OH, THE HUMANITIES!

Joanne Jacobs notes, "You can major in Taylor Swift and minor in K-pop -- but shouldn't."  That's in endorsing a recent lament for the kind of work students get away with to earn degrees.

In its early years, the University of Wisconsin-Madison offered courses covering Virgil, Cicero, Livy, logic, calculus, ethics, chemistry, constitutional law and other touchstones of a classical education.

In the year of our Lord 2026, students can stroll past Lincoln’s statue looming atop Bascom Hill on that very same campus to study video games through feminist, queer and ecocritical lenses.

Culture warriors are busy bludgeoning universities for their ideological monocultures: founding civics institutes, prohibiting diversity, equity and inclusion statements in hiring and cutting federal funding to questionable research — but mediocrity is arguably as large a problem as ideological capture.

Maybe the humanities disciplines should have stuck to close reading and creative writing.  It's not as if nobody's noticing.  "Dear reader, it's straightforward enough: think of 'the humanities' as 'those disciplines that deconstruct reality as a hobby' and you won't go far wrong.  That reality has a say in what gets deconstructed never ceases to catch the academy by surprise."

NOT THE JOB I SIGNED UP FOR.

Senior deanlet Gillian R. Hayes offers a column with the misleading headline, "On Leading People Who Don’t Want to Be Led."  Read on and note the deception.

It is a common joke in meetings: “Thank goodness I got that Ph.D. so I can …” followed by whatever administrative task is most frustrating that week: approving time sheets, navigating compliance forms or filing expense reimbursements. A few years ago, I was part of a joint senate-administration group on faculty engagement that spent much of the year discussing reimbursement practices. At the end of his ninth year in a demanding administrative role, one colleague told me the moment he felt most proud was not after launching new academic programs or mentoring countless faculty. Instead, it was after successfully arguing that receipts should not be required below a certain dollar threshold. We laughed—that awkward laugh you do when it’s that or cry.

But some conversations carried no laughter at all. One faculty member who came to meet with me recently, a senior professor who is by all accounts thriving, told me something I have not stopped thinking about. “I imagined shaping young minds and creating knowledge,” he said. “But that’s not what I do.” His daily reality had come to feel dominated by compliance tasks, student crises he was never trained to handle and an unrelenting sense that the institution had quietly redefined his job without telling him. For the first time in his career, he was considering leaving for the private sector. He wasn’t fighting me or acting entitled. He was resigned. He was sad. He was asking what we could do together to make things better.

Yes, there are faculty who get off on the procedural minutiae of meetings, seeing in them an opportunity to demonstrate their erudition, or something, by straining at the most minuscule of gnats.  Is it any accident, dear reader, that such faculty members are probably pulling for the mullahs to string Our President along from now until the return of the twelfth imam?

YOU HAVE DONE THAT YOURSELF.

Georgia State's Rob Jenkins correctly reminds the poo-bahs of higher education of a fundamental truth.  "Higher education has completely abandoned its mission—or at least many institutions, and many departments within those institutions, have done so."  I wonder why that is.

I WONDER WHY THAT IS.

"Humanities Chairs ‘Pessimistic’ About Their Departments’ Future."  We've been on that beat for a long time.

Of course, the people whose salaries depend on not paying attention to what Cold Spring Shops does will deflect, deny, or cry.

Humanities chairs—anxious about increasing political interference, declining enrollments and students’ skepticism toward the value of humanities degrees—are largely pessimistic about the future of their departments, according to a new report from the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.

Chairs told researchers that they are perceived as “a necessary evil” or “troublemakers” by institutional leaders. One chair described their department as “persecuted.” Another asked: “Where’s the respect for my expertise?”

Well, yes, four decades of denying coherent beliefs and turning out the next generation of baristas will have that effect.  As far as respect for expertise, well, there might be people who can tell you all the ways in which 1940 Schlitz beer bottles are different from the ones on the beer truck in 1955, and there are organizations for the collectors of bottles and other breweriana, and undoubtedly those people enjoy great respect among their fellow collectors, but they don't go awarding each other tenure, grants, fellowships, and endowed chairs.

ACADEMIC INTROSPECTION MUST BEGIN WITH APPRAISAL OF FAILURES.

Penn historian Jonathan Zimmerman engages in constructive self-criticism in the house organ for business as usual in higher education, noting, correctly, that "Condescending dismissal is a terrific way to avoid the hard questions about our own complicity in the degradation of the university."

His article opens with an anecdote in which his colleagues re-enacted a cartoon.

The anecdote with which he opens his article has already received widespread play and mockery among the Militant Normals in social media.

In March of last year, about two months after President Trump returned to the White House, I traveled to Washington for a meeting of American education scholars. The opening panel focused — appropriately enough — on Trump’s threats to university funding, free speech on campus, and more. Then it was time for questions, and I raised my hand. I said that I agreed with all the critiques of Trump, but I also wondered what those of us who work in higher education might have done — or not done — to bring about this awful moment. Could we use it to look in the mirror, I asked, and not just to circle the wagons?

Dead silence. Then another member of the audience spoke up. “I just wanted to say that I was deeply offended by Professor Zimmerman’s use of the term ‘circle the wagons,’ which connotes a hateful history of Native American displacement and genocide,” she said, as I remember it. More awkward silence. Finally, the moderator of the panel interjected with something along the lines of: “Thank you for reminding us that we need to be careful in the language that we use to describe others.” So the panel began with a diatribe about Donald Trump’s assault on free speech and it concluded with a warning to watch our words.

Yes, I can easily envision the pursed-lip indignation, or perhaps the finger-wagging, or perhaps the "Azza" preface. Such people deserve the mockery that they get.

THAT'S HOW IT IS WITH SACRED PRIORS.

I did not expect "For 'Sensitive Issues,' Read 'Sacred Priors'" to be validated so quickly or by an academician so highly placed.  And yet here we are.  "Garber Says He is ‘Disappointed’ by Student ‘Ignorance’ on Israel-Palestine Conflict."

Harvard President Alan M. Garber ’76 said he was “disappointed” by the widespread ignorance of Harvard students who expressed strong opinions on the Israel-Palestine conflict — and their disinterest in learning the facts of the issue.

Speaking at an event in Manhattan, Garber said he was struck both by students who held firm views without a grasp of the underlying history and by those who chose to avoid forming views altogether.

“If you’re going to have strong views about an issue,” he said, “I would hope that at a University you would have the curiosity to learn the facts.”

The remarks mark a shift in emphasis for Garber, who has spent much of the past year warning about deteriorating conditions for free expression on campus. In a December podcast appearance, he argued that Harvard “went wrong” by allowing faculty to inject their personal views into the classroom, a shift he said discouraged open disagreement.

On Monday, Garber made clear he sees the problem extending beyond faculty.

Garber described the attitude among students as “disturbing” and “ignorant,” saying he was especially troubled by a combination of shallow knowledge and reluctance to engage in disagreement.

“What I really felt was most disturbing as a Jewish president, but also somebody who cares personally a lot about the issues that were being discussed, is the level of ignorance among people on all sides of this issue,” he said.

“The lack of knowledge and this unwillingness to have open dialogue pain me even more,” Garber added.

Where to begin?  What is the effect of nearly a half-century now of cracking down on speech that "creates a hostile environment" or is "harassing and demeaning?"  What is the effect of enabling some people to live their illusions because it is "their truth," and you get written up for questioning it, on that curiosity to learn the facts?  And how often have people learned that "dialogue" is a worship-word meaning the relevant deanlet gets to set the wrong-thinkers straight?

AS SPRING BREAK WINDS DOWN.

Passover has begun, as I post this churches are about to offer Maundy Thursday services, with Good Friday and Easter to follow, and spring break winds down with the return of the collegians, and the latest strains of the common cold, to campuses.  And Charles C. W. Cooke is not amused with the genre of shock journalism called "ask chicks in bikinis about Serious Things."  Summarized, he asserts, "There is no great need to berate clueless adolescents for enjoying the tail end of their childhoods."  And for the simplest of reasons: sometimes letting it all go for a while is healthy.

For a start, it’s not at all obvious to me that the people on that beach are any less knowledgeable about current affairs than those of a similar age who spend their days being indignantly political on social media and beyond. It is true that the figures whom Fox interviewed do not know anything useful about immigration or foreign policy or economics. But, frankly, neither do most “engaged” 18-year-olds, many of whom, by dint of their peculiar obsessions, have talked themselves into holding some of the stupidest ideological opinions ever witnessed by the tired eyes of man. I am not, as a rule, an advocate for ignorance, but I am willing to bet, for example, that the median beachgoer in Fox’s video has a better instinctive understanding of American politics than the median attendee of a Brooklyn DSA meeting. Now, as ever, intensity does not wisdom create.

I’d also be willing to bet that those beachgoers are far happier than most political obsessives — and, at age 20, happy is a pretty important thing to be. When you read the various judgments that have been rendered in this case, it is impossible to miss the whiff of Puritanism, which was famously defined by H. L. Mencken as “the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.” Left unspoken in every condemnation is the insistence that, rather than remain ignorant in their bliss, those people should be serious, focused, vehement, and miserable. But there will be plenty of time for that. A few years after they have left the beach, those “revelers” will have jobs, mortgages, and children. Life, as the meme has it, will come at them fast. And, when it does, they will learn about politics — or, in many cases, not learn about politics — in much the same pattern as human beings typically do.

If anything, the existence of people who can play like grasshoppers in the summer suggests that things are not as bad with the world as our Excessively Earnest People would have us believe.

Historically, it is a great privilege to live in a time and place in which one’s primary concern can be “what bikini I’m gonna wear next.” To see young and unencumbered people with such habits is not a national disgrace or a societal failing or a civilizational problem to be solved, but a sign that our system is ticking along nicely. If one accounts for the changing fashions, the videos from Fox’s beach party could have been taken in 2005 or 1990 or 1975 or at any time in the modern era in which the United States was not engaged in a totalizing catastrophe. If, in our passion, we are determined to censure the oblivious, then let us do it within more appropriate climes. Harvard, say. Or Congress. Or, dare I say it, the press.

Perhaps, after such a long time between one totalizing catastrophe and the next, the ensuing catastrophe will be more totalizing.  That's the logic of the ekpyrosis.  On the other hand, if you're complaining about spring breaking kids who don't know much about history, or, for that matter, about vendors of artisanal pet food delivered to your door, you might be crying with your mouth full.

FIRST PANAMA CITY, NOW DAYTONA?

Ten years ago, Margaret "University Diaries" Soltan observed that Spring Break festivities weren't, shall we say, opportunities for people to use DeMoivre's Theorem or Mendelian genetics as pick-up lines.  "Allow certain ingredients to be put together in a concentrated way in a specific location, and you can actually destroy civilized life."  Panama City would just as soon not be a Spring Break destination.

Now, it's Daytona's turn.  "When other Florida cities decide they’re deathed-out by it all – when they finally close their doors to the bloodiest, trashiest, weekenders in America – the few scummy holdouts, like Daytona Beach, get everyone."

Maybe not everyone.  An observation by Sgt. Mom at Chicago Boyz is relevant.

I have had to read endless news stories (both mainstream and from various blog-teams) about the depredations committed by one subset. How often does one read about some violent and sometimes vicious assault in a public place, a brawl in a fast-food outlet or entertainment venue, or a smash-and-grab robbery … and scroll down to the mugshot(s) of the arrested perpetrator(s), the surveillance camera stills or on-the-spot posted video, and think to oneself, “Yep, about what I thought…”

Town Hall's Matt Vespa, after posting the reporting from Daytona, asks readers not to judge.  "Look, not trying to harp on stereotypes here."  His call for restraint in the comments is mostly honored in the breach.

WOKE, BROKE?

Portland State University have long been on our "shake out the suboptimal capacity" list.

Perhaps it's time for Portland State to think about its mission and purpose.  It sometimes gives the impression of being a state-supported version of Brown (or Reed) without the starlets paying bribes to get their underprepared spawn in, or perhaps of Oberlin with a less upscale food court, or perhaps Evergreen State with a broader offering of courses.

That despite, or is it because, of a trolley running through the middle of its student center.  The only sane thing you find in some self-styled progressives is their respect for things that run on rails.

THE PROFESSOR'S RESPONSIBILITY IS TO SAY NO AND UPHOLD STANDARDS.

That's what you're paid to do.  Preening on stage or pontificating for local television or, if you're famous enough, testifying before Congress, is what compensates you for doing your work.

How much irresponsibility is there these days?  Try Minding the Campus's David Randall.  "Grade inflation has gotten so bad that a 1968 C+ might clear the bar for a Yalie A today."  The student he refers to is, famously, our 43rd President, who might have used his academic standing self-deprecatingly.

Bush’s example tells us, by the by, that a C+ Yalie is perfectly capable of running the country. It helps, though, when the C+ Yalie knows he was only a C+ student—that knowledge breeds a useful humility. The C+ Yalie who thinks he’s an A student tends toward an unfounded arrogance when put in charge of things.

Unfortunately, in the intervening years, the "gentleman's C" has become the "gentleman's B minus" and these days, Mr Randall suggest, an A minus on the transcript is grounds for a grade appeal.

Commentators a generation ago cautioned that grade inflation meant a C+ in 1968 was roughly equivalent to a B+ by 1999—and we’ve had another quarter-century of inflation since then, so by the same measure, Bush’s C+ might now clear the bar for an A at either school. Not that the grades mean much anymore either way: a straight-A Yalie today may be weak on basic grammar, and who knows whether he’s ever seriously engaged with the history of America or Western civilization.

(Even the young Joe Biden might have earned a B+ at Yale in 2026. One fears that Biden, as he is now, might still manage a B-.)

Mr Bush's opponents, Al Gore and John Kerry, also Ivy types, earned similar grades.  Perhaps politicians, to be successful, have to have some of that hail-fellow-well-met about them, and that doesn't show up on the transcript.  I'll be nice and not ask too many questions about why Barack Obama's transcripts are deep secrets.

THE ADVERTISING PRISONERS' DILEMMA.

I was under the impression that metaphor was well-known.  There's a Minimal Publishable Unit, at least, in rediscovering it.

Auto insurance companies are some of the largest advertisers, with top brands spending upward of $1.5 billion per year, even though they’re household names. When Geico runs another spot featuring its ubiquitous gecko mascot, or Progressive cranks out another Flo ad, are they wasting their money?

“That’s where the puzzle starts,” says Navdeep Sahni, a professor of marketing at Stanford Graduate School of Business. After a century of research on advertising, scholars still don’t have an empirically solid grasp of exactly how or why it works. One leading theory suggests that advertisements provide consumers with new information. If that’s the case, why do the most prominent brands need to advertise? Another influential theory suggests that advertisements create associations in consumers’ minds, hitching a particular brand to a category.

“But if you push that thinking further, it doesn’t actually tell you what to expect,” Sahni says. “If you’re primed to think about Geico, that might also make you think about Progressive because the two things are associated. Or it might make you think about Progressive less. The theory isn’t diagnostic or precise in what it says.”

Sahni and doctoral candidate Yifan Yang go a long way toward resolving these issues in a new working paper that shows the dramatic benefit of auto insurance advertising. They found that ads not only boost visits to an advertiser’s website but also interfere with consumers’ recall of alternative brands, dislodging the competition from their minds. The findings help explain why spending millions on repetitive campaigns, even by well-known brands, is essential to remaining in people’s memories.

Some of what the researchers did to influence their research subjects to follow insurance company links comes close to treating those shoppers as fish to be hooked.  That concluding paragraph suggests the repeated prisoners' dilemma is at work: although the messages look duplicative and repetitive (and among the property and casualty insurance companies, often silly) they serve as counter-programming to the other company's silly messages.  Although their work is about strategies for staying in consumers' minds, and they wonder if the work generalizes, their discussion does not contemplate another possibility, which is that repeated advertising is an expensive signal of permanence.  Ask yourself, as Steven Landsburg once did in his Armchair Economist, whether a fly-by-night company would hire a celebrity to endorse a product of unknown quality.

MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING.

Campus Reform lodges a complaint.  "Marxist ideologies found in University of Utah's economics department."  That prompts Glenn "Insta Pundit" Reynolds to quip, "Leaves found on trees."

Here's how Campus Reform's Austin Brown reports.

The University of Utah’s Department of Economics claims to prepare students for a wide variety of economics-related careers, yet it appears to place an emphasis on promoting left-wing political ideologies.

The department has gained a reputation over the years for the amount of time dedicated to teaching students about Marxism. An article published in 2018 in The Daily Utah Chronicle stated that it “has been labeled a center of Marxist thought” and that its “Marxist characterization has been documented by numerous publications.”

One doctoral student told the Chronicle that nearly everything in the department is “built on Marxism.”

In defense of its economics curriculum, the school asserts that it “offers students an exposure to an unusual breadth of economic thought, as is reflected in elective offerings that examine feminist, historical, and institutional approaches.”

It might be, as Mr Brown suggests, that the course content of “Political Economy of Race, Class, & Gender” or “The United States of Inequality: Political and Economic Remedies and Challenges” can be taught from a perspective of tight priors in which whatever inequalities or disparate outcomes exist are the consequences of an entrenched Ruling Class deploying its powers to keep the Oppressed oppressed.  They do not necessarily have to be taught that way: the challenge is to establish whether a student could ask whether sex roles or labor market outcomes or the amassing of fortunes is in part emergent.

GIVE LOGIC AND CONTENT A CHANCE.

"Let’s Return to Teaching Students How to Argue," argues Gregory Roper for the Martin Center.  He raises a variant on the "it's silly to make your identity the basis of your argument" so popular among the Culture Studies types.

A Hispanic student, for example, can write only out of his Hispanic-ness, writing what “they” know and experience from that “position.” And how dare anyone presume to judge from outside of that position whether the result is “good writing” or a “coherent argument”? But maybe that’s the point: Asking her to “improve her writing” is to impose alien standards upon her. Such a philosophy is designed to persuade students that they can’t have thoughtful arguments with anyone unlike them. And test scores have declined all the way through.

His essay is a bundle of points, as is often the case with polemical material, and yet, within it is a case for the proper way to make an argument.

What if the solution to our republic’s woeful rhetorical culture lies in learning from the best rhetorical educators of the ancient Roman republic?

Consider: Rome was a place of astonishing cultural diversity, stretching from Spain to Gaul to North Africa to Egypt and Asia Minor, and all had to find a way to do business together. That meant law, and that meant lawyers, and that meant ways for lawyers to argue effectively for their clients. That, finally, meant teaching the art of rhetoric—the technical skill of persuading others with one’s words to think something, to change their minds, and to make something happen.

For example, no Syrian could afford to come to Rome and say, “Well, I can articulate this only from my Syrian cultural-epistemic position, and you Italics trained by Greeks will never really enter into my cultural mindset because of your biases; furthermore, your conceptions of rational argument are oppressive, so I will speak in a Syriac way that is neither rational, nor logical, nor presents evidence as a way to support its arguments.”

Nope, that Syrian had to learn rhetoric and how to persuade using logos, pathos, and ethos. He had to learn how to structure an argument, how to present it well, and how to appeal to his audience. Quintilian and Cicero taught all of these, and this conception of rhetoric became the most popular way of training those who spoke and wrote. It’s what we need today.

It was called stasis theory, and it worked on a simple principle: You can’t have a productive argument unless you figure out precisely what the two sides are arguing about.

Rhetors were taught to explore a dispute through a series of questions: What are the facts? What is this? What caused it, and what effects did it have? Is it a good or bad thing? What should be done? The point in asking these questions is to discover the point of stasis—that is, the place where the two sides need to stop, for there is where they have their differences and can engage in productive debate.

There has been a lot of damage done to the intellectual tradition since, whether it is the "incommensurable methodologies" of Kuhn's paradigms, or those cultural-epistemic positions that you had to experience in order to hold, or perhaps the trendy foolishness of deploying sneer quotes whenever somebody says evidence or truth or proof.  "So it always is with people who are so wedded to their priors that to ask 'what evidence would lead you to change your mind?' is heresy."  The "what evidence" question, though, is the key to conducting an argument.  That is the task Professor Roper sets for higher education.  "Maybe the problem with a rancorous republic isn’t with our politics. Maybe it’s that we’ve educated students for the past 40 years without teaching them how, calmly and patiently, to argue with their opponents. Instead of teaching students that debate is impossible, let’s teach them how to do it."

Faster, please.

MULTI-LEVEL MARKETING AND AMWAY AT YALE?

Campus Reform associate editor Alessia Degraeve files "Yale College Republicans President explains how rampant grade inflation is an institutional strategy."

Manu Anpalagan, the Yale undergraduate who spearheaded a revival of the Yale College Republicans chapter, argues that grade inflation at Yale University is not an accident, but a conscious institutional strategy.

Grade inflation at Yale is often described as a cultural drift or a lingering side effect of the COVID-19 era policies. But Anpalagan argues those disparities persist because they serve the university’s institutional incentives.

“I believe this rampant grade inflation and decline in coursework rigor is a calculated decision by university officials,” Anpalagan told Campus Reform. “Administrators know that highly motivated students will seek to continue their education by going to law school, medical school, and other graduate programs.”

Within graduate school admissions, even marginal GPA differences can determine outcomes. Inflated grades make Yale students more competitive on paper—and, in turn, make Yale itself look more successful.

“Every additional tenth or even hundredth of a point in your GPA can really help,” Anpalagan said. “So if the university makes it easier for students to get better grades, and that in turn helps their chances of getting into graduate school, it ultimately reflects well on the undergraduate institution as well.”

Higher graduate school placement rates feed directly into the metrics universities use to advertise success: alumni outcomes, post-graduation salaries, and national rankings. In that environment, Anpalagan argues, grade inflation functions as a reputational tool rather than an educational one.

What effect those higher departmental rankings in Yale's evergreen disciplines has on the life prospects of Yale graduates who go on to advanced work in those evergreen disciplines might be another matter.  The Campus Reform article focuses on the distorted signals that accompany inflated grades.

We were calling attention to the likely diminished life prospects of those honors graduates nine years ago.

"Like many colleges and universities, Yale relies on graduate students and other low-paid contingent faculty members, like adjunct professors, to teach much of its coursework."  Yes, and Professor Klein's essay reveals another dynamic at work, higher education as multi-level marketing with more earnest pitchmen.

We've also noted the likely diminution of creativity as students do what gets them the good grades and continued funding, rather than beavering away at the frontiers of knowledge to identify anomalies: and there is no shortage of anomalies, let alone of interesting questions.

Yes, and the graduate students so trained on the taxpayer dime learn the arts of grantsmanship, and, should they be fortunate enough to land a tenure-line job, they can then write grants and recruit and develop the next generation of Amway representatives researchers.  Whether the work so funded is better than the work professors develop on their own initiative remains to be seen.

That "fortunate enough to land a tenure-line job," dear reader, is not throw-away carping by an admittedly jaded onetime academician.

Perhaps when Amway comes to Yale, that will concentrate minds.

Reality dawns on Rebecca Gordon.  "Is Higher Education a Pyramid Scheme?"

Yes, yes, it is, and we told you so a long time ago.  (So long ago, in fact, that the links have expired at that old post.)  It wasn't just a pyramid scheme at the lower levels of the academic food chain, even then.

How are those Yale graduates doing with their academic placements, whether they continued at an Ivy or accepted financial aid from solid departments that might not "look as successful" in sending their baccalaureate graduates on to graduate or professional schools?

CANDLEMAS AT ST. OLAF.

Public television set aside part of Christmas Eve to acknowledge that Christmas Eve refers to a religious event, and their programming frequently includes elements of the St. Olaf College Christmas Festival.  Think future Lutheran Church Ladies working on their handbell technique, and I think the programmers work the Anglican Lessons and Carols (those stand out in my memory as the segment local public television most regularly carries) in with the Norseman Band and Viking Chorus.

The St. Olaf Candlemas service, however, took place at Notre Dame University.  South Bend are in the lake effect snow belt downwind of Lake Michigan, and January has been productive enough of lake effect snow that some civil engineering students, inspired by a classmate's igloo, built a chapel out of snow blocks.  Their efforts motivated resident campus priests to offer a Candlemas service, with Mass.

They didn’t only have a Candlemas Mass, the Catholic Feast of the Presentation of the Lord, marking 40 days after Christmas, when Mary presented Jesus in the Temple. They also sang hymns at the snowy structure, dubbed “St. Olaf’s Chapel," as well as the university’s alma mater, "Notre Dame, Our Mother."

University publicists were on hand to share the news.

Love thee, Notre Dame 🎶

Last night, more than 1,600 Notre Dame students braved 19° temps for Mass at St. Olaf’s Chapel, built by Coyle Hall residents from the 38 inches of January snow. pic.twitter.com/TpYiTblTR2

— University of Notre Dame (@NotreDame) February 3, 2026

Candlemas, forty days after Christmas, is the end of the Nativity season.  There are some people who leave their Festive Season decorations up until Candlemas (that's taking long chances with natural greenery inside) rather than removing them after Three Kings.

There's some pretty good snow sculpting talent at Notre Dame, judging by the photos in Bob Hoge's article.

A WELL-DESERVED HONOR.

Timothy Taylor has edited The Journal of Economic Perspectives since its establishment in 1986, and the American Economic Association have recognized his work by naming him a Distinguished Fellow of the Association.  Well done.

All editions of Economic Perspectives are on the public access side of the Association's web site.  It is that time of the spring semester for senior thesis and capstone paper writers to get cracking on their projects and they really ought be using that resource rather than Wikipedia or Pajamas Media or even Cold Spring Shops!  Oh, Perspectives regularly offer imponderables, too.

YOUR INTEGRITY OR YOUR LIFE'S WORK.

Ever since the second coming of a Trump presidency, higher education types have protested that the administration is conditioning its financial support on obeisance to that administration's policy goals.  Regular readers of Cold Spring Shops have long understood what Reason's Jack Nicastro put bluntly.  "Federal Funding for Universities Comes With Strings. Now Trump Is Pulling Them."  His focus is on the appropriability of patent royalties: yes, on occasion federally sponsored research comes up with commercially successful things.  His concluding paragraph, however, notes the broader implications of Our President's actions.

Getting the government involved in subsidizing higher education was always a Faustian bargain. The Bayh-Dole Act may have supported the tenfold increase in university patents in the two decades following its passage, but it did so at the expense of attaching government strings to academic research. It should come as no surprise that the Trump administration is now tugging on them to cow academia into compliance with its political agenda.

As if the other government strings didn't have the same effect.  The post's title comes from a Rikki Schlott essay, "How Ideologues Infiltrated the Arts," which ran in The (Not Detroit) Free Press midway through the Jarrett regency, during which the foundations and the national endowments shared a common view of what was True and Beautiful.  Choreographer Lincoln Jones got the equivalent of a "recant or be excommunicated" missive from Pope Linus the people who write the checks.

“Fundraising felt impossible,” he added. “The requirement on grants comes down to this: If you don’t agree with this very particular and recently adopted approach to social justice, we won’t fund your art. Behind the scenes, so many people in the arts world told me just to say the words.”

“Every time I spoke to funders, the first conversation was about diversity. It just felt like, okay, this is how you get funding now. Honestly, it felt like somebody was holding a gun to my head and saying, ‘Your integrity or your life’s work.’”

That bargain—pledge allegiance to the new orthodoxy or stick to your mission and risk your career—is one now faced by many in the world of American fine arts.

I mean, when the director of the National Endowment for the Arts during the Obama presidency, Rocco Landesman, recognizes there's a problem, there's probably a problem.

Landesman, 75, who has produced multiple Tony-winning shows including Angels in America and The Producers, said he worries about what is happening to the world where he has dedicated his entire life and career.

“We’re taking first-rate artists and making them into third-rate political activists,” he said.

“Art is supposed to unsettle us; art challenges what we feel about ourselves,” he continued. “But most of the art today affirms commonly held views of our society. You either fit in or you perish.”

The same thing might be happening to decorated laboratory scientists in universities you might have heard of, according to Minding the Campus contributor J. Scott Turner.

There is nothing unlikeable about any of the scientists whose stories Blonigan and Liu tell. They are justly proud of what they do, and of their devotion to science. As someone who spent a multi-decade research career in a never-ending scramble for funds and living with perpetual uncertainty, I feel their pain.

Nevertheless, they are in the grips of a prideful delusion: that they are valued as scientists, that the funding, privilege, and prestige they enjoy have been conferred on them so that they might advance science, and that what they do is valued by their universities as science. They are blind to the reality that they are galley slaves, chained to the oars, valued not for the science they do nor for their good intentions, but for the revenue streams they generate.

Doubt me on this? Here’s a thought experiment. Decide to dedicate your career to an intellectually promising line of inquiry that doesn’t cost much money to pursue, or even better, that can be funded without grants. What do you suppose will happen to your academic career? Here’s my hypothesis: you will soon have no academic career.

And where is nemesis in all this? Pull away the mask, and her identity is revealed. Nemesis is the mighty river of federal research funding, roughly $100 billion that streams into universities nationwide every year.

Note further, dear reader, that any institution of higher (cough!) learning that wants to participate in federally funded research or performance or guaranteed student loans must comply with, you guessed it, government guidelines.  Cynical Me suggests that the guidelines, pre-Trump, enforced agreements among the universities that the universities could never reach among themselves.

GOOD QUESTION.

Inside Higher Ed columnist Rachel Toor asks, "Can we in higher ed, the true 'life-long learners,' think hard about what we’ve gotten wrong, admit our mistakes without shame and then change and adapt to the world we all now live in?"

Perhaps the continued apologetics for all wokeness, all the time, have ceased to persuade.

Every scientist worth her NaCl knows a theory is right until it’s proved wrong. That’s why she keeps experimenting. But in higher education, we tend to treat our current crisis—declining enrollment, loss of public trust—as a “failure” of the market or demographics or even the political landscape. We rarely stop to ask if we are fundamentally wrong about the model we are using.

I'd like to see even a little acknowledgement that I, and people who shared some of my objections to business as usual, might have had it partly right.  That's not where she's going.

We confuse the aesthetic of academia—the gorgeous campus, the passionate faculty, the dorm-living young people that represents the small college liberal arts experience—with the institutions that serve the 70 percent of students who fall outside the traditional, fictional Wheeler ideal.

Watching this, I was reminded of a story my late uncle, Seymour Benzer, a geneticist at Caltech, once told me. He had been invited to Oxford to give a talk and was walking the quads with a colleague. They passed workers scraping soot off the ancient buildings. The witty Brit he was with turned to him and said, “We put that in bags and ship it to Yale for their buildings.”

It was an apt reminder that we’ve long mimicked the ancient Oxbridge model, importing not just the architecture, but the “soot”—the assumption that tradition itself confers value. That might work for elite institutions where students are buying social capital. But for the rest of higher ed? In today’s world, faculty who cling to their lectures and red pens don’t serve our current students.

We are busy scraping the soot off the past and applying it to the present, rather than admitting that the building itself might need a redesign.

Higher ed in the U.S. has been one of our country’s greatest achievements. But maybe we can think about what we’ve gotten wrong, admit it without shame, and then learn and grow and change? Some of us must out of sheer necessity if we want to keep our jobs.

It's not the institutions that are selling that social capital that confront shrinking enrollments and opt to close down.  The U.S. News guides continue to sell.  I doubt that Ms Toor is seriously suggesting not bothering with providing at least the rudiments of that social capital to matriculants who for a variety of reasons do not seek admission at the elite institutions.

A STORY LINE TOO CRAZY FOR DOSTOYEVSKY.

On Saturday, we learned of an economics review session at Brown University that ended with shots fired.  When Cold Spring Shops resumed posting on Monday, law enforcement was still looking for their suspect or supects.  Providence authorities were not inspiring much confidence, at least among Militant Normals.

Sometimes it's prudent to hold off on any speculation until the evidence is in hand.  But Providence authorities are not doing much to clear the fog of war.  This story broke Saturday just after Navy sang second, with early reports of a "person of interest" questioned and released, and a second "person of interest" detained and questioned Sunday and ultimately released.  There was security camera tape available.  "The footage showed the gunman walking calmly down a street near campus, dressed in all black with his face covered."  The difficulties Providence authorities are having identifying the real suspect do not please Town Hall's Matt Vespa.

Monday evening came news of a Massachusetts Institute of Technology fusion researcher sustaining a mortal wound, shot in the foyer of his condominium in Brookline, Massachusetts.  Dear reader, it is prudent to hold off on speculation, between the news networks and the internet were all sorts of assurances that the professor's murder had nothing to do with Brown or it might have been the jihad presenting itself and who knows what I might have missed paying attention to Aaron Rodgers doing Aaron Rodgers things on Monday Night Football.

HOW LOW TRUST SOCIETIES UNRAVEL.

The investigation of Saturday's campus shooting at Brown University, where authorities are still looking for whoever pulled the trigger, is doing little to close the credibility gaps government officials are so good at creating, let alone to polish the tarnish off the Ivy League's notorious safety school.

It’s a horror show. That’s all I can think of right now. Every time the authorities get in front of the cameras to give an update on the Brown University shooting, it becomes another episode of Keystone Cops. This heinous crime is tragic—two people were killed. It’s also become a textbook case in how not to address the media or handle a crisis.

And no, you don’t need years of experience to know that when you have zero answers, maybe you shouldn’t hold a press conference.

“I don’t know” isn’t the phrase anyone wants to hear, and yet that’s what Brown University president Christian Paxson said when asked a basic question about what was happening inside the building where the school’s engineering classes are held. That was six hours after the attack. Then, a suspect was in custody, but that was corrected, only to be followed by the arrest of a person of interest who was later released. There’s no usable camera footage of the suspect.

Police also have no idea how the shooter entered the building.

Contrast that with the prompt response by senior administrators including the president, dean of liberal arts, and campus police chief  the evening of February 14, 2008.  The only second-guessing I will offer here is that on a Saturday during exam week, buildings are likely to be unlocked; that is, unless entry to campus buildings is for authorized (keycard holding) students, staff, and faculty at all times.  But, Matt Margolis continues, holding press conferences with no information forthcoming is of a piece with issuing weekly body counts and claiming to be winning in Vietnam.

No suspect. No arrest. No leads. No clue how he got inside the building. What about motive?

Well, witnesses heard the shooter yell “Allahu Akbar,” though Brown and local police are rather cagey about that angle of the story, refusing to comment on it. Hey, Democrats and media, the conspiracy theories you rail about; this is how they get spawned. And now, after the person of interest was released, there are reports of local law enforcement throwing the FBI under the bus.

What a mess. Even more of a reason not to go in front of the cameras, right?

I’ll tell you this, the shooter has had quite the head start, and he’s likely out of the area.

Law enforcement communications regularly leave details out of public statements in order to verify the veracity of witnesses or to catch suspects in a lie.  Perhaps saying nothing about key-card records or jihadi war-whoops is of that protocol.  But the absence of any comments about details that are circulating widely is only giving people who don't have much regard for officialdom or the Ivies material that might disrupt more lives.