "dwarf planets," which raised some thorny questions about semantics: If a raincoat is still a coat, and a cell phone is still a phone, why isn't a dwarf planet still a planet?

NASA said Pluto's downgrade would not affect its $700 million New Horizons spacecraft mission, which this year began a 9 1/2-year journey to the oddball object to unearth more of its secrets.

But mission head Alan Stern said he was "embarrassed" by Pluto's undoing and predicted that Thursday's vote would not end the debate. Although 2,500 astronomers from 75 nations attended the conference, only about 300 showed up to vote.

"It's a sloppy definition. It's bad science," he said. "It ain't over."

I'm waiting for the radical semioticians to put their two cents in. If the concept of "planet" is a social construction reflecting the interests of a power structure, of what meaning the concept "universe," let alone the perception of "universe?"

DOODLEBUGS RETURN TO SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA. Years ago, the Santa Fe Railroad envisioned Budd Rail Diesel Cars on frequent headways providing the Los Angeles - San Diego service. Two cars were purchased for proof of concept, but after a fatal derailment at Redondo Junction, they were rebuilt and exiled to routes in west Texas once protected by gas-electric cars.

German-built twenty-first century rail diesel cars (today referred to in the British fashion as Diesel Multiple Units, and timetabled under the British-sounding name "Sprinter") are now being delivered to the commuter railroad's shops.

San Diego Union-Tribune photograph by Charlie Neuman.

I like the colors, which remind me of my Laser, Warp Thirteen.

(Via Dan Zukowski)

JUST OBEY GOOD LAWS? Wednesday's Chicago Tribune had a front-page story on a flagrant act of civil disobedience suggesting Chicago's foie gras ban might not be enforceable.

Chicago's immediate reaction to a city ordinance banning foie gras--the French dish made from the livers of force-fed ducks and geese--was to embrace the gray goo like never before, in flights of culinary imagination.

Rhetoric and pate abounded on the first day of the City Council's ban, as restaurateurs and gourmands openly flouted the prohibition--cultured, giddy, goose-liver-fueled acts of defiance.

Worse yet for the prohibitionists, they had a good time while flouting the law.

At BJ's Market & Bakery, a soul food restaurant on Stony Island Avenue, a sign placed next to the cash register declared foie gras the special of the day, and those who had it proclaimed it delicious.

"I've had regular liver and it doesn't taste like that. I hate to say it, but it tastes like chicken," said manager Steven Jones, 22. "I tried it and I thought it was pretty good."

At Connie's Pizza on Archer Avenue, employees wedged a foie gras pizza on a table display between a pork cutlet sandwich special and a bucket of Miller Lite bottles.

His table shaking with laughter, 54-year-old Jerry Stout of Naperville pronounced that "it tastes like expensive liverwurst. But I better not say that, they might try to ban that too."

Ban Braunschweiger with a bunch of expatriate Prussians a Hiawatha ride away? (Well, maybe the damage has already been done. "Noodled geese" are a German tradition too.)

That got me thinking about yesterday's mini-dissertation on viewpoint diversity (sorry, Professor Munger, not enough time to write a short post this evening either) and I had a bit of time to download and skim Thoreau's "On the Duty of Civil Disobedience" over lunch (no pate shops near campus, sorry) which one of the Inside Higher Ed essayists endorsed, highlighting "Why does it not encourage its citizens to be on the alert to point out its faults, and do better than it would have them? Why does it always crucify Christ, and excommunicate Copernicus and Luther, and pronounce Washington and Franklin rebels?" as a passage for further discussion. Sure, that passage appeals to the mind-set that would "interrogate the power structure" to discover its desire to suppress any threats to its continuance, and sure, "Civil Disobedience" is an abolitionist tract. But it's an odd sort of abolitionist tract that also argues,

Yet this government never of itself furthered any enterprise, but by the alacrity with which it got out of its way. It does not keep the country free. It does not settle the West. It does not educate. The character inherent in the American people has done all that has been accomplished; and it would have done somewhat more, if the government had not sometimes got in its way. For government is an expedient, by which men would fain succeed in letting one another alone; and, as has been said, when it is most expedient, the governed are most let alone by it.

Warm-up question: has the Chicago foie gras ban put off longer the day when the last goose is noodled, if in fact the practice of noodling geese is a barbarous relic? Harder question: is Mr Thoreau arguing that government policies that stop compelling people not to trade with each other (segregated schools and lunch counters) by instituting specific compulsions (intact busing and quotas) put off longer the day when people can interact with other people?

I read Thoreau further. "Must the citizen, ever for a moment, in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator?" No collectivist tract this.

Possible exam question: Can the proprietors of Chicago restaurants find an intellectual argument for their pate parties in "On the Duty of Civil Disobedience?"

Others have been thinking about different dimensions of the protest. Marquette Warrior notes a potential separation-of-powers case in which the Chicago City Council has exceeded its authority. (Be careful what you ask for, such a litigation might lead to a nationwide prohibition of pate, and your Braunschweiger and my double bratwursts will be next.)

Hit and Run's Katherine Mangu-Ward also celebrates the civil disobedience. But again, one has to be careful.

A few enterprising chefs have already figured out ways to work around the sloppily-worded ban, while they wait for the outcome of their pending lawsuit against the city. Chef Michael Tsonton of Copperblue explains:

I'm usually serving the foie gras with some potatoes, salad and brioche. If we cannot sell the foie gras, I will be giving it away complimentary, and I will be charging $15.99 for the potatoes and salad and brioche.

Careful where you go with those blue-plate specials. In my regulated industries course outline is a case called Nebbia v. New York, 291 U.S. 502 (1933) in which a grocer's bundling of a bottle of milk with a loaf of bread was successfully prosecuted as a subterfuge to evade a minimum price regulation enacted to support dairy farm incomes. The court held, "The use of private property and the making of private contracts are, as a general rule, free from governmental interference; but they are subject to public regulation when the public need requires. P. 523." The rest is left to the reader as an exercise.

LOSING CONFIDENCE IN CONVENTION. I have come across a number of posts by some of the cooler heads around the internet that suggest great discontent with established ways of doing things, as well as the potential for great social upheaval, of a form not yet clear. It would be depressing to address all of them in turn, but I'll not lack for material rolling into the new semester.

Start with an Arnold Kling column at Tech Central Station.

The main prediction from this essay is that we will see an outbreak of popular frustration in the next few years. I think that many people are tired of political spin machines, diplomatic "solutions," and fancy intellectual models of the world that fail in practice. They long for a leader who talks straight and who can make the plays work on the field the way they were designed to work on the chalkboard.

The failures of elitist thinking will create an adverse environment for haughty, cerebral politicians such as Tony Blair or Benjamin Netanyahu. Instead, I expect more populist figures to emerge, which gives me considerable misgivings. I think that populist economics is mostly bad. If voters turn to populists on the issue of national security, my guess is that the economy will suffer for it.

But I think that the popular instinct is that the elites so far have not gotten it right on security and Islamic militancy. And in that regard, the popular instinct is right.

The tiredness is out there. Additional examples over the next few days.

BUYING BOWL ELIGIBILITY. Phil Miller at The Sports Economist discovers that the hottest college football program at schedule completion time is ... Buffalo.

Buffalo became such a hot commodity in the off-season that it broke contracts with West Virginia and Rutgers because Auburn and Wisconsin were offering at least double the money. Troy State of Alabama will receive $750,000 from Nebraska to play in Lincoln this season. Louisiana-Lafayette will get the same amount from Tennessee next year.

With the weakest teams in Division I-A becoming more expensive, top programs are stooping lower for competition. Iowa, a Big Ten favorite this year, wooed Montana, a Division I-AA program, for $650,000.

“It’s all about the money — any administrator will tell you that,” said Rich Rodriguez, the head coach at West Virginia. Buffalo dropped West Virginia from its schedule, without even a courtesy phone call, to earn an extra $300,000 to play at Wisconsin. Mr. Rodriguez added: “It’s not for the excitement of college football. Let’s not kid ourselves.”

The joys of life in the Mid-American. Poor Troy University, last seen in these pages giving Northern Illinois an opportunity to come from behind at the Silicon Valley Bowl, is still Troy State as far as the New York Times is concerned. (Sorry, Richard.) Northern Illinois has climbed out of the "bought win" category, going for the two point conversion and a shot at a win in Evanston and getting robbed on their last trip to Madison, thereby extracting a visit from Iowa to Soldier Field, but the opener at Ohio State and the Iowa game, as well as a division winner's schedule in the Mid-American, expose the guys to a risk.

When the N.C.A.A. proposed allowing 12 games, most coaches objected. Some saw the proposal as exploiting players to fill athletic department coffers. When the extra opponent is a bigger, faster and stronger team, not only does the risk of embarrassment rise, but the potential for injury also increases.

N.C.A.A. officials agree that the change was about money. Football home games are typically the primary source of revenue for an entire athletic department. Other than football, the only college sport that makes consistent money is men’s basketball. The other men’s and women’s sports, except in rare cases, cost more to run than they generate.

David Berst, the N.C.A.A.’s vice president for Division I, said the organization’s board authorized the 12th game because universities could increase revenue. He said data showed no significant injury risk in playing one more game. Coaches are resigned to the change.

Catch that "no significant injury risk." Small sample!

That is because the 12th game means another Saturday to fill hotel rooms, pack restaurants and bring in millions of dollars more in ticket and concession sales. Wisconsin and Auburn, for example, have stadiums that hold more than 80,000 fans and can usually sell out any game, regardless of the
opponent.

Adding a weak team like Buffalo can be beneficial for two reasons. First, it practically guarantees a victory. Second, weak teams will visit for a lower price than better teams, meaning a higher profit on each home game. And many of the weaker teams do not insist on a home-and-home series that would require the better team to visit the next year. That means the better team has an open home date for the next season, which it can use to play another weak team.

But Buffalo, which was once a solid State University of New York operation with no athletic aspirations, is unlikely to attract the kind of beer-and-circus student buzz its decision to join the Mid-American and obtain visibility in athletic programs. (Read Murray Sperber's Beer and Circus for the elaboration of this argument.) The newest member of the Mid-American is Temple, where the attendance and revenue pressures will also be growing.

One suspects, however, that the Times reporter has never been to Madison.

Fans at Wisconsin may complain about sitting through home games against Western Illinois, San Diego State and Buffalo. But the coaches love it, even if they oppose the idea of a 12th game. Wisconsin will be favored in all three games and, by winning, would be halfway to qualifying for a bowl game.

Answer me this, New York Times: how many Badger fans are actually watching those games? Western Illinois, incidentally, is not an opponent to be taken lightly. But the bought wins are not prostituting selling themselves cheaply.

[Wisconsin associate athletic director John] Chadima, who has arranged Wisconsin’s schedule for 17 years, said he had seen a sharp increase in the cost for nonconference foes over the past five seasons.

For the weaker teams, a bigger appearance check means a chance to upgrade. Buffalo Coach Turner Gill said the Bulls were able to buy new furniture for their football complex and improve their weight room with the $1.5 million from their three nonconference road games. Buffalo plays in the Mid-American Conference.

But there appear to be some troubles.

Not everyone is so rosy about the frenzy involved in finding a 12th opponent. West Virginia and Rutgers learned via the Internet during the off-season that Buffalo had broken their contracts for 2006. When Buffalo did not return phone calls about whether the deal was off, West Virginia’s president wrote to Buffalo’s president demanding an explanation.

“The manner in which it appears that this situation is being handled has detracted from the considerable respect we have gained over the years for your school and conference,” David C. Hardesty, West Virginia’s president, wrote on Feb. 26.

When Buffalo responded two weeks later, it said that the Mid-American Conference was in charge of its scheduling. Buffalo’s athletic director, Warde Manuel, said he regretted the way the situation was handled and that he, and not the conference, would handle Buffalo’s future scheduling.

“It literally had nothing to do with money,” Mr. Manuel said. “This wasn’t a money grab for me at all.”

Rick Chryst, commissioner of the Mid-American Conference, said he took over Buffalo’s scheduling because of Mr. Manuel’s being new to the job and the poor financial situation for the university’s athletic department.

Question: is Buffalo effectively in receivership with the conference facing being de-rated out of the major bowl circuit? (And $1.5 million for the weight room is well short of the new locker room, weight room, and study hall a-building in DeKalb.)

NO RESEARCH TRIANGLE SPRINTER. Newmark's Door has been no fan of a proposed light rail project in Greater Raleigh. The proposal, which appears to be to operate diesel multiple unit cars on existing tracks, has been cancelled account reality checks in the ridership projections and rising costs for the additional tracks and buildings, reflecting global economic growth. The freight railroads, themselves straining under additional intermodal and coal traffic, and more than a few loose cars bringing building materials to the Triangle, saw the project as an opportunity to obtain additional tracks, an agreement that Metra was willing to make with Union Pacific and CN to expand service to Elburn and Antioch, but those were expansions of existing commuter railroads serving a traditional metropolitan area, which the Triangle is not.

I'm surprised the Door didn't post a thesis on the transit authority's use of the sunk cost fallacy.

"Given the investment we've made in rail to date, I think that should ... still be the priority," said Durham Mayor Bill Bell, a TTA trustee. "The main question is probably how to replace the federal funds."

Sometimes, it is efficient to cut your losses.

Live from the Third Rail offers a somewhat different perspective, although it seems a bit churlish to criticize people for wanting some green space between their house and their neighbours.

Meanwhile, conservatives in this relatively moderate state have been able to take advantage of the long, drawn-out process to exploit the plan's vulnerabilities, notably its escalating costs, need for land acquisition, and inability to serve all of the region's centers, most importantly (to them), the airport. Their shrill and misguided criticism has focused on the fact that the line would cost thousands of dollars for each rider it would serve, and they have emphasized the fact that North Carolina's citizens seem to prefer living in a sprawled-out environment.

Transit advocates would do better to consider adapting their technologies to what people want, rather than coming off like noodgy parents insisting that their children eat their broccoli.

Most politicians, including the two senators, have bought full-heartedly the concept that North Carolinians simply don't like density, ignoring the reality that density is impossible without strong mass transit opportunities. No one remembers that New York City's Upper West Side was back-country before the first subway line was completed in 1904.

And it pays to study history. Sure, there are plenty of pictures of New York elevated lines over prairies now built up, but there are also plenty of pictures of houses in Muskego and Hales Corners and Pewaukee and Mequon and Northbrook and Batavia that went up long after the Milwaukee Electric and the North Shore and the Chicago Aurora & Elgin sold the tracks for scrap. The Triangle is less thickly settled than either Milwaukee or Chicago, and yes, we're looking into ways to put some of the trains back, but the ones we had were marginal to the transportation system.

IT'S NOT AS BAD AS SOME WOULD HAVE YOU BELIEVE.

Mallard Fillmore cartoon for 20 August 2006, recommended by The Torch.

There's something wrong in higher education, but the lack of viewpoint diversity is probably not a big part of it.

Retired professor Donald Lazere, in Rethinking the Culture Wars — I, takes up the traditional claim that Academic Freedom and Critical Thinking are TOO IMPORTANT for mere politicians, let alone trustees to interfere. But he then destroys some of his credibility by denouncing his students.

I have spent 30-some years in conservative communities and state universities, teaching lower-division English argumentative writing and literary history courses that are general education requirements for students in business or technological majors, many of whom would not have chosen to take any such courses and resent them as increasingly costly obstacles to the most direct path to a high-paying job. Most such students are conservative, not in any intellectual sense, but in the sense (which they admit) of fearfully conforming to the political and economic status quo, to the attitudes that will be expected of them as compliant employees, and to the necessity of looking out for number one in the “Survivor” sweepstakes of the global economy. Such students are not likely to welcome the cognitive dissonance forced on them by humanities courses demanding Socratic self-questioning of their sociopolitical or religious dogmas, and they are wont to express their resentment, if not in complaints to Horowitz, in the course evaluations that have been debased into consumer-satisfaction surveys in which the top-ranked teachers provide the fewest demands and the highest grades.

Translation: his courses have been strained through the race-class-gender filter and his charges properly resent his patronizing them as oppressed drudges that their betters at Berkeley or the Harvard Business School will put onto the 24/7 treadmill only to downsize them in the next paradigm shift. Is it not possible to help his charges develop their b.s. detectors and at the same time contemplate expanding their horizons? Or is his column an indirect admission that there's excess capacity in California's higher education system, and his former employer, California Polytechnic at San Luis Obispo, exists only to cool out a few marks or to do the work the high schools should have done?

That tone comes through in his essay.

This conception of liberal education as a minimal counter-force to the political and economic status quo, as well as to majority opinion, is fraught with difficulties and possible abuses, to be sure. Can we, or should we, avoid revealing our own moral or political sympathies in class? Should we, for example, teach Plato, Jefferson, Emerson, and Thoreau (or Frederick Douglass, Rosa Parks, and Martin Luther King) as inspirations for existential moral choices, or simply as subjects of neutral study, perhaps as representatives of a particular viewpoint or “bias,” always to be balanced against sources on “the other side,” including equal time for defenses of slavery and segregation? Moral judgments are of course less disputable in reference to such past conflicts than to present ones like the war in Iraq or affirmative action; neither conservative nor liberal polemicists have provided a clear road map for how teachers should deal with current moral disputes and public opinion about them.

I suspect we could find people who disagreed with each of those individuals on fundamentals of their world views, without necessarily defending slavery or segregation, and there is certainly room for consideration of the pre-industrial acceptance of slavery or serfdom as a necessary evil to support the inventors and thinkers of the time. (To do that, however, might compel the professor to see the legitimate achievements of capitalist development.) I also recall more than one source of advice for beginning professors suggesting that the most effective way to teach the New Deal (as an example) is to leave students unsure whether the professor thinks of Franklin D. Roosevelt as inspiring leader or as tyrant. (There is ample evidence on both sides of that disagreement.) The professor is part way there.

My impression is that the exhortations of NAS, ACTA, and other conservative educators for core liberal arts curriculum and more requirements in history — with which I happen to agree — fall short of outlining a coherent curriculum and pedagogy for critical citizenship. (On the flip side, many liberal advocates of multiculturalism and diversity have failed to delineate what kind of studies American students of all ethnic, gender, and social-class groups need for minimal common knowledge as citizens.) In such a curriculum and pedagogy, students would not merely be indoctrinated into American chauvinism and simplistic “virtues,” as some on the right advocate, but would be encouraged to think critically about competing ideological or moral viewpoints (in party politics, journalistic and entertainment media, as well as scholarly sources) about American and world history, as well as about the present world.

The pedagogical approach that I personally have developed over the years applies Gerald Graff’s principle of “teaching the conflicts,” in presenting students out front with the current debates on such issues and disclosing my own left-of-liberal viewpoint on them, as exactly that — one perhaps biased viewpoint among other possible ones, to be understood in relation to opposing ones and studied through the best conservative vs. liberal or leftist research sources that students can find, leaving it up to them to evaluate the opposing arguments, and grading them on their skill in researching and analyzing sources. I do not claim that mine is a foolproof approach, but most of my students have found it a fair one throughout the years, and I have heard few alternatives, especially from conservative educators.

I suspect he would have been more effective had he left his own preferences out of it. But if he is true to his words, students who take the time to express a conservative viewpoint will not be marked down for it.

Colby College professor Joseph Reisert offers a companion column, Rethinking the Culture Wars — II, that also rebuts Mallard Fillmore's presumption.

The first reaction I usually get when I tell people I’m a Republican and a college professor is bewilderment, followed by such questions as: “How is that possible?” (usually from someone on the left who assumes that to be smart and well educated is to be liberal) and “Do they allow that these days?” (from someone on the right who assumes that academic conservatives invariably suffer discrimination).

Although some vocal conservatives complain that liberal faculty members use their classrooms to indoctrinate students and to punish dissenting students by giving them poor grades, my own experience suggests that such incidents are quite rare. In my 20-plus years as a conservative student and teacher at three strongly left-leaning institutions (Princeton, Harvard, and Colby), I have never felt discriminated against.

The stereotype of liberal elitist dies hard, doesn't it? It's also likely that a lot of the poor grading of conservative arguments reflects sloppy thinking by the essayists, but there's a deeper problem if solid conservative arguments aren't on the reading list. But his essay reflects a deeper frustration with hyperspecialization breeding insularity among the professoriate.

That danger is the ever-increasing cultural marginalization of academe, which threatens intellectual impoverishment to all of us — professors, students, and ordinary citizens alike. There was a time, not that long ago, when leading figures in higher education served as public intellectuals, addressing the vital issues of their day and receiving a respectful hearing from political leaders and the public at large. These days, if a professor from any field outside the hard sciences is being quoted in the media, odds are good that it’s for the purpose of ridicule.

Academics are fond of lamenting the decline of the public intellectual, but we too often blame the public for having forsaken us without asking whether it is not we who have forsaken the public. The central problem with academe today is that we overwhelmingly speak professionally only to other academics, who share our sense of what questions are important and our wider range of values and commitments. Academe has continued to move ever further to the cultural and political left not through any overt discrimination against conservatives but through a decades-long process of self-selection.

Left-leaning professors tend to address questions that interest them, with the predictable though not intended consequence of inspiring their left-leaning students and leaving their more conservative students indifferent or disenchanted with academe. Is it any surprise that smart young liberals get Ph.D.’s and become liberal professors, while smart young conservatives tend to pursue careers in business or the other professions instead? I have no doubt that academe will never again become central to American cultural life as long as professors continue to represent such a narrow spectrum of political affiliations and religious beliefs. Nevertheless, our problems cannot be solved by party politics or by legislation and lawsuits.

True up to a point. I have always been fascinated by leftism in Physics. One would think that people who grasp conservation of matter and energy might appreciate laws of conservation in human interaction, such as my friend the Say Aggregation Principle. But the Physics department is a good place to find socialists, and I suspect that responsibility for containing nuclear weapons is a small part of it. I have also noted the tendency of academicians, including individuals so well-placed as to not be threatened by the success of others, to dismiss public intellectuals, whatever their persuasion, as "popularizers." That was the case, by the way, long before the conservative criticism of "eggheads" included the introduction of evidence of policy failures.

UNDOING THE SHAMEFUL ACT? The redevelopment of the Farley Post Office into additional passenger facilities for New York's Pennsylvania Station faces yet another complication.

Sheldon Silver, the Assembly Speaker, who controls the State Board together with Gov. George E. Pataki and Joseph L. Bruno, the State Senate Majority leader, said yesterday that there are still too many unresolved questions.

In addition, he said, there is also a new, more comprehensive proposal to modernize and expand Penn Station on both sides of Eighth Avenue, between 31st and 33rd Streets, by moving Madison Square Garden a block west to the back of the post office building that was to be converted into Moynihan Station.

If memory serves, there was once a Pennsylvania Railroad plan to build something called a World Trade Center on that west side site, which is now air rights over the Long Island Rail Road coach yard. But if the Garden goes, look what's envisioned to take its place.

Aside from the political sparring, the nub of the issue today is that the developers subsequently put together what some are calling Plan B: the complete renovation of Penn Station, which sits below Madison Square Garden, between Seventh and Eighth Avenues. The current Garden would be demolished to make way for office towers, a soaring glass canopy and a commercial complex. Across Eighth Avenue, the post office would be converted to an adjunct train station.

I suppose it would be too much to ask that the "soaring glass canopy" bring to mind London's Crystal Palace and that the office tower have a lobby reminiscent of a Roman bath. (The Michigan Central station and office tower in Detroit carried the lobby off more effectively than Pennsylvania Station did, but Michigan Central had the misfortune to build that office tower in a market where additional office space has not commanded a premium in years.)

Let us praise Plan B, starting with James Lileks's riposte to the designers who promised "the world's finest railroad station."

No, I hate Penn Station. I’d like to go back in time, drag the architects into the present, and ask them: what, you thought we would all be wearing George Jetson jumpsuits, queuing patiently for the Atomic Express? The reality is a waiting room with insufficient signage, a great hall that isn’t, and a Hudson News thronged with balding guys, ties askew, furtively paging through battered porn mags.

Quite. Now turn to page 28 of The Late, Great Pennsylvania Station, where Garden president Irving Felt predicts, "Fifty years from now, when it's time for our Center to be torn down, there will be a new group of architects who will protest." Doubtful. Bring on Plan B.

INCENTIVE COMPATIBILITY CONSTRAINTS. Sunday Times columnist Simon Jenkins asserts, When students pay full fees, universities will flourish again. It appears as though Britain's universities are requiring matriculants to put up some earnest money.

The number of students is fewer than the number of places and universities are chasing students. This is despite the fact that the 300,000 confirmed in their initial choice of courses is one of the highest on record. A further 90,000, mostly with below the requisite qualifications, will be allocated places through the clearing house system, education’s answer to eBay. A decrease in the latter group is partly the result of a 17,000 drop in overall applications with the start of the £3,000 top-up fee this year (balancing the surge last year).

That's an outcome consistent with an incentive-compatible self-selecting tariff (I still have open spaces in advanced theory class if you're curious.)

This suggests that a market economy is lurking deep within British higher education. Worthy students are qualifying for places in unprecedented numbers. Less worthy ones are being mildly deterred from wasting time and money on a possibly lesser degree.

Quite. What the article might also suggest is that there's excess capacity in British higher education.

The government naively hoped that universities would vary top-up fees to offer students a choice. In fact only three of Britain’s 96 universities have not imposed the full amount, which suggests that the fee was far too low. A few universities desperate for applicants are being tempted to reduce their fees at the last minute, because for every £1 they get from an extra student they get £2 from the government, a state subsidy to mediocrity.

That's probably true in the States as well, despite positional arms races, driven by parents' correct perceptions of what "access" is doing to higher education, that bids up prices at the fifty colleges claiming to be in the U.S. News Top 20, despite attempts by the state flagships to entice more out-of-state full-fare students, despite pleas of poverty from administrators seeking more federal and state aid.

Dig into the economics, however, and the commentary begins to break down.

The truth is that nobody can value a university education except its customers and they are not charged its cost. As a result universities remain among the last unreformed corners of the public sector, still working to the medieval calendar. Students are left untaught for half the year so they can attend harvests, pilgrimages and religious festivals (refashioned as pubs, fly-drives and raves).

Expensive campuses, laboratories and libraries are left idle for most of this time. Courses that could be completed in one or two years are stretched to three or even four. Meanwhile, centralised research assessment has become fantastical. About 150,000 academics must overproduce work of doubtful benefit to be measured by peer review, metrics and citation indices.

There is no good reason for not charging students the full cost of their higher education, subject to a test of means. That cost is now between £9,000 and £15,000 a year. I know of no serious economist who can show that this is really a national investment, only that most graduates are richer than most non-graduates.

Back to front: whether there is a national interest or not in subsidizing college depends on the marginal positive externalities universities produce. I'm still of a mind that the state investments are a regressive transfer. The idle capacity argument misleads. How much idle capacity does a car park represent, let alone the suburban train facilities that are empty overnight in London and empty during daylight in Oxford and Guildford and Watford and Bletchley? Publish or perish? I will make common cause with anyone, inside the academy or outside, who is prepared to accept that there are journals that others read and journals that exist only to pad resumes, and to change the reward structure so as to defund the latter. The customers? Is it time for a refresher course in the Principle of Derived Demand? In the States, much of the discontent with higher education comes from employers who are increasingly frustrated with the lack of higher-order, let alone lower-order, skills in honors graduates of precisely those fifty in the top twenty.

Deeper into the article, Mr Jenkins appears to accept the regressive transfer argument.

University education is a benefit that accrues peculiarly to the individual. Whether paying for it should be regarded as surtax on middle-class families or a future tax on graduate incomes is immaterial. There is no justification for forcing the mass of taxpayers, who are nowadays as much poor as rich, to pay for it. Government support should be limited to scholarships and research endowment, not for basic costs. Such subsidy can be targeted at poor students, engineers, doctors or teachers, according to taste. Blanket subsidy prevents such targeting and encourages indolence and indulgence.

I would note only that there is such a thing as a labour market, and here in the unreconstructed States, there are ample incentives for people, rich or poor, to study medicine or engineering, and there's room for extending that principle to teaching. (Do the high-risk school districts in North American cities really expect to be able to conscript the best teachers?)

Toward the end, he offers an observation that I hope to be able to expand upon later this week.

Those that want to teach should not be penalised for it. Those that want to do esearch should go in search of the relevant support. If brighter, poorer students go to cheaper universities, so much the better for those universities. That is how the great municipal institutions faced down snobbish Oxbridge in the first half of the last century.

That has been my charge to Northern Illinois for as long as I have understood what our institutional research is telling us: our best students are individuals who well might have thrived at Wisconsin or Northwestern but for their circumstances. We do them a dis-service by choosing not to bring out their full potential.

(Via University Diaries, who notes that the continued calls for academic markets and a variety of institutional missions in Britain and Europe are evidence of a status quo dysfunctional.)

QUESTION OF THE DAY. Juan Williams in the Washington Post.

The real question is how one does battle with the culture of failure that is poisoning young people -- and do so without incurring the wrath of critics who say we are closing our eyes to existing racial injustice and are "blaming the victim."

(Via Sean Hackbarth. Read and understand.)

That people who have lived through the struggles for civil rights legislation are taking up the call against the "authenticity" of street culture and noting many of the youngsters' failure to take advantage of the rights secured in Brown and the Voting Rights Act will do more to achieve the goals of those policies than anything my posts can add or detract.

PRAISING THE ELBURN 400. Destination: Freedom notes that Elburn used the opening of Metra service as the theme for this year's Elburn Days, a Lions Club fundraiser. The festival was Saturday-Sunday, which I treated as two good days to work around the house with The Sounds of Freedom overhead.

DON'T EAT YOUR SEED CORN. It's literally the basis of life as we know it.

The great edifice of variety and choice that is an American supermarket turns out to rest on a remarkably narrow biological foundation comprised of a tiny group of plants that is dominated by a single species: Zea mays, the giant tropical grass most Americans know as corn.

Via Stuart Buck with an assist from Katie Newmark.

Economics puzzle: to what extent does the industrial use of corn, whether as a starch or as a motor fuel, affect the price of food? I will contemplate an answer to this, during the upcoming Corn Fest.

A WORTHY RAIL PRESERVATION EFFORT. The latest issue of First and Fastest arrived in today's mail, with mention of a new Milwaukee transit archives and museum.

THE UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN WISCONSIN AT DEKALB? I've sometimes joked about Madison influences on life and work at Northern Illinois University, but there's a serious point. One way to look at the expansion and diversification of the State Line's economy is as cross-border integration. A more ominous interpretation might be the expansion of the Chicago suburbs north of the Cheddar Curtain.

Wisconsin should think about marketing itself "as a metro area, with proximity to Chicago with a lower-cost-of-living advantage," said William A. Testa, senior economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago.

When it comes to providing support services for business, such as lawyers and accountants, the work increasingly will flow to downtown Chicago's Loop, he said.

In some ways, the suburbanization of southeastern Wisconsin has already begun. It's an easier trip to Great America from Milwaukee or Waukesha than from many parts of greater Chicago and the Fox Valley, and the expanded Hiawatha service makes Mitchell Field an option for North Shore travelers.

That cost-of-living advantage? My colleague at the Fed is certainly aware the bid-rent curve hasn't been abolished.

SAFETY IS OF THE FIRST IMPORTANCE. Railroaders use the term "cornfield meet" to describe the consequences of a train crew misunderstanding, or ignoring, orders or signals such that trains encounter each other where they're not supposed to. The term is a form of railroad gallows humor, as the consequences are anything but pretty.

One commuter train ignored a stop signal and slammed into another Monday, killing at least 58 people and injuring more than 140, authorities said.

The crash took place about 7 a.m. at the edge of a cornfield outside the town of Qalyoub, 12 miles north of Cairo. The trains were carrying commuters from the towns of Mansoura and Benha.

The train from Mansoura was going at least 50 mph when it sped through the stop signal before a crossing, police officials said on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to give statements to the media. The signal was still blaring Monday afternoon.

I wish reporters would be more accurate about what the railroad's hardware does. As far as I know, the signal will be displaying a red aspect, but, as the block is occupied by two trains, at least one of which was NOT supposed to be there, that's not conclusive of anything. If there's an Egyptian counterpart to the National Transportation Safety Board, there will be a finding of causes of the collision, and perhaps recommendations for improvements. The fault may not be with the train crew or with the signals.

Egypt has a history of serious train accidents, usually blamed on poorly maintained equipment. Many of those incidents have occurred in the Nile Delta.

The train might have been going 50 mph because the engineer missed the signal (that has happened in prosperous Chicago) or because the braking malfunctioned (an express train went into the basement of Washington Union Station in early 1953) or because the signal was not displaying a restrictive aspect (that has also happened in the Chicago area.) The police are correct not to make any statements, because they'd be guessing. Let them do the emergency response work, and let the accident review assess the circumstances.

THE SOUNDS OF FREEDOM. We got rid of the overcast and the humidity, and it has been a gorgeous day for B-17 overflights.

Ah, the sound of four turning overhead. (I miss the Boeing Stratocruiser ...)

WHAT'S MISSING FROM THIS PICTURE? USA Today columnist Julianne Malveaux laments the rising price of a college education.

Compounding the problem for students: The increases aren't limited to tuition. Books have become such an exorbitant expense — often approaching $1,000 a semester — that some students share books or do without them. As USA TODAY reported Thursday, 15 state legislatures are looking at ways of getting the costs under control. Lab fees are on the rise, too.

Students are lugging the financial burden well after graduation. Even worse, perhaps, is that they're being forced to make untenable choices about their future. A public service career, for example, may take a back seat to a higher-paying job because of this debt issue.

The "good people make bad career choices" argument is an old one, but perhaps public sector employers ought pay competitive salaries? But that's a minor quibble.

In Phi Beta Cons, George Leef takes issue with part of Ms Malveaux's argument.

Malveaux writes that "education is supposed to be an equalizer," but doesn't grasp that the attempt to make college education nearly universal will only exacerbate the problem of credential inflation. We can't educate ourselves to equality, but the attempt to do so will feed the expansion of the education establishment and depress academic standards.

We're already past the point of diminishing returns on higher education when many graduates end up taking "high school" jobs that don't call for any large degree of intellectual acumen. Instead of more "investment" in higher education, we need educational reforms that will enable students to master—and demonstrate their mastery—the basic language, math, and reasoning skills that are the building blocks to success.

Mr Leef's post addresses part, but not all, of the problem. To the extent that college becomes the new high school, but with student and parent choice, universal access (and the concomitant push to "retain" the recruits) stimulates positional arms races that drive up the prices at universities atop the league tables (no matter how those tables are structured.) Furthermore, the expansion of government aid to students is unlikely to ameliorate the textbook prices (which I have rebelled against whenever possible by using University-produced course packs, and which my students have rebelled against by shopping for used books online) because that adds to the third-party incentives already at work. Visit some of my sources of Company Mail, and visit some of their sources, and you'll very quickly discover weblogs maintained by faculty at expensive private colleges where students have access to Daddy's plastic, hence the price of a textbook (or a new set of Uggs?) is no big deal. Government grants and loans (what's the latest default history on those?) are the taxpayer deputising for Daddy.

CREATIVE DESTRUCTION. Times change, and so does the Allis-Chalmers manufacturing complex in West Allis.

Today, about 5,500 people draw paychecks on the site, but their typical task has morphed from forming metal at a lathe to processing data at a computer. Only about 10% of them still manufacture things - complicated, specialized things, such as the massive industrial kilns produced by a dozen well-paid employees of the A-C Equipment Services Corp.

So it is with Wisconsin as a whole. Pushed by the forces of globalization, the state's economy is evolving at an increasing pace, with service companies becoming more important as less-skilled manufacturing jobs move overseas. But as with all evolution, the best of the future builds on the successes of the past.

Manufacturing, now backed by increasing amounts of technology on the surviving factory floors, still provides the steel of Wisconsin's economic backbone, just as it did a quarter-century ago in the recession-racked year of 1981.

Connect the dots in those paragraphs. "Less-skilled manufacturing jobs move overseas" and "increasing amounts of technology on the surviving factory floors." That's called comparative advantage. But it doesn't come for free. As the article notes, Wisconsin (and the United States) was once a more dependent on agriculture. But the manufacturing that drew workers from the farm fields was the high-technology of its day. The surviving manufacturing jobs make use of the high technology as of today. Tractors? Automobiles? Steel castings? Routine. The premium for math-intensive degrees in the current labor market suggests that the long-standing U.S. comparative advantage, in knowledge-intensive, leading edge products is still there.

IT GETS FOGGY ON SODOR, TOO. Here's a grab shot from the Illinois Railway Museum's Spaulding Tower webcam. Somebody has a wicked sense of humour coupling a Missabe Road coach immediately behind Thomas, who has had some bad experiences in mining country.

NOBODY PICKED UP THE WILD CARD. The teams in contention for the National League's at-large playoff berth appear to be playing for leaster. The Milwaukee Brewers, despite having a terrible May, June, July, and beginning of August, are no worse than four games out of the wild card, with current frontrunner Cincinnati in their division. At the Wisconsin Sports Bar, an observer suggests the young players are still committed to the cause.

What I really enjoyed was the display of real emotion that was on display after they won the game. Prince [Fielder] spiked his helmet and the rest of the team acted like they had just won the division. Nice to see they still care I had been starting to have some doubts lately since they have sleepwalked through a few games.

THE LEAGUE TABLES ARE OUT. U.S. News classifies Northern Illinois University among the "national universities, fourth tier," whatever that means. There are also Washington Monthly classifications available (noted by Joanne Jacobs) in which the Mid-American members are also clustered together. More on the implications as time permits.

HEADING FOR DEKALB? The Chicago Tribune's Ends of the Line series visits Elburn.

Metra is providing 300 parking spots at the station, with plans to ultimately add another 1,300. This is because of its projections that, between 2000 and 2030, the Elburn area will grow more than 650 percent.

When the service began in January, the parking lot was less than half full. On my most recent exploration of Metra, the lot was over two-thirds full at mid-day on a Friday.

But you can plan for it -- that's what Metra is doing by extending its lines farther out with the possibility of extending farther still -- and someone is to blame--everyone who wants more house for the money, less congestion, a place in the country.

It's only fourteen railroad miles to DeKalb, but that's in another county. For now, images of trains passing Midwestern dairy barns are still possible. (The photo gallery is up for Elburn, although the gallery archives are incomplete for the summer series.)

Chicago Tribune photograph by Chris Walker.

For the present, Elburn still has the look of small-town Illinois, although careful readers of the photo gallery will see what the future holds.

But for now, the Kane County village is a fair representation of what Elburn was. The Gliddon Drug store is still on Main Street as it has been since 1946. The newspaper clippings posted on the store's prescription counter make a sort of throwback blog, letting local people know things of interest to the community. And Mayor Jim Willey just oozes small-town, laid-back charm on his site, www.elburn.il.us/mayorsblog.html, where he has posted shots of citizens.

The pedestrians are taking advantage of an infrequent gap in traffic on Highway 47. In the background is the butcher shop from which my bratwursts come.

Chicago Tribune photo by Chris Walker.

Next week: Harvard, which is also a difficult destination for a day-tripper out of DeKalb.

PASSENGERS ARE ADVISED NOT TO TRESPASS UPON THE RAILWAY. Sad news from the Rock Island line. This morning, one trespasser was run down by a train, and the relief train to pick up passengers on that train ran over a bicycle abandoned to its fate, just in time, by another trespasser.

RIDING FOREVER 'NEATH YOUR STREETS. Via Live from the Third Rail, a service that will allow you to display the rapid transit mileage you've ridden.

Got at b3co.com!

As several commenters to the post have noted, the menu is incomplete. In time perhaps there will be buttons for the Liverpool subway and the Manchester and Sheffield limited tramlines as well as San Diego and a number of inland cities in the western U.S. and Canada.

NEW GOLDEN CHICKEN DELIVERY VANS? OK, I should cut Marquette University some slack as it appears their basketball team will play Wisconsin-Milwaukee, but news of a fleet of yellow Hummers for the use of the men's and women's coaching staffs is too delicious to resist. Marquette Warrior recommends some investigative reporting by The Triumvirate. The chairman of Marquette's Board of Trustees is a graduate who has done pretty well by selling ... Hummers.

Seems simple to me. Even logical. I don’t really agree with tuition dollars being spent in this way, even if the H3s are from Bergstrom’s dealership and are extremely discounted. It seems to conflict with Marquette’s constantly professed “social justice” effort, not to mention common fiscal sense in this time of high gas prices.

This is much like the recent coffee coersion incident, if you are basing your decisions on sound business logic (maybe these Hummers will help bring in talent?), great, but realize that you are speaking out of both sides of your mouth when you preach an almost socialist strain of social justice and rely on capitalist cost benefit analysis.

Whether Marquette athletics is a separate corporation or still an administrative unit of the university, the provision of this motor pool is not likely to sit well with some of the faculty, particularly those who might agree with this.

THE SOUND OF FREEDOM. Sentimental Journey, one of a few B-17s still capable of flying, has been visiting DeKalb this week. DeKalb Chronicle coverage includes a video presentation of the plane's arrival.


A proper warbird has nose art.


There will be some sightseeing flights offered over the weekend, which will offer east side residents the opportunity to hear the sounds of freedom as the plane takes off and lands.

WHEN THE WIND DOESN'T BLOW. August regatta season makes for challenging weather conditions in the State Line. Monday featured strong northwesterlies, the first harbingers of fall frostbiting, and there were still good winds Tuesday. But then comes in the high pressure and the winds swinging around to the south and then ... quitting. If you can't sail, play beanbag. No guns, no protests, no throwouts!

Unattributed Inland Lake Yachting Association photograph
Lake Geneva Yacht Club, 17 August 2006.

I still suspect that beanbag is as popular as it is among the twentysomethings because they never had the chance to play casual bag toss games as eight year olds; in this picture probably eight year olds with summers full of Optimist dinghies and Cub class sloops.

One thing Lake Geneva never had was a beachfront twister (think Coney Island Cyclone or Bay Beach Greyhound or Belmont Giant Dipper). The C-Scow sailors improvised something close to a beachfront twister. (If you've never been to Lake Geneva, be advised that the club is at the bottom of a 75 foot high ridge. Southerly breezes coming over the higher spots can make for some challenging sailing close to the docks.) Note that some marks are to be left to port and some to be left to starboard. My source tells me the noodles were used for fending off.

Unattributed Inland Lake Yachting Association photograph
Lake Geneva Yacht Club, 17 August 2006.

NOBODY PAYS LIST PRICE. The bursar at Wisconsin - La Crosse is simply being a bit more explicit about it.

The University of Wisconsin-La Crosse would charge students $1,320 over three years on top of annual tuition increases to expand and diversify its student body under a pilot program approved Thursday by the UW System Board of Regents.

Such things have been going on for a long time, policy statements notwithstanding.

Until now, all of the state's public universities - with the exception of UW-Madison and UW-Milwaukee - have charged the same level of tuition. The money has gone toward instructional costs only.

Under UW-La Crosse's program, which must be approved by the governor and Legislature, a quarter of the $15 million generated would go toward financial aid. Half of 1,000 new students admitted would be minority or low-income.

Note the conjuring trick from the first paragraph to the second. Everybody might see the same tuition, but not everybody sees the same scholarship or grant or work-study opportunity or loan, and some of those scholarships and grants have "financial need" or "historically underserved" earmarks. That more of the money might have come from legislative appropriations I do not dispute, but not all matriculants at La Crosse or Platteville or Oshkosh paid list price. In that respect nothing has changed.

The proposal, however, is properly stimulating a debate over the public and private benefits of higher education.

While the regents rallied around the pilot program, a leader of the United Council of UW Students said implementing it across the system would be a mistake. He said it would saddle students with too much financial burden.

"I think it would be a disaster," said David Glisch-Sanchez, the organization's director of academic affairs. "It would send the message that the entire university should be funded by students and their families."

Break that last claim down: to the extent that the university is funded out of general revenues, people who do not qualify for admission are paying to support it, including the climbing walls and Oktoberfest and the summer ritual of throwing stuff away. It's certainly in the students' interest to have their higher education take less out of their pockets, but let's evaluate the public and private benefits and the possible regressive transfers first.

There's also the Parkinson's Law phenomenon at work.

The additional money would go toward the UW System's "growth agenda" - roughly $50 million in new initiatives that include $10 million for research at UW-Milwaukee and 2,000 new full-time students, most of them in the UW Colleges and statewide extension.

Under the UW-La Crosse pilot program, tuition would increase $220 each year for three years starting in 2008. That would be on top of the annual tuition increases approved by the regents for all of the schools in the UW System.

The university, which saw its state support cut by $6.3 million over the last six years, plans to use the money to add 1,000 students and 100 faculty members over six to seven years.

Ronald Lostetter, UW-La Crosse's vice chancellor for administration and finance, said such an expansion is needed to address the growing demand for the university and to improve the quality of education. Nearly 6,400 applicants vied for 1,750 spaces in the freshman class this fall, he said. The student to faculty ratio is 23:1.

"We want to increase quality for all students," Lostetter said.

But the expansion goes beyond class sizes. A major focus of the program is bringing in more low-income and minority students, of which UW-La Crosse has few. The university would hire new staff to help recruit and retain 500 such students. It would use $3.8 million to fund scholarships and other forms of financial aid.

"We are targeting two particular groups," Lostetter said. "Students from the bottom two income quintiles and students of color."

He said UW-La Crosse needs more diversity to prepare its students for a multicultural work force.
Ryan VanLoo, president of UW-La Crosse's student association, said he supports the pilot program even though it would mean higher tuition bills.

"This will move us forward in the right direction by bringing in full-time faculty and staff and diversifying our student body," he said.

So even if the expected minority enrollments don't show up, because Madison and Milwaukee and Platteville and Oshkosh and St. Cloud (reciprocity) and Northern Illinois (we have some Cheesehead Specials) are also pursuing those more diverse student bodies, there will still be things to spend the money on. And notice the other goodies in the list. If population pressures are causing Madison to tighten their standards, LaCrosse and Milwaukee (and, per corollary any other Wisconsin public college) will argue that their programs ought to be worthy of students good enough to get into Madison, and their faculty ought to get research support more like Madison's, and for all I know more technology corridors and football teams. And thus the dilemma of public higher education: more emulation of the flagship universities leading to more proliferation of doctoral programs turning out more future baristas?

THE NEW ACADEMIC YEAR BEGINS. The Northern Illinois University calendar specifies that the week of August 21-25 is for faculty meetings, and the Committees of the University booklet is thicker than an Amtrak timetable (and somewhat more precise about the timekeeping!)

From Despair, Inc., a little reminder to colleagues at Northern Illinois and elsewhere.


Teach your students well. Keep Michael Munger's words in mind. It's what goes on between meetings that counts.

ANOTHER SHAMEFUL ACT OF VANDALISM? USA Today sports columnist Ian O'Connor ranks the replacement of Yankee Stadium up there with the redevelopment of Penn Station.

Why are the Yankees tearing down one of the last great temples of American sport? Why are they leaving a perfectly functional ballpark, only the world's most famous ballpark, for a monument to big-business greed next door?

You don't just level Yankee Stadium, the same way you don't just level Fenway Park or Wrigley Field. You paint them, renovate them, equip them with new bathrooms and modern, fan-friendlier ways of watching the game.

The language Yankee management uses to promote their project echoes claims Pennsylvania Railroad management made in the early 1960s.

On the anniversary of Babe Ruth's death, too many people were too willing to celebrate the scheduled demise of Ruth's 84-year-old house. Steve Swindal, Steinbrenner's eventual successor, said, "We promise to deliver to you, the fan, the finest baseball facility in the world."

Yes, dear reader, that collection of newsagents and greasy spoons on the arrival level of Penn Station was planned that way, with the goal of "finest railroad station" in mind. New Yorkers didn't know what they lost until it was gone. Now they appear to be repeating the error, and with the Chicago White Sox as a recent example of a misguided stadium replacement.

MORE MISERIES FOR THE MID-AMERICAN. College football is all about the learning experience. Not.

A dozen schools will start the 2006 season with the clock ticking on their status as full-fledged members of the NCAA's highest football-playing division.

And when the season kicks off in about two weeks, it will be important for those schools to get the turnstiles spinning.

The NCAA's attendance requirement for continued full-fledged status in the association's Football Bowl Subdivision (Division I-A) can be met if a school averages 15,000 in actual or paid attendance for all home games one time during a rolling two-year period.

Twelve teams fell short of that goal last year and were sent a "courtesy letter" by the NCAA, reminding them of the requirement, NCAA spokesman Erik Christianson said. The schools averaging fewer than 15,000 were Bowling Green, Louisiana-Monroe, Ball State, Temple, New Mexico State, San Jose State, Utah State, Akron, Rice, Buffalo, Kent State and Eastern Michigan, which was last nationally at 5,219 a game. Six of the teams are in the Mid-American Conference, three in the Western Athletic Conference.

The strategies the teams use to build attendance are not necessarily in the best interest of the players.

[Bowling Green will play] three home games in September, including the opener against Wisconsin at Cleveland Brown Stadium, which counts as a home contest for Bowling Green, Campbell said. The school is anticipating 30,000-40,000 for the Badgers.

It may count as a home game for Bowling Green, but Wisconsin has some of the more loyal road fans, and an opportunity to prowl the riverfront (which has been gentrified) and visit the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame makes for a promising road trip.

Northern Illinois will be doing something similar with Iowa coming to Soldier Field. That's an easy road trip for Iowans, and there are more than a few Iowa expats in Greater DeKalb. But it has nothing to do with money.

The problem Northern Illinois has faced with scheduling such games is injuries to key players. There is enough of a difference between the top of the Mid-American and the top of the Big Ten that top performing players in Mid-American games can be badly whipped in these games. Although margin of victory doesn't figure in the bowl rankings the way it used to, there are still incentives for the Big Ten teams to run up scores on their Mid-American opponents. And in the end, the visibility gained may not be all that great. Bowling Green's experience is likely to be similar against Wisconsin.

HE FINISHES THE NATIONAL ANTHEM. Wisconsin resident Bruce Froemming has been calling balls and strikes for a long time.

When the 66-year-old Froemming signals "Play Ball" from behind the plate, he'll begin Game 5,000 of his 36-year major league career, joining Hall of Famer Bill Klem as the only umpires to reach that milestone. He also worked 13 years in the minors.

He's consistent, even when the history books are at stake.

He has never quite gotten over villain status at Chicago's Wrigley Field for the first of the no-hitters he worked, in 1972. The Cubs' Milt Pappas needed one more strike for the 12th perfect game in major league history, but Froemming called three close pitches in a row as balls. The resulting walk ended the bid for a perfect game. Pappas got the next out for the no-hitter.

STARTING YOUR OWN UNIVERSITY. Oklahoma State University is going to have the best football team T. Boone Pickens can buy.

“If you follow the argument that facilities attract recruits, obviously this is a quantum leap forward for Oklahoma State,” says Chuck Neinas, the former Big Eight commissioner and College Football Association executive director.

“Money doesn't buy happiness, and it can't necessarily buy victories. But it certainly creates a platform to develop a program.”

Gundy and his staff hit recruiting pay dirt last winter, signing a class that by most assessments ranked among the nation's 20 best. He says the facilities promised by Pickens' gift were a factor.

There remains a gap between Oklahoma State and much of the rest of the Big 12 in operational spending on such necessities as equipment, travel, recruiting, salaries and scholarships.

OSU typically ranks ninth in the conference, and the roughly $8.5 million it spent on football last year was dwarfed by Texas' $15.5 million outlay en route to the national title, according to figures provided by the schools. With facilities covered, however, other donors can kick into those other areas, particularly scholarships.

“It was obvious to me and everyone else associated with OSU that we'd been playing with a short stick forever and someone needed to do something unprecedented to change the paradigm around here,” Holder says. “All we've done for decades is just talk. Finally, there's more than just talk.”

It's a $165 million bounce that Schmidly says is being felt beyond the university's playing fields and courts. “I'm getting ready to do a huge campaign for student scholarships,” the OSU president says, “and I can go to donors and say, ‘Look what Boone did to help us with athletics. Can you help us with academics?' So it's made my job a hell of lot easier.

“And let's face it. This is America. People like to be associated with winners. They like to be associated with things that are on the upswing, and this institution is on the upswing. In many ways, Boone gave us that momentum.”

We shall see. I don't recall anybody faulting the economics program at Northwestern when its football team went 0-for-the-1980s, and the Nobel committees recognized Wisconsin faculty despite frustrated football fans saying "hurry up, November." The football visibility has not hurt Northern Illinois, although my colleagues were doing their best when the football team was going 0-for-the-1990s.

A sidebar lists other large individual donations to institutions of higher learning, including two donations to establish new universities from scratch.

THEY GO FASTER WHEN THEY'RE NOT TOWING WATER SKIERS. The Inland Lake Yachting Association championship regattas have been going on at the Lake Geneva Yacht Club, where results are in for the Class A One-Design and the Class E Inland Championship.

STILL AMERICA'S DAIRYLAND, and headed upmarket.

Wisconsin-made unsalted butter swept the 2006 World Championship Cheese and Butter Contest this past spring. Grassland Dairy Products in Greenwood, which at 102 is considered the nation's oldest and largest privately owned butter-maker, took all three prizes in the unsalted butter category of the world competition. The company's European-style unsalted butter won best of class.

Graf Creamery, another privately owned company in Zachow, consistently wins honors in national and international butter contests and earned top honors at this year's Wisconsin State Fair. Graf is considering adding European-style butter to its product line - a testament to the growing popularity of higher-fat "boutique" butters.

Organic Valley, based in La Farge, makes organic European-style unsalted butter, which that company touts as "the champagne" of butter with 84% butterfat. Outpost Natural Foods stores and several Sendik's and Roundy's Pick 'n Save stores carry Organic Valley butters, including the European-style product.

Extra credit if you know where Zachow and LaFarge are, without consulting a map. Now go have yourself an ear of corn.

THAT NEIGHBORHOOD IS SO HOT NOBODY LIVES THERE ANY MORE. Rust Belt cities with shrinking manufacturing bases also see falling house prices, notes USA Today. But people are also figuring out that a place can rate high in the "desirable location" rankings and not be worth the trouble.

In Baton Rouge, for example, prices shot up 27% from the second quarter last year. In Florida, where few middle-class families can afford a home in the coastal cities, buyers are migrating to such places as Ocala, Gainesville, Jacksonville and Tampa.

"We're getting a lot of people from California and from South Florida — people tired of the chaos, crowded conditions and overpriced homes," says Donna Delegal, a Jacksonville agent.

California has five of the top 10 most expensive cities led by San Francisco with a median price of $751,900. But gone are the days of multiple offers and "as is" sales. Homes are sitting on the market longer. Sellers are starting to cut prices and offer incentives.

Interregional arbitrage, gotta love it.

CAMPUS CAMPING. Yesterday's sojourn to Madison put me smack in the middle of Sublease Expiration Day, an event that includes a number of rituals, including the one called "I Hope It Doesn't Rain Because I Can't Move In Until Tomorrow." (The end of summer school in DeKalb is nowhere near this hectic.)

Something that has changed in the years since I finished university is the volume of stuff. I saw some trash piles with more cubic footage than my stuff, movable and disposable, at the end of sophomore or junior year.

THERE IS NOTHING LIKE THE TASTE OF LARK. The Sesquicentennial series of DeKalb Municipal Band concerts ended this evening. Band director Dee Palmer has this schtick where he introduces Rossini's William Tell Overture with a request that listeners not think about the Lone Ranger, then, when the cavalry charge begins, he puts on a black hat. (What's that line, attributed to the elder Adlai Stevenson, about being able to hear that piece without thinking about the Lone Ranger?) Also on the evening's concert, a medley including Happy Days Are Here Again. There's a specific visual image I associate with that tune. What is it?

THEY'RE DESIGNED TO RECOVER. I used the last day before fall contracts begin to visit some libraries in Madison. There was also time for a look at the lakefront. I arrived just in time to see the aftereffects of a knockdown puff on a Laser.


The sailor quickly got matters in hand and popped it upright.


I think I was watching some Laser training going on at the Hoofer Sailing Club. One of the toughest things to adapt to in a Laser is the absence of any kind of half speed setting. (In a sloop there are things one can do with the trim of the main and the slot to depower a boat.) If you use your instincts to ease the main and attempt to bear off in a Laser, you quickly discover that you really have no control. The best thing to do is trim it properly, hike hard, and take advantage of its quick responsiveness at speed. Even then, there's this little thing called the auto-tack to be aware of.

POOLING AND SEPARATING EQUILIBRIA. I'm tooling up to teach the advanced theory course, and one of the topics I intend to cover is self-selection. Perhaps between now and the end of the semester I will come up with a more intuitive explanation than "Pooling happens when efficient separation is costly." The phenomenon is clearly ubiquitous and merits further investigation.

Consider first the vanishing vacation (via 11-D; Andrew Sullivan was grousing about this in August of 2001.)

SOMEWHERE on a faraway beach, a cellphone rings, a BlackBerry buzzes, a laptop beeps.

It is an electronic requiem for the American vacation.

Why did it die?

“There’s a large increase in the number of people who worry that they will lose their job,” said Ellen Galinsky, the president of the Families and Work Institute, a nonprofit center for research on the American work force. In 1977, 45 percent of people felt truly secure in their jobs while only 36 percent have felt that way in recent years, she said, citing the organization’s surveys.

But wait, there's more!

But plenty of employees worry about taking vacation for reasons that have little to do with job security. Some consider themselves to be indispensable. Many are competitive. “There’s the feeling that overwork is the red badge of courage,” Ms. Galinsky said, adding that people often compete to see who works the latest and the longest.

Ambitious workers can even be reluctant to ask a colleague to help out while they are on vacation. “They take it all on themselves,” said Jennifer Sullivan, a spokeswoman for CareerBuilder.com, the job recruitment Web site. “Those are the people that are probably working multiple hours on their vacation or not taking vacation at all.”

But it is not cruel Dickensian bosses and heartless company policies that prevent employees from enjoying — or worse, taking — their vacations.

“Mostly people work because they want to,” Ms. Galinsky said.

“It’s mostly something that we’re doing to ourselves.”

And there's definitely self-selection.

“The reality is the more responsibilities you have, the less time you take off,” wrote Anderson Cooper in Details magazine last year. “You have too much to lose. I’m convinced a big reason I got my own show on CNN was the fact that I kept filling in for people who were on vacation. Now if I leave the anchor chair too long, I worry Eve Harrington will take my place.”

Thus, a pooling equilibrium in which the most ambitious people both set the norm, and, upon achieving high rank, look for the same traits in their underlings. And the rat race appears to go to the swiftest rat.

Downsizing, labor market volatility and the country’s shift from an industrial economy to one based on service and knowledge have helped create what Ms. Galinsky described as a “rapid-fire” way of working. People expect instantaneous responses to their e-mail messages at all hours, vacation or no vacation. The boundary between work and home life is now fluid, she said, adding that “we plan life off the job the way we plan life on the job.”

And that may not be a good thing. The Families and Work Institute study found that overworked employees are more likely to make mistakes, to be angry at their employers and at colleagues who do not work as hard. These employees are also more likely to have higher stress levels, experience symptoms of clinical depression, report poorer health and neglect themselves.

But is that pooling equilibrium necessarily stable? Last week, I considered evidence that the newest entrants to the work force were saying enough to all that.

Consider next house poverty, which is troubling the dean at Anonymous Community.

When other people are willing to take out (or extend) interest-only and negative-amortization mortgages, they push up the price of houses. If I understand math well enough to know the stupidity of taking out that kind of loan, I will find that my prudence will be punished by my being relegated to neighborhoods I want no part of. Since other people have abandoned traditional (or long-standing legal) restraints, I am forced either to live (comparatively) low on the increasingly-polarized economic scale or to take outsized risk. Neither is reasonable. We used to have strict requirements about credit-worthiness, down payments, and amortization, precisely to prevent the kind of runup in precarious lending (and house prices) that has happened over the last few years.

The dean must be contemplating the Two Income Trap. It's not clear that people would be less house-poor in the absence of creative financing. The price of a house might be lower in the presence of harder budget constraints, but the Say Aggregation Principle would still bite on people, and two-income households would still be able to outbid one-income households for many houses, particularly in the neighborhoods with the most desirable schools, and fewer people might be able to buy houses. It's an old problem. The social critic might grouse about the little boxes made of ticky-tacky, but those boxes were an improvement over the cold-water flats.

He's also contemplating the Good Old Days.

When there was something resembling a viable Democratic party, the grand compromise was to do away with most sumptuary laws, but to enact public policies that tended to lead to a relatively football-shaped income distribution and to provide pretty good public schools in most areas. The compromise, and it was a good one, was that certain basic necessities of life were within the reach of most people, but ‘frills’ were left to the open market. (In some relatively egregious cases, frills were even subject to ‘luxury taxes.’ These have been replaced mostly by ‘sin taxes,’ which are taxes on the luxuries available to the working and middle class.)

I'm trying to remember when these Good Old Days were. I remember something called "tracking" and something else called "de facto segregation" and something else called "restrictive covenants" leading respectively to "mainstreaming" and "intact busing" and "fair housing" and a new set of inducements to self-selection. (In fact, there's probably a week's worth of Lagrangian manipulation in the preceding sentence.)

The taxation part of the quote is material for my colleagues, who work on something called "Ramsey optimality." By definition, sumptuary taxes on "frills" can be avoided by doing without those frills. The technical term is "elastic demand." Such taxes aren't terribly effective at raising revenues. The "sin taxes" may in fact tax "luxuries" although those taxes are more effective at raising revenue if the demand for the good is inelastic. Cigarettes and beer come to mind, and economists of a provocative stripe will introduce the notion of legalizing street drugs and taxing them according to the inverse-elasticity rule.

NOTICE OF CHANGE IN SERVICE. The new Sturtevant for Racine station will be open effective Monday, August 14. The new station will have a paid parking lot, with a fee of $2 a day. The old station had an unimproved parking lot, but no parking charges. Boarding figures for Sturtevant might bear watching.

BRINGING IN THE SHEAVES. Today's sermon takes as its text Deut. 25:4 and Matt. 6:11. I wonder what the prophets and the apostles would make of the steam traction engine. It's a manufactured item, and like any other manufactured item, people collect them. The Northern Illinois Steam Power Club held the 50th annual Threshing Bee outside Sycamore this weekend.


You don't just put these in your car's trunk and take them to your friend's basement for an operating session. You also have to know what you're doing restoring and operating them. The safety valve has lifted on this one. If that fitting doesn't work properly, the aftereffect is not pretty.


The coal smoke gets in your eyes, and in the collector's bloodstream.


The building in the background of the preceding picture houses this stationary engine.


It powered the ammonia compressor for the refrigeration system at a Carrollville, Wisconsin glue factory. The working parts are quite transparent compared to high-technology equipment. The flyball governor will cut off the steam supply if the machinery turns too fast, and five gauges keep track of the steam pressure and the status of the refrigeration plant.


The show is a good place to shop for precision tools, although these preservationists tend to work on a somewhat grander scale than the Cold Spring Shops.


Stationary engines are quiet compared to their mobile counterparts.


The show includes exhibits of other kinds of vintage farm implements. Before rural electrification, many farms used a one-lung portable gasoline engine, such as this Hippe-Steiner model, to power household appliances.


These machines conserve fuel in a simple way. Set the governor for the speed you want, fire it up, then rely on the flywheel to conserve momentum. When the speed drops off sufficiently, the governor opens the fuel supply, you hear a cough, then the engine free-wheels again. With contemporary solid state there might be a way to adapt this technology to automobile engines (those V8-6-4 engines of a few years ago come to mind, but the uneven firing cycles are a bit inelegant.)

It's a little bit easier to collect gasoline tractors than to collect steam traction equipment, although you'd still have to invest in a trailer to move it around with any dispatch.

This John Deere is at the edge of the grounds, with a cornfield across the farm-to-market road behind. But in the distance, the other side of the trees, the tract houses proliferate. I'm told the family that owns the club's grounds intends to keep the property for the threshing show, but one wonders if they'll be able to hold out against the offers, let alone the noise complaints, as the cornfields go for more tract houses. (The Illinois Railway Museum has been buying up parcels of land around its grounds against such gripes, and I'm waiting for inhabitants of the new houses west of Mukwonago to either complain about the trolley or to ask about the possibility of extending it to Milwaukee, last reached by trolley on 13 August 1939!)


We'll see these bratwursts again before summer's end.


The grounds are large enough that powered transportation is available. Here is the Sycamore Talgo, better known as the Lake County Farm Heritage Association's barrel train. The tail car is painted like a Holstein cow.


There's also a live steam railroad on the premises, with this freelanced Shay (not an easy project, particularly absent a specific prototype) on the unloading track. You don't just toss these in the pickup and head off to the neighbor's for an operating session.


The railroad was offering rides, using diesel power and the flat cars in the background.

OTHER NEWS MUST BE MORE IMPORTANT. The Chicago Tribune's Ends of the Line series visits Antioch. The researchers are clearly exploring these communities by automobile.

A ticket at the Antioch movie theater is $2 before 6 p.m. and $4 after, reason enough to hop the train for a visit.

Where have we seen this movie theater before? Regular readers of Cold Spring Shops will know that the matinee is possible ... just ... on the train, but the last train to Chicago (the Antioch Hiawatha?) leaves for Chicago at 7:02, Monday through Friday only.

The Antioch photographs, like last week's Big Timber photographs, are not yet available online.

Next week: to the edges of DeKalb.

ON THE WIND. The Inland Lake Yachting Association's regatta updates include this picture of the A Scows in full cry.

Unattributed Inland Lake Yachting Association photograph
Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, 11 August 2006.

MISUNDERSTANDING RAILWAY PRESERVATION. The good news is that the Flying Yankee may be made railworthy again. The bad news is that the main press doesn't get railway history.

It was sleek and shiny, strangely silent and impossibly quick--an unprecedented vision dropped into the grime and hopelessness of the Depression like a visitor from the future.

The train known as the Flying Yankee caused the kind of sensation cynical 21st Century commuters can hardly imagine. It drew crowds of 10,000 when it first visited Portland, Maine, and Nashua, and 25,000 turned out for its debut in Boston in the winter of 1935.

Powered by diesel and electricity instead of steam, the Yankee flew between Boston, northern New England and New York for 22 years, dazzling passengers with its quiet, cushioned ride and speeds of more than 90 miles per hour.

I'd hesitate to call it "impossibly quick." Boston-Portland in two hours with steam was not impossible. But the train never ventured south of North Station on business. Troy, New York, perhaps, and rarely faster than 75 mph. Perhaps the writer is thinking about the East Wind, itself worthy of a post some day, or the all-Pullman Bar Harbor and Downeaster that did link the Official Region to the Maine coast.

Then, in the 1950s, car ownership exploded. Train ridership collapsed. The Flying Yankee was retired after nearly 3 million miles of travel and left to sit at a Carver rail museum for almost four decades, as vandals pocketed bits of its sleek Art Deco features and rot settled into its once-plush seats and carpets.

That the train was, by 1957, a bit clapped out as well as subject to the limitations of a fixed consist might have had something to do with its being retired. That some railway preservation societies have more will than they have wallet is a reality. I can think of a few Burlington Zephyrs of that era that are still extant but real basket cases. (Union Pacific's streamliners of that era, with their aluminum construction, were worth a lot more to the scrap merchant than preservationists could come up with.)

Commissioned by the Boston & Maine Railroad, the Flying Yankee was built by the E.G. Budd Co. of Philadelphia. It cost $280,000 and was modeled after the Pioneer Zephyr that caused a stir in Chicago in 1934.

The Yankee offered unheard-of amenities, including air conditioning and clam chowder. It opened travel between Boston and Maine with an aggressive 732-mile daily schedule that looped from Portland to Boston to Bangor and back.

The Yankee is the second-oldest Budd motor train. The Pioneer Zephyr, preserved underground at the Museum of Science and Industry, stayed in service until the early 1960s on Burlington secondary lines west of the Missouri River. The details about the schedule are correct. Air conditioning, however, was already in place on some Boston and Maine and New Haven dining cars as well as the Pullman-Bradley lightweight coaches that went into service before the Yankee did. And it would be a wicked pathetic New England railroad that didn't offer clam chowder in the dining car.

The ride experience, however, is different from the old steamcars.

Curved lines dominate the Yankee, which was partly designed by architect Paul Philippe Cret in the opulent Art Deco style. So dramatic was the difference between the Yankee and other trains, even a short trip left an impression. Charles Downing rode the train in 1936 from Boston to Portsmouth on his way home from the circus.

"It was like sitting down in your Morris chair in your living room--the chair leaned back, the lighting was indirect, and there was no noise, no clanking," said Downing, 88, of Maine. "The doors closed with a little hiss, and the only sound was the click-click of the air brakes. On the old steam trains, the brakes were always slamming and squealing and grinding. I remember thinking, this is elegant--I'm so glad I'm in here."

And with a little help from the Yankee's friends, the train will roll again.

USING EVERYTHING BUT THE SQUEAL. But the opportunity cost of a bratwurst might now include ... a full tank of gas?

[University of Illinois] researchers were able to determine the precise balance between a temperature hot enough to break down the manure's molecular bonds and a pressure high enough to keep the super hot poop from turning into a gas. These conditions allow the pig excrement to emerge less than an hour later as thick, black, sludgy oil.

Along the way the product is stripped of its telltale scent--it smells like wet coffee grounds--and is only slightly less pure than the natural stuff, [professor Yuanhui] Zhang said. The only byproducts are a small puff of carbon dioxide, a few dribbles of water and a tiny bit of dirt.

"What's fascinating is that it's a relatively simple process," said Ted Funk, a researcher in Zhang's group. "Even though the process has complex chemistry, it's relatively short, requires almost no extra materials, and you get a nice energy output."

In fact, the researchers have found the sludge contains three times the energy used to produce it. This energy ratio, combined with a technical breakthrough earlier this year that allows continuous feeding of the system with fecal matter, has been noticed by entrepreneurs.

Pig farms also smell of ammonia. Is there an easy way to extract that as well? Commercialization of Porky's Petrol (Performance Fuel for Road Hogs?) awaits the development of industrial-scale refineries. Is it time to short Big Oil for a case of "not invented here?"

OUR NEIGHBORS AT WAR. Clintonville, Wisconsin resident Beth Karlson (not a known relative) met with President Bush last week during his trip to northern Wisconsin. Mrs Karlson's son Sgt. Warren Hansen died in a helicopter crash in Iraq. The Army has been less than forthcoming with information she'd very much like.

What she wants now is the Army investigative report. "I guess that I'm being stonewalled," she said before meeting Bush.

The President promises she'll get the report. The burden is also on the military to be forthcoming to the parents and children of the war dead both as a matter of decency and as a matter of credibility toward future volunteers.

TIME TO SELL THE WORLD COUNCIL SHORT? The American Baptist Assembly will be selling some of its land fronting on Green Lake, Wisconsin.

Green Lake Conference Center plans to sell part of its 1,000-acre spiritual retreat on Wisconsin's deepest lake, using proceeds from the possible $25 million-plus sale to help America's pastors revitalize their congregations and reach out to everyday "unchurched" people.

What's the connection?

Land-sale proceeds could generate at least $1 million in interest a year, [center president Ken] Giacoletto said. The non-profit Christian center would use that money to help stagnating congregations broaden their reach via its Center for Excellence in Congregational Leadership. The three-year program for pastors, their families and lay leaders includes six week-long sessions at Green Lake.

So one down-sizes the conference center and invests the proceeds at not less than 4% interest in order to pay for long-term training programs to up-size congregations. There has to be a thesis topic in there somewhere ...

ANAGRAM THIS. Sometimes the word-verification feature gives me something that looks like Polish with a hangover, but recently it offered ebadgr. SIEVE!

QUOTE OF THE DAY. University Diaries, savoring downtime.

Those of us ambivalent about other people find nothing lost and much gained by withdrawing from them on occasion and being by ourselves.

With Sprecher in moderation?

CREDIT ON THE CLOCK. It's a matter of public record who designed the Allen-Bradley tower clock.

THE FASTEST THING WITH SAILS. The premiere of The Ultimate Ride coincided with an historic day at the Inland Lake Yachting Association's Class A Championship. The wind direction was right for the race committee to set a 3 1/2 mile windward-leeward giving the boats a chance to make velocity good to windward and get onto screaming planes downwind.

The premiere of the movie was preceded by a lawn party. The invitations specified "sailor's best" for attire. Throw a blue blazer over your summer race officer outfit (white shorts, white polo shirt) and people will call it "styling." Before the movie began, partygoers were able to watch replays of the day's racing using a program by Kattack, a company that was downloading Global Positioning data from transponders on each of the boats for subsequent use. If the for-sale version of the software includes wind vectors to go with the traces of the boats, this program has great potential for training purposes.

The movie? Recommended for sailing enthusiasts, and especially for Inland sailors. Gary Jobson, who narrates the movie, came to the premiere to introduce the movie, and he noted the A scows have about 50 percent faster velocity made good than America's Cup boats. (Velocity made good is what matters in racing: you can be sailing fast but away from the next mark; the art is to have the right blend of footing and pointing upwind, and tight and broad reaching downwind.) He intends to talk up the A Scow among the East Coast E Scow fleets. No spoilers here, just some teases: an A Scow once ran down a smaller scow in a mixed fleet race, and an A Scow crew attempted the Chicago to Mackinac. But you'll have to buy the movie or rent it or make nice to me to find out how they fared.

EXTRAS AND EXTRAS. World War II was the last great railroad war. Steven Spielberg is making a movie based on Flags of our Fathers, a biography of the six troopers who raised the flag on Iwo Jima. But vintage passenger trains are not exactly abundant on the common carriers. Solution: hire the Silver Cars from the Illinois Railway Museum.

These cars received a mechanical refit to be able to travel to the Chicago area, as well as new glazing, and a temporary Burlington paint job. (One might call these extras "stunt doubles" as Mr Spielberg's original plan was to hire the Nebraska Zephyr, but those cars were damaged in a switching oops. Preservation railways are subject to all the hazards of the common carriers with the additional difficulty of locating spare parts.

Inside, the cars still show evidence of their use on Amtrak. Silver Ridge, because of its unusual floor plan, was not converted for head-end power in Amtrak's Heritage Fleet rebuilds. Remember purple-and-orange, carpeting halfway up the walls, and paisley upholstery?



Slumbercoach Loch Sloy has its Northern Pacific lettering, which would be correct for trains running on the Burlington as well. In the movie it might show up immediately behind the diesel ... anachronism alert!


The double Slumbercoach room provides a toilet and sink as well as double bunks. Today's Superliner roomette eliminates the plumbing in order to provide somewhat wider bunks. There's not much luggage space in either configuration as there isn't enough headroom in the corridor for the luggage space the Viewliner sleepers provide.

The museum has made some improvements in the grounds. This shelter once served Springfield Avenue in Rockford, Illinois. After the end of interurban service, someone adaptively reused it as a doghouse. (If not for doghouses, chicken coops, diners, and cottages there'd be a much thinner supply of preservable city and interurban cars.)


The collection is going to receive shelter as well. These tracks are grouped in such a way as to permit sheds to be built over them, probably for maintenance purposes so as to allow for more display space in the existing carbarns. The museum recognizes that storage has opportunity costs, and cars kept under roof must earn their keep in some way.


Inside one of the existing barns, a clear shot of North Shore baggage-coach 251. The North Shore Line attempted to match the steam railroads' silver cars with silver paint and carefully applied shadow markings.


Here is the oldest steam locomotive in the collection, an Illinois Central small Suburban Tank. It is set up for decent visibility over the coal bunker in order to run bunker-first in one direction. The Boston and Maine Budd Car behind it is set up with control cabs on each end, again, to make turning a suburban train less challenging.


The Chicago solution has been to provide a control cab on one end of a coach, and a diesel on the other end of the train (and despite the profusion of grade crossings, passengers are allowed at the engineer's end.) But it makes one feel a bit old to look at this car and remember that cars in this style and coloration were running from Geneva into Chicago in 1986, when I started at Northern Illinois.


The pioneer Fairbanks-Morse diesel switcher, which runs, was on the diesel house lead.


The dispatcher's office has a working signal control panel. The museum has a number of webcams now, including one that provides live updates of the model board.


Inside the tower, a preserved track diagram offering visual aids to the signalman. This is South Upton Junction on the North Shore Line.


The view of a diesel train from the tower.


Some pot signals recently obtained from North Western Station during a rebuilding of the Lake Street interlocking. These look like British "shunting signals" but they were used to give the road out of and the route into the station. Some signals had one or two stars on the back side that illuminated to give the road to a train so long that the engine was beyond the end of the platform.


At the main station, a North Shore Line train using older cars that never received the Silverliner treatment.


The day of my visit, the museum was setting up for a vintage automobile show.


I don't know whether this car was an early arrival or the property of a museum member.


Here's a screenshot, taken from the museum's tower camera, of the show.


The next big event will be a Day Out with Thomas, the weekends of the 19-20 and 26-27. The Chicago Tunnel Company did not deliver this shipment of Thomas toys for the upcoming Day Out with Thomas.


Thomas now has some new of friends, including a Claud Hamilton and a Stirling Single from the Victorian era, a Streak from the streamliner era (scroll down to Spencer), and a Q1 (Neville), Ivatt Suburban Tank (Arthur), and a 9F (Murdoch) from after the war. No doubt many of those push-toys will be going home with tired toddlers in the next few weeks.

PRICE TAKERS. Rising input prices induce leftward shifts of supply curves, but substitution behavior by producers and consumers matters.

In 2005, Briggs [and Stratton] blamed high costs of steel, aluminum, copper, plastics and energy for a 4.5% price increase for the hundreds of thousands of engines it built for the lawn-and-garden industry. If ever there was a year that a price increase was justified, 2005 was it, Chief Financial Officer James Brenn said in a conference call with analysts.

The same could be true for many companies this year. In a recent national survey of manufacturers, 59% of the respondents said they added surcharges on products to help cover higher commodity costs. Sixteen percent said they would move factories overseas to get relief from high prices.

Companies have had mixed results in recovering their material costs, said Dan Meckstroth, chief economist with Manufacturers Alliance, the Arlington, Va., trade group that conducted the survey.

"Often it comes down to who has the most muscle," he said. "If you have a strong market position, your customers might not have a choice but to accept price increases. But if you are one of many suppliers for the same product, it may be very difficult" to get customer cooperation.

High material costs have pushed some automotive industry suppliers into bankruptcy. The automakers, with their own problems, have been reluctant to accept price increases from suppliers.

Thus, more challenges for policy analysts. On one hand, "muscle" means consumers have fewer options to play one vendor against another: textbook price searching behavior. On the other, "muscle" might mean figuring out ways to serve consumers more cheaply, such as using cheaper labor, where available, with the more expensive materials.

PROFITING BY THE IGNORANCE OF OTHERS? Eras of "energy crisis" provide all manner of Teachable Moments for industrial economists. (I find myself assuring students, or is it reminding myself, that although we could devote the entire semester to energy prices, we won't.) Take a couple of news items. One shows the Principle of Complements at work.

"I think everybody's very cautious about buying a larger SUV right now. They're great vehicles, but they do use more gas, and I think that's where people are concerned," said Dennis Worthy, general manager of the auto auction near Caledonia.

Worthy said prices for bigger used SUVs have fallen as demand has waned, but prices for smaller, fuel-efficient used cars have increased.

The lack of interest in gas-gulping used SUVs is just one sign that rising gasoline prices - which might climb further because of the BP pipeline problem in Alaska - are changing the market for cars.

The article also illustrates why economists keep on invoking ceteris paribus.

The run-up in gas prices clearly has cut the demand for vehicles that use a lot of fuel, but U.S. automakers haven't been nimble enough to adapt quickly, some experts said.

"They were making money hand over fist for a lot of years, so that makes it hard to change," said Jay Baron, president and chief executive of the Center for Automotive Research in Ann Arbor, Mich. "It's difficult to come up with new kinds of vehicles. . . when sales are going well."

Even though sales of big SUVs are dropping, it's way too early to start writing an obituary for SUVs, others contended. Not everybody wants a smaller vehicle, and many still consider the convenience and their personal needs - such as roominess - worth the cost of the gas it takes to keep an SUV or a bigger vehicle running.

We still have some work to do distinguishing long-run from short-run adjustments, as well as making sense out of optimal inertia. Established firms frequently get clobbered by surprises. But somebody had to come up with the idea of the SUV. It did not spring in full obnoxiousness off of Henry Ford's drafting table.

Economists also like to think in elasticities. Here's why.

[Paul] Taylor [of the National Automobile Dealers Association] noted that every dollar increase in a gallon of gasoline from now on will be smaller as a percentage than the boost to $2 from $1 and to $3 from $2.

The average price of a gallon of unleaded gas in metro Milwaukee on Monday was about $3.23 a
gallon, according to Milwaukeegasprices.com

"People make adjustments about the prices of gasoline in the context of all the expenses associated with buying and operating a new car," Taylor said.

In the two years after a 1997 increase in the price of a gallon of gas, from about $1.25 to $1.30 to $1.60 to $1.70, he noted, the purchase of four-cylinder autos went up about 5% in models in which less-efficient six-cylinder engines also were an option.

Relative prices, relative prices.

Another article shows that the confusion over what constitutes competition never goes away. There's this "minimum mark-up" law in Wisconsin that applies, or does not apply, to motor fuels.

The 1930s-era minimum mark-up law requires wholesalers to charge gas stations at least 3 percent more than they paid. Gas stations in turn must tack on at least 6 percent more at the pumps. The law's supporters say it prevents large retailers from underselling smaller gas stations and driving them out of business.

There's a cause to nail your colors to the mast for! Support your right to pay higher prices to buy at independent gas stations!

The Wisconsin Petroleum Marketers and Convenience Store Association issued a statement Tuesday saying the state's minimum mark-up protects small businesses from competitors who could undersell them.

If the underselling is by businesses using some improvement that's practicable on a small scale, such that a multiplicity of firms continue to serve the market, that's the textbook model of atomistic competition. But what happens if the improvement is one that's only practicable on a large scale? (At this stage, there are no large-scale improvements in ethanol blending comparable with the Standard Oil Trust's improvements in kerosene distribution in the late 1800s.) And if the improvement is being tested by a dominant firm? Then things get more interesting.

Banking representatives have been beating down the doors in Congress to get it to block Wal-Mart's bid to open a bank. The giant corporation has asked the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. to give it a charter for a bank in Utah, a move that the bankers see as just the first. Wal-Mart insists that the bank will be used only to process debit and credit card transactions at its stores.

But bankers, particularly smaller community banks, are worried sick that Wal-Mart will start with the limited-service banks and eventually turn them into full-service financial institutions. Suddenly, the same folks who have fought any governmental "interference" with Wal-Mart's employment practices want the government to help them control what they now agree is a beast.

Wal-Mart could do to those community banks what it did to the locally owned hardware store.

(As if banks aren't entering into partnerships with retailers. There are TCF branches in Jewel-Osco -- isn't the integration of a grocer and a druggist anticompetitive?) But there is a connection. A Jewel-Osco or a Wal-Mart or a Meijer provides under one roof the services that used to be offered behind multiple sole-proprietor storefronts.

As of this evening, Wisconsin's governor has directed that the minimum markup law does not apply to ethanol blends in gasoline. Hence another policy lesson: efficiency isn't the only goal.

[Governor] Doyle told state Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection regulators not to enforce the 1930s-era law that requires that gas prices go up by 9.18% between wholesalers and retailers. The Legislature this year debated but failed to pass a measure that would have repealed the minimum markup law for all fuels.

"More and more drivers are turning to ethanol-based fuels because they are cheaper, and that is a trend we want to continue," Doyle said.

But the governor's order was an election-year gift to ethanol producers, said Erin Roth, executive director of the American Petroleum Institute that represents major oil companies. The move could hurt those convenience stores and other retailers who don't sell ethanol-blended fuel as price-weary consumers shop for the lowest prices, Roth said.

"It's an incentive for people to buy ethanol-blended gasoline," Roth said. "He ought to do it on all fuels."

Sure, but there are a lot more cornfields in Wisconsin than there are crude oil wells. Now if one could extract the methane from the cow-flops ...

FACING THE MUSIC. The Northern Illinois University statement on the one-year probation imposed by the National Collegiate Athletic Association is up.

Northern Illinois University will not appeal an NCAA Committee on Infractions ruling handed down today in which the committee acknowledged “mitigating circumstances” and imposed a reduced minimum penalty.

Instead, NIU officials say the report and its one-year probation penalty brings closure to a long-standing case involving a former women’s basketball player. NIU first notified the NCAA of possible violations more than two years ago.

“At the heart of this case was a faculty member who, at the request of the athletic department, reached out to help a struggling student,” said NIU President John Peters. “We’re grateful to the infractions committee for recognizing that context and for acknowledging that NIU’s excellent compliance history strongly influenced their final decision.”

The Northern Star reports that two individuals no longer associated with the university received letters of reprimand. (If they're no longer with Northern Illinois and these reprimands are not a matter of public record, do the responsible officials at their current employers have any way of knowing this?) The Star's sports editor recognizes that the probation can lead to adverse entries on the permanent records of others.

Despite the fact that it was a former NIU athlete and she was a part of the women's basketball team only, all of NIU athletics will feel the effects of the probation. This shows one of the NCAA's major flaws in it's current system when it comes to situations like these.

If anyone in any sport at NIU commits an infraction in the next year, then that could equal seriously bad news for the athletic department. We're talking the possibility of a loss of scholarships or even the loss of postseason play, which other schools like Michigan and Georgia have experienced in the last few years.

But he has a few things to learn about what "institutional reputation" means. The other teams can bask in the association with a bowl-winning football program, and, in the classroom, the strengths of an accounting program or the weaknesses of an area studies program can affect the academic reputation of the university taken together. Tell me who your friends are and all that.

The university is already responding to the probation. I recently attended an event at which the compliance coordinator reminded boosters that there were rules governing booster interaction with students and potential students.

ADAPTIVE REUSE. With diesel-powered commuter trains providing the only service into Metra's North Western Station, much of the former Chicago and North Western crew room and baggage facilities under the trainshed north of the Washington Street commuter concourse has been idle. Metra will be realizing some rental income from those properties after they're converted into MetraMarket. But isn't calling it Chicago's first French-style fresh food market a bit Arch Deluxe? The Reading Terminal Market, which has been under the trainshed at Philadelphia's Reading Terminal for years, has long offered vegetables, cheese, meat, fish, baked goods and flowers (as well as restaurants and taverns, not to mention scrapple, apple pan dowdy, and shoo-fly pie.)

TO THE FIFTH POWER. According to Site Meter, my 100,000th visitor arrived from Oak Brook Illinois looking for "erica christenson wikipedia." My post may not have been what the visitor was looking for, although it is fitting that the post matching the search is one on college follies.

The way the various counters work, there is probably some other contender for the 100,000th visitor somewhere back in April. Thanks to all for your continued interest.

HOW IT CAME UNDONE. Earlier this year I reviewed On the Wrong Line: How Ideology and Incompetence Wrecked Britain's Railways, which was very critical of the way in which British Railways became the part-private, part-subsidized, and part-public attempt to provide the rail equivalent of a road network it is today. But British Railways were not fragmented simply to implement libertarian fantasies about what a rail system should be. Stephen Poole, who worked for British Rail up to one of its restructuring, wrote about his experiences in Behind the Crumbling Edge, a not-at-all-favorable portrayal of the nationalized railroad that becomes Book Review No. 25. The railroad Mr Poole hired out on was very much the general purpose common carrier, still serving Britain's legacy heavy industries including the then-publicly held collieries and steelworks, and blending loose-coupled unbraked slow freight trains with express passenger trains and all manner of commuter and branchline local passenger trains, often shepherded from station to station under manual block rules. There was ample potential for things to go wrong, and it did. That operating staff (not necessarily train crew men in militant unions) bought into the view of the railroad as a social service agency not necessarily committed to precision transportation did not help. That's not to say the railroad's administration didn't recognize there were problems, but getting things changed brings to mind university policymaking on a bad day (see p. 183.)

Schemes such as Driver Only Operation and Penalty Fares, which were good ideas in essence, were largely the brainchildren of managers who moved from post to post and who wanted to leave their mark as they went along. At one time you couldn't really hope to be able to use their mark individually because of the nightmare of negotiation and consultation required before change could be contemplated.

Not surprisingly, things went wrong. The word "muddle" turns up frequently as a description of what the railroad attempted to do. One suspects, however, that Mr Poole is a bit skeptical of the thinking that started with the perfectly valid observation of motor and air carriers competing with the railroad being carried through to the suggestion that the railroad itself be restructured in order to provide railroad units competing with other units. (In my view a restoration of competition by creating independent companies running on competing lines, perhaps going so far as to re-introduce competition between the Midland and the North Western might have made more sense than the creation of service-specific operating companies. Mr Poole does not spell out his preferred view, although he refers to some "mismanagement" in the transition.) Given all that happened on British Railways, Mr Poole's acceptance of an early pension, comparing the old system's investment in some recent management training with East Germany's investment in Berlin Wall guarding in 1985, shows much more grace under tough circumstances than I would be capable of showing in public.

THEY ARE BEGINNING TO CATCH ON. The backward bending supply curve is not just for the blackboard.

"Common in academia, sabbatical leave is becoming a more common tool in business," the [Society for Human Resources Management] says on its Web site (www.shrm.org). "As adapted by many non-academic organizations, sabbaticals are provided to allow employees to pursue education, engage in personal projects or attend to special family needs."

That's the analogy. Here's the context.

[Robert W. Baird's Leslie Dixon] has been in human resource management for 19 years, and in the last decade, she has seen a surge in consideration of leaves and flexible work arrangements that let employees better balance work and life.

"We have had more people asking," she said. "The more we look at it, the more we realize that, to attract and retain the best people possible, we needed to have" such policies.

The changing face of the work force also is forcing such changes, said Shelley Jurewicz, executive director of the Young Professionals of Milwaukee.

Younger employees see time flexibility as much more important reasons to stay with an employer than do most companies, she said.

"You are going to have to put energy into these emerging top benefits if you want to compete for talent," she said.

But not everybody has yet caught on. The coffee bar at the local vendor of lottery tickets and Marlboros in a box (the modal purchase of almost everybody waiting in front of me) now sells a coffee with extra caffeine.

There are some subtleties to labor force participation that call for further research.

IN HIAWATHA'S FOOTSTEPS. Last week Monday, I sent an internet order to a British video producer called Video 125. The packet of DVDs were in my mailbox Saturday. Well done.

HOW IT ALL WENT WRONG? Shelby Steele had time on a long drive to meditate on how President Eisenhower might have been able to use what we so delicately call "a racial slur" among his golfing buddies without anybody influential making a fuss, and President Clinton some years later being able to take what we used to call "indecent liberties" with the college help and get away with it. The result of his meditation is White Guilt, Book Review No. 24. Much of this meditation is familiar to people my age: Fifties conformism, state-sponsored segregation at odds with the plain language of the Declaration of Independence, and a war to contain communism that appeared to be going noplace offered young people the opportunity to bundle their expected boundary-testing with what they understood as a more thoroughgoing and internally consistent re-evaluation of established ways of doing things. As is often the case, James Michener's Kent State sums up what was emerging (p. 137): "Vietnam, and our treatment of minorities. Corruption, and our indifference to ecology." (In those days we were still close enough to "Chicks say yes to guys who say no" that Mr Michener's source did not include sexism and homophobia, but those came along in due course.)

Professor Steele was able to experience those days with the zeal of a black man recently empowered by the new dispensation, and with the cleverness of a smart man who saw the points of advantage: thus he was able to act "authentic" without being brought up short by his Chicago Transit supervisor at his summer job, or by his university's president when he and his fellow militants submitted their "non-negotiable" demands. (Yes, younger readers, we did talk that way once.) But he later discovers that something has gone wrong. Turn to page 174.

By the mid-eighties the schizophrenia imposed on me as a black who was identified with the left had become unbearable. I had no interest in becoming a conservative. I just instinctively disliked the left's disregard of principles that had always been important to me. Worse, I had been terrified of the Faustian bargain waiting for me at the doorway to the left: we'll throw you a bone like affirmative action if you'll just let us reduce you to your race so we can take moral authority for "helping" you.

He's not becoming conservative, but he is being mugged by reality. Along the way, he encounters the Silent Generation relic from Hell. You know the type: Don't judge the Great Society by what happened. Give us credit for our good intentions. Bleah. And here's where he sees us (p. 176).

The left abandoned its compassionate Jeffersonian liberalism of the early civil rights era in favor of the dissociation that enabled it to respond to the crisis of white guilt (broadened by the sins of sexism, Vietnam, and environmental indifference.) In this crisis, if you could win moral authority for a society threatened with revolution, you would be given real political power. So, in trading in principles for dissociation, the left stumbled onto the formula for power that would see it through the next several decades.

But this was a deal with the devil. In choosing dissociation over principles the left became impotent; without demanding principles it could not solve the very social problems that justified its existence.

The contemporary right, Professor Steele notes (if "right" is even the right descriptive) has renounced its intentions to restore the segregationist order, and it is in a position to judge the dissociational left by the fruits of its policies. It's not so much Professor Steele left the left as it is the left left him. Page 180: "And if I've learned anything in all of this, it is that if you want to be free, you have to make yourself that way and pay whatever price the world extracts."

So for all that, why nearly 200 pages of meditation? At the end, we're left with Professor Steele's original puzzle, but no insights on what might have been done differently? Was it necessary that delegitimizing white supremacy necessarily meant the end of constraints on people in power taking liberties with interns? Was there any way to implement, say, a more consistent civil rights policy in which the power of the state could neither be used to prohibit people from associating or doing business with each other, nor to compel them to do either? And what other policies might have helped Black America deal with the reality Professor Steele notes that the end of institutionalized racism brought with it both freedom and responsibility, which are scary in their own way.

And in some places the book stretches to make a point. Sure, the O. J. Simpson criminal trial might have been a consequence of white guilt, but mightn't the prosecution's witness confessing that cops planted evidence, and the prosecutor's request that the defendant attempt to put an Isotoner driving glove over a plastic protective glove had something to do with it?

COSMOPOLITANS. These blue-collar aristocrats, metalworkers for Milwaukee's In-Place Machining, will go anywhere.

Apart from a cowboy-like spirit of adventure, what keeps In-Place workers competitive are their well-worn passports - their tickets to the global economy. In-Place makes them a condition of employment.

The passports put them in a distinct minority. According to the U.S. State Department, 25% of Americans own passports. While that number has risen in recent years, it lags the 39% of Canadians, 40% of Germans and 70% of British who have passports.

That gives In-Place an edge in a nation that struggles to connect with the 95% of the world's population that lives outside the U.S. According to the Commerce Department, the U.S. runs a chronic trade deficit with nearly every trading region around the globe, exporting 53 cents of goods for every $1 Americans import.

Do we have to have a refresher course on comparative advantage? Someplace has to specialize in the repair of heavy machinery, including formerly classified offshore drilling rigs and gas-turbine generating stations in Kirkuk. (Yes, Kirkuk is in Iraq.) Might as well have it in Milwaukee, where the machine tools and control systems that made the assembly line happen were made.

GOVERNMENT FAILURES. The "Rippers" for worst rail transportation agencies are up.

These are the "not-so-coveted" awards, and are, once again, totally arbitrary. Generally, either vague Construction Documents, or even covert attempts to skewer a Supplier or Contractor have resulted in strained relationships, higher costs, and lower quality.

Among the offenders is the North San Diego County Transit District, which is working on what a correspondent tells me is a new commuter rail project using German Desiro diesel-multiple-unit cars (here are some in Hungary, and the British have electric versions of them, they'd look good in turquoise with salmon pinstripes) and going under the name of "Sprinter," which brings to my mind Thomas the Privatised Tank Engine contemplating Selina the Sprinter Unit's curves. (There's a Sprinter Unit simulator on offer from Train Sim.)

A VICTORY ONE CAN LIVE WITH? July's Reason includes an article on the difficulties of nation-building. Authors Justin Logan and Christopher Preble, both affiliated with the Cato Institute, are not pleased with the Bush Administration's turnabout from Governor Bush's 2000 skepticism about using the U.S. military for nation-building.

That’s why we’re alarmed that the Bush administration has created a nation-building corps from America: the State Department’s new Office of the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization, which was established by Congress in July 2004. The office’s mandate is to “help stabilize and reconstruct societies in transition from conflict or civil strife, so they can reach a sustainable path toward peace, democracy, and a market economy.” Meanwhile, a November 2005 Defense Department directive makes stability operations a “core U.S. military mission.” Such operations would involve on-the-ground assistance, not unlike the provisional reconstruction teams in Iraq...

Deeper into the article, however, is the material I'd like to expand upon.

In the most thorough survey of American nation-building missions, the RAND Corporation in 2003 evaluated seven cases: Japan and West Germany after World War II, Somalia in 1992–94, Haiti in 1994–96, Bosnia from 1995 to the present, Kosovo from 1999 to the present, and Afghanistan from 2001 to the present. Assessing the cases individually, the authors count Japan and West Germany as successes but all the others as failures to various degrees. They then try to determine what made the Japanese and West German operations succeed when all the nation-building efforts since have failed.

The authors note one possible source of the difference.

Although “postconflict success often depends on significant political changes,” it said, the “barriers to transformation of [an] opponent’s society [are] immense.” And in the absence of a decisive outcome between warring parties (such as happened in World War II), there is always a danger that violence will continue.

Put another way, the road to a successful transformation of the adversary might involve actions the victor might regret. Here's Professor Bainbridge with some specifics.

[T]he greatest generation had doubts about the morality of the strategic bombing campaign even in the midst of the war. The British denied Bomber Harris a peerage in 1946 (although they did offer him one in 1951, which he refused), even though they gave peerages to virtually all of the UK's other major World War II commanders at that time. Bomber Command did not get a separate campaign medal. And so on.

Indeed, there seems little doubt but that the strategic bombing campaign violated the precepts of a just war. In particular, it violated the tenets of proportionality and discrimination. Proportionality holds that the response to aggression should not be disproportionate to the original aggression. Was the deliberate firebombing of Dresden or Hamburg, say, proportional to the Blitz? As for discrimination, there is no doubt that Bomber Harris and his US counterparts deliberately targeted German and Japanese citizens.

His summation:

[A] just war must be fought justly. And we do the so-called greatest generation no service if we ignore their serious moral failings in this regard. The West, after all, is supposed to be the good guys.

But how much of the difference in effect between the Blitz and the thousand-plane raids was attributable to incompetence on the German side? And what persuasion is permissible against citizens of a bellicose government? Chris Bertram of Crooked Timber takes one position.

[T]he current actions of the Israeli government , in bombing facilities like Beirut Airport and a power station in Gaza, in deliberately making civilians suffer (and in many cases causing their deaths) are illegal and disproportionate, words that don’t do justice to the bloody reality. Collective punishment and reprisal are not permissible actions, but that is plainly what is going on here. Lebanese people are being killed as a matter of policy in order to put pressure on the Lebanese government.

Betsy's Page takes another.

Just imagine if there was a breakaway terrorist group in northern Mexico that sought to destroy the United States and was lobbing rockets across the border into the United States killing and endangering all the people who lived in the Southwest. Suppose Mexico was helpless to stop those renegades and so we launched attacks against them ourselves. And then you had some thoughtful people throughout the globe telling us that we needed to negotiate with those terrorists.

Note in her hypothetical that the Mexican government, as appears to be the case with the Lebanese government, is not capable of being a government, which is to say, maintaining its monopoly on violence. The German and Japanese militaries were not rogue militias acting independently, perhaps with some encouragement from other powers. That makes identifying the "warring party" to be on the receiving end of a "decisive outcome" somewhat more difficult. (And many policy-makers continue to work under the impression that there are oppressed everyday Muslims held hostage to the ambitions of a few crazies.)

THE WEBMASTER IS BUSY. The Tribune's Ends of the Line visits Elgin Big Timber. Photographs are not yet available, perhaps because the Tall Ships and Lollapalooza also have photo series going.

A note about that station name: some people gripe that Metra simply named their relatively new station on the west side of Elgin (which is strategically positioned near a crossing of the Union Pacific line to Belvidere and Rockford as well as a logical jumping off place for Hampshire and Genoa, if DeKalb County ever gets its act together, on the Milwaukee, er, Iowa, Chicago & Eastern) for the nearest mile road, as unlike on much of the Metra system, there was never a station there in the steam era. But there's nothing particularly unrailroady about the station name. Consider Manchester London Road (now Piccadilly) or London Liverpool Street (if only the concourse building at Penn Station could have been "redeveloped" as sensitively) or the New Haven's Route 128.

OUCH. Inside Higher Ed notes, "NCAA Rule Breaking at Northern Illinois." The specifics:

The NCAA Division I Committee on Infractions has placed Northern Illinois University on probation for one year for limited violations in women’s basketball, mostly related to extra benefits given to a student-athlete by a faculty member. This was the university’s first major infractions case.

Well, the specifics aren't real specific.

The extra benefits began in December 2003, concluded in June 2004 and totaled nearly $2,000, according to the public report from the committee.

The committee noted that the relationship with the faculty member began after a former assistant director of athletics placed the student-athlete in contact with the professor for mentoring due to personal difficulties the student-athlete was experiencing at the time.

According to the infractions committee’s report, the former assistant director of athletics provided a cursory explanation of NCAA guidelines to the faculty member, specifically that student-athletes cannot receive benefits beyond what any student at the university could expect to receive.

However, the former assistant director of athletics did not monitor the relationship; follow-up regarding potential extra benefits being received by the student-athlete; report the potential for extra benefits to appropriate staff at the university; and provide the faculty member any in-depth NCAA rules education prior to and during the relationship with the student-athlete.

As a result, the committee cited the assistant director of athletics for failure to monitor the situation. It noted the student-athlete should have realized the benefits were improper as well.

I had coverage of this story when it broke. The Association takes a somewhat dimmer view of the case than the university did.

While the university considered the violations to be secondary in nature, the committee concluded the violations were major. Even though the student-athlete’s relationship with the faculty member was not based on athletics and the faculty member had a history of being generous with others, those facts were mitigating factors only related to possible penalties, the committee said.

The committee added that it took into account mitigating factors when considering penalties in the case.

“The violations were in the context of a relationship conceived out of a concern for the welfare of a student-athlete, and the faculty member who provided the extra benefits did not have an athletic motivation in her actions,” the committee wrote in its report.

The player in question has since left the school, there has been a coaching change in women's basketball, and the kids have been performing well off the court.

WHY WE HAVE PEER REVIEW. Ohio University's Richard Vedder and some of his colleagues have set up something called the Center for College Affordability and Productivity and commenced publishing a weblog. Professor Vedder was a member of the Spellings Commission on Higher Education and the content of the weblog suggests Center members will use the site as an extended minority report on the Commission's statement.

One post caught my eye as it offers me an opportunity to get around to a book review I have been putting off. Professor Vedder has a frank exchange of views with Gary Becker.

Two events over the weekend demonstrated once again something that I already knew -- that the Higher Education Establishment in America is in a state of denial about the reality that America's colleges and universities are increasingly costly and inefficient -- and probably, at the broader social level, not a sector on which we should be devoting huge amounts of new resources without some fundamental changes.

In Boston on Saturday, I got into a bit of a civilized contretemps with a man I greatly admire, Professor Gary Becker of the University of Chicago, a Nobel laureate in economics and truly a great economist. I had suggested that empirical work I had done shows that perhaps new government investments in higher education have low rates of return, since state government appropriations and state economic growth are negatively correlated -- more spending, lower growth. He replied that we as a nation underestimate the true rate of return on higher education. College graduates commit fewer crimes, are less likely to be unemployed, have fewer low birth weight babies, etc. (Some other data from the estimable postsecondary.org even suggests that college educated drunk drivers are more likely to wear seat belts than their less educated drunken colleagues).

Like most good scholars, Becker is usually very fastidious about taking into account other factors that might explain the phenomenon he is investigating. But not here. I would speculate that if the individuals who graduated from college had gone into construction as semi-skilled or unskilled laborers, they likely would have been more responsible citizens than average Americans. College students are, on average, brighter, more motivated, more disciplined, etc., than non-college graduates. College admissions is a screening process, and the truly non-bright, poorly motivated, undisciplined individuals either do not apply for admission or are rejected. Many of the positive virtues attributed to college education may have been largely (or even completely) developed elsewhere -- in the home, through church attendance, etc. Becker seemingly dismisses or ignores some evidence that might suggest higher education's role in determining the quality of our lives may be less unambigously positive.

The negative correlation argument appears in Going Broke by Degree: Why College Costs too Much, which I read long ago and now offer Book Review No. 23. On one hand, I'm likely to sympathize with a man who can note (p. 213)

The corruption of college athletics, the occasional scandals over college admissions, the growing politicalization of the academy, lax standards, the construction of extremely luxurious facilities, and excessive student party-going threaten public trust in our institutions of higher education, along with the immense subsidies that allow universities to operate as they do.

On the other hand, if he's going to write about "undisciplined individuals [who] either do not apply for admission or are rejected" today, has he rethought "Although students are probably no more accomplished academically and arguably less so than their parents" (p. 112) or his case for performance-based scholarships to attenuate the moral hazard of subsidies that he suggests "would lower somewhat the scandalously high attrition rate" (p. 225) or his suggestion that universities outsource their remediation to Sylvan Learning (p. 179?) (He does not suggest that Sylvan send the bill to the high schools that dropped the ball in the first place.) One thesis of Going Broke by Degree is that third-party payments attenuate the incentive for the universities (the state-supported ones thanks to taxpayers, the privates thanks to endowments and student loans) to contain their costs, which is logical enough, but the book also maintains that those third-party payments induce students and parents to make inefficient choices of college. (He leaves unexplored the possibility that the low tuitions (relative to equilibrium) name colleges charge (to boost their selectivity rating, see p. 19) also induce inefficiently many applications and admissions. (Regular readers know where I stand on this point.)

But it is to that asserted negative correlation between college spending and state economic growth rates I must turn. Professor Vedder reports two such regressions. In the first, (p.135)

(Change in?) Personal Income Per Capita (1977 to 2002) = 35.837 (1.172) - 11.933 (Level of?) Higher Education Spending (3.570) - 0.004 1977 Income Per Capita (1.957) + 1.402 Taxes as Percent of Income, 1977 (1.070) + 0.091 Changes in Taxes as Percent of Income, 1977-1999 (0.064) - 0.476 Percentage Workforce in Unions (1.582) + 0.164 Age of State (4.362) + 0.152 Percent Days the Sun Shines (0.831) + 0.912 Percent Population over 65, 1981 (1.177). The adjusted R² is 0.641 and the equation F-statistic (what are the degrees of freedom?) 12.170. The t-statistics are in parentheses and I have bolded the estimates with t-statistics greater than 2.

Going Broke by Degree is a publication of the American Enterprise Institute and as such might be susceptible to editing in such a way as to highlight favorable findings. The editors did not require Professor Vedder to provide much by way of description of his sample (are we looking at 51 observations, showing the average annual growth rate in fifty states and the District of Columbia over a 25 year interval, or are we looking at a panel of 51x25 observations?) That makes a difference for the equation F-statistic as well as for the interpretation of some of the t-statistics close to 2, such as the coefficient on 1977 income per capita. And a referee for Review of Economics and Statistics or Regional Science and Urban Economics would raise a number of questions about potential autocorrelation in the case of a panel. There's also an obligation for a researcher to say something more about specification. We're not looking at estimates of an indirect utility function, which has some basis in theory, or the Becker-Mincer kitchen sink, which is a generally accepted specification. By way of explanation we get, "I included seven variables used in table 7-1 for control purposes (to approximate more closely the usual assumption of 'holding everything else constant')." At least these seven variables occur in levels, preempting the gripe I raise about people using "controlling for" rather than "dummying out," a frequent feature of the kitchen sink regression. But why these seven? Why not the won-lost record of the nearest pro football team or width of temperature range, January to July or square miles of waterfront?

A few pages later comes another regression, which is even more troubling.

(Change in?) Personal Income Per Capita (1977 to 2002) = 44.570 (1.760) - 13.002 Higher Education Spending, 1980 (4.431) - 6.583 Change in Higher Education Spending, 1980 - 2000 (1.533) + 1.186 Percent Population 18-24 Years Old, 1981 (0.561) - 0.004 Income Per Capita, 1977 (2.397) + 2.320 Average Tax Burden (1.875) - 0.705 Average Percentage of Workforce in Unions, 1973, 1984 (2.214) + 0.130 Age of State (4.213) - 0.232 Energy Production, 1977 (2.649). The adjusted R² is 0.690 and the equation F-statistic is 14.925. In this regression Professor Vedder reports that his sample is 48 observations.

This result is autistic number-crunching. (That's my single biggest complaint with the book, as there are other examples in other chapters, most of those, however, not concealed behind the phony precision of a regression estimate.)

We're supposed to believe that 25 years of change in personal income per capita can be captured in a single set of regressors with a different set of control variables "To deal with a possible problem of omitted-variable bias" (p. 139.) Possible problem?? How about a very real problem of specification bias (there is no theoretical framework in the book or in the footnotes leading to the choice of this data base and set of regressors) or an even greater problem of aggregation bias (the college-age population in 1981 will be prime-age workers in 2002, but that workforce is being augmented by subsequent graduates, and where have the retirees gone?) I fear that Going Broke by Degree will convince people who are already convinced, but it won't do much to convince the unconvinced, particularly those with a working knowledge of statistical inference.

THE VALUE OF RESERVE CAPABILITIES. Last month, I suggested that Wisconsin's hiring of conspiracy buff Kevin Barrett was evidence of sloppiness in their hiring. The writers at ACTA Online expand the argument.

The discussion about University of Wisconsin lecturer Kevin Barrett has rightly swung away from academic freedom to issues of hiring and internal review: Ringing evocations of academic freedom in Barrett's case both misconstrue academic freedom--which is not the freedom to push political viewpoints or junk science in class, and which is not the freedom to teach whatever one wants however one wants--and deflect attention away from the real issue at hand, which is how Barrett came to be hired in the first place. UW clearly needs to pay more attention to its hiring processes, and it needs to pay particular care to its mechanisms for evaluating applicants for part-time teaching jobs of the sort Barrett has. Instead, it has issued ringing endorsements of academic freedom: "We cannot allow political pressure from critics of unpopular ideas to inhibit the free exchange of ideas," says Provost Patrick Farrell. "That classroom interaction is central to this university's mission and to the expansion of knowledge. Silencing that exchange now would only open the door to more onerous and sweeping restrictions."

But UW is not alone in either its casual approach to hiring adjunct lecturers or its apparent lack of established procedures for assessing what teachers are teaching and whether they are teaching well. Nor is it alone in its willingness to fall back on hollow evocations of academic freedom when weaknesses in its present personnel practices are exposed.

The statement has elements of a Complex Proposition. On one hand, Wisconsin, like every other large university, often finds itself having to cover a class or three on short notice. Each department chairman (often, the department administrator on the chairman's authority) probably has a list, an extra board if you will, of people who would be willing to pick up a class on short notice. And for the most part, those appointments are quite satisfactory, and the adjunct faculty members have considerable rapport with the students. (Those followings develop all too frequently as those people are filling in on a variety of courses over the year or two that a cohort of majors spends in-department.) On the other hand, the post hints at the possibility that the real problem is with the existence of the extra board. Perhaps the trustees and administrators ought take another look at the consequences of their calls for cost-cutting and for reducing the tenure-depth of departments. If departments are not allowed to offer tenure-track and tenure lines, despite being "enrollment-impacted," but are authorized the use of the extra board, does it come as a surprise that every so often someone who does not measure up will be called off the extra board? On the other hand, to formally investigate the extent of the extra board might raise the possibility that James Michener hinted at in Kent State: What Happened and Why? years ago, namely that the universities (whether it's our MAC rival Kent or Northern Illinois or Wisconsin or Yale) are using sweated labor.

The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel ran a guest column by ACTA's Charles Mitchell that trots out the usual nostrums, rather than address the extra board itself.

ACTA proposed that course of action in a July 17 letter to the UW Board of Regents and several administrators. Our letter encouraged them to perform an institutional self-study of the classroom environment, institute post-tenure review of faculty, assess hiring and promotion practices to ensure that quality of research and teaching - not ideological litmus tests - are the criteria for job security, incorporate intellectual diversity concerns in guidelines on teaching and include intellectual diversity issues on course evaluations.

If Mr Barrett is called off the extra board at a per-class fee that is less than a month's gross pay for a senior professor, and never placed on the tenure track, what good will the post-tenure review be? Why not review the expense-preferense behavior of administrators and trustees that puts departments in the position of having to go to the extra board? Designing a course evaluation to include "intellectual diversity issues" sounds like an exercise in wheel-spinning in the making.

And replacing a Complex Proposition with a False Dichotomy doesn't help matters.

So if UW-Madison wants to avoid the kind of headlines it is getting right now, its leaders have a choice: They can bet that no one else on the faculty will ever again say anything to raise the ire of a state legislator, or they can implement some simple and proactive reforms to show they care about the education students are receiving.

You mean there isn't an efficient level of legislative discontent? Or that keeping Madison enrollments sufficiently small that the university relies less on the extra board might not produce headlines of a different kind?

SECOND SECTION. Inside Higher Ed's look at the academic job market.

Faculty members have for years been complaining that the higher education job market is growing the most in part-time positions. Data released by the Education Department Wednesday back up that contention. While the figures aren’t new, the department’s 10-year look at college and university employees shows that employment growth has been uneven — in some cases dramatically so.

And yes, dear reader, your perception of a proliferation of administrators and functionaries is correct.

QUESTION OF THE DAY: State Fair chief baker Dave Schmidt.

"Every now and then I get someone who's standing in line who says 'I've never eaten a cream puff,' and I'm like, 'Oh my God, where are you from? Illinois?'"

A HISTORIC WAY TO SOME UNUSUAL MUSEUMS. Last Friday's Ends of the Line series in the Chicago Tribune, featuring South Bend, (the rivet counters caught the Tribune erroneously referring to Metra) was accompanied elsewhere in the paper by an article on the troubles of Gary, Indiana at its centennial. Left unstated in either article was that the South Shore Line, which still reveals vestiges of its interurban heritage, serves both cities. I've blended photos that accompany both Tribune articles with a few of my own, from a recent inspection of the Last Interurban.

A book titled Duneland Electric divides the South Shore into four sections. Starting from Chicago, the first section is trackage rights on the Illinois Central, now known as Metra Electric. Just north of Kensington (115th Street), where the South Shore begins, is the headquarters of The Pullman Company. The headquarters building was an arson victim a few years ago. Restoration is in progress.


From Kensington to Gary, the South Shore is a two-track suburban operation "in the shadow of the steel mills." There's a stretch along the Indiana Toll Road where the cars are able to leave everything on the highway behind. There are not many good photo locations through this stretch.

Gary's beaches are also in the shadow of the steel mills.

Chicago Tribune photograph by E. Jason Wambsgans.

That sky looks hazy and humid and nasty, just the kind of day for building a sand castle or taking a swim. The water in Lake Michigan gets tested regularly. The beaches of the South Shore are generally safe to swim in.

The Duneland Electric section of the South Shore begins somewhere east of Gary, where the interurban leaves behind the steel mills and the parallelling railroads.


The ancient and the modern at Beverly Shores: the South Shore's one remaining "Insull Spanish" station, a lamp-post that looks like it could have come from Plasticville, and (edited out) a crawling-message annunciator sign.

The meet at the city limits: this has been a tradition at Sheridan siding in Michigan City for nearly 100 years. I've deliberately posted a long shot to illustrate the northbound train trundling through the streets of Michigan City.


East of Michigan City comes the "interurban time machine": fewer freight trains, and more frequent cars at weekends than on weekdays. Hudson Lake is the one remaining station between Michigan City and South Bend.


It is a flagstop. The South Shore has installed solar-battery strobe lights for passengers to activate in advance of the train (they have timers that cut out after 15 minutes.) Milwaukee Electric used a more primitive version of this system at some shelters years ago. But until recently, the South Shore timetables carried the notation ^fStops on signal (use light at night.) The ritual throughout the Midwest was to bring some matches and a rolled up newspaper and hope to get the newspaper lit in sufficient time for the motorman to see the light and stop the car. (But I suppose with modern flame-retardant papers and water-based inks the strobe is more reliable.)

South Bend is home to a number of tourist attractions beyond the expected Old Notre Dame. There's an indoor whitewater training center.

Chicago Tribune photograph by Alex Garcia.

The Studebaker Museum has an exhibit at the airport inviting guests.


Once upon a time, Studebaker sponsored Mister Ed. (This was before the Karlson household had a television. We finally bought a television. A few weeks later came the Cuban Missile Crisis, followed over the next few months by the end of the North Shore Line, the assassination of President Kennedy, and Studebaker's exit from car manufacture. Put that dummy variable in your regressions!)

The South Bend airport recognizes that passengers waiting to check in and people meeting incoming passengers might take an interest in airport operations.


I realize with security what it is, we'll never see Detroit's open air observation deck, let alone Milwaukee's balconies above the jetways again, but airports that have done everything to hide their operations from their clientele are missing something.

This Delta plane has just arrived from Atlanta. Somebody could fly to South Bend and ride the interurban to Dune Park or Hammond or change to the Metra Electric at Kensington.


Outside the airport is a recently-opened war memorial. The crosses have dog tags but no names yet.


The South Shore's station at South Bend does not lend itself to unobstructed views of trains and passengers. The Tribune photographer makes a good effort at an artistic composition in tight quarters.

Chicago Tribune photograph by Alex Garcia.

The approach to the airport has interurban-like tight curves.


The first mile or so toward Chicago bring to mind the side-of-road trolley of the early years of interurban service. Worth a look if you're in the Chicago area.

WE ALREADY KNOW. The University of Wisconsin continues to make a bad defense of academic freedom.

The university’s chancellor, John D. Wiley, said that he was baffled by [CIA 9/11 conspiracy buff Kevin] Barrett’s beliefs but that they were irrelevant in the classroom, where he must stick to a syllabus that has been approved by the department. That syllabus includes a week devoted to the war on terror.

A 10-day university review had determined that Mr. Barrett presented a variety of viewpoints and that he had not discussed his personal opinions in the classroom, Mr. Wiley said.

“I think it would be a serious mistake for legislators to try to get in and micromanage curriculum,” said Mr. Wiley, who added that university officials would keep an eye on Mr. Barrett by meeting with him throughout the semester. “We don’t go around and question all our instructors to find out what all their views are.”

No, because you don't have to. "The University of Wisconsin is an affirmative action employer." Your "commitment to diversity" is a job qualification, and there are any number of remarks a search committee member can make at a job interview or on a campus visit to tease out the requisite sympathetic head-nod. Your promotion and tenure application might ask you to spell out the ways in which you have contributed to "Design for Diversity" and made efforts to "incorporate multiculturalism" in the classroom. (I can name promotion applications that have made these, and similarly insulting, requests of candidates.)

But the New York Times does a rather poor job of circling the wagons in defense of academic freedom.

At the University of Colorado, a committee voted in June to fire Ward L. Churchill, an ethnic studies professor who had compared some victims of the Sept. 11 attacks to a Nazi official. Professor Churchill appealed this month to keep his job.

And early this year at Northwestern University, Arthur R. Butz, a tenured professor of engineering, drew strong criticism after saying he agreed with the belief of the president of Iran that the Holocaust was a myth.

Mr Churchill was given his walking papers for academic misconduct (made-up credentials and plagiarism), not for making a botch of the "banality of evil" argument. Professor Butz has given Northwestern the opportunity for a long time to dis-associate itself from his private views as long as he does not bring them into the classroom. His current profile on a student gripe site suggests from the timestamps that some people added reviews when the story broke.

MUSICAL VISUALIZATION. The DeKalb Municipal Band performed Johann Strauss's Blue Danube tonight, which I can never listen to without wondering what happened to those Pan Am shuttles to the Space Station Hilton we were supposed to have by now.

APPLIED VERTICAL RESTRAINTS. Saturday night's chorizo race was a one-off.

Lost in the local and national hubbub over the introduction of a fifth Racing Sausage to the Klement's lineup at Miller Park is the fact that Major League Baseball, which has authority over such merchandising and licensing matters, has put the Chorizo back in the freezer.

Baseball has strict rules for clubs that want to introduce a new mascot, uniform or logo change, and the Chorizo got caught up in the rules.

According to Susan Goodenow, an MLB spokesman, baseball wants to be sure that fans tie into new characters or promotions from a marketing and licensing standpoint.

Suppressing inter-sausage competition in order to foster the league's image?

She said baseball granted the Milwaukee Brewers a special dispensation allowing the character to participate in last Saturday's Sausage Race as part of Cerveceros Day at Miller Park.

But for the Chorizo, it was one and done for 2006. And with it went a public relations campaign that got Klement's and the Brewers national publicity.

We are dealing with a business that has some of the characteristics of a regulated industry. It won't go quite as far as "The existing sausages are capable of performing the race. If more interesting races are desired the existing sausages can race faster. The Chorizo is incompetent to participate in a sausage race."

But there is the potential for some deal-killing attorney to decide that some people are having too much fun.

Dan Lipke, Klement's senior vice president of sales and marketing, said the company had no problems putting the Chorizo on the physically unable to perform list for the rest of the season.

"Everything in sports and business is a work in progress," Lipke said. "It is what it is."

Lipke said the downtime would enable Klement's and the Brewers to design new marketing and promotion programs for the five racing sausages.

"But baseball has the final say," he said.

If Major League Baseball acts like a cartel, I'll let you know. Spam and mash for any killjoys.

INCENTIVE-COMPATIBLE RENT SEEKING? The University of Chicago retains its management agreement to operate Argonne National Laboratory for the Department of Energy.

A law enacted by Congress a few years ago calls for competitive bidding to determine the operators of national labs, and the university mounted a huge effort to maintain its historic role managing Argonne.

"We spent millions to compete," said Thomas Rosenbaum, University of Chicago research vice president.With more than 100 positions that are joint appointments at Argonne and the university, the two institutions are closely intertwined. University leaders said that their main concern was maintaining research synergies. The lab employs about 2,900, including about 1,000 scientists and engineers.

While expensive and harrowing for the university, the bidding process was valuable because it caused a review of Argonne's management that will result in improved operations, Rosenbaum said.

As an example, the number of days lost to accidents at Argonne must be low enough to rank the lab among the top 10 percent of safely operated research labs when compared to private industry, Rosenbaum said.

"We have to meet quite explicit performance targets," he said.Lab safety, especially concerning nuclear materials, has been a major concern at the Department of Energy. Argonne management was cited in March for lax security and safety that occurred over many years dating back to 1999. While calling the lapses serious, energy department officials said that no major injuries resulted.

Several other federal labs have been cited for safety lapses, and the federal law requiring competitive bidding was enacted in part because of problems at the government's nuclear weapons lab near Los Alamos, N.M.

Other nearby universities worked with Chicago, but the private sector stayed away.

In preparing its bid, the University of Chicago recruited Northwestern University and both University of Illinois campuses in Urbana-Champaign and Chicago to join Argonne's board of governors and scientific advisers. It also recruited BWX Technologies Inc., which has a long history of nuclear manufacturing work, as a subcontractor for nuclear operations at Argonne.

Jacobs Engineering Group Inc. was also hired by the University of Chicago to bring project management and safety expertise to Argonne's operation.

With all major research universities in the state behind a single bid and the relatively low annual management fees offered, the process failed to attract any contender from the private sector such as Bechtel and Lockheed Martin.

Disclaimer: I hold a renewable short-term appointment with Argonne as an energy and environmental policy scientist. A number of physicists at Northern Illinois use the Advanced Photon Source as a research tool.

DEVELOPING BOTTOM-FEEDING STRATEGIES? A Philadelphia Inquirer report sees strategic planners in higher education anticipating the next enrollment crunch.

"Some institutions are going to struggle to find students," said Brian Prescott, a researcher for the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education, a policy organization created by the legislatures of 15 states. It has projected the number of high school graduates nationwide since the 1960s.

Traditionally, public institutions and elite private universities have so many more applicants than available seats that they should be able to weather the downturn without much trouble. Harvard, Prescott said, will still be Harvard.

"But an average private college in Pennsylvania may not be able to maintain the same level and quality of students, while their competitors in the Southeast or the West may be OK," Prescott said.

Perhaps there's a way out of the social waste inherent in remediation, which the Cincinnati Enquirer (you say "inquirer," I say "enquirer," let's call the whole thing off???) suggests is a non-trivial waste.

Education experts say this isn't just about a student taking a few extra classes. Remediation, which often affects minorities from poor families in low-income public districts, has an impact that stretches from families to schools to taxpayers.

Remedial needs strain the student, who might pay hundreds or thousands of dollars for classes that don't count toward a degree.

"At first I thought it was going to hold me back," said Daniel Williams, 18, a 2006 Woodward graduate who'll be in a remedial program at the University of Cincinnati when fall classes start.

They strain colleges, too, which devote instructors, classrooms and supplies to classes that ideally wouldn't be necessary.

And they strain the state - in essence, taxpayers - to the tune of about $30 million a year in remedial costs. While that's less than 2 percent of the overall higher education budget, "We would never say that $30 million isn't a lot of money," [Ohio Board of Regents staffer Darrell] Glenn said.

"It would be really good if we could take that $30 million and use it for something else."

But perhaps the greatest problem is what so often happens to students who require remediation: They struggle. They fail. They drop out. They lose the earning power of a college degree.

The state tracked a group of students for six years and found that among the remedial students, only 15 percent earned a bachelor's degree in that time; nearly three times as many nonremedial students received their degrees.

"The biggest effect of having 40-something percent of students not ready for college is that, lo and behold, the ones not ready when they start are much less likely to get a degree," Glenn said.

But apparently the state universities would like to have the enrollments, Mr Prescott's suggestion that the enrollment downturn is going to bite at the less-famous private colleges first.

"I think there is a mindset in Ohio that college is a luxury, not a necessity," said Jonathan Travel, the Regents' vice chancellor for educational linkages and access. "To me, it's a whole system, and it's easy to blame the whole system, too ... (but) we're all in this together."

Might it help to think of higher education as conferring primarily private benefits (that can be appropriated by the degree-holder) and ending the fiction of large spillover benefits from spending money on remediation and climbing walls and subsidies for football fields? Harder question: what is the social waste in the less-known private colleges taking up the remediation cause as a way of keeping the buildings full?

CAPITALIST ACCUMULATION? Syem-pyat-dyesyat has a certain ring to it.

The producer of America's best-selling ketchup, Heinz, has launched an effort to squeeze more of its brand onto Russians' dinner plates and challenge its Russian counterpart, Baltimor, as king of the condiments.

H.J. Heinz Co.'s European division finalized a deal in April to buy a majority stake in Petrosoyuz, a privately owned St. Petersburg food manufacturer that is a major player in the world of ketchup, mayonnaise and other spreads.

The article goes on to explain that "Baltimor" is a reference to the Baltic Sea. "Petrosoyuz" sounds a lot like a Soviet-era term for an industrial complex near Leningrad.

Heinz established itself in Moscow by becoming sole source of catsup to McDonald's in Russia, much as it has long been in the States.