RULE K, AGAIN. I attended a one-day conference in Chicago (of which more on the weekend) and expected a fast Metra ride to Elburn in plenty of time to get home and tidy up before the Avalon Quartet concert. A trespasser had other ideas.

An pedestrian was hit by a Metra commuter train on the Union Pacific West Line railroad tracks about 5:30 this afternoon in Geneva, according to police.

The Geneva Fire Department said the unidentified pedestrian was killed. The accident was just east of the Fox River and west of Crissey Avenue.

Train No. 41, which was due to stop in Geneva before arriving in Elburn at 5:35 p.m., remains parked with about one-third of the train on the bridge.

Many of the passengers on the westbound train walked from the accident site back to the Geneva train station, according to police. Metra was to provide transportation to those passengers going beyond the Geneva stop. Those walking back to the station used the bicycle and pedestrian bridge over the river at the south end of Island Park.

Metra and Union Pacific's handling of the delay was a bit more effective than Metra's and Burlington Northern's, when the same thing happend on a train I was riding three years ago.

The train was checking for the Geneva stop when the engineer put it into emergency. The engine was on the bridge, but the hind end was feet-dry. After about 45 minutes, the crew asked all passengers to walk to the rear of the train. Their announcement was that ongoing passengers would be put on buses. The "bicycle and pedestrian bridge" is the lower deck of the railroad bridge, and our police escort led us to the Geneva station. Many of the passengers were going to detrain there anyway ... problem solved, although some dinners might have been late. There were no buses at the station, and some regular passengers (who had perviously experienced delay by railway trespass or by the hog-law) suggested there would be none. My contribution: if you see a westbound train, get on it. A railroad employee was alerted by a colleague that a westbound train was coming, which one did, and those people who hadn't phoned home for a ride got on it, with a delay of about 85 minutes to La Fox and Elburn passengers.

GETTING VINCE'S FEDORA. A professional football game with meaningful playoff implications was only available on broadcast television in Dallas, Milwaukee, and Green Bay. Everybody else had to find a tavern or a friend with satellite dish service carrying the NFL Network. Brian Goff at The Sports Economist characterizes the tussle between the league, which would prefer that its Network be made available as part of the basic cable service, and the cable carriers, who have offered to carry the Network in the sports add-on bundle as a game of chicken, where he would like at least one referee to stay out.

The [Dallas Morning News] article alludes to possible intervention over the long run by the FCC and state legislators. I can only hope that doesn't happen, other than prompting them to reduce whatever barriers to competitive entry exist. There is a marketplace out there, and it is working itself out albeit not in some kind of instantaneous, nirvana kind of way. By the way, I'll be enjoying the game on my DirectTV connection.

An editorial in USA Today suggests the league is being churlish.

Cable companies are also used to having their way — not because they are liked but because, as insulated quasi-monopolies, they don't see much advantage in being liked. In this particular dispute, however, they happen to be right. They're saving millions of non-fans from an attempt by the NFL to pick their pockets.

The reason the NFL Network is not on most cable systems is the league's arrogance. It won't let the cable companies put its channel on a premium tier, where the fans who want it would pay the NFL's premium price. The network insists that it be included in a basic package, which spreads the costs to all customers, including those who don't care a whit for football.

The NFL wants an average of 80 cents per cable subscriber per month, according to media consulting firm SNL Kagan, making it the fifth most expensive cable channel among 159. Even to the NFL's fans, that price might seem high for a network that provides about 24 hours per year of live NFL football and about 8,736 hours of filler. For people whose idea of good TV is cooking shows, it must seem downright insane.

Not to mention potentially inefficient.

Take, for example, Stigler's "A Note on Block Booking." Block booking of movies was the offer of a fixed package of movies to an exhibitor; the exhibitor could not pick and choose among the movies in the package. The Supreme Court banned the practice on the grounds that the movie companies were compounding a monopoly by using the popularity of the winning movies to compel exhibitors to purchase the losers.

Stigler disagreed and presented a simple alternative argument. If Gone with the Wind is worth $10,000 to the exhibitor and Getting Gertie's Garter is worth nothing, wrote Stigler, the distributor could get the whole $10,000 by selling Gone with the Wind. Throwing in a worthless movie would not cause the exhibitor to pay any more than $10,000. Therefore, reasoned Stigler, the Supreme Court's explanation seemed wrong.

But why did block booking exist? Stigler's explanation was that if exhibitors valued films differently from one another, the distributor could collect more by "bundling" the movies. Stigler gave an example in which exhibitor A is willing to pay $8,000 for movie X and $2,500 for Y, and B is willing to pay $7,000 for X and $3,000 for Y. If the distributor charges a single price for each movie, his profit-maximizing price is $7,000 for X and $2,500 for Y. The distributor will then collect $9,500 each from A and B, for a total of $19,000. But with block booking the seller can charge $10,000 (A and B each value the two movies combined at $10,000 or more) for the bundle and make $20,000. Stigler then went on to suggest some empirical tests of his argument and actually did one, showing that customers' relative tastes for movies, as measured by box office receipts, did differ from city to city.

Put another way, perhaps the National Football League ought consider putting its Thursday night games on pay-per-view rather than engage in transaction-cost-reducing bundling complete with cross-subsidization.

The president of the Network, however, contends that the cable services exhibit undue preference and prejudice toward their own sports channels.

This is about squashing competition. NFL Network and a handful of other independent programmers such as the Hallmark Channel and the Black Television News Channel cannot get a fair deal with Big Cable for one simple reason: We are not owned by a cable company.

Companies such as Comcast, Time Warner and Cablevision control what content gets aired, but they also own many of the channels you must buy in your cable package. Comcast puts NFL Network on an expensive sports tier that viewers have to pay extra to receive. So why is The Golf Channel in Comcast's must-buy package? Because Comcast owns The Golf Channel.

He goes on to note,

A remedy is needed to fix this market failure. Our government leaders should ensure that Big Cable cannot treat its channels better than it treats independent channels such as NFL Network and hold consumers hostage in the dispute. A neutral, third-party arbitrator should be able to step in to bring about an agreement. Six states are considering legislation to do just that, and the Federal Communications Commission is looking at the issue, too. We don't fear independent arbitration and believe that in virtually every case, it would lead to a negotiated settlement

So what is Big Cable's problem? Is it worried that its discriminatory double standard will become public knowledge?

There's no market failure here, although there may be a failure to correctly define the property rights. Early in the 20th Century, the Hepburn Act forbade railroads from favoring shipping managers with free passes and the Elkins Act forbade both rate rebates and discounts from published rates. These laws effectively ended any incentive for railroads to own shippers, thus ending the Delaware and Hudson and Reading anthracite coal holdings. (The regulatory history books are at the office, and it's been some time since I had to teach the details.) There is the possibility, however, that the cable companies will be treated as common carriers rather than vertically integrated programmers and carriers as a resolution of the dispute.

The game? As I griped last week, Thursday night football is for the Mid-American championship. Packers didn't win. I had previous plans to attend the Avalon Quartet concert, which coincided with the final public performance by the Vermeer Quartet, in Rockport, Maine, near cellist Marc Johnson's retirement home. Great performance, and a few of us were having so animated a conversation in the lobby at intermission that we missed the blinking of the lobby lights ...

SETTEBELLO. Wednesdays are often very busy, particularly as the pace of end-of-semester conferences picks up. (Relax, get your rest, don't panic, review your notes, come back again, we'll get through this.) The university's orchestra presented its end-of-semester concert tonight. Two works by Samuel Barber, including his Knoxville (which the orchestra of a few years ago, with different personnel and a different conductor, also offered) and the Beethoven Op. 92 in A. I can't get enough of that one. Life is good.

SELF-SELECTION. Thomas Sowell points out the error of access-assessment-remediation-retention.

There are, of course, many students and professors who are in the academic world for the very serious purpose of acquiring knowledge and deepening one’s understanding of the world and oneself.

Most of my own academic career was spent in places like Cornell and UCLA, where there were scholars with distinguished reputations in their respective fields and where the student body was significantly above the national average.

Even so, there were still quite a few students, especially at UCLA, whose interest in the life of the mind was, to put it charitably, limited.

More important, the negative effect of students who are not serious can be detrimental to the education of those who are. I found this to be true in each of the five colleges and universities where I taught, as well as in each of the three universities from which I received degrees.

George Leef revises and extends.

The students who interested in academic work after high school are already going to college. Most of those who now don’t go to college aren’t well prepared for it and want to do other things. Consequently, [Richard] Vedder concludes, “If incremental state funding encourages relatively unqualified students to pursue college, the marginal attrition rate amongst those students is likely to be extremely high.” (Here, Vedder could have strengthened his argument with evidence that substantial numbers of college graduates now wind up doing jobs that don’t really require any advanced education.)

I'd add, extending some earlier posts, "the tenure-track faculty will only rarely see the rotten fruit of that harvest."

Professor Sowell raises a second point that ought to give pause to the advocates of mindless productivity measurement.

The sizes of the classes and the campuses can also have an impact. Too many people do not think through the consequences of admitting a larger number of students, including some who may not be as well qualified as the others.

When I taught an honors class in introductory economics at Cornell — a seminar with 15 students, compared to a couple of hundred students in the regular class — my department chairman urged me to expand the honors class to 30 students, “so that more students can get the advantage of the small class.”

It never seemed to occur to him that expanding the class would destroy the advantages of the small seminar.

The chairman will get a bonus for increasing the student-credit-hours-per-faculty-member.

Professor Sowell also points to a possible improvement in total factor productivity.

At both Douglass College and Howard University, where I taught the full year course in introductory economics, the second semester classes were a sheer delight because the less serious students dropped out after their experience with my grading standards in the first semester.

It was not just that the remaining students were better than the ones who left, they were better than they themselves had been in a class atmosphere that was different when influenced by less serious students.

At Amherst College, one of the classes that I taught as a visiting professor was made compulsory for graduating seniors, against my wishes, and just a couple of students with bad attitudes managed to dampen some of the other students, who were outstanding in themselves.

Retention, when it matters: up. Working conditions and faculty morale: improved. Potential for a compensating differential for faculty: there.

He, however, would not make a good famer, and perhaps he lacks the teaching vocation.

A graduate seminar that I taught at UCLA was a great experience the first year I taught it, largely because of one outstanding student who raised the level of discussion for the others. But, when I taught it the next year without that student, the results were so meager that I never taught that seminar again.

At the end of one class session I told the members of the seminar: “I have a decision to make and you gentlemen have helped me to make it.”

With that, I went on leave for two years to run a research project in Washington.

Professoring is a lot like farming, in that you're not always sure ex ante what the learning environment will be, and sometimes the sun shines and sometimes the grasshoppers flock, but you don't quit the first time you have a below-average year.

GET THE GRIPES RIGHT. Although I have little patience for individuals bent on destroying higher education from within, I have less patience with outside observers who raise illogical objections.

"The U.S.A. spends more on higher education, as a percentage of gross domestic product, than any other industrialized country, according to the Education Department." - USA Today

Bet you didn't know that. On the other hand, you very likely did know - because it's mentioned repeatedly - that this country spends more on health care, as a percentage of gross domestic product, than every other advanced country.

I'm a little too tired tonight to go through the OECD Income and Product Accounts and identify other sectors for which that is true, although I suspect that personal transportation, prepared food, and hobby equipment would also be in the "larger" category. Therefore, it's not the greatest lede, but it postpones the rhetorical question (I've been grading senior papers) for two paragraphs.

Why is spending so much on health care considered a national scandal by many commentators but the outsized spending on higher education is not?

Could part of the answer be that the health-care system is studied, analyzed and dissected by a scholarly community that simply isn't willing to apply the same critical perspective toward the institutions that sign its checks?

Unwilling to apply the same critical perspective? The columnist ought to read a few of the explicitly collegiate weblogs.

To the contrary: The self-interested consensus among academics is that this
country needs to spend far more on higher education.

That's unclear.

When health-care costs rise at double the inflation rate, intellectuals understandably knit their brows. When higher-ed costs outstrip inflation (as they do year after year), the only people who complain tend to be powerless parents and students.

No. Two separate phenomena. Health economists, in particular, have been looking for a better description of health care expenditures than "costs." The term "costs" misleads because many of the services insurers, including governments, currently pay for, such as heart transplants, smart prostheses, and erection stimulants, used to be unavailable at any price. A similar observation applies to higher education, although some of the services, such as special education and eligibility studies, ought not be offered no matter how attractive the price.

I do agree with one observation in the column, that being the deleterious effect of third-party payments on price discipline. On the other hand, where the reality of paying tuition is that nobody pays list price, it does not follow that the parents and students are powerless.

THE HOME OFFICE OF INTELLECTUAL MEDIOCRITY. Thus did Charlie Sykes, in Profscam, characterize the university's role in making the common schools less effective. A column by Doug Lynch, a vice dean in Pennsylvania's Graduate School of Education, does little to rebut the jape.

The American system of higher education is marked by incredible institutional diversity and one would assume that a key component of differentiation among all those schools would be a similar diversity of faculty. The facts suggest otherwise. For instance, some 50 percent of all faculty members are adjuncts, who often teach the exact same courses at “competing” colleges. Even among tenured faculty member, the average consumer of education would be hard pressed to differentiate “products” based on faculty. Do you think you could, without knowing the “brand,” identify a given institution on the basis of its faculty’s pedigree? Institutions trade faculty on the open market, and it is unclear that there are any real differences among the vast majority of them.

Admittedly, I'm an insider, but yes, I can distinguish a Mason public choice argument from a Wisconsin welfare economics argument from a Princeton game-theoretic argument. Calculus, on the other hand: there is no more a specific Northern Illinois way of doing calculus than there is a specific female way of knowing things. At the same time, an "open market" is an environment in which inefficient differentiation is selected out, and offerings, as the columnist notes, and prices, as I suggest here, tend to converge to a standard range of offerings and one price.

To be charitable, let's suppose the columnist never heard of the Law of One Price.

A few paragraphs later comes a howler.

Furthermore, while many colleges market continuing education courses to employers, few encourage or reimburse their own employees to take those same courses. One might argue that the sabbatical is the biggest investment a university makes, but that is limited to tenured faculty members largely and ironically, it is an unstructured professional development experience, if one followed the logic, then we ought to do away altogether with programs of study and curricula.

Nothing like building business for one's extension efforts by selling "professional development" to one's colleagues. Bleah. As far as a sabbatical being "unstructured," come off it. One has to submit a research proposal, and it had better be sufficiently original to pass muster with the review committee, and one had best turn in the working paper if one hopes to apply for another one, although your chances are better if you present the working paper at an academic conference and better still when you publish it. There are also limits to the structure. "Original research" means "We're not sure what the structure of the solution is."

The academic conference, then, becomes the real venue for scholarly development.

There appears to be a mounting trend that has many companies advocating for the worth of talent development within colleges, while colleges themselves dismiss the notion. Companies are increasingly arguing that if, for example, sending an executive to a professional development conference is not taxable, then enrolling her in a Wharton program shouldn’t be either.

Non sequitur. Conference expenses are reimbursable. I don't know what the situation is at Penn, but here, one can't claim expenses without turning in the conference paper. I have been to some conferences in Philadelphia, one of which was organized by Penn's now-closed Regional Science program, and we all spent a lot more time talking to each other about regional science, including over dinner, than we did viewing the Bell or exploring the High Speed Line.

The columnist concludes,

More important, if colleges want to be perceived as part of the solution rather than a major cause of the looming crisis, they must examine their culture and policies to better align them with what we collectively know to be true — that access to knowledge and talent is the key to a future society that is both just and wise.

Pure wordnoise. The crisis, if indeed it is a crisis, is in the abandonment of the higher in higher education.

COMPLICITY, COMPOUNDED. Last week, I asserted,

[F]aculty reluctance to meet those introductory classes is faculty complicity in access-assessment-remediation-retention: there's no entry level quality control, no reward for the faculty to do so, and posting whinges on anonymous weblogs appears to be sufficient release.

Wisconsin's Donald Downs, elaborating on Delaware's re-education camps, notes that faculty tend to ignore the totalitarianism of Student Affairs.

In The Diversity Machine (2002), for example, Frederick Lynch provided a detailed portrait of numerous interlocking national programs designed to promote diversity and attitudinal change, almost all of which were run by non-faculty personnel. The University of Michigan, for example, had about 100 such programs (this is not a misprint), but the faculty tended to ignore them because they applied to areas outside of the faculty's main concern. As long as such programs did not jeopardize faculty research, no problem. In The Shadow University, Harvey Silverglate and Alan Kors also provide many examples of violations of academic freedom committed by administrative staff in the name of pet causes. Despite these and other works, public concern remains targeted at faculty members, not staff.

A few years ago I served on a speech code committee that ultimately led to the abolition of the university's faculty speech code. The committee consisted of faculty, students, and staff. One of the things that struck me during this year-long service was the posture of the staff members toward academic freedom and free speech. With one outstanding exception, the staff members evidenced little concern about the effects broad speech codes can have on the intellectual honesty and integrity of the classroom. Their experiences and professional agendas simply did not prepare or predispose them to take academic freedom all that seriously. This was not the case for faculty members on the committee, including those who supported some sort of code.

He goes on to note,

It will be interesting to follow the plight of the residence life program at the University of Delaware now that it has the full attention of the faculty. Will the faculty exercise its fiduciary responsibility to defend the principles of free thought that comprise the core of liberal education, or will it eschew the burden of this responsibility out of indifference or fear? Nothing I have said here is meant to get faculty members off the hook for supporting such programs as Delaware's. Nor is it my intention to reflexively criticize university staff. After all, universities would grind to an immediate halt without its valued staff members. The problem is those staff members who promote agendas that threaten the truth-seeking mission of the university.

I fear, however, that as long as the senior professors are relatively free to pursue their research, while the armies of adjuncts on term contracts can be mau-maued into going along with the Diversity Boondoggle's gutting of learning in the name of access, and the beneficiaries of access figure out on their own that college is not for them and never darken a professor's door, the senior professors will have scant incentive to defend either free thought or the core of liberal education.

The astonisher is that as many students get through, successfully, as they do, take five to seven years though it may. In the military, the recruit first faces a career non-commissioned officer. In railroading, the student engineman quickly gets to know the crusty road foreman. In the university, eighteen year olds get psychological "treatment" from twenty year old housefellows and introductory calculus from twenty-five year old graduate assistants who have yet to prove a theorem of their own. Experience, literally, is the greatest teacher, and for many students, the teacher with the steepest grading curve, at least until dormies get put on Double Secret Probation for harboring unsustainable thoughts.

I offer these observations to provoke Professor Downs, who notes,

It might be time to look more closely at the problem of faculty neglect as a distinct problem, and at the factors and forces that contribute to this neglect - above and beyond active faculty perpetration or complicity. I hope to do so in a future essay.

Developing.

EMERGING CORRIDORS. Casper-Cheyenne-Denver-Pueblo-Albuquerque, anyone? The idea is to use the Joint Line for passenger trains and build an avoiding line through empty country to the east for the freight. Here I go again...

To earn the high-speed designation from the Federal Railroad Administration, the train must exceed 90 miles per hour for at least 75 percent of the time.

Pull June 1954 Official Guide off shelf, thumb to the rear third, locate C&S-FW&D schedule on page 1040: Texas Zephyr 21 off Denver 12.01 arrive Colorado Springs (74.5 mi.) 1.40 Pueblo (118.5 mi.) 2.28. The Twin Zephyr it isn't. Page forward to Union Pacific entry at page 852 (you can identify the younger ferroequinologists or the freight train fans by their unfamiliarity with the organization of the Guide.) Running times just over an hour Denver to Greeley (52 miles) for named trains that avoid Cheyenne. Again, though: faster timings doable with the existing infrastructure.

Memo to Federal Railroad Administration: integrate over this speed curve.

FROH, FROH, WIE DIE BEIDEN SONNEN FLIEGEN. Just in time for Beethoven's birthday, the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra is performing the d minor, Op. 125 as part of the full symphony cycle (will there be recordings?) Some people don't like the "Turkish Music."

Beethoven bent, folded and mutilated Classical forms at will and worked at a megalomaniacal scale that led the way to Wagner. The raucous passage that opens and recurs in the finale came to be called the "horror fanfare" ("schreckensfanfare") even by its German admirers. Many commentators found the "Turkish" episode, with its cymbal and triangle, vulgar.

I like that section. It puts me in mind of a German drinking song, with a hint of oom-pah music from the contra-bassoon.

A FORM OF TENURE, AFTER ALL. Here's Texas A&M's Jim Hu last Saturday.

Faculty like to complain about how much their schools pay the football coach, but this week reminds us that coaches don't have tenure. In addition to Dennis Franchione resigning here at TAMU, there are now openings at Michigan, Nebraska, Baylor, and Ole Miss, with more probably to come.

By Monday, the coaching position is filled. Apparently replacing a president who becomes SecDef is more challenging.

Priorities! Football coach fired Friday, replaced today. President leaves a year ago and we're still waiting. What the heck... maybe this will push the process along; wouldn't want the new President to have to fire and hire a coach right away... right? Grasping for good reasons...

Anyway, former Packers HC and current Texans asst. Mike Sherman was just announced as the 28th head coach. Sherman was an assistant here twice with RC Slocum before going to the pros.

Packer players are pleased for their former coach. Owen Robinson elaborates on the implications for A&M.

I know that many Wisconsinites don’t have a lot of love for Mike Sherman (even though he was 57-39 with the Packers, won the NFC North 3 times, and went to the playoffs four times) but I’m happy to see him coming to College Station to be the head coach of the Aggies.

There's that fourth-and-a-country-mile in Philadelphia...

When he was there under R. C. Slocum as the offensive line coach, the Aggies were doing well. Much of this, if you remember, was because of a great running game led by.... you guessed it.... a great offensive line. His NFL coaching career has been pretty decent - not great - but pretty decent. But college coaching and NFL coaching are very different.

Plus, there are some intangible things that I like about Sherman. He is well respected and liked by the A&M athletic program, the alumni, etc. He is associated with some glory years for A&M football. This should help with recruiting and such. Also, Sherman is just a good guy. After the Fran years of questionable ethics, it’ll be good to see an honorable guy on the sidelines again.

This is a good thing for A&M. Then again… talk to me again in four years.

But if he's out after four years, he'll likely be offensive coordinator somewhere else. Tenure, in effect.

"Probably more to come" is accurate. Northern Illinois is now searching, with Joe Novak choosing to call it a career.

"I feel good about this decision," Novak said. "It's time. It's the right time for me personally, for my wife [Carole] and family, and for this program. Everyone says you know when it's time and this is it for me.

"Overall, it's been a wonderful ride," he continued. "There have been good days and bad days, but a lot more good than bad. I'm leaving the program in better shape than I found it, which you always want to do. We accomplished some things, but there are some things we didn't get done, too."

Novak departs with a career record of 63-75 after a 2-10 2007 season with a junior-laden, injury-riddled team. From the middle of the 1999 campaign through the end of the 2006 season, his Huskies won 58 of 90 (64.4 percent) of their games, won or shared the MAC West Division title four times, made two bowl appearances [2004 Silicon Valley Classic and 2006 San Diego County Credit Union Poinsettia Bowl] and played in the league's championship game in 2005. Northern Illinois was one of just 18 programs in the nation, and the only team not affiliated with a Bowl Championship Series conference, to post seven straight winning seasons from 2000-06.

Elsewhere on the merry-go-round, the Packers might be raiding the Big 11 Ten for a chief executive.

IT'S ALLEGEDLY PRODUCTIVITY. Yes, the student-credit-hours-per-faculty member is high, but the learning is negative.

Most remarkably, when it comes to teaching not just “facts” but conveying to students the scientific approach to problem-solving, research shows that students end up thinking less like professionals after completing [mass lecture] classes than when they started.

“In a very real way, you’re doing damage with these courses,” [Colorado Nobel Laureate Carl] Wieman, now a leading voice for reform, said in a recent interview.

State and federal policymakers are clamoring for more accountability and better graduation rates, and if faculty don’t step up, bureaucrats might. The National Center for Academic Transformation estimates that the 25 most common college courses — in subjects such as economics, English, psychology and the sciences — account for 35 percent of four-year college enrollment nationally.

I'm reminded of the craftsman's aphorism: good, fast, or cheap, pick any two.

I've been tempted to put together a long-term plan for an economics department in a medium-sized mid-major. Lets figure twenty sections each of income theory and price theory (principles of macro and micro, if you will) of not exceeding 35 students plus a full slate of upper-division classes and sufficient advisors to guide up to 200 capstone theses per semester. Works out to an economics faculty of about 45. My department is currently at 14.

MORE BROKEN CARDAN SHAFTS. Destination: Freedom hails the newest world's most powerful diesel locomotive.

The modern and angular looking Voith Maxima 40 CC has a power rating of 3,600 kilowatts, or almost 5,000 horsepower. It uses an automatic hydraulic transmission for coupling the engine to the drive wheels, unlike competing diesel locomotives offered by EMD; Bombardier, Siemens and Alstom, which employ a traction generator coupled to AC asynchronous drive motors via an electronic propulsion control unit.

"Modern and angular looking translates as "butt-ugly." (View picture.)

Those "competing diesel-[electric] locomotives" currently max out at 4400 horsepower with a single prime mover. Let's not forget the 6000 horsepower SD90MAC from Electro-Motive and AC6000CW (and a double-ender for China) from General Electric (with a German prime mover) that proved to be unwieldy even for large North American trains. Those are still the record-holders for most powerful single-engine diesels.

It's not the first time people have gotten carried away with diesel-hydraulics. The Germans have relied on them for years. The Western Region of British Railways was so impressed as to adapt several German designs for their purposes. The Southern Pacific was sufficiently intrigued by the idea of 4000 horsepower with one prime mover to purchase a total of 18 Krauss-Maffei ML-4000 diesels that didn't last very long.

TONIGHT'S RAILROAD READING. Megan McArdle has doubts about the Northeast Corridor.

This post reminds me of another discussion I was recently in: why is America's high-speed rail so dreadful? The Acela delivers you, at enormous added expense, to Boston one hour ahead of the regional. On the DC-to-NY run, the added benefit is 10-15 minutes.

The answer is that the Acela uses existing track, which is twisty, the better to serve every congressional district between here and Boston. Real high speed rail needs to be fairly straight, for the same reason you don't take hairpin turns at 120 mph in your car.

Of course, if we were not going to build high speed rail, the sensible thing to do was not to have a high-speed program at all. Instead we got the dreadfully expensive, yet basically useless, Acela.

It has nothing to do with public choice. The existing track is twisty because it was stitched together out of numerous older railroads, many of which were optimized to the technology of the 1840s, and which originally existed to haul manufactured goods from town to port. The Washington to New York still uses Civil War era routes and tunnels through Baltimore that are almost that old. The electrification on that segment was added during the Depression, using Reconstruction Finance Corporation money. It was enough of an improvement to handle the logistics of World War II. But a high speed line? No. In Depression and War, the fastest and most flexible corridor service in the world was Chicago to St. Paul via four different routes.

The New York to New Haven is primarily a commuter railroad that became electrically operated (primarily to comply with Manhattan smoke ordinances) early in the twentieth century. North of New Haven, there is a state-of-the-art electrical distribution system, but the rights of way date to railroading's Pleistocene era. Most of Rhode Island was still empty in those days, making straight line operation possible and providing today's racetrack for the Acela. But the right of way suitable for a high speed line is ... that of Interstate 95. The New Haven Railroad once acquired sufficient real estate for a faster line through Connecticut and western Rhode Island, but, to obtain temporary succour, it sold that real estate to the turnpike authority and then turned a freight profit hauling building materials.

Tyler at Marginal Revolution extends.

I've also heard that freight railways crowd the lines and Amtrak doesn't pay a high enough prices for access; the freight services had, way back when, pledged to the government to give Amtrak trains priority but of course that kind of cheap talk is not enough to get the job done; here is some relevant background, and more here.

That's true in some parts of the country, but most emphatically not the Northeast Corridor. The trackage belongs either to Amtrak or to the Metro-North Commuter Railroad. Apart from some factories between Newark, N.J. and Newark, Del. the gross product originating is software and lobsters that don't fill many freight trains. Elsewhere, yes, some of the freight carriers are not not cooperative with Amtrak, or have lost sight of the discipline of timetable operation.

The friends of rail transportation offer a different perspective.

Invest in densely populated corridors first, focusing on the creation of an effective and efficient commuter rail system; pump money into high speed rail, which has proven attractive to riders; and give Amtrak a dedicated funding source, in much the same way that highways and airports have dedicated funding streams (the gas and ticket taxes, respectively).

Sure, one can apply the old Welfare Economics Paradigm. Sometimes, however, one might have to apply some old thinking to new problems. Everybody acts as if "high speed rail" means dedicated rights-of-way with electric trains and Strangelovian signalling and dispatching and expensive upgrades of the infrastructure. It's possible, however, to obtain many of the benefits of increased speed simply by amending some of the Federal Railroad Administration rules to permit faster operation on existing tracks and signals.

QUOTE OF THE DAY. Harvard's Henry Louis Gates.

The historical basis for the gap between the black middle class and underclass shows that ending discrimination, by itself, would not eradicate black poverty and dysfunction. We also need intervention to promulgate a middle-class ethic of success among the poor, while expanding opportunities for economic betterment.

The provocation for the observation is a Pew survey.

"African Americans see a widening gulf between the values of middle class and poor blacks, and nearly four-in-ten say that because of the diversity within their community, blacks can no longer be thought of as a single race," according to a study released Tuesday by the Pew Research Center.

That conclusion leads to a bit of chin-pulling. There's nothing new in envisioning social divisions within the clunky aggregates (Anybody remember when the Slavic and Italian "races" were distinct from the English and the Nordic?) that white or black or brown represent. The culture-studies types have their race and class typologies as a way of identifying multiple sources of what they would view as oppression. The expression "white trash" refers to one aggregate of self-oppressed people: there is a pejorative that uses the adjective "street" to refer to another. Professor Gates's observation is instructive, in that it suggests that some of the oppression is self-inflicted. He has more in a similar vein.

The sad truth is that the civil rights movement cannot be reborn until we identify the causes of black suffering, some of them self-inflicted. Why can’t black leaders organize rallies around responsible sexuality, birth within marriage, parents reading to their children and students staying in school and doing homework?

Columnist Juan Williams has misgivings.

Racism, stereotypes and segregation laws long enforced the idea of a single black race by keeping down black people no matter their education and class. But just over 50 years after the Brown v. Board of Education decision set in motion the modern civil rights movement, with a unified black America pressing for political and social equality, there are significant numbers of people with dark skin, and racial discrimination battles, who say black people do not have enough common experiences and values to be thought of as one race.

This phenomenon is occurring inside black America as values held by black and white Americans are becoming more similar, according to 72 percent of whites and 54 percent of blacks. But the people who share values are middle-class blacks and whites. The black poor are the ones being left out, and they know it.

Consider: The black people most likely to say that blacks no longer share values across class lines have only a high school diploma or less education (37 percent), or they are lower-income (39 percent). Those most likely to say that all black people have many common values are college-educated blacks (78 percent) and black Americans who have incomes of more than $100,000 (66 percent).

But 70 percent of the same well-educated black people also acknowledge that they see values increasingly "diverging" between the black poor and middle class. That's different from the responses to a 1986 poll in which all classes of black Americans said differences over values were not diffusing the common black experience. Today both middle-class and poor blacks agree that racism is still a big issue for any black person. But they admit that the divide over values is splitting the community.

That phenomenon is not limited to rich or poor blacks, or rich or poor whites, or rich or poor Americans. One of the Thomas Friedman books suggests that a commodity trader in Chicago has more in common with a commodity trader in Manila than with a tractor assembler in Milwaukee. Class divides may or may not be more difficult to transcend today than they used to be. They are present, however, and there are right and wrong ways to address them.

For colleges, I'd say pick a level of subsidy you can sustain, and do it right. Instead of bringing in, say, two hundred students, and supporting them almost-but-not-quite-enough, bring in one hundred and do right by them. (Six hours of work-study a week? Okay. Thirty hours of Wal-Mart a week? Not okay.) And in 'doing right,' accept that some will still fail. Some people are drama-prone, and will find ways to find fault with whatever level of help they're given. At some point, you need to be able to say, with a clear conscience, there. This much is what we're willing to do; the rest is up to you. What that level would be in any given setting will vary, and that's fine.

And the Habits of Highly Effective People matter.

As a manager of people, I've noticed that the weather is always worse at some people's houses than others', even when it isn't. Some people manage to run into awful traffic every single day, even while their colleagues who take the same routes somehow get to work on time. And some people are just perpetually crabby, no matter how many of their grievances get addressed. You can't control how other people feel, or how they choose to live their lives. You need to decide what institutional conditions need to be addressed so that people with reasonable drive and life skills will have a genuine shot at success, and call it good. There will always be some who will condemn your efforts as inadequate, based on their own life drama, and some will even call you horrible names and question your personal integrity in the process.

Read the rest of the post, and the comments.

TAKING SEMIOTICS TOO SERIOUSLY. Tom McMahon, whose eponymous weblog is a friendly connection, rearranged a lame bumper sticker to suggest that the recommended action might not always be so easy. Milwaukee radio talker (and critic of higher education) Charlie Sykes liked the effort so much he posted it to his higher traffic site. The folks behind the original bumper sticker took offense. A full-scale weblog spat has broken out. Shark and Shepherd have a good summary of the first few days of skirmishing. Marquette Warrior, another friendly connection, suggests that the folks taking offense themselves give offense. Paul Noonan at The Electric Commentary, yet another friendly connection, suggests (via a tu quoque argument) that Mr Sykes is selective in his defense of freedom of expression. The spat has continued through the long weekend. There's a continuing discussion on Sykes Writes, and longtime Madison and Milwaukee policy maven Jim Rowen has been raising numerous counterarguments.

I do think, and I repeat, that he's in a hypocritical position because of his earlier battle with Miller Brewing over its participation in a tasteless and offensive advertisement.

If you're going to get offended about someone misusing religious symbolism (a Last Supper image), then don't praise and defend others who are doing the same thing (tampering with the Islamic Crescent and playing with the Star of David).

So be consistent, or risk being labeled a hyprocrite.

Maybe.

This is a classic Red Herring since whether the accuser is guilty of the same, or a similar, wrong is irrelevant to the truth of the original charge. However, as a diversionary tactic, Tu Quoque can be very effective, since the accuser is put on the defensive, and frequently feels compelled to defend against the accusation.

I'll let others work out whether both rearrangements rise to the same level of sacrilege, or whether we have yet another case study in Free Speech for Me -- But Not for Thee. The good news is that the spat has, so far, been confined to bytes and pixels, rather than bites and pistols.

A NEW TRAVELING TROPHY. Northern Illinois and Ball State will be playing for ownership of ... a cornstalk.

After discussions between the schools and in honor of one of the Huskies' and Cardinals' oldest, and closest, league rivalries, the teams will vie for "The Bronze Stalk" starting with the 2008 contest. The schools will seek a corporate sponsor for the rivalry and the trophy will go to the winner of the football game each year.

A model of the trophy, which is being designed by local DeKalb artist and nationally-recognized sculptor Renee Bemis, will be on display Saturday at Huskie Stadium when Northern Illinois and Ball State meet in the final game of the regular season for both teams. The trophy will depict several cornstalks in tribute to the locales of both universities. DeKalb, Illinois and Muncie, Indiana are cities located just outside of the major metropolitan areas of Chicago and Indianapolis, respectively, which are famously surrounded by corn fields. The wooden base of the trophy will feature the Ball State Cardinals' logo on one side and the Northern Illinois Huskies' logo on the other.

What, no Mason jar?

The trophy will begin its service in the custody of Ball State, who held on for a win this afternoon. Will the team that wins it from the other team sprint across the field to take it and then take a victory lap, the way the winner of the Axe does?

WANT TO BUY A WARBIRD? Get one from Courtesy Aircraft Sales in Rockford. The inventory includes some jets.

CHEERFUL NEWS. The Superintendent has learned that two of the three Milwaukee-area members of the 2007 All-American Marching Band that opens the Macy's parade are from the recently-re-started Milwaukee Hamilton band.

A PROPER ANCHOR FOR A CORRIDOR. The editorial writers at the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel are hailing, complete with a video, the rebuilding of the Union Passenger Station as an Intermodal Terminal. They continue to indulge in wishful thinking about the future.

If 110-mph train service is established to Madison, Chicago, the Twin Cities and Green Bay, those trains would stop at the station.

Regular readers know that my standard for the Chicago service begins at 75 minutes, Milwaukee to Chicago. Amtrak once asked the Postal Service to change the description of the Hiawatha Baltics on a commemorative postage stamp because general knowledge of a steam train capable of 125 mph speeds put the carrier in a bad light.

If the KRM Commuter Link is built, the station would be part of a line serving workers, students and shoppers from the southern suburbs, Racine, and Kenosha, where passengers could transfer to Chicago's Metra trains.

The benefits of that interconnectivity are not clear. South Siders and south suburban residents have the airport station, and Racine and Kenosha riders have a large paid parking lot at Sturtevant. What's the point of transferring to Metra and getting into Chicago not much faster than a Shore Line local on the North Shore Line got you there until the summer of 1955?

MAGIC(G.B.) = 2. Packers come from behind, stuff and mount Lions.

Since the Packers began league play 87 years ago, they have had a better record than 10-1 after 11 games only one time. That was 1929, their first championship season, when Curly Lambeau's legions played to a 0-0 draw on the road against the Frankford Yellowjackets after 10 straight victories.

"I'll say this," [head coach Mike] McCarthy said. "It was a true gut-check for our football team. This team has arrived as far as playing well in all three phases. For us to step up the way we did today, I thought was impressive."

Next up: another Thursday game, this time in Dallas. (What's up with these Thursday night games? Are the teams playing for the Mid-American title?)

MARKING OFF. Happy Thanksgiving. President Bush's Thanksgiving message notes that Berkeley Plantation in Virginia has a serious claim to the first official Thanksgiving (is "for what we are about to receive let us be thankful" unofficial?) A year ago, I sat down with some family members and designed the new house, starting with the train room (hey, is that a second random thing?) This year, I'm in it.

Thanks, readers, for looking in.

JUST SLIGHTLY AHEAD OF THE CURVE, AGAIN. A Hit and Run post on "food miles" makes the following observation.

By extension, walking to the big "industrial" supermarket in your neighborhood may be most responsible food choice you can make.

Two weeks until the Schnuck's opens a quarter mile from here. Others may look at it, and at my neighborhood of new houses, and call it "sprawl." I call it five minutes saved on the bike ride to and from the office, as well as a shorter walk to the nearest coffee house and in the near future a grocery in walking distance. The funky downtown coffee house with a great view of the railroad is a bit farther away.

I expect to get a lot of exercise preparing the new Victor E. Garden. It will be bigger than the old one, but I've got to start from scratch converting the mix of clay and compacted spoil that comprises my backyard. There won't be many food miles walking out back to harvest stuff.

SMUG ALERT. Via Greg Mankiw (a bit obvious with the vanity plates, Professor?), a Harvard Crimson article on faculty preferences in cars. There's nothing quite like establishing a dominant paradigm to subvert the dominant paradigm.

Priuses are common, suspected Porsche owners don’t want to be interviewed, and, as for the most academic of automobiles? It’s the Subaru Forester.

Isn't the Forester sort of a baby SUV?

King at SCSU Scholars notes there's more conformity at one of the self-proclaimed Harvards of the South.

I am reminded of this conversation on EconTalk where Mike Munger tells of a meeting of Duke department chairs. Everyone has a Prius or other hybrid. Next to last comes up the chair of chemistry, who argues that hybrid cars may use more energy (though less fuel) than gas vehicles. (Here's one report explaining why that might be so.) The chemist is then asked what he drives. "Oh, I drive a Prius, but that's just because you have to if you're gonna be a faculty member."

The Crimson article mentions one prominent nonconformist on the Harvard faculty.

“I drive a Chevy,” John R. Stilgoe proclaims. “It makes me sound like a common man.” The famously quirky visual and environmental studies professor says his black ’96 Suburban helps him blend into rural America on his annual summer field trips into the heartland.

He’s also quick to note that he doesn’t actually drive his massive SUV (city fuel economy: 11-12 miles per gallon) to campus—just from his house south of Boston to a train station. “If you reduce your carbon footprint at the house, you can drive whatever you want,” Stilgoe says.

The article doesn't tell you that John is an O Scaler who is pretty handy with a razor saw.

For the record, I am a faculty member who does not drive a Prius. If I ever get around to identifying eight random things as I've been tasked to do, one of the entries will be that I have purchased three new cars so far, a 1979 Volkswagen Rabbit that I used for 140,000+ miles, a 1988 Volkswagen Golf that I used for 220,000+ miles, and a 2003 Volkswagen Golf that's a relative youngster at 67,000+ miles.

WASHINGTON MONUMENT SYNDROME. That's the public-choice dynamic, noted at opinion journals as diverse as National Review, Reason, and Washington Monthly, in which a government agency reacts to a proposed budget reduction (in some cases, a smaller than usual increase in the appropriation) by eliminating a relatively cheap but visible and popular service. The short form is "closing the Washington Monument," although I'm not sure the National Park Service has ever done so.

Something similar may be at work in the academy's increased reliance on contingent faculty.

“We have to contend with increasing public demands for accountability, increased financial scrutiny and declining state support,” said Charles F. Harrington, provost of the University of North Carolina, Pembroke. “One of the easiest, most convenient ways of dealing with these pressures is using part-time faculty,” he said, though he cautioned that colleges that rely too heavily on such faculty “are playing a really dangerous game.”

Mark B. Rosenberg, chancellor of the State University System of Florida, said that part-timers can provide real-world experience to students and fill gaps in nursing, math, accounting and other disciplines with a shortage of qualified faculty. He also said the shift could come with costs.

The article appears to be conflating two things: in nursing and accounting, the practitioneer who picks up one class as a way of supplementing the income from his or her day job (or, in engineering, to be able to talk shop with junior engineers in competing companies without violating the antitrust laws) is a perpetuation of the honorable tradition of the adjunct professor as a nonacademician with a bit of the vocation, but in many of the other disciplines the adjunct faculty are attempting to make a career out of multiple part-time jobs, while retaining some expectation of a tenure-track job. Much of the article is about the travails of such wanderers, as well as of the students who take classes from the wanderers.

“Really, we are offering less educational quality to the students who need it most,” said Ronald G. Ehrenberg, director of the Cornell Higher Education Research Institute, noting that the soaring number of adjunct faculty is most pronounced in community colleges and the less select public universities. The elite universities, both public and private, have the fewest adjuncts.

“It’s not that some of these adjuncts aren’t great teachers,” Dr. Ehrenberg said. “Many don’t have the support that the tenure-track faculty have, in terms of offices, secretarial help and time. Their teaching loads are higher, and they have less time to focus on students.”

Dr. Ehrenberg and a colleague analyzed 15 years of national data and found that graduation rates declined when public universities hired large numbers of contingent faculty.

Several studies of individual universities have determined that freshmen taught by many part-timers were more likely to drop out.

“Having an adjunct in a course is not necessarily bad for you, but having too many adjuncts might be,” said Eric P. Bettinger, an economics professor at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland.

Students say they can often tell when a professor is part-time. Mike Brennan, a sophomore at the University of Michigan, Dearborn, said the courses taught by adjuncts tend to be more basic and the exams less challenging. “They have so many classes that they give tests that are easier to grade,” Mr. Brennan said.

Carly Matkovich, a senior at the university, said she had bonded more with her part-time teachers, in part because they have more practical experience. But it is usually hard to find time to talk with them outside class. “They’re never around,” Ms. Matkovich said. “It does make me feel kind of cheated.”

Trust the economists to get it right. Now we have to start educating the fourth estate about total factor productivity.

At some departments the proportion of faculty who are tenured is startlingly low. The psychology department at Florida International University in Miami has 2,400 undergraduate majors but only 19 tenured or tenure-track professors who teach, according to a department self-assessment. It is possible for a psychology major to graduate without taking a course with a full-time faculty member.

“We’re at a point where it is extreme,” said Suzanna Rose, a psychology professor who said she stepped down as department head in August, primarily because she could not hire as many tenure-track professors as she thought the department needed. “I’m just very concerned about the quality.”

Ronald Berkman, the provost at Florida International, disputed her numbers, saying the psychology department has 23 professors who are tenured or tenure track and 5 full-time teachers on contracts. The department is conducting a search for three more tenure-track professors, Dr. Berkman said.

“Which is not to say that they don’t need more, which they do,” he said.

In particular, students will switch majors when they run into trouble completing their schedules.

Right now, a friend of mine is a journalism graduate student trying to land an internship with a newspaper. A question that pops up at every interview – the question that almost blocked him from his graduate program altogether – is, “If you’re so interested in journalism, why were you an English major in college?”

It’s because your chances of getting into the journalism class you want or need are about the same as my chances with Natalie Portman. So my friend traded in a useful major that’s near-impossible to nail down for an easy-to-schedule major that’s borderline useless for his intended career. With scenarios like that playing out, one could almost jump to the conclusion that the school doesn’t care about our education and just wants our money.

Making sure your students get the classes they need isn’t some obscure pet project that can be tackled at leisure. It’s an essential function of this institution, and something that can damage people’s futures if it isn’t fixed quickly.

A little history: the journalism majors are fortunate to have journalism classes to be closed out of. Fifteen years ago, the state board of higher education attempted to cram-down a "rationalization" of the state universities under the misleading rubric of "priorities, quality, and productivity." (In those days, the business fad was to come up with an acronym with a "Q" in it someplace, and thus demonstrate your commitment to a superior product. Pure symbolism over substance.) Among the intended "economies" was the abolition of the journalism degree along with a few other "not socially useful" programs. Journalism continues to function, albeit at a reduced output, and I cannot reject the hypothesis that schedule-completion hassles are the Washington Monument syndrome at work: inconvenience the students sufficiently, and perhaps they and their parents will gripe to the legislature and Springfield will cough up the cash.

The administration, however, engages in rent-seeking of its own. Here's a University Diaries quip about the revealed preferences of Florida International's administration. At 11-D, Laura makes a connection to the family policy problems inherent in Adjunct U.

One class can consume about 20 hours per week devoted to lecturing, lecture prep, grading, and student conferences. Over the course of a semester, adjuncts, many of whom have spent a decade in graduate school, make less than a worker at McDonald's. Tuition for one student in the class exceeds their pay.

Adjuncts live in the shadows of universities teaching Intro to History and writing classes and survive on ramen noodles and coffee. Universities, which have been tauted as bastions of liberal thought, turn a blind eye to this injustice in their midst, because nobody really wants to teach Intro to History or those writing classes. How many of those adjuncts are women with children who don't have the freedom to relocate to tenure track opportunities across the country?

That's another Ancient and Honorable tradition of the academy: employing the faculty spouse, for many years the wife, as office help or technician. Expanded labor force participation by women disrupts that arrangement. I would note further that faculty reluctance to meet those introductory classes is faculty complicity in access-assessment-remediation-retention: there's no entry level quality control, no reward for the faculty to do so, and posting whinges on anonymous weblogs appears to be sufficient release.

A commenter proposes an adverse consequence.

Making everyone adjunct means all teaching and no research. No research -- in partnership with the executive branch's attempts to kill science -- puts an end to the one thing the US still excels at. How to demote a nation in two easy generations!

I'm not sure that's true -- industry and some parts of the government continue to sponsor applied (rather than basic) research. I suggest, however, that a university in which nobody is attempting to expand the frontiers of knowledge, because everybody is busy reading somebody else's prepared slides, isn't really a university.

QUOTE OF THE DAY. University Diaries.

Good whores and good professors offer a physical presence that’s worth your time and that, in its effects, can’t be duplicated by internet porn or distance learning. The devotion to intellectual seriousness and excellence, the ethos of disinterested curiosity, the communication of the attractiveness of cultural values through one’s complex sensibility, the modeling of intellectual agility and the pleasures of the mind generally through spontaneous, energetic, challenging, face to face dialogue… these are the things professors teach at the same time they teach a certain content.

Go. Read. Understand.

REVEALED PREFERENCES. Students struggle with mathematics because there's insufficient social justice in the pedagogy, which is not the same thing as insufficient social justice in the content.

Paul Ernest, a professor at Exeter University's school of education and lifelong learning, argues that traditional teaching methods disadvantage ethnic minority pupils, girls, students with special needs and those from poor backgrounds, and that considerations of social responsibility should be applied to maths teaching.

"I disagree with people who think that mathematics is neutral and value-free," he says. "It is human made, therefore culturally influenced, and this makes social justice central and relevant in mathematics.

"We need to think of different ways of contextualising maths to take multi-culturalism, racism and sexism into account. Students need to see that everyone owns maths, and that many countries have had their roles in the development of the subject downplayed. We need to make maths more democratic and discursive, so they are not afraid to suggest wrong answers." As Ernest readily accepts, this last suggestion demands a total rethink of teaching styles, as one of the main problems students come across in maths is precisely that an answer is simply either right or wrong. And it's hard to get round that. Whereas an essay can allow for shades of opinion and degrees of understanding, most school - and even undergraduate - maths doesn't throw the subject open to these nuances.

Well, no, e^ix = cos(x) + i sin(x), not give or take a hyperbolic tangent.

I suppose it's churlish to point out that it's precisely the parts of the world where there's a premium on the skills of the symbolic analyst that this conversation is taking place, perhaps because there's a migration of people from parts of the world where that premium is absent to where that premium is present.

I know it's too much work deconstructing the full argument. Via Joanne Jacobs, I offer an Education Gadfly retort worthy of General MacAuliffe.

I'LL TAKE PUBLIC FIGURES FOR $500, ALEX.

The answer is:

We're floundering in a quagmire in Iraq. Our strategy is flawed, and it's too late to change it. Our resources have been squandered, our best people killed, we're hated by the natives and our reputation around the world is circling the drain. We must withdraw.

Who is ...

WHY WE TEACH COST-BENEFIT ANALYSIS. Destination: Freedom makes common cause with opponents of tax-limitation policies sold under the rubric "taxpayer bill of rights."

‘Taxpayer Bill of Rights’, or TABOR, ballot measures attempt to place tight caps on state and local revenues. These caps limit public sector spending and investment based on a formula linked to population growth and inflation. Voter approval is typically necessary to override the caps. The measure sounds reasonable but ignores the nature of investment and on-going operational expenses for many public services. TABOR has become a favorite tool for some libertarian and conservative anti-government activists.

These measures can have dramatic and disastrous effects on the ability of states and communities to deal with an array of infrastructure improvements and investments. In 1992, Colorado became the first, and remains the only, state to adopt a TABOR amendment. Despite its robust growth and relatively high per capita income, a recent study ranked Colorado 35th in transportation funding, sixth-worst in the nation on highway and transportation maintenance. The state received a “D+” from the American Society of Civil Engineers for the condition of its infrastructure. In 2005, Colorado voters decided to place a temporary moratorium on TABOR in order to invest in needed transportation and other projects.

I suspect advocates of tax-limitation would use the vote as evidence that the law is working: the rent-seekers who otherwise would enjoy untrammelled access to the public purse must convince voters that the transportation projects are indeed useful. The American Society of Civil Engineers, after all, has a membership whose salaries often depend on a steady stream of government spending on bridges, road widenings, and housing projects.

ON THE LIGHTER SIDE. Betsy's Page finds a marvelous animation of "Battle of New Orleans" using Lego figures.

FACTOR-AUGMENTING TECHNICAL CHANGE. Via Charlie Sykes, an early-1990s version of 24, complete with a hippiesh Jack Bauer. Watch it and reflect on what instantaneous communication used to be.

MINNESOTA'S TAX DOLLARS AT WORK. You can buy a proper playing field. Atmosphere is another matter.

During his [recruiting] visit last fall, [David] Gilreath watched UW beat Penn State, 13-3, in front of a boisterous crowd of 81,777. He had never experienced such an atmosphere in the Metrodome, except when Wisconsin fans flooded the stadium.

"The Metrodome is kind of boring," Gilreath said. "I went to Gopher games since I was in the ninth grade. I thought that was loud. I thought that was nuts.

"Then I came here. . . . It was crazy. My mouth dropped."

Minnesota is scheduled to play just one more season in the sterile Metrodome, which is off campus. An on-campus, open-air stadium, which will seat about 50,000 fans, is set to open in 2009.

The last game at the Dump this season was properly the last game for Minnesota and Wisconsin, the latter retaining ownership of the Axe and awaiting a bowl invitation.

Associated Press photo courtesy Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel.

EXPERIENCE AND CUNNING SUPPLEMENTED BY YOUTH AND ABILITY. Vinnie Testaverde has retired and unretired and today he led the Carolina Panthers into Lambeau to face Brett Favre and the Packers, who prevailed.

SALES TAX MEANS SALES TAX. That goes for the Wisconsin football program, too.

Wisconsin athletics director Barry Alvarez asked lawmakers Wednesday to help his department avoid a potentially huge tax liability.

The [Wisconsin] Department of Revenue is threatening to start collecting the sales tax on donations made to Badgers’ athletics by people trying to qualify for season tickets, Alvarez said. His department would owe $400,000 in the first year and up to $2 million if the tax is collected retroactively to 2001, he said.

The Badgers’ legendary former coach testified in favor of a bill that would specifically exempt such donations from the sales tax. Fans would still pay the sales tax on the face value of the tickets.

“The failure to enact (the bill) would have an immediate negative financial impact on the Athletic Department,” Alvarez said.

An Assembly committee voted 11-0 for the bill after a 45-minute hearing. A similar plan failed to pass the full Legislature last session.

The department started requiring donations for preferential seating at football, men’s and women’s basketball and hockey games several years ago as part of a plan to get its “financial house in order,” Alvarez said.

The school charges up to $250 for Wisconsin football season ticket holders and smaller premiums for other sports. The payments are required for 38,000 seats at Camp Randall and 6,500 at the Kohl Center, Alvarez said.

Bingo. "Required donations are not donations."

IT'S HARD TO WIN A HAND OF LEASTER. Northern Illinois moves from #4 in the Bottom Ten to beyond the waiting list.

OUR NEIGHBORS AT WAR. Remembering Specialist Ashley Sietsema, Illinois National Guard and Northern Illinois University.

QUOTE OF THE DAY. Life choices are not interchangeable.

"This is the dark underbelly of cohabitation," said Brad Wilcox, a sociology professor at the University of Virginia. "Cohabitation has become quite common, and most people think, 'What's the harm?' The harm is we're increasing a pattern of relationships that's not good for children."

The article goes on to note that Professor Wilcox's observation is not yet consensus among practitioners.

PAGING LOTKE AND VOLTERRA. Predator cycles are part of the balance of nature.

It is a desperate - and likely endless - fight to protect the delicate ecology of the world's first national park, home to a rogue colony of Lake Michigan lake trout that biologists believe was illegally planted in Yellowstone Lake by self-serving anglers hungry for bigger trout to fry.

That is, until the bigger trout population falls into a Malthusian trap.

A model of biological evolution is considered, based on Lotke-Volterra population models (ecological interaction), with mutation being modelled by introducing new species with random ecological connections. It is found that the system evolves away from the ecological equilibrium point to a sort of steady-state balancing extinction with speciation.

That's the scientific version. The popular version goes like this.

Lake trout belong in Lake Michigan. The big lake gets out of whack without a top predator to cull its schools of smaller prey fish, including pesky alewives. But overfishing, pollution and an onslaught of invasive species combined to wipe out the king of the Lake Michigan food chain about 50 years ago.

Today, Lake Michigan lake trout are hatchery-raised and, like a dose of antibiotics, dispensed annually to help keep swarms of prey fish in check.

But in an absurd twist of ecological irony, it's a different story in Yellowstone.

In Yellowstone, Lake Michigan lake trout are the disease.

Read the rest of the story. It's depressing.

I also found this predator cycle simulation that appears to provide an online interactive application.

THERE WERE HIAWATHA PARADE FLOATS. The Hiawatha Room posts this picture of one built for the 1941 American Legion convention in Milwaukee. It appears to be parked between two of the support buildings at West Milwaukee Shops.


There are some differences between it and the mystery relic, but there are similarities.

In other Hiawatha nostalgia, consider the in-progress restorations of Coffee Creek and a 1948 leg-rest coach.

COLLEGIATE MODERN. Ogg Hall. Looks like the same furniture that was in the place in 1971.

REVEALED PREFERENCES. An anonymous professor at an ambitious Southern flagship university raises a familiar gripe.

Lost in the shadows of the administration's grandiose vision are the basic necessities of professional life. The real work of the university takes place on the ground -- in the classroom, the library, and the faculty office. And those of us on the ground doing the work should be equipped with the shovels and boots our dusty work requires.

Sometimes the working conditions are no better elsewhere. Everything this columnist notes is also daily reality in at least one enrollment-impacted department in a mid-major.

And there you have it, the list of vague values that propel this institution forward, punctuated with the ubiquitous exclamation point that is the hallmark of [Big Southern's] proclamations: Diversity, Excellence, Rankings.

What do any of those labels really measure? And what do they really mean? How do they translate into the material conditions of my professional existence? The buzzwords stubbornly resist embodiment in mundane -- yet crucial -- items like adequate supplies of departmental letterhead, functional furniture, clean corridors, reliable e-mail systems, and, yes, soap in the bathrooms.

When my classes are at full enrollment, there are so many students and so many desks that my instructional space at the front of the room is reduced to a rectangle -- no more than a foot in width and 3 feet in length -- in which I pace like a caged animal back and forth before my students. I could gain another foot of space by moving the overhead projector, but that easy solution evades me as the projector is literally chained to the front wall.

But who wouldn't want to achieve greatness, or the illusion thereof, on the cheap?

The biggest obstacle -- not only for myself but for the realization of the university's ambitions -- is the great disparity between its abstract mission statement and the material requirements of the teachers and scholars for whom the mission is a mandate.

The administration wants BSU to become one of the "top" institutions in the country, and to achieve that goal with facilities that are outdated, overcrowded, and ill-maintained, and with technologies that are unreliable, obsolete, and often unavailable.

I note this column in light of the Northern Illinois strategic plan, of which more perhaps next week.

MAKING THE CASE FOR A CORRIDOR. The editors of the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel hope to harvest a few spillover benefits, no doubt at somebody else's expense, from a Chicago Olympiad.

In addition, the Olympics bid could finally jump-start long-overdue improvements in rail transportation, including the possibility of a high-speed rail link between the two cities.

On that score and others, Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, Milwaukee County Executive Scott Walker and the congressional delegations need to read from the same playbook. A seamless and reliable transportation system is key.

That is, if the International Olympic Committee awards the 2016 summer games to Chicago. Whether that happens or not, there are developments on the Hiawatha corridor. The aesthetes at the paper have been down on the 1960s design of the Milwaukee station for some time. That station has received a makeover, and architecture critic Whitney Gould suggests there can never be enough of that Penn Station-style open space in a railroad station.

Gone are those elongated, cartoonish arches and that overbearing porte-cochère. Gone is the silly bell tower. No more broken doors and stick-on bathroom tile.

In their place is a luminous atrium that extends the building 30 feet north to the street, adding 7,500 square feet of space to the waiting area. Architect Greg Uhen has created a soaring, 50-foot-high room whose lively structural elements - crisscrossing white beams - express the sense of movement and connection embodied in a terminal for trains, buses and, perhaps someday, commuter and light rail (a prospect that seems less far-fetched as oil prices edge toward $100 a barrel).

Those arches ("modern renaissance" on the outside, echoed over the ticket windows inside) were state of the art in 1965, and that "silly bell tower" was characterized by Trains as "a nod to its 1886 predecessor" which had a full clock tower. The porte-cochere came in handy for transferring to taxis on a rainy day, as well as honoring a Milwaukee Road tradition (see the new and old Sturtevant stations, as well as Milton, or Richland Center with its canonical porte-cochere.) All the same, the station upgrade is good to see.




Let me take this occasion to remind readers, and Journal-Sentinel editorialists, what speeds used to be routine on that railroad.

THAT MERIT TRAP, AGAIN. An essay in Chronicle Careers addresses some of the same issues as a post I noted here, a bit more coherently but no more persuasively.

Many of my childhood friends have struggled to find stable, full-time work. The police and fire departments aren't hiring; nursing and education have shifted to part-time, no-benefits operations; manufacturing is long gone; and the union jobs that lifted many of their fathers into the lower-middle class have disappeared.

So, in the place where I grew up, there are men and women in their 30's who live with their parents and can't start families because there are so few real jobs, even for the ones who put in a couple years at community college, transferred to a state school, and were the first in their families to get degrees that were sold as certain tickets to the middle class.

The essay doesn't spell out which state schools. Is he referring to a flagship campus, a comprehensive, or a Division III party school? I keep claiming there is excess capacity in the institutions last named. Evidence to the contrary might prompt me to tone it down.

A lot of those people end up delivering pizzas, mowing lawns, waiting tables, or working the checkout lane at Wal-Mart for $7.15 an hour, and the message spreads that education doesn't matter.

College Lite? No. Warmed-over high school? Surely not.

But that is old knowledge in a lot of subcultures -- the world of their great-grandparents -- and it is being relearned in our new Gilded Age. As Anya Kamenetz has observed in her book, Generation Debt (2006), education is, more and more, not a ticket to anything but financial ruin. You have to know somebody who knows how the system works, who will help you. Or you have to start your own business, if you can get some money. But you probably can't. For some, mostly the men, the military seems like the only reliable way out. It's no accident that military advertising emphasizes earning marketable skills; you'll see the world, and you'll come back able to look your dad in the eye.

That is, as Veterans Day observances remind, if you do come back, and as speakers at the observances remind, if you come back whole. (And even people who come back unhurt physically do come back changed intellectually.) But let's back up ... there's this reference to a "system" to which some people seem to hold mysterious keys.

To a great extent, my life's course was set by the determination of my parents to give me chances that they never had and to foster a conviction that I would not live as they did: to have only one child, to send that child to parochial schools, to emphasize study, and to enforce strict rules.

No mystery there: that's the Habits of Highly Effective People. The mystery, and there are still plenty of social science books to write on aspects of it, is why that determination hasn't yet emerged as an evolutionarily stable strategy, and why one can observe variations in its observance among siblings raised according to the same rules.

But, even as a child, I can remember feeling that school was training me to be a subordinate in a culture -- nearly a caste system -- where the people who have money and power were different from us in personal style, language, and values. The suited professionals in their BMWs looked like members of some kind of alien occupation army; there was no possibility of communicating with them on equal terms. And they seemed to wield almost absolute power -- over rent, jobs, health care, schools, prices -- from inaccessible conference rooms in downtown office buildings. We never met their children because they lived in faraway suburbs.

Some vast conspiracy that. I'll concede that there's more to joining those ranks than buying the right suit and driving the right car, all the John T. Molloy self-help advice notwithstanding. That's not the source of the problem, as the essayist goes on to note.

In the context of working-class schools, I saw that a few students -- compliant, ambitious, individualistic, and possessing an aptitude for mimicry -- were eventually singled out for advancement. They passed by using test scores, recommendations, and loyalty oaths in the form of application essays. And if one of those students succeeded in a decade -- usually by joining the lower class of suit-wearers -- they were brought back to reinforce the myth of unfettered meritocracy: "See kids, you just have to work hard."

Let's pause for a moment and reflect on the implicit inequality of outcome in that "lower class of suit-wearers" and "myth of unfettered meritocracy." Grant for the sake of discussion that the highest-paying jobs earn larger salaries compared to the mean and to the lower-paying jobs today than they did 20 or 50 years ago. That suggests the value of the marginal product of those higher-paying jobs is rising proportionately faster than the supply. If there is in fact some conspiracy among those BMW-driving bespoke-suit wearing elites to keep the individualistic mimics (really?) down, there is also a powerful incentive for some conspirator to defect (hire the mimic for half the price of the holder of the prestige degree, get more than half the effort for it.)

I was a believer, but most working-class kids only half-trust what they are told. They see what happens to their parents and older siblings. And they know that trying too hard at school will cost them friends and make them targets for violence, particularly in the earlier phases of education, before the weeding process and tracking systems produce cohorts who cling to a sense of being exceptional and deserving, unlike their lesser peers. And they pay a price for spending time studying instead of building alliances in the neighborhood.

There's a rather blunt book, Resentment Against Achievement, that calls for more careful work on why the greatest resistance against individual effort comes from the very communities that would appear to benefit most by a greater exertion of such efforts. Rather than engage those ideas, the essayist chooses to throw a pity-party.

Some students, like me, can rise into the middle class that way, putting the dangers of the early grades farther into the past, but, at some point -- maybe decades later -- the ability to mimic elites must become so refined, so subtle and nuanced, that one cannot succeed anymore. There are five forks, and you don't know what to do with three of them. You've never been to Martha's Vineyard. You are reluctant to speak anyway because you can't remember the rules for "who" and "whom." People are laughing, and you don't know why. You feel like a lead pipe on a lace napkin. You have risen to your level of incompetence, and what is there to do but admit you don't belong and rely on the charity of your hosts?

Please. That social capital is relatively easily acquired. I also suspect that the circles of high achievers would welcome genuinely productive additions to their ranks: it's no accident that "income inequality" and "time crunch" coexist in the Popular Perspective. The author's closing remarks raise the possibility that the people remaining in the old neighborhood might have problems themselves with their neighborhood's verities.

I don't belong in the old neighborhood either. I made my choices long ago; or perhaps others made them for me. No one is awaiting my return. I think I can hear what they'd say: "You seem to like playing the working-class hero for rich people. Whatever. Do it if it works for you. You never belonged here anyway, even when you were a kid. If I could get out of here, I would. So get on with your life. We'll be fine without you."

What that imaginary friend is suggesting is "Are we making our own lives more miserable by making the lives of our ambitious acquaintances miserable?" So, again, why the persistence of resentment of the strivers by the non-strivers?

FASTER THAN THE LIMITEDS. Destination: Freedom notes China Rail's purchase of latter-day trolley sleepers.

The world’s first EMU sleeper cars are included in a $1.5 billion order for 40, 16-car EMU trains (640 cars) that the Chinese Ministry of Railways has awarded to the joint venture of Bombardier Sifang Power (Qingdao) Transportation Ltd. (BSP).

The joint venture members are: Bombardier Transportation, whose share of the contract is valued at $596 million; Power Corp. of Canada; and China South Locomotive and Rolling Stock Industry Corp. It’s the largest single order for rail passenger cars ever placed at one time in China.

Twenty of the trains will be designed for 155-mph-overnight sleeper service.

There might be some quibbles from friends of the Interstate Public Service and Illinois Terminal about that "first EMU sleeping cars" although the absence of controllers is probably dispositive of any such quibble. The Chinese, however, are in a position to go the Chicago-New York Electric Air Line (scroll down to Faster than the Limiteds entry) a few times better by actually building and running the service. Well done, China Rail.

THUS ENDETH THE VERTICAL ZOO. The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel notes the passing of Ogg Hall with a story headlined Raucous UW dorm goes upscale.

When Mark Werth moved into the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Ogg Hall dormitory as a freshman in 1965, everything was new: the beds, the closets, the fluorescent lighting and the rotary phone in each room.

Note: that was pretty upscale for those days, if the stories of the pay-phone at the end of the hall are more than hazy memories.

Werth helped build Ogg's raucous reputation from scratch, pulling fire alarms and lobbing water balloons.

"We were sort of pioneers for the newest residence hall on campus," said Werth, now 60. "When you told people you lived in Ogg, people said, 'Oh, the new one.' We got some cachet out of that."

By 1999, when Andy Masur moved to Ogg, kids still pulled its fire alarms. But the dorm had the smallest rooms on campus. With its 13-story towers, cinder block construction and 1960s look, Ogg earned a reputation as a bit of a dump.

We referred to it as the vertical zoo. It was tear-gassed more than once during the waning years of Vietnam protests, and if any of my readers remember the Fish House swimming pool, check in and say hi.

Ogg has fallen. Ogg will rise again.

Demolition crews started last week to rip down the old Ogg Hall, where four decades of students spent their first nights away at college.

Across the street stands the new Ogg, a gleaming construction of sand-colored stone and reflective glass that opened this fall. It boasts larger, air-conditioned rooms, a kitchenette on every floor and a price tag that's nearly $800 a year higher than what students pay to live elsewhere on campus.

I wonder, though, whether there's still more interest in living in the two faux-Oxford quad buildings, Adams and Tripp. Years ago, the rooms there still had government issued gooseneck desk lamps and two or three rooms shared an electrical circuit. Now two or three rooms will share a toilet. (What, no communal shower to turn into a pool?)

The new Ogg represents the new Wisconsin student. Many have never shared a bathroom, let alone a bedroom. They pay $7,000 for in-state annual tuition and fees.

The article suggests that they're also going to be deprived of good stories to tell. Read it for the details. It also suggests that ETTS generalizes from the decline and fall of the great passenger trains to the collegiate experience.

Rooms in old Ogg were laid out in a circle around the elevators, while rooms in the new dorm are arranged in clusters of four, where eight residents share a bathroom. Other perks: each floor has a kitchenette with pots and pans and a study lounge with comfortable chairs.

"My friends are like, 'This is like a hotel,' " said sophomore resident Val Maharaj.

Yet some students say they miss the noise and interruptions of the old Ogg.

"You don't get to know as many people on your floor," said Megan Groves, who lived in the old dorm last year. "You have to make more of an effort to meet the rest of the floor."

And not everyone has been enthusiastic about the new campus digs.

In 2004, when the university won approval to build the dorm, some legislators from both parties bristled at its fanciness and price tag.

Masur said future Wisconsin students will miss out on the austerity of the college experience.

"There's so much money flowing into UW, with these fantastic dorms where kids have the greatest luxuries," he said. "As good as that is . . . it is losing something of the grittiness that we experienced."

The next generation of Badgers will, however, be able to truthfully say that they had to go to class against the wind and uphill both ways. (Everybody familiar with Madison's geography will grasp that truth in an instant.)

There is, of course, an Ogg Blogg for the nostalgic.

AN ADJECTIVE, NOT A POSSESSIVE. That's Veterans Day. (Via University Diaries.) There's a meditation at Right Wing Nut House while Blackfive thanks Google for remembering.

SUMMONING THE ECHOES. In 1962, Vince Lombardi's Packers gave a new team called the Minnesota Vikings a 34-7 initiation to the National Football League. The teams have played each other approximately even in the wins-and-losses since then, with both the Vikings and the Packers going to four Super Bowls. This afternoon, however, the Packers went Lombardi and Phil Bengtson (who had the Bud Grant Vikings to deal with) and Dan Devine and Bart Starr and Forrest Gregg and Lindy Infante and Mike Holmgren and Ray Rhodes and Mike Sherman seven better. Packers 34, Vikings 0.

THE GALES OF NOVEMBER, REMEMBERED.

Paul Michaels photograph

The full Edmund Fitzgerald tribute information is here, and I offer reviews of Mighty Fitz and The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, and the truth about that "S. S. Edmund Fitzgerald" lifering that washed ashore in Lake Superior last summer.

UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES. I've had an opportunity to follow up on a post from April and read Philip Orbanes's Monopoly: The World's Most Famous Game & How It Got That Way, which is a relatively easy way to produce Book Review N^o. 32. That earlier post developed most of the themes the book explores in greater length: apparently the earliest antecedents of Monopoly^(TM) were the work of Henry George's disciples and other critics of capitalism, bent on demonstrating the evils of earning income from land ownership. (A game to illustrate the blessings of a socialist alternative strikes me as a more valuable propaganda tool as well as of greater intellectual interest. Sorry ... no "that's Candy Land" comments, please.) Eventual Attorney General (and trustbuster extraordinaire) Rexford Tugwell made an attempt at producing a real estate game as a collegiate teaching tool, and some of his economics students attempted further refinements. (But none of them achieved trembling-hand perfection, alas.)

Later, there was a great deal of maneuvering by Parker Brothers to secure the rights to Monopoly^(TM) and to competing games including Finance, which always struck me as a cheap imitation of the real thing with somewhat more contrived property names, and now I know why. More than a few of the home-made board games included didactic spaces such as "New York, New Haven, and Death Railroad" (long before Patrick McGinnis), "Goat Alley," "Rickety Row," and the intriguing "Hulett's Landing." Rich Uncle Pennybags turns out to be a somewhat less menacing avatar of J. Pierpont Morgan Himself.

The book does not touch on the feature of the game that strikes me as most paradoxical: it often plays much like competitive capitalism, wherein there are sufficient budget and capacity constraints that no player is able to dominate the board. (I have never encountered a Monopoly^(TM) player, either enthusiastic or reluctant, who hasn't noted the inordinate length of most games.) There is one trick I wasn't aware of that does sound like a classic profit-maximizing monopoly. Buy three houses. The incremental rent is highest at the third house (I'd never analyzed the deeds that closely, but check it out) and the rules of the game do not allow the Bank to hire a builder, so if all 32 houses are on the board, nobody is able to build additional houses. Restrict output and raise price, forsooth, and preempt your rivals' building plans to boot!

SAVOR THE DAY. Wisconsin 37, No. 13 Michigan 21. The University of Michigan band knows only one tune, and they didn't have much chance to play it today. I'll provide readers On! Wisconsin! and Varsity.

THE MARKET IS EFFECTIVELY COMPETITIVE. George Leef of Phi Beta Cons comments on an affirmative action debate at UCLA (motto: On! Wisconsin!)

What's fascinating about the story is the protest against the speakers. One Adam Lerman said "Young people in this city are not going to accept being relegated to second class universities."

Pretty silly. Unless UCLA were to expand many times over, it's inevitable that most students in Los Angeles will have to be "relegated to second class universities." Moreover, there is no reason to treat UCLA as if it's Shangri-La and everything else as garbage. The courses at UCLA aren't taught any better than at the less prestigious schools. A UCLA degree is not a guarantee of success in life and a degree from, oh, Cal State Northridge isn't a badge of shame. Like so many others, this Lerman fellow has fallen for the notion that your life will be one of Hobbesian misery unless you get into a prestige university.

Look no further than the price policies of the leading universities. Northwestern's Burton Weisbrod presented some of his recent work on nonprofits in our departmental workshop series. Among the slides is this information (go to image 10) which I have modified ever so slightly. The entries refer to listed tuitions among universities in 2004, with out-of-state tuitions for the state universities ranked among the top 100 "best national universities" included in the calculations. Note that the net price is lowest among the top 10 (perhaps there is some discounting going on to obtain more low-income students, but there's almost no difference in net price among the 11-50 set, with somewhat lower but still comparable net prices for everybody else. The price differentials suggest somewhat strongly that both students and universities view their offerings as substitutable (otherwise, the top 10 would be able to get away with much higher net prices than their less-reputable rivals, with the net price decreasing in distance from number 1.)

KEEP SCROLLING -- THE TABLE FUNCTION WORKS, BUT WITH LOTS OF WHITE SPACE ....

Ranking	Average listed tuition	Average Institutional Grants	Net price
1-10	$29,176	$15,919	$13,257
11-25	$28,820	$11,440	$17,380
26-50	$27,713	$10,645	$17,068
51-100	$23,344	$8,355	$14,989
>100	$17,101	$1,607	$15,594

I submit that the California State educational experience is probably not that much different from the experience offered at one of the flagship campuses, unless the California State curricula have become cesses of access-assessment-remediation-retention. I suspect, however, that there will be faculty resistance to that model of higher education, resistance that requires encouragement. Toward that end, I offer an observation from Rate Your Students.

Every week a student asks me for (a) lecture notes (b) a "retake" on a quiz or test (c) whether I "drop" low quiz/test grades and (d) whether he can take a quiz/test at his convenience because he has an ingrown toenail (an actual excuse).

I could blame the students for their wheedling and whimpering, but I blame other faculty. Where are students getting the idea that faculty hand out lecture notes so the little cherubs don't have to tire themselves by taking notes or attending class? They get these ideas from other faculty. Who is giving them lecture notes? Other faculty. Who is letting them retake quizzes, drop tests, and reschedule at their convenience? Other faculty. Some "teaching excellence" or "academic support" person will answer that these dumbing-down techniques improve student learning. They clearly don't. Have we seen any improvement in learning since faculty began handing out notes, powerpoints, and "retakes"? No.

The short form of the paragraph that follows: Grow. A. Pair.

I have a proposal. Faculty should hang together. Don't give lecture notes, and don't post lecture notes. The cherubs will learn that faculty expect them to attend class and take notes. Don't give retakes. The cherubs will learn that the first test or quiz is real and they have one shot at it. Don't give make-ups. Don't drop grades. Don't come in on Saturdays. If they miss class for Uncle Ernie's birthday party, then let them take the consequences. Don't IM with students. If the cherubs have something important to address, then they can address it like adults. Act like the bosses they will soon have. Stop making it harder on the rest of us.

Indeed.

OF WIENERMOBILES AND SKYTOP LOUNGES. The Brooks Stevens design firm recently became property of Ingenium.

Probable Milwaukee Road publicity photograph from the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel files.

As part of the Brooks Stevens story, the Journal-Sentinel once published a Hiawatha tribute. What the story doesn't tell is that the Milwaukee prepared plans for a transcontinental Hiawatha in the early 1940s. The tail car was a modified Beaver Tail parlor configured as a sleeping car with some roof windows in the rear lounge section. The Skytop lounges look like a radical departure from the prewar Beaver Tails; they are, however, an incremental change from the 1940 plans, which are themselves an incremental change from the 1938 Beaver Tails, fitted with Buck Rogers-esque tail fins and large rear-facing windows.

And yes, there really was a Brooks Stevens

Even "planned obsolescence," a marketing ploy that made him, in [art curator Glenn] Adamson's words, "the Antichrist" to the doctrinaire left, had about it an engagingly populist aura.

From Stevens' perspective, planned obsolescence was the consumer's desire "to own something a little newer, a little better and a little sooner than necessary."

Manufactured objects traded in for the newest thing weren't necessarily scrapped, he emphasized. They simply went on the resale market, becoming available to another level of purchaser who might not be able to afford the very latest sensation.

In that passage, there are multiple ideas that merit further reflection. Take first Mr Stevens's observation that dated models cascade from original owners to new owners. I recall a Newsweek economics column (sorry, can't give you the author or the exact year) from the mid-1970s suggesting that the used car market was one of the great engines of wealth redistribution (where else could one buy $2500 of car services for $500)? I believe that column preceded widespread knowledge of the Akerlof lemons principle. The vulgar understanding of "planned obsolescence" gave rise to popular criticisms of excessively materialistic consumer behavior, most notably Vance Packard's The Waste Makers. Mr. Stevens would suggest that the annual automotive model change actually reduced waste: consider this passage from page 130 of Mr Adamson's Industrial Strength Design, the catalog of exhibits at a Stevens retrospective in Milwaukee a few years ago."If companies did not bring out a new and better product each fall, volume would fall off, unit costs would increase, and employment would be reduced." Mr Adamson characterizes the observation as "Machiavellian" but "persuasive." A more accurate characterization might be "wrong." Perhaps the model change attracts buyers who would otherwise keep the existing model running for another year, but those are incremental buyers for whom the company has made an investment in tooling for the new design that it could avoid by continuing production of the existing model. Furthermore, continued production of the same model means a larger volume for that model, with perhaps economies obtained by learning by doing. At the time Mr Stevens made his observation, however, Armen Alchian's instructive "Costs and Outputs" might have still been a working draft for the Rand Corporation. Finally, the assertion that "employment would be reduced" is the lump of labor fallacy. Fewer people might have been tempted to drop out of high school to hire out with the Big Three and the Little Two at union wages, and perhaps some of the adjustment costs those people had to bear in midlife when the automobile manufacturers emphasis on style over substance encountered the realities of higher fuel prices and more dependable cars made elsewhere.

PROGRESS?

Day by Day for 8 November.

Roundup of commentary and interpretation here, with more here.

LET THEM GET A LIFE. From time to time, I've mused on the popularity of beanbag (or "bags") among the collegiate set as evidence of an overscheduled childhood. Perhaps that's not the only evidence. Consider the recently-rebuilt tot-lots at our Child Development Center.

One year has passed since two sad occasions when unknown vandals caused nearly $2,500 of damage to the old playground equipment, which included a “Discovery Tot Tree,” a “Country Cottage House” and an “Easy Stove Table.” The top of the plastic treehouse was ripped from the bottom, hoisted over the 4-foot fence and later found adrift in the river. The house and the table were torn apart.

There is now an eight-foot fence around the tot-lots. I asked a colleague if that was required by some safety regulation and the colleague indicated that from time to time they'd have the apparatus damaged by collegians who got over the old four-foot fence to play on it. Although some of the new features can handle the live load of an adult, this stuff is engineered for toddlers. But again, as with the beanbag, does the propensity of collegians to use the tot-lot indicate insufficient opportunities for spontaneous play with other youngsters?

The continued fallout from the withdrawn (pending redesign?) Delaware consciousness-raising treatments suggests that the overscheduled childhood becomes an overscheduled freshman experience.

The direction Residence Life has taken with its meetings and programs is also unsettling. In previous years, floor meetings and programs were focused on social icebreakers and interacting with new members of the residence hall community. Testimonials from both sides show that many of these meetings have been redirected to focus on tolerance and diversity issues.

(Via The Torch.)

There are always a few things the residence hall advisors ought to make clear. I still remember the warning about having a high school guest in the room with her shoes off ... On the other hand, perhaps the best way to learn about your neighbors' talents is to, well, get to know them as people. Be nice to that dork, he can write code like nobody's business.

FOUR BEATS THREE. In the Bottom Ten, that doesn't count as an upset.

NOW WE KNOW. A year ago, there was great joy among the numerous wannabe-court-intellectuals shilling for the Democrats.


Today, it appears as if Lucy has the last laugh after all.

The exquisite irony of watching Democrats fall all over themselves trying to kill impeachment after spending most of the last 7 years accusing Bush/Cheney of the most dire impeachable offenses was almost too delicious to watch. It showed the Democrats to be shallow political hacks, eager and capable of using rhetoric to undermine the presidency during a time of war but without the balls to match their actions to their words.

Representative Kucinich: merry prankster, certifiable loon, but please don't call him a leftist.

TRYING TO PUSH THE FOURTH TURNING? In the logic of generational cycles, there are hero cohorts (most recently, the GIs who came of age during World War II), artist cohorts (who come of age during the post-crisis consolidation and, like the Silent Generation I frequently revile in these pages, worship process over outcome), prophet cohorts (who come of age by challenging the order consolidated, often misperceived as limited to the Sixties hippies), and Nomad cohorts (who come of age somewhat neglected and who their elders see, often correctly, as crude.) In that logic, the cycles are rhythms of history, but they are supposed to be emergent phenomena, which can go badly wrong should a cohort attempt to push the cycle before its time. (Any such cycle ought to be arbitraged away by sufficiently forward-looking independent agents, but I digress.)

Now comes Christopher Hayes, perhaps unwittingly applying the cohort designations to a baby boomer not likely to be mistaken for a hippie.

[President] Bush, then, emerged as a kind of prophet. Because his image-makers had already portrayed him as having abandoned Boomer frivolity for Greatest Generation discipline, he seemed the natural choice to lead the country through its trials. In 2002, after congressional Democrats suffered losses in the mid-terms despite heavy campaigning from Bill Clinton, Time's Margaret Carlson concluded this was due to a post 9/11 "shift in the culture," in which "Clinton-era values are no longer America's."

Although it's true that the aftermath of September 11 gave the national-greatness conservatives opportunities to influence the President in ways that the business and libertarian factions of the Republican coalition would have rejected if Third World grievances had remained in culture-studies departments and Southwest Asian mosques, it's also true that the Clintons fancied themselves prophets, with she often asking herself what Eleanor Roosevelt (from an earlier Prophet cohort) would have done, and he expressing some regret that no great challenge came up on his watch. (Signing the Iraq Liberation Act is one thing, having the opportunity to enforce it another.)

The essay raises a theme that dominates generational thinking. In that model, a secular crisis becomes an all-consuming event in which a new social order emerges. (I suspect some people would use the locution "is constructed." That strikes me as too orderly.) Mr Hayes offers a warning to symbolic analysts, should that indeed be the social dynamic.

But [Saving Private Ryan]'s real message revolves not around Ryan, but Cpl. Timothy Upham. We first meet Upham when Miller goes to fetch him from his desk where he is poring over maps and translating communiqués from French and German.

Young and wispy, with hair brushing his upper lip, Upham is a translator, not a fighter: He hasn't fired a gun since basic training and wants to take his typewriter with him. He quickly earns the unit's ire by annoyingly chatting everyone up and quoting books and poetry. At one point, after engaging a German tank that manages to kill one of their own men, the American soldiers capture the lone surviving German and force him to dig his own grave before they execute him. As the German pathetically mutters nonsensical English phrases, Upham objects to Miller. "Captain, this isn't right," he says, "You know this. He's a prisoner, he surrendered. He surrendered, sir." Miller is skeptical, but ultimately swayed. He blindfolds the German and tells him to walk 1,000 paces and then turn himself in to the first American soldiers he sees. The other men grumble.

It's not the last we see of the German. In the film's climatic battle, as the Americans try to hold a bridge under a heavy German attack, this same former prisoner returns to shoot and kill Captain Miller. Meanwhile, during the battle, Upham is paralyzed by a fear so total that, as his Jewish comrade wrestles hand-to-hand with a menacing Nazi, he can only cower in the stairwell below, crying as the Nazi plunges a knife in the Jewish soldier's chest.

The message is clear. In the great struggle for the future of the free world, the intellectual cannot be trusted. His concern for the laws of war means he is weak and cowardly, and will contribute to defeat. Only the true soldier can win the war. This is the ethos of the Cult of the Soldier, which would come to entirely dominate our politics in the years to follow.

I missed that detail the first two times I watched the movie. The DVD is on hand, should I get some breathing time. The metaphor, however, might refer to the process-worshippers more generally, not necessarily to the truest believers among the Prophets.

SAYING NO TO THE VANGUARDISTS. Via Liberty and Power, a Sean Collins review of Until Proven Innocent, a chronicle of the Diversity Boondoggle's rush to judgement at Duke.

Radical faculty members did not hesitate to presume guilt, and emerged to denounce the players. Houston A Baker Jr, a professor of English and of African and Afro-American Studies, was particularly prominent in the media. In a public letter to the administration, Baker wrote that the team embodied ‘abhorrent sexual assault, verbal racial violence and drunken white, male privilege loosed amongst us’. And in an email to the mother of a lacrosse player, Baker called her son and his teammates ‘farm animals’. A ‘Group of 88’ faculty signed a full-page advertisement in the campus paper that described Duke as a ‘social disaster’ for students who are ‘objects of racism and sexism’ and ‘see illuminated in this moment’s extraordinary spotlight what they live with everyday’. The signers asserted without qualification that something ‘happened to this young woman [Mangum]’, and thanked protesters ‘for not waiting and for making yourselves heard’.

All wrong, as we now know. But there's nothing quite like a Tight Prior. That's Bayesian-speak for "narrative that confirms our prejudices."

In its details, news coverage generally followed DA Nifong’s statements uncritically. But most of the national media bathed the Duke affair in the light of a modern-day PC morality tale. On one side were white, privileged, racist, drunken, arrogant jocks at the ‘Harvard of the South’; lacrosse players in particular were from the upper classes and violent in nature (not unlike their description in Tom Wolfe’s novel I Am Charlotte Simmons – set at ‘Dupont University’, which is a thinly-veiled disguise for Duke). On the other side was a poor African-American single mother working hard to advance through a local community college. The case was presented as personifying broader social problems of sex and race in the United States.

This set-piece outrage made for a compelling story. There was only one problem: it wasn’t true.

The toughest question for any empirical researcher to answer is "What evidence would persuade you to reject your hypothesis?" It may not be wise to couch that answer in terms of statistical significance. I suppose, though, that if you've argued yourself into a position that denies the possibility of any objective reality, it's easier to fall back on that position rather than cope with the cognitive dissonance.

At Duke, university president Broadhead changed his tune over time, and eventually (in September 2007) apologised to the lacrosse players for not supporting them. But the radical professors were not in the least bit embarrassed. A group of them issued a ‘clarification’ letter to their original advert, rejecting all ‘public calls to the authors to retract the ad or apologise for it’ and claiming they were misinterpreted. The letter-writers implicitly blamed the Duke student body for an ‘atmosphere that allows sexism, racism and sexual violence to be so prevalent on campus’. The faculty were the real ‘victims’ – victims of ‘intimidation’ for their views.

In the same way, I suppose, that anonymous academic webloggers whinge when somebody questions their logic, or lack thereof. But academic tenure, for all its advantages in protecting the audacious for challenging entrenched orthodoxies, is also a rampart for milquetoasts. Incentives matter.

Apparently, so do strategic reserves.

However, the New York Times held on to its pro-Nifong stance until the bitter end. Even as late as August 2006, when much of the case had fallen apart, the Times continued to bang on about the ‘tangled American opera of race, sex and privilege’ and tried to resurrect the case by taking as good coin a police sergeant’s notes cobbled together after the fact. Like the Duke faculty, the Times remained unapologetic: after the defendants were declared innocent, the paper’s ‘public editor’ concluded that its coverage was balanced, and any flaws were not the result of ideological bias.

Perhaps that paper exists, much like Pravda and Izvestia did until 1991, to make true believers comfortable with their prejudices. Duke's students appear to be made of sterner stuff.

If there is a redeeming feature of the Duke story, Taylor and Johnson find it in the response of the Duke students. Although some were against the players early on, many reserved judgment, and, as the facts emerged, campaigned for the accused students. Abandoned by adults in the administration and faculty, perhaps the students at Duke (and elsewhere) have learned that it is now up to them to get American society back on track.

Yes, if anyone can agree on what that "track" is. (The review notes that the diversity hustlers find unlikely allies in Christian temperance types who would just as soon cast the demon rum out and in law-n-order politicians wedded to zero-tolerance policies.)

NINETY YEARS AGO. Aleksandrov and Eisenstein would have you believe that the Bolsheviks came through this Petrograd arch and started the ten days that shook the world.


When I took this picture, ten summers ago, Leningrad was St. Petersburg again, and the masses in the courtyard were more likely to be there before or after enjoying the Impressionist collection that Iosif Vissarionovich and Nikita Sergeyevich would have you believe were degenerate art.

Thank you, Friedrich Hayek, for demonstrating the folly of "scientific management" of a complex adaptive system (a lesson that the "synergy" chasers of the 1960s conglomerates had to learn the hard way).

Thank you, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, for documenting the evil that ensues when true believers in a better world pursue their vision to the exclusion of any objection, no matter how trivial.

Thank you, Ronald Reagan, for correctly identifying both the folly and the evil, despite the sneering from supposedly more sophisticated quarters.

INSUFFICIENT OPTIONS. Destination: Freedom welcomes coverage in the Sunday supplements.

With the exception of The New York Times’ editorial pages, the news columns of The Wall Street Journal, and until recently only a handful of other general news circulation papers, few news outlets, print or otherwise, have understood or written about in depth the transportation crisis we have created, or successfully explained it.

The article, by author Peter Richmond, is one of the most important to appear in more than a generation of generally spotty or shallow news coverage of the American transportation crisis, outside of specialty or academic periodicals, in large part because of its broad reach. Until recent congestion became “gridlock”, general assignment reporters were usually only able to spend a small amount of time on any given subject, and could not become instant experts at everything they covered.

That reference to "specialty periodicals" includes Don Phillips's columns in Railway Age Illustrated Trains, where he has been writing, repeatedly, about the coming strangulation of the transportation network.

Now Parade picks up the story.

Americans spent about 3.7 billion hours stuck in traffic last year, burning gasoline whose price had soared by 60%. At the airports, security lines snake endlessly, runways are choked, and delays are common. One recent study found that, between January and August 2007, one in four flights arrived late; 159 flights were kept on the tarmac for more than three hours in August. As a result, more than half of U.S. businesses augment commercial air travel with expensive corporate jets and charters. Isn’t there a better way?

Policy problems. Looking for a term paper topic?

1. How much of that congestion is caused by government failures elsewhere, including the insistence on rebuilding existing highways under traffic and failure to do relatively cheap things such as synchronize traffic lights?
2. What is the incidence of corporate welfare in the form of trucks on the highways and corporate jets in the airways using the road and air networks without bearing the opportunity costs.

But let's think carefully about what that rail alternative is going to look like.

Many transportation experts insist that the best answer to transportation gridlock is efficient intercity rail travel. Trains use one-fifth less energy than cars or planes. They run in bad weather. They’re business-efficient and tourist-friendly. Yet, since the early 1960's—with the exception of the Northeast Corridor, from Boston to Washington, D.C.—railroad transportation in the U.S. has become largely irrelevant. For most Americans, train travel from city to city remains an afterthought. And for good reason: Our national rail system is inadequate, relying on aging equipment and a shrinking route-map. The system sorely lacks both financial resources and government support.

I suspect that some Southern Californians might bridle at that "irrelevant," and the emerging corridors outside Chicago, including but not limited to the Hiawatha, continue to attract new riders without alienating too many existing riders. The ultra-fast electrified corridors, or the InterCity 110s that I keep advocating, are only part of the story.

As our airways and highways have slowed down, demand for train travel has been increasing. In fact, Amtrak ridership was up for the fifth year in a row, reaching record levels—despite the fact that a third of trains arrived late last year. In the Northeast, since Amtrak introduced higher-speed Acela trains in 2000, the railroad’s share of 10,000 daily commuters between Washington, D.C., and New York City increased from 45% to 54%.

“Train travel is the thing for a one-day business trip,” says Malcolm Edgerton, a Chicago architect who travels often from Chicago to Springfield on Amtrak for work. A recent trip, he said, “would have meant seven hours of driving, and I would have been exhausted. Instead, I left in the morning, did work on the train, got there at noon, did my thing, even had time to visit a museum. Then, on the way back, I drank Scotch in the bar car and traded stories with a salesman and another architect. The round trip was $40.”

(The nice thing about cut-and-paste is that I can lift chunks out of a column in a different order than the author put them in, in order to maintain the flow of my argument.) Note that the Springfield line might be good for 110 once all the advanced signalling and four-point grade crossing protection is in place. Excessive caution, I say. That expanded Springfield service uses Illinois money, which might reduce the public-choice dynamics (Turbotrains to Parkersburg, West Virginia?) inherent in Federal funding of the rail network.

The key to improvements may be federal incentives for state investment, say train watchers of all stripes. They point to two successful projects that relied heavily on state funding. Amtrak recently expanded service from Chicago to downstate Illinois and St. Louis, where ridership is up about 50%, and major improvements were made to the Philadelphia-Harrisburg line.

In light of those successes, the newly Democratic-controlled House approved $50 million in matching funds for state Amtrak projects, and the Senate approved a similar program for $100 million. “We are on the edge of a revolution in thinking and the thinking of policy-makers of the future of transportation,” says Rep. James Oberstar (D., Minn.), who heads the House transportation and infrastructure committee. “And that future is filled with high-speed, reliable rail service.”

I'm not sure why the Shinkansen envy. The article misses a lot of the more prosaic action, including the six-car off-peak rakes on Metra, the San Francisco commute expresses to Silicon Valley, and the Lackawanna Electric into Penn Station. And although the Europeans might be investing heavily in upgrading their intercity lines, it's no accident that state-of-the-art electric and diesel multiple unit technology tends to be European: there's a lot of that Vienna to Wiener Neustadt or London to Oxford business to accommodate, and a lot of upside potential for that traffic in the States.

CONDOLENCES. Kerry remembers Grandpa.

TURN IN THOSE WRECKERS, RIGHT-DEVIATIONISTS, AND SUBVERSIVES.


Article 58 mandates it.

Residence Life is not taking kindly to having their program immediately and completely shut down. Faculty and RAs who stand up against the program have been feeling the heat.

Developing.

IT WORKED. Thus did Brett Favre explain the latest long pass to Greg Jennings putting the Packers ahead of Kansas City to stay.

Favre rallied Green Bay past Kansas City 33-22 and joined Tom Brady and Peyton Manning as quarterbacks who've beaten all 31 other teams in the NFL.

In an odd confluence of timing among three of the game's greats, Manning and Brady both achieved the career milestone only one week ahead of Favre, who had been 0-3 against the Chiefs and was probably seeing them for the last time.

Announcer Wayne Larrivee made his "dagger" call in the wake of a subsequent interception return for a touchdown by Charles Woodson.

Mason Crosby added a fourth field goal, from 45 yards, and with 59 seconds to go Charles Woodson intercepted Huard's pass and went 46 yards for a touchdown that made the game look much more lopsided than it actually was. The Packers scored 17 points in the final 3:05 on a defense that hadn't given up more than 20 all year.

FRUSTRATION. Years ago, it was Neenah's Red Rockets going to the state basketball tournament only to lose the final game (including, memorably, once to Milwaukee Hamilton). Now it's Neenah's turn to deliver the frustration, only to Marquette in soccer.

The coexistence of independent and common schools in the same tournament takes some getting used to. There used to be parallel tournaments, and one of the gripes those in charge of the common schools had, particularly when playing games with the independent (in Wisconsin, read "Catholic" or "Lutheran" for the most part) schools was that the indies could offer something resembling athletic scholarships, while the common schools had to build teams out of residents of the district. That, too, has changed.

NOVEMBER IS MODEL RAILROAD MONTH. There aren't likely to be many workbench shots in the near future, but there's plenty of benchwork to salvage from the former quarters.

COMMODORE STAUBACH IS ON THE BRIDGE. Navy 46, Notre Dame 44.

WHY IT MATTERS. Two items that generated many a post on the academic weblogs this week highlight a central theme of these pages, namely that higher education ought to be higher education. Start with the commotion about junior faculty looking for new jobs. Let's break this down. As long as departmental hiring committees have the responsibility for identifying people to hire, and as long as departmental promotion committees do the initial recommendations for tenure or promotion, junior faculty recognize that their primary responsibility is to be competitive in the discipline. That means establishing a reputation as a scholar.

Perhaps the people who manage higher education might want to re-examine whether the German model or the land-grant model of scholarship is the best one to apply to higher education, but as long as the reward structure is as it is, it ought not come as any surprise that faculty members respond to the incentives it provides.

Why, then, might faculty members wish to leave? I'll concede that securing a more visible position in the academic food chain is part of it. I'll note, however, that the food chain is probably more skewed than it ought to be, and some of the responsibility for that skewedness rests with senior faculty who are indifferent or hostile to their colleagues' ambitions. There is no shame in making a promising colleague look good enough to be raided away by some other program. There is nothing but shame in thinking that the success of a colleague somehow diminishes your own work.

Some responsibility for that skewedness must rest with administrators whose mindset is "We'll never be as good as College X and there's no point in even trying," particularly when that mindset mutates into the more virulent forms of access-assessment-remediation-retention and the lowered expectations that come in train. There is nothing quite like the intellectual challenge of keeping one's mind sufficiently sharp and focused to produce the kind of research that will be rewarded in the discipline after one has spent some time attempting to reason with Rate Your Students fodder. Does it come as any surprise that the sites run by the anonymous jobseekers that set off the conversation also have a goodly number of gripes about unprepared or unmotivated students? Improve the working conditions and people will be less disposed to want to publish their way out.

And that leads to the now-suspended Delaware reeducation camps. As I noted in that post, using freshman orientation to inculcate some humility and to make the point that the privilege of a university education brings responsibilities with it is an honorable tradition. Somehow, in the Delaware materials, that mission mutated into consciousness-raising about how American society is a machine for the replication of the existing system of social stratification. I'm not persuaded of that: there is the Spielberg effect at work.

I wonder whether that consciousness-raising doesn't turn a bad theory into something like a self-fulfilling prophecy (I'm at Delaware while my richer neighbors are at Swarthmore or Princeton: what point effort?) Such thinking is, again, likely to further skew the academic food chain, and contribute to the excess demand for the places that show up at the top of the U.S. News (what happened to the World Report?) rankings. It's also likely to raise the resentments against affirmative action that much of the Delaware material addresses. (Sure, it's a thoughtcrime to mention that, but you can't speak of a machinery for replicating social stratification and at the same time expect people whose test scores are higher but who were not admitted to a better part of the machine to like it.)

Doesn't it make more sense for all concerned to recognize the excess demand and provide working conditions for the faculty and classroom conditions for the students under which all are challenged to excel rather than led to believe that their status is somehow second- or third- class? I'd expect that there'd be less job-hopping for a better fit (read research prestige and intellectually stimulating students) under those circumstances.

TONIGHT'S RAILROAD READING. Ezra Klein commends Congress for funding Amtrak.

It's true that America doesn't have the density to support a train infrastructure like that of Europe's, but parts of America certainly do, and in those areas, Amtrak just isn't funded well enough to be a competitive option. This, of course, creates a rough cycle in which a poor reputation drives away customers, which in turn increases fares and lowers service quality, which in turn harms the reputation, which in turn drives away customers, which...

Much of the United States east of the Mississippi River has a population density comparable to France, and there are a number of corridors which could be brought up to a respectable 110 mph service at a relatively low cost, particularly if policymakers drop those cartel-era speed limits compelling trains to plod along at 60-80 mph. Increased frequencies, even on passenger-unfriendly Guilford (or is it Pan Am Rail) and on the inefficiently-downsized Main Line of Mid America, not to mention on the Hiawatha service, which in my view is capable of setting the pace for economical upgrades of corridors without the folly of electrification and 180 mph running, have been bringing in the riders. More reliable timekeeping would help.

The reader comments are instructive (there are no comment links, just scroll. Hand-fired commentary, forsooth.)

It would help Amtrack [c.q] a lot if the railsystem would become independent from the company owning the rolling stock and providing the actual service. Decades of neglect have turned the rails into a state beyond repair, and its [c.q] totally illusionary to run something like a modern rail service on them. In Europe, railway compaqnies [c.q] had to rebuilt most of the tracks connecting cities from scratch, too. This is a multi-billion-dollar endeavor, but it will be an attractive alternative for flying,if finished. It's quite an ironic fact that Amtrack's [c.q.] engines are dewsigned [c.q.] for speeds of 150 mph and more, but that it's impossible to actually drive that fast most of the time. The explanation is, of course, that politicians wanted Amtrack [c.q.] trains to look like TGVs or ICEs, but shied away from the costs that it would have taken to really bring the system up to that standard. Let's hope this scrooge attitude will change soon.

Demsetz auctions for train operating franchises, British-style? The British are still learning some of the difficulties with the approach. Designed for speeds of 150 mph? True of the latest power on the Northeast Corridor, but neither the New Haven nor the Pennsy really have the speed potential of the Great Western or the Milwaukee Road or the old Big Four lines from Chicago to Cincinnati or Cleveland to Cincinnati (to consider a couple of neglected corridors).

We should build out the infrastructure for rails for both freight and passenger services. These need to designed to allow each type of service to operate well.

Then we can let various operators compete to run on the rails. This is somewhat like trucking which uses the highways.

We know that freight hauling by rail is competitive and if subsidized as the roads are would be huge. We can see this becuase [c.q.] trucking is forced to build trains on the roads with triple trailer trucks. This system is silly.

I would agree that a clear transportation road map and investment to build strong long haul freight rail and local region rail passenger service infrastructure is long over due.

The problem, dear reader, is that freight and passenger rail are really two different technologies. The day will come when the BNSF will do all in its power to keep the intermodals on the Transcontinental and the coal on the Burlington Route. But to argue that the freight infrastructure is deficient is to have missed the Track Renewal Train in action or news of that 70 mph bridge across the Des Moines River.

PHOTOPHOBIC? The University of Delaware administration has pulled its residential reeducation treatments pending a review.

While I believe that recent press accounts misrepresent the purpose of the residential life program at the University of Delaware, there are questions about its practices that must be addressed and there are reasons for concern that the actual purpose is not being fulfilled. It is not feasible to evaluate these issues without a full and broad-based review.

Upon the recommendation of Vice President for Student Life Michael Gilbert and Director of Residence Life Kathleen Kerr, I have directed that the program be stopped immediately. No further activities under the current framework will be conducted.

Vice President Gilbert will work with the University Faculty Senate and others to determine the proper means by which residence life programs may support the intellectual, cultural and ethical development of our students.

A commenter at SCSU Scholars catches an irony in the program objectives.

“Students will recognize the benefits of dismantling systems of oppression”

One oppressive system down, how many more to go?

At least one Delaware graduate is reviewing his donation practices.

If this indoctrination is typical of what current UD students are now routinely exposed to as official University policy, then there would be no useful purpose served by sending the school any of my money.

Thus have I been informing the fundraisers at the University of Wisconsin since early in the Donna Shalala years.

That said, University Diaries located press coverage from the GG-1s' Nest that suggests the residential orientation program is a distortion of a laudable goal.

The training is important to help students understand those who are different from them, said Justin Blair, an 18-year-old sophomore from New Castle.

Freshman orientation has included such an objective for years. A religious college might want to make its students aware of Matt. 25:40, and the more selective colleges of the early 20th century urged their students not to get too full of themselves simply for having been admitted. In those days, faculty and students alike were more likely to view college as a privilege, not an entitlement, and with that privilege came responsibilities. In one of Tom Clancy's early novels (I want to say it's Patriot Games, but the Clancy collection is still in storage) there's a passing reference to a senior gunnery sergeant on the Annapolis staff whose presence is a reminder to cadets: You must be worthy of commanding men such as this. A little empathy for people less favored than you is not a bad thing. (Part of the success of The Phantom Professor site is the author's keen eye for what happens when trustafarians have not been cautioned against getting too full of themselves.)

At Delaware, however, the recommended treatment appears not to include the Approved University Answer ("It depends...") among the options offered either to trainers or students.

[Delaware freshman Brooke] Aldrich said other exercises made many students feel uncomfortable. In one, she said, students were asked if they approved of such things as affirmative action or gay marriage. If they did, they would join students on one side of the room. If they didn't, they would join students on the other side of the room. They were not permitted to explain their reasons or to answer "I don't know," she said.

"We had a strong urge to debate back and forth, tell each other why we chose this and sort out each other's views," she said. "But at the end, we were told the exercise was designed so that we could not have debate, that a lot of times in life you don't have the opportunity to express your opinion. There was a lot of pent-up tension from that."

It appears as if the default position is "The existing social order is oppressive." Or: "You may not question affirmative action." I read some of the Delaware materials (some memory holes are less thorough than others) and much of the training material takes as beyond debate that concepts such as merit or dependability are arbitrary with far more potential to destroy than to shape. Fine. Show me the evidence that what I refer to as the Habits of Highly Effective People have blighted more lives than some alternative regime, including but not limited to the Experimental Prefigurative Communities of Transformation that the Diversity Boondoggle would like to make of higher education.

REAL MEN DON'T EAT TOFU. No soy milk in that coffee, either.

INCOME = WAGES + INTEREST + RENT + PROFIT. I suspect, however, that widespread understanding of this law of conservation would deprive many a pundit of something to fret over. Herewith yet another meditation on family wages.

Lisa suggests that it is unworkable because contrary to the principle that the free market should set wages. But if I'm not mistaken, we had the family wage here in America for decades, at least unofficially, and it was the reason that many who grew up in working class families years ago had the same kind of family arrangement as higher-income people, built around a breadwinning father and a homemaking mother. No one in those days decried it as being against the free market, as far as I know, because it was something that placed a priority on care of children and mothers being able to stay at home and fathers as heads of families. Market principles are only one of the ways by which a society allows itself to be guided.

Market prices can only reflect the willingness to offer and the willingness to buy resources traded on those markets. There's a more complete illustrated explanation here.

Left unsaid, however, is whether that division of labor (dad compensated in cash, mom compensated in kind) was one that everybody accepted. Also left unsaid is whether that division of labor was superior to the one preceding it, in which mom, dad, and the surviving kids all participated in a lot of subsistence work.

The idea of the family wage also produced a more egalitarian society in a good way, with less polarization between rich and poor and more of a common experience for all, and it did this not through redistribution but by emphasizing work and the importance of fathers. (Don't worry — the rich still had plenty, although that was perhaps less conspicuous than it is today.)

Would that it were that simple. The technology of the day was more likely to augment the brawn of the men rather than the brains of the men and the women. Compare a hand-fired steam locomotive or a horse-drawn plow with a Dash-8 or a tractor with air-conditioned cab.

Also, as soon as mothers began to work in large numbers, the prices of everything went up, as a real estate agent in Westchester County explained to me, making it more necessary for a family to have two incomes to afford what one income once bought.

See the title of this post.

Catch also that Westchester County reference. Next we can probably look forward to another round of fretting about assortative mating. Here's a corrective.

As bright and intelligent women go and get those careers that they wish to have (as is of course their right to pursue) we find that they tend to marry those bright and intelligent men who also pursue similar types of careers. We thus have a group of families with two high incomes, increasing the income gap.

What a difficult problem for someone who is both feminist and egalitarian. Which is to be decried, if either? That women now have the same freedoms in work and selection of a partner that men have historically had? Or the effects of this upon the income distribution?

When one faces choices, with good points and bad points to each, one must make trade-offs.

Or, perhaps, to get somebody else to pay for the consequences?

So, if two incomes are mandatory for the basics of middle class life -- home, car, kids, dog, then childcare is now a necessity for most families. Those babies don't raise themselves. Yet, where is the child-care discussion in this presidential debate?

MORE ON FINLANDER PURPLE. That's a pejorative illustrating the potential for marginalizing the Other (hey, I could retrain to do cultural studies, but that would involve a pay cut) in a relatively homogeneous community. (One of the things one learns in building a house is the 2^n-1, for n -> infinity names the paint companies have come up with for beige. No doubt it preserves the illusion of having choice where the Guardians of Public Aesthetics would prefer there be none.)

Now introduce a more exotic Other.

Elizabeth Villafranca perceived it as another jab at Hispanics in a city that has targeted illegal immigration.

"We know who has the bright colors," she said after the council meeting. "Latin Americans."

The author Sandra Cisneros, for example, famously painted her historical home in San Antonio periwinkle purple.

But the residents pushing the Farmers Branch paint initiative say their concern is home values and neighborhoods, not ethnicity.

Uh huh.

Via Virginia Postrel, who we wish well during her cancer treatments.

QUOTE OF THE DAY. The dean at Anonymous Community and I clash over some things, but on this we agree.

For all their foibles, which I've noted from time to time, tenured faculty are -- on the whole -- intelligent, independent-minded sorts. That comes with costs -- God knows, that comes with costs -- but it's also essential to what they do. As much as I resent the sense of entitlement that some of them display about the most ridiculous things, like actually being asked for receipts for travel reimbursement, I also don't want to staff classes with cubicle drones. As scary as self-styled 'free agents' are, the ones who actually drink the Kool-Aid are that much scarier.

Dr. Crazy recently started a blogfire with a post about looking for another job when you already have one. Some trolls took offense, claiming that in a tight job market, it's selfish for the 'haves' not to content themselves with their lot. But she was right, and I'd be afraid of anyone who didn't understand why. These are jobs. That's all they are. They involve 'doing work' in exchange for 'pay and benefits.' (And yes, I get hostile at the ones who take the pay and benefits, but don't do the work.) They do not involve pledging your immortal soul, or suspending your better judgment, or altering your personality according to what some motivational speaker with Dynamic People Skills says. That's overreaching, and it's insulting.

Amen.

For next week: discuss how "overreach" applies to the efforts at Delaware and elsewhere.

LIVING AT THE EXPENSE OF OTHERS. Never mind that it's a regressive transfer.

Modernization is needed for a system that is being inexorably strangled by increased traffic.

Catch the Divine Passive? This modernization is going to be provided by whom? The nameless ciphers at MINITRUTH Delaware's Student Affairs office?

The White House needs to get strongly behind the Lott-Rockefeller measure, and the House needs to reconsider what it has done. The extension gives Congress another 90 days to act, but if NextGen and a reformed financing system aren't approved by the end of the year, there's a good chance the issue will get lost in next year's elections.

Air passengers and shippers deserve better.

Particularly if they don't have to pay for it, which is what the Journal-Sentinel editorialists are advocating.

DOWN THE MEMORY HOLE. Delaware Starts Removing Materials from Web Site.


Some specifics:

The University of Delaware has removed its “Whole New World” training materials from its website—the materials that included the teachings about racism which we mentioned in our letter and press release about the case, and which have been roundly criticized by multiple bloggers (here’s one among many). The materials used to be here.

The post ends with a good question.

If there’s nothing wrong with these materials, why were they removed?

Removed? They never existed. You're referring to an imaginary number on a list that was allegedly misplaced.

SECOND SECTION: Apparently the memory hole did a lot of work in a short time.