OVERLAPPING PROTECTED CLASSES. The point of raising peoples' multicultural consciousness ostensibly was to prepare everyone to get along well when a polity no longer had an ethnic or religious majority, or when, in an alternative formulation, it became "majority-minority." That was the idea, but Betsy's Page points to a London Times article with a distressing lead.

THE vast majority of people in Britain are officially oppressed, according to a report that claims we have become a “nation of victims”.

The study calculates that 73 per cent of Britons are members of officially recognised “victim groups”, including the disabled, women, ethnic minorities and homosexuals. Each group is given government support, including protective legislation.

The boffins in question might have prior beliefs they seek to strengthen.

The report, We’re (Nearly) All Victims Now, by the socially conservative think- tank Civitas, gives warning that the rise of a “victimocracy” undermines democracy because people are no longer considered equal under law.

Perhaps the notion of equal protection under the law is a bit too retrograde for some people, but H.M. Government's reaction to the existence of multiple protected classes suggests complications in attempting to fine-tune different treatment for people in different circumstances.

In October next year the Government is setting up the Commission for Equality and Human Rights, which merges the disability, race and equal opportunities commissions.

The notion of "multiple oppressions" is a lot easier to invoke in a cultural-studies seminar than it is to implement as a matter of public policy.

Many people, such as black women, are victims of so-called multiple discrimination. The report uses official figures to strip out the overlapping groups to calculate that nearly three quarters of people belong to one category or other. The biggest oppressed group is women, who constitute 51 per cent of the population and are protected by a range of legislation covering discrimination, equal pay and domestic violence. Ethnic minority men amount to 4 per cent; white disabled men 11 per cent; white male pensioners 5 per cent; and white, gay, able-bodied men, 2 per cent.

The study, perhaps unsurprisingly, concludes that claiming benefits as a consequence of one's victimhood does not raise the self-esteem of the person who holds protected status.

However, the report gives warning that seeking victim status can harm the victims, denying them personal responsibility by always blaming others and undermining their self-respect.

Those are the expected social-conservative talking points. There is, however, corroborating evidence from an unexpected quarter.

One of the great benefits touted by diversiphiles -- those who love diversity and promote it everywhere they can -- is that having a diverse student body, for example, would teach each group to respect and understand the others. But in a new study Robert Putnam finds that "in the presence of diversity, we hunker down".

We act like turtles. The effect of diversity is worse than had been imagined. And it's not just that we don't trust people who are not like us. In diverse communities, we don't trust people who do look like us.

Is there such a thing as "cultural convergence"? Interestingly, four years ago Putnam was saying something different. I am not sure why we find this surprising; even in his relatively famous "Bowling Alone", Putnam found that a high degree of homogeneity is needed to form "social capital"...

Professor Putnam goes on to note that he's not providing aid and comfort to xenophobes.

Prof Putnam stressed, however, that immigration materially benefited both the "importing" and "exporting" societies, and that trends "have been socially constructed, and can be socially reconstructed".

In an oblique criticism of Jack Straw, leader of the House of Commons, who revealed last week he prefers Muslim women not to wear a full veil, Prof Putnam said: "What we shouldn't do is to say that they [immigrants] should be more like us. We should construct a new us."

Economist's reminder: "socially constructed" is a somewhat infelicitous phrase that raises the possibility of a vanguard managing that reconstruction, or, in a term popular with the Diversity Boondoggle, a "transformation." It's more accurate to contemplate institutions evolving so as to reduce transaction costs (equal treatment under the law likely to be administratively less cumbersome than evaluating the magnitude and direction of each vector of oppression) and cultural customs selecting and adapting the most useful among the newcomers. Consider Germans bringing Sunday picnics and bratwurst and giving up the Lederhosen and learning English. The Moslem day of worship is Friday, and I can see a three-day weekend becoming the norm, even without immigration by Moslems. The veil is likely to be an old-country custom that won't make the change.

There ought to be limits to the "affirmation" of "difference." The Twin Cities appear to be a good place for Moslem immigrants to make a better living driving taxis, but more than a few of them are reluctant to transport passengers who are carrying adult beverages.

Minneapolis-St. Paul is concerned that its taxi service is deteriorating. Citing their religious beliefs, some Muslim taxi drivers from Somalia are refusing to transport customers carrying or suspected of carrying alcohol. It started with one driver a few years ago, but the average number of fare refusals has grown to about three a day, says airport spokesman Patrick Hogan. "Travelers often feel surprised and insulted," he says. "Sometimes, several drivers in a row refuse carriage."

Taxi drivers and officials from the airport, taxi companies and the Muslim American Society are discussing how to address the issue. Partly out of concern that taxi drivers might be citing religion to avoid short-distance fares, the airport is now forcing drivers who refuse a fare to go to the end of the line for waiting taxis. It is not a popular decision among drivers, Hogan says.

The drivers do not want to pay the price for exercising their beliefs and the regulatory commission proposes two colors of designator lights, one for drivers who will not transport liquor or drive to liquor stores and another for those who will not. Daniel Pipes sees disquieting trends at work.

But on a societal level, the proposed solution has massive and worrisome implications. Namely, the two-light plan intrudes the Shari‘a, or Islamic law, with state sanction, into a mundane commercial transaction in Minnesota. A government authority thus sanctions a signal as to who does or does not follow Islamic law.

What of taxi drivers beyond those at MSP? Other Muslims in Minneapolis-St. Paul and across the country could well demand the same privilege. Bus conductors might follow suit. The whole transport system could be divided between those Islamically observant and those not so.

Why stop with alcohol? Muslim taxi drivers in several countries already balk at allowing seeing-eye dogs in their cars. Future demands could include not transporting women with exposed arms or hair, homosexuals, and unmarried couples. For that matter, they could ban men wearing kippas, as well as Hindus, atheists, bartenders, croupiers, astrologers, bankers, and quarterbacks.

Hit and Run's Tim Cavanaugh suggests we're seeing multiculturalism run amok.

The tempting answer is Yes, pious fools should be allowed to turn down all those fares, and presumably go home emptyhanded at the end of their shifts. (Ironically, refusing to take drinkers in your cab also deprives you of the teetotaller's only pleasure: doing a slow burn of superiority and disdain at the drunken slobs whose lives are in your hands.) But all solutions become impossible once a regulatory agency is involved. The airport commission sets standards for correct and non-discriminatory service, which makes the reasonable response outlined above technically impossible. The only way the [Metropolitan Airport Commission] has found this compromise solution is by carving out a fake exception to its own mandate. As Pipes indicates, once you've carved out one of those, new and more absurd exceptions can be expected to follow.

Milton Friedman once argued that many of the "public accommodation" sections of the civil-rights were misguided, because business owners who wished to indulge their own prejudices could pay the price in lost business. That didn't wash when the prejudice being indulged was a reluctance to serve dinner to a "colored" person. It doesn't wash, at least in Illinois, when the prejudice being indulged is a reluctance to be party to an induced abortion. Mr Cavanaugh is correct to note that the Commission has faked an exception to its own procedures. I'm not familiar enough with Minnesota taxi regulation to claim that the exception is contrary to the "undue preference or prejudice" language of common-carrier regulation.

The abolition of special taxi licenses might be another solution. Whether drivers choose to advertise their services as Shari'a compliant or as drinking-friendly or as anything else might better be left to the open market. Readers: does a Twin Cities taxi medallion trade, in the New York fashion, for the capitalized present value of future monopoly rents?

YOU COULD PUT THESE ON YOUR COURSE OUTLINE. John Palmer has a statement that could work as a set of Candid Answers to Frequently Asked Questions.

THE SENSITIVITY GULAG NEEDS A BAND. Even before the University of Wisconsin's new complaint procedure is in Ordnung, the sensitivity monitors have acted on a denunciation of the marching band.

What band members did, exactly, is still a mystery - even to some students - but it was described in an Oct. 3 letter from Chancellor John Wiley to band director Michael Leckrone as behavior "that can be seen as anything from boorish and offensive to patently dangerous and unlawful."

Wiley warned in the letter he would consider suspending the band's activities and travel or replacing its leadership if there were more reports of "gratuitous vulgarity, sexualized banter or joking, hazing, or other forms of demeaning conduct."

"I say this, you know, because I do not feel I have a choice: we either solve the problem now, and the band you have built to such legendary proportions survives, or we look at virtual extinction for a significant period of time," Wiley warned in the letter to Leckrone.

The university released the letter, labeled "Personal and Confidential," on Wednesday in response to an open records request from The Associated Press. Wiley personally warned band members on Oct. 5 that such behavior would not be tolerated.

Chancellor Wiley has not yet made the band a nameless number on a list that was later misplaced, but the threat is in the air.

In the letter, Wiley ordered band members and field assistants to attend training to prevent harassment. He also appointed an ombudsman - Eden Inoway-Ronnie, an aide to Provost Patrick Farrell - to meet with band members to confidentially discuss any concerns.

Casey Nagy, Wiley's top aide, said the behaviors in question violated the band's code of conduct and were repeated despite previous warnings from the administration. He said some of the reports were from the bus trip home from Ann Arbor.

"If these behaviors recur, they are immediately at risk of losing travel to any postseason competition," he said.

As for hazing, Nagy described it as "any kind of conduct that's forced on another individual or denigrates their sense of person or space."

Leckrone said he didn't think it was appropriate for him to comment to the press or the entire band about what happened, even though some students were in the dark as to what their peers had done.

Those band members should be grateful that associating with enemies of the people is not yet contrary to the Wisconsin judicial code.

QUOTE OF THE DAY. Coyote Blog develops The American Question.

Economics is a science. Willful ignorance or emotional rejection of the well-known precepts of this science is at least as bad as a fundamentalist Christian's willful ignorance of evolution science (for which the Left so often criticizes their opposition). In fact, economic ignorance is much worse, since most people can come to perfectly valid conclusions about most public policy issues with a flawed knowledge of the origin of the species but no one can with a flawed understanding of economics.

Postscript: In fact, the more I think about it, the more economics and evolution are very similar. Both are sciences that are trying to describe the operation of very complex,bottom-up, self-organizing systems.And, in both cases, there exist many people who refuse to believe such complex and beautiful systems can really operate without top-down control.

Complex adaptive systems do pretty much what they damn well please, forsooth!

SELF-PARODYING. Indeed so. The "Mystery of the Urinal Deuce" episode of South Park airs again this evening and Saturday evening. As Marquette Warrior notes,

But we'll trust the guys at South Park to be even wilder than the tin-foil hat crowd.

No spoilers here. Program your recorders or mark your calendars.

THE VIEW FROM MY WINDOW. The Gales of November came early, with the South Shore of Lake Superior receiving up to eighteen inches of snow. (Somebody at the Weather Channel didn't get the word: the Detroit Tigers no longer play at Tiger Stadium.)

DeKalb, Illinois, 12 October, 9 am.

The leaves have not yet turned.

DON'T WATCH THIS AD. It's been Instalanched, and Charlie Sykes has a copy just in case Google yanks it, but you really don't want to see Madeleine Albright doing a Tom Sawyer in Osama's cave.

IT MAKES A GREAT ARMBAND. Ann Althouse discovers a creepy new University of Wisconsin plan to encourage students to become casual informants to the Gauleiter Dean of Students.

Students can report anything, from a hate crime to graffiti to verbal harassment. SAJA will attempt to follow up in every instance, contingent on the information provided, to investigate possible misconduct and to provide resources to the victim.

[Interim Dean of Students Lori] Berquam says that many hate or bias incidents are relayed anecdotally to ODOS staff. The reporting form is one way to quantify how many incidents take place on campus and provide a method for following up.

The acronyms refer, respectively, to Student Advocacy and Judicial Affairs, which at Wisconsin apparently has a mission beyond open-container violations and cheating, and the Office of the Dean of Students, which apparently fancies itself capable of running a network of informers.

Fortunately, the resistance is strong. Professor Donald Downs notes,

In other words, the present policy amounts to a speech code, as it encourages people to file reports on other people’s attitudes and speech that informants deem insufficiently senstive.

Professor Althouse has been gathering designs for that armband.

Wisconsin's administration never ceases to amaze me. Just before the student volunteers start calling around asking graduates to send some money, they've given me this year's reason to say no.

RUNNING EXTRA. View a sample informer report.

MERCANTILISM GONE UPSCALE. In the latest manifestation of "The Windy City Gone Wimpy," the pate-banners at the Chicago City Council seek to ban what they define as a formula business from historic districts.

Proponents got the idea from San Francisco and cities where similar measures are in effect.

The proposal's backers point to a 2004 study that found that for every $100 spent at an Andersonville business, $68 remains in Chicago, compared with $43 at a chain store.

Let's take this proposition seriously. How many Andersonville (a North Side neighborhood that was once the Swedish ghetto of Chicago) residents earn their incomes in Andersonville businesses? Heck, how many earn their incomes at a workplace in Chicago?

The neighborhood's roots date to the mid-19th Century, when immigrant Swedish farmers moved into what was then a distant suburb. Settlement was sparse until the Great Fire of 1871, when the log cabins preferred by city-dwelling Swedish immigrants were outlawed within Chicago's boundaries.

The immigrants soon migrated north, settling into homes around Clark Street and opening delis, hardware stores, bakeries and other businesses.

The neighborhood, which is officially part of Edgewater and Uptown, slid into a decades-long decline after the Great Depression. Swedes began to move to the suburbs after World War II and Clark Street became littered with empty storefronts.

Though local business leaders rededicated Andersonville to its Swedish roots in the 1960s, disinvestment again plagued its commercial district in the 1980s.

You mean a neighborhood might not be self-supporting, and people and businesses move out? Or, a neighborhood might earn its keep by encouraging people from other neighborhoods to import goods and services from it?

Frequent Clark Street patron Amy Mall said the homegrown shopkeepers are what make the neighborhood special.

"It would be sad to see Andersonville change," said Mall, who routinely rides two buses from the Logan Square neighborhood for the shopping pleasure. "If it did, there wouldn't be a reason to go there."

What is to stop the residents of Logan Square from running "Buy Logan" campaigns, or local businesses asking the City Council to defund the Chicago Transit Authority so that Logan Square residents can't contribute to Andersonville's balance of trade surplus?

Time to consider a point Paul Krugman makes in Pop Internationalism. The purpose of trading is to import, meaning to get more cheaply the stuff you can only produce for yourself at greater expense. Consider the latest acquisition at Cold Spring Shops. In the foreground, a Chinese-built Great Western King. There are some dollars that left the United States to make this acquisition possible, and more than a few British pounds went to China. In the background, a Great Western King I assembled some years ago from an Oakville kit. Far fewer dollars left the United States to make that kit possible, and one could argue that I "saved" a lot of dollars designing my own power train and electrical pickups and a number of other improvisations to make it run. (The opportunity cost is left to readers as an exercise. Top-link economists are supposed to devote every waking minute to researching difficult problems.) But for all the money that I didn't spend, and all the papers I didn't write, I have an engine that didn't run as well out of the box as the one that involved sending money out of the country.


To the extent that Andersonville business interests are encouraging the residents of other Chicago neighborhoods to import goods from Andersonville, their argument in favor of keeping the money in Chicago is internally inconsistent, and to the extent that residents of other Chicago neighborhoods are willing to import goods from Andersonville, the shopkeepers will be able to hold their own against those formula businesses.

IF YOU BUILD IT, THEY WILL COME. Increased train frequencies have led to more passengers boarding at Sturtevant.

Now that Sturtevant for Racine is open, will the expanded parking facilities and more inviting station, a bit closer to the Interstate, bring even more passengers?

(I have observed some Milwaukee Airport passengers boarding or detraining at Sturtevant, which is about seventeen minutes running time away.)

RECLAIMING THE TRADITIONAL VIRTUES? Administrators and students at Columbia University seem bent on getting the folks at the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education upset. First comes a recruiting flyer for the hockey club that rubs the women of the fevered brow the wrong way.

A free speech controversy has hit Columbia's campus-even if some refuse to admit it. On Wednesday, the Office of Athletic Communications released a statement announcing a reduced punishment for the men's ice hockey club. While we are pleased the club has regained its season, even the remaining punishment is disconcerting. Administrators and student government representatives have eschewed the free speech issue at the heart of the controversy, instead clinging to the club's procedural errors and disciplinary history as being the reasons behind the punishment. But would the club be facing any punishment if its flyers did not contain the phrase "Stop being a pussy?"

(Sorry for the mixed metaphor: the women of the fevered brow probably haven't been rubbed the right way, let alone the wrong way, in the past 30 years.) Here, Columbia's president Lee Bollinger comes off to the Foundation as pandering to the discontented.

President Bollinger has repeatedly extolled the virtues of free speech and has promised Columbia students the freedom to express their ideas. In 2004, he sent student leaders a letter stating, "In order to maintain an atmosphere of free and spirited inquiry and discussion, we must choose to forego our natural instinct to punish those who are intemperate and even offensive." One wonders if Columbia administrators bothered to read this letter before deciding to punish the hockey club for using a single word that some students found offensive.

For some reason, the George Carlin "seven words" sketch comes to mind.

Columbia's overreaction to the flyers represents an attempt to enforce a Victorian notion of civility and decorum upon its students, the vast majority of whom are adults capable of setting their own moral guidelines. As one of America's leading universities, Columbia should not punish students for saying "bad words," nor attempt to control the content of their speech. Until these most basic principles are understood and honored, Columbia's commitments to free expression are empty promises.

Bad words. Bad. On the other hand, what is Columbia doing admitting crude, street-talking louts in the guise of having a hockey club?

And what is Columbia doing admitting crude-street talking louts in the guise of diversity? The author of a linked opinion piece in the Columbia Spectator does not approve of the recent shout-down of Minuteman organizer Jim Gilchrist.

Did I miss a memo? When did an opinion (any opinion) become so revolting and odious that the only option available to highly erudite Columbia students is to shout and drown out the voices of opposition? When did the free exchange of ideas become so dangerous that debate could not be allowed and only violent intimidation is an appropriate response? In the past two weeks, Columbia University, my venerable alma mater, has seen two separate incidents of private censorship that threaten to destroy any claim she might make as a pinnacle of thought and enlightenment.

The memo has been public policy among many of the Perpetually Aggrieved for years.

The real possibilities of human freedom are relative to the attained stage of civilization. They depend on the material and intellectual resources available at the respective stage, and they are quantifiable and calculable to a high degree. So are, at the stage of advanced industrial society, the most rational ways of using these resources and distributing the social product with priority on the satisfaction of vital needs and with a minimum of toil and injustice. In other words, it is possible to define the direction in which prevailing institutions, policies, opinions would have to be changed in order to improve the chance of a peace which is not identical with cold war and a little hot war, and a satisfaction of needs which does not feed on poverty, oppression, and exploitation. Consequently, it is also possible to identify policies, opinions, movements which would promote this chance, and those which would do the opposite. Suppression of the regressive ones is a prerequisite for the strengthening of the progressive ones.

Thus,

Liberating tolerance, then, would mean intolerance against movements from the Right and toleration of movements from the Left. As to the scope of this tolerance and intolerance: ... it would extend to the stage of action as well as of discussion and propaganda, of deed as well as of word.

From which it follows that suppressing the phrase in question in the hockey flyer is necessary, and Mr Widlanski's question is misguided.

Hopefully, as the dust settles, Columbia students will reexamine their methods of voicing disagreement—this time realizing that in our free society, as Ben Widlanski sagely notes, freedom of speech requires that “everyone who has something to say should be allowed to say it.”

That's not the game plan for the individuals the New York Post characterizes as "speech thugs."

"It was fundamentally a part of free speech," one protester told The Columbia Daily Spectator. "The Minutemen are not a legitimate part of the debate on immigration."

Can it be true that free speech at Columbia applies only to those who are deemed "legitimate" by a self-proclaimed group of political purists?

So it would seem. And, sad to say, Wednesday night's fracas was no isolated incident.

And, even more sad, it's not just students who have made Columbia so inhospitable to the First Amendment.

Conservatives, supporters of Israel and others who want to win the War on Terror routinely see their First Amendment rights trashed - while the university throws open its doors to tyrants like Venezuela's Hugo Chavez and Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (the latter invitation being withdrawn under extreme public pressure).

Simply "suppression of the regressive ones" as far as the powers that be at Columbia are concerned.

DON'T PUT THESE ON YOUR COURSE OUTLINE. I read "Rate Your Students" but generally don't link to their material. I'll make an exception for this set of Frequently Asked Questions and the Refreshingly Candid Answers thereto.

BEATING THE HUSKIES IS MORE IMPORTANT. Richard Vedder encourages university administrators to ask themselves, "why do they hate us?"

One reason why governmental support is increasingly hard to come by is that universities and their coordinating bodies often behave irresponsibly, taking actions that most Americans view as inappropriate or unwise. Three examples that have surfaced over the past couple of weeks make this point.

I'll focus on the third example.

Finally, at Ohio University (where I teach), the Columbus Dispatch revealed a week ago that 17 football players (14 percent of the total) have been arrested for various crimes in 2006. Bad enough. But the story also showed that NONE of them had missed one minute of football play for legal transgressions, even a player who beat up another person (and former football player) after being kicked out of a bar for disorderly conduct. The University's first response was to say the coach's punishment (that the players had to STUDY for a few days in his office) was severe enough.

Ohio hired that coach from Nebraska in order to win games in the Mid-American and help get the conference out of not-quite-double and not-so-secret probation. Has anybody in Lincoln fussed about the off-the-field habits of Husker starters?

TWO SYSTEMS OF BELIEF? Sequential entries at Phi Beta Cons offer differing takes on what's going on in (a few corners of) the academy. George Leef recommends a John McWhorter column discovering the most recent manifestations of Barnaby Sneerly.

Anyone who does what I do is used to running up against this type of guy now and then. I mention it not as a personal cri de coeur, but because of a larger tragedy: how ordinary such perceptions are among his demographic, and the failure of our higher education system to correct them. Instead of countering the unthinking polarization increasingly typical in our discourse, a college education too often leaves unchecked a confusion between dogma and enlightenment.

His summation:

“Why can’t Johnny read?” we were once taught to ask. But today, if Johnny learns how to read, in college he is taught that there is only one way to think.

Preceding that post is John J. Miller recommending Arthur C. Brooks in Opinion Journal advising something along the lines of "don't worry, be happy.

"Most studies of the subject have indicated that, indeed, upward of 90% of college professors at many universities hold liberal political views. In some chools and departments, faculties are virtually 100% left-wing. It is one thing to lament this ideological lopsidedness in the academy. But it is quite another to assume that professors actually bend the little minds in their care toward a liberal point of view, or even a radical one. Imagine a student with God-fearing Republican parents exposed to the depredations of an English professor aiming to use his class as a Bolshevik training camp. Will the professor succeed in turning the kid into a Red? The evidence says, probably not: When it comes to politics, people from conservative families follow their parents, not their professors.

The most recent evidence on this subject comes from the mid-1990s, in the University of Michigan's National Election Studies. These survey data uncover two facts. First, people who go to college are more likely to vote Republican than those who don't go to college. Adults 25 and under from Republican homes are, for example, 11 percentage points more likely to vote Republican if they attended college than if they didn't. And young adults from Democratic households are 11 percentage points less likely to vote Democrat if they've gone to college than if not.

Second, nearly everybody grows more likely to vote Republican as they age--but especially college graduates. It is no shock that the vast majority of people of all educational backgrounds from Republican homes vote Republican by age 40. It may come as more of a surprise that 40-year-olds with Democrat parents are far less likely to vote Democrat if they've gone to college than if they haven't. In fact, while three-quarters of the uneducated group still vote Democrat, the odds are only about 50-50 that the college graduates vote this way. And they've not all become skeptical political independents: Fully a third are registered Republicans.

Obviously, some kids turn left in college--but this appears to be the exception, not the rule. Does all this mean that our colleges and universities are actually breeding grounds for conservatism? Hardly. What the statistics really show is that higher education by itself doesn't affect political views very much. Rather, in addition to the strong influence of parents, it is higher incomes--which typically reward a college education in America--that push people to the right politically. In Republican families, the income effect reinforces parents' influence on their kids. In Democratic families, the two effects work against each other.

To fearful Republican parents, then: Sleep tight. When it comes to politics, your kids are in good hands--yours.

How many ways shall I disassemble this? First, consider two possible sample selection biases. These surveys are often based on party preferences people express in order to register to vote in primary elections (themselves a survival of the so-called Progressive Era intended to take candidate selection out of the hands of party insiders by compelling candidates to pander to party insiders) in states where such registration is required in advance of the election. In states that allow crossover voting, such data is meaningless. Furthermore, the faculty surveys often focus on departments at highly visible universities. They tell us more about Stanford or Syracuse than they do about Stanislaus or Stony Brook, let alone about faculty viewpoints among adjunct-heavy community colleges that might have moonlighting executives in the management and engineering faculties. The student survey weights the sample to reflect the lower proportion of Stanford and Syracuse graduates in the population of all graduates.

Next consider a self-interest hypothesis. The propensity of college students to favor Democrats and then vote Republican in middle age is at least as old as the Great Society (what's that line about "to live like a Republican, vote Democratic?") and it might be driven as a desire to keep what one has acquired, as Professor Brooks notes, or it might be a recognition that what appeals to a college sophomore might not appeal well to a messy reality (that raises a question about professors whose thinking has not developed beyond the sophomore level, but I digress.)

Or, perhaps, nobody is paying that much attention to what goes on in Literature anyway.

EPSILON. Northern Illinois survives, 28-25. Homecoming weekend at Oxford, Ohio ends at 11.18 pm on Sunday. It's a long bus ride to DeKalb.

ASK THE PEOPLE IN THE TRENCHES. Margaret Soltan has further impressions of the Athena Roundtable.

But, for instance, it seems to me it'd be a better use of ACTA's time to invite some truly typical faculty members at American universities to discuss -- maybe to defend -- the complex ethos by which many of them live. This is not as irresponsible, selfish, and madcap an ethos as some at ACTA believe (though there's plenty wrong with it), and it'd be helpful for the organization to gain some nuance about it.

Agreed. A tussle over who gets control of the curriculum committee at Harvard or Chicago has little or no effect on the challenges of providing higher education to most of the country's students, who are at the flagships and the mid-majors and the community colleges.

The academy's problem, however, might rest with something other than risk-averse, pusillanimous tenured cowards.

People don't start being bold non-conformists once they get tenure if being a bold non-conformist was never in the most tenuous sense an option for them.... And think about it. What sort of person is going to be attracted to one of the few jobs in America that grants you lifetime job security in the form of academic tenure? As to the risk in going up for tenure itself -- the overwhelming number of people who go up for tenure in the United States get it. At some schools, the rate is around 95%.

Doesn't that 95% refer to the less competitive private liberal arts colleges, and the less-famous departments at the flagships, and many of the mid-majors, and the regional converted teachers' colleges and the community colleges (to the extent that there are tenure lines at many of these?) One has to be a bit of a bold non-conformist to make the kind of research contribution implicit in "national" or "international" reputation.

I HEARD THAT ONE UP HERE. The shootout continues. Garrett Wolfe just ran over two defenders to complete a two-point conversion. Northern Illinois 28, Miami 25.

WHY INDUSTRIAL ECONOMISTS WILL NEVER LACK FOR WORK. Michael Munger (via Knowledge Problem) makes an important point about collective action.

The boundary we fight over today divides what is decided collectively for all of us from what is decided by each of us. You might think of it as a property line, dividing what is mine from what is ours. And all along that property line is a contested frontier in a war of ideas and rhetoric.

For political decisions, "good" simply means what most people think is good, and everyone has to accept the same thing. In markets, the good is decided by individuals, and we each get what we choose. This matters more than you might think.

The bulk of the essay focuses on the workings of the median voter, as contrasted with the incentives confronting the marginal investor facing non-median preferences. (There are some nasty non-convexities that sometimes come into play.)

The thing to keep in mind is that market processes, working through diverse private choice and individual responsibility, are a social choice process at least as powerful as voting. And markets are often more accurate in delivering not just satisfaction, but safety. We simply don't recognize the power of the market's commands on our behalf. As Ludwig von Mises famously said, in Liberty and Property, "The market process is a daily repeated plebiscite, and it ejects inevitably from the ranks of profitable people those who do not employ their property according to the orders given by the public."

Sometimes, however, those orders run up against those non-convexities, which makes that contested frontier a bit more contested, as well as requiring the investor to identify enough of the "most of us" so as to be able to recover the investment.

NOT YET SETTLED. Early in the fourth, Northern Illinois 20, Miami 18, Miami on the move.

IN GRANT'S BACK YARD. This weekend, the Civil War reenactors were at work just south of Stockton, Illinois. The skirmish to be reenacted is set in Georgia in the fall of 1864. The terrain of the North West Frontier is suitably rugged. (I will have additional illustrations in some forthcoming book reviews.)


I invite my overseas readers to discover what the total population of these States were in 1860, and contemplate what Americans are capable of doing to their neighbors if they get angry enough at each other.


In Jo Daviess, "county mountie" is not trucker slang for the sheriff's speed trap. This horse is being acclimated to unexpected noises, the better to help direct traffic at fireworks displays. I suspect the horse, who is the rider's property, not the county's, is going to associate "kids feed me grass" with loud noises. General Sherman is pacing the battle line.


This reenactment features General Thomas doing the narration, using a technology not yet developed in 1864.


Union troops will have to make do with the technology of the time.


A turkey vulture with a bright red head surveys the battlefield.


The rebels are holding a bridge that the Army of the Cumberland wants to take in order to continue the encirclement of Atlanta. Although there is word of the Yankee advance, these Virginians take best advantage of the lull.


The bridge has lanterns so as to ensure safe passage at night. Morseville to the left, Pleasant Valley to the right.


The mountain howitzer is the 1864 version of the rocket-propelled grenade launcher. It breaks down to be transported by three mules, it can be pulled and pushed by a squad, and Yankee cannon that have a different trajectory are hard-pressed to provide counterfire.


The Rebel preparations are necessary, as these Union cannon are positioned to support an attack on the bridge.


General Thomas wants the bridge taken intact, thus this cannon is pre-sighted against a likely defensive position to the left of the bridge.


Cavalry prepare to skirmish to the right of the bridge, as a Confederate foot patrol moves up.


The mountain howitzer fires in support.


Illinois artillerymen have a cheat sheet to get the range and the charge right.


During the Civil War, "shock and awe" meant the infantry commander would ask the battery to fire more rapidly.


The skirmish was inconclusive, with the Rebels retaining the bridge but unable to dislodge the Army of the Cumberland. General Thomas is wiring his regimental commanders to request situation reports.


He also received an order to make another attempt on the bridge on the next day.

THE WRONG TIME OF THE WRONG DAY. At the half, Northern Illinois 17, Miami of Ohio 12. Garrett Wolfe is making a nimpression on the commentariat. But it's still Sunday night college football, and that's wrong.

A VISIT TO THE TEST PLANT.


Micro-Mark had a sale on rollers. They're useful for running-in a mechanism before putting the locomotive in service on a short railroad with no continuous running. They're also useful for checking one's engineering. Here a Hiawatha gets a checkout. The red clip-lead to the frame and to the engineer's side brush terminal ensures proper polarity. First run it slowly to see that all fits, then try a faster speed.


I shut off the flash unit so as to emphasize the blur. She'll do a scale 125 easily. Now to engineer the valve motion so it won't seize. At those scale speeds, the wreckage isn't pretty.

THIRTY YEARS' PROGRESS. King athlete has leukemia on the run.

King has been inspired enough to claim the No. 11 spot in the state boys team rankings. The Generals have been led by senior Joe Stilin, [Tim] Hoehnke's best friend on the team and a potential individual state championship contender.

"Joe says at the end of his races, if he's at a point where his body is feeling pain, then he thinks about what I've been going through and he doesn't worry about his pain anymore," Hoehnke said.

But there might be a positive light at the end of the tunnel for Hoehnke. "Right now, the doctors say I'm in remission, which means the cancer is undetectable to their equipment," he said. "But there's a chance it's still in my body. That's why they're continuing the chemo, because if it is still in my body when they stopped, it could come back even stronger."

Researchers have learned a few things since Milwaukee Hamilton's 1972 state basketball tournament run. High schoolers who might not have had their junior prom to look forward to might now have a chance at a full life.

NOT THE BEST THING FOR THE KIDS? Thus concedes Northern Illinois coach Joe Novak.

"Ideally, no, I don't think it's the best thing for the kids," said NIU football coach Joe Novak. "We're going to get back at about 5 a.m. on Monday, and I'm going to tell our kids to go to their 8 a.m. classes."

Which they were given advance enrollment into, so as to have their afternoons free for weight training and practice.

But it has nothing to do with money.

NIU's game on Sunday is a prime example of a movement storming D-I college football. That movement is asking a majority of mid-major football teams to take big dollars to play nationally televised games on "school nights."

But is the television exposure coming at the expense of student athletes' personal health and academic integrity?

"In my view, the real 'exploitation' comes if institutions are admitting football players who are unable, or unwilling, to do the academic work," said MAC commissioner Rick Chryst in an e-mail interview.

Yes, let's kick that can back to the kids. The conference is on not-quite-double and not-so-secret probation for its dismal attendance figures, and the commissioner faults the recruiting efforts of the coaches? In an afternoon I could fill an entire deck of cards (as opposed to a 32 card Schafkopf deck) with athletic administrators who ought to be hiding in spider holes rather than taking easy questions from veteran sportswriters. But that would be about as challenging as, oh, working through the "times 10" table for integers 1 to n, for n large.

Northern Star columnist Sean Connor, fortunately, is made of sterner stuff.

Now, read the following stats and ask MAC Commissioner Chryst again whether or not mid-major schools are being exploited by ESPN.

Of the five Tuesday night D-I football games ESPN is airing this fall, all of them are match-ups between mid-major teams.

Four of the five games ESPN is showing on Wednesday nights this season are between mid-majors.

On Thursdays, nine of the 14 games involve mid-major teams. Then, on Friday, seven of 11 match-ups are between strictly mid-major schools.

Now that ESPN has lost the NFL on Sunday nights, ESPN has replaced it with college football.

And guess what? Five of the six Sunday night games on ESPN are between mid-major schools.

One Sunday showdown is between Morehouse University and Miles University. It begs the question of whether these schools would have gotten games on ESPN before this year.

Keep that kind of investigative reporting up and the sports desk is going to wish you were reassigned to the Washington press corps.

IF YOU'RE SO SMART, WHY AREN'T YOU RICH? Don Boudreaux offers an extended version of that argument to a devotee of the argument that Karl Rove is more powerful than a Lyapunov attractor.

If Mr. Jones is correct, he can make a financial killing. All he need do is to invest all of his assets going long in gasoline futures (which are today about 30 percent lower than they were in late July). Indeed, he ought even to cash out all the equity in his house, max out on his credit cards, and borrow heavily from his brother-in-law so that he can invest as much as possible in these futures.

He can then contribute his post-election financial bounty to the Democratic National Committee.

Heh.

QUOTE OF THE DAY. Arnold Kling:

Strong immigration enforcement may be the contemporary equivalent of the Smoot-Hawley tariff.

You mean immigration policy really winks at a cheap labor subsidy from illegal immigrants?

THE ODDS ARE WITH THE HOUSE. The fact that a store offers you an extended warranty for what looks like a small fee is evidence that they expect to profit by it. To what extent?

Neither Circuit City nor Best Buy discloses how much of its bottom line comes from extended warranty sales. But analysts have estimated that at least 50 percent and in some lean years 100 percent of profits at the electronics retailers come from extended warranty sales.

The full article (via Marginal Revolution) is a clinic in applied economics.

REVEALED PREFERENCES. Must be a slow news day.

At issue is the ethics of the bootleg latte.

The manager at that store -- who asked that her name not be used -- said about 5 percent of customers order a doppio, that is, a double shot of espresso and then put a twist on that order. Rather than the 8-ounce cup the doppio would usually command, they ask for the coffee to be put in a 16-ouncer, leaving about three fourths of that cup empty.

These customers take their cups to the condiment counter where various milks, half-and-half, flavorings, etc. are laid out for free use. They pour enough milk into the cup to nearly fill it, then take it back to the office for a zapping in the microwave.

By creating such faux grande lattes, these customers are saving $1.45 ($1.75 versus $3.20 before tax). What they don't get is milk foamed by the barista, but in a side by side taste test, tasters noted that the two were virtually the same.

Those self-made latte customers on North Michigan are far from alone in their frugality. They and makers of an iced version, the faux Americano, have become the focus of a dust-up that has exploded across the Internet with a no-holds-barred fervor that has proponents of the "it's wrong" camp branding the drink a "ghetto latte."

Give. Me. A. Break.

Charlie Sykes wasted an hour of his program about a week ago taking calls on the propriety of the pour-your-own iced latte. But if Starbucks wants to preclude these arbitrage actions, all they need do is issue new specifications that prohibit the use of larger cups for smaller drinks and specify how much ice goes into the iced latte.

A report on Starbucks Gossip, starbucksgossip.typepad.com, a site not affiliated with the company, said Starbucks' response to the flap is: "Customization is a fundamental attribute of the Starbucks Experience. We provide condiments to our customers so they can make their drinks to their liking and we appreciate their patronage. We trust our customers to make the choices that are right for them." Although the statement isn't found on Starbucks' official Web site, a company spokesman confirmed that this is the official position. Also, the manager of the Michigan Avenue store said she has been told not to interfere with bootleg latte makers.

"I think this has more to do with the customer's sense of being in this together than Starbucks losing money," said David Ozar, professor and co-director of graduate studies in health care ethics in the department of philosophy at Loyola University and former director of Loyola's Center for Ethics. "After all, the free condiments are, for the company, a marketing tool to keep customers coming in. If that marketing no longer pays for itself directly or indirectly, they'll change the policy.

D'oh!

AN INCOMPLETE SET OF PRICES. British natural gas producers are paying gas companies to take immediate delivery.

Britain's gas storage capacity is 96% full so firms need to offload supplies. As domestic gas bills are based on longer-term contracts, consumers will have to wait for big reductions.

After trading at an average of 26p a therm through September, the spot price for gas delivered immediately fell to -5p during the course of the day, meaning traders are paying to get rid of it.

Ian Cook and William Polley make wry remarks about prices becoming negative. It's more accurate to note that tankage has an opportunity cost. It's cheaper for the well operator to hire the gas utility's tankage via what looks like a "negative" price for the gas than to expand its own storage capability.

Phil Miller considers a more complex case.

This happens in labor markets too where employers effectively pay some employees to retire.

Here, the unpriced good is the expected higher productivity of the replacement employee (because only relative prices matter, a less-productive entry-level replacement also satisfies the condition.)

I think it was Harold Demsetz who once quipped that a model of an economy that treated information as a scarce resource would look very different, very much as a model of a railroad that treated steel as a free resource would look very different from railroad that treats steel as a scarce resource. It's not so much prices that are negative occurring in practice as it is prices that bundle more than one good that provide the anomaly here.

CONDOLENCES. To Lynne Kiesling and the Knowledge Problem family.

A DIFFERENT KIND OF TRAIN BLOGGING

Acela Express

No Japanese bullet train

Subject of haiku

PLANES AND CONVEXITY.

The algebra is on the panels to the right. One objective function, four constraints (the fourth of which subsumes as many as six additional constraints, depending on how you set it up.) Objective function in purple, consumer utility constraint in black, transformation curve in orange, additional orange at the origin discusses possible variations in the dimensions of the consumption Edgeworth Box which is shown in brown.

I have a really colorful one in mind for Monday, illustrating the workings of Walras's Law in an out-of-equilibrium allocation. Perhaps that will offer an opportunity for a tutorial on the Say Aggregation Principle.

THERE'S MORE THAN WORKPLACE DEVELOPMENT. King Banaian reacts to the Conference Board's report on workforce preparation by the high schools and higher education.

As someone said to me after lunch, what kids are missing is the fourth R: the real world. And what employers seem to be doing is hiring college graduates with hopes that they've received that fourth R. And in the real world, one thing you can't have is inflated grading. When we do this, we are kicking down the road the problem with a lack of professionalism and work ethic that's lacking in the high school graduate.

Which, presumably, the high schools could do for everybody rather than relying on the community colleges and the liberal arts faculty to do for some.

Professor Banian goes on to expand on some remarks I made in a different context (my riff on the Conference Board is a variation on one of my usual themes.)

While a "coreless curriculum," as Stephen puts it, is a real problem, what we really want in these students is that work ethic along with the ability to work together, to speak clearly, and to be able to solve problems and think critically.

If there's some other way to deliver that than a classical curriculum centered on the Great Books, I'm fine with that. But good luck finding one.

I'm not sure which collectivity that "we" refers to. That work ethic begins at home (and to some extent it's over-rated: some people can give the impression of being busy and accomplish nothing and some people can sip coffee from 10 am to noon and still produce La Cenerentola and William Tell -- without thinking about the Lone Ranger!) The ability to work together and to speak clearly: begins at home, learned in kindergarten? Solve problems: sometimes that's the application of an algorithm. Critical thinking: define a different kind of problem or ask if there mightn't be a different approach to the situation or make connections among diverse solutions to seemingly unrelated problems. That's where higher education used to come in. According to the dean at Anonymous Community, it still does.

Back at Proprietary U, students frequently asked me why they had to take Gen Ed classes (such as mine). I responded that your technical skill gets you your first job, but your communication skills get you promotions. If we academics don't want the rest of academia to follow the Wal-Mart/Rio Salado model, we need to start making a serious case about the economic value of actual education, taught by actual educators.

To which I add: at a content level worthy of performing at the highest level. I stand to benefit by such an emphasis, as do the students and the employers. Researchers who follow cohorts of college graduates over entire career paths have discovered that holders of so-called practical degrees tend to do a little better at landing those first jobs, but holders of liberal arts degrees are over-represented relative to their proportion of all degrees in the corner offices. Perhaps that makes sense: the practical degree, like a proper high school degree, equips the holder to identify and solve a number of routine problems without having to be walked through every step. The liberal-arts degree equips the holder to grasp the wrinkles and consider the unconventional approach that works because it's analogous to something that happened in a very different setting.

(The "Rio Salado" method focuses on applied problem-solving of the lower order kind. As the dean puts it, "The underlying assumption of the Rio model seems to be that education is training, and nothing more. It can be reduced to standardized modules that anybody can deliver at any time. If education really is just training, then who needs full-time faculty?" To which I must add, why does the military need senior non-commissioned officers? Why does the backshop need an experienced master mechanic?)

CAR SHORTAGES? Nostalgic for the Interstate Commerce Commission?

Agricultural groups and the state's largest utility complained at a Milwaukee hearing on rail shipping last week that tight capacity and poor service were becoming chronic problems.

The Journal Sentinel's Rick Romell, who covered the hearing, reported that We Energies, the Milwaukee-based utility, had to burn more natural gas, which is costlier than coal, because it couldn't get enough coal by rail.

John Petty, executive director of the Wisconsin Agri-Service Association, said at the hearing that railroads pick and choose which agricultural shipments they want to carry. Petty, whose group represents businesses that handle 80% of Wisconsin corn, wheat and other grains, said producers have waited as long as five days for a train to haul a load.

The editors at the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel have some proposals.

The federal government should take two steps.

First, reform the board's complaint process so it's a legitimate safe harbor for rail customers. It isn't now.

Second, Congress should take a thorough look at whether antitrust exemptions given to railroads still make sense. Any review should consider the industry's overall economics, of course, because 26 years of deregulation have been good for railroads and shippers alike. We have argued in the past that bills introduced in Congress to eliminate the exemptions go too far. But declining service and rate spikes on routes where there are not good alternatives raise questions about the railroads' monopoly power.

The railroads, which were not represented formally at the hearing, say they've worked to keep rates competitive, Romell reported. They note, correctly, that rates have declined since deregulation and that railroad capital spending is up 21% this year. The railroads claim recent surveys show service is better.

All the more reason the railroads should not oppose streamlining the federal complaint process or a review of their industry.

But suppose the review suggests the current capacity adjustments are exactly what an efficient market would have produced? If so, the car shortages are transient until capacity adjusts to demand. A revised "complaint process" accomplishes exactly what?

DOING THE HIGH SCHOOLS' WORK? The Conference Board has a gripe. Most Young People Entering the U.S. Workforce Lack Critical Skills Essential for Success. Specifically:

The findings show an especially big gap in writing skills. Nearly three-quarters (72 percent) of incoming high school graduates are viewed as deficient in basic English writing skills, including grammar and spelling. And, when asked about readiness with regard to applied skills related to the workplace, the greatest deficiency was reported in written communications (memos, letters, complex technical reports), and in professionalism and work ethic. Eighty-one percent of survey participants say their high school graduate hires were deficient in written communications.

Many employers expect to substitute more hiring from the two- and four-year colleges for hiring out of high school, although there's accumulating evidence that the colleges are not doing the high schools' job more effectively.

Poor writing skills also continued to be a problem among both two-year and four-year college graduates. Nearly half of all survey participants (47 percent) report that two-year college graduates are deficient in this skill.

The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel picks up some Milwaukee-area reaction.

The gap is growing between employer expectations and applicants' competency, which should compel more businesses to get involved in the education system, said Van Walling, vice president and area manager for CH2M Hill engineering.

But the education establishment gets defensive.

Sister Joel Read, co-chairwoman of the education committee of the Greater Milwaukee Committee, said employers have long griped about the quality of job applicants, though rarely detailed the deficiencies.

"It's not enough to complain about it. It just isn't," said Read, retired president of Alverno College.

"Teaching is not a profession that's held in high regard by the business community, and I think it's come to roost, so to speak," Read said.

Much as a company would work with a supplier to improve components it found inadequate, Read said, employers must help educators instead of just criticizing them.

It might be more effective to focus on the revealed preferences of the education establishment. The Conference Board was not uniformly negative.

Interestingly, workforce readiness of high school graduates was reported as adequate by a majority of survey participants in three areas considered critical for current and future workplace needs: [information technology, teamwork, and diversity.]

The first might be an emergent phenomenon from years of practice with Play Stations and laptops. The second and third might reflect the schools' emphases on active learning and group work. Whether multicultural curricula have crowded out the basic skills remains an open question.

Another revealed preference is being reconsidered, notes Betsy's Page.

I've long thought that we do kids a big disservice by pretending that every single student should be placed on a college-track. Some kids are just not interested in learning all that college-prep material; they tune out, start failing, and then eventually drop out. However, there are plenty of decent careers out there for which a college education is not necessary. And they could get excellent vocational training and some business training and be ready to go out into the world ready for a career as an electrician, an auto-mechanic or computer repairman. Rather than turning high school into a struggle to fit kids into a one-size-fits-all career path that, in essence, abandons some kids, we could prepare them vocationally and keep them from dropping out from school and society.

She links to a CNN article that suggests the new thinking about the industrial arts is as a skill, not as a sump for the burnouts.

The question of how to create a skilled labor force that meets future needs is something that has occupied Rick Stephens for years.

The senior vice president for human resources at Boeing Co. said everyone needs a range of training to succeed these days.

"An auto mechanic today needs to know computer science, electronics, how to use sophisticated electronic tools ... none of which require a degree," Stephens said.

In 2000, there were 258 career tech high school courses that met University of California standards. Six years later, the number is up to 4,705, according to state statistics. That is significant, say career tech advocates, because it illustrates how the academic world is beginning to realize the importance of the trades and include them in college courses.

The woodshop class at Hoover [high school in San Diego] is one of the few electives available at the comprehensive high school.

Teacher Arturo Gonzales spent 10 years working in the cabinetmaking industry before he took a pay cut to teach. His classes are crowded and he would benefit from having an assistant, but money is tight, he said.

"A lot of kids are in here to create, to get away from the math class, the English class," Gonzales said. "They want to work with their hands."

He tells his students that this is a math class, too, but a fun one.

Indeed. (One of these days the "sand falls on a conical pile" related-rate problem will be replaced with one that starts "A ship is 889 feet long and displaces 40,000 tons ...)

WHAT'S THE DIFFERENCE? Journal-Sentinel weighs in on water.

The whim of the governor of Michigan, say, should not trump the needs of the people of Waukesha or New Berlin. And basing a decision on a "fair and equitable process" is always better than basing one on a personal preference or on one person's opinion.

Strange Loop alert: what criterion makes a "process" "fair and equitable"? Can one devise a process without weighing preferences?

TWO SYSTEMS OF BELIEF. Is tax money being allocated efficiently to roads? A USA Today article notes the hidden costs of deferred maintenance.

Crumbling roads and highways in the nation's metropolitan areas are imposing a "hidden tax" on motorists by increasing costs to maintain their vehicles, according to a survey released today.

Twenty-six percent of the USA's major urban and suburban roads have substandard pavement that provides an unacceptably rough ride to motorists, according to TRIP, a non-profit research group in Washington that is funded by the insurance, highway construction and automotive industries.

That the survey is the highway-lobby talking points does not automatically render it false. Blown tires and broken suspensions caused by potholes are real.

Sean Hackbarth comments, "Here in Wisconsin our road problem is we'll build a four-lane highway to just about anywhere." Believe me, expanding the road network before the traffic materializes is not a bad idea. Illinois insists on widening the existing roads, under traffic, during the summer excursion season. But even that spending, niggardly though it is, is too much for Destination: Freedom.

While the annual state support to Amtrak goes to $24 million, a jump from the present $12.1 allotment, $5.3 BILLION is being sought for road expansion as part of the governor’s Congestion-Relief Program. How much “congestion relief” can you expect when you spend 212 times as much money on highways as transit!? The interest alone on $5.3 billion would cover much of the operating cost of Amtrak in perpetuity. Where in this picture is the public being provided with adequate choices to function in today’s society without a car? And how do you “cure” congestion when you ADD to the problem? Do we “cure” obesity by eating more and then buying a larger belt??

Fast-rewind 100 years, to the emergence of the interurban. That the power companies were expanding interurbans along corridors most conducive to running power lines left a lot of hamlets, not to mention farms, devoid of the ability to function without a horse. Additional train frequencies along the existing Amtrak routes in Illinois will expand choices in Bloomington and Macomb and Carbondale and Urbana, but DeKalb and Charleston still have to make do without. Perhaps highway congestion cannot be cured (more on this before year's end.) But the Amtrak and Metra and Transit Authority service still leaves plenty of Illinois residents a long way from the nearest train station.

There's no easy way out. Some people see the expansion of the road network as undesirable.

Part of the problem is that states and communities keep building highways on the edges of metro areas instead of properly maintaining heavily used urban roads, an advocate of mass transit says.

"We don't maintain and operate what we have built already, and we are not providing alternatives to solo auto travel through transit and other investments," says Kevin McCarty, director of policy for the Surface Transportation Policy Partnership.

(Perhaps because "solo auto travel" isn't the blackboard home-to-work-in-city-and-return.)

Construction delays might be a necessary evil.

The Atlanta metropolitan area is an exception to deteriorating roads. This sprawling metropolis, where motorists are often delayed by road-construction backups, is one of three urban areas in the nation — along with Orlando and Phoenix — where at least 75% of the highways and major streets are in good condition, according to TRIP's survey.

"Our board adopted a policy in the '70s that we were not going to build anything we cannot maintain," says Harold Linnenkohl, commissioner of the Georgia Department of Transportation. "Our goal is to resurface 10% of our highway system each year. We stayed with that for a long time, but we're facing some budget crunches like everybody else. So, in recent years in some areas, we're doing 5%-6%."

But that deferred-maintenance hidden tax might also be a hidden subsidy.

Interstates generally are in better condition than local roads, and "urban interstates are much worse than rural interstates," [author Alan] Pisarski says.

You suppose all those 53 foot semi-trailers might have something to do with that?

SCOURGED UNDER PONTIUS PILATE ... AND ROSE ON THE THIRD DAY. Statements of faith are useful. Their repetition encourages believers to remember what fellow congregants have in common.

Policy analysts of varying stripes also repeat statements of faith. But here, the repetition is less instructive. Criticisms of the politicized university curriculum that recite, yet again, the "water buffalo" story and a few other atrocities of the politically correct from the early 1990s are more effective at shoring up the converted than in persuading the not-yet-converted, let alone aiding the politically correct in seeing the error of their ways.

Something similar pervades The I Hate Corporate America Reader, Book Review No. 34. Editors Clint Willis and Nate Hardcastle cull a number of stories from inter alia The Nation, PR Watch, and The Ecologist. The work is a useful reminder that there might be more to the workings of a technologically advanced economy than the corporate cheerleading that sometimes gets into Tech Central Station and the Wall Street Journal. On the other hand, yet another recitation of Union Carbide at Bhopal and Exxon Valdez on the rocks suggests to the skeptical reader that contemporary radical politics is as dependent on a few anecdotes as is contemporary criticism of the academy. That the preface and some of the articles have the tone and language of a late-1960s underground newspaper doesn't help. That said, the concluding article on a re-examination of corporate chartering has much to recommend it. If the rules provide for the creation of a limited-liability entity with the purpose of making steel, is a subsequent decision of that entity's management to run hotels instead one that ought be immune from a review of the charter?

IT MATTERS ELSEWHERE. University Diaries quotes a New York Times article on the Faustian bargain Rutgers University appears to be making in order to become the next Eastern member of the Mid-American. In the comments section is a reference to an open letter a Rutgers professor, William C. Dowling, has written to the Rutgers trustees.

Professor Dowling pulls no punches.

In my view, there are three ways Rutgers can go in this moment in its history: (1) we can sustain the state of mediocrity achieved over the last 12 years under the Lawrence administration, (2) we can sink even farther down in the ranks of public institutions of higher learning, or (3) we can aim to have Rutgers among the top 5 public institutions in the country within a period of 5-10 years.

Needless to say, it is option (3) that I will address in this letter. Given its natural advantages -- one of the strongest applicant pools in the United States, a very high-powered faculty, a history and tradition going back to the colonial period -- it has always seemed to me that it is harder for Rutgers not to be one of the leading public institutions in the country than to go on in our current state of demoralized mediocrity. As a colleague of mine once said, with all Rutgers' advantages, you have to work hard to be mediocre.

It's a lengthy letter but one does not have to read far to reach tonight's Quote of the Day.

At a good university, the brightest and most intellectually motivated students on campus are at the symbolic center of the institution. They are made to feel that they are at the very heart of the university's mission to provide a high-quality education for students from less-than-wealthy backgrounds. Their intellectual commitment in turn inspires other students with a sense of purpose and aspiration.

On the other hand, most open-admissions state universities -- schools like Nebraska and Oklahoma and Ohio State -- make no pretense of trying to attract top students. Teaching at such schools takes place mainly at a remedial level. If the occasional bright student who is stranded at such a school feels marginalized, nobody worries about it.

Yet even some of these institutions have begun to see that operating a remedial learning operation for a huge and indiscriminate mass of intellectually underprepared students means depriving many other students of their one chance at a real college education. They are taking steps to do something about it.

The professor proposes merit scholarships without apology.

Rutgers should aim for an entering class that includes about 20% students from around the nation. At the same time, we should make certain that out-of-state students meet at least the same admissions requirements as entering New Jersey students, and if possible -- on an "enrichment of the whole" principle -- substantially exceeds them.

One way to do this would be to index out-of-state tuition to entering SAT scores. So, for instance, an out-of-state student entering Douglass with the same 1200 SAT as in-state Douglass students might pay a tuition of $15,000. But students with higher SATs would be "forgiven" a certain percentage of the out-of-state increment for each increase of 20 points in her combined SAT, until at a very high level (say, 1400), an out-of-state student would pay the same tuition ($5300) as entering New Jersey students. This plan should be adopted, with appropriate statistical adjustments, across the entire college system.

He also expresses reservations about the access-assessment-remediation-retention sinkhole that accompanies open admissions on a by-the-test score basis.

Most encouragingly, he notes that the tone set by the state's flagship campus can have a salutary effect on the performance of the rest of the state system.

The effect has been to give California a state system in which the top four or five campuses are all among the leading public institutions in the country. In a recent U.S. News ranking of public universities, for instance, Berkeley was listed as #1 in the nation, UCLA as #4, the University of California at San Diego as #7, and the University of California at Davis as #10. (Rutgers, in this same ranking, was tied for 24th-27th place with such lackluster institutions as Virginia Tech and the University of Delaware.)

A differential tightening of admissions standards as described earlier in this letter would immediately give Rutgers an internal version of the "cascade" principle that worked to the advantage of every student -- for all would take a large percentage of their classes with all other students at the university -- while dramatically improving the standing of the university as a whole relative to public institutions elsewhere.

(A note to New Jersey readers: in Illinois and Wisconsin, where the flagship campuses are chasing full-fare students from out of state, there are gains from trade between faculty and ambitious students closed out of Urbana or Madison. To some extent university policy makers have begun to act on those gains from trade.)

There are a number of other suggestions in the post. Taken together, however, the message is clear. An academic administration ought to be worthy of its best students.

BOOYAH. For dinner.

ONCE I BUILT A RAILROAD, NOW IT'S DONE.

These might be the Good Old Days of freight railroading, but the network we see did not emerge fully-capable out of anybody's grand design, or to reflect any one business model. Although DeKalb offers ample opportunity to view Union Pacific in action, not too far away are the relics of a number of other railroads long since gone. This weekend's Railroad Reading visits crossings along the Chicago Great Western, a property that probably shouldn't have been built, although the desperation spawned of that discovery led its managers to be pioneers in advocating regulated pricing and in developing new kinds of service. (More about that another day.) East of Sycamore, the right-of-way is a bicycle trail as far as the Fox River, where it connects with other trails making use of the Chicago Aurora & Elgin. West of Sycamore, the right-of-way is mostly gone, but there are a few traces left. The Sycamore station building was moved to the north side of town, where it is a private residence. The handcar shed has been removed, but the handcar setouts remain. In the background is Illinois Highway 23. The Woodstock and Sycamore interchanged here. Motor cars ran north to Genoa and Marengo alongside 23 as far as Genoa.

    There was a small yard where the DeKalb branch, built at the behest of barbed wire barons who didn't like paying the Chicago and North Western's rates although this didn't stop them from using DeKalb as the basing point for reckoning delivered prices for barbed wire.

    Chicago and North Western branches from Cortland and Spring Valley joined a few blocks south. The tracks went north to Belvidere, Caledonia, and Beloit. At one time there was a local passenger train service from DeKalb to Madison. The derelict spur track connects behind the yellow-brick building with that line, which was lifted in 1942. It is difficult to determine from the remaining construction whether the crossing was grade-separated or at a level that was obliterated by subsequent industrial development.

    West of the crossing of Annie Glidden Road is the Wilkinson-Renwick nature preserve. The crossing of the Chicago Great Western with the Chicago Milwaukee & Gary, which became a Milwaukee Road property in 1922, is in a marshy area and its relative unattractiveness as a farm site meant that some native unplowed prairie is near trackside. (Prairie conservationists, however, have to weed wild plants and trees that were introduced for other purposes.) The Chicago Great Western grade is paved as far as a boardwalk over the marsh. The Milwaukee line was a working railroad until the early 1980s. The grade is now a hiking trail a few hundred yards to the north.

    West of the boardwalk, a bit more of the CGW grade is still clearly a former railroad grade. Modern plowing methods (those tractor pulls aren't just for show) have obliterated much of the railroad where the right of way was an easement through a farm.

    The next crossing is at Holcomb, where the former Burlington-Milwaukee Flagg Center - Davis Junction - Rockford line is still in operation. The tracks are behind the tall grass. A few traces of a switch along the CGW are still visible in this road. The grade east and west of Holcomb is indistinguishable during growing season. Perhaps come late November some clues to its location will appear.

    The Chicago and North Western abandoned the Byron to Galena Junction section of the former Chicago Great Western in 1971. The section east of Byron struggled on for a few years. An interchange track with the Milwaukee became an industry track now worked by the Milwaukee's successors. The right-of-way west is still clear.

    This crossing is easy to find as it's just behind the Byron High School (is their fight song "On With Byron!" set to guess what?) parking lot.

   

The Illinois Central Railroad's original Main Line of Mid-America was a Cairo-Centralia-Bloomington-Freeport-Galena line intended to tap the lead mines of the North West Frontier. The Centralia to Chicago, now the main line, is in the original plan, but as a branch. The Centralia to Freeport is mostly abandoned now. Here, the grade reaches the south shoulder of Baileyville Road near what the Illinois Central called Dunbar and the Chicago Great Western called South Freeport.

    Face north, there's a bank of approach lights for the Albertus Airport on the right-of-way. The gap in the treeline shows the path of the railroad. A 15-minute section map from the 1930s shows an overpass and interchange facilities with a wye at South Freeport. A more recent 7 1/2-minute section map shows the runway over that site.

   

Just north of the S-curve in Baileyville Road is this view of the farm fields back toward the trees that mark the location of the Illinois Central's fill. Does "CGW" stand for Corn, Goldenrod, and Wheatfield? 

   About a mile south of the Silver Creek and Stephenson, the Racine and Southwestern crossed Illinois Highway 26. The side road leads to the Freeport Humane Society.

   

This CGW mile marker (the west face reads "C 109") escaped the tender mercies of the scrapper, the farmer, and the highway department. That's the Cold Spring Shops inspection car parked approximately on the Southwestern, which was resurfaced along with Highway 26.

   

The crossing itself is in the middle of a swamp. These pilings supported the Chicago Great Western. There are a few more west of the Milwaukee.

   

This photo is at the crossing site. The trees have not yet had a chance to start growing on the Milwaukee, but in a few years it will be difficult to tell from the underbrush exactly where the right of way was.

   

The underbrush, should you wish to verify this location for yourself, runs to plants with picky spines and seeds.