LOSING THE GOOD OF THE INTELLECT. The late Richard Mitchell used that line, from Inferno, to great effect in an Underground Grammarian essay, "The Curriculum from Hell".

"For we have reached the place of which I spoke,where you will see the miserable people, those who have lost the good of intellect."

Here sighs and lamentations and loud cries were echoing across the starless air,so that, as soon as I set out, I wept.

Strange utterances, horrible pronouncements, accents of anger, words of suffering, and voices shrill and faint, and beating hands,

all went to make a tumult that will whirlforever through that turbid, timeless air, like sand that eddies when a whirlwind swirls.

Professor Mitchell's essay is an early reaction to the introduction of the inclusive curriculum. He suggests that, like other fads, it will pass.

There is quite enough contention, and ambition, in the University to provide a testing and weighing of them all. Some will flare for a space and sputter out, and some will get the Mene, mene right away. Some will fall, only to rise again in another age.

But when the [State] University of [New York at] Albany gives some of its humanities departments the mene, mene, all of a sudden the Received Tradition becomes important. For instance, David Foster at Chicago Boyz finds my link to Gregory Petsko's criticism of Albany's decision, and an instructive bull session ensues.

That's not the only place to find reaction to the humor in the humanities establishment's response. Carol Iannone notes on Phi Beta Cons,

I was surprised that the lament over the shrinkage of support for the humanities and for literature was carried on without reference to the deleterious academic fads that for decades have been undermining them — Marxism, feminism, deconstruction, postcolonialism, postmodernism, all of which denied the possibility of truth and objective knowledge, denigrated the classics as foils for the deployment of power by the privileged white male elite, worked to dismantle the great tradition as racist, sexist, classist, and exclusionary, and promoted inferior works that supposedly represented the formerly excluded victims. The [Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers], formerly the [Association of Literary Scholars and Critics], was founded precisely because the Modern Language Association failed to defend the literary heritage but instead enthusiastically championed these trends. You go out of your way to announce that great literature is not really great and perhaps no greater than your average television show, and not surprisingly interest will decline.

That's longer, and more nuanced than, "Deny incoherent beliefs of any kind: enjoy incoherence" but the sentiments are the same.

At Minding the Campus, John M. Ellis elaborates.

Freshman core courses that gave an overview of the achievements of Western culture were soon abolished almost everywhere, mandatory courses in this nation's history and institutions went too, and literature departments even stopped requiring that Shakespeare be an essential part of the English literature major. Even when formerly mandatory courses are still offered as options, they are often presented through the lens of a jaundiced view of our cultural past that tends to discourage further study.

Predictably, enrollments in departments that substituted adolescent politics for the humanities dropped sharply. My own institution tried something that turned out rather like a controlled experiment to test student response. The radical faculty set up a major in World Literature--one heavily invested in the third world and in victimology--as an alternative to the literature department's conventional majors in English, French, German, etc. They waited expectantly for what they thought would be a rush out of the old and into the new. Alas, enrollments in the new courses were so low (mainly single digits while Shakespeare and Dickens were still drawing hundreds) that the Dean was soon forced to intervene to end this embarrassing fiasco.

There was a time when "save the humanities" would have been an appropriate cry, but that was years ago, when they were being dismantled in one department after another and replaced with the intellectual triviality and sheer boredom of endlessly repetitive Marxist identity politics, as cowardly administrators looked on and did nothing. The poverty of intellectual content was masked by an elaborate jargon, but that only made things worse: the remade programs became the laughing stock of their campuses. But now the day of reckoning has arrived. Enrollments have collapsed, to the point where the smaller departments face extinction. Those enrollments are sinking not because students don't value the humanities, but because they do.

It is important to grasp the fact that the cry we are now hearing ("save the humanities") is not about saving the humanities. It is rather about saving the faculty, who long since destroyed them, from the devastating consequences of their own foolish actions. It asks for a bailout, so that those same people can continue enjoying the fiefdoms they created to replace what once were departments of the humanities. And to respond favorably to that appeal would be folly.

Yet the crisis does need a response--but not the one that is asked for. Now that this day of reckoning has arrived, the appropriate cry should be: "restore the humanities." That rather different slogan would suggest that we should take hold of these failed departments where enrollment has collapsed following abolition of the humanities, and bring them back to health.

All the same, the beat goes on, according to Peter Wood.

Another way is exemplified by the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee’s Center for 21st Century Studies. To be sure, C21, as it styles itself, is not in the prediction business. It was founded in the heady days of 1968 as the Center for 20th Century Studies, and aimed at fostering “cross-disciplinary research in the humanities.” It evolved; or perhaps that term is too teleological. It moved along; it encountered trendy new ideas; it coagulated around them. Its Web site explains:

“The Center has long been a leader in the study of modern and contemporary culture, including film, performance, the visual arts, and everyday life, as well as in critical reflection in such areas as feminism, media theory, multiculturalism, postcolonialism, cultural and social theory, and lesbian and gay studies. We do not, however, limit our inquiries to the contemporary world, recognizing that the exploration of the historical, political, and social dimensions of contemporary problems, including race, class, gender, sexuality, and conflict, can only enhance our understanding of them.”

He concludes with the Trenchant Observation of the Day.

"We don’t really need a whole lot more evidence that our current system of higher education has a wobbly future."

Stop being reductive, perhaps you'll learn something.

LARGE IRISH COFFEE, THREE SHOTS OF BUSHMILLS. Phi Beta Cons have posted several observations of the possible ban of alcoholic energy drinks such as Four Loko, an Illinois export perhaps more toxic than Governor Blagojevich, Our President, or "Go Cubs Go". Herewith a product review.

However, to mourn the end of the drink when the ban was announced, I stopped by a neighborhood convenience store and bought one of every flavor they had (just three, and no, I didn’t drink them all at once). That night, with a heavy heart, I drank a can of the lemon flavor and played Call of Duty Classic. That flavor is disgusting, and the smell makes it even worse — it sort of wafts around the room when you open the can, a pungent mix of lemon, energy drink, and alcohol.

Reason's Jacob Sullum is also underwhelmed.

At a poker game last night, I cracked open a couple of Four Loko cans and distributed samples. We all agreed it was one of the vilest drinks we had ever consumed. It was not as syrupy as I expected and in fact had a bitter edge that is characteristic of energy drinks containing caffeine and taurine. The one in the purple can tasted like a grape soda with crushed aspirin mixed into it. Even a test subject who has a fondness for Mike's Hard Lemonade could not abide it (or the cranberry-lemonade variety, which had the same unpleasant aftertaste). In terms of psychoactive effects, it was indistinguishable from wine; I did not notice any extra kick from the caffeine. (One can has about as much caffeine as a cup of coffee.) I suspect that the reformulated version of Four Loko, which will not have caffeine, guarana, or taurine, will taste better and will therefore be, if anything, more appealing both to underage drinkers and to the "young adults" that the FDA is so worried about.

Thus, ideas of a product ban will not go away.

Fear not, though. Angus at Kids Prefer Cheese proffers DIY Four Loko.

Or you could simply ask your bartender to make up the order given in the title.

A FEW MORE MINUTES OF FAME. Kishwaukee Hospital gets a percentage of the proceeds a gold recycler earns from a table at a benefit event. That gets the Daily Chronicle curious about the economics of rising gold prices.

The price of gold is driven by the fact that it is an exhaustible resource and by currency fears in the global recession, said Stephen Karlson, an associate professor of economics at Northern Illinois University.

“Because a lot of central banks are effectively printing more money, there are people who are scared their paper money might lose value,” Karlson said. “Gold is an inflation hedge, and a lot of it is driven by fear.”

For people selling their gold, there is little downside to taking advantage of the high prices, Karlson said. But he cautioned there is a chance buyers might be investing in what economists call a speculative bubble.

“All of the money that used to be sloshing around in hedge funds or dot-com stocks or McMansions may be a lot of the money now bidding up the price of gold,” Karlson said. “No economist, no business guru, no fortuneteller knows the day or the hour at which a bubble will pop. But when it ends, a lot of people might end up holding the bag.”

Cold Spring Shops does not endorse investments. Do your own research before investing in gold, or in McMansions.

FASTER THAN A GALLOPING HORSE. Charles Krauthammer pens a column in which "Don't Touch My Junk" takes the place of an eighteenth-century revolutionary motto.

Shannon Love of Chicago Boyz is inspired to stitch the motto onto the Gadsden flag.

Gadsden Flag, Don't Touch My Junk Version
Copyright © 2010 by Shannon Love and hereby placed in the public domain.

There are other efforts on offer. I had a few free moments after class this morning and turned up another version, in a form suitable for my Facebook profile picture. There is also a line of Cafe Press products featuring the flag and the contemporary motto.

Cold Spring Shops wishes to remind readers of another motto, with the Thanksgiving travel rush and National Opt-Out Day approaching.

Avoid the strain, take the train.

IF A TRIP TO MARS, YOU'D EARN, REMEMBER, FRIEND, THERE'S NO RETURN. Burma Shave once posted a string of signs reading FREE, FREE, A TRIP TO MARS, FOR 900, EMPTY JARS. Burma Shave had a taker. Red Owl supermarket manager Arliss French, in Appleton, Wisconsin, took the company up on its offer, and the company's president wired back with the caution that is the title line.

It's a case of the advertising art anticipating life.

In 1952, Wernher von Braun worked out a Mars mission of 963 days that provided sufficient lift capacity to land men on the planet and return them safely to earth. The flotilla he envisioned for the flight to Mars was only slightly smaller than the thousand-plane raids the Army Air Force was staging a few years previously.

Space colonization, however, does not require a round trip.

Establishing a human colony on Mars could go a lot faster if space travelers adopted the same mindset as early American settlers and expected never to return home, two scientists believe.

That's a suggestion. Remember, friend, there's no return is being considered by NASA, but it's not yet policy.

WHY IT MATTERS. College Misery links to An open letter to George M Philip, President of the State University of New York At Albany by Brandeis biologist Gregory A. Petsko. Go. Read. Understand. I'll provide a few highlights.

Just 30 days ago, on October 1st, you announced that the departments of French, Italian, Classics, Russian and Theater Arts were being eliminated. You gave several reasons for your decision, including that 'there are comparatively fewer students enrolled in these degree programs.' Of course, your decision was also, perhaps chiefly, a cost-cutting measure - in fact, you stated that this decision might not have been necessary had the state legislature passed a bill that would have allowed your university to set its own tuition rates. Finally, you asserted that the humanities were a drain on the institution financially, as opposed to the sciences, which bring in money in the form of grants and contracts.

Let's examine these and your other reasons in detail, because I think if one does, it becomes clear that the facts on which they are based have some important aspects that are not covered in your statement. First, the matter of enrollment. I'm sure that relatively few students take classes in these subjects nowadays, just as you say. There wouldn't have been many in my day, either, if universities hadn't required students to take a distribution of courses in many different parts of the academy: humanities, social sciences, the fine arts, the physical and natural sciences, and to attain minimal proficiency in at least one foreign language. You see, the reason that humanities classes have low enrollment is not because students these days are clamoring for more relevant courses; it's because administrators like you, and spineless faculty, have stopped setting distribution requirements and started allowing students to choose their own academic programs - something I feel is a complete abrogation of the duty of university faculty as teachers and mentors. You could fix the enrollment problem tomorrow by instituting a mandatory core curriculum that included a wide range of courses.

Once upon a time, universities equipped their students with the ability to rebuild their civilization from scratch, should circumstances require it. That's what the first two years were about, with the additional opportunity for students to discover their comparative advantages. General education as something to get out of the way? Corrosive.

He's right to point to faculty complicity. There's more to come here on the death of the humanities, as time permits. And sometimes theater arts and music can be a recruiting point. (Is it fair that Northern Illinois can claim Joan Allen and Dan Castellanato and an orchestra that many more famous universities would covet and a steel band?)

Young people haven't, for the most part, yet attained the wisdom to have that kind of freedom without making poor decisions. In fact, without wisdom, it's hard for most people. That idea is thrashed out better than anywhere else, I think, in Dostoyevsky's parable of the Grand Inquisitor, which is told in Chapter Five of his great novel, The Brothers Karamazov.

I've got to continue my education and buy this book, based on the plot summary.

That single chapter in a much longer book is one of the great works of modern literature. You would find a lot in it to think about. I'm sure your Russian faculty would love to talk with you about it - if only you had a Russian department, which now, of course, you don't.

Professor Petsko has only begun to talk smack. Just go read it.

It seems to me that the way you went about it couldn't have been more likely to alienate just about everybody on campus. In your position, I would have done everything possible to avoid that. I wouldn't want to end up in the 9th Bolgia (ditch of stone) of the 8th Circle of the Inferno, where the great 14th century Italian poet Dante Alighieri put the sowers of discord. There, as they struggle in that pit for all eternity, a demon continually hacks their limbs apart, just as in life they divided others.

The Inferno is the first book of Dante's Divine Comedy, one of the great works of the human imagination. There's so much to learn from it about human weakness and folly. The faculty in your Italian department would be delighted to introduce you to its many wonders - if only you had an Italian department, which now, of course, you don't.

Macaroni Vermicelli is going to be ringing the changes on Dante again in these pages. But go read the letter.

As for the argument that the humanities don't pay their own way, well, I guess that's true, but it seems to me that there's a fallacy in assuming that a university should be run like a business. I'm not saying it shouldn't be managed prudently, but the notion that every part of it needs to be self-supporting is simply at variance with what a university is all about. You seem to value entrepreneurial programs and practical subjects that might generate intellectual property more than you do 'old-fashioned' courses of study. But universities aren't just about discovering and capitalizing on new knowledge; they are also about preserving knowledge from being lost over time, and that requires a financial investment.

Rebuild from scratch, forsooth. And push the economists or the engineers or the business faculty or some of the nano-scientists too far, or hamstring them with too much process, and they'll set up their own companies.

The best way for people to be prepared for the inevitable shock of change is to be as broadly educated as possible, because today's backwater is often tomorrow's hot field. And interdisciplinary research, which is all the rage these days, is only possible if people aren't too narrowly trained. If none of that convinces you, then I'm willing to let you turn your institution into a place that focuses on the practical, but only if you stop calling it a university and yourself the President of one. You see, the word 'university' derives from the Latin 'universitas', meaning 'the whole'. You can't be a university without having a thriving humanities program. You will need to call SUNY Albany a trade school, or perhaps a vocational college, but not a university. Not anymore.

Please don't call it a trade school unless there are people on the faculty who I could trust with my vertical milling machine.

Just go read it.

ATTEMPTING TO UNDERSTAND THE PERPLEXING. Milwaukee television station WISN goes to the land of train riders.

Hopping on and off a train in Illinois is a very common thing. People at the Glenview, Ill., depot can't understand why Wisconsin isn't on board with high-speed rail.

"Why shouldn't you be taking advantage of the funding that should go to your state," train passenger Susan Jacobs asked.

Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn is pushing to grab those unwanted funds and the train manufacturer.

With Gov.-elect Scott Walker standing by his promise to stop the construction of high-speed rail, Illinois residents feel sympathy and confusion toward their neighboring state to the north.

"It's a bad idea. It's jobs for Wisconsin people, It's a bad idea," train passenger Greg Leeb said.

The City of the Big Shoulders is still a serious Player with Railroads and the Nation's Freight Handler. And our Commuter Rail efforts are the envy of the world.

THE PROPER SENTIMENT FOR OUR TIMES. Donald Trump fires an apprentice who violated a fundamental rule.

"I've just been given some very disturbing news that [contestant] Anand [Vasudev] has been text messaging people telling them to bring in money, Anand is that true?" Trump asked.

"That is not true sir. I haven't been texting anyone regarding money, absolutely not," Anand replied.

"Well you know if you did, it's a clear violation of the rules... you're saying you didn't do it?" Trump questioned.

"I have not done that," Anand insisted.

Big mistake.

"You want me to read you a text message?" Trump fired back.

"Go right ahead, Mr. Trump," Anand said.

"Come to Trump Tower from 10AM-1PM. Bring at least $50. Pretend like you don't know me. Need you to buy a pedicab from me or one of my teammates. I'm project manager so my ass is on the line. I'm getting close to the top -- I won't have my phone with me, so just come by and pretend like we don't know each other," Trump read aloud to the seven remaining contestants.

"Pretty bad right?"

"That was bad, Mr. Trump," Anand replied.

Why did you deny it? You lied to me," Trump noted.

"I want to be at the top, I want to win, and nobody came... it was wrong and it was inappropriate but being a project manager, you want to win," Anand told Trump.

It's more than his ass on the line now.

After Anand and Trump both agreed on the fact that Anand crossed the line, Trump declared Anand fired.

"This is why the country's gotten into such trouble. This is the kind of thinking that we've been witnessing on Wall Street for the last five years -- Anand, you're fired," Trump said.

I'm informed that there was no taxi waiting for him at the door, as is usually the case with the fired contestants.

A BUSY DAY FOR AMTRAK, AND FOR THE PIZZERIA. Amtrak's busiest day is the Sunday after Thanksgiving (a lot of its traffic is collegians, and they start melting away the previous Thursday, but they all want to return on Sunday).

Thanksgiving Eve is the busiest day for the pizzeria, as a lot of families, contemplating the work involved in getting the traditional turkey together, go for the traditional comfort food, and let somebody else clean the kitchen.

It's also a busy day for Amtrak, so if you want to avoid the airport congestion, which will be aggravated by National Opt Out Day, get your reservations in.

Image courtesy Atlantic Monthly.

More commentary, and the source.

MAKING POLITICAL HAY. Wisconsin governor-elect Scott Walker's decision to cancel the extension of Hiawatha service to Madison (or not) gives the opposition a chance to exploit the cross-Cheddar Curtain rivalry.

Image courtesy The Political Environment.

Or perhaps the governor-elect wants the money for road projects in anticipation of the national government's latest hero project.

OVERREACH. Victor Davis Hanson writes finis to Our President's ambitions, and to the delusions of his enablers on the left.

It all started in January 2009, when a giddy Barack Obama failed to appreciate how he got elected. He concluded that his victory was proof of a radical shift to the left on the part of the American electorate. In fact, it was a combination of the novelty of the first serious African-American presidential candidate, a so-so McCain effort, the traumatic financial meltdown of Sept. 15, 2008, unhappiness with the Bush administration’s Iraq war, fawning media, an orphaned presidential election with no incumbent running, and Obama’s centrist campaigning that explained the near impossible election of a northern liberal, when kindred sorts such as Dukakis, Kerry, McGovern, and Mondale had all failed. The country clearly wanted a corrective to the big spending and borrowing of the Bush administration — and soon discovered that, instead, it was going to get a far larger second serving of it.

From the outset, European expansive government was the model for this administration. But a statist antidote to the financial crisis was a complete misreading of ongoing events at home and abroad. The Wall Street meltdown was a result of a two-decade-long state intervention in the mortgage industry. Big government had guaranteed lower-income Americans that they could buy homes they could not afford, while those who built, sold, or financed subsidized houses were aided and abetted by the con — assured of exorbitant government-backed profits with the ethical cover of helping the poor achieve home ownership.

In reaction, quite fabulously the Obama administration explained this government-backed Ponzi scheme in terms of popular distrust of private enterprise and a need for a radical expansion of government as a share of GDP — or, in the now-infamous quip of Rahm Emanuel, “Never let a serious crisis go to waste.” More ironic still, the implosion of much of southern Europe and the belt-tightening and cost-cutting of the European Union’s strongest economies offered ongoing proof that the redistributive state was unsustainable, at the precise moment we Johnny-come-lately Americans were rushing to embrace just that failed paradigm. The almost stealthy departure from the Obama administration of academics who so prominently guided our economic policy until recently — Peter Orszag, Christina Romer, Larry Summers — suggests that they wished to get out of fantasy town ahead of the reasoning posse that was bound to follow.

The same flight of logic explains the Obamians’ weird post-election political triumphalism about the first two years of unpopular legislation promoted or passed by the administration. The takeover of health care, passage in the House of cap-and-trade, bailouts, expansions of entitlements, and huge deficits should — given their low poll ratings — have been something to hide rather than parade. Yet Obama and his loyalists point to these very accomplishments as proof that a now unpopular administration should be proud of its unpopular record.

Of course, the American people did not see it that way, in the greatest outpouring of anger in any midterm election of the last 72 years. Apparently the voters liked very little of what Obama had envisioned for them — and felt that it didn’t take a political genius to increase government spending with borrowed money. Only a fabulist would keep bragging of a political legacy that led to political catastrophe. Two years of stasis and gridlock would have done better for the Democrats at the polls.

There also emerged an equally unhinged postmortem analysis that cited almost every cause of Democratic defeat — except the unpopular record of 2009–10 and the weak economy: The most visible and exposed president in American history had not “gotten the message out.” The inordinate loss of blue-dog Democrats in key swing congressional districts that are barometers of national opinion “proves” that the defeated Democratic incumbents there were not liberal enough. The referendum was supposedly a warning to both parties in general and Washington in particular — and therefore the loss of 60 or more Democratic seats in the House is analogous to the wave of public frustration that Obama rode into office in 2008. Again, the reasoning class clings to fantasy instead of the “facts and science and argument” that explain why all the House gains of 2006 and 2008 were wiped out at one stroke. Twenty-one months of Barack Obama’s vision proved more deleterious to Democrats than what six years of Iraq and the mortgage meltdown did to Republicans.

The list of mythologies could be expanded: A public furious over open borders and looming amnesty was supposedly frustrated about the lack of “comprehensive immigration reform,” the new euphemism for amnesty. The failure to act on unpopular promises like closing Guantanamo, trying KSM in a civilian court, and ending “Don’t ask, don’t tell,” apparently disappointed voters. Calling fellow Americans “enemies” and telling Republicans to sit in the back seat were symptomatic of Obama’s inability to rev up the base in partisan style.

Easier to blame the outcome of the election on too much business money buying campaign commercials.

THE CASE FOR LIMITING GOVERNMENT? Our President is out of his depth, which may or may not have prompted Newsweek to contemplate the implications of "The presidency has grown, and grown and grown, into the most powerful, most impossible job in the world." Does it really come as a surprise when, after years and years of Smart People telling us that Enacting The Right Policies and Putting Technocrats In The White House will Make Our Lives Better, and after years and years of Talking Heads describing every inconvenience as the next crisis, and framing the ending of the inconvenience as something requiring Action By The Government (I think it got out of hand about the time the Talking Heads all used the Capitol as part of their logo or their backscene) that eventually Reality would be waiting on a dark alley somewhere off of K street with a leaded sock?

Can any single person fully meet the demands of the 21st-century presidency? Obama has looked to many models of leadership, including FDR and Abraham Lincoln, two transformative presidents who governed during times of upheaval. But what’s lost in those historical comparisons is that both men ran slim bureaucracies rooted in relative simplicity. Neither had secretaries of education, transportation, health and human services, veterans’ affairs, energy, or homeland security, nor czars for pollution or drug abuse, nor televisions in the West Wing constantly tuned to yammering pundits. They had bigger issues to grapple with, but far less managing to do. “Lincoln had time to think,” says Allan Lichtman, a professor of history at American University. “That kind of downtime just doesn’t exist anymore.”

Among a handful of presidential historians NEWSWEEK contacted for this story, there was a general consensus that the modern presidency may have become too bloated. “The growth is exponential in these last 50 years, especially the number of things that are expected of the president,” says presidential biographer Doris Kearns Goodwin, who had dinner with Obama and a handful of other historians last summer. Obama aides speaking on background say that the president’s inner circle can become stretched by the constant number of things labeled “crises” that land on his desk—many of which, like the mistaken firing of Department of Agriculture employee Shirley Sherrod in Georgia or the intricacies of the oil cleanup in the gulf, could easily be handled by lower-level staff. “Some days around here, it can almost be hard to breathe,” says one White House official who didn’t want to go on the record portraying his boss as overwhelmed. Another senior adviser says that sometimes the only way to bring the president important news is to stake out his office and “walk and talk” through the hall.

The growth of the presidency has been a sort of Catch-22. Most presidents after Roosevelt, at least until the Vietnam era, got by with only a few dozen advisers. Ted Sorensen, the Kennedy speechwriter who died last month, was actually hired as a domestic-policy counselor, one of only a handful (he wrote speeches in his spare time). Today there are more than 35 staffers devoted to domestic policy, plus more who parachute in on particular issues, like health care or energy. Yet as the president’s responsibilities have grown, the instinct has been to hire more people to help manage the work, including the flow of information. “That’s wrong; the more people you have in the White House, the more problems are sucked into it,” says James Pfiffner, a George Mason University professor of public policy whose 2007 book, The Modern Presidency, examined the enormous growth of the office. Other historians point to the changing role of cabinet secretaries. While Obama has more department leaders than ever before—15, compared with Gerald Ford’s 11 and Lincoln’s 7—many of them have less power and influence, which has required minor decisions about trade, energy, and economic strategy to be handled by White House staffers.

Enumerated and limited powers, winning by default? Is the house organ of the Liberal Establishment not disagreeing with periodic attempts by Republicans and libertarians to abolish a few cabinet departments?

Political scientist Thomas Cronin once credited the period between World War II and Watergate as the “swelling of the presidency.” It was during the Eisenhower administration that historians first asked if the president simply had too many demands. But those were far less cluttered times. “We had a lot to do, and many people were asking questions, but we were never overwhelmed,” says Harry McPherson, who served as counsel, then special counsel, to Lyndon Johnson. Such memories sound quaint to current White House staffers. “There is never a day we come in and there are only a few things we need to do,” says Bill Burton, Obama’s deputy press secretary.

And John Kennedy ran for office pledging to get the country moving again, and there was a circle of enlightened opinion that maintained the Eisenhower presidency was a do-nothing presidency.

Be careful what you ask for, you might get it.

JUNK SOCIAL SCIENCE IS PERMISSIBLE IN SERVICE OF THE RIGHT CAUSES. Some students at Bucknell University parodied affirmative action with a bake sale in April 2009.

Bucknell shut it down because of a minor paperwork discrepancy, then forbade BUCC from ever holding such a bake sale in the future. (Click here for video and here for audio documentation of these points, despite Bucknell's lies to the contrary.)

Another list that was later misplaced. That happens often enough in these days. The story didn't die at Bucknell, or decay over four or five years as cohorts of students graduate, because John Stossel held his own bake sale, and made a television segment (online video at the FIRE post) and wrote a column about it.

More recently, a student group at Wesleyan University held the same kind of bake sale. The faculty response defies parody.

In the wake of an affirmative-action bake sale hosted by the campus conservative club, the Wesleyan University admissions office swore up and down that the school doesn’t have an affirmative-action policy — but now, a large number of the Wesleyan faculty have written in to Wesleyan’s campus paper, the Wesleyan Argus, to defend the practice of affirmative action.

Closer to home, a residence hall organization held a different kind of affirmative action casino.

Project RED (Residents Engaging in Diversity) hosted their fourth annual "Casino Night" in the Stevenson Towers Main Street Food Court, where students could play casino games without risking any actual money.

What made this casino different than most were the decorations. The walls were adorned with posters that read "For every $1 a white man earns, a white woman earns 74 cents."

Similarly, African American men earned 72 cents, black women earned 64 cents, Latino men earned 54 cents and Latina women earned 52 cents to the white man's $1, according to the posters.

There's a long tradition in higher education of alerting students to their privileged circumstances, and there are ways to get that point across while recognizing that race and sex differences in earnings disappear once job tenure, education, and experience are impounded in ceteris paribus.

That's too adult a problem for the reds.

Students' hands were marked with an X when they entered the casino floor, and they were given two $500 chips.

After students changed out their chips for smaller amount, they began to play games. With the "money" students earned, they had the opportunity to win prizes ranging from hooded sweatshirts, a blanket, T-shirts, hats, a basketball, and more items purchased from the University Bookstore.

When students were finished playing, they could cash out their chips in the form of raffle tickets and enter to win prizes.

Besides the educational posters that decorated the walls, there was another surprise in store for those in attendance.

When students lined up to cash in their chips, they were made aware that the Xs they had marked on their hand had a hidden meaning.

Each color X stood for a different race and sex, had been randomly assigned and would determine what kind of exchange rate they would get on their chips. For instance, people marked as white males would receive one raffle ticket per $50 in chips, whereas students marked as a Latina woman got one ticket per $100 in chips.

Not all students were happy after they heard about the unique caveat.

"I felt cheated," [sophomore Khaylin] Snead said.

Before the raffle drawing, [project coordinator Bianca] McGraw spoke about wage discrepancy to the crowd.

"This happens all the time," she said.

McGraw gave examples of coworkers receiving unequal pay for doing equal work, working equal hours and having equal experience. Students roundly agreed this was unfair.

An example is not a proof. A generalization from a small sample is not a trend. How difficult would it be to let the colors signify different levels of educational attainment?

PERSEVERE. The Northern Illinois women's basketball team had a coaching change during the off-season, and the new coach has a first win here, with the team rallying from nine down to beat George Washington by six.

CONCRETENESS OPTIONAL.

Craig Brandon spent some time teaching at New Hampshire's Keene State College and he had such a bad experience with yobbish students, craven administrators, and questionable academic practices that he chucked it all to work on The Five-Year Party: How Colleges Have Given Up on Educating Your Child and What You Can Do About It. I've made references to Margaret Soltan's and Peter Sacks's reactions to his thesis. and made time to read it and review it.

Book Review N^o. 28 suggests that Mr Brandon generalizes excessively from his own experiences, and his investigation thus paints with too broad a brush, sometimes unconvincingly.


The flagship universities of the northeastern states are weak to begin with (see inter alia ZooConn and ZooMass) and Keene State is probably a lot less selective than the somewhat less well known University of New Hampshire (which at least has train service) and it might well be the very model of a subprime party school (at least Mr Brandon is aware of one frame for the weaker providers of higher education).

THERE IS NEVER A RIGHT TIME TO BUILD A WRONG PROJECT.

Destination: Freedom elaborates on its approval of New Jersey governor Chris Christie cancelling the New Jersey to Penn Station Under tunnel project with that observation.

TAKE CARE OF THE ACADEMICS AND THE IMAGE WILL TAKE CARE OF ITSELF.

Yes, Northern Illinois University has been through difficult times, and it's understandable that potential students might be concerned about their safety. The resources devoted to coping with perception tend, however, to focus on the wrong things.

According to a Sept. 2 NIU Today press release, "a Vision 2020 committee, drawn from across the campus, will set ambitious benchmark goals for such areas as graduation and student-retention rates; optimal university enrollment, in both size and composition; and the percentage of incoming students ranking near the top of their high school classes."

Headquarters keeps doing these strategic planning things, each of which sucks up time, none of which seem to have any effect. (When the management fad was downsizing, somebody envisioned a 19,000 student university with an economics faculty of sixteen; enrollments currently exceed 24,000 with an economics faculty of nine, give me one reason to be cooperative.)

Apparently, rather than, oh, hiring more faculty, or closing down the special education functions, the solution lies in a better tagline. The economics faculty is nine; add in political science and history and sociology and maybe you get to 45, yet somewhere on campus there are 45 people with time to serve on a marketing and branding subcommittee. They've already been doing some word-smithing.

RETURNING TO CIVILIAN LIFE. Northern Illinois University earns a Governor's Award for Excellence in Veterans Education.

“These student veterans are outstanding role models who exemplify character, leadership, service to the community and academic success,” [university president John] Peters added, noting that the overall grade point average of NIU student veterans is 10 percent higher than the overall GPA of the student body. “We are proud and honored to have them as part of our community.”

Earlier this year, Military Times EDGE magazine ranked NIU 49th on its list of 101 top colleges for veterans, out of a total 4,000 institutions. G.I. Jobs magazine editors also named NIU for the second consecutive year as being among 1,120 top military friendly schools in the country, out of 8,000 colleges.

At today's Veterans Day observance, conversations included reserve call-ups pending or postponed, and more than a few people contemplating the life of a military spouse.

Thanks, stay safe, hit the books.

GOING TO SEA, THE WAY IT USED TO BE. Fresh water rationed, no showers, spoiled food, top speed three knots. That's not what Carnival Cruise passengers bargained for. Did I mention no functioning toilets?

Peg Fisher of Las Vegas, on her first cruise with husband Tom, described impromptu meals that included cheese-and-beet sandwiches and others filled with something that looked like corned-beef hash.

"If you could see the things they put on sandwiches, seriously, this could be the only cruise ever where people lost weight instead of gaining weight," Peg Fisher said.

Chris Harlen, a dental technician from Buena Park, offered a quick description of his experience after disembarking with his wife and two children, ages 10 and 8.

"It was gross when the toilets weren't working. What can you do?" Harlan said. "There were a lot of people getting smashed off warm beer."

The bar had more than rum, sodomy is optional, and the bo'sun didn't have to break out the lash.

DON'T LET THE GOOD PLAYERS DO ALL THE WORK. A substitute coach in a youth soccer league experiments with playing to win. (Via Joanne Jacobs.)

Every week you’ve been told that the important thing is just to have a good time. Well, this week it’s going to be different. The number one goal is to win; the number two goal is to have a good time. But I assure you: if you win, you will have a much better time!

They won, they had a better time, and they discovered that free-riding on the efforts of the better performer wasn't quite enough.

THE HOTTEST TICKET IN DEKALB. It's the Elburn Shuttle.

Some students take the shuttle because it is faster and cheaper than
driving.

"I take it because I have to commute, and I don't want my parents coming all the way up from Geneva," said Travis Reed, junior electrical engineering major. "It's a lot faster than driving, though it does get pretty busy on Friday."

It runs Fridays and Sundays, sometimes in multiple sections.

One of these days the county and Metra and Union Pacific will get their act together and we'll have proper commuter trains.

AMERICA'S TEAM. That would be the Packers, not the Cowboys.

NOBODY PAYS LIST PRICE. That's because, where there are third party payments, the incentives to discover the factor-minimal bundle are attenuated.

Cato’s Neal McCluskey writes here about the impact of government student aid; it’s more accurate to call it “college aid” because it helps schools to bring in more money, spend it, and then claim that students need more “help.” He marshals some strong evidence.

Obama is jetting around the country, telling audiences to vote for Democrats because they are so dedicated to keeping college “affordable.” But increasing government subsidy for attending college doesn’t lower costs — it increases them and spreads them to taxpayers who would rather do something else with their money if they had any choice.

To be specific:

Because students are able to cover the incessantly rising prices. And how can students do that? By using more and more money that comes from someone else!

The data scream this reality so loudly even passed-out undergrads could hear it. So why does it get so little attention? In part, no doubt, because many in the media refuse to even consider that there could be a causal connection between ballooning aid and skyrocketing prices.

Case in point: I just purchased The Cars of Pullman, a full-size, lavishly illustrated, short press run book for $40. A similarly-sized paperback textbook of 182 pages would likely set you back almost $100, and the publishers would want to revise it after three years. Our bookstore is now seeking the cooperation of faculty in keeping students' book bill below $700, as that is how much money financial aid authorized. I don't believe in coincidences.

The article, written before the election, speculates on the ability of the Democrats to buy votes by being generous with the grants and loans. How's that hope and change working out?

A related article suggests another source of social waste in the grants and loans.

Just as housing subsidies incentivized people to purchase homes that they otherwise shouldn’t have, higher education subsidies have incentivized people to go to college who weren’t ready or suited for it. In both cases, the cost to taxpayers has been substantial while the alleged benefits have proven illusory.

The higher education establishment's loyalty to Democrats might well be repaid in light of the election results. Think of the Pell Grants and the national endowments as Grenada. The Berlin Wall comes later.

THE LAND OF LINCOLN, REPUBLICAN BY ACREAGE. These maps, from The American Thinker, show the Republican majorities by county or district in red and the Democratic majorities in blue.

American Thinker graphic from Yahoo Elections Dashboard.

Governor Quinn, a Democrat, and Senator-elect Kirk, a Republican, both won narrowly, meaning the colorations are insufficiently nuanced. There are enough Democrats in the State House to make the reapportionment interesting.

SHORTER RACHEL MADDOW. A Fox News pundit can put his money where his mouth is. A pundit at MSNBC can't.

TRENCHANT OBSERVATION OF THE DAY. There's been a lot written about the election results. Peggy Noonan says Americans Vote for Maturity.

Electable doesn't mean not-conservative. Electable means mature, accomplished, stable—and able to persuade.

Conservatives talked a lot about Ronald Reagan this year, but they have to take him more to heart, because his example here is a guide. All this seemed lost last week on Sarah Palin, who called him, on Fox, "an actor." She was defending her form of political celebrity—reality show, "Dancing With the Stars," etc. This is how she did it: "Wasn't Ronald Reagan an actor? Wasn't he in 'Bedtime for Bonzo,' Bozo, something? Ronald Reagan was an actor."

Excuse me, but this was ignorant even for Mrs. Palin. Reagan people quietly flipped their lids, but I'll voice their consternation to make a larger point. Ronald Reagan was an artist who willed himself into leadership as president of a major American labor union (Screen Actors Guild, seven terms, 1947-59.) He led that union successfully through major upheavals (the Hollywood communist wars, labor-management struggles); discovered and honed his ability to speak persuasively by talking to workers on the line at General Electric for eight years; was elected to and completed two full terms as governor of California; challenged and almost unseated an incumbent president of his own party; and went on to popularize modern conservative political philosophy without the help of a conservative infrastructure. Then he was elected president.

The point is not "He was a great man and you are a nincompoop," though that is true. The point is that Reagan's career is a guide, not only for the tea party but for all in politics. He brought his fully mature, fully seasoned self into politics with him. He wasn't in search of a life when he ran for office, and he wasn't in search of fame; he'd already lived a life, he was already well known, he'd accomplished things in the world.

Here is an old tradition badly in need of return: You have to earn your way into politics. You should go have a life, build a string of accomplishments, then enter public service. And you need actual talent: You have to be able to bring people in and along. You can't just bully them, you can't just assert and taunt, you have to be able to persuade.

Although her comments focus on Governor Palin, something in that last line brings a Hawaiian basketball player to mind.

UNIVERSITIES ARE FAILING AT THEIR MISSION. Margaret Soltan reviews Craig Brandon's The Five Year Party.

A recovering Keene State University professor, Brandon is angry that so many of our schools just sit there, stewing in 4 Loko, flunkies, and football; he notes that although almost no one learns anything on these campuses, plenty of party school students graduate -- alcoholic, big with debt, and as intellectually null as they were on entry.

Must add this book to the pile of items to review. Regular readers know that universities leave money on the table by succumbing to these temptations, rather than making the effort to be more substantial.

Brandon rages, chapter after chapter, at the waste of money, time, and intellect party schools represent; he's scandalized by the sheer danger of attending them: "[I]f you concentrate five thousand to twenty thousand adolescents in an area of a few acres and figure that about 40 percent of them are intoxicated at any one time, date rape [among many other crimes] is perhaps the inevitable result." He talks about death by fraternity, sadistic fraternities, fraternities that kill. He definitely doesn't like fraternities.

I don't want to seem glib. Brandon's book is right about almost everything - about the mercenary motives of these schools, their demoralized professors and wasted students... But it's wrong about one big thing. Brandon thinks that serious numbers of the parents of these students care. Or that they would care if they knew what he's telling them in his book. His book's rather patronizing subtitle evokes a world of wee ones whom pa and ma are trying to protect...

That's intriguing. Shorter form: the parents are aliterate, ergo it is no surprise that their children are also aliterate.

Stop enabling aliteracy, you'll get less of it.

HOW OTHERS SEE US. Der Spiegel sagt 'Obama Comes Across as Cold, Arrogant and Elitist'. There's a variety of opinion on offer. Even in translation, it's clear that the Germans don't get the Leave Us Alone Coalition.

Another article from the same magazine makes an instructive comparison.

When America is feeling self-confident and optimistic it can adore this kind of president, like John F. Kennedy was idolized during the Camelot era. However, an America that is uncertain and at odds with itself can find it hard to place its trust in someone who seems so perfect. That too helps to explain why so many people see the former community worker as a member of the establishment -- someone who is allegedly in cahoots with Wall Street and who doesn't take care of ordinary people.

One may find it ironic, unfair even, that the Republicans are profiting from this. But Obama must realize that he himself is part of the problem. That is his only chance of repeating Bill Clinton's success. Clinton shifted towards the center following the crushing defeat for his Democrats in the 1994 Congressional elections.

In the Fourth Turning scheme of things, Mr Kennedy took office toward the end of a High. He was not quite the right man to manage the beginning of a secular challenge to the existing order, but then, neither were Presidents Johnson nor Nixon. Mr Obama is taking office toward the end of an Unraveling. That's approximately the position Herbert Hoover and James Buchanan found themselves in.

THE CHART OF THE DAY. Randall Hoven of The American Thinker has harsh words for Our President.

Say all you want about how Obama inherited this recession; he wants credit for the recovery. So let's give him the recovery. Look at how it compares to all the other postwar recession recoveries. To us ignorant, unwashed hillbillies, it sure looks like Obama's "recovery" is going nowhere slowly.

Out of eleven recession recoveries, Obama's is the only one that did not go above its pre-recession GDP peak by the third quarter of recovery. It is still not there even by the fifth quarter. It is one of only two in which there were fewer jobs fifteen months into the recovery than at the beginning of it. Yes, the hole was slightly deeper this time, but there is little evidence that we are even crawling out of it.

I think I know what some of you might say: Obama is only on the bottom of those charts because he started out in the deepest hole. Sorry, but even the rate of improvement in this recovery is historically anemic. The growth in GDP is the third-slowest of the eleven postwar recessions, and the growth in jobs is the second-slowest.

He's reacting to the Establishment spin, which once again seeks to lay off a failure of The Best And The Brightest on the false consciousness or susceptibility to influence or just plain stupidity of the electorate.

American Thinker chart.
Source: St. Louis Fed/FRED, GDPC96 and PAYEMS series..

Because the trigger for this recession is a financial reset, the path of recovery might be different. The very ambition of the Obama Administration, by changing a lot of laws at a same time that tax rate cuts were about to expire, might have compounded the uncertainty. You'd think that's the kind of thing a professor with a lectern could say.

FIFTY YEARS OF ENABLING FAILURE, ENABLED.

During the campaign season, I recall numerous Serious People ruminating about how the Tea Party was going to turn the Republican Party into a regional reliquary of religiosity. Demography, and fault lines in the Republican coalition, are not yet destiny. (I've encountered versions of this prediction going back to the end of the Reagan administration, often as wishful thinking by the opposition.) Now that the votes are mostly counted, more than a few Serious People are calling the election outcome (which, by all objective standards is a Republican wave of historic proportions) a failure because a few Tea Party candidates managed to prevent the Republicans from securing the Senate.

A DIFFERENT MORPHOLOGY. The Fourth Turning references at Cold Spring Shops come from an hypothesis of social evolution in which the life experiences of different generations shape their attitudes, which feeds back on the responses they make to situations they find themselves in.

Richard Florida's The Great Reset: How New Ways of Living and Working Drive Post-Crash Prosperity proposes a different hypothesis of social evolution, one more amenable to economic analysis, in which financial markets on occasion seriously misallocate capital, in ways that are a long time developing and foreseeable, albeit poorly foreseen, and the resulting disequilibrium takes a long time to unwind.

If his hypothesis is true, Book Review N^o. 27 is at once the gloomiest and the most optimistic report filed for this year. Professor Florida suggests that the current financial crisis, and the attendant stagnation in the industrial and consumer sectors, have more in common with the Long Depression that began in 1873 than with the more famous Great Depression that began in agriculture in the middle 1920s and caught the financial economy's attention late in 1929.

His use of the expression "reset" refers to the adjustment of the economy to new technologies that are emerging at the same time existing patterns of production and consumption break down. These can be frustrating times because at the same time the financial markets are re-evaluating projects that work, the consumer economy is attempting to find new uses for resources, and from among the potential new ideas, the best uses haven't yet emerged. Thus a public policy that attempts to restart a consumer economy based on McMansions financed by bubblelicious loans with obnoxious SUVs in the garage and a flat-screen TV bigger than Edison's movie screen will get the back of the invisible hand, hard.

What, then, is to be done? Professor Florida favors public policies that encourage the agglomeration of creative thinkers, the better to foster that emergence. But those public policies have an element of vanguardism. The National Endowment for the Arts as a way of fostering creativity in design and marketing? Does it really pay for artists to get grants reviewed by other artists to produce exotica that very few people will look at, when upscale businesses are willing to pay for designs Virginia Postrel will rave about? Passenger Rail to allow creative people to think or nap or network during their commutes? Sure, but there are cheaper ways to provide the trains, and a complementary policy that makes the trains more attractive by making roads less pleasant will be a tough sell.

Provocative, worth reading, probably better at anticipating the outlines of what will follow than at providing a plan for getting there.

(Cross-posted to 50 Book Challenge.)

FISCAL RESPONSIBILITY AND REGULATORY REFORM.

A series of articles on the folly of spending money on European-style high-speed electric passenger trains inadvertently make the case for the Cold Spring Shops "give them their head to 110" campaign.

RECOGNIZING THE ROOT CAUSES. David French of Phi Beta Cons reflects on the monuments we have destroyed.

We live in an ignorant culture -- and I'm not just talking about our failing public schools. Our elite universities are failing us also, turning out graduates who are (to borrow Glenn Reynolds' phrase) "credentialed, not educated." In other words, our educated elite -- our ruling class -- often isn't elite at all, but instead their minds and hearts are jammed with fashionable nonsense, including a naïve, Epcot Center view of multiculturalism, hostility, and ignorance toward our own history and culture, and ever-diminishing adherence to orthodox faith.

We live in increasing decadence. And by "decadence" I'm not necessarily referring to the hedonism that's overtaking our youth, but to the selfishness that underlies our spiraling divorce and illegitimacy rates. Our marriage rate diminishes as we want life on our own terms, on our own timing, with children often along for the (very rocky) ride.

We let others fight our wars. In our nation's history no major war has ever been fought with a lower percentage of Americans in uniform than our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. While not all young people are called to serve, it is distressing how few even consider it. During my year in Iraq, I saw heroism that I could scarcely comprehend, as young soldiers gave everything to protect us and to save the lives of their brothers. Yet the war merely hovers on the edge of our consciousness, and these young men and women have less influence on our youth than Lady Gaga.

In "The Cost of Correctness" I wrote "Deny coherent beliefs of any kind: enjoy incoherence."

Thanks, post-modernists and multiculturalists.

VINDICATION. In 1991, I wrote an essay titled "The Cost of Correctness" for a long-since closed down Faculty Bulletin at Northern Illinois. It opened with "Universities are failing to carry out their mission. Contributing to this failure is a collection of ideas we call 'politically correct.'" It may not have changed many minds, but after further review, I have little reason to change mine. The editor chose to highlight this passage: "Given all the competing demands on our time, that people have continued to read and appreciate these dead white males suggests that their work has value." Now comes an essay by Lindsay Johns in Britain's Prospect titled "In praise of dead white men".

Dead white men, the pillars of the western canon, remain supremely relevant to black people in the 21st century, because their concerns are universal. At its best, the canon elucidates the eternal truths at the heart of the human condition. It addresses our common humanity, irrespective of our melanin quotient. Homer, Virgil, Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Dickens—all male, all very white and all undeniably very dead. But would anyone be so foolish as to deny their enduring importance? Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy, Boccacio’s Decameron or Pico’s Oration On The Dignity of Man are as germane to black people as they are to white. There is no apartheid in the philosophical musings of Cicero, no racial segregation in the cosmic grandeur of Dante and no ethnic oppression in the amorous sonnets of Shakespeare. These works can, if given the chance, speak as much to Leroy in Peckham or Shaniqua in the South Bronx as they can to Quentin in the home counties.

It's part of a Prospect special feature on the failings of multiculturalism in Britain that appears to be otherwise sequestered behind a pay wall.

DON'T BE STUPID ABOUT BEING SMART. Our President's supporters, and more than a few of his detractors, credit him for being reflective and receptive to differing points of view. And yet, it is again possible to fly from coast to coast without ever entering the air space of a Democratic district.

Dorothy Rabinowitz suggests that preparation matters.

Whatever the outcome of today's election, this much is clear: It will be a long time before Americans ever again decide that the leadership of the nation should go to a legislator of negligible experience—with a voting record, as state and U.S. senator, consisting largely of "present," and an election platform based on glowing promises of transcendence. A platform vowing, unforgettably, to restore us—a country lost to arrogance and crimes against humanity—to a place of respect in the world.

Perspective matters.

At a Democratic fund-raiser a few weeks ago, the president noted, in explanation for the Democrats' lack of enthusiasm, that facts and science and argument aren't winning the day because "we're hard-wired not to always think clearly when we're scared." The suggestion was clear: The Democrats' growing resistance to his policies was a product of the public's lack of intellectual capacity and their fears.

And the company you keep matters.

What you probably won't hear, at least from many Democrats, is any admission that President Obama and his allies in Congress overreached by pushing a big-government agenda on a country skeptical of centralized government planning and bureaucracy and tired of excessive government spending.

And we now have a Congress in which both major parties are more in thrall to their true believers.

HOW INEFFECTIVE ARE CONNECTICUT'S HIGH SCHOOLS? The Office of Retaining Students Who Weren't Prepared in the First Place never lacks for work. (Via Joanne Jacobs)

Seventy-two percent of Connecticut’s high school graduates who go on to community college aren’t prepared for college work, according to a state education group. The remediation rate is 65 percent for graduates enrolling at four state universities.

“Connecticut has a significant college readiness gap that is threatening our ability to replenish our workforce,” said Michael Meotti, the state’s commissioner of higher education. “We are fortunate that with 3 out of 4 high school graduates going onto college, we have one of the highest college-going rates in the country. But now we are finding that many of these students are not college ready.”

Only 54 percent of Connecticut high school graduates who go directly to college will earn a certificate or degree.

I'll never lack for work either. For five years, Cold Spring Shops has noted the unfavorable cost-benefit ratio of producing dropouts by making a bad job of middle and high school followed by two or three semesters of repeating middle school in college, something that probably discourages some of those collegians. The Cold Spring Shops suggestion is that colleges send the high schools that failed to prepare those students the bill for the remedial courses, and although the idea has not caught on, the liquidity constraint confronting governments has not gone away.

MISPLACED ENTHUSIASM. A Northern Star investigation discovered that Northern Illinois University lost money on its Independence Bowl appearance. Profit or loss, it doesn't diminish the editorial board's enthusiasm for Tuesday Night Football.

Next Tuesday evening, NIU football hosts MAC-rival Toledo, in what is one of the biggest games in program history. With ESPN coming to DeKalb to shine a national spotlight on the Huskies, it is in both the university's and football program's best interest to cancel classes for the afternoon and pack Huskie Stadium.

The idea does not come without precedent. In actuality, it's a trend mid-majors are beginning to embrace more and more when their programs are given the opportunity to be showcased on a national stage: Southern Mississippi in 2007, the University of Texas-El Paso in 2009 and, most recently, the University of Central Florida last month, to name a few notable instances.

Heck, the University of Washington is making football recess respectable among the state flagships.

The students are free to ask for a recess. So far headquarters has gone on with business as usual. That's the proper attitude.

[Washington] will be able to showcase nationally how it doesn’t give a shit about holding classes, and this will persuade thousands of the most brilliant potential applicants that they should apply to the University of Washington.

Saturday is for college football.

NEITHER RAIL FAN NOR RAIL PROFESSIONAL. That's what makes James McCommons's Waiting on a Train: The Embattled Future of Passenger Rail Service, A Year Spent Riding Across America such a compelling read, and, now that the summer Trip Report has been filed, material for Book Review N^o. 26. Part ethnography, part policy advocacy, part business reporting, Waiting on a Train exposes readers to the Springer show that often plays out in the coaches; to the perspectives freight railroaders have about a passenger train, often with unreliable equipment, gumming up their transportation machinery; to the differing visions of successive Amtrak managements; and to the sometimes wishful thinking of state and national transportation planners.

Mr McCommons lives in the Iron and Copper Country of Upper Michigan, and he opens by noting the loss of the Peninsula 400 and the Green Bay corridor. Thus, many of his trips, sometimes solo, sometimes excursions with his sons, begin with a bus ride to Milwaukee to pick up a Hiawatha (generally routine, on time or ahead of time, as regular readers know, but when there's a pedestrian fatality, seriously late: is it necessary for the coroner to hold up a train and several hundred people for three hours as has been the case in my experience?)

Sometimes his trips are for family purposes or recreation, sometimes to interview senior railroad managers or Passenger Rail officials. He manages to cover almost all of the Amtrak system, including the southerly and southwestern segments that have not yet been marked up on the Cold Spring Shops map. Some of the trains are good, some of the trains are not good, some of the cost-cutting measures such as the cafe-lounge that replaces both Sightseer Lounge and diner on some long-distance trains please nobody, some of the crew are helpful, and some are crabby. Mr McCommons gets some details wrong in ways that will annoy serious ferroequinologists; on the other hand his discoveries of the South Shore Line (electric cars outside my window: what's that?) and some other railroading gems the ferroequinologists tend to take for granted are charming.

(Cross-posted to 50 Book Challenge.)

THE TRAGIC VISION, IN ONE SENTENCE. It's a question from the dean at Anonymous Community.

Is there a way to reward colleges for improving graduation rates without inadvertently rewarding stupidity?

The context for the question is Texas's new disclosure requirements, which inter alia condition state funding for its universities, colleges, and junior colleges on completion rates. The tradeoff, which the dean's post and the bull session participants confront, is that being more selective in admissions increases the proportion of students who satisfy the completion criteria, but there are fewer students. At Cold Spring Shops, that's a feature, not a tradeoff, although we probably take a harder line on second, third, ..., n^th chances than some.

The Texas disclosure requirements go so far as to require universities to report the profit or loss generated by each department, and within each department, the faculty member. James Joyner at Outside the Beltway concurs in part and dissents in part.

Many if not most states have too many universities, too many overlapping programs and departments, and are generally run as if it were still the 1940s. Certainly, this was the case in the state of Alabama, where I earned my three degrees. Fifteen public four-year universities is about ten too many for a relatively small state with only 4.3 million people. And that actually understates the number, since many of these schools have satellite campuses in other parts of the state. Troy University, where I used to teach and Steven Taylor still does, has major campuses in Troy, Dothan, and Montgomery. Which means that Montgomery alone has three four-year campuses funded by the public. Twenty-six public two-year colleges is likely too many as well. (There are also numerous private institutions which compete against these, but they’re at least not as heavily subsidized.)

Even aside from the macro picture, there are doubtless plenty of professors who are dead weight. Either they’ve long stopped being effective teachers or researchers but hang on due to tenure, or they were hired in a different demand climate and now don’t have enough students to justify their salaries.

The problem, however, is that the metrics the educrats are likely to use won’t address these problems and, indeed, will exacerbate them. At TAMU, they’re reportedly “weighing annual salary against students taught, tuition generated, and research grants obtained.”

The kicker is in those metrics.

“Students taught” is a useful floor metric. If a professor is mostly teaching sections of three to five students and not doing much in the way of research, they’re likely not pulling their weight. (I qualify only because there may be disciplines and circumstances where those low numbers would be justified.) But the obvious educrat response to this metric is to jam more people into each section of introductory classes and to cancel lower demand specialty courses required for majors, making it very difficult for students to tailor their degree.

Because the educrats also have the silly idea that anybody can teach an introductory class (imagine The Marine Corps without those 20-year veteran drill sergeants), further down that road comes the Rent-A-Prof reading slides to those members of the class that showed up to update their social networks once they'd downloaded the slides. As one of the commenters in the Anonymous Community bull session notes, "It is easy to teach down to a specific set of narrow outcomes and produce students who are unprepared for anything after graduation. How long before Texas employers complain about college grads like they complain about HS grads?" I'm beginning to see the effects of so-called high-stakes testing in my classes. The notion that university students can engage in, in fact are encouraged to engage in, indeed might be recognized for excellence in, original thought, terrifies some people. But wait, there's more ...

“Tuition generated” is not a metric with which I’m familiar. Indeed, aside from a handful of superstars here and there, I can’t conjure how it is that a faculty member will “generate” tuition. Students come to institutions, not to study with individual professors.

In any event, tuition generation is an exercise in cost allocation, and cost allocation is an exercise in arbitrariness. Is the tuition generated adjusted on a per-student basis for the costs of the Office of Retaining Students Who Probably Shouldn't Have Been Admitted in the First Place, or is the revenue of the mathematics department reduced because the sub-numerates place a larger burden on the tutoring service, or the revenue of the communications department reduced because that's where the athletes go, or increased to the extent that ticket sales contribute to the position of the university?

Then there's the issue of how to reward scholarship.

“Research grants obtained” is a very useful metric in a handful of disciplines, notably in the hard sciences. But most research in most disciplines don’t and shouldn’t require research grants. Regardless, the amusing thing about this measure is that it’s contrary to the others. That is, it encourages professors to spend their time and energy chasing grants and writing up research proposals in order to generate revenues that they bring in to the school . . . most of which is spent pursuing the research in question. Aside from PhD-granting institutions, where graduate students can join in on the project and enhance their prospects for future employment, this process will have the effect of taking professors away from their core function of teaching students.

Yes, but remember that the mentality is one of running departments as profit centers. (Never mind that in some disciplines, obtaining a consultantship without running any proposals through the government and foundation mill is simpler, and permissible subject to conflict of interest regulations). The requirement, however, might induce some administrators to emulate the institutions that are at the top of the U.S. News league tables, and draw the obvious inferences about access-assessment-remediation-retention. And Randy Moss will be a perfect gentleman in the locker room.

I'm overanalyzing. Professor Bainbridge is ticked off.

There was a highly annoying article in today's WSJ about the way state governments are trying to turn universities into factories stamping out job ready proles. Not surprisingly, the charge is being lead by my fellow conservatives, who in the last 20 years have gone from prizing the life of the mind to prizing anti-intellectual morons.

Just go there and enjoy.

THE TRENCHANT OBSERVATION OF THE DAY. Southern Indiana's Jason Fertig correctly sees the consequence of expanding college enrollment.

The push from our elected officials to increase the amount of college degrees will only ratchet up the enrollment of unmotivated students on campus. While the apathy train left the station a long time ago, now is the time to apply to brakes before it picks up any more speed.

The push produces an expensive signal of degraded value.

A CHAMPION PASSES. Maurice Lucas, who earned rings with the Marquette Warriors and Portland Trail Blazers, 1952 - 2010. Seashells and balloons.

WHERE ARE THE FORMULAS AND THE GRAPHS? Some years ago, in one of the periodic restructurings university administrators seem bent on doing (and each time adding evidence to my claim that the supposedly rising college degree premium is the labor market signalling "give us people of ability") I was tasked with teaching several sections of introductory economics. (The department chairman at the time lowered the cost of the graduate program by moving some people specifically hired for various graduate courses to larger sections, while assigning cheaper people not necessarily best qualified to the graduate courses. Tool.)

The question came up when a student in one of my sections asked an economics major for advice on a problem set. I had attended some conference sessions on The Error of Teaching Principles As If Students Are Prepping for Prelims (Paul Samuelson actually bragged about the use of his best-seller for precisely that) and my questions were more along the lines of "If you had the power, what forms of competition would you prohibit?" Somehow we got through the first three weeks without a graph, and through the course with only five diagrams: a one person production possibility frontier, a generalized production possibility frontier, a Marshallian Cross, a simplified price-taker diagram, and a price-searcher diagram. (I'll sell you the course pack if you're interested).

There have been any number of conference sessions on Teaching Principles As If the Big Ideas Matter. The effort is still going on.

[Kelly] Markson [of Wake Tech] started her talk with some lighthearted research that she conducted one evening at a cocktail party (and recorded on video). She asked forty-somethings whether they had liked economics in school. Nearly everyone had hated it and they had forgotten what they learned—if they had learned anything important at all.

The potential for disliking the survey course is probably even greater because it has been traditionally taught from standard textbooks, as if the students are economics majors and are going on to study additional economics. Yet most students are in a two-year terminal degree in business administration and this will be their only economics course. Furthermore, many students who take it are weak in math. (Those with stronger math skills are likely to take the two-semester micro- and macro- sequence.)

Traditionally, students had to plunge into math, calculating elasticities and figuring out how to depict complex activities such as production functions graphically. When Markson taught the course that way (for one year), she found that those chores took so much effort that students failed to learn the underlying principles—the ones worth remembering, such as the role of incentives, opportunity costs, and the value of trade.

By removing the mathematics (except for supply and demand curves), she can now devote weeks to the basics (which standard texts breeze through in the first two chapters). Markson draws on everything from class debates, videos such as John Stossel’s “20/20” clips (which are available for classroom use), and current events to make the course relevant. She gives extra credit to students who discover videos that illustrate economic concepts.

Incentives Matter. Everything Has An Opportunity Cost. Opportunity Costs Differ. People Trade for Mutual Gain. There's probably more intellectual challenge in presenting these well than there is in exploring the finer wrongs of Viner-Wong.

IN THE SPIRIT OF BILTY AND NYSTROM. The national government spends $3.7 million on internal improvements in the Cold Spring Shops neighborhood.

“That money will be used to replace two railroad bridges, which the U.S. Department of Transportation said would lay the groundwork for eventually raising the speed on the route to 110 mph. Earlier this year, the federal government granted the state $810 million in stimulus money to extend the Hiawatha from Milwaukee to Madison, a 110-mph leg that could one day be part of a Chicago-to-Twin Cities route and a larger Midwestern network of fast, frequent trains,” wrote Sandler.

It's more accurate to say that the infrastructure improvement might be a step toward restoring 110 mph speeds on the line, however regular readers have seen my "give them their head to 110" campaign for some time, and infrastructure improvements that allow Hiawathas, whether powered by butt-ugly P-series diesels or by the world's fastest steam locomotives, to mingle with freight trains the way The Milwaukee Road did it during World War II has a benefit-cost ratio that merits the small addition to the national debt it incurs.

The comments to the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel article include the observation that the current 89 minute trains get people from Milwaukee into Chicago much faster than drive time, and a tribute to the gentleman who offers the trolley service of beverages and snacks on selected trains. (It is a shame, however, that Amtrak can't roll out a Super Dome with downstairs bar, or a buffeteria car, or a Skytop Lounge, let alone a seventh car when loadings are high.)

In related news, the current Wisconsin government has reached an agreement with the national government to commit the entire capital budget for upgrading the tracks from Milwaukee to Watertown and building passenger-capable trackage from Watertown to Madison. One candidate for governor has pledged to stop the Milwaukee to Madison train project. Neither the opponents nor the proponents of the Madison service in Wisconsin have thought things through. The opponents suggest that the money might be better spent on patches to the interstate highways; the proponents fail to stress the usefulness of a Madison to Chicago train that would enable Brookfield residents to get to Chicago without driving to the Airport station, Sturtevant residents to view the antiques and the fall colors in Watertown, or, horrible dictu, north suburban flatlanders to get to college in Madison.

The news tends to speak of Passenger Rail improvements in isolation. Chicago is a logical hub for a midwestern train network, heir to the Rockets and Zephyrs and Hiawathas and Arrows, provided the resulting trains are scheduled with a view toward connectivity.