WHERE THE EXCESS CAPACITY IS. Norfolk State University attempts to temper tough love with retention, with the expected results.

Because so many students come from disadvantaged backgrounds and never received a good high school education, they are already behind, he said, and attendance is essential. Norfolk State would appear to endorse this point of view, and official university policy states that a student who doesn’t attend at least 80 percent of class sessions may be failed.

But biologist Steven Aird failed to make tenure, and the article suggests his willingness to fail students was the reason.

The problem, Aird said, is that very few Norfolk State students meet even that standard. In the classes for which he was criticized by the dean for his grading — classes in which he awarded D’s or F’s to about 90 percent of students — Aird has attendance records indicating that the average student attended class only 66 percent of the time. Based on such a figure, he said, “the expected mean grade would have been an F,” and yet he was denied tenure for giving such grades.

Other professors at Norfolk State, generally requesting anonymity, confirmed that following the 80 percent attendance rule would result frequently in failing a substantial share — in many cases a majority — of their students.

Professors said attendance rates are considerably lower than at many institutions — although most institutions serve students with better preparation.

One reason that this does not happen (outside Aird’s classes) is that many professors at Norfolk State say that there is a clear expectation from administrators — in particular from Dean Sandra J. DeLoatch, the dean whose recommendation turned the tide against Aird’s tenure bid — that 70 percent of students should pass.

The article has provoked a wide-ranging discussion in the comments section, including a differing perspective on the Atlantic print article noted here.

The column has been Instalanched. George Leef at Phi Beta Cons summarizes.

American colleges and universities want to keep the classrooms full of paying customers, and many of them reach far down into the barrel of high-school graduates to do that. Lots of those students are very ill-prepared and unmotivated. They're used to a K-12 environment that isn't demanding and excuses weak performance as a matter of course.

When in college, if they run into someone like Professor Aird, most of them continue with their old habits and find themselves earning D and F grades. How do they react? Most of them do what the political Left encourages: instead of adjusting to the world, expect the world to adjust to you. Complain that the professor is too hard, unfair, unreasonable, out of touch, etc. Anything except improving your performance to meet the standards for a good grade.

Professor Aird offered a similar perspective to his students in January.

"You can only develop skills and self-confidence when your professors maintain appropriately rigorous standards in the classroom and insist that you attain appropriate competencies. You cannot genuinely succeed if your professors pander to you. You will simply fail at the next stage in life, where the cost of failure is much greater.”

What is Norfolk State's job and graduate school placement record? This article notes that Norfolk State's enrollment has been falling, this despite the echo baby-boom and the universal college bubble. Careful readers will note that it is also despite heavy doses of access-assessment-remediation-retention.

TOE THE PARTY LINE, OR ELSE. At the University of Toledo, one form of identity politics cannot be held superior to another. A columnist in the Toledo Free Press, writing, she thought, as a private citizen, observed,

As a Black woman who happens to be an alumnus of the University of Toledo's Graduate School, an employee and business owner, I take great umbrage at the notion that those choosing the homosexual lifestyle are "civil rights victims." Here's why. I cannot wake up tomorrow and not be a Black woman. I am genetically and biologically a Black woman and very pleased to be so as my Creator intended. Daily, thousands of homosexuals make a life decision to leave the gay lifestyle ...

Leave the psychology aside and focus on the identity politics. She continues,

The normative statistics for a homosexual in the USA include a Bachelor's degree: For gay men, the median household income is $83,000/yr. (Gay singles $62,000; gay couples living together $130,000), almost 80% above the median U.S. household income of $46,326, per census data. For lesbians, the median household income is $80,000/yr. (Lesbian singles $52,000; Lesbian couples living together $96,000); 36% of lesbians reported household incomes in excess of $100,000/yr. Compare that to the median income of the non-college educated Black male of $30,539. The data speaks for itself.

Leave the social science aside: this is a culture war theme I've seen elsewhere.

Focus, rather, on the reaction of the University of Toledo.

The University of Toledo has suspended with pay one of its administrators for writing a newspaper op-ed that questions whether homosexuality is a civil rights issue. The school said the administrator was suspended precisely because her views on homosexuality do not comport with those of the university, a state institution.

Crystal Dixon, associate vice president of human resources at the Ohio-based university, sparked controversy Apr. 18 when she wrote in the Toledo Free Press that she did not agree with comments by the newspaper's editor that portrayed homosexuals as civil rights victims.

This is the same University of Toledo that takes strategic planning beyond parody.

John Lott asks,

If she had written a piece say the opposite, what would have happened to her? Even if she had listed her affiliation at the university, nothing would have happened.

I'm not sure what he means by "opposite?" Privileging the claims of homosexuals over those of people of color? Or suggesting that the oppressions are equivalent?

Robert VerBruggen at Phi Beta Cons notes this:

I'd add that this is not a school publication but a local paper — one could argue that advancing such views on campus could conflict with her human-resources job.

On a side note, why is a public university "on record" supporting controversial legislation?

Perhaps more to the point, someone in headquarters could ask whether an associate vice-president's public reservations about a university policy might make her less effective at implementing that policy.

As far as "supporting controversial legislation," what's new? Student Affairs and Human Resources and more than a few curriculum committees treat the provisions of civil rights laws as indecently minimal requirements, and seek to have their more aggressive practices codified as law. Thus do professors have to retrain as special education teachers.

THEY SAVED LIVES. Northern Illinois University invited first-responders and community members who pitched in with everything from cookies to ribbons to a reception this afternoon. At the end of the formalities, university and community announced the debut of Huskies on Parade, where $1000 leases you two fiberglass Huskies to decorate in time for the resumption of classes in the fall.

Tuesday's examinations appear to have gone off as scheduled.

ON SATURDAY CAN EXAM WEEK BE PRAISED. I'm returning to grading jail for much of this week. Monday's exams took place with only the usual anxieties. I won't consider the semester done until I see that graduation procession on Saturday.

DON'T KNOW MUCH TRIGONOMETRY. Don't know much about algebra, despite a state mandate.

In a pattern that has area math professors scratching their heads, some community colleges are seeing an increase in the numbers and proportions of entering students who can't do algebra, or even basic arithmetic.

These skills require practice, they're different from riding a bicycle.

One of the biggest reasons for the large wave of college students behind in algebra is timing. If a student takes algebra as an eighth- or ninth-grader, it often means arriving at a community college or state college with several years separating their last encounter with x and y.

"You have to keep practicing your skills or they diminish," said Michael Kane, interim dean of sciences and mathematics at Sierra College. "The pipeline from secondary education to college can have such big gaps."

Even students who have worked through several years of higher math in high school can find themselves back at the algebra drawing board. Too often, high school standards do not run as high as college standards, professors said. [California's] high school exit exam, required to graduate from public school, tests basic math and pre-algebra skills, but doesn't go deeply into algebra, they said.

In addition, if students earn C's or lower in high school math courses, or if teachers grade too softly, it can lead to wider gaps.

"If you get a C in a math class and you try to go on and build, you're going to have holes," said Cosumnes [River College] math professor Lora Stewart.

As Joanne Jacobs notes, universal testing can have perverse effects.

Teachers feel pressured to lower standards so unprepared students — the kids who didn’t learn arithmetic in elementary school — will move on. The math section of the state graduation exam can be passed with a 55 percent; random guessing would yield a 25 percent.

The comments to her post suggest demoralization in the trenches. Wonderful world indeed.

WHERE NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND BEGAN. Via Charlie Sykes, a Dallas television station's discovery of the state of college readiness.

This month 7,500 Dallas ISD seniors are expected to walk across the stage and make their families proud.

But what if we told you that 75 percent of the seniors headed to Dallas community colleges can't read above an 8th grade level, and others can't add or subtract?

Graduation is a time for feeling proud, but that might quickly change to frustration for thousands of DISD students like Gia Hollis come fall, when reality hits.

News 8 requested and received documents from the Dallas County Community College District that show, over the last three years, an average of 75 percent of the DISD students enrolled in classes took at least one developmental education course.

“My reading levels are so low, and I’m really not comprehending, and it’s really holding me back," Hollis said. "It’s taking me longer."

Hollis is in a developmental reading course at El Centro College. Developmental courses prepare students to take college classes. In the Fall of 2007, out of the 1,110 DISD students enrolled in Dallas community colleges, 810 had to take one of these courses.

“This percentage is much too high," said Dr. Joan Rodriguez, who teaches developmental reading at El Centro. In her upper level course, where we met Hollis, most students read at an 8th to 10th grade level, struggling to comprehend what’s in some newspaper articles.

“I get so frustrated," Hollis said. "Don't know why I wasn't taught those skills before coming here and having to be at this point in my life and start all over. It’s been very challenging."

”It's very frustrating ... for the students who come in here who say: ‘Wait a minute, you're asking me to do all this? I don't know how to do this. I don't have enough time to do this. I'm not used to doing this. I don't want to do it,'" Dr. Rodriguez said.

Dr. Rodriguez believes high school tests reward students for minimal knowledge, which won’t work in college where professors expect you to know how to read and comprehend complex sentences. She says college professors don’t grade you on whether you try, but what’s right.

The article notes the continued tension between teaching to the test and having the right kind of test, as well as the deleterious effects of calculators on math skills.

QUOTE OF THE DAY. University Diaries Extension, on the fruits of access-assessment-remediation-retention.

“No one is thinking about the larger implications, let alone the morality, of admitting so many students to [university] classes they cannot possibly pass,” writes an anonymous adjunct English professor in the June 2008 Atlantic magazine (far as I know, it’s not available online). He teaches in two “colleges of last resort,” where local, often older, students, go to rack up credits so they can move along a career track.

But they can’t pass the anonymous professor’s required course, because it’s not about memorizing practical vocational information. It’s about thinking and writing coherently, and having a point of view of your own. Many of his students don’t know how to analyze anything, let alone take a polemical position relative to it. They can’t use prose coherently, and they don’t know what it means to set out a grounded, rational argument. Worse, the professor’s other course asks them to write a formal paper about a work of literature. They’ve read almost nothing.

The essay concludes,

Note what the author isolates as the key intellectual trait of authentic college students: They have already learned something by the time they get to college, and the most important thing they’ve learned is a sort of rough intellectual history, an early but functional sense of the categories by which we organize and understand various human expressive acts — this is literature and these are its traits; this is the legal tradition and these its salient features. The serious college curriculum builds upon this foundation by adding not merely more information to it, but more complexity to its categories. The best-educated college graduates move easily among categories to make important intellectual connections — they put science and theology into play in order to think at a high level about empirical and non-empirical truth claims. They read The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and Mimesis in order to ask not merely what a particular theory or novel means, but what the fact of our having evolved particular standards of scientific legitimacy, and a particular ethos for fiction, means.

This is what university education is about — the disciplined assimilation of information into historically established categories which allow us to regulate and embellish thought about the world. This professor’s English comp and Intro Lit courses are primitive stages in this education: they ask students to convey only the most basic sense of categorical awareness, the shakiest intimation that there are contexts that connect what would otherwise be arbitrary bits of information, random creative eruptions. A few of this professor’s students will be able to do this, but most will not, and it is a cruel and expensive hoax to fail them repeatedly on their efforts.

I'm not sure which hoax the article has in mind: college lite, or social promotion in elementary school, or some mix of both.

LATE TRAINS GET LATER. Rockford Register-Star editor Chuck Sweeney takes stock of regional and inter-city developments along the Dairy Route.

Now we discover that the trains are still three to five years away. We are making progress, nonetheless, thanks to federal planning grants secured by Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., and Rep. Don Manzullo, R-Egan. Last week, consultants released their route and ridership study that picked the Union Pacific line from Rockford through Belvidere, Huntley and Marengo to Elgin as the preferred route for commuter trains.

A lot of people are confused about where Amtrak fits into this picture. It doesn’t. Durbin proposed the reinstatement of Amtrak service from Chicago to Dubuque, Iowa, along the Canadian National line through Elmhurst, Genoa, Rockford, Freeport and Galena.

That’s the former route of Amtrak’s “Black Hawk,” a train promised by the late Bob McGaw when he ran for mayor of Rockford in 1973. McGaw delivered the train in just 10 months. McGaw, a Democrat, was a mayor who had clout in Springfield and knew how to use it.

The “Black Hawk” operated from February 1974 through McGaw’s two terms, but it ended in late summer 1981. The train was nifty in concept, but it was operated by a freight railroad (Illinois Central) that saw it as a nuisance and wasn’t particularly interested in running it on time. I know because I often took that train to Chicago.

Commuter trains and Amtrak trains do different things. The former make many station stops, the latter do not. While we need both, Amtrak service is the quickest to begin, because Amtrak owns the trains and the tracks on the CN line are in good shape. An Amtrak study of 2007 said the CN line would need $31.6 million worth of upgrades from Chicago to Iowa.

That would take state funding. Commuter service on the UP line hasn’t seen passenger trains since about 1950 and the tracks west of Belvidere will need a major, multimillion dollar overhaul. The commuter service also will require voters to approve a tax, most likely a quarter-cent sales tax. Capital cost, according to the TranSystems study released last week, is $247 million.

The guardians of the public purse, however, would rather waive the federal gas tax for the summer, ensuring that the roads will suffer even more from deferred maintenance and corporate welfare for truckers, while Congress will look less fiscally responsible than it does when it masks deficits in other accounts with surpluses in the highway trust fund.

As far as the train service is concerned, CNR, the operator in due course of Illinois Central, are not particularly passenger train friendly, and Union Pacific are likely to demand that the line between Gilberts and Rockford be doubled in order to accommodate the commuter train.

YOU CAN ONLY WORK THE PROBLEM. The Daily Chronicle interviews Northern Illinois president John Peters.

A BILL OF ATTAINDER? Perhaps it should not surprise that onetime Puritan colony Massachusetts writes a variation on the sumptuary law.

A record 76 colleges and universities have endowments valued at more than $1 billion, according to the latest tally by the National Association of College and University Business Officers.

Such wealth has led Sen. Charles Grassley, the senior Republican on the U.S. Senate Finance Committee, to propose mandating that the largest college endowments make the same 5% minimum annual payouts as private foundations are required to do. In many years, many colleges have spent much less, provoking criticism that they are hoarding their wealth instead of spending it on educating students. In this hostile environment, some of the wealthiest colleges, including Harvard, have recently sweetened financial-aid packages.

State Rep. Paul Kujawski, a Democrat from Webster, Mass., who is a main proponent of the tax on big endowments, calls the size of the biggest endowments "exorbitant," raising questions of whether they are truly nonprofits.

Kevin Casey, a spokesman for Harvard, said the proposal would hurt Massachusetts and colleges because it would damage "stable bedrock institutions" that have helped shield the region from the worst of the economic slowdown.

Perhaps, perhaps not. It is no accident that the three states home to the most famous private universities are the "cuckoo state" (New Jersey, whose higher education policy is to take advantage of low state-university tuitions elsewhere), accompanied by the homes of ZooConn, best known for basketball, and ZooMass, best known for campus brawls.

On one hand, perhaps an admissions and financial aid policy at Harvard or Princeton or Yale that did away with legacy admissions in order to appropriate five percent of the endowments might compel well-off people in the Northeast to take more of an interest in their local land-grants (if they don't turn their kids into Coasties) than as a conversation-starter in the office pool.

On the other hand, perhaps Harvard could relocate.

I have often wondered what the efficient scale of a university is and, in particular, whether it would be better to create a second Harvard with the university's wealth than to expand the first one. Maybe the Massachusetts state legislature will give the powers-that-be at Harvard an incentive to consider more radical expansion plans.

The generalization (a merger, or a hostile takeover of Davidson?) is left to the reader as an exercise.

QUOTE OF THE DAY. William Polley, on the election-year gas-tax-holiday vote buying. "Good public policy should be well outside of the neighborhood of 'pointless'." Indeed. There's an open letter from economists of all political stripes that succinctly notes what's wrong with the proposal.

A TIME TO REBUILD. Cole Hall will remain in service, partially as lecture hall. Here is the statement from Northern Illinois president John Peters.

For nearly two months, we have sought your opinions and ideas through a variety of mechanisms: a confidential email box, open forums, small-group meetings, an online survey and many one-on-one conversations with students, faculty, staff, alumni, donors and families of those most affected by the events of February 14.

Two major themes emerged from this study, and those themes were consistent across all groups: First, you said you did not want to see Cole Hall demolished.

Many of you invoked the memories of those whom we lost, and asked that any renovation include a link to whatever permanent memorial is established nearby.

Second, a substantial number of you said you did not want to teach, work or attend classes in the auditorium where the shooting took place, and that efforts to make the building look different – both inside and out – would be much appreciated.

With those two themes firmly established, we probed further with an online survey that presented three possible options. More than 5,000 of you responded to that survey, with the majority favoring option #2, in which Cole Hall room 101 would be converted into non-classroom space. Option #2 also calls for Cole Hall room 100 to be updated in function and appearance, and for other interior areas to likewise be given a different look and feel. Finally, the preferred option includes plans to change the building façade to update and substantially change the exterior appearance of the building.

Taking one 500-seat auditorium out of service requires us to replace that classroom space elsewhere on campus. More than 12,000 students had classes in Cole Hall this academic year, so the need to replace lost instructional space is very real.

Option #2 includes plans to construct a new 400-seat auditorium in the center campus area, either connected to an existing building or as a freestanding structure. Preliminary cost estimates for both the remodeling and renovation of Cole Hall and the construction of a new 7,800-square-foot auditorium/lecture hall to replace Cole Hall room 101 total about $7.7 million – substantially less than what we were anticipating with the complete demolition of Cole Hall and construction of a new classroom facility.

Our representatives support this option.

State Rep. Robert Pritchard, R-Hinckley, said he expects to introduce
legislation in the next week that would provide state funding for the proposal.

“It's obviously a very reasonable approach that has taken a lot of input from the university and the community,” Pritchard said during a phone interview Wednesday night. “It meets a lot of the concerns people have about tearing down a building every time there is some violence, yet is respectful toward students, faculty and families.”

Peters praised Blagojevich and other state officials for the support in the days following the shooting, but noted in his e-mail that lawmakers are grappling with how to pay for numerous priorities during tough fiscal times.

“That our request represents a strong consensus opinion from our campus community will be an important factor in legislative deliberations,” he wrote.

The NIU group was met “very graciously” by members of the governor's staff and legislative leaders, Pritchard said, but he noted that “no one is making firm commitments” right now.

“They were sympathetic, and we, as well as they, acknowledged that the budget process in Springfield is difficult and that they understand the emergency essence of our request,” Ken Zehnder, associate director of external affairs at NIU, said during a phone interview Wednesday night. “They are considering it.”

The university expects it to take at least two years to get the plans finalized and work completed, he added.

The Northern Star offered a semester-end interview with President Peters.

In spite of all this - we had a flood, we had a graffiti incident, we had the tragic day of February 14 – we’re having 2,500 undergraduates [and 1,000 graduate students] receiving their degree next week. That’s what we’re about and that’s a celebration. That’s the celebration of a lot of hard work, those people will have a quality collegiate degree and they're going to go out and do great things.

The balance of the interview is worth your attention.

ROLLING ROADBLOCKS. Although the Law of Demand induces substitutions and conservations, drivers understand trade-offs.

Drivers have known for years that throttling back is a sure way to improve gas mileage, and the Papins are among those who are consciously slowing down to save. Several airlines have adopted the same tactic, adding a few minutes to flights to save millions on fuel.

But most drivers still appear to be winking at posted speed limits because they say their time is worth more than the gas they'd save by slowing down.

Kelley Goodman, an upstate New York therapist, says gas prices haven't yet gone high enough to justify slowing down.

The article goes on to note responses by truckers, some of whom have no incentive to slow down, and some compelled by their employer to do so. One such employer, Schneider National, is resetting the governors on its trucks. The story bundles that development with some special pleading by the truckers' welfare-rights organization.

The trucking industry's largest lobbying group today called for a nationwide 65 mph speed limit, longer trailers and other steps in an effort to cut greenhouse-gas emissions and save billions of gallons of fuel.

Meanwhile, Green Bay-based Schneider National Inc., one of the country's biggest trucking firms, went still further: The company will voluntarily cut the top cruising speed on its 10,600 tractors to 60 mph, President and Chief Executive Officer Chris Lofgren said during a press conference announcing the industry initiative.

Schneider's slowdown - the firm currently caps cruising speeds at 63 mph - will be equivalent to taking more than 7,200 cars off the highways, Lofgren said, and will save 3.75 million gallons of fuel a year.

"We encourage others in the industry to make this commitment with us," Lofgren said.

What intrigues about this proposal is that it's couched in the language of "sustainability", but somewhat differently from the language of, for instance, the University of Delaware's residential reeducation program (of which more next week).

Limiting cars and trucks to 65 mph could conserve more than 11 billion gallons of diesel and gasoline over 10 years, the American Trucking Associations said in announcing its sustainability proposals.

A longer article offers additional details.

The trucking association said its initiative is primarily an environmental effort, but acknowledged that soaring diesel prices - they currently average $4.15 a gallon - would help boost acceptance among the industry.

Likely to draw the most public attention are the call for a national speed limit of 65 mph for all vehicles and the proposal to allow longer or heavier trucks.

Since Congress repealed the national maximum speed limit in 1995, 32 states have set limits at 70 mph or more on some highways, according to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. Thirteen western states allow speeds up to 75 mph.

Trucking has been deregulated for nearly thirty years, yet there are still people who think like public utility managers. Because an agreement to restrict output by slowing down trucks has the prisoners' dilemma property of any restraint of trade, one sells the restriction of output as "in the public interest."

In the short term, what Schneider proposes will simply add to the snarl on the interstates. It's annoying enough when an elephant galumphing along at 70 shoulders into the passing lane to go around a triple maintaining 69. Now imagine the same process, but galumphing along at 63. Never mind: the welfare-rights organization has the chutzpah to ask for longer trucks as well, when anything over 28 feet is a menace in a thickly settled area? Perhaps in the quest of insurers for their own corporate welfare comes countervailing power.

But permitting wider use of double and triple trailers and allowing trucks to carry heavier loads is almost certain to spark opposition.

"A truck that's heavier is less safe, and I think there's already a huge mismatch between a heavy truck and a passenger vehicle, even the biggest passenger vehicle," said Anne McCartt, senior vice president for research at the insurance institute.

Perhaps it's time, however, to ask the truckers to raise funds for their own rights-of-way.

To reduce fuel-eating congestion, the federal government should first clear traffic bottlenecks in such metropolitan areas as Chicago, Atlanta, Los Angeles and Phoenix, followed by road building to address capacity problems, the association said.

"In certain areas of the country we need to build new, truck-only corridors," said Tommy Hodges, head of the trucking group's sustainability task force and chairman of Titan Transfer Inc. of Shelbyville, Tenn.

Mr Hodges, may I introduce the controllers of BNSF Railroad and Union Pacific, who seem to be meeting a need for new freight-only corridors without raiding the public purse.

THE WRONG KIND OF EXCESS CAPACITY. The drug bust at San Diego State prompts alum Matt Welch to quip, "Funny, I thought that cheap access to frat-boy drugs were the whole point of SDSU.... " Now Trending opens its coverage with "With its reputation as being the biggest party school in Southern California, nearly 100 students were arrested Tuesday in a sting operation at San Diego State University." I Need to Calm Down motivates a comment on press coverage of the vice squad with "This is apparently big news because, as everyone knows, college students don’t do drugs. (I can’t even keep a straight face typing that. Is the pervasiveness of drug culture on college campuses really news? Really?)" Taken together, the posts say more about what universal college would look like than all the mission statements and strategic plans can.

THE FRUITS OF ACCESS. Or as University Diaries puts it, San Diego State University is a School-Free Drug-Zone. Despite the university's fears about San Diego becoming the next Los Angeles (harborside downtown looks prosperous, Mission Beach manifests all the low-status symbols of the Pacific Rim) and its trendy and feel-good mission statement, the men of Theta Chi discovered a risky, but potentially profitable, way to work through college.

A five-month investigation prompted by a cocaine overdose death last year led to the arrests of 96 people, 75 of them San Diego State students. A second drug death occurred while the investigation went on.

Twenty-nine people were arrested early Tuesday in raids at nine locations including the Theta Chi fraternity, where agents found cocaine, Ecstasy and three guns. Eighteen of them were wanted on warrants for selling to undercover agents.

Two kilograms of cocaine were seized in all, along with 350 Ecstasy pills, marijuana, psychedelic mushrooms, hash oil, methamphetamine, illicit prescription drugs, several guns and at least $60,000 in cash, authorities said.

Profits may have been used to finance fraternity operations, they said. Those arrested included a student who was about to receive a criminal justice degree and another who was to receive a master's degree in homeland security.

"A sad commentary is that when one of these individuals was arrested, they inquired as (to) whether or not his arrest and incarceration would have an effect on him becoming a federal law enforcement officer," said Ralph Partridge, special agent in charge of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration in San Diego.

During the probe, investigators discovered that in some fraternities most members were aware of "organized drug dealing occurring from the fraternity houses by its members," the DEA said in a news release.

The reaction of the fraternity's national office requires no further comment.

Theta Chi, based in Indianapolis, has 131 chapters in the U.S. and Canada and more than 161,000 initiates. It was founded in 1856.

The San Diego chapter was founded 61 years ago and has 65 members.

"They were on the upswing," [national executive director Dale] Taylor said. "They had improved their recruitment. They were trying to raise money for a new house."

ATTEMPTING TO LEGISLATE COUTH. Professor Munger discovers that Florida is attempting (unsuccessfully, a commenter notes) a legislative ban of the pickup truck scrotum. On one hand, I've never understood the message that, er, decoration is supposed to send. On the other hand, it's useful that some people come with warning labels.

POINTLESS TAX RELIEF. Greg Mankiw has Senator Clinton taking on the American Economic Association. She sounds silly.

Pressed to name a supportive economist Sunday, she replied, "I'm not going to put my lot in with economists because I know if we did it right, if we actually did it right, if we had a president who used all the tools of the presidency, we would design it in such a way that it would be implemented effectively."

That works in Star Wars, where either mental discipline or the power of the Dark Side makes for effortless effective implementation. That was a long time ago in a galaxy far away. On earth, complex adaptive systems do pretty much what they please.

FOR WE LIKE SHEEP HAVE KNOCKED A TRAIN ASTRAY. Seriously.

It started on Sunday evening (27th April) when a southbound InterCity Experss [c.q.] (ICE) running at 200 km/h (125 mph) headed for Munich collided with a flock of sheep gathered just inside the northern end of the 11 km (6.9 mile) long Landrücken Tunnel just south of the city of Fulda along the Hannover – Würzburg high speed rail line. The collision resulted in the death of at least 20 of the animals and caused the 14-car long ICE-1 train set to derail and run-up against the right-side tunnel wall over a distance of several hundred meters.

The train set remained mostly upright during the derailment due to containment by the tunnel wall, which several rail experts say prevented injuries from being far worse than they were. Of the 135 passengers on board, about 19 were injured, four of them seriously.

With illustrations.

I understand that steam-era railroaders dreaded running into a pig, because it would act like a derail. On the other hand, a Pennsylvania Railroad GG-1 once hit a bulldozer straight on and knocked it into the next section.

WHY IT MATTERS. A Northern Star columnist weighs in on the bomb threats and background street crime, which he suggests is inducing some students in good standing to transfer.

Fortunately, NIU has not reached the level of violence of Chicago Public Schools right now, which have seen a horrific increase in gun-related fatalities.

However, with as much tuition as we pay, one would think that this institution would be free of the same neglected atmosphere that plagues some of the poorest and most crime-polluted areas of our state. I’m not saying that DeKalb is particularly affluent, but if you have the intellect to get into college and don’t like to waste money, it’s ironic that you would be the same type of person to call in a bomb threat or try to rob any of Shelley’s delivery drivers (and those are pretty cool guys).

So that begs the question: “What kind of place am I in?” And that is dependent upon the kind of people who populate the area.

“The people who should be leaving are the ones making the threats,” junior English major Vinny Slowiak said. “Those people want classes and exams canceled. If you don’t want to take a test, why are you in college?”

Exactly. Administrators, rethink "access" and retention will take care of itself.

ON MY WORKBENCH.

In order to lower the axle loadings, simplify counterbalancing, and limit the rotating mass on any axle, the senior class at the Moscow Mechanical Engineering Institute came up with a split eccentric.

Left to right in foreground: primary eccentric; between auxiliary rocker and link is eccentric extension; the radius rod will be a lamination of the two pieces in front of the extension, and the combination lever is at right. I am looking forward to a satisfying evening of hammering to create a valve stem.

CORPORATE WELFARE RECIPIENTS FOLLOWING TOO CLOSELY. A promising Southern Illinois University journalist dies.

Ryan Rendleman, a senior from Batavia studying journalism, was stopped for road construction when a tractor-trailer rear-ended his Honda Accord, according to a release from the Illinois State Police. The initial collision caused a four-vehicle pile-up: Rendleman's car and three semitrailers.

The accident was reported at 1:27 p.m., and Rendleman was pronounced dead at the scene, according to the release.

Stopped for road construction. Some corporate welfare recipient is drafting for some other corporate welfare recipients, and none of those probable log-falsifiers is paying attention to road conditions. Why are we buying rights of way for such people?

The article did not report whether the driver was of a piece with those whose poor driving offered previous material on this theme.

The reporter who was run over by these roadhogs appeared to have a promising future.

In his stint as a reporter, he painted the picture of wet plunges into dunk tanks, relayed the tale of a gruff cab driver turned lunch lady and shared the story of a janitor who jumped to save the life of a suffocating 17-month-old.

Rendleman shared a weekly "Professor Profiles" series every Wednesday during the spring 2007 semester, taking pride in his ability to translate the seemingly unscholarly yet inspirational elements of the lives of faculty and staff at the university.

In his voyage to the more visual side of the newsroom, he pushed himself to find the perfect visual moment, whether it was on his own assignments or while helping others with theirs as photo editor during the fall 2007 semester.

We extend our condolences to Mr Rendleman's family, friends, and colleagues at the Daily Egyptian.

THANK YOU FOR LOOKING IN. Here is the April to April traffic report. That spike in February represents the traffic from one bad week. My objective last spring was to obtain another year-on-year increase in traffic, if perhaps not as dramatic as the one that began once Google Images started sending people this way for the pictures. That increase appears not to have happened, but I have a decent base from which to build additional traffic once the new school year starts.


Posting will be somewhat lighter during the summer months, for reasons that I suspect parallel the reasons some of my readers have for making fewer visits.

One question for readers: how many prefer the new Site Meter bar chart with the older line chart?

STRATEGIC PLANNING FOLLIES. The Toledo Institute of Technology, formerly known as the University of Toledo, intends a re-engineering (run for the exits) of its curriculum and focus, in which the corrective to access-assessment-remediation-retention is mass-customized (the oxymoron meter is in the 30 minute overload range) access-assessment-remediation-retention, but with more computers, larger classes in a gym re-styled as the educational incubator, (approaching the 15 minute overload range) and more deaducationists reporting directly to a deputy provost of teaching and learning.

I regret to inform you that this is not a misplaced April Fool post. University Diaries offers editorial comment, and the bull session identifies a faculty forum at TIT, er, UofT that includes links to other comments on TIT's brain-cramp, er, new paradigm (THE NEEDLE IS IN THE FIVE MINUTE OVERLOAD RANGE) that are able to give it more attention than I have the energy to at the moment.

THEY'LL NEVER LACK FOR MATERIAL. Rate Your Students, that is.

IN HEAVEN THERE IS NO BEER. To build social capital, we drink it here.

TRAINBLOGGING. Here?

EARLIER POSTS THAN USUAL TODAY? Yup, I'm warming up for a bout of grading.

KEEPING THE POOR POOR. Over the weekend, Senator Obama's minister gave some speeches, including a Detroit keynote address, that have drawn angry responses from commentators left and right.

Here's a Jonah Goldberg summary.

On Sunday in Detroit, he explained to 10,000 people at the Fight for Freedom Fund dinner of the NAACP -- an organization adept at taking offense at far less racist comments from nonblacks -- that whites have an inherent "left-brain cognitive, object-oriented learning style. Logical and analytical," while blacks "learn not from an object but from a subject. They are right-brain, subject-oriented in their learning style. That means creative and intuitive. The two worlds have different ways of learning."

Blacks even have better rhythm, Wright explained.

I watched some of the speech, and that's not exactly what the preacher said. (He did cross the line attempting to bundle scales and rhythms with ethnicities. I learned at a young age that it was bad music theory to equate "black keys" with "Chinese" music, yet another source of pentatonic scales, and while it is true that Prussian common time is LINKS zwei DREI vier, there are pieces in common time with emphasis on the second and fourth beat. Would the reverend accept ONE two three four as Native American common time? And as long as I'm griping, Lyndon Johnson's speech patterns were an object of mockery, although probably not in the preacher's social circle.)

What he did say was pernicious, but only for its effect on the future miseducation of children. The less incendiary bits of the speech, which the commentariat have let pass, made reference to the suspect research on differences in learning, including but not limited to learning styles or identity-politics corollaries to "womens' ways of knowing." By endorsing that research, the reverend pushes back the day when parents whose children are most mis-served by deaducationist fads will say Enough.

END THE CORPORATE WELFARE. Our tax dollars go to provide inefficiently many rights-of-way for trucking companies that do not bear the costs of using them. Thus motorists have to bear the costs inflicted on them by excess-weight vehicles more productive of potholes than of ton-miles. Pedestrians and corner lot owners are at risk because city governments refuse (or are prohibited by state and national governments) to ban articulated vehicles from city streets. And I haven't even begun to fulminate about the effects of one of those slow-accelerating ton-mile-nonproducers on traffic flows when it has to deal with the mistimed traffic lights on the arterial streets.

But I have more serious things to fulminate about. On Friday, I had business in Chicago, and as I was making my way through the Loop, the loudspeakers at the L stations were advising riders of a closure on the North-South from Grand to 35th. A runaway truck left two people dead on an escalator at the Cermak-Chinatown station. The mechanical condition of the truck and the aspects on the traffic lights are not yet public knowledge. But who among us has not seen a semi on an arterial street, that upon receiving a yellow light with a block or two of stopping distance, hasn't accelerated (that is, if such things can be said to accelerate) and laid on the horn. This behavior is apparently encouraged by the industry, and far too frequently winked at by law enforcement. So we have the stories of two lives cut short, whether by inattention or mechanical failure or by business as usual. The driver is a real piece of work.

Initial toxicology tests showed no signs of illegal drugs in the system of the driver, Don Wells, but officials are awaiting expanded results for additional substances.

"We are investigating everything," said Chicago Police Sgt. Maurice McCaster of the major accidents unit.

After police took his clothes as evidence, Wells declined the paper garments he was offered and stayed in the police lockup naked, McCaster said.

Wells, 64, was in custody for two days. During that time, he urinated on the floor of his cell instead of using the urinal, sources said.

Wells' behavior is one of many mysteries surrounding the Friday rush-hour crash, which killed Eloisa Guerrero, 47, and Delisia Brown, 18. Wells, of Metamora, Mich., was ticketed for negligent driving and released from police custody Sunday night.

The truck left no skid marks, sources said. That fact has led investigators to wonder if the brakes malfunctioned -- or if Wells simply did not apply them. Investigators are examining the truck for mechanical problems.

The corporate welfare recipient trucking company epitomizes precision transportation, if precision is in counting the misrepresentations.

According to U.S. Department of Transportation records, over the past 30 months Whiteline had 41 accidents with 15 injuries and one fatality before Friday.

Whiteline's safety officer said she had found 923 falsified drivers' logs from 2004 to 2006, according to lawsuit records reported by WMAQ-Ch. 5. Some 691 driver logs were missing, the officer said.

Why are we buying rights of way for corner-cutting enterprises such as these?

Closer to home, a different trucker failed to yield with the predictable result.

The driver of the semi in an accident that killed NIU glassblower Daniel Edwards was cited for failing to yield while turning left.

At 7:42 a.m. Wednesday, Edwards, 60, of Rochelle was traveling eastbound on Highway 38 near the interchange with I-39 when a westbound semi-trailer turned in front of his motorcycle, causing a collided.

Edwards was taken to Rochelle Community Hospital, where he was pronounced dead. Daniel’s wife, Diane Edwards, 58, of Rochelle, was a passenger on the motorcycle and was also taken to Rochelle Community Hospital and then transferred by helicopter to Rockford Memorial Hospital.

The driver of the semi, Gerald Hemker, 51, of Germantown, was not injured in the crash.

Hemker was issued a citation for failing to yield while turning left, according to a Rochelle Police Department press release.

Edwards was best known at NIU for hosting a glassblowing demonstration each fall. He planned on retiring at the end of the semester. Edwards was the 1999 recipient of the Helmut E. Drechsel Achievement Award, given out by the American Glassblowers Society.

“We are very saddened and shocked by the news of Dan’s death this morning,” said Shannon Gates, coordinator for recruitment and public relations of the Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry, on Wednesday. “He was a great asset to our department, as a talented glassblower and good friend.”

One man dead, one couple's retirement ruined, one more episode of sadness on campus, because law enforcement winks at disregard of traffic signals by truckers, and because road commissioners refuse to separate freight from passenger traffic.

TWO SYSTEMS OF BELIEF. A recent Inside Higher Ed commentary (unwittingly) notes the fundamental dynamic of higher education.

On one hand, there is a cherished and sentimental view of universities as academic places where caring teachers mold young minds through unhurried and probing conversations about poems and politics, the human condition and the forces of nature. In this utopia, a university’s classes are small, tutored by sage and patient scholars; juvenile errors and excesses are gently but firmly corrected; and, of course, football games are always won. And in this romanticized view, lush and leafy campuses are sanctuaries for eccentric intellectuals to think deep thoughts, develop whimsical theories, and indulge in the time-consuming trials and errors of research.

On the other hand, when talk turns to matters of state funding or, even worse, tuition, sweet sentimentalities are replaced by a fulminating call for universities to become ruthlessly efficient – no time or treasure squandered on small classes or idle contemplation or tending to pretty flowers on campus. Things must be run as “lean” as business would have us believe it has become. Fat must be excised, indolence must be punished mercilessly, unnecessary processes must be re-engineered and unnecessary people banished. Over-extended and under-funded state budgets have only served to increase the clamor for universities to become more frugal than friendly. And tax-phobic critics of state government spending, in particular, have elevated the no holds barred efficiency-as-a-mandate rhetoric.

The authors get to the heart of the matter several meandering paragraphs later. (Nothing quite focuses the mind like "If you send us a shorter manuscript that also addresses these comments.")

The evidence is not at all clear that “efficiency,” as commonly understood in business jargon, is in any way rewarded by the higher education “marketplace.” Imagine, for example, the least efficient institution of higher education in your state. Chances are that the teaching loads of its high-paid faculty are largely discretionary and barely measurable, with faculty efforts focused instead on the publication of esoteric thoughts in widely-unread journals; its library contains hundreds of thousands of volumes that haven’t been opened in decades; it has well manicured lawns and, probably, a facility that seats tens of thousands of people but is only used five or six Saturdays each year (hint–think football stadium).

One wishes that some of these business wannabees and their unthinking accomplices in the legislature would develop a better understanding of efficiency. Efficiency refers to the identification and fulfillment of all feasible gains from trade. That "least efficient" institution quite likely is catering to the excess demand for perceived quality, an excess demand augmented by the toxic blend of "customer satisfaction" with "access for all" that the authors would have readers believe is efficient.

Imagine then, the most “efficient” higher education institution in your state. It likely has under-paid faculty with teaching loads that approach sweat-shop labor conditions; it may well be housed in a store-front; its library might be little more than a set of encyclopedias; and it is marketing hard for a student body that will keep it marginally solvent.

The late Fred F. Loock would wisecrack that the businessman who sold his product for a lower price knew what it was worth. That's not the way to endow museums and libraries.

The real test of efficiency, though, requires demand as well as supply.

Now ... which one has accomplished students waiting with baited breath for word of a favorable admissions decision? Which one receives tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars in largesse from loyal alumni or proud donors each year? Which one commands the almost slavish allegiance of those very state legislators who cheer loudly from prime seats at athletic pageants but publicly threaten to discipline their spendthrift habits? Is “efficiency” — in a business definition — really recognized or rewarded in the higher education marketplace?

The "efficiency" of cheaper for its own sake ought not to be. The efficiency of recognizing and realizing gains from trade ought to be.

A commenter to the column asks readers not to generalize.

The author’s example of the least and most efficient institutions misses the point of the need for controlled spending. The purportedly “inefficient” institution that has all the frills can probably afford them. Otherwise it would be in a position where it had to control costs (like the purportedly “efficient” institution). Any college can go into massive debt to provide amenities, but they do so at the risk of going out of business if the gambit doesn’t pay off in increased revenue. Frankly, mediocre schools with mediocre revenue streams have to live within their means. The American public needs to do the same.

The column does argue from the extremes, and in its willingness to take a dig at the state flagship institutions, misses the main point. Where the efficiency is one of offering the sentimentalized college experience, for which there appears to be excess demand, rather than making universal college inexpensive, for which the unproductive output is in excess supply, a strategy of drawing invidious comparisons with the private colleges and the state flagships, rather than ending access-assessment-remediation-retention strikes me as less productive.

CONSENSUS MAY BE EASIER TO REACH. In a letter circulated to students, staff, and faculty, Northern Illinois president John Peters summarizes points of agreement about the future of Cole Hall.

First, I want to report that majority opinion on key issues differed very little from group to group. In ratios ranging from 3-to-1 to 4-to-1, our campus community asked that Cole Hall remain standing, but that it not be used for instructional purposes in its current configuration. Many of you invoked the memories of those whom we lost, and expressed a desire to honor them by giving new life to the building where they died.

Second, while some favored demolition and others urged us to keep the building, the majority of those espousing either position said they would not be comfortable taking or teaching classes in Cole Hall in its current incarnation. The strength of that feeling did not seem to diminish over the course of our six-week survey process.

Three proposals are on offer.

The first option suggests renovating both Cole Hall auditoriums, continued use as a lecture hall, but with significant changes and functionality.

The second option involves renovating Auditorium A (Room 100) as a lecture hall, while remodeling Auditorium B (101) to support no classroom activities.

The third option is to renovate both auditoriums to support no classroom activities.

Options two and three require the development of a large lecture hall somewhere else on campus. All options focus on use of the first floor with little to no change to the basement area.

The "Auditorium A" reference is to Jameson Auditorium, where a computer science class had finished early. "Auditorium B" refers to Collins Auditorium, all references to which appear to have been expunged from the university archives.

The basement area at one time held materials from the anthropology museum's collection as well as the anime association's screening room.

HENDRIK HOUTHAKKER. Via Greg Mankiw, the Washington Post obituary, noting Professor Houthakker's service to Official Washington.

BEST WISHES. King Banaian of SCSU Scholars is in hospital, recovering from not-so-routine surgery.

A BLUSTERY DAY FOR SPRING PRACTICE. Note the terrace seating on the balcony of the new locker room. I wonder if those are the only extra-fare end-zone seats in the Mid-American.


There was an open practice on Saturday, marking the end of spring football practice. I don't observe the event frequently enough to judge whether the pre-scrimmage tailgating drew more people than usual or if there were more visitors from the other Great Lakes states than in previous years. Judicious use of the telephoto lens and the crop feature makes the impression of a full stadium. I was able to secure a seat at the 50 yard line just as the practice began. There were a lot of little kids in the stands, which is a good sign. The mid-majors offer a comfortable game environment for parents, and our winter troubles haven't scared them off.

NOW YOU ARE CATCHING ON. A letter to the editor gripes about DeKalb traffic. Although the letter-writer focuses on the congestion that ensues when Union Pathetic Pacific use the tracks west of town for Unlimited Parking, the comments include several suggestions that the city traffic engineers improve the sequencing of the traffic lights. I fully agree. Those sensors that will throw a yellow in the face of a car maintaining a safe following distance behind the car in front of it have to go as well.

IT MUST BE TERM PAPER SEASON. I wonder if somebody got gigged.

WHAT IS UNSEEN. The University of Chicago's Allen Sanderson reminds readers that prestige has opportunity costs.

As reported in the press and media events, an overwhelming majority of Chicagoans—84 percent—was supportive of the city's bid to host the 2016 Olympic events. (Given the political season and climate, another way to "spin" the numbers for those opposed is that only 54 percent were strongly supportive; 30 percent were simply "somewhat supportive.")

I suspect that at least 84 percent of those polled were also in favor of world peace, fewer potholes, and the Cubs winning the 2008 World Series. But a more relevant way to elicit information is to face respondents with some prices or notion of the sacrifice required to achieve a stated objective.

For example, what if the pollsters had asked: "How much would you be willing to pay annually in the form of taxes on what you own, earn or spend to bring the 2016 Olympic Games to Chicago?" The survey could have given some prices to choose from: $0; $50; $100, $500 or $1,000. Or, alternatively, the pollsters could have asked: "If it costs the city $1 million to have the 2016 Olympic Games here, are you strongly in favor, somewhat in favor, somewhat opposed, or strongly opposed?" Then we could, either sequentially or by segmenting respondents, up the ante: "What if it costs the city $100 million? $1 billion?"

The boosters will tell you such talk takes away the fun, but there is always fun in spending other peoples' money.

Time and time again, commissioned polls or impact studies purport to show one thing when reality is quite another. I have yet to see an economic impact study for building a sports facility or convention center, or hosting a major sporting event, that did not promise cornucopias of cash to the city bold enough to "invest" in the scheme. And yet, virtually all convention centers in this country lose money, and revenues spent inside new sports palaces enrich only the owners and leagues.

If the pattern holds, and it likely will, cities that host Olympic events tend to lose money. These short-term, overly hyped events, as opposed to longer term, well-thought-out urban investments, have low or negative rates of return.

That may be fine if our eyes as well as our wallets are wide open, knowing full well that this will cost us monetarily but that we still want to do it.

After all, we spend money on dogs and boats with no expectation that they will pay for themselves financially. But, then, let's at least be upfront and honest about it: "Yeah, it's going to cost us—and you, the taxpayer—an unknown ton of money and some serious inconveniences, but we think it's worth it and here's why."

He also notes the conjuring trick in advising taxpayers that it's private money at risk.

Whether to support the Games themselves or merely the city's official bid, the latter carrying a price tag of $50 million to $100 million, one hears that "only private money" is underwriting those activities; no tax dollars will be spent. "Private" implicitly refers to donations from corporations and wealthy citizens. However, in jargon that students learn on the first day of Economics 101, virtually all expenditures or allocations have an opportunity cost, whether it be for a firm or family.

If Boeing, Sears, Motorola or McDonald's gives $1 million to help finance our Olympic bid, that is $1 million that does not get returned to stockholders as dividends or plowed back into the company for new projects and production. In addition, that is $1 million that does not, then, support an exhibition at the Field Museum, a new gallery at the Art Institute, or an after-school youth program.

When I sit down each December to write out checks to local, national and international charities and other non-profit organizations, I am implicitly choosing how to allocate, say, $2,000 among various groups and activities. The slice that goes to WTTW Ch. 11 doesn't go to the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless or the American Cancer Society—or to the University of Chicago. It's still just $1 million or $2,000 no matter how a corporation, a wealthy benefactor or I cut it.

There is no free lunch in this world and no free Olympic Games either.

Mr Sanderson correctly notes the introductory economics jargon. It's an idea that requires a modicum of repetition, in part because economics is not required of all collegians and in part because in all too many classes, "opportunity cost" gets lost in a thicket of formulas and graphs that can throw even the more dedicated student off the trail.

WE ENCOURAGE CREATIVITY. Here's a look at what's on Kerry's workbench. More precisely, it was her workbench.

HERE WE GO AGAIN. Threat prompts NIU to tighten security.

Northern Illinois University is boosting security this week after threatening graffiti was found.

School officials said the graffiti was found Monday, but university police concluded the threats don't warrant suspending classes. In an e-mail to students, the school urged students and faculty to "remain calm but vigilant and to report any information they might have about this threat to the campus police."

In a statement, the school said it would not release details because "excessive media coverage of campus threats clearly contributes to their proliferation."

Just as we're getting our composure back, and the weather is getting better.

THE ROAD FOREMAN OF ENGINES SAYS EARTH DAY IS EVERY DAY.


Pigouvian taxes or not, smoke inspectors on the Prison Point bridge or not, a clean-burning locomotive is a boon to the bottom line.

Some time ago, I came across some snarking at a General Motors executive who was touting a hybrid car and trashing global warming. There is no reason to snark. The Road Foreman of Engines gets it.

The sign is in the Cold Spring Shops collection. It is a replica of (variously) a Pennsylvania or Chicago and Western Indiana or Terre Haute Line roundhouse sign, depending on the observer.

THE MODEL OUTPERFORMS REALITY.

One of these days, I'll figure out how to dub some music on these things. I can report that some of the knocks have been taken out of the mechanism, the gearbox is running smoothly, and I'm fettling out some of the small valve gear components.

I have also found pictures and plans of some intriguing twelve-wheel bathtub gondolas. In a dusty corner of the library I also located a document by comrade N. N. Nyetnyev, describing some research at the Lomonosov Institute on rotary couplers. We thus have evidence, dear reader, that the Soviet Union went the Virginian Railway one better on coal transport and invented the unit coal train, during the Third Five Year Plan. All glory to Comrade Stalin!

I am also pleased to report that my videos, with or without dubbed sound, are not art, and therefore do not have to be taken down when they become too controversial.

GETTING THE MATRICULANTS RIGHT. Here's a jaded view of the Ivies, going for the exotic.

This goes to show something those of us who hoist the almost unbearable privilege of having gone to graduate school there already know, which is that there are some extremely strange young women at Yale. Worthies there might consider the wisdom of a simple question on the admissions application, "Are you extremely odd?" I am not suggesting that the extremely odd be excluded from Yale, only that a quota might be a good idea. This goes for faculty hiring as well.

And here's a jaded view of Wesleyan, where headquarters would like to tone down the exotic.

[Wesleyan sophomore Ben]Seretan, who currently works at the front desk in the Admissions Office, added that this is only one component of the Roth administration’s new marketing strategy.

“I’ve noticed with the new administration a re-branding paradigm shift that’s happening,” Seretan said. “It’s all about academic excellence and ‘excellence’ in general as opposed to uniqueness and idiosyncrasy. I don’t even know what excellence means.”…

I don't make this stuff up.

So far, the boutique colleges are in a position to tinker at the margins of odd, because their oddities have not yet proven dangerous to themselves or to others. The expression "creative destruction" has meaning beyond the economics of competitive capitalism, and it implies tradeoffs in university admissions policies that are only now being explored. The boutique colleges might help those of us who do the heavy lifting by backing off from treating extreme difference (or as Professor Smith puts it, "odd") as a virtue.

WE WILL PREVAIL. Today was a tease for the summer to come. The Northern Illinois steel band offered its spring concert. Before the concert, the CAFE Steel Band from Baltimore, regular guests at our event, offered an outdoor performance in the art campus courtyard. I regret not having brought my camera. There is a source of concert videos, and I did see a few digital cameras in action, but nothing uploaded to the most obvious source yet.

I enjoy the efforts of the pan faculty, and the Baltimore program, to demonstrate the versatility of the instrument. In addition to traditional and new calypsos, the university band offered the concluding movement of Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony (take that, Josef Stalin!) while the Baltimore band adapted one of the swing-era numbers (it includes a quote from Yankee Doodle and some animated bass drum, help me with the title.) Although the G.I. generation that kicked back to such tunes is passing from the scene, the kids are determined to keep the music alive.

I also obtained enough information to work out that calypso composer Lord Kitchener adopted that stage name which honors a British commander whose work in South Africa met with the approval of Tribagonians.

There will be a fall concert on November 16 (that's a new offering for the steel band) and the 2009 spring concert is set for Sunday, April 26.

THE BENEFIT OF THE DOUBT.

Chicago Tribune reporters Jodi S. Cohen and Stacy St. Clair have obtained Steven Kazmierczak's graduate school application essays.

Well before his murderous rampage at Northern Illinois University, Steven Kazmierczak described himself as a victim who had overcome hard times.

In graduate school applications, reviewed exclusively by the Chicago Tribune, Kazmierczak wrote that his own mental-health struggles would one day enable him to help others—a vision that tragically imploded Feb. 14 in one of the deadliest campus shootings in U.S. history.

"For as long as I can remember, I have always been an extremely sensitive individual, and feel as though I am able to empathize with other people's emotional and social needs," he wrote. "However, some of my peers were not very understanding or accepting, and I feel as though I was victimized to a certain degree during my adolescent years."

There's nothing unusual about feeling victimized. I suspect that the Peanuts strip in which Charlie Brown admits to feeling out of place on earth appeals to a lot of adolescents. It certainly did to me.

HERE ONCE THE EMBATTLED FARMERS STOOD,
AND FIRED THE SHOT HEARD ROUND THE WORLD.
(Relocated from the April 2007 archive.)

Please visit Forward Movement's chronology of the events of April 18 and 19, 1775, with excerpts from primary sources, and the Right Wing Nut House exegesis of "Paul Revere's Ride."

"Concord Hymn" by Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Photo courtesy S. Ells in Thoreau Country.

Let [petty] tyrants shake their iron rods,
And Slav'ry clank her galling chains.
We fear them not, we trust in God.
New England's God forever reigns.

William Billings, Chester. (The version I learned included the "petty.")

THERE WILL BE GOOSEBUMPS. Ivy League Conservatives have video of the U.S. Army Chorus singing part of Battle Hymn of the Republic for the visit of Pope Benedict XVI to the Executive Mansion.

There are several arrangements of the hymn in use. This arrangement omits the "fiery gospel writ in burnished rows of steel" and concludes with "let us die to make men free," the original wording.

THOSE CULTURAL-STUDIES HOTHOUSES. I am a bit too tired to extend my references to the Diet of Worms and the Holy Inquisition to attempt a witticism about feminists dancing on the head of ... .

Let me instead commend this Adam Kissel post at The Torch that concludes with this rebuke to one of Colorado College's Grand Inquisitors. It is the Quote of the Week.

The terribly low respect for free expression by [Colorado College director of institutional research and planning Amanda] Udis-Kessler is yet another reason for Colorado College to feel very, very ashamed. Dialogue sometimes feels a bit disrespectful; it's a hazard of vigorous debate. Adults in college are strong enough to take it, but maybe that's not true at Colorado College.

What was I saying about the logic processes of the assessors of the obvious, or about the disservice a hothouse environment does the classes it is supposed to protect?

WHY I CALL IT ASSESSING THE OBVIOUS. Minding the Campus points to a statement from the Intercollegiate Studies Institute about the assessment fad.

Ongoing assessment diverts teachers from teaching. Instead of preparing their courses, meeting with students, or grading papers—in short, executing their teaching duties—they must spend a substantial amount of time worrying about how to assess what they teach. Moreover, academic deans, instead of overseeing assessment activities, might be better engaged in useful activities such as developing young faculty or securing grants. No one, to my knowledge, has done a serious cost-benefit analysis of whether the innumerable hours faculty and administrators expend on assessment could be better used on activities that directly benefit students. No one knows what opportunities have been lost to the demands of devising and implementing assessment instruments.

If the professors are not doing the assessing, the essayist suggests, the hired help is.

Universities, where much of the actual teaching is done by inexperienced graduate students, do not expect their research-oriented faculty to perform assessment. Indeed, many prestigious university professors have no idea what assessment is. At the most highly rated universities, assessment is carried out by staff hired expressly for that task. For example, the University of Virginia has a Department of Institutional Assessment and Studies that reports directly to the State Council of Higher Education. It is unlikely that the state would not accredit its own state-sponsored, tax-supported university.

The real scandal of outcomes assessment, the one nobody talks about, is that the methods used to assess usually produce very little worthwhile data. Departments and programs create assessment tools though a process that (1) sets goals for student learning, (2) gathers evidence of whether students have learned what is expected, (3) interprets the information gathered, and (4) adapts teaching methods in light of the evidence. Every social scientist knows that the only valid way to measure human phenomena is with double-blind experiments in which neither those who actually administer the tests nor those who take them know what’s being tested.

Of course, this is impossible when assessing college programs. Students know exactly why they are being assessed. Even worse, faculty and administrators whose programs are being assessed not only are the people administering the assessment instruments, but they are often the people charged with devising them. Such a system is easily abused since no one wants to look bad. Measurements tools are constructed that simply validate what teachers and administrators are already doing.

Put briefly, the essay identifies two problems. First, if there are assessment professionals, they are likely graduates of the colleges of deaducation, otherwise known as the home office of academic mediocrity. Second, if the assessment is supposed to produce constructive self-criticism, there has to be a Holy Office somewhere to identify the sinners (or is it running dogs of capitalism? I get my zealots confused) and specify the appropriate penance. I disagree with the claim that double-blind experiments are the only valid measurement tool.

Apparently I am not alone in characterizing the activity as assessing the obvious.

The dirty secret is that teachers pay almost no attention to assessment outcomes. They learn little from the exercise—considering it only another (usually uncompensated) onerous administrative duty—and they often dismiss the findings because of the way accrediting agencies structure the activity. Since assessors cannot be experts in every academic field, they require that every department and program aggregate information. The people doing the assessing are not capable of judging the merits of syllabi, tests, and papers from outside their field of study. Thus, they make all departments homogenize the “outcomes” into a form comprehensible to a generic reader. The problem is that students learn chemistry differently than they do a Dostoyevsky novel, and assessment measurements that attempt to aggregate information across disciplines may miss this important difference.

As if the graduates of the college of deaducation could distinguish Dostoevsky from Lobachevski in the first place, but I digress.

The post concludes with a reminder of the duty of the successful professor.

Teachers assess all the time. They read student papers and exams to discover if students have learned. They ask questions in class and engage students in discussion. They look over student evaluations to see if the way they are associating with students is being well received. They are always trying to find better ways to help students grasp the material. Why do they need to spend time in another elaborate and meaningless type of assessment? They don’t—and it’s time to say so.

Amen.

GET YOUR TICKET AT THE STATION ON THE ROCK ISLAND LINE. There was a joke, in those early years of Amtrak before the opt-out railroads had to opt in, about the lady who had to get to Moline in the worst way. The punchline: Sorry, ma'am, the Rocket just left.

Now comes a proposal to restore the Des Moines Rocket.

The trip from Iowa City to Chicago would take about five hours with a train traveling up to 79 mph. A one-way adult ticket could range from $25 to $68, based on fares for comparable routes.

[Amtrak spokesman and onetime WNIU newscaster Marc] Magliari said the service would be popular with college students, especially the many Illinois natives who attend the University of Iowa. The university's hospital facilities are also a draw to the area, he said.

Others would likely take the train to visit casinos in the Quad-Cities area, officials said.

The aforementioned Des Moines Rocket reached Iowa City in 4 hours 25 minutes on the timetable in effect in June of 1954, and the Rocky Mountain Rocket was there 3 hours 54 minutes after leaving Chicago. The Rock Island line was clapped out at the time the railroad liquidated, although it is now in shape for light axle-loading, multi-wheeled steam locomotives (of five coupled axles rather than seven) as well as a cousin of the Rock Island's war baby Northerns. The planners anticipate more work.

At the request of the Illinois Department of Transportation, Amtrak in January completed a study on establishing passenger-train service between Chicago and the Quad-Cities. Parts of that plan were incorporated into the study of the Iowa City to Chicago route.

Iowa officials also have asked for a study on extending the route to Des Moines. That should be ready in late 2009, Magliari said.

Illinois is also looking at a new Amtrak line running between Rockford, Ill., and Dubuque.

What the article doesn't tell readers is that there is a railroad currently capable of supporting 100 mph passenger train operation, serving the riverboats at Clinton as well as the universities at DeKalb, Illinois; and Boone, Iowa; with a short bus connection from Cedar Rapids to Iowa City. That railroad, however, is property of the passenger-unfriendly Union Pacific.