THE EFFICIENT LEVEL OF PARTICIPATION.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 John P. Minogue asserts, The 20th Century University Is Obsolete.

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

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

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

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

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

The column is also a bit confused.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

HALFTIME. Huskies 17, Bobcats 14.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

His perspective on the changes to come is different.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Edward Hopper's Nighthawks in O Scale.

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

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

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

Now consider the effects of the disaggregation.

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

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

Not upstairs over the beanery:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When the researchers finished their coffees, they promised more.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Professor Vedder takes a first cut at a related problem.

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

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

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

King Banaian considers additional tradeoffs.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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


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


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


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

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

Rockford Register-Star photo by Sheryl Drost.

More pictures.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Zeidler Union Square, Milwaukee.

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

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

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

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

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

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

University Diaries lays some smack on Mr Frank.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More stuff for my strategic plan?

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

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

SETTING THE PACE FOR THE FLEET.

Aircraft carrier Midway is now a large museum and war memorial in the San Diego harbor.

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


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


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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And the beggar-thy-neighbor policies are proliferating.

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

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

Developing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stay safe.

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

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

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

SELLING THOSE WINS.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The City Council debate has material for further research.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sometimes the old way is better.