I watched some of the speech, and that's not exactly what the preacher said. (He did cross the line attempting to bundle scales and rhythms with ethnicities. I learned at a young age that it was bad music theory to equate "black keys" with "Chinese" music, yet another source of pentatonic scales, and while it is true that Prussian common time is LINKS zwei DREI vier, there are pieces in common time with emphasis on the second and fourth beat. Would the reverend accept ONE two three four as Native American common time? And as long as I'm griping, Lyndon Johnson's speech patterns were an object of mockery, although probably not in the preacher's social circle.)On Sunday in Detroit, he explained to 10,000 people at the Fight for Freedom Fund dinner of the NAACP -- an organization adept at taking offense at far less racist comments from nonblacks -- that whites have an inherent "left-brain cognitive, object-oriented learning style. Logical and analytical," while blacks "learn not from an object but from a subject. They are right-brain, subject-oriented in their learning style. That means creative and intuitive. The two worlds have different ways of learning."
Blacks even have better rhythm, Wright explained.
TheInitial toxicology tests showed no signs of illegal drugs in the system of the driver, Don Wells, but officials are awaiting expanded results for additional substances.
"We are investigating everything," said Chicago Police Sgt. Maurice McCaster of the major accidents unit.
After police took his clothes as evidence, Wells declined the paper garments he was offered and stayed in the police lockup naked, McCaster said.
Wells, 64, was in custody for two days. During that time, he urinated on the floor of his cell instead of using the urinal, sources said.
Wells' behavior is one of many mysteries surrounding the Friday rush-hour crash, which killed Eloisa Guerrero, 47, and Delisia Brown, 18. Wells, of Metamora, Mich., was ticketed for negligent driving and released from police custody Sunday night.
The truck left no skid marks, sources said. That fact has led investigators to wonder if the brakes malfunctioned -- or if Wells simply did not apply them. Investigators are examining the truck for mechanical problems.
Why are we buying rights of way for corner-cutting enterprises such as these?According to U.S. Department of Transportation records, over the past 30 months Whiteline had 41 accidents with 15 injuries and one fatality before Friday.
Whiteline's safety officer said she had found 923 falsified drivers' logs from 2004 to 2006, according to lawsuit records reported by WMAQ-Ch. 5. Some 691 driver logs were missing, the officer said.
One man dead, one couple's retirement ruined, one more episode of sadness on campus, because law enforcement winks at disregard of traffic signals by truckers, and because road commissioners refuse to separate freight from passenger traffic.The driver of the semi in an accident that killed NIU glassblower Daniel Edwards was cited for failing to yield while turning left.
At 7:42 a.m. Wednesday, Edwards, 60, of Rochelle was traveling eastbound on Highway 38 near the interchange with I-39 when a westbound semi-trailer turned in front of his motorcycle, causing a collided.
Edwards was taken to Rochelle Community Hospital, where he was pronounced dead. Daniel’s wife, Diane Edwards, 58, of Rochelle, was a passenger on the motorcycle and was also taken to Rochelle Community Hospital and then transferred by helicopter to Rockford Memorial Hospital.
The driver of the semi, Gerald Hemker, 51, of Germantown, was not injured in the crash.
Hemker was issued a citation for failing to yield while turning left, according to a Rochelle Police Department press release.
Edwards was best known at NIU for hosting a glassblowing demonstration each fall. He planned on retiring at the end of the semester. Edwards was the 1999 recipient of the Helmut E. Drechsel Achievement Award, given out by the American Glassblowers Society.
“We are very saddened and shocked by the news of Dan’s death this morning,” said Shannon Gates, coordinator for recruitment and public relations of the Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry, on Wednesday. “He was a great asset to our department, as a talented glassblower and good friend.”
The authors get to the heart of the matter several meandering paragraphs later. (Nothing quite focuses the mind like "If you send us a shorter manuscript that also addresses these comments.")On one hand, there is a cherished and sentimental view of universities as academic places where caring teachers mold young minds through unhurried and probing conversations about poems and politics, the human condition and the forces of nature. In this utopia, a university’s classes are small, tutored by sage and patient scholars; juvenile errors and excesses are gently but firmly corrected; and, of course, football games are always won. And in this romanticized view, lush and leafy campuses are sanctuaries for eccentric intellectuals to think deep thoughts, develop whimsical theories, and indulge in the time-consuming trials and errors of research.
On the other hand, when talk turns to matters of state funding or, even worse, tuition, sweet sentimentalities are replaced by a fulminating call for universities to become ruthlessly efficient – no time or treasure squandered on small classes or idle contemplation or tending to pretty flowers on campus. Things must be run as “lean” as business would have us believe it has become. Fat must be excised, indolence must be punished mercilessly, unnecessary processes must be re-engineered and unnecessary people banished. Over-extended and under-funded state budgets have only served to increase the clamor for universities to become more frugal than friendly. And tax-phobic critics of state government spending, in particular, have elevated the no holds barred efficiency-as-a-mandate rhetoric.
The evidence is not at all clear that “efficiency,” as commonly understood in business jargon, is in any way rewarded by the higher education “marketplace.” Imagine, for example, the least efficient institution of higher education in your state. Chances are that the teaching loads of its high-paid faculty are largely discretionary and barely measurable, with faculty efforts focused instead on the publication of esoteric thoughts in widely-unread journals; its library contains hundreds of thousands of volumes that haven’t been opened in decades; it has well manicured lawns and, probably, a facility that seats tens of thousands of people but is only used five or six Saturdays each year (hint–think football stadium).One wishes that some of these business wannabees and their unthinking accomplices in the legislature would develop a better understanding of efficiency. Efficiency refers to the identification and fulfillment of all feasible gains from trade. That "least efficient" institution quite likely is catering to the excess demand for perceived quality, an excess demand augmented by the toxic blend of "customer satisfaction" with "access for all" that the authors would have readers believe is efficient.
Imagine then, the most “efficient” higher education institution in your state. It likely has under-paid faculty with teaching loads that approach sweat-shop labor conditions; it may well be housed in a store-front; its library might be little more than a set of encyclopedias; and it is marketing hard for a student body that will keep it marginally solvent.The late Fred F. Loock would wisecrack that the businessman who sold his product for a lower price knew what it was worth. That's not the way to endow museums and libraries.
Now ... which one has accomplished students waiting with baited breath for word of a favorable admissions decision? Which one receives tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars in largesse from loyal alumni or proud donors each year? Which one commands the almost slavish allegiance of those very state legislators who cheer loudly from prime seats at athletic pageants but publicly threaten to discipline their spendthrift habits? Is “efficiency” — in a business definition — really recognized or rewarded in the higher education marketplace?The "efficiency" of cheaper for its own sake ought not to be. The efficiency of recognizing and realizing gains from trade ought to be.
The author’s example of the least and most efficient institutions misses the point of the need for controlled spending. The purportedly “inefficient” institution that has all the frills can probably afford them. Otherwise it would be in a position where it had to control costs (like the purportedly “efficient” institution). Any college can go into massive debt to provide amenities, but they do so at the risk of going out of business if the gambit doesn’t pay off in increased revenue. Frankly, mediocre schools with mediocre revenue streams have to live within their means. The American public needs to do the same.The column does argue from the extremes, and in its willingness to take a dig at the state flagship institutions, misses the main point. Where the efficiency is one of offering the sentimentalized college experience, for which there appears to be excess demand, rather than making universal college inexpensive, for which the unproductive output is in excess supply, a strategy of drawing invidious comparisons with the private colleges and the state flagships, rather than ending access-assessment-remediation-retention strikes me as less productive.
Three proposals are on offer.First, I want to report that majority opinion on key issues differed very little from group to group. In ratios ranging from 3-to-1 to 4-to-1, our campus community asked that Cole Hall remain standing, but that it not be used for instructional purposes in its current configuration. Many of you invoked the memories of those whom we lost, and expressed a desire to honor them by giving new life to the building where they died.
Second, while some favored demolition and others urged us to keep the building, the majority of those espousing either position said they would not be comfortable taking or teaching classes in Cole Hall in its current incarnation. The strength of that feeling did not seem to diminish over the course of our six-week survey process.
The first option suggests renovating both Cole Hall auditoriums, continued use as a lecture hall, but with significant changes and functionality.The "Auditorium A" reference is to Jameson Auditorium, where a computer science class had finished early. "Auditorium B" refers to Collins Auditorium, all references to which appear to have been expunged from the university archives.The second option involves renovating Auditorium A (Room 100) as a lecture hall, while remodeling Auditorium B (101) to support no classroom activities.
The third option is to renovate both auditoriums to support no classroom activities.
Options two and three require the development of a large lecture hall somewhere else on campus. All options focus on use of the first floor with little to no change to the basement area.
The boosters will tell you such talk takes away the fun, but there is always fun in spending other peoples' money.As reported in the press and media events, an overwhelming majority of Chicagoans—84 percent—was supportive of the city's bid to host the 2016 Olympic events. (Given the political season and climate, another way to "spin" the numbers for those opposed is that only 54 percent were strongly supportive; 30 percent were simply "somewhat supportive.")
I suspect that at least 84 percent of those polled were also in favor of world peace, fewer potholes, and the Cubs winning the 2008 World Series. But a more relevant way to elicit information is to face respondents with some prices or notion of the sacrifice required to achieve a stated objective.
For example, what if the pollsters had asked: "How much would you be willing to pay annually in the form of taxes on what you own, earn or spend to bring the 2016 Olympic Games to Chicago?" The survey could have given some prices to choose from: $0; $50; $100, $500 or $1,000. Or, alternatively, the pollsters could have asked: "If it costs the city $1 million to have the 2016 Olympic Games here, are you strongly in favor, somewhat in favor, somewhat opposed, or strongly opposed?" Then we could, either sequentially or by segmenting respondents, up the ante: "What if it costs the city $100 million? $1 billion?"
He also notes the conjuring trick in advising taxpayers that it's private money at risk.Time and time again, commissioned polls or impact studies purport to show one thing when reality is quite another. I have yet to see an economic impact study for building a sports facility or convention center, or hosting a major sporting event, that did not promise cornucopias of cash to the city bold enough to "invest" in the scheme. And yet, virtually all convention centers in this country lose money, and revenues spent inside new sports palaces enrich only the owners and leagues.
If the pattern holds, and it likely will, cities that host Olympic events tend to lose money. These short-term, overly hyped events, as opposed to longer term, well-thought-out urban investments, have low or negative rates of return.
That may be fine if our eyes as well as our wallets are wide open, knowing full well that this will cost us monetarily but that we still want to do it.
After all, we spend money on dogs and boats with no expectation that they will pay for themselves financially. But, then, let's at least be upfront and honest about it: "Yeah, it's going to cost us—and you, the taxpayer—an unknown ton of money and some serious inconveniences, but we think it's worth it and here's why."
Mr Sanderson correctly notes the introductory economics jargon. It's an idea that requires a modicum of repetition, in part because economics is not required of all collegians and in part because in all too many classes, "opportunity cost" gets lost in a thicket of formulas and graphs that can throw even the more dedicated student off the trail.Whether to support the Games themselves or merely the city's official bid, the latter carrying a price tag of $50 million to $100 million, one hears that "only private money" is underwriting those activities; no tax dollars will be spent. "Private" implicitly refers to donations from corporations and wealthy citizens. However, in jargon that students learn on the first day of Economics 101, virtually all expenditures or allocations have an opportunity cost, whether it be for a firm or family.
If Boeing, Sears, Motorola or McDonald's gives $1 million to help finance our Olympic bid, that is $1 million that does not get returned to stockholders as dividends or plowed back into the company for new projects and production. In addition, that is $1 million that does not, then, support an exhibition at the Field Museum, a new gallery at the Art Institute, or an after-school youth program.
When I sit down each December to write out checks to local, national and international charities and other non-profit organizations, I am implicitly choosing how to allocate, say, $2,000 among various groups and activities. The slice that goes to WTTW Ch. 11 doesn't go to the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless or the American Cancer Society—or to the University of Chicago. It's still just $1 million or $2,000 no matter how a corporation, a wealthy benefactor or I cut it.
There is no free lunch in this world and no free Olympic Games either.
Just as we're getting our composure back, and the weather is getting better.Northern Illinois University is boosting security this week after threatening graffiti was found.
School officials said the graffiti was found Monday, but university police concluded the threats don't warrant suspending classes. In an e-mail to students, the school urged students and faculty to "remain calm but vigilant and to report any information they might have about this threat to the campus police."
In a statement, the school said it would not release details because "excessive media coverage of campus threats clearly contributes to their proliferation."
This goes to show something those of us who hoist the almost unbearable privilege of having gone to graduate school there already know, which is that there are some extremely strange young women at Yale. Worthies there might consider the wisdom of a simple question on the admissions application, "Are you extremely odd?" I am not suggesting that the extremely odd be excluded from Yale, only that a quota might be a good idea. This goes for faculty hiring as well.And here's a jaded view of Wesleyan, where headquarters would like to tone down the exotic.
I don't make this stuff up.[Wesleyan sophomore Ben]Seretan, who currently works at the front desk in the Admissions Office, added that this is only one component of the Roth administration’s new marketing strategy.
“I’ve noticed with the new administration a re-branding paradigm shift that’s happening,” Seretan said. “It’s all about academic excellence and ‘excellence’ in general as opposed to uniqueness and idiosyncrasy. I don’t even know what excellence means.”…
Well before his murderous rampage at Northern Illinois University, Steven Kazmierczak described himself as a victim who had overcome hard times.There's nothing unusual about feeling victimized. I suspect that the Peanuts strip in which Charlie Brown admits to feeling out of place on earth appeals to a lot of adolescents. It certainly did to me.
In graduate school applications, reviewed exclusively by the Chicago Tribune, Kazmierczak wrote that his own mental-health struggles would one day enable him to help others—a vision that tragically imploded Feb. 14 in one of the deadliest campus shootings in U.S. history.
"For as long as I can remember, I have always been an extremely sensitive individual, and feel as though I am able to empathize with other people's emotional and social needs," he wrote. "However, some of my peers were not very understanding or accepting, and I feel as though I was victimized to a certain degree during my adolescent years."
Let [petty] tyrants shake their iron rods,William Billings, Chester. (The version I learned included the "petty.")
And Slav'ry clank her galling chains.
We fear them not, we trust in God.
New England's God forever reigns.
The terribly low respect for free expression by [Colorado College director of institutional research and planning Amanda] Udis-Kessler is yet another reason for Colorado College to feel very, very ashamed. Dialogue sometimes feels a bit disrespectful; it's a hazard of vigorous debate. Adults in college are strong enough to take it, but maybe that's not true at Colorado College.What was I saying about the logic processes of the assessors of the obvious, or about the disservice a hothouse environment does the classes it is supposed to protect?
Ongoing assessment diverts teachers from teaching. Instead of preparing their courses, meeting with students, or grading papers—in short, executing their teaching duties—they must spend a substantial amount of time worrying about how to assess what they teach. Moreover, academic deans, instead of overseeing assessment activities, might be better engaged in useful activities such as developing young faculty or securing grants. No one, to my knowledge, has done a serious cost-benefit analysis of whether the innumerable hours faculty and administrators expend on assessment could be better used on activities that directly benefit students. No one knows what opportunities have been lost to the demands of devising and implementing assessment instruments.If the professors are not doing the assessing, the essayist suggests, the hired help is.
Put briefly, the essay identifies two problems. First, if there are assessment professionals, they are likely graduates of the colleges of deaducation, otherwise known as the home office of academic mediocrity. Second, if the assessment is supposed to produce constructive self-criticism, there has to be a Holy Office somewhere to identify the sinners (or is it running dogs of capitalism? I get my zealots confused) and specify the appropriate penance. I disagree with the claim that double-blind experiments are the only valid measurement tool.Universities, where much of the actual teaching is done by inexperienced graduate students, do not expect their research-oriented faculty to perform assessment. Indeed, many prestigious university professors have no idea what assessment is. At the most highly rated universities, assessment is carried out by staff hired expressly for that task. For example, the University of Virginia has a Department of Institutional Assessment and Studies that reports directly to the State Council of Higher Education. It is unlikely that the state would not accredit its own state-sponsored, tax-supported university.
The real scandal of outcomes assessment, the one nobody talks about, is that the methods used to assess usually produce very little worthwhile data. Departments and programs create assessment tools though a process that (1) sets goals for student learning, (2) gathers evidence of whether students have learned what is expected, (3) interprets the information gathered, and (4) adapts teaching methods in light of the evidence. Every social scientist knows that the only valid way to measure human phenomena is with double-blind experiments in which neither those who actually administer the tests nor those who take them know what’s being tested.
Of course, this is impossible when assessing college programs. Students know exactly why they are being assessed. Even worse, faculty and administrators whose programs are being assessed not only are the people administering the assessment instruments, but they are often the people charged with devising them. Such a system is easily abused since no one wants to look bad. Measurements tools are constructed that simply validate what teachers and administrators are already doing.
The dirty secret is that teachers pay almost no attention to assessment outcomes. They learn little from the exercise—considering it only another (usually uncompensated) onerous administrative duty—and they often dismiss the findings because of the way accrediting agencies structure the activity. Since assessors cannot be experts in every academic field, they require that every department and program aggregate information. The people doing the assessing are not capable of judging the merits of syllabi, tests, and papers from outside their field of study. Thus, they make all departments homogenize the “outcomes” into a form comprehensible to a generic reader. The problem is that students learn chemistry differently than they do a Dostoyevsky novel, and assessment measurements that attempt to aggregate information across disciplines may miss this important difference.As if the graduates of the college of deaducation could distinguish Dostoevsky from Lobachevski in the first place, but I digress.
Teachers assess all the time. They read student papers and exams to discover if students have learned. They ask questions in class and engage students in discussion. They look over student evaluations to see if the way they are associating with students is being well received. They are always trying to find better ways to help students grasp the material. Why do they need to spend time in another elaborate and meaningless type of assessment? They don’t—and it’s time to say so.Amen.
The aforementioned Des Moines Rocket reached Iowa City in 4 hours 25 minutes on the timetable in effect in June of 1954, and the Rocky Mountain Rocket was there 3 hours 54 minutes after leaving Chicago. The Rock Island line was clapped out at the time the railroad liquidated, although it is now in shape for light axle-loading, multi-wheeled steam locomotives (of five coupled axles rather than seven) as well as a cousin of the Rock Island's war baby Northerns. The planners anticipate more work.The trip from Iowa City to Chicago would take about five hours with a train traveling up to 79 mph. A one-way adult ticket could range from $25 to $68, based on fares for comparable routes.
[Amtrak spokesman and onetime WNIU newscaster Marc] Magliari said the service would be popular with college students, especially the many Illinois natives who attend the University of Iowa. The university's hospital facilities are also a draw to the area, he said.
Others would likely take the train to visit casinos in the Quad-Cities area, officials said.
What the article doesn't tell readers is that there is a railroad currently capable of supporting 100 mph passenger train operation, serving the riverboats at Clinton as well as the universities at DeKalb, Illinois; and Boone, Iowa; with a short bus connection from Cedar Rapids to Iowa City. That railroad, however, is property of the passenger-unfriendly Union Pacific.At the request of the Illinois Department of Transportation, Amtrak in January completed a study on establishing passenger-train service between Chicago and the Quad-Cities. Parts of that plan were incorporated into the study of the Iowa City to Chicago route.
Iowa officials also have asked for a study on extending the route to Des Moines. That should be ready in late 2009, Magliari said.
Illinois is also looking at a new Amtrak line running between Rockford, Ill., and Dubuque.
Houthakker, who is not Catholic, said he does not believe joining an equestrian order will mean he will be obligated to ride a horse. "At least I hope not," he said, "because I am not a horseman."There was nothing that focused the mind quite like the letter, over his signature, that ran "If you are able to incorporate these comments while submitting a manuscript of not more than 4,500 words we will be pleased to reconsider."
The weather cooperated for the game (boxscore) which establishes a new attendance record for Northern Illinois baseball.Notre Dame and former Northern Illinois baseball coach Dave Schrage moved along just fine until both teams stood at home plate for a moment of silence to honor the victims of the Feb. 14 NIU campus shootings.
"That's when it really hit me," Schrage said. "And I was glad we were able to do this."Northern Illinois and Notre Dame played baseball on Wednesday night at U.S. Cellular Field. But the result, a tough 5-4 loss for the Huskies, won't be the first thing remembered when people look back on this game.
This was about a university and a community coming together again to remember the past and push toward the future.
Sign of the times.CAMPUS ALERT CANCELED
4:50 p.m., 4/17/08
Due to today's events, the Counseling & Student Development Center in Campus Life Buildingn 200 will be open today until 8 p.m. and will reopen Friday morning at 8 a.m. Campus Life Building 100 is also open until 8 p.m. tonight for students who would like to talk to each other about today's events or speak with a counselor.
Updates, if warranted.3:50 p.m., 4/17/08
The Health Services building and the adjacent Telecommunications building are the only buildings that have been evacuated. Occupants in buildings surrounding that complex (Adams, Williston, Wirtz, etc.) are asked to not exit the sides of their buildings that face Health Services. All classes are being held as normal. No classrooms have been affected by this closure.
2:54 p.m., 4/17/08
Campus police are on the scene and are securing the building with the assistance of a canine unit. More information will be posted as it becomes available.
2:18 p.m., 4/17/08
A bomb threat targeting the NIU Health Services building (near the intersection of Lucinda Avenue and Normal Road) was received today around 2:00 p.m. Police have cleared the building. No pedestrian or vehicular traffic will be allowed in that area until further notice.
All members of the DeKalb County community are invited to participate in the Huskies for Hokies Candlelight Vigil at 8 p.m. Wednesday, April 16, in the Martin Luther King Commons.
The event is intended as a show of support and sympathy for the Virginia Tech community, which will be marking the one-year anniversary of a shooting spree on their campus that claimed 32 lives.
Faculty, staff and students from Virginia Tech have been extremely supportive of NIU in the wake of its own shooting tragedy on Feb. 14. Administrators from that school have shared information and advice; counselors briefed their NIU counterparts on how best to help students and assisted in training sessions; and several student groups traveled to DeKalb to meet and comfort NIU students. More than 1,000 VT students participated in a candlelight vigil of their own on Feb. 18 to show support for NIU.
“We really wanted to do something for Virginia Tech because they have done so much for us. They have truly helped in our recovery,” said Brittany Brzezinski, a senior from Libertyville, who is helping to organize the event.
The campus of St. Xavier University was like a well-guarded ghost town Monday, its classrooms empty, its dormitories shuttered and its every entrance patrolled by school security officers and Chicago police.The St. Xavier threat appears to have been a false positive. To close operations, particularly threats that occur near exam week, is to induce miscreants to use extreme measures to obtain a little extra study time, or perhaps the option of obtaining a grade based on partial information. To reject the threat, however, is to risk a room of dead people. In light of the last year's events, administrators appear to be erring on the side of caution.
That quiet watchfulness spread to neighboring campuses as well, after threatening graffiti was found last week in a university residence hall.
Following St. Xavier's lead, four schools adjacent to the South Side university—Mother McAuley and Brother Rice High Schools, and Queen of Martyrs and Southwest Elementary Schools—closed for the day Monday.
As St. Xavier's students found alternate housing and wondered when classes would resume, the university's decision ignited a debate among campus security experts over whether such a drastic measure was justified over anonymous scrawls in a bathroom stall.
At issue is the balance between keeping students safe in the wake of recent campus shootings in Illinois and Virginia, and overreacting to threats that are often non-specific and untraceable. Acknowledging that the St. Xavier decision is hard to judge without more details of the school's deliberations, some experts said closing a campus risks creating more problems down the road.
Others, however, said that erring on the side of safety should be the new standard.Scott Poland, crisis coordinator for Nova Southeastern University in South Florida, says that closing a school should be the last resort. He advocated instead increased security, meetings to put students on alert and ongoing threat assessments.
"We shouldn't close schools every time there is a threat of violence," he said. "In fact, in most instances—say of a bomb threat or something—you deal with the issue but then return to the operation of the school."
But other school security experts said it was better for school officials to exercise maximum caution. St. Xavier officials said they had no choice after discovering the second of two threats in Regina Hall Thursday, this one reading "Be prepared to die on 4/14."
In a week that marks the anniversaries of the Virginia Tech and Columbine shootings, others said it would be hard to send students into the area on the day that was so specifically marked.The people who make the decisions are aware of the possible perverse incentives.
Later Monday morning, in an apparently unrelated incident, Malcolm X College evacuated its students for several hours after a similar threat was discovered.
In the far north suburbs, Grayslake Middle School was closed about five minutes early Monday, when threatening graffiti was found in a restroom. Police and staff of Community Consolidated School District 46 swept the building and grounds and determined that school could reopen Tuesday.
Also on Monday, Oakland University in Michigan canceled classes and campus activities for two days after threatening scrawls were found. Coastal Carolina University officials in Conway, S.C., suspended classes until Tuesday morning because of a fatal shooting near campus.
Officials at St. Xavier said that they only shut down campus after conversations with several parties, including the Chicago police, the FBI and administrators at Northern Illinois University.There is no easy answer to that last question. To treat each threat as a potential Northern Illinois gives too much power to the miscreants. To erroneously disregard a true threat ...
School spokesman Joe Moore said that the school has had an emergency continuity plan in place for years, and that it was revised as recently as last year's shooting at Virginia Tech. "There's no question that the national conversation has changed since a year ago," Moore said. "We're taking steps that we might not have considered [before Virginia Tech]."
University officials were tight-lipped about the details of that emergency plan, and what other warning signs may have led them to close. But Brett A. Sokolow, president of the National Center for Higher Education Risk Management, believes that for the school to shut down, "they must have had pretty credible reason to do so.
"It is rare to shut down for several days, he said, and it carries a cost."The shutdown results in accomplishing what the person making the threat intends: to disrupt the school," he said. "There are many implications to that. Now once you have a threat do you shut down every time?"
The medical training provided to Northern Illinois University police officers likely saved lives, but police arriving from other departments did not always take direction, creating what could have been a dangerous situation after a gunman opened fire on campus two months ago, killing five, two NIU officers told a national conference Monday.We're likely to see some updating of prior beliefs elsewhere. There are other options available to university officials, some of which might keep some people who will be dangerous to others or themselves off campus.
Lt. Darren Mitchell told how officers who entered a lecture hall moments after the shooting ended found the gunman, a former graduate student, dead on stage and some students, uninjured, still frozen in their seats. Mitchell and Lt. Todd Henert gave the closing address at a campus security conference hosted by the University of Central Oklahoma, which also Webcast their remarks.
"A lot of people thought our chief was out of his mind," Mitchell said of NIU Police Chief Donald Grady's proposal to train all officers as emergency medical technicians, which was adopted about five years ago. "We've since had numerous occasions where our officers . . . have engaged in lifesaving treatment in order to help people. [Feb. 14] turned out to be the pinnacle . . . of how helpful it was."
FBI Assistant Executive Director J. Steven Tidwell said campuses need to transform themselves to better identify students who could become violent. "One of the things we are now all doing is building picket fences," he said. Universities should "have enough picket fences that sooner or later you'll see them step over one."That's easy to say, but somewhat more difficult to implement, as an Inside Higher Ed post on the creative writing of parasuicidals notes.
In a study of undergraduate and graduate students at two Northeastern universities published in Pediatrics in 2006, researchers from Cornell and Princeton Universities found that 17 percent of students surveyed had engaged in self-injurious behavior — defined as purposeful self-infliction of bodily harm, without social sanction and without suicidal intentions.Relatively few of those individuals become dangerous to others. Does self-injury become a "picket fence"? What about buying a Cubs logo tattoo?
I don't recall that Amtrak quite as fondly. The rolling stock, all the talk about "making the trains worth traveling again," was clapped out, timekeeping systemwide left a lot to be desired, and many of the remaining trains were subject to the tender mercies of Penn Central or Missouri Pacific or Southern Pacific or Union Pacific dispatching, and to Burlington Northern's fragile permanent way.You would not know it from what happened subsequently, but Amtrak was popular in those days.
Passenger loads were large, and Operations was struggling to find extra cars for the trains during peak periods.
Every night we put out an 18-car Broadway Limited. The Zephyr and Empire Builder? Same thing. Each train had the longest consists the Union Station platforms could hold.
At the ticket window and over the telephone I turned away hundreds of applicants for coach and sleeping-car space.
Out on the platforms I saw weekend trains leave for Detroit, St. Louis, and Quincy with seven cars or more. Sometimes Amtrak borrowed extra cars from the commuter railroads around Chicago, something that’s no longer possible now that one commuter agency, METRA, owns the entire fleet.
What was happening was that the American people believed that the federal government was going to save the trains—and grow the train system. Pre-1971, when Americans saw the railroads eliminating trains, they got the message and stayed away. Post-1971, when they saw the federal government committing itself to saving trains and growing the service, they started coming back.
I call the Amtrak we knew at that time “Amtrak I.” This is the period when Amtrak looked the way Congress originally designed it, as a pure Train Operating Company—a single nationwide carrier that owned trains but no tracks and had to rent track space from the privately owned railroads.
Again, all posts there, and all whinges there, are anonymous.I repeat: learning to discipline your own procrastination/perfectionism is one of the most important things I can help a student learn. It's not just about being able to keep a job when they are done, though that is nice. It's about self-mastery, people. It's a lot like everything else we do here. It's about struggling with yourself and overcoming your resistance to expressing your ideas, regardless of whether those ideas are about math, the universe, the nature of it, Derrida, Dracula or a computer program. It's about learning to own and manage your own creative and intellectual processes; it's about forging a daily commitment to the intellectual work that we do either as scholars or as professionals. And no, I don't expect students to be perfect right way; that's why I give students a few grades they can drop to help them figure out that their normal routine of "Wait until the last minute, do a crap job, beg for more time" won't cut it.
Learning to manage your own work (setting your own deadlines, learning to keep them) is the difference between those who move up ladders, corporate and otherwise. It is the difference between finishing your dissertation and not doing so; it is also the difference between getting tenure and not getting tenure at research universities. Pretending you're above that sort of "deadline nonsense" just says to me that you are a sloppy and undisciplined scholar, not that you are producing golden eggs.
[Interim archivist Cindy] Ditzler said the NIU artifacts, which number in the thousands so far, are an important record of how the community grieved and may be of future use to writers or researchers. Not only has her staff gathered mementos left around campus (after first photographing them), it is also collecting postings on Facebook and YouTube and even text messages, e-mails, poems, thank-you cards and instant messages.Their work is not finished. People continue to leave fresh flowers and light candles at the doors to Cole Hall.
She said she hopes to have everything gathered by summer and cataloged in a year.
"You really had to go gangbusters," said assistant university archivist Joan Metzger on the speed with which online materials had to be gathered. "That stuff might be here today and gone tomorrow."
Working with carpenters and a groundskeeping crew, archivists gathered the mementos over three hours one March morning. Breakable items were wrapped in tissue paper; stuffed animals exposed to the elements went into a freezer to prevent mold.
Candles will go into plastic bags with silica gel packets. The 16-foot-long sections of canvas where students and others wrote messages will be digitally photographed, rolled in layers with acid-free tissue paper, wrapped in muslin cloth and stored in archival tubes.
Piled together and shorn of their context inside a conservation lab, the items left outside NIU's student center and at other locations almost seem more moving.
There are five ceramic angels, four large plastic bags of silk flowers, five baseballs, a small pile of red hearts, dozens of candles, a single ballerina slipper and a hand-knitted white scarf covered in red hearts. A bag brims with folded paper cranes, which in Japanese culture can signify a wish of peace for the deceased and their families. Ditzler said that out of respect for the items and to prevent them from being damaged, she would not allow anyone inside the room. She showed a reporter pictures she'd taken.
St. Xavier, which has campuses on Chicago's South Side and in Orland Park, called in Chicago police and the FBI after school officials found a threat scrawled on a bathroom wall at Regina Hall, a freshman co-ed dorm located on the main campus at 3700 West 103rd St. in Chicago.On one hand, nobody wants a repeat of Northern Illinois or Virginia Tech. On the other hand, any miscreant with a marking pen can get a few extra study days, possibly with the side effect of making other students nervous.
Menacing graffiti was first found on April 5. But a second message found Thursday in the same bathroom stall was of more concern to school officials because of its specific threat: "Be prepared to die on 4/14."
"We stepped in immediately, given the post- Virginia Tech climate. We can't take even the most seemingly harmless threats anything less than seriously," said Joe Moore, the university's spokesman.
"We have been pursuing a very, very aggressive investigation to try to narrow down who might have perpetrated this," Moore said. "Ultimately we had to weigh the risk of the students with the likelihood of something occurring and had to choose to close the school."This week marks the first anniversary of Virginia Tech's Cruel April. With final exams approaching, I fear we have not seen the last of these threats.
Moore said the chief of St. Xavier's campus police made the recommendation to close after consulting with several law enforcement agencies.
A dean attempts to put the best possible face on the change, but not convincingly. Southern Cal administrators did discover, the hard way, that there are market tests.Given that German enrollments are healthy, should German programs be on the chopping block?
Not surprisingly, language faculty members answer that question No, and generally German departments have avoided elimination in recent years, even without the benefits of the the booms of Arabic or the large total numbers of Spanish. So proponents of German study were outraged this week as some learned that the University of Southern California — a large university that boasts of its international emphasis — is eliminating its German department and not allowing any new majors or minors in the field.
The department is a small one — three tenured faculty members and three full-time adjuncts — with relatively few majors in recent years, although most of its enrollments are from non-majors. But the reason the department is small is that the university last approved a faculty search in German in 1991, and simply let positions go unfilled as professors retired. Now, with two professors nearing retirement, the university has announced — with no advance warning, according to faculty members — that the department is simply being shut down. While German departments have not been shut down in recent years, some have reported having difficulty replacing retiring faculty members, so the pattern at Southern California is one that is viewed with distress.
I am pleased to report that internal research at Northern Illinois has discovered "inability to find upper division courses" as a reason for students completing their degrees elsewhere, and that some resources have been released to increase, at least temporarily, upper level course offerings. We have, however, the same history of retrenchment by attrition, although no departments have yet been closed by retirement.Gerhard Clausing, chair of German at USC, said he was told of the decision on March 27, and that university officials told him the decision was final and that they would not consider alternatives. He said he spent about a week trying to figure out if there was anything that could be done, and that largely failing to get information, he felt he had to share the news with students and faculty members.
Clausing said he regularly proposed additional hiring — frequently in conjunction with other departments, such as comparative literature — but was turned down by the administration every time. So while he said it was true that enrollments could be higher (about 125-140 students a semester are in German now), he said it was hard to attract more students when permanent positions disappeared.
The administration “told me that the department wasn’t sustainable, but they caused that to happen,” he said.
Read the rest.In both the natural and social sciences, however, theory is something more than mere speculation. Theory is the generalizable distillation of empirical investigation, the payoff that comes from gathering and connecting a heap of pertinent facts. It takes facts to build a scientific theory but it takes a theory to organize and make sense of the facts.
Theories are valued for their explanatory power. A developed and confirmed theory is what science aims for. It is the gold standard of scientific inquiry. The theory of gravity and the theory of relativity are not lacking in facts just because they are theories. To dismiss something as just a theory and not a factual science does not make sense from a scientific point of view. Theory is not all that “soft” and, for that matter, facts are sometimes not all that “hard” or firmly fixed.
Since scientific theories in all fields contain some unanswered questions, why is evolution singled out by the intelligent designers as the one gap-ridden speculative theory? The answer is glaringly evident: evolution is in direct collision with Genesis. If evolution is true, then the Bible’s description of how God fashioned the world in six days and created humans in their present form seems much the fairy tale. And if Genesis is a fairy tale, then of what validity is the remainder of the divinely dictated tome that serves as the unerring fundament of Judaic-Christian belief?
The response offered by the scientific defenders of evolution is predictable and somewhat incomplete: “We have no way of testing and demonstrating the truth or falsity of non-natural spirit forces that are presumed to be acting in nature.” It would be nice if someday someone would add, “and neither do the intelligent designers.” That is the real problem. Of course, scientists cannot move outside their fundamental paradigm and demonstrate divine causation, but neither can the designing creationists.
This is a crucial point because the burden of proof for intelligent design is on the designers. Where is their field work, their laboratory experiments, their observational reports and accumulated evidence measuring the effects of ID vectors on various natural forces and entities, all the things we would expect from a scientific inquiry interested in “hard facts”?
When True Believers begin to harbor doubts, they don't immediately give up the faith. It's too scary; too much pride and money has been invested; too many jobs and reputations are on the line; and they need to find a new reason to live. So they always try to add on new wrinkles and qualifications to their crumbling story.Mr Lewis suggests the efforts of some climate-change policy advocates are for pride rather than logic.
That variation, by itself, does not vitiate the anthropogenic warming hypothesis. The response of some of the policy advocates, however, bears scrutiny.Today that's happening with the global warming cult.
"Human-caused global warming" has now officially been re-named "climate change" to explain the inconvenient truth that the winter of 2007-8 was the coldest in a century, in spite of all those tons of "greenhouse gas" being spewed into the air from all the new factories in China and India. Worldwide temps dropped 0.6 of a degree C in one year. That may not sound like a lot, but it's more than all the ballyhooed warming in the preceding century.
Mr Lewis's remarks about modeling identify a phenomenon that D. McCloskey has identified as the "A Priming" of theoretical economics. Ultimately, however, that A Priming has to make sense of the empirical regularities. Here, however, it takes a model with a finitely thick atmosphere to beat the predictions of the model with the infinitely thick atmosphere. Whether such a model gets through peer review is another matter. It need not be the case that scientists (or any community of scholars) be "ruthless with open failure." Thus the continued usefulness of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.In the 1960s social psychologists studied a doomsday cult which made the big mistake of predicting the day of Armageddon. When that day came and went without crisping the world, the cult leaders didn't admit they were wrong. Instead, they discovered reasons why doomsday had been postponed. It was a triumph of faith over facts. That's how stock market bubbles and busts work. It's how the jihadi Armageddon cult of Tehran will crumble, if we're all very lucky.
How can this super-cold winter happen? It's got all the faithful a little worried. Climate modeling teams all over the world are sweating 24/7 to deal with it. They are producing epicycles for their models, to hang on the warming story.
"Epicycles" are cycles on top of cycles. When traditional astronomy began to collapse in the years before Copernicus, True Believers reacted by adding lots of little cycles on top of the great cycles of the planetary orbits, to protect their faith. Trouble is, they had to add so many cycles on top of cycles that eventually, the whole system became a laughingstock. Ultimately you could explain anything you wanted -- after the fact.
The Polish astronomer Nicholas Koepernick -- called Copernicus -- pointed out that a sun-centered planetary model could get rid of all those epicycles with elegant simplicity. You only had to assume that the planets are going around the sun, not the earth. Suddenly all those cycle-on-cycle orbits simplified into near-circular ellipses. But he only saw the page proofs of his book De Revolutionibus on his death bed. He didn't want to share the fate of Giordano Bruno, who was burned at the stake, or Galileo Galilei, who was put under house arrest by Pope Urban VIII and forbidden to publish in the last years of his life. Because mobs of True Believers can get pretty nasty before they give up. [See also this view of Galileo's troubles -- editor]
Today we see a spate of new computer models showing up in science journals, each one attempting to rescue some piece of the ecological goose that laid the golden egg. These are often not called "models." With utter dishonesty, they are labeled "new studies of the climate." But they are not empirical studies at all. They are little math models with new epicycles, but still based on the same gross oversimplifications. To reassure the True Believers, they always end with the same punch line: Yes, Virginia, there really is a global warming faerie, and all the doom-sayers are right.
How good are the assumptions in these models? Well consider the fate of Ferenc M. Miskolczi (pronounced Ferens MISkolshee), a first-rate Hungarian mathematician, who has published a proof that "greenhouse warming" may be mathematically impossible. His proof involves long equations, but the bottom line is that the warming models assume that the atmosphere is infinitely thick. Why? Because it simplifies the math. If on the other hand, you assume the atmosphere is about 100 km thick (about 65 miles) -- which has the big advantage of being true -- the greenhouse effect disappears! No more global warming.
Miskolczi once worked for NASA, but resigned in disgust when they would not allow him to publish his work. (It appeared in the peer-reviewed Hungarian journal Weather, and looks legit). So it's the global warming faithful of NASA Goddard Space Center, notably True Believer Godfather James Hansen -- who are always complaining to the media about Bush Administration censorship -- but who have ended up censoring their own scientific skeptic. Cosmic justice for NASA, you might say.
Censoring skeptics is an admission of weakness. That's why Pope had to shut up Galileo -- he couldn't win on the facts. The science establishment is now going after the Galileos of our time for the same reason, because orthodox scientists are pretty frail human beings and don't really like to be wrong. Reasoned skepticism is not something our papacy of politicized science wants to hear. Off with their heads!
That's the real global warming tragedy -- a speculative bubble in science, which happens all the time, has now been protected by the politicians, and allowed into an ugly and expanding volcanic pressure point. It is threatening to erupt and engulf climate modeling around the world. Scientists are pretty ruthless with open failure.
