TOO MUCH OF THE WRONG KIND OF CAPACITY? The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel is going to follow some freshmen through Wisconsin-Milwaukee, which now enrolls more Wisconsin residents than Madison does. Their situation, the paper argues, is representative of much of higher education.

Only four out of 10 freshmen at UWM graduate within six years. Three out of 10 drop out after the first year.

Those retention and graduation rates are typical of the non-selective universities and community colleges that serve the vast majority of the nation's college students.

Last year, UWM launched a variety of initiatives designed to keep freshmen in class and on track. The programs, which include mentoring and revised remedial courses, are showing signs of success.

But the university's leaders concede there's only so much they can do.

Academic credentials have been proved to be the biggest indicator of success in college. [Emphasis added - SHK] Even when they're well-prepared, some students are crushed by the financial burden of tuition; they can't balance school with the work required to pay for college. Others party all the time once they're beyond their parents' watch.

"We don't have all that much control," UWM Chancellor Carlos Santiago said.

I will be following this series. There's a Journal-Sentinel weblog that also follows Milwaukee area education.

LIGHTNING STOPS HUSKIES, CARDINALS DON'T. At halftime of a game delayed nearly an hour by local lightning, host Ball State was in a 14-14 tie with Northern Illinois. The second half belonged to Garrett Wolfe, who set a school rushing record despite having two long touchdown runs nullified by penalties. Final score 40-28, with Ball State picking up two touchdowns late in the game. Northern Illinois is now promoting tailback Garrett Wolfe and offensive tackle Doug Free for national performance awards.

It was not a good day to be a football fan in Indiana. Wisconsin used a sneak air attack to score the first 52 points of their game at Bloomington and held off Indiana's 17 point run at the end.

THE LAST GREAT ACT OF DEFIANCE. The railroad track is not a safe shortcut home, particularly if you're not in a condition to expect trains at any time in either direction.

The victim's 18-year-old friend, who was with him at the time, told authorities that both men were drunk.

According to the Sheriff's Department, the two Silver Lake men were walking southbound on the tracks, taking a short cut home around 11:30 p.m., when a northbound train approached.

The friend said both men got off the tracks, but that [the deceased] got back on, "flipped off" the train" and was struck.

He died at the scene.

THE INCOMPETENCE TAX. The Thinking Mother pronounces anathema on cashiers that don't understand cash.

Sometimes I don’t realize what is wrong until I am back in the car. Nowadays they shove the money at you so fast, and they don’t count it out. Especially when I was a girl and a teenager, back when everyone either used cash or check, the cashiers would do a few things differently.

First, they could do their math. Second, they would tell you what you own. Third, they’d count back the change to you, counting up by giving you one coin at a time and then counting up with the paper money to get to the amount they tell you. Lastly they’d actually thank you for your purchase.

Now the cashiers don’t tell you what you owe, they just stare at you (or they look the other way or talk to their co-workers) and stick their hand out, then they don’t count back the money, they often don’t even make eye contact through this process, and lastly they don’t thank you. I have found myself thanking them but then I wonder why do I thank them when they should be thanking me for making a purchase at that business?

She offers some hypotheses about what's gone wrong.

SEPARATING EQUILIBRIUM. There's an instructive bull session in progress at 11-D on the merits, or lack thereof, of high-occupancy-toll lanes, inspired by a Dissent article suggesting that those lanes don't really solve the metropolitan transportation problem.

What to do about traffic is a political issue of growing importance. The cost of road-building is increasing, and a growing body of research shows that sprawl development stimulated by new highways quickly makes new roads just as congested as the old ones. Should congestion nevertheless be relieved by continuing to add more road capacity? Or should investment be shifted toward mass transit?

There's something called the Law of Peak Expressway Congestion that suggests road improvements divert traffic from other roads, until travel times are the same on the improved road as they are on the unimproved roads. (Indifference at the margin, anyone?) An elaboration of the law suggests that additional capacity shortens the duration of the peak subject to the same indifference condition, which makes sense as long as the total volume of trips stays the same, but a shorter crush hour serves as an inducement for more people to relocate.

The next few paragraphs of the article summarize a number of possible policy contradictions that affect both road advocates and transit advocates. I want to focus on the efficient pricing of high occupancy toll lanes.

The toll roads that Samuel champions have been heavily promoted by free-market transportation thinkers, and they have attracted growing interest from policy-makers. A confluence of forces puts tolls at the center of the current transportation agenda. As suburbia spreads out, people must drive farther to reach their destinations, so cars spend more time on the roads. The cost of highway construction has exploded as suburbs spread, with price tags often approaching two or three billion dollars even for roads that serve only one sector of a metropolis. State highway departments, squeezed between the growing costs of maintaining existing highways and the difficulty of raising taxes in a conservative political environment, find their ability to add road capacity falling farther and farther behind traffic congestion. Toll roads seem like an obvious solution, one consistent with the broader political climate that prefers user fees to taxes and favors privatization of public services.

The article neglects to note: and the reluctance of state or county highway commissions to use their own money to expand the road networks, and the reluctance of Congress to release moneys from the Highway Trust Fund in order to make the national government's fiscal house look less disorderly, but let's abstract from that and focus on efficiently self-financed toll roads.

In principle, the new emphasis on tolls is a long-overdue move in the direction of a more rational transportation system. The concept is unassailable; if drivers pay the full cost of the roads they use, environmentally damaging and economically costly overuse of the automobile will be discouraged. Funding better mass transit with toll revenues can advance both social equity and environment protection. These ideas have long been close to the hearts of transit advocates and environmentalists. But toll road proposals do not always accomplish in practice what tolls promise in theory. Many tolling schemes now under discussion would preserve and expand the highway lobby's subsidies rather than curbing them.

Here's a related point from testimony by Douglas Holtz-Eakin as director of the Congressional Budget Office.

If a good or service is provided free of charge, people tend to demand more of it--and use it more wastefully--than they would if they had to pay a price that reflected its cost. Hence, congestion pricing is premised on a basic economic concept: charge a price in order to allocate a scarce resource to its most valuable use, as evidenced by users' willingness to pay for the resource.⁽⁴⁾

Introducing congestion pricing on a crowded highway--that is, charging tolls that are higher during peak times of the day and lower during off-peak ones--has two economic effects. First, it dampens demand for the highway during the most congested periods by inducing some motorists to alter their travel plans. Some drivers will be able to modify their schedules so they use the road at less busy times. Others will find alternative routes or switch to public transit. Second, continued demand in the face of appropriate congestion pricing serves as a signal for additional investment in road capacity.⁽⁵⁾

But there are efficient and inefficient ways of so doing. Oliver Williamson's 1966 peak load pricing article (JSTOR) lays out the argument with some glorious Lagrangians and some intuitive diagrams. The high-occupancy toll problem (and the related problem of selling cuts in the roller-coaster line) is one in which the provider is simultaneously providing a premium service at a higher price and a congested service at a lower cash outlay, but with the people who choose the cheaper congested service incurring disutility. As a modeling exercise, the marginal commuter is indifferent between the marginal utility adjusted by the higher price of the premium service and the marginal utility adjusted by the lower price of the congested service (there are some additional subtleties involved in avoiding division by zero.) The Dissent article correctly flags a potential inefficiency.

This is especially true of the latest fad among the free marketeers, what are known as express toll lanes. These are pay lanes added to existing highways that currently don't charge tolls. Toll rates vary from hour to hour, increased at times of heavy traffic in such a way that the toll lanes never back up. The main advantage of this procedure is that the driver who pays the toll is guaranteed a fast trip; on the busy suburban highways where these lanes are under consideration, there is so much traffic that simply widening the road would not get rid of congestion. Proponents argue that express toll lanes give the consumer more choice than building additional free lanes — when you need to get somewhere in a hurry, you pay the toll; when your time is less valuable, you don't.

"More choice" is not equivalent to raising sufficient moneys over the cycle of use to cover the incremental cost of expanding the network, which is one of the constraints in Professor Williamson's Lagrangian. And thus Dissent claims a flaw in the pricing system.

These survey results suggest that the "Lexus lanes" moniker is well deserved. Who uses pay lanes is mostly determined by income. For most of the people in the free lanes, consumer sovereignty is a fiction. They haven't made a voluntary decision that their time isn't worth the price of a quicker commute. They are sitting in traffic jams because the toll exceeds what they can afford to pay.

Consumers optimize subject to budget constraints, indeed.

Even if this is true, toll lane supporters respond, the lanes still benefit lower-income drivers. Those who can't afford to use the new lanes benefit from the added road capacity tolls pay for. With the wealthy on the new lanes, fewer drivers are squeezed into the free lanes, and everyone has a faster commute. The argument is logical, but it does not fit the facts. It turns out, excepting rare circumstances, that express toll lanes added to existing highways cannot raise anywhere near enough revenue to pay for their construction cost.

That, however, means the tolls have not been designed in such a way as to satisfy the incremental cost constraint. (It does not follow that the tolls are too low. A lower toll and a somewhat lower speed in the carpool lanes may be the efficient outcome.)

In such circumstances, express toll lanes only modify the failed policy of subsidized highways so as better to preserve it. When it becomes impossible to keep traffic moving freely on all lanes, express lanes give an affluent minority the open roads that can no longer be provided for everyone. Tolls in this scheme are primarily an allocation mechanism, and only incidentally a source of revenue. Their purpose is to deter those less able to pay from using the new lanes. Only those wealthy enough to afford the tolls bypass the traffic jams, but everyone who is backed up on the free lanes gets to pay the bills.

In other words, Dissent concurs with the Paul Weyrich wing of "conservative" transportation policy that sees highway projects as a form of socialism, complete with shortages and shoddy services. The article goes on to advocate different forms of congestion charges, although it omits mention of efficient peak-load pricing of the entire road network as an alternative.

THE SPEED RESTRICTIONS ARE MISGUIDED. Illinois tax dollars have been going into signaling and crossing protection upgrades to make possible safe operation at 110 mph on the old Alton Route from Dwight to Springfield. But that speedup, which is now seven years in the making, has not yet materialized.

With new safety gates and other improvements, 126 miles of track that stretches north from Springfield is ready to whisk passenger trains about 30 miles per hour faster than they now travel.

But more than a decade after Illinois set its sights on high-speed rail, trains are still chugging along at their usual 79 miles per hour, throttled as officials reevaluate new safety technology to ensure faster trains can coexist with freight trains and cars that cross over rail lines.

Specifically,

PLAN: Boost speeds from 79 mph to 110 mph along a 280-mile corridor from Chicago to St. Louis, where trains make nine stops between Alton and Summit. Travel time would be trimmed from about 5½ hours to less than four hours.

STATUS: Crossing signals have been upgraded along the entire corridor. Along a 126-mile stretch from Springfield to south of Joliet, track has been upgraded for a smoother ride and nearly 70 four-armed safety gates have been installed at crossings.

HOLDUP: State officials are reevaluating high-tech safety systems that can automatically slow or stop trains to make sure they can coexist with slower-moving freight traffic and cars that cross rail lines.

TIMETABLE: Once an automated safety system is chosen and approved by federal regulators, trains could speed up along the improved central Illinois track. No target date has been set to begin high-speed service along that route, which would trim about 45 minutes off of the Chicago to St. Louis trip. No money is earmarked for upgrades between Springfield and St. Louis or from south of Joliet to Chicago.

COST: Illinois has spent about $80 million on rail and crossing improvements along the central Illinois stretch. Costs to complete the entire corridor are expected to be about $400 million.

Passenger Rail, who located the article, notes,

But let's not just give Passenger Rail priority, let's separate freight from passenger. There will be no true next-generation, high-speed or not, if we don't separate freight from passenger. The Illinois project isn't going to do that, and it is just a revamp.

If Illinois aspires to mimic Britain's InterCity 125 or the German diesel ICE trains, yes. But perhaps the problem is with the rules. Zephyrs and 400s and Hiawathas were routinely cruising at 110 mph (American-style high-speed rail) on jointed rail protected by semaphore signals and in the latter two fleets, with steam power. Intermodal trains routinely reach 79 mph where track conditions permit. Perhaps it is the rules, not the infrastructure, that require a revamp.

THE SECOND DRAFT OF HISTORY? I'm more familiar with John Keegan's work on naval warfare and the European wars of the early twentieth century, where he's producing the n^th draft for n large. Mr Keegan is defence editor of The Daily Telegraph and in The Iraq War he makes extensive use of his colleague's first drafts as well as his own files on the travails of Mesopotamia. For Book Review No. 33 let me note that a work released early in 2004, and relying heavily on a July interview with U.S. General Tommy Franks is one that will likely be overtaken by events as the third and fourth drafts of history take shape in the War Colleges and history departments over the next few years. The parts that deal with the history of Mesopotamia as something called Iraq took shape, and the emergence of Saddam Hussein as Maximum Leader are instructive, as is the analysis of the major combat operations, where the adjective "mysterious" is often apt.

The concluding paragraphs are likely to occupy policy analysts for some time. The final event before the book went to press is the suicide of British scientist David Kelly, whose comments on possible weapons of mass destruction might have involved statements about material he was not cleared for. That episode was the harbinger of the second-guessing and recriminations to follow. Mr Keegan suggests we might have much worse to look forward to.

Thus the certainties that had inaugurated the brief and brilliant campaign to overthrow the tyranny of Saddam Hussein petered out in recrimination. Objectively the world was undoubtedly a safer place as the result of his downfall, besides being morally purged of one of the most wicked dictators of modern times. Subjectively it was even more divided than it had been when the 'war on terror' was undertaken after the atrocity of 11 September 2001. The Muslim world in general, the Arab world in particular was confirmed in its grievances, particularly that the West was prepared to use its overwhelming military superiority to keep Muslims subordinate. 'Europe', the Europe of the Franco-German plan to create a federal union strong enough to stand on terms of equality with the United States as a world power, had been humiliated by the failure of its efforts to avert the war. Liberal opinion, dominant throughout the European media and academia, strong also in their American equivalents, was outraged by the spectacle of raw military force supplanting reason and legality as the means by which relations between states are ordered.

Reality is an uncomfortable companion, particularly to people of good will. George H. W. Bush's proclamation of a new world order had persuaded too many in the West that the world's future could be managed within a legal framework, by discussion and conciliation. The warnings uttered by his son that the United States was determined to bring other enemies of nuclear and regional stability to book -- Iran, North Korea -- was found by his political opponents profoundly unsettling. The reality of the Iraq campaign of March-April 2003 is, however, a better guide to what needs to be done to secure the safety of our world than any amount of law-making or treaty-writing can offer.

Alas, a second draft of history may not be indicative of future developments.

ON THE INTERCHANGE TRACK. The summer's purchases of house cars have been weighted and inspected and await switching into service.


The furnace gets turned on every so often, and there's talk of frost. Look for more model reports in the weeks to come.


A pile of index cards with the maintenance records of the new cars, a spare pair of Bettendorf trucks, and the coupler height gauge.

THOSE ACCURS'D POTATO CHIPS. They don't just raise your cholesterol count.

The Dante's Inferno Test has banished you to the Third Level of Hell!
Here is how you matched up against all the levels:

Level	Score
Purgatory (Repenting Believers)	Very Low
Level 1 - Limbo (Virtuous Non-Believers)	Low
Level 2 (Lustful)	High
Level 3 (Gluttonous)	High
Level 4 (Prodigal and Avaricious)	Low
Level 5 (Wrathful and Gloomy)	Moderate
Level 6 - The City of Dis (Heretics)	Moderate
Level 7 (Violent)	Moderate
Level 8- the Malebolge (Fraudulent, Malicious, Panderers)	Moderate
Level 9 - Cocytus (Treacherous)	Moderate

Take the Dante's Inferno Hell Test

(Via Charlie Sykes)

WHY IT MATTERS. Long form: scroll down, or keep reading.

Short form, example 1, on the Sunday morning newsradio: "Northern Illinois and Notre Dame won." Winning streak, losing streak, we're doing our job on the academic side.

Short form, example 2, witnessed on campus. Student with nose in book making way along central mall.

Short form, example 3, theory class. "Can we practice with some Jacobians?" Hal Varian and David Kreps leave the nastier bits out of their texts ...

RETHINKING THE RANKINGS. An organization called Education Sector discloses some of the thinking behind its college ranking system, which the Washington Monthly picked up in August. (Via Joanne Jacobs.)

There's still some tweaking to be done. The report's executive summary notes the following.

College rankings have increasingly defined the terms of the marketplace in higher education and the message from the market is clear: wealth, fame, and exclusivity are what gets colleges and universities ahead today.

Maybe.

The college diplomas of the nation's top executives tell an intriguing story: Getting to the corner office has more to do with leadership talent and a drive for success than it does with having an undergraduate degree from a prestigious university.

(Via University Diaries.)

Professor Mankiw concurs in part and dissents in part.

Interesting spin. You could turn the numbers around and tell a different story. My very rough guess is that about 1 percent of college graduates have degrees from Ivy League schools. So that 10-percent figure means that an Ivy League graduate is about ten times more likely to become a CEO than is an average college graduate.Of course, the better chances for the Ivy League grad are largely a selection effect rather than a treatment effect, as discussed in this old article by Alan Krueger.

(A commenter provides an odd factoid: "It's also still true that there are more University of Wisconsin CEOs than any single Ivy League school CEOs. That's odd even if it's a freak." And the mercantilists in Wisconsin fret about how many graduates leave the state? Somebody has to specialize in the production of future CEOs. Might as well be Wisconsin, now that exporting hockey players to bring down an Evil Empire isn't an option.)

Re-railing the train of thought ...

Gary Randsell, the president of Western Kentucky University (WKU), is well aware of that fact. While the lion's share of public attention to higher education is focused on elite colleges and major research universities, institutions like WKU—public, regional, masters-granting institutions—are actually far more representative of higher education today. Along with community colleges, the WKUs of the world are where most college students actually go to college.

Thus the importance of the mid-majors. Don't we owe our best students the same intellectual challenges the alleged name-brand universities are supposed to present?

To some extent Mr Randsell gets it.

By today's standards, Randsell has been an unusually successful president, rapidly growing WKU's applicant pool, enrollment and endowment, recruiting new faculty and building new university facilities. “I want nationally competitive faculty,” he says. “I want nationally competitive students. I want facilities that are national or world-class in terms of technology. I want a campus that is second-to-none in beautification. You've got to compete, you've got to work hard, you've got to be doing things that continue to improve your quality, or you're going to get passed in a hurry in this business….We're going to compete in that arms race and we're going to win.”

(His appearance on "Declining by Degrees" was less encouraging.)

The interpretation the folks at Education Sector draw is also less encouraging.

President Randsell's comments illustrate just how fiercely successful leaders will compete on whatever terms the marketplace demands—and they suggest how little the terms of today's marketplace have to do with how well students are taught, how much they learn, whether they graduate, and whether they succeed in their future lives.

The higher education premium is a premium to human capital formation, not an incentive to acquire a signal. "Nationally-competitive" is a statement about success in teaching, learning, and graduating. Why apologize for these things, or for paying a premium price for premium professors, or for charging a premium price for the opportunity to study with such professors and sharpen your brains with premium classmates?

Because today's rankings reward institutions for wealth, many college presidents are no longer national intellectual leaders but narrowly focused fundraisers-in-chief. Because rankings reward institutions for their “scholarly” reputations, colleges recruit faculty who are distinguished in research even if their teaching skills are sub-par. Because the current rankings reward colleges for selective admissions and high freshman SAT scores, more scholarships are going to wealthy, high-achieving applicants, instead of the lower-income students who need financial aid the most.

Isn't it possible to address the defects in the U.S. News rankings and provide some content at the same time. Endowment: what's that? Again the canard: excellent researcher, indifferent teacher. Again the gripes about merit scholarships. See here on the real scandal in higher education, here on the excess capacity devoted to remediation and retention, which I'm tempted to refer to as high school with beer bongs, and here on the resulting social waste. One more time: what's wrong with bolstering retention by screening out individuals who are more likely a priori not to make it through? (And don't fob them off on the trade schools!)

The failure of the U.S. News rankings to provide colleges with incentives to improve the quality of their teaching is one reason why studies have found that many American collegians aren't learning what they need to know. In a recent report on college-student literacy, for example, the Washington, D.C.-based American Institutes for Research revealed that only 38 percent of graduating seniors could successfully perform tasks like comparing viewpoints in two newspaper editorials.

It strikes me as exceedingly cumbersome to lay off on a newsmagazine what might more logically be charged to the failure of the common schools to do their work in the first place, or to the failure of the access-assessment-remediation-retention culture in the academy to say Enough to those common schools.

What the U.S. News rankings do, in effect, is confirm the status of colleges and universities that by virtue of their prestige are valuable to students irrespective of the quality of the education they provide. Students could get a rotten education at Harvard and Yale and they would still be ahead of the game because Ivy League degrees have so much cache.[c.q.]

One wishes people who represent themselves as researchers of higher education would be familiar with the Spielberg Effect.

But the vast majority of college students—almost 90 percent—don't attend selective colleges and universities. They attend institutions that don't have the status to open doors for their graduates on the basis of name alone. Instead, what matters to these students is the quality of the education that they receive.

No argument. But rather than grouse about a newsmagazine's ranking system and raise false objections to merit scholarships, why not recognize higher education's real credibility problem, summarized in coreless curricula and inflated grades?

THE METROPOLITAN AND NORTHWESTERN L. The Chicago Transit Authority has released two concepts for the Circle Line. Neither envisions extending the northern end to a connection with the Ravenswood branch or a southern extension that would restore the Stockyards branch.

ANOTHER SUNNY DAY IN PARADISE. The Northern Illinois University Libraries sent a team of photographers out for a DeKalb Sesquicentennial tribute. The full gallery is in the library lobby. Here's a sampler.


Maybe some of my own once the leaves start turning.

RULES WRITTEN IN BLOOD. Consider a test track that is used by only one experimental train. Dispatching and track occupancy rules are irrelevant, right? Wrong.

As many as 23 people may have been killed when the Transrapid magnetically levitated train collided with a maintenance vehicle on a large test track near the town of Lathen in northwest Germany on this Friday morning. The test track is 31.5 km long in total. The collision happened at 9:40 AM local time.

The three-car train was on a demonstration run with 29 passengers, mostly engineers and other technical and management personnel from the German gas and electric utility company RWE as well as employees of the mag-lev test track company IABG..

A rolling scaffold-like structure use for maintenance of the track, all of which is elevated above the ground in a forested area outside of this town near the German border with Holland, was apparently left forgotten on the track when the demonstration run started. The Mag-Lev train collided with the maintenance vehicle at an estimated speed of 200 km/h (124 mph). The train is capable of reaching 400 km/h on this track.

Railroad melodramas of the silent film era would find great comedy in a character animatedly pumping a handcar to stay ahead of an onrushing express. That's art, not life. One does not leave maintenance of way equipment, whether it is a handcar or an inspection truck or the rail grinding train or a maglev truing machine on a live track without protection of a track and time permit ("Track One, MA to CO, 10:30 am to 11:15 am, SHK") or a Form B work order. The railroads figured this out the first time a locomotive ran down a work horse, sometime before the Charles Minot era. The default premise is that if the track is capable of carrying a train, it is a live track. ("Expect movements on any track at any time in either direction.")

Even with modern protections, bad things can happen. I have a commercial videotape of a control-car ride on a Milwaukee North Line scoot in which the engineer describes a novice Union Pacific track inspector who requested track and time on the east track of their Skokie Valley line immediately before taking possession of the east track of the Canadian Pacific, a mile or so west. He bailed out just before a northbound Hiawatha nailed his truck.

One does not leave maintenance equipment "forgotten" on a live track. It is a shame that the boffins at Transrapid conceived of a research laboratory that happened to be a railroad without contemplating the possibility of work equipment occupying the track, or of unscheduled demonstration trains leaving the station without ascertaining that all expired work permits had been properly closed out. That neglect of basic premises of safe operation has ended 23 lives needlessly early. Spare a moment's thought for the families.

SECOND SECTION: The Transportationist.

Taking the long view, it should be remembered that all new transportation technologies have growing pains, some like the first train crash are overcome (the opening ceremonies of George Stepheson's Rocket on the Liverpool and Manchester Railway railway killed MP William Huskisson from Liverpool (September 15, 1830). However, some like the Hindenberg crash on May 6, 1937, doom the technology.

The "growing pain" in question is one that could have been anticipated, and that it occurred suggests a lack of experienced railroaders on the laboratory's safety team.

MOZART LIKED BIRDS. So quipped Maestro Brett Mitchell between the first and second movements of Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 23 in A when some twit was a bit slow to turn off a mobile phone. (A concert is an opportunity to shut the rest of the world off for a while. Leave the shackles at home. Do you think we're really impressed that you're doing business during intermission?)

The concerto was the Philharmonic's 250th birthday offering for Mozart, and it was sandwiched between Shostakovich Centennial items the Festive Overture and the Symphony No. 5 in d. The Philharmonic previously performed the Fifth in 1992. (How many conductors and how many performers have rotated through since then?) The program notes describe the second movement as a "village dance gone wrong" possibly after "one drink too many" which is not bad: I envision a clapped-out boardwalk with a badly out-of-round carroussel. They also confirmed that the impression I have in the third movement of a procession of Orthodox monks at a funeral is accurate. Prior to the performance, Conductor Mitchell announced that the orchestra would use a slow tempo in the symphony's coda (there is some controversy over the metronome marks) because Shostakovich wrote in Testimony that the finale is "as if someone were beating you with a stick and saying, 'Your business is rejoicing, your business is rejoicing.'"

It is worth remembering exactly what genuine tyranny is.

LOOKING FOR THE SIMPLEST EXPLANATION. Marquette Warrior located a macroeconomic outlook composed by Wisconsin's Donald Nichols, a James Tobin student who was a bit perplexed by some movements in gasoline prices.

Yet, recently we have seen $3.00 gasoline. This is way above what one would expect to find if crude oil costs $65 per barrel. Historically, $3.00 gasoline would be expected if crudewere to cost $2.15 per gallon. But $2.15 per gallon of crude x 44 gallons to the barrel means that crude would then cost about $95 per barrel!

The joys of putting together a macroeconomic forecast on short notice! "Historically" refers to a price path along which shocks are discounted accurately and expected gains from trade are identified and acted upon. As Professor Nichols noted elsewhere in his paper, Hurricane Katrina affected the supply in the short run, and in the presence of inelastic demands and supplies in the short run, large price movements in response to small supply shocks are no surprise. But the Nichols Outlook anticipates a return of gasoline prices to the low $2 per gallon range.

For the future, if crude prices remain near $65 per barrel and taxes remain near 50 cents on the gallon, I would expect gasoline prices to be about $2.35 nationally, and $2.43 in Wisconsin. Gasoline prices of $2.35 per gallon will not disturb the ongoing economic recovery.

Econobrowser (via Knowledge Problem) is thinking along similar lines.

Using that 60 cents benchmark, a retail gasoline price below $2.20 a gallon appears to be quite reasonable to anticipate.

So why are gasoline prices coming down so dramatically? There are important seasonal factors in U.S. gasoline prices, which are higher in the summer due to summer fuel requirements and greater gasoline demand. Everyone always seems as shocked when prices go up in the spring as when they come down in the fall, even though to some extent that same pattern is repeated every year.

But the simplest explanation for the price fluctuations appears to be equilibrating properties of competitive markets, not some kind of political business cycle at work. And in the Marquette Warrior post, a testable hypothesis.

[Conspiracy buffs] claim it’s just the fact that an election is coming up. Supposedly, the oil companies want the Republicans to win, and are holding down the price to help them.

Of course, since prices are low right now, we would not be surprised to see them go up after the election. But then, likely, they will go down again.

That's if the oil companies are part of a vast right wing conspiracy to tweak a political business cycle. But if Professor Nichols and the energy economists are correct, absent any undiscounted supply or demand shocks, there will be no noticeable movements in crude oil or gas prices immediately before or immediately after the election, although there will be a noticeable movement up as refiners adjust production to the summer gasoline blends and attempt to anticipate the travel season equilibrium price.

FRITZ THE PLUMBER WAS A PROFESSIONAL. Joanne Jacobs notes middle-class jobs going begging in Scotland.

Scotland has high rates of youths "not in education or employment" and a shortage of plumbers. Britain is importing skilled blue-collar workers from Eastern Europe. "The Polish plumber" is in high demand.

The Scots are rethinking elementary education, in a way that raises the spectre of tracking.

The move is a radical attempt to deal with the thousands of demotivated school-leavers who head into the workplace without either qualifications or job skills.

It smacks, however, of the traditional academician's attitude, usually expressed by someone who couldn't carry water for a patternmaker, that those who dislike or aren't up to algebra or close reading are somehow cut out to wire your house and weld your car.

David Lonsdale, spokesman for the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) in Scotland welcomed the proposal.

"Employers tell us that too many school-leavers lack the basic skills required to be productive in the workplace, so the First Minister's plan to improve standards in basic literacy and numeracy and give youngsters the chance to learn a trade, sounds spot on," he said.

But unions were scathing. David Eaglesham, general secretary of the Scottish Secondary Teachers' Association, said: "This is all about election posturing and not about education. It is the worst form of selection."

He added: "It is an arbitrary process. You are doing these kids down in a big sense. There is no reason why plumbers shouldn't do poetry.

"They have their whole life to learn a trade and there is no reason why the whole breadth of the curriculum is shut off just because they are going to go for a trade. It is going back to the bad old days."

I repeat: the more serious problem is in thinking that people who can't do poetry are somehow suited to be plumbers. Fritz the Plumber managed both.

LOCAL KNOWLEDGE. The winds came up Sunday for the Melges 17 championship.

Day 2 had the forecast of big wind and that was getting the racers excited. It doesn’t take much breeze for these boats to plane, so the fleet was excited. There were many wipeouts in the days racing, but the boat is easily righted and sailed dry, which lets you get back racing fairly quickly after any capsizes. The regatta championship was coming down to a race between two boats. With four races on the last day, well run by PRO Mike Sherin, the fleet was tired, but each and every sailor whether it went well or poorly had a big smile on their face after ripping around in these fun boats. Overall champions for the second year in a row were Art Brereton and Harry Melges, closely followed by Andy and Iggy Labanauskas.

I have enough toys, right?

This event had teams coming from just about everywhere. The teams ranged in ages from young to old and you had both women and men skipper and crew combinations. Young guys sailing light and some heavier teams out racing as well. The boat is light, only 300lbs all rigged and ready. The 17's have a roller furling jib, large roached mainsail and an asymmetrical spinnaker with a dousing tube. These boats are certainly fast. They are sailed like a scow, but have the feel of a very fast skiff. Practice and organization is the key to this boat and it was evident that the teams that have been racing these boats from the beginning were the teams to beat.

Hmmm ...

READY TO DO GENERAL EQUILIBRIUM.

Edgeworth Box, core.

Five faces are solved. What must be true of the sixth face?

NOT SEEKING ALIENATED POETS. The editorial board at the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel notes that middle class jobs are going begging.

Bucyrus International, for example, the South Milwaukee maker of heavy equipment for the surface mining industry, has 300 openings for welders and machinists - a result of its healthy business with China and India. But the company is having a hard time finding enough people willing to do jobs that pay on average $22 an hour.

But it's not just Bucyrus. A study released last month by the Center for Workforce Development at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, found that work force quality was the top concern of area manufacturers. An annual survey of business executives by the lobbying group Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce found similar results.

If the current wave of shortages is a concern, it's likely that an even larger one is about to crash ashore. Baby boomers are beginning to retire, which will hit manufacturers particularly hard. As an example, most skilled workers at Bucyrus are in their 50s, says the company's top executive, Timothy Sullivan. The region may be short thousands of workers in the coming years.

Memo to academic advisors: Befuddled area studies and general education majors can't carry water for a patternmaker. Heck, a lot of tenured professors couldn't carry water for a patternmaker.

A CENTENARY. Composer Dmitri Shostakovich, born September 25, 1906. The University Philharmonic has a suitable tribute prepared for Monday evening.

SWEEP AT HOME, FLOP ON THE ROAD. Between the five game home winning streak at the beginning of the Brewers' season and the five game home winning streak at the end, the baseball gods have placed the road trip.

THE PRINCIPLE OF SUBSTITUTES AT WORK. What sleet or snow or gloom of night could not do, electronic mail and electronic funds transfer can do. There are fewer blue letter boxes for the couriers to call at on their appointed rounds.

If a box is earmarked for removal or relocation, a 30-day notice is posted on the box that informs users how to argue against the planned removal.

"For the vast majority of the 300 boxes that we've removed, we have had little or no response," [Milwaukee postal district manager David Martin] said.

You mean revealed preference works too?

THE GREEN BAY 400. Better news from Michigan. The Detroit Lions always tormented Vince Lombardi and Mike Holmgren. New Packer coach Mike McCarthy celebrated his first win in Detroit, where Brett Favre passed for career touchdowns 400, 401, and 402, and the defense managed to hang on.

A DIFFERENT KIND OF FAST BOAT. Residents of Marinette, Wisconsin and Menominee, Michigan put aside whatever differences they might have had over college football (although the Central Time Zone part of Michigan is in many ways an extension of Wisconsin, there are a few loyal to that unimaginative band with a good football team attached) to christen USS Freedom, the first of a new generation of littoral combat ships, which in best military form will be referred to hereafter as LCS.

A fast, agile, and high-technology surface combatant, Freedom will act as a platform for launch and recovery of manned and unmanned vehicles. Its modular design will support interchangeable mission packages, allowing the ship to be reconfigured for antisubmarine warfare, mine warfare, or surface warfare missions on an as-needed basis. The LCS will be able to swap out mission packages pierside in a matter of hours, adapting as the tactical situation demands. These ships will also feature advanced networking capability to share tactical information with other Navy aircraft, ships, submarines and joint units.

Freedom is the first of two LCS seaframes being produced. Freedom is an innovative combatant designed to operate quickly in shallow water environments to counter challenging threats in coastal regions, specifically mines, submarines and fast surface craft. The LCS is capable of speeds in excess of 40 knots and can operate in water less than 20 feet deep.

"Recovery of manned and unmanned vehicles." I suspect that refers to helicopters and variations on Predator.

THE RACING SCOW EVOLVES. For years, the Inland Lake Yachting Association sanctioned competition in a variety of racing scows, ranging from the 40 foot Class A sloop and the 28 foot Class E, both of which are capable of pulling waterskiers, through the 20 foot Class C catboat and Class M-20 sloop, to the 16 foot singlehanded (except in heavy air) Class MC catboat and doublehanded Class M sloop. In recent years, the A and E fleets have enjoyed greater popularity, the M-20 has morphed into the I-20, and the builders have ceased production of the Class M. A few true believers continue to participate in the Class M invitational and championship regattas.

There appears to be a worthy successor to the Class M in the form of the Melges 17, a 17-foot (d'oh!) doublehanded sloop that incorporates a number of America's Cup inventions including extensive use of carbon fiber, the curved roach high-aspect mainsail, and asymmetrical spinnakers. (Blogger now lets readers click on these pictures to see bigger pictures.)


The Melges 17 Championship visited the Lake Geneva Yacht Club. Despite the weather mayhem all around us, there was no wind Saturday afternoon and ample opportunity to look at the boats and catch up on sailing news. Alas, no action shots, although I had an invitation to help out on observe from the race committee boat if they did race.

Class C and M champion Jane Pegel is impressed with the Melges 17's responsiveness to wind conditions. (She is quite formidable at adjusting the M Scow to any change in conditions, and many is the Lake Geneva, nay Inland, sailor she's blown past by adjusting more accurately to a wind shift.) To her eyes, the Seventeen reacts more quickly to wind changes, both accelerating and decelerating. That might keep the less-adaptive skippers closer, but the more alert and more adaptive skipper should still win.

The Seventeen is a bilgeboard scow, but the when-all-else-fails-pull these handles are not part of the boat's rig. No doubt legions of M and MC crews who have had to sit on those handles will appreciate the less-cluttered crew positions. But I'm going to have to look at this boat more closely with a view toward possible sources of complexity. (On a Laser, everything is in plain sight, and the new rules that allow pulleys instead of a cats-cradle of loops and knots on the boom vang and outhaul make adjustments somewhat easier to execute, although one must still remember to release all those settings for downwind before bearing off!)


A roller-furler jib, and a retractable spinnaker pole.


Intriguing boat ... I have enough toys, right?

FOUR BITS LESS TUPPENCE BUYS A MEDIUM POP. The student center food service at Northern Illinois has a fall promotion in which the price of a medium cup of pop is based on the Huskies' scoring in the previous game. I asked a cashier, "If the Huskies win a game 3-0, will we see 3 cent pop?" Yes, but as the Talk Like a Pirate inspired title notes, today's results were a 48-14 drubbing of Indiana State, whose losing streak continues. (I can sympathize with Indiana State fans. There was a long losing streak here in the late 1990s, and the California Bowl team of 1983 was not able to end Northwestern's losing streak.)

A local sportswriter offered some keys to victory.

1 - Establish dominance early. Division I-AA teams have meant trouble to the Huskies in the Joe Novak era. The Sycamore can put points on the board. Letting ISU get confidence with an early score or strong defensive effort must be avoided.

Is a fumble return for a touchdown on Indiana State's first series sufficient?

2 - Force turnovers. It will be hard for Indiana State to mount a challenge if they commit costly turnovers.

3 - Be aggressive. The Huskies need to show some bark on defense and attack the Sycamores.

See above.

4 - Spread the wealth. This should be the ideal game to let some of the inexperienced players on the offense get some confidence, which will help the Huskies down the road.

I was on travel and listening on the radio, but it appears as if the starters were resting most of the second half.

Now comes a three-game road trip including the premiere of ESPN's Sunday Night [College Style] Football, which has nothing to do with money. Amateur sport and all that.

Wisconsin did not fare as well in Ann Arbor, despite a good start. Elsewhere, Nevada (current athletic director Cary Groth held that job at Northern Illinois for years) better than Northwestern, and, in a game that would have more import in basketball, Connecticut defeats Indiana, who will be Wisconsin's next opponent.

SUPPLY CURVES SLOPE UPWARDS. At Rip Track, evidence that for railroad contractors and suppliers, these might be the Good Old Days.

-Class One Railroads are buying things like never before! Everybody that I talk with is crazy busy! I know I am, which is one reason my posts are more infrequent. So, if you were making widgets as fast as you can, and one customer is buying almost everything you can make, but here comes another customer who requires this-that-and-the-other to be happy, you will ask yourself, why put up with the hassle here? Case in point: For some time, railroad material suppliers have filled their production schedules with work obtained by winning bids from Agencies. Suppliers put up with the associated aggrevation in order to cut overhead with full production. Now, Class One Railroads are claiming all of that once-excess production. And, I don't know any supplier who would rather deal with an Agency than a Railroad.

-Not only that, but US Suppliers are being courted by foreign concerns! And these people are more than willing to purchase a quality US-made product without anywhere near the problems that must be dealt with when working with a domestic concern. That means nothing but more pressure on production.

Here's what it boils down to: Production capacity is not increasing; production demands are increasing. The result will be, believe it or not, that suppliers can begin to select their customers!

Put another way, those customers who are prepared to fork over more of their expected consumer surplus to the vendors will be the ones who walk home with the bread, or the trackage. (Traders are price takers in equilibrium, but out of equilibrium all manner of strange things happen.) Whether the increase in demand will be of sufficient magnitude and duration to call forth additional capacity (yes, those short-run and long-run supply curves and the LeChatelier-Samuelson effects are for real) remains to be seen.

AND AGAIN FOR FUN. Brewers 13, Giants 12 on Fan Appreciation Night.

They appreciated the Brewers going through their entire batting order in the first inning to turn a 4-0 deficit into a 5-4 lead, and another nine-batter inning in the eighth to turn a looming 12-10 loss into victory.

They appreciated Hall hitting a two-out single to drive in the tying run. They especially appreciated Jeff Cirillo, who turns 37 today, hustling to second to beat a force-play throw with two out in the eighth, enabling the deciding run to score.

Perhaps best of all, the outcome relieved them of the question of whether they appreciated Barry Bonds' performance: two doubles, home run No. 733 and six RBI that seemingly put the Giants in command.

"Wow!" Brewers manager Ned Yost said when it was all over.

Indeed.

NOTHING LIKE A HOPELESSLY MOOT POINT.

The debate over the true world's fastest steam locomotive continues.

I put my money alongside that of [a different] Steve, with the A class Atlantics, (when on a lightweight train). Second comes 05 002, probably equal with the F7s, only the F7s did it more often! And then dear old Mallard. She strugggled down Stoke Bank at 125 mph, and no more than that according to her designer, Sir Nigel Gresley. And then collapsed in a heap at Peterborough and was towed into Kings Cross by...what else...an Atlantic!!!! Sadly not one of the Milwaukee A class, that may have done some damage on the way!

That post continues,

But who gets the last laugh? Why Mallard of course. All the others have long since gone to the cutters torch!

As if that's not enough, search the state of Wisconsin from Peshtigo to Potosi and from Trego to Pleasant Prairie and the only streamlined steamer you'll find is a Gresley Streak!

The Cold Spring Shops champion, based on this evidence, is illustrated. The discussion lays out the case.

The first run very briefly mentions an A class on test with a 6 car, 310 ton train that, "on practically level track......(reached) a maximum speed of 125 mph"

The second run, which for the present I have taken to be another test run, this time with an F7 Hudson, saw 550 tons taken over 4.5 miles at an average of 120 mph, with a maximum of 125 mph. This again is reported as being on "practically level track" This may well be the same run that is briefly mentioned by Brian Reed in his Locomotive Profiles that covers these locos.

The third run has more detail. The Baron states that in June 1942 engine 101 took 14 cars at 680 tons over the 85.6 miles from Chicago to Milwaukee in 65 minutes start to stop. The most relevant part of this run were the 48 miles, (pass to pass), reported to have been covered in 27 mins 20 seconds at an average speed of 105.4 mph. Discounting the impact of a 90mph restriction the net average was 107 mph!

Baron Gerard Vuillet also refers to the fact that the same distance 85.6 mile distance from Chicago to the Milwaukee stop was covered in 1943 with a 780 ton train in 63 minutes, with an apparent maximum of just 102.5 mph! He also states that the fastest A class Atlantic run over that route was in 59 minutes, but presumably with a much lighter train than hauled by the F7s.

I note again: moot. By 1943 the diesels were beginning to take charge of the Hiawathas, and although those topped out at 117 mph, on occasion they'd do the Milwaukee-Chicago leg in just under an hour.

3 HOURS 55 MINUTES. Virgin smashes Glasgow-London speed record.

Today’s record was set by the 12:37 special Pendolino from Glasgow Central to London, with over 400 passengers on board, which arrived at Euston station at 16:32. It was the first non-stop run between Glasgow and London since 1949, and the first ever sub-four hour southbound Glasgow to London journey.

The paragraph about the train's environmental impact is instructive.

The nine-car 439-seat electric Pendolino emits a carbon footprint of only 28 grammes per kilometre compared to the 215 grammes per kilometre of a BMW Three Series five-seat car. Its regenerative braking system returns up to 1,500 kWh of electricity to the power lines through reverse thrust traction motors. This means that Virgin Trains' 53-strong train fleet returns some 17 percent of the power used back to the network.

The grammes per kilometre of that Stanier Pacific in full cry in 1949 is left to the reader as an exercise. The reference to electricity keeping its own books, forsooth! is also instructive. The Milwaukee's Rocky Mountain Division boxcabs returned about 12 percent of the power to the grid.

Virgin Trains’ Chairman Sir Richard Branson said: “This record run has demonstrated the real potential of the upgrading of the West Coast Main Line and the state-of-the-art Virgin Pendolino trains. It has also raised over £30,000 for Heaven’s Angels and I would like to thank everyone who has supported the Heaven’s Angels campaign - Virgin Trains’ staff, the staff and readers of The Railway Magazine who promoted the train and our partners at Network Rail and ALSTOM for all helping us to achieve a new Glasgow to London speed record”.

Well done!

COMPARE AND CONTRAST. Michael Novak, via Instapundit:

What the Pope was lecturing on, in his modest, quiet, careful way was the crucial role of reason. His triple play consisted in using reason to get three different runners out at three different bases.

He told Christians and other religious people that reason is indispensable for disciplining religious faith. As he put it in an earlier lecture, it is important for reason to take the toxicity out of religion.

He told secularists, who define reason solely as science and limit it to empirical knowledge, that their grasp of reason does them an injustice by its narrowness. This tunnel vision cuts them off from many forms of human understanding and insight. It also prevents them from having reasoned conversation with that vast majority of the world’s people who are religious.

Finally, practically as an aside — as if he had intended to make a double play, then saw an opportunity to make a third out — he also tried to save the honor of Islam as a religion that once had a high and civilizing tradition of reason (and in many quarters still does). He tried to do this by pointing out that those in Islam’s midst who are seen daily preaching and practicing violence are injuring the faith’s good name.

Rob Kall, via Charlie Sykes.

Ratzinger is not stupid. Including the reference to the passage that has incited Muslim anger was no accident. It was a calculated, intentional strategy designed to help George Bush and the Republicans in the 2006 elections, just like the Catholic church systematically helped Bush and the Republicans in the 2004 elections, through Cardinals and Bishops who attacked Kerry.

The Vatican has become a partner with the republicans, so they coordinate, come the final stretch of election time, to make things happen, make statements, take positions that help the Republicans.

They help the republicans because the Republican positions on birth control, abortion, stem cells, gay marriage, pre-marital sex are closest to the Roman Catholic Church's positions.

By firing up an angry Muslim response, a predictable response after the cartoon episode earlier in the year, the Pontiff in red has created a media situation that makes nervous soccer Moms and quick to ignite Christian nationalists rev up their fear, their xenophobia and... their loyalty to the Republicans-- who not too deeply beneath the surface-- are racist, anti-Muslim, anti non-Christian.

To spell it out, it seems that the Pope intentionally drew an angry, violent, anti-Catholic, possibly anti-Christian response from Muslims on the street in the Arab world. This makes great TV-- burning the Pope or Christians in Effigy, threats to terror Bomb the Vatican and Catholic Churches. This is designed to raise the hackles of American Christians, to intensify the fear of Muslim terrorism, to boost the belief that there are 1.1 billion Muslims plotting against Americans.

Good night.

ON THIS WE AGREE. The dean at Anonymous Community characterizes the academic nonaggresion pact as the "real scandal of higher education."

A small but non-zero number of faculty have decided to exploit this quirk of our industry, and establish a sort of arms-control agreement with students. I won't ask much of you, and you won't bad-mouth me. In certain programs, people can make careers doing this.

We may be at different parts of the food chain, and the experience of an economist dealing with aspiring accountants, engineers, and the occasional pre-med or pre-law (read the full text of the Standard Oil case, 221 U.S. 1 (1911) and then ask me for a reference letter!) is different from that of an administrator at a two-year college, but on this, no disagreement.

The non-aggression pact has been present for a long time and as a commenter notes, at a wide variety of colleges and universities. I had some earlier thoughts on the phenomenon here, with links to a number of related posts elsewhere, and here, with the suggestion that at research universities the nonaggression pact might be a Nash equilibrium.

The payoff to a student who would like to ski rather than attend class or study is larger given that the professors are dealing in inflated grades anyway. Thus if the reward to a professor is r and the reward to a student is s, both r(research,ski) > r(advise,ski) and s(ski,research) > s(inquisitive,research) . Neither the students nor the professors have cause to regret their actions, given the actions of the professors and the students, which means the students and the professors are using their Nash equilibrium strategies.

In Profscam, Charlie Sykes suggests multiple causes. First, at p. 84:

But the gut (easy course) is not an aberration in the modern university: It is the inevitable byproduct of the professoriate's desire to expend as little time and energy on teaching combined with the imperative of keeping classrooms stocked with warm tuition-paying bodies. Nor is this limited merely to the lower end of the academic spectrum.

On the other hand, p. 85 suggests other forces are at work.

The pressure to open admissions, argue Professors [William] Rau and [Paul] Baker, is academe's "original sin."

"Perhaps Socrates or Jesus Christ could educate this range of students, but most faculty cannot walk on water, nor do they care for the taste of hemlock," they wrote. But given the "grinding, impervious logic" of the numbers game, academia must make compromises. Among the first things to go, the authors argue, are any introductory textbooks "written at a 12th-grade reading level or above. ... Since students can vote with their feet, introductory courses are typically geared to keep the bottom quarter of the skill range from fleeing in panic."

The numbers game also virtually dictated the collapse of standards within the classroom itself. "If two-thirds of the students do not possess the skills necessary for professional success," wrote Professor David Berkman, a former chairman of a journalism department at an urban university, "there is no way you can flunk out a number anywhere near that percentage. There is simply too much intimidation in the academic environment. This is especially true for junior -- meaning untenured -- faculty members who teach many of the lower division courses where the bulk of the weeding out should take place. ... No junior instructor [c.q.] who wishes to gain tenure will flunk out 67 percent of an introductory course." The result, charges Berkman, is rampant pandering.

And yet truth will out, if higher education's defect rate has any information content. But isn't there an enormous waste of resources in letting people decide over five or six or seven years that higher education really isn't for them, particularly in an environment where there is excess demand for the fifty or so institutions claiming to be in the U.S. News Top Twenty?

IMPOSSIBLE TO BE EVERYWHERE. The Iowa Interstate Railroad recently took delivery of two Chinese-built QJ mudsuckers, one each built in 1985 and in 1986.

Image courtesy Steam Train Diaries.

As part of the sesquicentennial of the bridging of the Mississippi River, the locomotives were in steam to the great delight of Quad Cities boosters. Over the weekend, some excursions ran east along the Hennepin Canal to Bureau, where the trains could be wyed. Adding to the excitement, North Star Rail's super 4-8-4, Milwaukee 261, participated.

Tom Lampman photograph from a public Flickr archive.

Look how quickly Wikipedia picks up such things.


Tripleheaded SD90MACs or whatever variant on C60AC-9 GE calls its top-of-the-line diesel these days can walk off more expeditiously with whatever the yardmaster can cobble together. But tripleheaded steam really brings the public to trackside. (I'm not smart enough to figure out how to tap that enthusiasm for the Steam Age to develop awareness that in many ways, THESE are the Good Old Days of railroading. Is anybody at Union Pacific or BNSF or Iowa Interstate making that effort?)

YOU SHOVEL 15,000 TONS AND WHAT DO YOU GET? If you're the last operating giant stripping shovel, honorable retirement in a mining museum to be established right where you broke down.

The last of its breed, Silver Spade carried on alone until April 19 when it suffered a serious breakdown. Nineteen of 100 rollers fell out of place between the shovel's stationary bottom and its revolving top, resulting in the shovel's demise.

The rollers weigh about 800 pounds each and are the size of a quarter keg of beer. Replacing them would be a big, expensive job, said Kent Henschen, Bucyrus marketing manager.

At some point, it's not worth the money to rebuild old machines when the new technology is better, he said.

Marginal analysis, forsooth!

NOW IT'S JUST FOR FUN. Brewers 1, Cardinals none. There's Sprecher in the 'fridge for the weekend.

DRAW YOUR OWN CONCLUSIONS.

Spiegel image via Google Images.

If it rants like an Aryan, and it gooses like an Aryan ...

Is there a Farsi version of Gott erhalte Franz der Kaiser?

GOING FOR A SPEED RUN. The October issue of Railway hit my mailbox this afternoon with news that a Virgin Trains fundraiser using a Pendolino to attempt to run Glasgow - London Euston (401 miles) in less than four hours has sold out. (Railway has even less online content than Trains but the Cold Spring Shops research department was able to ferret out some online discussion of the project.)

The train will run this Friday 22 September and a progress report will be available this weekend.

That brings up a question: has there ever been a longer nonstop run than the Burlington's 1015 mile Chicago-Denver Zephyr test runs eastbound in 1934 and westbound in 1936? (Average speeds were around 77 mph for both runs if memory serves, with the westbound, using one of the Denver Zephyr sets actually a bit faster than the eastbound.)

BADGER FANS ARE GETTING FIRED UP, as this search string indicates. The first verse you seek is here.

TWO-FOUR-SIX-EIGHT! ORGANIZE AND SMASH THE STATE! Kathleen Parker attempts to make sense out of the senseless.

Contrary to what fanatics have insisted, the pope was as critical of the West as of Islam, if not more so. While Islam suffers from faith without reason, he said that Western culture suffers from reason without faith.

His point was that the two cultures cannot enter into a productive dialogue unless they both recognize that faith and reason are inextricably bound. Islam has to drop its sword and the West has to make room for the divine.

Pope Benedict's view is that by ignoring faith, the West--but especially Europe--is ill-equipped to engage a culture that is so firmly entrenched in faith.

"A reason which is deaf to the divine and which relegates religion into the realm of subcultures is incapable of entering into the dialogue of cultures," he said. Likewise, a faith-based culture that abhors reason cannot engage in civilized discourse or advance the goal of harmony.

Harmony, however, is not what the Islamofascists or their willing accomplices among the boutique multiculturalists seek. And it's not clear that the "West" is as attuned to reason as Ms Parker suggests. Consider Betsy's Page, where a recommendation of an Anchoress post suggests that the heirs to the Weather Underground have a blind spot when it comes to Islamofascist rage.

Why should they be interested in dialogue when they can be successful rioting?

Remember all those university administrators of the 1960s who praised the crazies among their charges for their "idealism?" By their fruits shall ye know them.

SO MUCH FOR THE "A" TRAIN. The powers that be at the Chicago Transit Authority found a novel way to make talk of skip-stop expresses on the L go away.

So call it a huge coincidence, or call it what it is. Either way, Getting Around called on the CTA in last Monday's column to bring back skip-stop semi-express train runs to help restore some semblance of on-time service. All trains did not make stops at all stations under the skip-stop system that the CTA used successfully until it was phased out in 1995 on the Red Line, the Blue Line and the Brown Line.

CTA officials responded that such a low-cost quick-fix was not practical--not even temporarily--on any of the CTA's rail lines. The CTA eliminated skip stops, at zero cost, due to declining ridership. Today, ridership has rebounded while service has plummeted to record lows.

Although the popular skip-stop service has been gone for more than a decade, many of the old skip-stop signs, designating stations as stops for "A" trains, "B" trains or both, were left untouched.Immediately after last Monday's column appeared, however, the signs got a touch-up. Actually, it was more like a whitewash.The CTA sent crews to rail platforms across the city to paint over the skip-stop designations, first with a white primer, then with bright red paint.

Embarrassment eradicated, right? Maybe, except for the lethargic train service still encountered by 500,000 CTA train riders each day.

Spin, spin, spin.

Stations along the O'Hare and Forest Park branches of the Blue Line, the Loop elevated system and the Red and Blue Line subways had their outdated skip-stop signs "retouched" last week, CTA spokeswoman Sheila Gregory said Friday.

Gregory insisted it was part of routine maintenance, coming 11 years after the end of skip-stop service."While crews were out on the system cleaning graffiti earlier this week, they touched up the paint on all of the signs in need, including the A/B signs," Gregory said, adding that the cost of the paint job is "difficult to quantify."

CTA officials apparently see no rush to go after the low-hanging fruit--such as introducing economical operational solutions--while modernization of the system creeps ahead for many years.

To the chagrin of anybody who will be commuting on the CTA today, next week or several years from now, Gregory said:

"There is no quick fix to increased travel times. ... Even as the existing slow zones are addressed, new ones will continue to appear."

I'm tempted to go looking for relics of the North Shore Line along the L, and will advise if any of those were missed by the cleanup.

OUR NEIGHBORS AT WAR. Kosovo, DeKalb, Baghdad and return.

Donald Grady, the chief of the NIU Police Department, will depart for Washington, D.C. this weekend to be briefed before he is deployed to Baghdad in early October, where he will remain for the next year.

Best wishes, Chief, on your sabbatical."

I will still be intimately involved with everything that happens here at the department and at the university," Grady said. "I will continue to have daily interaction with the police department. We will hold daily conference calls, and I'll be checking and responding to e-mails."

And to a safe return.

"I'm concerned for him, because I don't want to see him go to one of the hottest areas of the planet," [Lieutenant Darrell] Mitchell said. "However, I'm also very proud."

GODSPEED ATLANTIS. Atlantis OK'd for Landing Despite Debris.

NASA officials said their best guess was that the object was a plastic filler placed in between thermal tiles which protect the shuttle from blasting heat. A second mystery object was spotted several hours later, midday Tuesday, by Burbank. But NASA said it appeared to be a garbage bag, which would unlikely be a damage risk.

During Wednesday's inspections, the astronauts spotted three more pieces of floating debris. Jett described the objects as two rings and a piece of foil. He told Mission Control the first object, about 100 feet from the shuttle, was "a reflective cloth. ... It's not a solid metal structure."

NASA downplayed the discovery of Wednesday's objects, saying the fact that no problems were found with the shuttle was more important.

All the same, the absence of a contingency plan is troubling.

NASA's main concern was the status of the all-important heat shield, because a damaged shuttle skin led to the 2003 demise of the shuttle Columbia. NASA had not worked on a contingency plan of parking the shuttle at the international space station for astronauts' safe haven, but would not have ruled that out if serious damage had been found.

"Houston, we have a problem."

"Roger, Atlantis. Park at the Space Station."

"Err... there's a Soyuz in the loading zone."

"Atlantis, copy. Stand by."

RUNNING EXTRA: Atlantis made a nominal landing around sunrise. The current space program conjures up memories of the early days when everything was sequenced to establish first an orbital capability, then rendezvous and docking, then a Moon mission. Mercury launches tended to feature lengthy holds, and re-entry nervousness accompanied John Glenn's mission, as well as Apollo XI (first time jitters) and Apollo XIII.

BUCCANEERS ON THE KISH. Yar, and supersize me Fish'n-More!

THE CESSPOOL OF THE WEST. Yes, Michigan has a Lake Erie coastline, but this Rich Lowry column in National Review suggests that "perfect petri dish of failed policies" (an Ann Coulter line) might best describe Michigan.

Liberals dissatisfied with the Bush economy have, through the wonders of federalism, an alternative. They can move to Michigan. The state represents a rough approximation of ideal liberal economic policy. It is heavily unionized, taxed, and regulated in a failed attempt to close its eyes to the dynamic forces of the market and globalization all around it.

Pile on:

Michael LaFaive of the Mackinac Center calls Michigan “the France of North America.” Economically competitive states might have a personal income tax, or corporate income tax, or sales tax — Michigan has all three. It has long been the only state with a European-style, value-added tax — the Single Business Tax. A company can be in bankruptcy and still have a tax liability, making Michigan a bad state even to lose money in. In a 2002 filing for relief from the tax, General Motors explained that it would operate at a loss, but one of its projects would still create a $7 million-a-year tax liability.

Michigan recently repealed the Single Business Tax effective at the end of 2007, but has punted the decision about how to replace it. A relative moderate, Gov. Granholm has resisted general tax increases, but levied new fees, sin taxes and other “revenue enhancers.” The state still insists on trying to target tax incentives and other special breaks to favored businesses, in a doomed replay of 1970s-era industrial policy.

Ouch. But again, Michigan's problems are a legacy of the Old Industrial State.

It used to be that unions could force unnaturally high wages and benefits on U.S. manufacturers, and the costs would be passed along to consumers. Those were the days prior to globalization when the U.S. auto industry had a lock on the domestic market and experienced little international competition. It was inevitable that Michigan would find the new competition disruptive, but not that it would react to it so poorly.

Consider an economy with a monopoly productive sector and a competitive productive sector, and one input supplied by a monopoly and another supplied competitively. Identify the allocative inefficiencies. Now turn the monopolies competitive. Evaluate. (This question is probably a bit much even for the advanced theory class, but stay tuned.)

Jay Reding (flag hoist: Sean Hackbarth) draws some policy implications.

Michigan is one of the states that has no one to blame but itself for its incredible economic failure. Michigan assumed that a single industry would be enough to support its entire economic base — and that’s never true. The combination of technological change and foreign competition has altered the economics of the auto manufacturing industry in fundamental ways. The economic and political control exercised by the unions ensured that Michigan’s government remained largely wedded to that one industry.

Just as only a fool would invest their entire savings into one thing, an economy based on one single industry is constantly under threat. As Lowry points out, Michigan’s high-tax, low-growth policies are now coming home to roost in a state that’s seen massive job losses due to poor public policy. He’s also right in pointing out that Michigan is a state that has done nearly everything that liberals think would make the US economy stronger — and it simply hasn’t worked.

Michigan’s lack of economic diversity, punitive levels of taxation, and incredible inflexibility have caused innumerable suffering as workers lose their jobs and are forced to move to states with more opportunities who don’t embrace the same set of failed policies. The lesson here is obvious: those states that attempt to enact the same set of principles risk coming to the same negative outcomes.

Michigan continues to lead the U.S. in outmigration. That's been going on since the late 1970s. (I count as a wash: Madison to Wayne State in 1979, Wayne to Northern Illinois in 1986.) The Mackinac Center, however, is pinning its policy prescriptions on weak analysis.

There are many reasons people move, but it is probably easiest to sum all of them up with one word: opportunity.

Unfortunately, the official response to the Michigan Malaise is more government interference in the private economy and increased spending in areas like higher education. This spending, we are told, will create more knowledgeable workers who will stay in Michigan and solve our problems.

But proponents offer very little in the way of hard evidence to substantiate this claim. Research by economist Richard K. Vedder, on the other hand, shows that even when a state "invests" more in post-secondary education, the result is the same — a relative decline in economic opportunity.

In his book "Going Broke by Degree: Why College Costs Too Much," Vedder details his research findings on higher education spending. Vedder employed statistical modeling techniques to look for a relationship between spending on higher education and the economic growth of a state. He found such a relationship, and it was negative — that is, the more a state spent on universities, the lower the state’s rate of economic growth.

Vedder backed his empirical findings with case studies specific to Michigan. Writing for the Mackinac Center in late 2004, he said: "The statistical results are confirmed by case studies. For example, compare Michigan with the two other largest Midwestern industrial states, Illinois and Ohio. Of the three states in fiscal 1980, Michigan spent the largest proportion of its personal income on state universities (one-third more than Illinois, for example). Over the next two decades, Michigan dramatically increased its already above-average commitment to universities, so that it had the sixth-highest proportion in the nation by 2000."

Of these states, Illinois had the smallest subsidies and the highest growth in per-capita income from the late 1970s until 2002. Michigan was the exact opposite, with high spending and lower growth. Moreover, low subsidies did not deter Illinois residents from pursuing post-secondary education. In 2000, the ratio of college students was higher in the Land of Lincoln than in either Ohio or Michigan, according to Vedder.

Shiver me timbers, there are drawbacks in attempting to capture 25 years of creative destruction in two data-points. One state has a manufacturing economy dominated by motor vehicle assembly. The other has a diversified economy including much of the financial and logistical infrastructure for Michigan. Does it surprise that the incentives to finish high school and attend university are different?

The balance of trade in higher education obsesses policymakers in the upper Midwest, as my beggar-thy-neighbor series of posts points out. University administrators throughout Wisconsin fret about graduates accepting jobs out-of-state, particularly in Illinois (but did any of their campuses see fit to offer me a post as space-cadet-theorist-in-residence?) and Amtrak's Michigan corridor service exists to transport flatlanders to Kalamazoo and Ann Arbor.

The comparison of Michigan with Illinois misleads in another way. Consider Michigan, Michigan State, Wayne State, and Michigan Tech. At one time Michigan attempted to maintain four research universities in-state. There are also three Mid-American members and a number of regional state universities and colleges. (It was clear that Wayne was going to lose out to the other three in the retrenchments that were in progress 20 years ago.) Public policy in Illinois has tended to favor Illinois at Urbana as the research university, with perhaps a few specialty programs in Chicago. But there's enough discontent among students good enough for Illinois who don't get in, and their parents, that Northern, Southern, and Illinois State can make the case to be additional research comprehensive universities. But that public policy has not maintained academic departments in Urbana at the same level that Ann Arbor has managed to maintain, let alone competitors that could be viewed in the same way as Michigan and Michigan State. Question: if not for Michigan, State, Tech, and Wayne, would the exodus from Michigan have been worse? Different question: How much Illinois human capital is being developed in Madison and Ann Arbor and East Lansing and Kalamazoo?

RUNNING EXTRA: More context at Voluntary Xchange.

STICK CLOSE TO YOUR DESK AND NEVER GO TO SEA. Some perspectives on success as an academician, from Professor Mankiw.

Real world experiences and outside interests are a distraction. Don't take time off from academic pursuits for a job in public policy. Don't ever work on Wall Street or do any consulting. Don't engage in the broader societal debate by writing op-eds or working on political campaigns. All of that takes time away from getting papers published in academic journals.

But don't stop there. If you have this objective, then it is best not to have hobbies, or read novels, or go to the movies. Don't spend time teaching well or mentoring students, except the very best students who can help you with your research. Don't get married or have friends, unless your spouse and friends are PhD economists and can coauthor papers with you. Whatever you do, don't have children--boy, are they a time sink! And if you make the mistake of having children, make sure you spend as little time with them as you can.

In other words, if you want to be the best academic you can be, get ready to be a miserable human being.

Alternatively, you might decide that, at the end of your life, Saint Peter will not judge you solely by checking the Social Science Citation Index. If so, maybe you should make life choices using a broader objective function--one that encourages you to sacrifice some degree of academic success narrowly construed for a more diverse, more satisfying, and more noble life.

Indeed. But keep in mind an anecdote that the Chicago Tribune repeated in a Sunday feature on a local economics department during its run of consecutive Nobel Memorial Awards. A junior professor urged his colleagues to wrap up a meeting that was running long as his wife was waiting in a car outside and he didn't want her to divorce him. One of the older heads is quoted as saying "You'd fit in better if she did." Draw your own conclusions. Draw whatever inferences you wish about the book reviews and the model-building efforts offered here.

YARNIN' ABOUT FREEBOOTERS IS MORE FUN. No, Big Oil is not the latest incarnation of the Corsairs of the Spanish Main. That, however, does not stop the conspiracy buffs.

The drop in prices may last a couple of months, long enough to get through the November election. Could that be what the oil companies want?

(Pillaged from Newmark's Door.)

Another Newmark would have such lubbers walk y^e planke.

It just goes to show how ignorant of simple economic principles the mass of the American people are. And of simple logic. If the Republicans had such massive powers over the market price, why would they have allowed it to go up so sharply the past 12 months. Undoubtedly, those high prices contributed to the funk and anti-incumbent mood that many voters seemed to have been in. Why couldn't the Republicans have waved their wizard wands and kept the prices low in the first place?

No wizard wand, only a Lyapunov attractor have we.

Petroleum analysts say the reasons are less Machiavellian: Supplies are above average, partly because summer's high prices attracted record imports. Hurricanes haven't knocked out Gulf of Mexico production. U.S. regulations permit a cheaper-to-make fuel blend in fall and winter.

“Without a shadow of a doubt, there is not any manipulation, and it has nothing to do with the approaching election,” says Peter Beutel, head of energy-price consultant Cameron Hanover. The petroleum market is “too big a market to manipulate. The price just … could not sustain itself.”

To be precise, swabbies, it's a market so vast that the Lyapunov attractor is the core is the competitive equilibrium. Say a prayer for for my Advanced Theory class, which will leave in December understanding how most of this works.

At Cold Spring Shops, fewer pieces of eight are going into the oilman's chest. 11 August 2006, 12.66 gallons, $ 40.50. 17 September, 13.34 gallons, $ 32.00. Yo-ho-ho-and a bottle of Sprecher.

AVAST, YE SCURVY DOGS!


Hornswoggled from University Diaries.

TOO MUCH OF THE WRONG KIND OF CAPACITY? A number of Inside Higher Education posts from last week are not inconsistent with that hypothesis. Start with "Documenting the Shift to Merit" on September 12.

A new study by the College Board, “Tuition Discounting: Not Just a Private College Practice,” lays the practice bare. The study, by Sandy Baum, an economics professor at Skidmore College and senior policy analyst for the board, and Lucie Lapovsky, former president of Mercy College and now a consultant, shows just how much public colleges — including community colleges, which are generally seen as bastions of the needy — are joining their counterparts in the private nonprofit sector in handing out significant proportions of their financial aid without regard to students’ financial need.

“We find that only about 40 percent of the institutional grant aid in the public four-year sector fills documented financial need, while more than 60 percent of the institutional aid in the private sector and the public two-year sector is need-based,” the authors write.

That finding, they write, “raises serious questions about the extent to which institutional aid funds are being used to enhance access to and choice in higher education. Not only are significant amounts of institutional aid in the public sector being distributed based on criteria other than need, but a high proportion of dollars are allocated to students whose financial circumstances would permit them to enroll without these subsidies.”

William E. (Brit) Kirwan, chancellor of the University System of Maryland, is troubled by the findings of the College Board study. “I think higher education has lost its way, frankly, when it comes to the management and distribution of financial aid,” says Kirwan. “Institutions have been investing disproportionately, and these data show this, in merit-based aid at the expense of need-based aid.” The situation is compounded by the fact that state programs like the Georgia’s Hope Scholarships emphasize merit over need.

How horrible: somebody who might be able to pay full fare at Johns Hopkins gets a full ride at Georgia as long as he or she maintains a B average. (Leave aside for the moment the Nash equilibrium in grade-grubbing and grade-inflating. Focus on the Spielberg effect: lifetime earnings of people who were accepted at Hopkins but matriculated and graduated elsewhere are indistinguishable on average from Hopkins graduates.)

The article goes on to bemoan the existence of enrollment managers who have learned something from the airlines, where the value of a good reservation and seat-pricing system exceeds the value of the aircraft of a major carrier.

Despite those caveats, the researchers say they were struck by the proportions of financial aid at public institutions that is not need-based. The high figure at four-year non-flagship institutions “means that public four-year institutions are using the significant majority of their aid to ’shape’ their classes,” they write.

Which from the perspective of the column is a bad thing.

“There are a significant amount of dollars out there going to students that could be redirected,” Baum said. “The major public policy question out of this study is: Do we want public institutions to be using their dollars to be attracting ‘better’ students or do we want them to help needy students?”

Note the scare quotes. It's not occured to Professor Baum that the implicit redefinition of higher-education-as-special-education disguised as access is sapping faculty morale, or that without some high achievers in the classroom, the retention pond stagnates, and employers only come-a-calling just before the economic expansion peaks?

A companion column, "Grappling With the Access Problem," reinforces my point.

Thomas G. Mortensen, a senior scholar at the Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Higher Education who has made a career advocating, through research, on behalf of the underserved in higher education, had mixed feelings as he listened to the proceedings at Chapel Hill on Monday.

He credited UNC and other elite institutions with doing something meaningful to try to help low income students — especially since the colleges have in many cases paid too little attention to these students in the past — and said that “any movement” in that direction is valuable. But he noted that “all of these kids would be going to college someplace else,” he said, and said that much more needs to be done to truly expand the pipeline to help the huge numbers of students who are not only financially needy but also left underprepared for college by their poor elementary and secondary educations.

"Going to college someplace else." Where a more docile faculty can be mau-maued into giving college credit for managing eighth-grade theme-writing and sixth-grade arithmetic? The failing rests with those primary and secondary schools, or perhaps with a failure of the public culture (if there is such a thing) to reinforce the habits of highly effective people, not with admissions officers identifying people who have a serious chance at finishing a meaningful degree.

Californians are catching on. A September 14 column suggests the community colleges are Raising the Bar.

Starting in fall 2009, students seeking an associate degree will have to go a course level higher than they currently do in both mathematics and composition. The mathematics requirement currently is to pass elementary algebra, equivalent to what is taught in many high schools in the ninth grade. Under the new requirement, students will have to either pass or place out of intermediate algebra as well. In composition, students currently must pass a course that is one level below freshman composition. Under the new standards, associate degree graduates would need to pass a freshman comp course.

Public higher education ought to be public higher education.

The rule change originated with the faculty (note: not with Governor Schwarzenegger, not with the trustees, not with the chamber of commerce.)

The push for the increased standards came from the faculty. The Academic Senate of the system has been working on the issue for several years, lobbying the statewide board to approve the tougher requirements, which happened on Monday.

Ian Walton, the Senate’s president and a mathematics instructor at Mission College, said that professors view the issue as one of setting standards that graduates need. “Students need more analytic capacity in math and English” than the current minimums assured, he said.

Walton also said that the current standards sent the wrong message to students in high schools (where high school level work was being required for an associate degree) and universities (which require higher level courses than the current standards for transfer admission).

“Our requirements seemed completely out of line,” he said.It took a long time to gain support for the measure, Walton said, because of concerns that some students would be denied associate degrees. But among the tools available to professors pushing for higher requirements was publicity, he said.

There's also reality. The American Economic Review is not obligated to publish my paper just because I sent it in; the editors are not even obligated to provide me with constructive criticism. But if I enroll at Mission College, there are some professors who feel obligated to grant me an associate's degree?

Professor Walton is made of sterner stuff.

Walton said that faculty members who pushed for the higher standards did hear such criticisms, and he said they came in two categories: Those who said that for vocationally oriented associate degrees, the higher standards weren’t needed, and those who said that the higher standards would exclude certain groups of students.

To those making the vocational argument, he said that from a career perspective, the current standards are far too low. “They track people into dead end jobs,” he said.

As to the argument based on demographics, he said, “we do have groups of students with a history of lower success rates in math and English courses, and no one wants to put up barriers. But when you see groups with lower success rates, you shouldn’t assume that those students don’t need higher standards.”

Indeed.

But not everyone has gotten the word. Some institutions of allegedly higher education are dealing with problems filling their entering classes, particularly with men of ability, by Using Football as Bait.

It is well known that many major universities use football as a marketing tool and as a stimulant to alumni giving. With a bit of a twist, small schools have started doing the same. As documented in a recent article in The New York Times, colleges that have traditionally had a difficult time attracting males are turning to football to bulk up their enrollments and to sculpt more diverse student bodies.

The Times reports that during the last decade, approximately 40 football programs have been instituted or reinstituted in the non-scholarship ranks. Administrators agree that football seems to act as a magnet for students in related activities such as band, athletic training, and cheerleading.

Tell me, again, why full rides to young men and women who can grasp chemistry and calculus and accounting are a misallocation of resources.

THE B TRAIN ALSO STOPS AT HARLEM. Live from the Third Rail comments on Chicago Tribune columnist John Hilkevitch's "Getting Around" contemplating the possible restoration of skip-stop services on the Northwestern Elevated.

Ask yourself this: if you had the choice during a -5 degree morning, would you rather spend more time on an exposed elevated platform watching trains pass by, or do you want to be in a heated train, even if it does crawl down the tracks?

The proposal arises amidst plans to rehabilitate parts of the Northwestern (which the youngsters refer to as the "Brown Line" and the "Red Line") at the same time that the Dan Ryan median strip line is being rehabilitated and the Dan Ryan "Expressway" is receiving an overhaul that will take several years.

A reasonably healthy person can get to downtown Chicago from the North Side more quickly riding a bicycle than taking the Red Line, which often takes more than an hour.

"The service is just awful. I prefer to take my bike because I get to the Loop faster," said Richard Harnish, executive director of the Midwest High Speed Rail Association.

Reinstating skip-stop service would be easy "because the CTA was doing it before on basically the same track layout and it worked very well," Harnish said.

The problem, once again, is a failure to spend money expanding the road network, whether for lack of federal matching funds that are being sequestered to make the budget deficit look better or for fear of disrupting neighborhoods or calling out the greenie protestors is irrelevant. What matters is that yet again money is going to rebuild a major Chicago highway under traffic, rather than to providing additional capacity. The skip-stop service worked reasonably well when the Northwestern was through-routed with the South Side. Englewood branch trains made the A stops, and Jackson Park trains made the B stops.

The northerly portion of the Northwestern is ill-suited to skip-stop operation, the following quote notwithstanding.

Yet transit experts said the north segment of the Red Line--between Howard and some point north of Clark Junction--is the best location to restart skip-stop service and save commuters time. The stations are closely spaced, giving riders a choice of where to board depending on their destination.

Alternating train stops between nearby stations would also help deal with over-crowded rail platforms and trains during mornings and evenings, the experts say.

During the morning rush, all the seats usually are taken by the time southbound Red Line trains have traveled from the Howard Street terminal to the Loyola stop in Rogers Park. Everybody boarding south of that point must stuff themselves onto packed trains for the long ride downtown.

North of Clark Junction, where the Ravenswood branch diverges, the Clark-Howard-Linden-(Waukegan) was originally a two-track railroad with island stations. When it was quadrupled, the express tracks were laid outside the existing, local tracks, and new island platforms serving all tracks were built at Addison (for a baseball park), Sheridan, Wilson, Loyola, and Howard. Evanston Expresses and North Shore Line trains used the outside tracks. South of Clark Junction, however, the local tracks are the outer tracks, with platforms serving all four tracks at Belmont and Fullerton. (Evanston Expresses remain on the outer tracks and now call at all local stations south of Belmont.)

At one time, the elevated was four tracks from just north of Chicago Avenue to Armitage, the junction with the subway. The subway entrance uses the two inner tracks. Although trains may switch tracks at Armitage, the elevated becomes two tracks, with preferred routing on and off the outer tracks. The elevated also used to run a variety of express trains. If the current service fills up by the time trains reach Loyola, why not path a few trains onto the express tracks south of Loyola (trackage to permit this move used to be in place at Granville.) In like manner, have some trains turn at Loyola, making all stops to Wilson or Sheridan, and thence onto the express tracks. It's a somewhat more expensive proposition to replace the outer tracks south of Armitage (these have been out of service for over 40 years) but the notion of sending a few North Side trains around the loop and back to Wilson or Loyola or Addison occurred to the Rapid Transit management over 70 years ago.

NO BUYOUTS. The University of Buffalo football team has attracted notice from the alleged newspaper of record for its change of schedule so as to obtain larger guarantees from Capital One Bowl winner Wisconsin and Capital One Bowl loser Auburn. There is no such opportunity for conference games. Buffalo is the most recent addition to the Mid-American Conference, and their schedule included a visit to DeKalb for a Saturday evening game.

It was a pleasantly warm afternoon suitable for tailgating and photography. Happy hour ban or no, a local tavern set up a beer garden on the east end of the tailgating area. There is a rather intense game of beanbag in progress.

Everywhere I went, I saw people playing beanbag.


Although these cars are parked in the "tailgating" area, this was not the only "cartopping" I saw in progress. The proportion of tailgating students to older adults is higher at Northern Illinois than it was at Wisconsin. Perhaps some of the people in this picture will be back to meet up with their second-generation-at-Northern kids in another 25 years. (Or will they meet up with their kids in Madison? I hope they give their eight-year-olds enough free time to organize their own beanbag games at that age.)


The marching band finishes its pregame concert.


The new locker room is taking shape north of the north end zone.


No Godzillatron here, just our scoreboard, and our artillery piece. Had Buffalo played at West Virginia, they would have encountered the Mountaineer, somebody in a Dan'l Boone outfit wielding a flintlock from the French and Indian War that the University of Wisconsin didn't want him to bring into Camp Randall. Here, we have a more substantial field piece, and we do fire a salute after each touchdown. In the background are some trees with a view into the stadium that some fans climbed during the 2003 BCS run to see what was going on inside.


From the west stands, there is a view of the east side of DeKalb. The headlights of westbound trains shine at the stadium as they pass under the old coal dock (gray structure above the M-N sign.) (Sunday update: this is a digital zoom shot with a headlight. The train is about to cross 7^th Street.)


The band reminds the student section where they are. (They also spelled it out for us. Many bands play to the press-box side only.)


On a warm evening, the body painted torsos aren't at risk of frostbite. I understand some of these fans were out when the Gales of November came early.


Yes, there was a game. On the second Northern Illinois play from scrimmage, Garrett Wolfe went 49 yards for a touchdown.


After a Buffalo three-and-out, a Northern touchdown on a reverse was reversed by a penalty, but a few plays later Northern was in the end zone again. We have Siberian Huskies on the field after each score.


The announcers for the student radio station had a nice view from the flying bridge. I hope they have quarters indoors once the Gales of November come.


At halftime, Northern 17, Buffalo 0; Buffalo unable to get a field goal attempt off as time expires thanks to mismanagement of their times out. Halftime of evening games is for fireworks.


The attendance is now a matter of public record. Most seats were occupied.

Northern fielded a punt with just over 4 minutes to play and broke another touchdown run. Buffalo answered with a touchdown near the end of the game, but Northern's special teams blocked the kick. Huskies 31, Bulls 13, the Black Bavarian tastes good.

In other games of interest, Wisconsin 14, San Diego State 0.

RAILROAD ARCHAEOLOGY TO DO. I've located a website with photos of surviving railroad stations, including a number of intriguing finds in Northern Illinois. Consider first the Rockford and Interurban. It quit business in 1930, but the stations in Cherry Valley, Winnebago, and Pecatonica still stand. More roadtrips to the North West Frontier are in order. Also still standing is the Hoopole station of the improbably named Hoopole Yorktown and Tampico (the last named being the birthplace of one Ronald Wilson Reagan.) According to Hilton and Due, the HY&T was originally projected as an interurban called the Dixon Rock Falls and Southeastern, but, like the Woodstock & Sycamore it was never electrified, although, unlike the W&S it remained in operation until 1954. Further afield, the latest issue of First and Fastest alerts me to a property called the Macomb Industry & Littleton, which was also conceived as an interurban, although it was never electrified, and it escaped the attention of Hilton and Due.

PEREGRINUS EXPECTAVI PEDES MEOS IN CYMBALIS. It is difficult to conceive of there being a Star Wars series without Sergei Eisenstein's Aleksandr Nevsky, in which the Order of Teutonic Knights play the part of a real-life Evil Empire that is stymied by a plucky if less well-equipped Russian army, and the Force assists by causing the ice to give way at the right time, all to a Prokofiev score.

The Teutonic Knights were, along with the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem and the Knights Templar, the last-named alleged in a recent best-seller to be protecting a secret that could shake the foundations of Christianity, the principal Crusader orders. Most of the Teutonic Order's crusading, however, took place in the lands east of the Elbe. They had some successes. A Prussian, after all, is a Pole with a von in front of his surname, e.g. von Blaskowitz, von Czudnochowski. They also had their failures. Their defeat by Aleksandr Nevsky at Lake Peipus in April 1242 ended their aspirations in Russia. Eight score years later, their ambitions in Poland and Lithuania were checked near Willenberg. That story provides the first part of Geoffrey Evans's Tannenberg 1410/1914, which is Book Review No. 32. Poland's King Wladislaw Jagiello, in alliance with Lithuania's Grand Duke Witold, managed to out-maneuver and surround a better-equipped army of Teutonic Knights.

Five hundred years later, a large Russian force moved against Germany's eastern border as a real threat against Berlin as well as to distract German efforts against Belgium and France. In the ensuing battle of Tannenberg, German commanders were able to make more effective use of captured Russian movement orders than, say, General McClellan was able to make at Antietam. The Russians suffered from poor command and control, rivalries between the army commanders, and poorer equipment than the Germans. A Russian army was surrounded and captured, and General Aleksandr Samsonov took his own life not far from Willenberg.

The Russian efforts were not completely in vain, as the Germans diverted forces intended to complete the Schlieffen Plan in the west to reinforce East Prussia. Author Evans argues that the subsequent Russian collapse, however, rendered Russia ineffective as an ally (that without any speculation about revolution) as well as freeing additional German troops for the war of attrition that ensued on the Western Front.

Adolf Hitler was instrumental in destroying two battle monuments. An equestrian statue of King Jagiello commissioned by Polish prime minister Ignacy Jan Paderewski in Krakow on the 500th anniversary of the defeat of the Knights was destroyed early in the German occupation in 1939. The Poles built a replacement and dedicated it in 1976. The German war memorial at Tannenberg, which became German commanding general, later Reich President Paul von Hindenburg's tomb, was destroyed with Hindenburg's body relocated to Berlin as the Red Army closed in in 1945.

Why this book review, and my focus on Willenberg? A relative recently located, concealed in a dresser drawer, a baptismal record of my great-grandfather in the Evangelical Church of Willenberg. Willenberg is currently Wielbark, Poland. The Evangelical Church still stands.


That appears to be a Lutheran rooster on the steeple, consistent with the official seal of the church on the certificate. One version of the family's migration from Prussia to Volhynia to Wisconsin is that they were offered land grants in Volhynia that included exemptions from the military draft, and they left for the States when word that the Tsar was considering ending the exemptions. Another version has the East Prussians in Volhynia leaving as a reaction to a Russification campaign as Aleksandr III cracked down on liberal elements generally. Whatever the story, they did leave, by 1905. But the records that have come into my possession suggest that my grand-uncle Jan may have been born in Willenberg. He was conscripted into the Allied Expeditionary Force and killed in action in France, possibly by an East Prussian.

THE FAREWELL TOUR BEGINS. The Vermeer Quartet offered their first recital of the 2006-2007 season. They began with Schubert's E-flat, Op. 125, no. 1, which despite being published posthumously is a teenage work for a family jam session. Well done. They finished with the Mendelssohn e, Op. 44 no. 2, a cheerful way to go home.

Inbetween, Shostakovich's No. 8, op. 110, a musical evocation of an evil empire. The program notes suggest that Shostakovich was contemplating taking his own life when he wrote this, during a three-day visit to Dresden shortly after he "caved into heavy government pressure to join the Communist Party." Nobody can write agitated and tortured passages quite like Shostakovich, and he captures the MVD at the door in three notes.

ARBITRARY AND CAPRICIOUS, INDEED. At Blogs for Industry, Jim Hu has been following the Gabrielle Stryker tenure case with the expertise of a practitioner both of a related discipline and of successful grantsmanship.

I'm curious about how the Provost could not have any preconceptions about a junior member of his former department whose interim review (most places do these at year 3 or so, when tenure decisions are looming but it's not too late to address possible weaknesses in the record) must have crossed his desk.

The information that the Department headship changed during this period is also interesting. This means that neither of the past two department heads was a full Professor (actually three; from what I can tell, Dr. Stryker had at least four department heads during her time at Oakland)...which is not an indicator of departmental strength. The Dean mentioned above is also not the current dean. The acting dean is the Associate Provost.

Is anybody in charge at Oakland?

He also links to an Oakland University AAUP site that includes Professor Stryker's external letters. One is perfunctory but favorable.

Dr. Stryker's recent work on computer and mathematical modeling of T. cruzi transmission provides pioneer information regarding the devastating effects of interruption of vector control programs that are likely to happen in developing countries. I am optimistic that publication of her recent articles and continued work will open the new research funding sources and Dr. Stryker would continue to work towards the vaccine development against T. cruzi.

A second concentrates on a different part of her research and reaches a similar conclusion.

Overall, I think it is fair to say that Dr. Stryker got off to an awkward start in her research and was probably working in too many different areas. However, she has now focused on a very important area and is achieving a high level of success in an important field with ample potential for years to come. I am particularly impressed that she has sought out multiple important collaborations that appear to be productive alliances. In today's funding climate, this is an important strategic move that will insure [c.q.] future success in grant applications. For these reasons, I enthusiastically support promotion of Dr. Gabrielle Stryker to the rank of associate professor with tenure.

The third letter is somewhat more negative, including a damning-with-faint-praise passage that often turns up in such evaluations.

Thus, Dr. Stryker would not appear to be a strong candidate for my institution. However, this does not say that she would meet the requirements at Oakland.

Come off it. We ask for external reviews all the time. The reviewer's department may or may not have had the opportunity to consider the candidate's dossier in some previous search. That the candidate never submitted an application to the reviewer's department, or that the department ruled out the candidate for their own short-list, or would not make the cut at the reviewer's department, does not strike me as useful information. (The alternative strategy, to suggest that the candidate might be attractive to other institutions, is equally irrelevant. By definition faculty without tenure are on the job market all the time.)

HOW OTHERS SEE US. Villainous Company reads a Reason Foundation working paper, reprinting work in Journal of Labor Research, suggesting that moderate drinking augments human capital, leading to higher earnings.

The survey question on alcohol asks respondents, “Do you ever have occasion to use any alcoholic beverages such as liquor, wine, or beer, or are you a total abstainer?” From this question we create a dummy variable where drinkers have a one and abstainers have a zero. The survey also asks respondents the frequency with which they go to a bar or tavern. Choices include the following: almost every day, once or twice a week, several times per month, about once per month, several times a year, about once a year, never, and don’t know. From this question we create a variable indicating whether an individual frequents a bar or tavern at least once per month. This somewhat crude measure attempts to capture whether one drinks in social or nonsocial settings.

We therefore estimate the following equation:

Yi = ?Xi+ ?Ai + ?Bi + ?I , (1)

[THUD]

...where Y is the log of real earned income by individual i; X is a vector of personal and demographic characteristics; A is the drinking dummy variable; and B is the social vs. nonsocial drinking dummy variable.

A commenter grumbles that it's "sloppy econometrics."

The excerpt continues

Control variables in X include race, age, age squared, religion, schooling, marital status, parental education, number of siblings, and region of residence.

*sigh*

I'm inclined to agree. In many cases these "control" variables give the response functions different intercepts but the same slope: there is no way of establishing whether a Protestant who bar-hops (an interaction term) would do better than an agnostic who is a regular at some bar.

FIRST SPELL OUT THE PAYOFF FUNCTIONS AND THE PROBABILITIES. At Voluntary Xchange, some thoughts about the effectiveness of fighting terrorists.

This is, that if an act of terror is one-time-thing, then there isn't much sense in fighting it. Alternatively, if terror is part of a pattern, then it does make sense to fight it.

However, if there is a pattern, and you do fight it, there are two possibilities. First, you might be unsuccessful and give up.

Alternatively, you might be successful, and reduce terrorism to something that looks like a one-time-thing ... again meaning there isn't much sense in fighting it.

But ... of course ... there is the reasonable position that not opposing terrorism further encourages terrorists.

So, what we have is that the absence of terrorist attacks on U.S. soil since 9/11 is both evidence of success in the war on terror, and evidence that the money has been wasted, depending on your perspective. Both are justifications for reducing our efforts and probably increasing the probability of future attacks.

Game theorists will recognize this as a game without an equilibrium.

It's worse than that. We can't be sure what game is being played. First, let's spell out what the "one-time thing" is. Was the September 11 raid truly a one-off? The hawks have a long list of attacks on American interests overseas (Beirut, Khobar Towers, Nairobi, USS Cole as well as the February 1993 truck bombing in the Trade Center parking deck.) The pacifists will suggest that each of those is a reaction to an American mis-step (tilting toward Israel, garrisoning Saudi Arabia, maintaining sanctions against Iraq.) What history is present in order for the September 11 raid to be interpreted as a signal, and what subjective probability (the hawk's or the pacifist's) is being updated by that signal?

Now, consider the response. Here, there's a possible parallel with the chain-store paradox. Viewed as a one-shot game, the best strategy for an incumbent store is to acquiesce in the entry of another store, as it loses less by acquiescing than it does by fighting. But if it doesn't know how many stores might enter, it loses less by fighting and acquiring a reputation for being crazy. Thus, whether or not there was a second attack in the works, the vigorous response to the first attack establishes the reputation: don't do this. (That a scared entrant might take on a different store, or that terrorist cells might move their activities to England or Spain is an extension of the chain-store model.)

But we don't know what information content rests in the end of Saddam Hussein's funding of human bombs in Israel or Colonel Qadafi's willingness to open his weapons labs to international inspection or Khalid Sheikh Muhammad in custody and talking, or Gulbuddin Hekmatyar in custody and talking, or what probabilities are being updated on the basis of those signals.

THE RECRIMINATIONS BEGIN. Give Coach Novak credit.

We got whipped. We got whipped good," said NIU coach Joe Novak. "I thought we got out-coached. We didn't tackle well enough, we didn't cover well enough, didn't protect well enough, didn't catch well enough. They executed better and we didn't tackle worth a darn."

Straight out of the Epistle of St. Vincent to the Cheeseheads.

In other sports news, the cost overruns continue at the posh locker room.

Construction of the Academic and Athletic Performance Center recently began north of Huskie Stadium. Paid for strictly through private funding, the building was originally priced at $9.5 million, and then bumped to $12 million.

But for those of you who didn’t read media relations’ Tuesday press release for NIU’s football game against Ohio, the price of the AAPC was listed at $14.5 million. Athletics Director Jim Phillips said the price was a misprint and believes the building will end up at around $12 million. Let’s hope so. — Sean Connor, sports reporter.

(I grabbed this from a .pdf page image of the September 11 edition.)

INEFFICIENTLY MUCH OF THE WRONG KIND OF EDUCATION? Greg Mankiw reacts to a David Brooks column proposing more public money for the common schools. (The column is behind the Times Select wall.) He recommends readers understand the arguments in Inequality in America: What Role for Human Capital Policies? and points to an instructive review. Let me highlight a paragraph of the review.

Reviewing specific programs, Carneiro and Heckman find that preschool education is highly effective, although with more impact on noncognitive than cognitive abilities. Schools are much less productive, and returns are low to increased investments in K-12 education in the form of higher salaries, smaller classes, and so forth. They suggest that structural changes that increase school choice and competition should have higher returns, but are careful to note that returns to increased investment in schools are limited by what families contribute to the production process. They also conclude that added investments in job training and higher education have low rates of return, particularly for lower ability adolescents and adults.

That's a polite way of suggesting the focus on curriculum is misplaced and that inculcating the Habits of Highly Effective People might be more productive.

To some extent, my sparring partner at Anonymous Community agrees.

One of my bloggy sparring partners likes to say that the natural check on colleges' impulse to lower standards is employers' unwillingness to hire graduates with weak skills. I've seen remarkably little evidence of that – from what I've seen, the business climate at any given moment has a far greater impact on the rate of hiring than do graduates' writing skills, particularly for entry-level positions – but I will grant that employers prefer people who can be counted on to show up for work. If we teach by example that deadlines are meant to be broken, we're not doing anybody any good. Telling a kid he can't get into class two weeks late is also teaching, in its way.

Tough love, amen.

The review considers a number of other possibilities but does not rule tough love out.

Carneiro and Heckman note some exceptions to their general thesis. They find short-term credit constraints limit college attendance for up to eight percent of the population. Financial programs targeting these families could pay off. School-based interventions with adolescents still enrolled (but not dropouts) have substantial impacts, particularly on noncognitive skills. Private job training has a relatively high rate of return but does not reduce (and may increase) inequality. Public policies providing training in the classroom have high rates of return, though other public job training programs do not.

The exceptions are taken to prove the rule, because they are relevant to so few people and have such small impacts on inequality. Carneiro and Heckman conclude (123): “the ability that is decisive in producing schooling differentials is shaped early in life. If we are to substantially eliminate ethnic and income differentials in schooling, we must start early.” Thus, a “serious reformulation of human capital policy is needed.” Yet, even with the benefit of a response and rejoinder, the reader is left with only hints as to what this might entail beyond rejection of most current policies and movement toward choice, competition, and local incentives in schools. Most intriguing are their statements that emphasize early family policy (135): “Good families promote cognitive, social, and behavioral skills. Bad families do not. The relevant policy issue is to determine what interventions in bad families are successful.”

Challenging task, that. By what standard can policymakers regulate the behavior of "bad families" without making the case for requiring bicycle helmets or banning pate? (Policymakers haven't yet figured out that properly timed traffic lights are a cost-effective way of taming speeding, reducing gasoline use, and damping road rage.)

OUR NEIGHBORS AT WAR. 52-year-old Waukesha soldier killed in Afghanistan.

Sgt. 1st Class Merideth Howard died when a car bomber slammed into a Humvee carrying 15 people, killing her and one other person, according to the Corpus Christi Caller-Times newspaper in Texas.

Howard, a Corpus Christi native, joined the Army Reserves in 1988 and went to Afghanistan in April, said her husband, Hugh Hvolboll.

She was a member of the 364th Civil Affairs Brigade in support of the 10th Mountain Division.

Howard was a firefighter before she began a career as a fire-safety consultant out of their Waukesha home.

TO REMEMBER. Others have done a fine job of rounding up perspectives on the surprise attack and developments in the intervening years. See Joe Katzman's omnibus post at Winds of Change as well as his fears of what is to come. James Joyner has a roundup Outside the Beltway, and National Review has an instructive symposium.

Andrew Sullivan's No Surrender best sets the theme he chose, which was "We're still here, get used to it." But perhaps the best evidence that we are prevailing came on Labor Day. Australian naturalist Steve Irwin had a fatal encounter with a stingray. Labor Day is the traditional start of the campaign season, and the television talk shows will spare some time for stock-taking and ankle-biting. Not that Monday. Perhaps Mr Bin Laden is making the wrong kind of videos. A wrestling match with a Siberian tiger, now that I'd want to see.

AS IT HAPPENED. Five years ago, I was up and about early to have an oil change and routine maintenance on my car. It wasn't until I had paid for the service and started my car that I had any inkling of what was going on on the East Coast.

As part of its commemorative coverage, CNN made available a real-time replay of its morning news show commencing at 8:30 am (Eastern.) Celebrity maternity wear, earnings prospects at Nokia, all of a sudden a cut to "disturbing video."

The first person the network reached in New York was their vice president of finance, Sean Murtagh, who observed the first plane from his office, which I believe is upstairs at Penn Station. He described the plane as a "twin engine passenger jet, possibly a 737," and he noted that the pilot was having what he interpreted as control troubles, with the wings rocking. Not bad for seeing something that didn't look right without any inkling of what was to happen, and consistent with an inexperienced pilot flying too low and fast for conditions.

The newscast repeatedly shows the second plane approaching the south tower, but it's obscured behind the north tower just before impact. Newscasters surmise that the jet is "another 737" and their first instinct is that something's wrong with the navigation system???

I suspect observers initially characterized both jets as 737s rather than the larger transoceanic twin-jets because they didn't realize how big the towers were.

THE WRONG KIND OF RECOGNITION. Oakland University provost Virinder Mougdil, whose veto of a tenure recommendation for biologist Gabrielle Stryker has been noticed at Inside Higher Education, is the object of a nationwide search by Margaret Soltan at University Diaries, who would like to have a conversation with him.

Mr Mougdil is precisely the kind of administrator I had in mind when I wrote,

The executive suites at numerous universities are occupied by individuals who, if the word got out, would have to hide in spider holes rather than sip sherry in panelled common rooms. Clearly, what we lack is a proper card deck.

The last full report on the card deck is rather old. Although I have added a few names since then, and there are only 32 cards to fill on a sheepshead deck, as it's still fitting to use a complicated game that you don't play with a full deck here, there is room for Mr Mougdil somewhere in the deck, and the headhunting firm of Schneider u. Schwarz is at work finding a proper placement for the arbitrary and capricious Virinder Mougdil. Professor Soltan has not disclosed a reward for winkling him out.

THIS IS SO SEPTEMBER 10. S.A. provides bus to take students to city council meeting. Not to protest university complicity in the war effort or to investigate potential diversion of city funds to infrastructure improvements under the locker room.

In an effort to sway DeKalb City Council members from effectively eliminating 50-cent draft nights, the "Save My Beer Bus" will begin loading passengers at the Holmes Student Center.

Adam Novotney, Student Association president, is leading students against the proposed ordinance to raise the minimum price of alcohol. The SA will provide a bus to take students who oppose the legislation to today's city council meeting.

The bus will begin picking up students at the Holmes Student Center at 6 p.m. and make its way to each of the residence halls. The bus will also bring students back after the meeting using the same route. The city council meeting is scheduled to begin at 7 p.m.

The only part of this more frivolous than the protest itself is the denial that it's a protest.

Novotney said the trip to the DeKalb Municipal Building is not a protest. He said the reason he wants to bring so many students to the city council meeting is to get his argument across and show how many students disagree with the ordinance.

"Some say it's not important. Should they be able to do this without asking the student body, what could happen next?" Novotney said.

Come off it. The essence of protest is to peaceably assemble for the redress of grievances, even over whether the public interest is served by legislating minimum prices at taverns.

The protest failed, both symbolically and substantively.

As the bus went to Grant and Stevenson, students stood bewildered when they saw a bus and were told it was not a Campus Circle Left bus.

After Stevenson, the bus made some unscheduled stops. In an attempt to gather more students, it made rounds to three local bars.

SA president Adam Novotney and other students went to each bar trying to coax people to attend the meeting.

At Molly's Eatery and Drinkery, 1022 W. Lincoln Highway, Novotney began asking people to join him on the bus and then told them some reasons to oppose the "Happy Hour Prohibited" ordinance.

"We don't like paying more for beer," Novotney said to a couple of patrons in Molly's.

One of them agreed. "We don't like that either," said Molly's patron Adam Willig. "I'm all for cheap drinks; I love it out here."

At Otto's, 118 E. Lincoln Highway, Novotney even offered to pay for a group's drinks if they got on the bus.

A few true believers made it to the council meeting.

The preliminary hearing before the council went longer than planned while students waiting outside were scolded by city attorney Norma Guess for being too loud.

The minimum price ordinance passed.

QUOTE OF THE DAY. Michael Ledeen is angry.

But many of our opposition leaders, journalists, broadcasters, and editors, and, apparently, the overwhelming majority of the professoriate, clearly have. Otherwise it would not be possible for them to actively undermine the war. It is wrong to say they have forgotten the significance of 9/11, because they never grasped it. For them, patriotism has always been unworthy of sophisticates like themselves, and fighting enemies on foreign battlefields is something that rubes and rednecks do. They understand neither the world nor their fellow countrymen. They think we can achieve peace by being nice–did you hear Senator Biden prattling on and on about the need to talk to our Iranian enemies?—and they don’t know that our commissioned officers are college graduates, many of them from the best universities. I doubt more than a small fraction of leading journalists know that you need a college degree to get a Marine commission. Their ignorance about, and contempt for our military, fester beneath the surface of their reportage.

How I wish Barbara Olson had the chance to confront them, live and in color. She knew them well, these self-satisfied, self-indulgent ignoramuses whose misunderstanding of the world was acquired at overpriced universities and at elegant dinner tables where they dined with like-minded people. How she would have ridiculed them and their alma maters, the Harvards, Georgetowns, Virginias and Chicagos who have just given their stages to Mohammed Khatami, the mass murderer who is pimping for the evil regime of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

She would not restrict her acid wit to those schools. She would also direct it at an administration that has failed so miserably to explain the urgency we need to destroy her murderers. She would surely demand an accounting from all those who signed off on Khatami’s visa. How could you? she would ask. You know–you say all the time–that Iran is the greatest supporter of the terrorists. You know–everybody knows–that the villains who organized my murder found sanctuary and support in Iran when they slinked out of Afghanistan. How could you then open our country to its former president? Have you no shame?

Go. Read. Discuss.

IN PRAISE OF EMERGENCE? Betsy Newmark, latter-day Baby Boomer, lays some smack on David Broder, the Face of Silent Generation Indecisiveness. First Mr Broder.

It is not that Americans have lost their self-reliance, he said, or their willingness to help their neighbors. But the bigger institutions on which they once thought they could rely -- the government, their employers, their unions -- are now either unreliable or entirely absent. When federal, state and local officials left the victims of Hurricane Katrina stranded in their flooded homes for days, it symbolized a fundamental breach of trust. When giants such as General Motors and Ford laid off thousands of workers while other companies walked away from the pensions they had promised retirees, it removed another prop to confidence. And when unions increasingly lost their ability to organize and represent workers, the sense of isolation became even stronger.

Now Ms Newmark.

People may indeed feel that large institutions are not as strong as they once were, but I'd argue that if people ever had a sense of security based on the power and competence of large corporations, government, or unions, they were deluding themselves and it might be a good thing that people are not placing their faith in large bureaucracies with their own agendas. The people who escaped Katrina did so because of their own initiative and not because of the government. That's a lesson we should all benefit from remembering.

Indeed. Is Mr Broder that nostalgic for the Old New Industrial State, or has he forgotten the mostly self-organized powerboat evacuation of Downtown Manhattan's stranded office workers on a sunny afternoon five years ago?

Law professor Kenneth Anderson's daughter is, if anything, even more skeptical of Wise Experts.

"Liberals," she said, presumably referring to her endlessly politically correct private school (the same National Cathedral that hosted ex-president Khatami last week), "always want to tell you what to do and what to think, but then they don't even keep you safe."

Democratic Party politicians might want to reflect on that awhile. They think of themselves as defenders of freedom, protectors of civil liberties. To my daughter, however, they are merely authoritarians who tell you what to think, but then, when push comes to shove, these liberal authoritarians don't even protect you from existential risk. In my thirteen year old child's political imagination, smoke from the burning Pentagon and the wreckage of the plane continues to rise. Does it in yours? Does it in theirs?

Ah but how many geese were noodled for the pate that was probably served at at least one function for Herr Khatami? There is a risk-assessment problem here: are you more likely to die of overeating than of terrorism? Harder question: are the food-preparation methods of fancy restaurants and caterers so affected by a public interest as to merit a ban? Harder question still: How many conventions of international law and due process apply to people who choose to operate outside the constraints of a state actor?

TO THE NORTHWEST FRONTIER. The Black Hawk War of 1832 merits further study. Today's post is a discovery I made while on a quest of a different kind. On the outskirts of Elizabeth, Illinois, not far from the grade of the Chicago Great Western Railroad, is the Apple River Fort.

The original fort was put together in a big hurry after word reached settlers in the area of the defeat of Stillman's Regiment to the southeast. The settlers quickly built a stockade around a cabin. The reconstruction includes manufactured goods characteristic of the early 1830s, although I suspect there is a bit more stuff in here than a mining family would have owned. (Nearby Galena is named for a lead-bearing ore, and Wisconsin's original Badgers were lead miners, not predatory mammals.)


The stockade included this fortified barracks building. The officers' quarters are on the ground floor, and 20 enlisted men slept upstairs.


This elevated firing point is aligned in the general direction of Stillman Valley.


The Black Hawk War is instructive in a number of ways. It could have been avoided. The U.S. government had a dispute with the Sauk tribe over who had the right to grow corn east of the Mississippi River. I'll have to do some more reading on this dimension of the story. At least twice during the war, U.S. regulars or Illinois militia fired on Sauk parties displaying a flag of truce. The U.S. government entered into alliances of convenience with inter alia the Winnebago and Sioux tribes who had disagreements of their own with the Sauk (are our counterinsurgency specialists studying these records?) Although in the State Line, Abraham Lincoln is the most frequently mentioned Distinguished Person to have fought in the campaign, you might recognize Jefferson Davis, Winfield Scott, and Zachary Taylor, who also participated.

The fort did what it was intended to do. Black Hawk's unit attacked with superior numbers, but the women inside, several of whom were named Elizabeth, assisted the men by reloading spare muskets and casting shot. (We're talking about nineteenth-century flintlock muzzle-loaders.) The defenders were able to maintain a firing rate that persuaded Black Hawk his unit was attacking a much larger force, and he broke off the attack to pilfer foodstuffs from the cabins outside the stockade.

The original fort was dismantled shortly after the campaign ended near Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin. This reconstruction dates to the late 1990s, based on archaeological exploration of the fort site.

CLANG, CLANG, CLANG GO MORE TROLLEYS. The Economist hails the tram. (Via Live from the Third Rail.)

Many of the original streetcars and interurbans were projects financed by the power companies. There's a new source of subsidy unlikely to be enthralled by a trolley mania.

Light rail is hugely expensive. The federal government can cover 80% of the cost, but it is so deluged with applications that 50% is more typical. On the local level, higher taxes are always a hard sell—and several municipal governments are often involved, which complicates matters. A much-advertised benefit of light rail is that it sparks economic development around stations. At first, though, as is happening in Houston now, householders can delay projects out of fear that their property will fall victim to the bulldozers.

Cost overruns have already caused trouble in Seattle, which had to budget in an extra $1 billion several years ago. The city's financial storm has calmed, and Sound Transit expects to complete a light-rail link to the airport by 2009. Now, though, planners across America must worry about a huge jump in the price of construction materials. Concrete for tunnels, barriers and supports costs around 11% more than last year. Prices of steel, cement and copper wiring have gone up too.

Buses are cheaper, and can make use of the road network (that is, when the government is funding expansion of the road network.) But the city bus, and its intercity cousin, are canonical inferior goods.

Can cities get by with buses, which are far cheaper than rail? Sadly, few people want to ride on buses unless they have to. In many American cities they are the transport of the poor, the drunk and the illegal. They are slow and often smelly, and come at unpredictable intervals. And when they stop, they may block traffic.

But petrol prices are having an effect. Buses have seen some astonishing growth, especially in smaller cities, notes William Millar, the president of [the American Public Transit Association].

I'm not persuaded, however, that the wireless internet access on the streetcar light rail vehicle the article touts will be enough to take away its disadvantage in making multi-purpose trips. (That disadvantage can be mitigated but not eliminated by better connections and generous transfer privileges. "Punch mine a little long as I have a lot to buy down by Schuster's.")

THE LAWYERING BEGINS. At Blogs for Industry, an update on a tenure denial at Oakland including a notice of grievance by the AAUP. Oakland faculty are covered by a collective-bargaining agreement with the AAUP. Wayne State was also under such an agreement when I was there.

The Oakland AAUP note the possibility that departments have in fact been lax in properly mentoring tenure-track faculty and documenting their progress.

The administration’s responses to date for all three tenure grievances have raised several serious issues that will need to be addressed during bargaining next summer. For the two current grievances these responses contained a sentence that should be immediately brought to the attention of all current candidates for reappointment and tenure. In both cases the administration claims it is the andidate’s “responsibility to develop and fully complete” the review dossier and that both “did not contain sufficient evidence that … had satisfied the (unit) criteria.” These statements could be read to say that perhaps the candidate had met the criteria but that this could not be established from material presented in the dossier. It is worth repeating that it is the candidate’s responsibility to prepare the strongest possible dossier to document fulfillment of all criteria. An academic unit that fails to assist a candidate in preparing such a dossier is either intentionally or unintentionally undercutting their colleague’s chances for a positive review.

Whether those criteria are properly stated or not, there's something wrong if a department and a college review committee can both recommend a candidate for promotion and tenure with little or no dissent only to have a case overturned for lack of documentation.

OUCH. Brett Favre is shut out for the first time in 220 starts with the Packers. I hear some crowing, but I'm not hearing the Berry Weiss being opened.

GUESS WHO'S COMING TO DINNER? I suppose I owe my friendly connection at University Diaries some reporting from Huskie Stadium next week, where our guest for Business and Ag Night and Scout Night is Buffalo, currently giving Bowling Green all a Falcon can handle. (Buffalo have one more win than Northern Illinois does.)

THEY CAN BRAG ABOUT SCORING FIRST, I SUPPOSE. In other games of interest to Cold Spring Shops, Wisconsin 34, Western Illinois 10.

THE SECRET SUCCESS STORY. The idea of comparing the travails of higher education to the troubled years of the regulated railroad occurred to me some time ago, when I brought to readers attention two books by Clemson historian Richard Saunders, Merging Lines and Main Lines, about the twentieth-century decline and transformation of the railroads. Merging Lines is a revision of The Railroad Mergers and the Coming of Conrail, which I read long ago and do not consider it sporting to claim a book review for browsing a second edition. Main Lines is relatively new. I dug into it before my trip to the Semmering Pass, and was sufficiently versed with its argument to be able to use some material in contrasting the problems of the European railroads with our own. (Short form: passengers and freight don't mix. Longer form: it might be possible to make money hauling freight.) I recently picked up and finished the book and suggest in Book Review No. 31 that it's a readable summary of the transformation of the regulated competition among numerous smaller railroads into the deregulated competition of two Canadian-based, two eastern, and two western railroads (with a little participation from some emerging "regional" carriers that do more business than some of the old-style trunk lines.)

The transformation of the railroads will give pause to devotees of Four-R Acts and 10-point programs, although, in fairness, deregulation was a bipartisan effort spanning the Carter and Reagan administrations. Main Lines focuses first on the evolution of public policy, from the nationalizations of the passenger service and of Penn Central (and the anthracite roads other than Delaware and Hudson and Erie-Lackawanna) through the Staggers Act and the privatization of Conrail. Next comes the business history, in which consolidations worthy of the House of Morgan lead to the emergence of what Professor Saunders calls the Super Seven (there is something magnificent in calling the roll of Conrail, CSX, Norfolk Southern, Union Pacific, Santa Fe, Southern Pacific, and Burlington Northern) and that morphs into a North American Final Six (BNSF, CSX, CN Rail, Canadian Pacific, Norfolk Southern, Union Pacific. At least three of them still have names that sound like railroads!) There are still stories to tell about the business strategy, and the re-creation of the Kansas City Mexico and Orient is a tale in progress.) The ending refers to the "invisible revolution" in railroading (no more cabooses to wave to, fewer shiny streamliners calling at fewer towns, but plenty of coal and especially containers) as well as the inevitable transition troubles: discriminatory pricing against captive shippers, staffing difficulties (the industry may be invisible, but too many train crews are subject to short rest and arbitrary call times); raising capital (there has been some progress in doubling and trebling the Transcontinental on the old Santa Fe, but Union Pacific and CSX face lawsuits from Amtrak over dispatching delays); and providing passenger service (fragmentation has worked better here than it did in Britain, but suburbanization and rising gasoline prices are going to aggravate the pressure on the network).

THE EFFICIENT LEVEL OF PARTICIPATION. In some ways, this post is a continuation of the preceding one. Rev. Minogue suggests there's plenty of upside potential for higher education, particularly of the cookie-cutter entry-level knowledge worker form. But there's accumulating evidence that inefficiently much participation in higher education, particularly of the form I characterized as "inefficiently much College Lite and inefficiently little Rigorous Learning." That post has attracted some comments and questions that I wish to place in a broader context.

Start with a USA Today report on the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education's latest National Report Card on Higher Education. The newspaper introduces the story as

The United States has made incremental improvements in preparing students for college in recent years, but it has made “no notable progress since the early 1990s” in increasing college participation rates, a report says. And, it says, degree-completion rates in the USA compare poorly with those of other countries.

Those and other findings “challenge the notion that the American higher education system is still the best in the world,” says former North Carolina governor James Hunt, chairman of the board of the non-partisan National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, based in San Jose, Calif.

There's more than one way to interpret the data. The harshest observation comes from the Center for College Affordability and Productivity, which notes "Too Many Kids Go to College." The post is inspired by a Pope Center report, "The Overselling of Higher Education." I'll just quote the executive summary.

Higher education in the United States has been greatly oversold. Many students who are neither academically strong nor inclined toward serious intellectual work have been lured into colleges and universities. At considerable cost to their families and usually the taxpayer as well, those students sometimes obtain a degree, but often with little if any gain in human capital that will prove beneficial in the labor market or in dealing with the challenges of life.

Because governments pay a large portion of the cost of a college education,students and their families do not bear its true cost. For that reason, they tend to make poorer choices – both with their dollars and the amount of effort they put into college.

Furthermore, students and their families often have an exaggerated or inaccurate view of the benefits that can be expected from a college education. The belief that obtaining a college degree is the only way for young people to find good employment and enjoy a prosperous life is widespread, but mistaken. Having a college degree is neither necessary nor sufficient for success.

Although it is often said that getting a college degree is becoming increasingly important because good jobs for people with only a high school education are supposedly vanishing, that appearance is mainly due to the phenomenon of credential inflation. As the possession of a college degree has become increasingly common among people in the labor market, employers have responded by using the possession of a college degree as a screening device. Few jobs demand such a high level of knowledge and skill that they cannot be performed by individuals with a sound basic education, but many employers now decline to consider high school graduates since there is such a large pool of college graduates available.

The great expansion of higher education has led to an infusion of large numbers of "disengaged students," which has had a deleterious effect on academic standards. In order to keep such students enrolled, schools have lowered academic standards, inflated grades, and degraded the curriculum. Many of the students who now obtain college degrees graduate with weak skills and can do no better in the labor market than taking "high school jobs." Keeping large numbers of academically indifferent students in college is costly not only in financial terms, but also in its tendency to lower academic standards and thereby waste the time of better students.

To combat the overselling of higher education, academic standards need to be raised and governmental subsidies for college studies should be lowered.

The details go on for over 40 pages.

The Inside Higher Ed commentary on the report card recognizes some of those points, but dissents on others.

[Center president Patrick] Callan said that on affordability, there is plenty of blame to go around. The federal government has failed to keep Pell Grants’ value rising with the cost of attending college. But he said that more Pell funds alone wouldn’t solve the problems because with rising tuition rates, “all the new money gets absorbed.” He called for a push by colleges to limit increases, while federal and state governments try to provide more need-based aid.

Might it be incentive-compatible for the vouchers to accompany the students?

But Mr Callan is somewhat more optimistic about being able to expand participation.

With the ground covered by the commission, Callan said, “the argument that this can’t be done without destroying higher education or dumbing it down is pretty much dead in the water.”

To some extent, the improvements his organization notes reflect some toughening up in high school. There is room for more improvement there, notes Joanne Jacobs.

Many students would work harder in school if they knew that it matters. Some slackers get it together later and use the community college system to catch up. Many struggle to get jobs as hospital janitors: They can't read the warning labels on cleaning solvents.

High schoolers can be expected to aspire beyond their abilities, but the size of the reality check is growing.

So why are kids today so clueless about their chances? [Florida State sociologist John] Reynolds said an increase in community colleges with lower admission standards may encourage unrealistic expectations about the possibilities of eventual bachelor's and professional degrees. Plus, today's high school teachers and counselors lack the authority to discourage students from attending college, even if they make very poor grades.

Kenneth Ginsburg, an adolescent medicine specialist at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and an American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) spokesman, has seen the consequences of high expectations unmet.

"What often happens is that many kids, regardless of socioeconomic background, start out by wanting to be in the exciting fields, the fields you see on TV," Ginsburg said. They want to be doctors, lawyers and basketball players. When the teens realize they'll never reach their dreams, he said, the results can be devastating.

"What you want to do is prevent a kid from hitting the wall," Ginsburg said. "If all of your eggs are put into one basket, and then suddenly you realize that you can't achieve something, you are left with a situation that is going to cause enormous amounts of stress and sadness."

The reality check matters, but the efficient level of reality check is less easy to determine. King Banaian endorses the multiple entry points to education and credentialing. Jim Hu is less certain.

Remediation is fine as far as it goes, and I'm a big believer in how America's greatness is related to second, third, and nth chances to reinvent oneself. But each of those retries has a cost and a probability of success. And every time we let them off the hook, we also teach the students a false lesson that is hard to unlearn: that these skills really aren't that important. Perhaps it would be better to teach students how to read, sustain an argument, and reason quantitatively the first time.

There's general agreement on that last sentence. Where commenters disagree is on the methods for inculcating those skills, nay, attitudes, in the first place.

In a related post, Jim Hu poses a tougher question.

One problem with [columnist Robert] Samuelson's analysis is that he's measuring students and adults by completely different standards. The students whose test scores give us low rankings among industrialized nations in math, science, and literacy don't learn to be that much better in math, science, or literacy after exposure to the real world. They do manage to get jobs that compensate for their educational shortcomings, often thanks to the innovation of the small fraction of their peers who weren't wrecked by our education system...supplemented by the tendency of highly educated and highly motivated people from other countries to come here to get rich. Is the US just better than most countries at implementing the theory of comparative advantage?

No, but the way in which the U.S. exploits its comparative advantage varies. I did a longer exposition of the answer here. The short form is that knowledge-intensive high-technology products can be produced using high-skilled workers (think iron puddlers and Web designers) or using low-skilled workers with easy-to-use machinery (think automobile assembly plants and picture presets on McDonald's cash registers.) The unionized middle-class economy many Democratic Party policy wonks pine for was of the latter form; the corresponding gains from trade to make dropouts productive without having to think about it have not yet been identified. The downside, however, was anticipated by Alfred Marshall years ago.

Ought we to rest content with the existing forms of division of labour? Is it necessary that large numbers of the people should be exclusively occupied with work that has no elevating character?

Can I include the administration's requests for progress reports on special education students in that last category?

INTERURBAN ALUMNI. In other games in progress, Penn State is playing at Notre Dame. The Chicago area traffic reports noted serious congestion on the Indiana Toll Road, and recommended that listeners ride the South Shore. Shuttle buses are available from the South Bend airport to the stadium.

SECOND SECTION: Notre Dame running all over Penn State, Rutgers better than Illinois, and New Hampshire better than Northwestern. Akron beat North Carolina State, and Ball State leads Indiana.

THE DAGGER. With 2:30 remaining, Ohio 35, Huskies 23, on the ground, on the ground, on the ground.

CLAWING BACK. With 13:30 remaining, a Northern Illinois two-point conversion attempt fails, and the Huskies are on the wrong side of a 28-23 margin.

EFFRONTERY. With 7:52 remaining in the third, Ohio 21, Huskies 17.

SECOND SECTION. Make that 28-17 with 3:32 remaining in the third.

THE MONASTERY NO MORE. Retired DePaul University president Rev. John P. Minogue asserts, The 20th Century University Is Obsolete.

The transformation of Higher Education Life Forms on the distribution side of knowledge is even more dramatic, evolving a new species that concentrates simply on distribution of currently available knowledge.

This new species features a small core of knowledge engineers who wrap courses into a degree to be distributed in cookie-cutter institutions and delivered by working professionals, not academics. There is no tenured faculty, no academic processes; the sole focus is on bottom-line economic results. These 21st century institutions are not burdened with esoteric pursuits of knowledge; rather, they focus on professional degrees for adults that have a fairly clear market value for a given career path.

The exemplars of this new species are the for-profit universities, which are cutting their teeth on the weakness of the 20th century universities. Though new at the game, in a few years they will be capable of hunting with lethal success. This new species is market-driven. Its key survival mechanism is the ability to rapidly evolve to new environments and to position in the market. Since they do not carry tenured faculty, they can rapidly jettison disciplines of study that do not penetrate market. Since they do not have academic processes, they can rapidly bring to market programs that can capture market share.

I take exception to the characterization of scholarship as "esoteric." Sure, there might be some people who want to stay one refinement ahead of Jean Tirole in the repeated chain store game, but there might be some value in understanding the logic of amnesties for illegal immigrants or perhaps in assessing the claim that Smokestack America gave its steel industry away by modernizing lethargically.

That there is a niche for "cookie-cutter institutions and delivered by working professionals, not academics" does raise the possibility that the traditional liberal arts curriculum is not for everybody, but that's a problem in allocating resources among types of education and training, not an argument for the obsolescence of the traditional university. (The institution that tries to be a little bit of everything is not so much obsolete as it is confused.)

The column is also a bit confused.

Still, these once elegant life forms persevere, but for reasons having nothing to do with innate capability to embrace change. Instead, at the undergraduate level it is the instinctual and perhaps irrational desire of many parents to see their children prosper in a traditional liberal arts environment, and so their willingness to spend inordinate amounts of money for education.

Instinctual or irrational? The first rule of economics research is, "Assume people are acting in what they perceive to be their best interest." Sometimes it's rational to participate in a positional arms race. (Yes, I hammer this point a lot. There's a bit of Grant, or is it Soviet doctrine, in the way I choose topics to post on. My suggestion that the access-accommodation-remediation-retention model is contributing to the U.S.-News driven positional arms race is gaining traction. I propose to fight it out on this line and all that.)

In addition, traditional universities have benefited from some serious slack in the evolutionary rope. The Industrial Age required a few knowledge workers and a lot of folks doing heavy lifting, whereas the Knowledge Age requires vast numbers of educated workers. Almost overnight, this has led to a massive spike in global demand for education, with motivated consumers increasing perhaps 100-fold. What was the privilege of a few has become the expectation of all.

But global supply falls far short of meeting demand. With a population of 295 million, the United States has only 15 million active seats in the higher education classroom; China, with a population of 1.2 billion, has 2 million seats available; Brazil, with a population 170 million, has 2.5 million seats available.

This imbalance between supply and demand has creating a robust market for all providers. Suppliers of higher education simply have to dip their nets in the water to catch students. There is not yet the fight-to-the death competition for market share, and inefficient institutions have received a short reprieve from their evolutionary fate. But at some point, as with all markets, a saturation point will be reached, with supply outstripping demand — perhaps in 5, perhaps in 15 years. When this inversion occurs, those life forms with the required flexibility to quickly adapt to a fiercely competitive environment will survive and the others will fade from memory.

Autistic number-crunching. There is more than one way to adapt the technology to the workforce. With that kind of upside potential the problem the conventional universities face is that of neglecting their core functions in order to become more like the cookie-cutter certifiers. (Wasn't the point of the government's primary and secondary schools to do that certifying?) Rev. Minogue misses that completely.

So what will be demanded of 20th century universities to survive when market supply reaches or exceeds demand? As in every market, those producers that have driven efficiency into their production system and responsiveness into their market positioning have at least a change at surviving. But the challenge is daunting because the 20th century university is trying to play serious catch up in new markets — adults, women, diversities, the under privileged — while using the same mentalities that allowed them to attract the 18 to 25 year old male.

As with IBM, which played in the personal computer market, but really lived in the mainframe business market, there is no fire in the belly of 20th century universities for these new markets. These institutions have not changed the way they go about their business to serve these new markets; and if there has been some change, it has been accompanied by the widespread grumbling of the faculty: Why do we have to teach at night? Why do we have to teach at multiple campuses? Why do we have to provide support services in the evening? Why do we have to teach students who aren’t educated the way we were? Why do we have to schedule classes so students can maximize their employment opportunities?

Let's boil that down to a single question: Why is DePaul bent on becoming a Pauline community college? I'm listening to the Northern Illinois University publicity during the game, which stresses the opportunity to learn from a world-class faculty and interact with a wide variety of students. A voice-over suggests Northern Illinois is becoming "the university of choice" just south of the Cheddar Curtain. Note what's missing: precisely the access-accommodation-remediation-retention stuff Rev. Minogue's colleagues are troubled by. (And justifiably so: he's informing them in so many words, "You may have been hired to do leading edge research and teach college-ready students. But you are now to retrain as special education teachers." And he calls the desire of parents to have their kids prosper in a traditional environment irrational?)

The comments that accompany Rev. Minogue's column will reward careful study.

HALFTIME. Huskies 17, Bobcats 14.

IF YOU'RE SO SMART WHY AREN'T YOU RICH? Political strategist Paul Waldman contrasts the Democratic and Republican styles of campaigning.

Think about what happens in campaign after campaign. The Democrat comes before the public and says, "If you read my 10-point policy plan, I'm sure you'll vote for me. Let's go over it point by point." The Republican then comes before the public, points to the Democrat, and says, "That guy is a weak, elitist liberal who hates you and everything you stand for. I'm one of you and he's not." And guess who wins.

That's probably not the best way to get people thinking more favorably about the Democrats. Consider first the non-sequitur in his characterization of the Republican's response. Does the 10-point policy plan include a plan for winding up the transition in Iraq and locating and liquidating Osama and Ayman? Or is it at best platitudes about improving relations with "international institutions?" Under the latter circumstances, "weak, elitist liberal" is harsh but descriptive.

Moreover, the limitations of 10-point policy plans, no matter how solid the credentials of the wonks who drafted them, are clear. Consider a passage from The Vices of Economists - The Virtues of the Bourgeoisie (p. 112).

The philosopher kings and central planners live in a world hopeful that procedure, mechanism, calculation, bureaucracy, MBA degrees, and other Tinbergean techniques will keep us warm and safe. It will not.

After going on eighty years of The Best and The Brightest attempting to manipulate the rest of us For Our Own Good with sometimes dubious results, the problem Mr Waldman's hypothetical Democrat faces is more severe than a bit of Republican name-calling.

Undaunted, Mr Waldman attempts to confront the paradox of being unpopular for favoring what popular opinion wants.

After it's all over, Democrats wonder why they lost, when a majority of the public favors nearly all the items on their agenda. Americans want a higher minimum wage, legal abortion, strong environmental protections, universal healthcare, and a tax policy that isn't tilted toward the wealthy, to name a few. But voters don't read policy papers, and they don't make decisions with a checklist of issues in their hands. That's why Republican campaigns operate on a different level: Whom do you identify with? Whom can you trust? Who is strong, and who is weak? These questions transcend issues, which is why Republicans -- who know they are at a disadvantage on the issues -- spend so much time talking about them.

Let's break this down. I suspect that if one took a survey in a college dormitory in the mid-1970s, a majority of the guys would favor having an evening alone with Farrah Fawcett. Could that wish be converted into a Congressional mandate? Discuss the obvious generalization. (I also recall President Reagan quipping about losing the war on poverty. Critics castigated him, but I've not seen a convincing refutation of his assertion.)

Thus, if the apparatus of Experts and 10-point programs is ineffective, what subsitute is there for integrity and resolve, even among politicians?

FOOTBALL SATURDAY. Parking spaces in central campus pretty-well filled for the first of three September home games. With 6:35 to play in the first, Northern Illinois 7, Ohio 0.

SECOND SECTION: Ohio answers with a long touchdown pass, then Garrett Wolfe breaks a long one. At 3:07 to play, Northern Illinois 14, Ohio 7.

A PAGE-TURNER. I just took delivery of Frederick Forsyth's The Afghan, and the speed with which this Book Review No. 30 is in front of you is a testament to its readability. Again, this is a review, not a plot summary. The research Mr Forsyth did to create The Odessa File and The Devil's Alternative certainly assisted in this tale grounded in contemporary insurgencies and covert operations. But (to use a term I just learned) discovery of the Unforeseen Cock-Ups are left to the reader. I will disclose this much: suppose Al-Qaeda is choosing Western targets in such a way as to keep domestic insurgents, particularly of the anti-capitalist-globalization kind, at least neutral?

THE WAVERLY ROUTE AND THE LACKAWANNA CUTOFF. During the era of decline of the loose-car steam railroad, the elimination of excess capacity became something between a survival strategy and an obsession. The title refers to two lines, the former the hill-and-dale mainline of the North British Railway between Carlisle and Edinburgh, which, like Rock Island's route between St. Louis and Kansas City, found the most difficult terrain while missing most of the cities inbetween; the latter a well-engineered line relocation from the New Jersey suburbs to Scranton, Pennsylvania. Both were closed under notorious retrenchments (the 1969 "Beeching Axe" chopped the Waverly, the 1976 Four-R (Conrail) Act led to the end of the Lackawanna Cutoff as well as most of the Erie-Lackawanna west of Meadville, Pennsylvania. Today, there is interest in restoring the Waverly so as to provide a way to move more freight while not interfering with the electric expresses on the East Coast and West Coast main lines, and in restoring the Lackawanna Cutoff to extend the suburban train services to Scranton (which is becoming the outermost suburb of New York) as well as to obtain more capacity for intermodal trains bound to the container ports of New Jersey and New York.

Universities seem bent on imitating the worst mistakes of railroads in the era of decline, including repackaging and slashing, and many seem doomed to learn the error of pursuing the downsizing fad too far. Consider Gilbert Hall on the Northern Illinois University campus. It was once a dormitory, right across a street from the art campus, and not far from physical education, engineering, and business. During the enrollment crunch of the early 1990s, it was converted to temporary quarters for administrators during the reconstruction of Altgeld Hall. After a number of cost overruns and delays, Altgeld has reopened as an office building, but there are still a few administrators in Gilbert. (They neither teach, nor do they do research.) It's easier to convert an office building that was once a residence hall back to a residence hall than it is to rebuild tracks that have been lifted, and headquarters contemplates making such a conversion.

I'm tempted to inquire about naming opportunities. How about Beeching Hall?

WHY DO YOU USE COLORED MARKERS? Does it help? Yes. That's why.

The context: an introduction of an Edgeworth Box model with threat points, the core, and a price ratio that generates excess demand and supply.

THIS WILL MOVE THEM UP IN THE RANKINGS. Sorry not to offer my guests more smack tonight. But head over to University Diaries for news of an Oakland University biologist recommended by her department, college, and the university personnel committee for tenure and promotion, only to have both vetoed by the provost for unstated reasons. There will be an AAUP grievance, although their newsroom hasn't yet noted it. I suppose if you're bottom-dwelling in the Washington Monthly rankings you have to do something.

RUNNING EXTRA. The trackback points to a Jim Hu post where he locates the minutes of the trustees' meeting at which the provost vetoes Professor Stryker's tenure. In those minutes, the money quote appears to be "Dr. Stryker has been told by the Dean of Arts and Sciences that the decision was based on her lack of independence as a researcher." Ah, the old coauthoring conundrum. (Historically, the lab scientists have questioned the economists' slow rate of publication and the economists have suggested that everybody who was in the building when the relevant titration was made or switch thrown is listed as an author. That does not appear to be an issue in this case.) Professor Stryker has provided additional information in a comment at University Diaries. She may have made the mistake of crossing the wrong person (her department chairman became provost) but the paper trail suggests procedural irregularities that will keep the common-room lawyers, as well as the real ones, occupied for some time. For starters, the department is obligated to note in a probationary faculty member's third-year and fifth-year review whether her research record offers sufficient evidence of her own talents as a scholar. (Continued publication with one's thesis advisor, or participation in grants at one's degree-granting institution, to the exclusion of any single-authored publications, collaboration with colleagues, or mentoring of Ph.D. students invites trouble. But the department or the college has failed to exercise due diligence in not suggesting a change of research emphasis.)

KARLSON'S ALGEBRA TRICKS. A Northern Star article on the physics of the forward pass challenges readers.

What's the solution of 18 x 35? The human mind is a number crunching machine - even if you're not in the middle of solving a math problem.

A few paragraphs later the article challenged readers, "Have you solved the multiplication problem yet?"

Simple: 18x35 = (20-2)x35 = 700-70 = 630, which I worked out before I got to that question. I have a bunch of these tricks.

The article makes the timing and aiming of a forward pass sound easier than it is. I never had such tricks.

ANCIENT VERITIES? Somewhere in my archives of railroadiana is a Chicago and North Western Railway scorecard for a golf outing. It's configured in such a way for the player to keep track of performances better and worse than par. In the margins near the best scores is the warning, "You have been neglecting your business." The note near the worst scores advises, "You have been neglecting your golf." USA Today reports anecdotal confirmation of that wisdom.

Golf Digest magazine today releases its biennial rankings of the top CEO golfers, and a USA TODAY analysis finds that two-thirds of the best 12 have seen their stock perform worse than the Standard & Poor's 500 index in 2006.

That includes the nation's best CEO golfer, Jim Crane of EGL, a shipping logistics company that ranks No. 599 on the Fortune 1,000. The 52-year-old Crane boasts a 0.8 handicap index. A handicap is an estimate of what a golfer shoots above par on his or her best days, so on Crane's best days he can be expected to shoot nearly even par.

EGL stock has fallen 20% vs. a 4% rise in the S&P 500. However, EGL rose 26% in 2005 vs. the 3% gain in the S&P.

Crane, who carries an extra set of clubs aboard his personal plane, said he was reluctant to make the list because he fears that people will think he's playing too much golf. He says he plays only on the weekends and hits a few balls in the evening. The stock, he says, is down due to investor fear that a slowing economy will hurt shipping. He jokes that the only influence he has on the economy is the greens fees he pays.

“There is no correlation whatsoever” between his golf and company performance, Crane says.

Trying to draw conclusions from CEO golf scores makes for entertaining reading, but they have nothing to do with each other, agrees Intuit CEO Steve Bennett, who moved from 17th to ninth by improving his handicap to 4.4 from 6.1. Intuit stock is up 18% this year after a 21% jump in 2005.

The sample of CEOs is probably small enough that Mr Crane's assertion is true if imprecise.

THE CLEANUP. Hard luck for a house rebuilder in Rockford.

Carl Sleszinski spent years fixing up seven houses on Sixth Avenue. On Monday he watched his hard work washed away by flood waters.

"Within two hours it was well up to the blocks on the home and we had people in canoes being helped out of their homes," Sleszinski said.

Three houses Sleszinski rehabbed are now condemned. He was planning on moving into a house until its foundation caved into the basement. So far, no one from the government has offered to help him rebuild.

"It seems like the people coming through here they look at it and say oh that's too bad. Well give an honest answer on if there's going to be any assistance."

Residents on 6th Avenue say the city needs to clean up Keith Creek. They're worried a tree that's been lying there for at least six months could cause another flood.

"I think it's part of their job to clean it. The city, it looks like they've ignored it," said Dennis Lee, a 6th Ave. resident.

"City people drive by that all the time and nothing is done about it. It's like if we don't have the money we don't care," said Sleszinski.

Relief efforts are in progress. I will alert readers to any special fundraising efforts.

FINDING THE MARGINAL BENEFITS. The New York Times discovers that sometimes college is the new middle school.

Along a wall is a rack of handouts explaining points of grammar that might have last been explicitly taught in middle school, a measure of the immense ground to be made up. One covers comparative adjectives, explaining “more” vs. “most” or “smarter” vs. “smartest.” Another discusses using pronouns and verb tenses.

Two very different essays have reacted to this article, which I have deliberately cherry-picked for the worst news first.

The dean at Anonymous Community offers some observations on the necessary evils of remediation from the perspective of a remediation provider, as well as the potential for an incorrect remedy.

After a considerable amount of back-and-forth with the department, the high school, and the testing center, I think I've located the gap. We test different skills. The high school defines 'good writing' as error-free prose. The college defines 'good writing' as 'sustaining an argument.' So the high school kids take our essay exam and write “See Spot run,” which got them accolades in high school; they place remedial with us, and get terribly upset.

My concern there is that with the current push for some sort of standardized national outcomes assessment test, we'll move to the high school model. It's easier to count errors 'objectively' than to assess the weight of an argument, so I'm worried that, in the name of uniformity, we'll move to error-counting. “See Spot run” will become exemplary.

I submit, however, that he's placing the blame for the toleration of poor work in the wrong place.

On a more mundane administrative level, the article highlights the glaring flaw in the move to define higher education as a private good. To the extent that cc's and other less-selective public colleges are forced to become more tuition-driven, it becomes harder for us to deliver bad news to students. If a student marches out the door upon being told he needs remediation – a fairly common occurrence, in fact – then the institution shoots itself in the foot financially by doing the right thing. At my previous employer, a for-profit, the bar for remediation was set so low that almost nobody was placed into it, despite some glaring skills deficits. That was a policy decision set to ensure that we didn't blow the sale when a student came to enroll.

When public colleges got smaller percentages of their budgets from tuition, it was easier to hold the line on these issues. As the public sector has shifted its funding to prisons and tax cuts, we've had to rely more on tuition, making the temptation to lower the standards much more compelling. If we're serious about fixing skills deficits, we have to stop punishing the colleges that actually try.

I disagree. The strategy of pursuing short-term tuition revenues by lax standards comes undone when those graduates write a "See Spot run" cover letter on a resume (or, worse, send "can u give me a job?" as a cover letter.) When the employers quit showing up at the job fairs or sending recruiters, the self-esteem game is over. Sorry to sound like a broken record. It is time for the mid-majors and the community colleges to stop apologizing for higher tuitions and recognize that their talk of access and accommodation simply gives promising students more reason to get sucked into the U.S. News driven positional arms race. (I'm beginning to suspect that the U.S. has precisely the wrong kind of excess capacity in higher education: inefficiently much College Lite and inefficiently little Rigorous Learning.)

The dean's conclusion is one that conflates marginal with total spillover benefits.

In this, as in so many things, defining a public good (an educated citizenry) as a private good (a credential for making more money) works fine for those at the top, but screws over those at the bottom. Thanks to the Times for noticing the existence of the bottom. Any time it would like to bother doing some actual analysis, that would be great.

What the article suggests is a failure of somebody (the common schools? the prisons? the churches?) to produce the genuine public good, life management skills, which both the dean ("The article acknowledges that many college students arrive with serious skills deficits, outside jobs, and family obligations. Some may never have made it through a serious book cover-to-cover; some may have only the foggiest grasp of algebra") and the article ("Two or three students in a class of 10 women carried most of the discussion, which seemed more like Ricky Lake than Lit 101, with students reacting to the film almost exclusively in terms of their personal experiences.") gloss over.

An American Thinker article asks some of the same questions I do.

There is a similar concern for the fitness of things in Schemo’s report on education problems. It does not seem to occur to her to wonder, let alone ask tough questions, about the national problem with remedial courses. How could the young man not know that he was unprepared for college-level math? And how could the folks at his Maryland public high school not have advised him? Did they not know that their graduates were being forced into remedial courses? And weren’t they doing something about it?

Isn’t there maybe something really wrong with an education system that allows this problem to develop and then allows it to fester?

His perspective on the changes to come is different.

But what if they are missing the point? What if the institution of work for cash wages—the common form of employment since the industrial revolution—is now in its decline, and that people must now offer their services to the market on a different basis?

What if they are missing the point on education as well? In the past generation we have doubled the inflation-adjusted monetary input into K-12 education, yet the positive effect as expressed in tests like the SAT has been less than zero. Could this be telling us something?

Two centuries ago the industrial revolution transformed the world of work for the common people and the elites of the world decided that every boy and girl should go to school. Perhaps the information revolution will do the same, and provoke an utter transformation in the world of work.

A Robert Samuelson column (via Betsy's Page) attempts to square the circle, suggesting that a mugging by reality often motivates people to continue their education.

Up to a point, you can complain that this system is hugely wasteful. We're often teaching kids in college what they should have learned in high school -- and in graduate school what they might have learned in college. Some of the enthusiasm for more degrees is crass credentialism. Some trade schools prey cynically on students' hopes and spawn disappointment. But these legitimate objections miss the larger point: The American learning system accommodates people's ambitions and energies -- when they emerge -- and helps compensate for some of the defects of the school system.

In Charlotte, about 70 percent of the recent high school graduates at Central Piedmont Community College need remedial work in English or math. Zeiss thinks his college often succeeds where high schools fail. Why? High school graduates "go out in the world and see they have no skills," he says. "They're more motivated." The mixing of older and younger students also helps; the older students are more serious and focused.

But despite Mr Samuelson's enthusiasm for spontaneous order, he sees inefficiently much reliance on Reality Check.

This fragmented and mostly unplanned learning system is a messy mix of government programs and private business. In some ways it compares favorably to other countries' more controlled governmental systems. Of course, that isn't an excuse for not trying to improve our schools. We would certainly be better off if more students performed better.

Is "performed better" the outcome of Habits of Highly Effective People that can be learned starting in kindergarten?

LESSONS LEARNED. After World War II a combination of wartime damage, insufficient return on capital, and ideology led to the creation of British Railways as a nationalization of the four investor-owned railways. The transition era is the subject of Robert Hendry's The Changing Face of Britain's Railways 1938-1953: The Railway Companies Bow Out. The book is a well illustrated history of the era, providing sufficient content for a proper Book Review No. 29.

A disclaimer: I am acquainted with Mr Hendry, whose Hillside Films might be of interest to the Russophile and whose Russian Railways Group is helpful for projects of the 4-14-4 kind.

Let's go to the lessons learned first (p. 185.)

It is popular to portray 'The Railway Executive' years from 1948 to 1953 as a period when Britain's railways lurched into crisis, due to inept management from the RE. Generations of writers have accepted this unquestioningly, and a 'fact' once it is in print, takes on a life of its own. Whether it is true or not, becomes irrelevant. When I started researching this book, I shared some of those prejudices, though a background knowledge of what was happening on other railway systems in the British Isles meant that I was not wholly convinced that railway officers who had done a good job in the traumatic years of World War Two, suddenly deteriorated into the buffoons that some writers would have us believe. As facts started to emerge, they had an inconvenient habit of not supporting the popular version of events. If one fact could not support the approved story, it could be disregarded as an aberration. If two were out of line, then there were two aberrations. If virtually every fact was an aberration, I had to ask if the story I had accepted all my life was right or wrong?

To be specific, the government railway maintained an operating ratio of around 92% throughout the 1948-1953 Railway Executive era. The net operating surplus appears to have been sufficient to meet the fixed charges of the investor-owned companies, although there are some ceteris paribus problems inherent in comparing the consolidations and abandonments of the government railway with what investor-owned railways might have done. One thing that did change was the capital structure, which under investor ownership offered a portfolio of common stock for risk takers and debentures for risk averters. (In the United States, railroads never had any trouble financing new rolling stock during the most troubled years of the 1960s as the locomotives and cars were sufficient collateral.) British Railway borrowing took the form of government bonds, which were used to buy out all the various claims share- and bondholders held to the investor-owned lines. That capital structure might have been suboptimal as well as inconsistent with the "operated in the public interest" objective claimed for nationalization.

The sections I found most instructive were the chapters on Ireland and the discussion of reconstruction. At nationalization, the investor-owned railways of Ulster presumably became part of British Railways. (Those details are not spelled out in the book. The Ulster schedules appear in the successor to Bradshaw's; the track gauge is different, and there is international interchange with Eire's railroad.) In Ireland, an observer could summarize in microcosm the effects of road competition, deferred maintenance, and war wear that later afflicted the larger systems on Britain proper. Reconstruction involved continuation of some locomotive-building programs in progress on the investor-owned lines. The Railway Executive did not see fit to hold those projects in abeyance pending the creation of the go-anywhere British Railways Standard steam locomotives, most of which, with running boards above the drivers and external motion, would not look out of place on Canadian Pacific. Mr Hendry is sympathetic to the Railway Executive's decision to continue the steam locomotive programs and develop diesel and electric locomotives domestically rather than come up with foreign exchange for oil and for North American diesel technologies. I'm inclined to disagree, with the advantage of a hindsight that has some forty years later seen the introduction of reliable Electro-Motive Division diesels (the Classes 59 and 66) and the equivalent of a Silvis rebuild with Electro-Motive prime movers dropped into Class 47s. There might be a Master's paper in quantifying the losses of the domestic development policy, particularly as it evolved after the crash modernizations of the 1960s (anybody remember Pennsy's haphazard rush to buy any diesel it could and junk the ill-advised T1 duplexes after five years? Compare and contrast.)

Changing Face offers food for thought for students of Penn Central, Conrail, and deregulation. Pennsy and New York Central were also affected by road competition, difficulties maintaining the common and preferred dividends (Pennsy's uninterrupted common dividend being a slow liquidation) and war wear, admittedly less severe in light of the German inability to develop an intercontinental bomber. The merger: grouping. Conrail: nationalization. Deregulation and privatization? It seems to have gone better than the fragmentation of British Rail, but other circumstances were at work. More about that anon.

MEMOS AND PIPES. A colleague reminded me that legendary basketball coach Al McGuire (the other Wisconsin-based coach to win an NCAA title in March 1977) used that term to refer to administrators and professors. (And what does it say about the current professoriate so cravenly caving to the fanatics that eventually made entire college towns into no-smoking sections? But I digress.)

It's rather the Munger Conjecture on the proliferation of McAdministration in state universities that I wish to address.

Edward Hopper's Nighthawks in O Scale.

The research staff at the Center for College Affordability and Productivity (I'm still not sure whether this is two guys at a smoke-filled Internet cafe, or a second-floor rented office above an all-night beanery with a good view of the drop forge across the railroad tracks) have done a preliminary pass through some college payroll statistics.

We took the total amount of money spent on professor salaries and divided it by the stated tuition at three rather different type schools. We calculated the average of this statistic for the eight Ivy League schools, the elite private schools that are widely acknowledged to be amongst the best in America. We did the same for the 11 public schools in the Big Ten athletic conference, a group of high quality flagship state universities. Finally, we did the same for the dozen schools belonging to the Mid-American athletic conference, a group of medium-sized and generally perceived to be medium-quality state institutions with somewhat less of a research emphasis than the Big Ten schools.

This is the same kind of imprecisely-specified number-crunching that so frustrated me in Going Broke By Degree. Is the numerator faculty salaries? Instructional payroll? Something else? Is the denominator full-fare tuition multiplied by enrollment? Reported tuition receipts?

Now consider the effects of the disaggregation.

In the Ivy League, professorial costs were on average less than 20 percent of stated tuition levels. In the Big Ten, the figure was much higher, close to 70 percent, whereas the Mid-American conference schools average was somewhat below 50 percent. Moreover, these statistics were calculated including graduate and professional students in the enrollment figures. These students absorb a relatively higher portion of faculty resources than undergraduates, suggesting our little ratio may overstate faculty salaries of those actually teaching undergraduates as a percent of tuition.

Or that the Ivies report compensation differently or rely more heavily on adjunct faculty not accounted for in the line item called "salaries and wages, tenured and tenure-track faculty?" Or that "actually teaching undergraduates" is as complete a job description for the professor as "actually preaching sermons" is for the parson? Or that there's a demand side, and the positional arms race among ambitious parents bids up posted tuitions at the Ivies but the administrations have resisted temptations to enroll as many students as Ohio State, creating more competition for professors?

Not upstairs over the beanery:

Assume that universities need facilities and support personnel that cost as much as faculty costs in order to permit instruction. Call that the 100 percent overhead cost assumption. Ignore the overstatement of salaries bias mentioned in the previous paragraph. Then at the average Ivy League school stated tuition rates are well over twice as great as the actual cost of educating students.

It's rivet-counting to ask whether the brain coach for the Harvard hockey team (it's quite good) belongs in that allocation or not, but the allocation is arbitrary.

These schools make a massive profit off undergraduates that is used to subsidize other activities (and also pay themselves handsomely; counting fringe benefits, the average total compensation of a full professor at Harvard now approximates $200,000 a year).

Couldn't the numbers be used equally well to argue that Harvard's senior professors are exploited: there's a heck of a lot of surplus value being accumulated by somebody (or dissipated in rent seeking?) Those other activities? Distinguish the above calculation from a calculation that the local Baptist congregation is paying the equivalent of $20,000 an hour to hold church on Sunday, with the building mostly idle the rest of the week while the pastor is calling on the sick or protesting injustices.

Closer to home, after a few strong coffees they come up with this.

In the Mid-America conference schools, professor salaries, even with 100 percent overhead costs, on average are slighly less than tuition. For undergraduate students, these schools may well make a modest surplus. State government subsdies do not appear to support undergraduate instruction. Again, the question is: why do taxpayers permit this to happen?

But suppose the Mid-American universities rely more heavily on non-tenure-track faculty not included in the numerator, and devote more resources to retention and remediation, undertaken by individuals who may not do any teaching at all? To return to the Munger Conjecture: is the alleged lack of productivity in higher education attributable to the proliferation of support staff and McAdministrators who neither teach nor do research?

When the researchers finished their coffees, they promised more.

To be sure, there are a lot of qualifications to this analysis that we are not discussing here in this already over long blog. For example, "net tuition fees" (after scholarships) are lower than stated "sticker prices." More needs to be said. Therefore,watch for more on this topic in the days, weeks, and months ahead.

Some discussion of sources and methods in those forthcoming posts will help.

BEGGARING THY HUSKIES. As I was going to the Silver Creek and Stephenson, I observed a billboard for the University of Wisconsin at Platteville advertising a price break called the Tri-State Initiative. The promotional language is a masterpiece of wonk-speak.

The Tri-State Initiative is a result of the State of Wisconsin identifying possible workplace shortfalls in several occupational fields, many of which are considered strengths among UWP's academic programs. These programs include engineering, manufacturing technology, building construction, computer science, business, agriculture, criminal justice and education. In response, UWP has developed a way to address these shortfalls by attracting more students interested in these occupations to the University.

The Tri-State Initiative is designed to increase enrollment by 2000 new undergraduate students in 10 years. The target recruitment region for the additional students is Iowa and Illinois! These regions have historically been productive recruitment areas for UWP. This new initiative features competitive pricing with other tri-state institutions when annual tuition, fees, room, board and books are included.

Northern Illinois University isn't doing anything this visible, but we've been working with guidance counselors just north of the Cheddar Curtain, particularly in those counties that might be among the northernmost counties of Illinois (Rock, Walworth, Kenosha, Door, and Vilas, for outlanders.)

LEFT UNSAID. I had occasion to watch the Fox News special, "Why Does College Cost So Much and Is It Worth It?" As with most news specials, it's long on anecdote and short on analysis, although the producers manufactured a bit of a debate between Chicago's James Heckman, who noted that the private benefits of a degree were large and borrowing against future earnings rational, and Ohio's Richard Vedder, who suggested that the availability of loans likely induces bursars to raise their rates. Left unexplored was the role of positional arms races in raising the value of Professor Heckman's university and others like it.

Professor Vedder takes a first cut at a related problem.

On the one hand, we as a nation have a tradition of wanting to provide opportunities for all Americans to improve their lot in life --call it the egalitarian or equal opportunity ideal. At the same time, we want efficiency in our colleges and high performance per dollar spent. Therefore we want kids to go to college who will work hard,and will learn. By inference, we, appropriately, do not want to spend resources on kids who drop out and fail to succeed much academically.

Our goal of "equal access" leads us to massive student aid programs, such as Pell Grants and some of the student loan schemes. Our goal of improved productivity and efficiency leads us to anti-access policies, such as restricting enrollment of less qualified students. The plain fact is that many low income, disadvantaged students are poorly qualified for colleges. If we let these students have easy access to relatively expensive four year institutions, we squander a lot of resources and get the current 50 percent or so drop out rates. If we insist on high admission standards, however, we deny access to many low income students, and restrict access disproportionately to some minority groups, such as African-Americans and Hispanics.

Insufficient alternatives? So what we may have is a separating equilibrium in which high prices and perceived selectivity signal a challenging curriculum and fewer "retention" problems, and low prices and a large student support corps signal a less challenging curriculum as a way of bolstering "retention." Read more closely, however: the problem is not higher education's, it is a failure of the common schools properly to prepare their graduates.

King Banaian considers additional tradeoffs.

IN AN OCTOPUSES' GARDEN THERE IS OIL. Goodly amounts of the stuff, apparently.

Chevron on Tuesday estimated the 300-square-mile region where its test well sits could hold between 3 billion and 15 billion barrels of oil and natural gas liquids. The U.S. consumes roughly 5.7 billion barrels of crude-oil in a year.

But there is the tension between tourism interests and extraction interests.

The proximity of the Gulf of Mexico to the world's largest oil consuming nation makes it especially attractive. And it could bring pressure on Florida and other states to relax limits they have placed on drilling in their offshore waters for environmental and tourism reasons.

There's still work for me, distinguishing marginal and inframarginal suppliers.

A test well indicates it could be the biggest new domestic oil discovery since Alaska's Prudhoe Bay a generation ago. But the vast oil deposit roughly four miles beneath the ocean floor won't significantly reduce the country's dependence on foreign oil and it won't help lower prices at the pump anytime soon, analysts said.

"It's a nice positive, but the U.S. still has a big difference between its consumption and indigenous production," said Art Smith, chief executive of energy consultant John S. Herold. "We'll still be importing more than 50 percent of our oil needs."

Sure, but the opportunity to defund Iran or Venezuela or Saudi Arabia is there.

WHO ATE THE TOUGHER CUPCAKE? College football's #1 and #2 will play during the regular season.

The Longhorns are 4-0 in No. 1 against No. 2 games, the latest coming last season when they beat USC in the Rose Bowl for the national title as the second-ranked team.

Ohio State is 2-0 in 1-2 games, the last coming in the 2002 Fiesta Bowl. The No. 2 Buckeyes beat top-ranked Miami in that game to win their last national title.

The game will be in Austin, with Ohio State bent on returning last year's favor in Columbus, but with Northern Illinois having softened them up. (Anybody remember what happened to Michigan the week after they hosted Northern Illinois last year?) Texas comes into the game after a more traditional bought win against North Texas.

HAVE I BEEN AT THIS FOR FOUR YEARS? It sometimes feels a lot longer than that.

STEAM IN THE STATE LINE. The Stephenson County Antique Engine Club operates a preservation railroad on the southeast side of Freeport, Illinois. The power is a 1912 36-ton Heisler geared locomotive. With the Illinois Railway Museum's steam locomotives undergoing work required for their next boiler inspection, the Silver Creek and Stephenson is the only railroad operating steam in the State Line.


The club purchased a short stretch of the Racine and Southwestern when the Milwaukee Road abandoned most of its branch lines in northern Illinois. The Milwaukee had to remove its tracks to preclude any continuing liability, but it was not obligated to remove bridge girders and culverts. Once upon a time, the Southwestern Limited and priority beer and auto-parts trains out of Milwaukee used this line.


There will be additional opportunities to explore this steam line, as preparations are under way for the Hallowe'en trains October 20-21. (There will also be "Sauerkraut and Bratwurst" days October 21-22, which intrigues.)


The Antique Engine Club also operates a regional history museum in the old County Farm building, which in 1900 was home to "sixty-two paupers, twenty-six of whom are crazy, five who are weak minded and three who have fits."


Today: nuggets about Freeport, site of one of the Lincoln-Douglas debates, that call for a return visit. There's much to explore in the northwest corner of Illinois.

AND THE WATERS PREVAILED. There was protracted rain this afternoon, thanks to a cool upper-level low and no jet stream. The southeast side of Rockford got the worst of it.

Rockford Register-Star photo by Sheryl Drost.

More pictures.

ABOVE OUR POOR POWER TO ADD OR DETRACT. Civil War novelist Jeff Shaara has written Civil War Battlefields: Discovering America's Hallowed Ground, which I am pleased to recommend to Civil War historians and casual tourists alike in this Book Review No. 28. The book combines capsule sketches of twelve battles with his own interpretation of the significance of events, and suggestions to the visitor. I have no evidence that he's getting a percentage each time a visitor hires a National Park Service guide, which is his advice to visitors.

Families with pre-teens might do well to entrust the research to their kids. Mr Shaara remarks favorably on his observations of "children who already know impressive details of the history of [Gettysburg], some leading their parents on a tour of their own, the child as historian." Guilty as charged, the same year he was first there!

His selection of battlefield parks to visit: Shiloh, Antietam, Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, Vicksburg, Chickamauga (which includes Lookout Mountain and Missionary Ridge), The Wilderness and Spotsylvania, New Market, Cold Harbor, and Petersburg (including the Rebel withdrawal to Appomattox.) He offers a mild apology for leaving out a few sites, which is inevitable in any tractable-sized book. I'd only note that a student of the Mississippi and Tennessee Rivers campaigns visit Belmont and Columbus, perhaps in preference to Fort Donelson. Shiloh is a must. Do take the time to walk the U.S. position in the sunken road, then walk the Rebel position facing it, where the greatest concentration of artillery assembled to that time was aimed at that road. Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, The Wilderness, and Spotsylvania are part of the same park site, and it is easy enough to visit those sites in the order they were fought over a day or two.

One gripe: the battle maps show insufficient geographical detail for my taste, and a bit more subtlety in the halftones to distinguish the units (or perhaps the official military unit symbols) would help.

GREAT LAKES, FREE-FIRE ZONE. The Coast Guard would like to practice terrorist-interdiction techniques on the Great Lakes. Perhaps that's evidence somebody's serious.

Lake Michigan has been used for military training in the past, going back to World War II. In recent years, parts of the lake have been designated as training zones, including areas near the Great Lakes Naval Station and Fort Sheridan, north of Chicago, and areas off of Manitowoc and Sheboygan counties that have been used occasionally for Air National Guard training.

CONTEMPLATING IMMISERIZATION. It's Labor Day, and time for a roundup of observations on the political economy of work and pay.

Zeidler Union Square, Milwaukee.

For tonight, four columns on income inequality, courtesy of University Diaries, who identified two fretful and two hopeful. First the fretful. Start with E. J. Dionne.

Want to know why so many men out there are mad? Check out Table A-2 on Page 38 of the Census report. (I'm grateful to my friend Bill Galston for calling it to my attention.) Adjusted for inflation, men's earnings were lower in 2005 than they were in 1973.

Dear liberals, who worry about the political leanings of angry men, and dear conservatives, who exploit that anger, do you have any proposals to end this income stagnation?

Ah, the joys of aggregating without respect to age, education, or country of origin. Then consider Thomas Frank. (No self-respecting Displaced Cheesehead pays for Times Select.)

When you view the world from the satisfied environs of Washington — a place where lawyers outnumber machinists 27 to 1 and where five suburban counties rank among the seven wealthiest in the nation — the fantasies of postindustrial liberalism make perfect sense. The reign of the “knowledge workers” seems noble.

Seen from almost anywhere else, however, these are lousy times. The latest data confirms that as the productivity of workers has increased, the ones reaping the benefits are stockholders. Census data tells us that the only reason family income is keeping up with inflation is that more family members are working.

University Diaries lays some smack on Mr Frank.

Longtime readers know that I have nothing in principle against Frank's effort to get the rest of the country outfitted with pitchforks and sent to Garrett Park. But I think he's wrong to assume that "Democratic leaders" are going to want to "talk about class issues." I've lived here a long time and met scads of Democratic leadership types -- in politics, academia, journalism, think tanks, etc. -- and the problem is that their class is absolutely equivalent to the Republicans' class.

Bill and Hillary vacation on Nantucket. Then there's John Kerry.

These are all happy satisfied rich people. You don't stir up class resentment among such people, whatever their theoretical ideological commitments may be.

In a way, Frank's comment admits as much; he says that class war will have to come from the grassroots. Then why is he writing in the New York Times? If something's the matter with Kansas, why isn't he publishing his opinion pieces in their newspapers?

But if he's going to stir up the populists, isn't he going to have to get his facts right? Work backwards: is Mr Frank against increased labor force participation by women, or in favor of sex-based pay differentials? If total output is increasing because of greater labor force participation by women, and labor markets reward equally productive male and female workers equally, the Say Aggregation Principle says family income, not prime-age male income, grows as the economy does. Laws of conservation are like that. Keep working backwards. I suspect that during the Eugene V. Debs era, lawyers outnumbered machinists in Washington, D.C., even if not by 27:1. That's called specialization and division of labor. (Someday I must post a column on the folly of expecting a lawyer to also do the work of a machinist, or conversely.) Those rich counties surrounding the Beltway? I like Steven Landsburg's formulation: bipartisanship is the conspiracy of the political class to keep some of the rents for itself.

Marquette Warrior weighs in with a link to a somewhat more pungent column.

Frankly, it's the conservatives who talk the language of this group. If the clueless people in the GOP would only understand that. This disconnection of the GOP leadership and their voters, is almost laughable if it wasn't so dangerous.

This group of people, the guys and gals that drive pickup trucks, use their hands for a living are fair game, but the conservatives have to go after their vote. Elections are not won by the upper crust in both parties, but on the ground at the Wal-Marts, and their working class customers.

If the GOP had the sense that they were born with, they would embrace the Wal-mart demographic and welcome them into their big tent. Who really represents the working class and who can do the best for them in their daily lives?

We know it's not the effete snobs of the liberal upper class.

Tell us what you really think. (Where's a good syndicalist column when I want to link to one?)

Now to the hopeful. Nicholas Eberstadt offers a riff on the permanent income hypothesis, with a call for better measurement.

These criticisms of the official U.S. poverty rate should not be confused with indifference to the plight of America's disadvantaged and poor. Indeed, the opposite is true. In the richest society humanity has ever known, material deprivation still afflicts too many Americans. We cannot expect to make progress, however, without adequate and accurate information. Advocates of social and economic justice in the United States should be in the front ranks of those demanding more accurate assessments of U.S. poverty. Without a clearer sense of where we stand, how we got here and where we are headed, most initiatives aimed at reducing poverty in the United States will be needlessly ineffective.

The editorial writers at the Wall Street Journal get to the heart of the matter.

The truth is that there has been a modest widening of the income gap in recent decades, regardless of which party is in power. That gap seems due largely to growing returns on education and skills in the global economy. Americans without a high-school diploma are losing ground against those who have college degrees. But this argues not for higher taxes on the rich, who already pay the vast bulk of U.S. taxes. It argues for reforming K-12 education so even the weakest and poorest students can compete against the world.

More stuff for my strategic plan?

NOTHING LEFT TO LOSE. Now that the pressure of getting to .500 and participating in the National League's wild card race is off, the Milwaukee Brewers found a way to end a 10 game losing streak by getting to "future Hall of Famer Greg Maddux."

Rendered moot for the moment: if George Webb will give away hamburgers when the Brewers win 12 straight games, what hamburger promotion is in order when the Brewers lose 12 straight? The broadcast team on WTMJ was speculating about such an event. Their suggestion: have Brewer management stand fans to the hamburgers.

SETTING THE PACE FOR THE FLEET. Aircraft carrier Midway is now a large museum and war memorial in the San Diego harbor.

From the bridge, visitors can observe the active fleet carriers across the harbor. Nimitz is behind the security fence, with space prepared for Reagan, which will arrive a few days after this picture was taken on 3 July 2006.


The bridge is a great place for the younger set to play at captain. One of the guides noticed my Lake Geneva Yacht Club shirt and teased me about "anything this big on Lake Geneva." (No, but visit Lake Michigan. Iron ore, as we will discover, is not as challenging a cargo as an air wing.)


The flight deck is home to a number of preserved carrier aircraft, including this F9F in what became the early Blue Angels paint scheme.


But before Midway was an exhibit on the San Diego waterfront, she was one of the final carriers laid down during World War II, using a battleship hull, and after a rebuild to the British angled flight deck configuration, she remained in commission until after Desert Storm. The museum association has commissioned two histories of Midway, and Midway Magic becomes the promised Book Review No. 27.

An aircraft carrier requires men to live in close proximity at sea for long periods of time. These bunks make the Amtrak Superliner roomettes look spacious.


Government issued storage: some compartments under one's bunk, and a locker nearby. (Under really crowded circumstances, some of these bunks are occupied under the hot bunk system, with multiple occupants.)


A naval ship is home to large numbers of rough men who are often at sea for a long time. The book does not pull any punches about some of the more serious breaches of discipline that occurred at sea, nor does it sugar-coat the primary task of sick bay after a spell of shore-leave.

The purpose of an aircraft carrier is to accomplish two dangerous tasks. The first is to launch aircraft. It's rather noisy with planes on the catapults running at full power (the only hope a pilot has of surviving in case of a premature launch) and the Navy, like the railroads, describes carrier doctrine as "rules written in blood." Midway Magic lists all the flyers who died launching or landing, with additional details of some of the lessons learned. As if launching planes isn't enough, Midway made a winter cruise to the North Atlantic to demonstrate the capability to launch in arctic conditions; she was also the platform for the test of a ship-launched ballistic missile (using a German V-2) and for the anticipated use of jet-assisted Neptune land planes in a nuclear reprise of the Doolittle raid. That, in addition to the normal operations off Korea, Vietnam, and Kuwait, and a patrol to the Taiwan Strait for which not all the details are yet known.


Once the planes are up, if they're not on a Doolittle raid or staging to land, they have to return to the carrier. There's a landing signal officer who is supposed to signal arriving planes to continue their landing or go around, and to grade the pilots on the quality of their landing He is in this exposed position between a controlled crash and the deep blue sea.


The pilots also have this focused Fresnel lens display that beams different color lights at the plane depending on whether it's on the right angle of approach or too high or too low. That sounds straightforward enough on a calm day in a harbor, but imagine the tossing North Atlantic in a snowstorm.


Belowdecks, the control panel for the power plants. I remarked to the retired engineering officer here that I'd have to rethink my characterization of the steam locomotive as the most complicated piece of transportation equipment to operate, and he was gracious enought to note that with a turbine engine, more speed is simply a matter of more steam pressure. None of this limited-cutoff-exploit-expansion-reduce-back-pressure.


The engineering and maintenance staffs have their customs and their rivalries, but a member of the flight deck crew or a pilot had best disrespect any one of the crafts.


At sea, you don't just call up the NAPA dealer or find the next roundhouse to effect repairs, and Midway is a bit large to trailer to Fiberglass Specialists. Much of the repair work, including damage control, and Midway did have a few close encounters of the collision kind, is done in-house. Lathes, drill presses, milling machines, tracks for overhead hoists.


What was I saying about Milwaukee making the tools that made Fordism possible?


A carrier is also preparing food for crew members, in some situations around the clock. Midway also distinguished herself on more than one occasion evacuating children from natural or man-made disasters.

Responsibility for keeping a carrier in proper form rests with the senior officers. The executive officer has an office with the utilities concealed behind a drop ceiling.


I wonder if the Navy and Amtrak have the same source of blue blankets. The executive officer, as below, and the captain get private quarters, as well as the responsibilities that go with those quarters.


Midway had captains with different command styles and different reputations. They generally acquitted themselves well. (At least one carried off a for-real Tom Clancyesque "if we were serious you'd be dead" supersonic pass over a shadowing warship not flying an allied flag. You'll have to read the book. This is a review, not a highlight reel.)

Midway holds the endurance record for a carrier patrol. The now-notorious "Mission Accomplished" banner on Abraham Lincoln recognized a protracted patrol of 282 days required by Operation Iraqi Freedom. Midway was at sea for 327 days ending in 1973, and she homeported in Japan. Despite the carrier's name, the book reports the Navy and the crew established a good working relationship with Japanese technicians, who reciprocated by taking good care of the ship.

BEING BEGGARED BY THY NEIGHBOR? Virginia Postrel looks at the political reception to attempts by flagship state universities to attract more students from out of state, which has the effect of raising the bar for in-state students.

This debate isn't that different from the one about racial quotas at state universities: Shouldn't student bodies represent (proportionately, in the case of racial categories) the people who pay the bills? Is a state-funded education a transfer entitlement--between taxpayers and state residents of college age--or is it a public good--a way of raising the human capital of the state and spurring economic growth to benefit everyone? Over the long run, is it politically feasible to fund necessarily elitist institutions of academic and research excellence through taxes?

If a state university system is supposed to be a public good, it should, at least at its flagship, try harder to attract and retain high achievers than to placate every mediocre high school grad. The most promising students don't want, or need, a repeat of high school, and neither do their professors.

May I use that second paragraph as part of my strategic plan?

The article suggests that public higher education faces another spell of excess capacity, which is going to come into tension with the hopes of the regional campuses to become more like the flagships.

One reason may be that public universities, even with out-of-state tuition, are often bargains. Students who might once have left their state for a pricey private education are opting for a relatively less expensive public one. And part of the increase is simply that the number of college-bound high school graduates is rising.

But that will change soon. Projections by the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education show the number of high school graduates nationwide is expected to decrease beginning in 2008. It won't happen evenly; states across most of the upper half of the country face the steepest declines.

And the beggar-thy-neighbor policies are proliferating.

In a move that is being watched closely, South Dakota, which faces a 9% drop in its college-going population over the next decade, cut out-of-state tuition for its public universities this year nearly in half. Compared with some other states, the plan largely has escaped controversy because none of the state universities are fully enrolled.

To shore up falling non-resident enrollments, University of Wisconsin regents in June reduced tuition for non-residents by about $2,000 a year at all but the system's flagship campus in Madison.

Developing.

IMAGINE NO VANDERBILTS. The newest Trains hit my mailbox, with an editorial, "Time to get back on the radar," noting the redesign of Monopoly^(TM) without railroads. (Electronic debit cards rather than pastel paper money, a version with Hobbit horses in place of iron horses, and a Revised Standard Version with famous streets throughout the U.S. replacing Atlantic City streets, some of which no longer exist, and four congested airports in place of the railroads are now on offer. Apparently the traditional Atlantic City version with its imagineered railroads and utilities will remain on offer for now.)

The editorial, which is not available online, laments that at the very time freight railroading has become an industry with the potential to earn the replacement cost of its capital and incremental improvements in passenger rail have demonstrated some usefulness in alleviating urban congestion, the redesign moves railroads further out of public view, with potential adverse consequences for attracting good people (the cowboy-era work schedules can't help) and obtaining government money for infrastructure improvements such as grade separations. (There are no longer cabooses to wave at, and steam trains are few and far between, and slow 125 car coal drags more of an annoyance to motorists already frazzled by insufficient expansion of the road network and maltimed traffic lights.)

On the lighter side, one wonders if the game redesign updates Uncle Moneybags. A cigar-smoking, mustachioed, top-hatted capitalist with a portfolio of four railroads works. But a holder of rental-car concessions in four major airports?? Please.

NOW THAT EVERYBODY'S BACK IN CLASS. Via Sherman Dorn, the Top 10 No-Sympathy Lines, with recommended responses by Wisconsin-Green Bay geologist Steven Dutch, whose disclaimer page includes a general rule that bears emphasizing.

The Internet is not a substitute for library research and I will not assist searchers who try to use it that way. Sorry to sound unfriendly, but I am seeing a lot of requests for information that can easily be found in textbooks or libraries. When I get such a request, I will respond with advice to visit your local public or university library, with a few suggestions for where to begin searching. The vast majority of useful information is in print, not on the Web, and between copyright issues and the expense of creating and maintaining web sites, it will remain that way for a long time to come.

Maybe I should compile a Consolidated Code of General Rules and a calendar with the Rule of the Day. Professor Dutch's would be a good start.

STAYING THE COURSE? Alaa at The Mesopotamian is at once troubled and hopeful about Baghdad's future.

Nevertheless, I don't think the situation is hopeless and I still believe that somehow the Government and the Americans will manage in the end, thanks to the patience and perseverence of the American leadership and the patriotic elements in the Iraqi side.

Al Maliki is proving to be a very sensible man, so far. I wish him luck.

I hope to find the time to tell you much more.

Stay safe.

Donald Sensing posts a somewhat different troubled and hopeful post at Winds of Change.

[Iraq's] army does not have to be as good as America's, it only has to be better than Iran's, Syria's, Jordan's or Saudi Arabia's. Of these four nations, only Iran can be considered a real threat from both political and military bases. Turkey is to Iraq's north and has a very strong martial tradition; also it is not an Arab country. The odds of the Iraqi army gaining parity with the Turks is remote. Fortunately, Turkey is an American ally and poses no threat to Iraq.

Would that last sentence still be true if Iraq becomes more of a federation with something representing Kurdish sovereignty in the north?

SELLING THOSE WINS. The Mid-American Conference established its depressing precedent of weeknight football games with the majority of its teams in action last Thursday. The Big Ten obtained what it paid for, with Northwestern defeating Miami of Ohio 21-3 in the Randy Walker Memorial Game, and Minnesota 44 points better than Kent State. The non-Big Ten teams had to work harder, with Boston College getting out of Mount Pleasant 31-24 and Iowa State requiring three overtimes to defeat Toledo. The Mid-American also has the interesting practice of scheduling some conference games for opening day, with Ball State hosting Eastern Michigan, where a faculty strike is in progress, and prevailing 38-20, and new conference member Temple losing 3-9 in overtime to Buffalo in the Zero Mostel Classic.

The games of interest to Cold Spring Shops were properly on Saturday. First up, Northern Illinois repeated last year's pattern by winning the second half at Ohio State, followed by Bowling Green scoring first against Wisconsin, before the expected Wisconsin running game got rolling. (The powers that be decided that State Line viewers would prefer Utah at UCLA (motto On! Wisconsin!) or Alabama-Birmingham at Oklahoma. But it has nothing to do with money.)

Elsewhere around the Mid-American, Penn State was better than Akron, and Indiana doubled Western Michigan. (The upper division of the Mid-American has some way to go to stay with the expected upper division of the Big Ten.) Ohio appears to have done a bit of win-buying of its own, hosting Tennessee-Martin in a tune-up before traveling to Northern Illinois on the upcoming Saturday.)

SAME PLAN, DIFFERENT PLANNER. The University's most recent mass mailing from the President includes this alert.

Provost Ray Alden joined us this summer and is now actively assessing all NIU academic programs and student services. Dr. Alden brings a wealth of experience to the task, having presided over tremendous programmatic and enrollment growth in his previous position as provost at University of Nevada Las Vegas. He is excited about NIU’s future and anxious to begin work on a strategic planning process I have asked him to initiate that will involve many of you and touch virtually every corner of our campus. I hope you can join me on October 5 for my annual State of the University Address when I can share more details on this exciting topic.

The dean at Anonymous Community has a few reservations about strategic planning.

It's about adapting. Which, I think, is what's so frustrating about strategic plans as they're usually done. With their superficial rigor, they aspire to a level of control of reality that they'll never have. A simple plan, well-executed in changing ways, is far superior to a long and complicated plan with subsections and three different synonyms for 'goals.' The more complicated the plan, the more time will be spent parsing its verbiage, rather than paying attention to the outside world.

Here's a measurable goal: no college's strategic plan should be longer than the Constitution of the United States. Colleges can be complicated, but sheesh.

But one wonders if the entire activity isn't going to be validation of decisions already taken. Here's the provost in an interview with the Northern Star.

"The first priority that I really got a sense for in the interview process is the need for university strategic planning," Alden said. "The university has done very well despite a severe financial crisis. We need to focus on where the university is going."

Students can expect to see some changes around campus within the next academic year, Alden said. A major change will occur when NIU breaks ground in October for a new residential facility for students with dependents. Alden also mentioned an early alert program in the works. This program will help detect struggling students so they can receive help before it is too late.

Presumably it would be out of order to suggest that the crisis in higher education is one of pretending that admitting unprepared students is access, and the lack of funding is a reluctance of the state to pay the universities for doing work that the high schools are supposed to be doing, and the strategy of offering public higher education that is higher education has the potential to break the positional arms race in which aspiring parents push their kids into the more "prestigious" universities to avoid the perceived remedial swamps the publics have become.

But bring that up in strategic planning and watch what happens. The business-imitators will object that you're not being a team player. (When the team is in the middle of scoring an own-goal, no.) The Quakers will cluck about reaching some kind of a "consensus." (If the consensus is to jump off a bridge, do you go along.) You can be sure the Silent Generation relics will want to find "common ground." (What was Cromwell's line about having sat there long enough?) Add to that the dynamic the dean has identified.

Savvy practitioners of internal politics get good at defining terms to mean what they want them to mean, entirely independently of any planning process. And serious institutional self-criticism is verboten in a strategic plan, so ideas conceived as remedies for particular problems outlive the problems they were supposed to solve, taking on weird lives of their own.

Yuck, indeed. But I'm unlikely to lack material this year.

COMMUTER UNIVERSITY. The final Chicago Tribune Ends of the Line essay visits University Park, formerly known as Park Forest South.

From the beginning, a university and train stop were incorporated in the planning. (Illinois Central Industries was a partner in the development, and, in 1969, the Illinois Central Railroad made its first commuter extension in 40 years to Park Forest South.)What now is the University Park Metra station is right across from campus, making commuting from and to the north -- even all the way to Chicago -- easy for students and faculty.

Also part of the original plan is Governors Gateway, an industrial park, now double its original size and housing some 60 manufacturing and service businesses.

"We have the best of two worlds here," village manager David Litton said. "We're far enough from the city to be able to enjoy open spaces and yet we're just 50 minutes from downtown.

We're a rapidly growing community with something like 8,400 or 8,500 residents now."

The next township south is Peotone, possible site of yet another Chicago airport. (Punch up the Hiawatha line and Mitchell Field could be 50 minutes from the Loop!)

The article has a slideshow that features artwork and wildlife on the Governors State campus.

HERE WE GO AGAIN. The semester has started, the students are back, party football season is about to start, and the City of DeKalb would once again like to tame happy hours in the public interest. But one tavern manager has given the game away.

Jeff Dobie, owner of Fatty's Pub and Grille, 1312 W. Lincoln Highway, said if the legislation is approved he will raise the prices. Dobie said he is not in favor of the government being in charge of the prices, but this is a welcome adjustment.

"We will raise the prices," Dobie said. "I don't have a problem with that. Bar owners are lowering their prices just to get people in the door."

Dobie also said he would rather see patrons going to a bar because of its atmosphere, not because the prices are cheap.

Compare and contrast prices and amenities on airlines before and after 1979. Discuss potential parallels to competition among licensed taverns in communities with and without bans on happy hours. Provide a theoretical framework. Extra credit for generalizing to repeated competition.

The City Council debate has material for further research.

7th Ward Alderman James Barr is unsure of regulating liquor prices in the city government.

"I'm strongly personally torn over this (the proposed legislation)," said Barr.

Barr asked City Attorney Norma Guess if other similar communities had minimum liquor prices.

Champaign, Macomb and Normal do not have similar legislation, but added those communities do not have the price wars like DeKalb, Guess said.

Ben Gordon Rehabilitation Center employee Kris Povlsen advocated the increase. "Human behavior says the cheaper the product the more it is going to be consumed," said 2nd Ward Alderman Povlsen. "I support the mayor's position because I understand the nature of alcohol."

Have the city councils in other Illinois cities with major universities done a better job of restricting output via fewer liquor licenses?

PASSING YOUR PRELIMS. I'll sometimes ask students to evaluate "A technological improvement that reduces the energy intensity of a steel furnace reduces energy use by the steel industry." Shannon Love at Chicago Boyz expands on the "counterintuitive" (actually, it isn't counterintuitive at all) possibility that the correct answer is "false, provided the steel market is competitive and the demand sufficiently elastic that expanded steel production more than offsets the energy saving on each ton of steel cast."

BEGGAR-THY-NEIGHBOR. Your guidance counselor tells you one of the old Wisconsin State University System campuses is just right for your needs (and they're all pretty this time of year). If you live in Kansas, Michigan, Missouri, Nebraska and North Dakota, the University of Wisconsin System has such a deal for you. Less well known is that Wisconsin residents are eligible for similar deals elsewhere.

Wisconsin students, in turn, can receive similar discounts at a variety of colleges and universities in the other states, including the University of Missouri, the University of Kansas and the University of Nebraska. But if they don't know that, there's a reason: No one told them.

The UW System administrator who is coordinating the program said he has done no advertising for Wisconsin students out of fear of "a brain drain" from the state. The system's goal, he said, is to attract non-resident students to Wisconsin.

"This program has the potential to be a brain gain," said Lynn Paulson, the system's assistant vice president for budget and planning.

"It does give students from Wisconsin discounts at other states, but we want to keep as many as we can."

Paulson said the system was required to send brochures about the discounts to high school guidance counselors across the state. But a guidance counselor at Racine Case High School said her school never got one.

"We received nothing," said Jennifer Muffick. "We had no idea that it was an option for our students.

The option includes bargain prices at the pretend Big Red in Lincoln and at the University of Kansas, flagship campuses both, as well as six Michigan campuses that the article refers to as "not especially prestigious." Hello Mid-American??

NOT TERRORISM. No, planting a pipe bomb on a busy train station is a prank.

A pipe bomb exploded in a trash receptacle at a Metra train station in Hinsdale today and, in a separate incident, passengers evacuated a train in Park Ridge after detecting a strange odor, authorities said.Police said they were questioning a man in connection with a pipe bomb in a trash bin at a station in west suburban Hinsdale. The device went off, but no injuries were reported. Nor was damage extensive. Remnants of the device were found in the Hinsdale Station, 21 E. Hinsdale Ave., around 7 a.m.

"At this time we do not have any reason to believe this was a terrorist act, nor do we have any reason for this act," Hinsdale police said in a prepared statement.

"Shortly after 6:55 a.m., there was a 911 call indicating (what sounded like) a large firecracker in the main depot garbage can," said Thomas Ahern, a special agent with the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

Train service along the Burlington Northern Santa Fe line, where the station is located, was not affected, said Meg Reile, a Metra spokeswoman.

Right, and right, if one defines a ten minute delay to one train, and other trains boarding from the usual down platform rather than the usual up platform as "not affected."

On my first visit to England, I was puzzled by the absence of trash cans in train stations (sometimes one finishes coffee before the track is posted and one wants to get rid of it.) There was a reason for the trash cans being removed, and it wasn't "not terrorism."

A VAST MORNING-PERSON CONSPIRACY. Years ago, I was expected in homeroom for roll call at 8:15 in order for my presence to be noted, and the first class of seven class periods began at 8:35. The seventh class period ended at 3:28. My younger siblings, still in elementary school, were expected to be in their desks by 9:00 and they were dismissed at 3:15.

Things are different today. In Fairfax, Virginia, high school starts at 7:20. Stephen Moore doesn't like it.

This controversy over early school start times is raging in hundreds of communities today, pitting parents against unbending school bureaucracies.

Surveys of teen's parents in school districts with early start times find that as many as 90% favor a later starting bell. If ever there were a case study in how public school boards ignore the wishes of their "customers," it is this.

Meanwhile, research overwhelmingly confirms that lack of sleep in adolescents has become a horrendous health problem in America. The National Sleep Foundation finds that teens now average between 6.5 and seven hours of uninterrupted sleep on a weeknight and only one in five gets the recommended nine hours. Of course computer games, chat rooms, sports schedules and the like have a lot to do with the late nights.

But so do their biological clocks. Studies show that spurting growth hormones in teens alter their circadian rhythm and naturally turn them into night owls, physiologically uninterested in 9:30 p.m. bedtimes and fiercely opposed to 6:15 a.m. wake-up calls. (This fact suggests that I myself am still in late puberty.)

Topic drift ... I'm not out of adolescence either. One of the advantages of an academic job is that one can garner a few thanks requesting those late afternoon and evening classes, as well as having less competition for computer resources at those hours.

The column suggests that the old style school schedule made more productive use of the day.

And we also know that later school start times can reduce this affliction. Amy Wolfson, a professor at Holy Cross who studies Americans' sleep patterns, tells me: "The evidence is pretty clear that students in the later-starting schools get more sleep and have less tardiness, fewer behavior problems, and do somewhat better in school."

Sometimes the old way is better.