AN OPPORTUNITY FOR THE STATE UNIVERSITIES?

Bloomberg reports on a number of private universities not quite able to make a case for inclusion among the 100 claimants to the country's top 20 changing their financial aid policies in the hopes of raising their profiles.

To increase their standing on college rankings, more private colleges are giving “merit aid” to top students, who are often affluent, while charging unaffordable prices to the needy, according to the report. The percentage of students receiving merit aid jumped to 44 percent in 2007-2008 from 24 percent in 1995-1996, the report found. To a lesser extent, public universities are using some of the same practices, [New America Foundation researcher Stephen] Burd said.

Many of the most selective and wealthiest colleges, including the eight members of the Ivy League, Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts, and Cambridge-based Massachusetts Institute of Technology, award aid based only on financial need. Less selective nonprofit colleges often offer tuition reductions and merit aid to lure students to fill their seats.

In a perverse way, these institutions are recognizing that there is excess demand for a degree from an institution perceived to be excellent, a point we have long emphasized here.

Colleges use merit aid for talented middle- and upper-income students because it is less costly than pursuing similar prospects from poor families, said Catharine Hill, Vassar’s president. Enrolling low-income students costs schools money because they are giving up a spot for those who can pay full freight -- or close to it.

“Unfortunately this kind of choice further contributes to the income inequality that has increased significantly in the United States over the last three or four decades,” Hill said in an e-mail. “Our nation’s commitment to equal opportunity and social mobility is at risk.”

The commitment, if in fact there is such a thing as a national commitment, is at risk for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the continued failure of the common schools in low-income neighborhoods.  A related Bloomberg column by Michael Petrilli gets it.

A huge proportion of this $40 billion annual federal investment is flowing to people who simply aren’t prepared to do college-level work. And this is perverting higher education’s mission, suppressing completion rates and warping the country’s K-12 system.

About two-thirds of low-income community-college students -- and one-third of poor students at four-year colleges -- need remedial (aka “developmental”) education, according to Complete College America, a nonprofit group. But it’s not working: Less than 10 percent of students who start in remedial education graduate from community college within three years, and just 35 percent of remedial students earn a four-year degree within six years.

The policy is not working, and the responsibility for the policy not working rests with the supply chain.

To be considered successful, the high schools serving these young people would need to get their college-bound students to a college-ready level, not just get them to graduation. They might offer more college-prep courses, especially for those pupils with the most promise, and make sure the teachers are up to the task.

Likewise, state officials concerned about college completion would be prodded to ensure that their high schools produce college-ready graduates, maybe boosting graduation standards accordingly. Better yet, they might start to include college matriculation and graduation rates in their high-school accountability systems.

As for colleges, without a federal funding stream for remedial education, many would decide to become more selective, only admitting students who are ready for credit-bearing courses.

This would probably raise the academic tenor of the institution, for students and professors alike. And with fewer students using Pell aid, we could afford to make each grant more generous, removing financial barriers that force well-prepared low-income students to leave before graduation, or not to come at all.

In sum, disqualifying the use of Pell grants for remedial education would substantially reduce the gap between the number of students entering higher education and the number completing degrees.

'Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished.

Where the article falls short is in praying for pre-college job training, or on-the-job training for entry level workers. That is not an alternative to toughness at the college admissions office cascading to toughness at the high school and before.  It is a by-product.  It's likely the case that today's disengaged high school junior is a risk to himself and everybody else on the shop floor, in the warehouse, or at the deep-fryer.

FIFTY YEARS IN STEAM.

Cedar Point is home to some of the most intense roller coasters on earth.  It's also home to the Blue Streak, for a while the last of the classic wooden out-and-backers on the Great Lakes, and to a live steam railroad.

Today, the park owns five steam locomotives and is one of the few amusement parks in the world that still uses coal-fired steam locomotives. The park uses four engines, No. 22 Myron H., No. 44 Judy K., No. 4 George R., and No. 1, which remains unnamed. The fifth engine, No. 3 Albert, built in 1910, was retired in 1991 and is now on display in front of the main train entrance.

The engines now make their home in an old-fashioned engine house at Cedar Point where a full-time railroad superintendent oversees their operation. Last year, more than 1.8 million guests traveled the railroad and, since 1963, more than 116 million guests have ridden the railroad.

There will be a special event on Saturday, 22 June, recognizing the railroad's longevity.

HILARIOUS.

Johns Hopkins political scientist Benjamin Ginsberg, who I credit with the expression "deanlets and deanlings", and whose work on administrative bloat in higher education previously led me to summarize, "The remedy is part Ko-Ko and part John Galt: identify the twenty percent of the deanlets and deanlings who would not be missed, and fire them", goes himself one better.

Dr. Benjamin Ginsberg, author of The Fall of the Faculty, says that many colleges and universities face the same administrative issues every day. By having one experienced group of administrators make decisions for hundreds of campuses simultaneously, MOOA (massive open online administrations) would help address these problems expeditiously and economically. Since MOOA would allow colleges to dispense with most of their own administrators, it would generate substantial cost savings in higher education.

"Studies show that about 30 percent of the cost increases in higher education over the past twenty-five years have been the result of administrative growth," Ginsberg noted. He suggested that MOOA can reverse this spending growth.  "Currently, hundreds, even thousands, of vice provosts and assistant deans attend the same meetings and undertake the same activities on campuses around the U.S. every day," he said.  "Imagine the cost savings if one vice provost could make these decisions for hundreds of campuses."

There's a lot of unconscious, or possibly uninformed, imitation out there already.  Perhaps there's some spare space in the National Security Administration's cloud to park all of this stuff in one, easily searchable, place.

Asked if this "one size fits all" administrative concept was realistic given the diversity of problems faced by thousands of schools, Ginsberg noted that a "best practices" philosophy already leads administrators to blindly follow one another's leads in such realms as planning, staffing, personnel issues, campus diversity, branding and, curriculum planning. The MOOA, said Ginsberg, would take "best practices" a step further and utilize it to realize substantial cost savings.

Ginsberg pointed to the realm of strategic planning. He said that thanks to to the best practices concept, hundreds of schools currently use virtually identical strategic plans. Despite the similarities, however, these plans cost each school hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars to develop. The MOOA would formalize the already extant cooperation by developing one plan that could be used by all colleges. Ginsberg estimates that had the MOOA planning concept been in use over the past ten years, schools would have saved more than a half billion dollars.  "One way to look at it," he said, "Is that through their tuitions students paid about $500 million for strategic planning that might have been used for curricular development or other educational purposes."  The MOOA plan, he declared, would end such wasteful duplication.

There's a deeper lesson in the emergence of groupthink implicit in "best practice" that  I wish to explore, but I'm saving it for another day.  Too nice a day to spend it all ranting at a keyboard.  For the present, let me cite all the Vision 2020 strategic plans in place before Northern Illinois University got around to one.

According to Ginsberg, another place where the MOOA concept is immediately relevant is "branding."  Following contemporary business models, hundreds of schools pay consulting firms hundreds of thousands of dollars to help them improve their "brand" identities. The results of these expensive individual efforts often seem quite similar. For example, after a major and costly rebranding effort, the University of Chicago School of Medicine declared that its brand would be "University of Chicago Medicine." After working with consultants, the Johns Hopkins Medical School decided that its brand would be "Johns Hopkins Medicine." And, the University of Pennsylvania Medical School was helped by its consultants to coin the brand, "Penn Medicine." A MOOA might have identified a brand that all medical schools would be happy to use, such as "[School's Name] Medicine."

No kidding.  Three manifestations of the same tagline, and ZooConn spent a lot of money redesigning their dog to come up with an animal that looks a lot like one Northern Illinois University gave up in its redesign.

Ginsberg has named his MOOA "Administeria," and plans to begin operations in early 2014.  He admits that widespread use of MOOAs could result in substantial unemployment among college bureaucrats. However, he noted that their skill sets make them qualified for work in such burgeoning industries as retail sales, hospitality, food services, event planning, and horticultural design.

Note -- nothing involving power tools.

DYSFUNCTION, WITHOUT KINSHIP TIES.

Thus the story line for more than a few academic novels.  Its absence, as far as the lobbying organization for business as usual in the academy is concerned, may be grounds for collegiality policies.

Clearly, [Southern Connecticut State deanlet Richard] Riccardi said, collegiality matters -- an idea outside research supports. Belonging to a collegial department figured higher in faculty satisfaction than did work and family policies, clear tenure policies and compensation, according to one cited study.

Makes sense: outside of a few top departments, the antagonism of a colleague is unlikely to result in any kind of intellectual development for the other members of the department. It's funny, though, how a study offered by administrators only hints at the forces at work to erode the very thing that's getting in the way of the faculty getting along.

As an adjective, “ 'collegial' indicates the way a group of colleagues take collective responsibility for their work together with minimal supervision from above.” Civility indicates politeness and courtesy, demonstrated by collaboration, speaking in a professional and respectful manner toward others and “stepping up” when needed, among other similar traits.

The past 20 years or so of higher education have witnessed the intrusion and expansion of supervision from above, all too often tossing onto the professors' desks responsibilities that have nothing to do with the higher learning.

Non-collegial faculty consistently fail to demonstrate these traits, [retired Southern Connecticut recreation and leisure studies professor Robert] Cipriano said. “It’s not a bad day. It’s consistent behavior, over and over again, when that person is labeled a ‘jerk.’ ” Riccardi said uncivil behavior is on the rise, due to economic uncertainty, the “classic” mandate to do more with less, and less motivated and prepared students.

Catch the elision of administrative bloat in that last sentence. That "classic mandate" is a gross misunderstanding of what productivity is all about; there's no attempt to unpackage more involvement of senior professors in the core courses from more forms to fill in for the various hand-holders in student "services", and more blanket electronic mails with lengthy attachments from headquarters; and those "less motivated and prepared students" are present because somebody somewhere either failed to motivate or to prepare them, or failed to deny their admission and call out the schools that didn't serve them properly.

Developing definitions is only half the battle, however; they then have to be shared with faculty as expectations in faculty handbooks, collective bargaining agreements and contracts, Cirpriano said. Discussions of collegiality should be proactive, not just reactive or punitive.

Process, nuance, buzzwords, another layer of management. Expect failure.

SENIOR SIGNING DAY.

It's usually a media event for the few kids who sign with a sports team.  Milwaukee's Hope Christian High School does the event way better.  As Charlie Sykes puts it, "No rent-a-jock athletic decision media event can compare to this."  Enjoy.

THE CASE FOR SENIOR NONCOMS.

Michael Nelson, professor of political science at Rhodes College in Virginia, calls out his senior colleagues for failing to staff a three-semester sequence on values as understood by Western religions.

Classicists regularly step outside their training to lead colloquiums on the Hebrew scriptures.  Philosophers strain to teach the Inferno. Theologians herd their students though the Iliad and the Republic. Political scientists struggle to make sense of Calvin.

Regrettably, however, a disappointingly small proportion of the Search faculty consists of full professors: only six out of the 30 who are teaching in the program this fall have attained that rank.  All too often, department chairs and other tenured senior faculty shunt the responsibility off on junior colleagues at the very stage of their careers when they most need to establish themselves in their disciplines and can least afford the time to get up to speed on entirely new subjects.

It amazes me how enthusiastically my young colleagues dive into Search anyway and how much satisfaction they derive from doing so — even though every minute that, say, an American historian spends learning about Christine de Pizan is a minute away from finishing that book on sexual politics in the Jackson administration.  We senior faculty who have risen as high in rank and job security as we can ought not to force our untenured junior colleagues into that position.

He's right, saddling new scholars with this assignment is faculty abuse. He doesn't recognize just how abusive it is.

I’m one of the six exceptions and have been for as long as I’ve been a full professor.  I think I can say, without fear of contradiction, that at the outset no one was more of an amateur than I — certainly in the modern sense of the word and, I like to think, in the original one as well. Fear of embarrassment prevents me from revealing the full extent of my ignorance when I began teaching Search in 1991. Suffice it to say that 20 years of studying the American presidency and related subjects had seldom led me into the by­ways of the Deuteronomistic history or the musings of the Epicureans.

Perhaps not, but 20 years in the classroom are the way to develop the professorial instinct to distinguish the ill-formed from the completely confused student questions, and the research savvy to make some of the connections back to that early philosophy.  There's a reason professors generally have the Ph.D. rather than some other sort of doctorate.

My first year teaching Search was the sort of experience that, while you are having it, you hope you will laugh about someday. I prepared feverishly for each class, trying to keep Jeroboam and Rehoboam straight and thumbing futilely through the Iliad to find the parts about Achilles' heel and the Trojan horse. Professors joke about staying a chapter ahead of their students, but what do you do when despite your best efforts they seem to stay at least a page ahead of you?

What you do is manage as best you can and treasure the odd mo­ment when it seems that perhaps you belong at the head of the table after all. I vividly remember the joy I took when, as a political sci­entist, I was able to offer insights into Achilles, Odysseus, and Aeneas that might not have occurred to a classicist, and even resulted in articles in two political science journals.

You also revel in your status as a fellow searcher with your students. One of our goals in the course is to encourage students to take serious­ly their own searches for meaning, and one of the things we always tell them in furtherance of that goal is that the faculty are searching with them.  That’s especially true when we annually read and reread works that have endured through the centuries because they speak to people differently at different stages of life.

Precisely. And it's a task better entrusted to more experienced faculty, for the same reason the recruit's first encounter with the military is a senior noncom.  (Yeah, I'm repeating myself, but no matter how many times I explain this, some goldbrick figures out how to screw it up.)

The lesson for senior faculty in all disciplines, I think, is that any of us are capable of teaching in courses like Search and that those who choose not to do so are cheating themselves by not taking the plunge, as well as relying too much on our junior colleagues.  After all, the issues that engage students as they read these works are the issues that engage the amateur even more than the specialist.

As for the senior faculty who have used their secure status to burrow deeper into their specializations rather than stretch out — well, if my experience is any guide, they would be personally enriched beyond measure.  They’re missing a chance to learn from the works they teach, from their colleagues in other disciplines, and even from their students.

The lesson for the institution is to encourage senior faculty to participate, starting with a year of partial course relief in return for sitting in on colleagues’ versions of the course.  At my dream version of Rhodes, being invited to teach in Search would be regarded by senior faculty as something to aspire to, a crown to one’s career.  Retiring without having done so would be regarded as a mark of incompleteness, even inadequacy.

I like it. Puts to shame most of the silliness that comes from the offices of faculty development.

Let's get real radical: nobody gets to screen for dean, provost, or president, without first having taught in a meaningful core sequence like Search.

LONDON'S LAW

In a Minding the Campus essay, retired NYU professor Herbert London contemplates the bitter fruits of access in higher education, irrespective of motivation or content.

The net effect is that many unqualified students enroll and rigorous academic standards have suffered. Instruction gravitates to the level of visible ability, thereby lowering standards across the board. Hence, easy money yields less intelligence than would otherwise be the case.

Yes, almost every professor over 50 would agree with this proposition, but it cannot be said. Nor is it easy to claim college isn't for everyone. It isn't, but try telling that to grandma who wants to see a grandchild with parchment in hand. This condition alone explains in large part why a nation with a 7.5 percent unemployment rate will soon have 1.5 million well paid computer engineering jobs left unfilled. We don't produce students with the skills for these positions; we don't maintain rigorous standards and we spend too much for too little received in the way of performance outcomes.

Thus do universities fail at their mission.

THE CASE FOR MARKET TESTS.

Last fall, Sarah Kliff at The Washington Post produced charts alleging excess expenditures in the neighborhood of $750bn on unnecessary health care.

You can see there are a whole bunch of sources for unnecessary spending that range from inefficient services to excess services and administrative costs.

Let's look at this followup and then play "Find The Missing Argument".

Obamacare doesn’t seem to do much to solve any of these problems. Reforms like these would make more sense.

The reforms referred to are procedural and organizational reforms. There's some of that in Obamacare, although the possibility that Obamacare serves as a lame stalking horse for single payer continues to rattle around in my mind.  Nowhere, though, is anybody proposing that patients pay their providers more directly for services.  Thus there's less hope of markets discovering prices.

TWO IN THE TOP TEN.

A panel of ESPN sports pundits identifies the twenty greatest coaches in the NFL.

At number 1, Vince Lombardi, with titles in 1961, 1962, 1965, 1966, and 1967.  "I'm going to be on your ass because you need to be pushed."

At number 10, Curly Lambeau, with titles in 1929, 1930, 1931, 1936, 1939, and 1944.  One other coach also has six titles, George Halas at number 4.  Bear fans: throw six quarters in the hopper and I'll add the link.

I'm slowly modifying a Packer flag in the style of a Civil War regimental flag, with the title years expressed in iron-on numerals.  The only other years I have to add since 1967 are 1996 and 2010.

It's no wonder that when Packer fans change a lightbulb, they first have to talk about how much better the old lightbulb was.

OPTING OUT.

A higher income raises the opportunity cost of goofing off.  It also permits its earner to purchase the same bundle of goods and have more time to enjoy it.  Come summertime, it seems necessary to review these ideas.  Maybe it's not about economic theory, but in the dead of winter Via Media suggested that employers consider how incentives matter.

Not surprisingly, a large salary is at the top of every employee’s wish list, with 88 percent of respondents ranking it as a key factor in job satisfaction. But beating out “being able to make a difference” and “challenging work” was a flexible schedule, with 59 percent naming it a key perk.

Sometimes, it's in the aggregation of individual decisions that social change takes place, Juliet Schor's efforts to reiterate traditional arguments from the left.

The first benefit of hours reductions is a significant reduction in unemployment. Maintaining balance in the labour market has always been through reduction in hours of work. Without the advances of a shorter workweek, vacation time, earlier retirement and later labour force entrance, the economies of the OECD would never have attained the "golden age" of high employment that prevailed after the 1930s depression. Between 1870 and 1970, hours of work fell roughly in half. These countries have re-balanced the labour market by re-distributing work to make its allocation fairer. We need shorter hours because it is unrealistic to count on growth in GDP to absorb all this current and future "surplus" labour. Rich countries never grow that rapidly. So the austerity economics that says work longer and retire later has it exactly wrong.benefit of hours reductions is a significant reduction in unemployment. Maintaining balance in the labour market has always been through reduction in hours of work. Without the advances of a shorter workweek, vacation time, earlier retirement and later labour force entrance, the economies of the OECD would never have attained the "golden age" of high employment that prevailed after the 1930s depression. Between 1870 and 1970, hours of work fell roughly in half. These countries have re-balanced the labour market by re-distributing work to make its allocation fairer. We need shorter hours because it is unrealistic to count on growth in GDP to absorb all this current and future "surplus" labour. Rich countries never grow that rapidly. So the austerity economics that says work longer and retire later has it exactly wrong.

Note: a secular decline in working hours beginning in that nasty Gilded Age of capitalist expansion and the Long Depression.  I'm not so sure how reduced working hours necessarily reduce energy use, as all that increased employment will bring increased commuting in its train.  The third benefit she claims, though, is pure income effect.

The second benefit of shorter hours is the time itself. As a growing movement of "downshifters" attests, short hour lifestyles allow people to build stronger social connections, maintain their physical and mental health, and engage in activities that are creative and meaningful. Time is especially valuable in rich countries where material needs can be met for everyone, and deprivation is caused by mal-distribution of income and wealth.

I'm surprised a Guardian essay doesn't include a gripe gripe about how in those rich countries people with additional leisure time might be buying even more toys or otherwise engaging in socially unproductive activities. Maybe getting the incentives to align is more important.  Reclaiming Our Time illustrates one way in which that alignment is occurring.

For those of us working too many hours, one way to take back our time is to substitute future raises with equivalent increases in vacation hours. Many employers are willing to make this substitution because it costs them no more, and for a budget-constrained organization, giving raises in vacation hours may be easier to handle than monetary raises. Surveys indicate that 85 percent of people who have chosen to work fewer hours are very happy with the decision.

The key, though, is for employers and employees alike to treat vacation as vacation, none of this checking your smart-phone for work messages every half hour, into the night, ad infinitum.

The new consensus from the left appears to be the 21 hour workweek.

Twenty-one hours is close to the average that people of working age in Britain spend in paid work and just a little more than the average spent in unpaid work. Experiments with shorter working hours suggest that they can be popular where conditions are stable and pay is favourable, and that a new standard of 21 hours could be consistent with the dynamics of a decarbonised economy.

There is nothing natural or inevitable about what’s considered ‘normal’ today. Time, like work, has become commodified – a recent legacy of industrial capitalism. Yet the logic of industrial time is out of step with today’s conditions, where instant communications and mobile technologies bring new risks and pressures, as well as opportunities. The challenge is to break the power of the old industrial clock without adding new pressures, and to free up time to live sustainable lives.

Is that the same industrial clock under which the working day dwindled in length prior to widespread union organising and the Fair Labor Standards Act?

To steal borrow an Insta Pundit line, all is proceeding as I have foreseen.

BLACK IRISH.

It's not clear whether Joan Walsh's What's the Matter with White People? Why We Long for a Golden Age That Never Was is an attempt to shore up MSNBC watchers, get the last word in a family argument, or disguise an autobiography as journalistic sociology.  Book Review N^o. 10 will explain each of those assertions.

MASS PRODUCTION AT HOME.

At the recent Circus Modelers convention in Baraboo, one of the modelers was demonstrating a 3-D printer.

This 3-D printer uses a roll of plastic material that's laid down only in the project itself.  Some of the items it previously produced are available for sale.  There are wagons available in a variety of scales.

It takes a few hours for the figure of an air-calliope player to emerge.  The printer, however, sells for about $1600.  I don't know what design program the operator uses.

A finished air-calliope player (1/24 actual size) is for sale.  In the background is a 1/48 wagon and team with a rubber mule assisting.  Note at lower left a finished 1/87 air calliope wagon and team.

WHY IT MATTERS.

Something is wrong in higher education when a student who applies to unnamed highly regarded universities views acceptances by Penn State and Michigan as somehow failing, or being hard done by.  It's up to the student to make the best of the situation.

Rather than obsessing about our school’s rank, we should work to prove ourselves worthy of the education that we will receive. The point of getting a college education is to prepare oneself to be an engaged citizen. We have to make sure to do our part for society. Don’t dwell on rejection: make the most of where you end up.

It's also up to the universities to challenge their matriculants: with excess demand for slots in the hundred institutions claiming to be among the top 20, there's no deficiency in getting a Harvard, or an Urbana, reject.

MEANINGLESS BRANDING.

University taglines are stupid.  As are contemporary corporate names.

Until 1988, Ameritas was insurance company Bankers Life of Nebraska. The name conjures oak-paneled board rooms and rock-solid finances. Then I suppose a consulting company made the company ashamed of itself, and you got Ameritas. I would buy a hamburger from an Ameritas but never life insurance.

You and I could name a hundred companies that threw away their heritages for meaningless names or collections of capital letters: KFC (Kentucky Fried Chicken), 3M (Minnesota Mining & Manufacturing), Exxon (Standard Oil), IHOP (International House of Pancakes), Altria (Philip Morris), UAL (United Air Lines and later Allegis), CN (Canadian National).

I question what they got for it. At the very least, a name should tell you what a company does or suggest a reason why you should trust it.

The post argues that BNSF Railway is not descriptive of the company's tradition or service area, in the way that Burlington Northern Railroad or Santa Fe or Atlantic and Pacific (you could look it up) are.

CLOSE READING.

To commemorate Saul Bellow's birthday, Professor Margaret Soltan analyzes a passage from Herzog.  It's in the details, and it requires understanding of possible influences on the author.  Go, read, and understand.

YOU DON'T HAVE TO GO TO SHEBOYGAN.

Among the Grub Street Guide to 41 Hyper-Regional Sandwiches is the Sheboygan Double Brat.

The researchers didn't finish their homework, as they left out the Point Drive In, a Karlson family tradition since the beginning of the Vince Lombardi era.  They correctly noted, though, that a Sheboygan style double brat has grilled onions on it.  The Cold Spring Shops version has sauerkraut, a heresy the Superintendent acquired in Milwaukee.  (They're catching on in Illinois, too.)

If you want to cook your own, here are Johnsonville's instructions, and mine.  That roll is an honest-to-City Bakery hard roll.  I load up with a supply at the beginning of the summer.  The Jewel bolillo rolls will hold up well enough in an emergency.  Hamburger buns are too flimsy.

SPONTANEOUS SURVEILLANCE.

A government capable of tracking all internet and telephone communications is a government capable of  all sorts of abuses.  It's also a bureaucracy, suggesting there will be some sort of pattern to its abuses.

Private citizens and social networks are not subject to those institutional constraints.  "I surmise the days of 'Live and let live' and 'Mind your own business' are over."

Perhaps so.  Those are bourgeois conventions.  So nineteenth century.  And the further constraint, that people be discreet about what they share in public, is also gone, to the particular annoyance of train passengers.  (Read the "Sound Off" section of any Metra newsletter and educate yourself.)

A husband allegedly bragging about cheating on his wife has been publicly shamed on Facebook, after a train passenger overheard his conversation.

The picture of the man, who had been traveling on a train from Philadelphia with friends, has since been shared more than 183,000 times since a Pennsylvania mother posted in on Wednesday.

'If this is your husband, I have endured a 2 hour train ride from Philadelphia listening to this loser and his friends brag about their multiple affairs and how their wives are too stupid to catch on. Oh please repost...' Steph Strayer wrote on Wednesday.

The good news, though, is that a rediscovery of bourgeois manners in public might be an evolutionarily stable strategy.

Twitter and Facebook are developing informal mores and codes of conduct, just like trains and other public places in the real world. Whether we like these codes is another question: They can be as harsh and as unjust as anything humans develop to police each other. But increasingly, they’re codes we’ll have to reckon with.

We'll know that social progress is taking place when words like "harsh and unjust" give way to "likely to reduce conflict".

CIRCUS DAY.

In the days before any kind of broadcast media, or tax-supported zoos, the big entertainment of the year was the arrival of the itinerant circus.  It was a hard-knock life (still is) and a marvel of logistics.

Townspeople would have plenty of advance warning that the circus was coming, because the advertising car, in town in advance with its brigade of tack-spitters, would put big posters on any vertical surface that would allow it.

The Head Brothers Circus is a 1/12 actual size model of a 25 car train circus.  It was begun as a modeling project by Herbert Head, and his children and grandchildren continue the tradition of setting it up and tearing it down in real time, just like the real travelling circus did.

Before dawn, the train would arrive in town and position the cars at a convenient road crossing for the wagons to be moved to the show lot.

The cars containing the horses, elephants, and possibly camels and a walrus, have not yet been switched out.  At far left are the four wagons of the dining department along with the mechanical stake driver.  The travelling circuses ability to move up to a thousand people, feed them, set up the show grounds, then take it all down and move it to the next town, intrigued even representatives of the Prussian military.

SEPARATING EQUILIBRIUM

At graduation time, the dean at Pioneer Valley Community made the case for a supportive academic culture, no matter the name on the institution.

Donors who had funded various scholarships attended and saw the students they had funded. We all got to hear the success stories of the students -- some single Moms, some recent immigrants, some people in suits and some in painter’s pants and sad-looking sneakers.  Many of the students had already made plans to transfer to some pretty impressive four-year schools, and they were grateful for the chance.

It’s a gratifying event, and I was happy to be there. But at some level, no matter how generous the donors, it was only possible because of the strength of the underlying institution.  Hollow out the community college, and the transfer route will close. Take away enough operating funding, and all the scholarships in the world won’t matter.

---

Some of the three dollar people will surprise you.  I never get tired of the success stories. They’re tributes to hard work, of course, and to the sacrifices of families, friends, and children. But they’re also affirmations, however unintentional, of the nobler, more inclusive side of American culture. A side that remembers that you can’t always tell who has the next great idea just by looking.

---

I’ve got nothing against research universities; I got my doctorate at one. But it would be nice if we could shift the public discussion a bit from the “climbing walls” and luxury dorms of residential universities.  More American undergrads attend community colleges than research universities. The funding issues here aren’t about out-of-control costs. At some level, it’s hard not to think they’re about writing off the three dollar people

"Three-dollar people" is a reference to the clientele that paid $3 to watch Detroit Pistons away games on a big screen at the Auburn Hills Palace.  Let's say that some of those fans were somewhat more badly behaved than Piston fans who could come up with the $25 and up for a live game.

SUCCESS AS AN ECONOMICS MAJOR.

Professor Newmark offers advice to incoming collegians.  Whether at Harvard or North Carolina State or Northern Illinois, it's on point.  I'd add only two things: take the second price theory course ("Intermediate Microeconomics" usually) as soon as you are eligible, and add George Stigler's Theory of Price and any edition of Alfred Marshall's Principles of Economics to your supplemental (almost typed recreational, that would be a plus) reading.  For students thinking about an economics Ph.D. (as an incoming freshman???) there's a list of unresolved research questions in economics early on in Marshall that's still topical.

OUCH.

Victor Davis Hanson, on the bitter fruits of feel-good progressivism.

Obama always has a unique insight into a disturbing pathology among wealthy white liberal elites, who often seek, in condescending fashion, to promote particular aspiring minority candidates into positions of power and influence by virtue of their profile rather than past record. Hence the prep-schooled Barry Dunham returned to the more exotic Barack Obama, an authentic enough “other” fresh out of Rev. Wright’s Church, but also the pet of the Ivy League.

It gets grouchier from there.

Obama brilliantly threaded the multicultural, Ivy-League, prep-school, affirmative action, just like us-sorta, yuppie needle. I’ll let you decide whether wealthy liberals practice such racialist paternalism because of feelings of guilt, because of their intrinsic dislike of the NASCAR/Sarah Palin working and middle classes, or as a sort of medieval exemption — the huge “Obama for President” sign on the lawn of the Palo Alto professor means never having to put your kids in schools where some are bused in from East Palo Alto. But what is absolutely non-controversial is that Obama’s prior record as a university undergraduate, a Harvard Law Review editor, a Chicago law lecturer, an Illinois legislator, and a U.S. senator was as undistinguished as his efforts to obtain those posts were absolutely dazzling.

It matters, though, when The Anointed get an inexperienced man with politics to their liking in a position where substantive politics matter.

Obama’s record as president? There is pretty much nothing other than ramming through an unpopular takeover of health care, leveraged by political bribes and deemed unworkable even before it is enacted. A “train wreck” is how its author in the Senate dubbed his own legislative offspring.  Otherwise it was golf, down time, and free rein for zealous subordinates to “fundamentally transform America” by any means necessary, usually through administrative fiat and subversions of the vast and always growing bureaucracy.

Obama is now somewhat shocked that a few in the media hold him responsible for lots of bad things that his administration did: destroyed the reputation of the IRS; had a rogue EPA director invent a phony persona; let the HHS secretary shake down PR money from corporations to sell Obamacare; turned the Justice Department into a veritable Stasi enterprise going after the phone records of reporters; reduced the State Department into an arm of the 2012 Obama reelection effort; and helped erode the reputations of both Hillary Clinton and Susan Rice, who advanced campaign narratives about Benghazi that were not just untrue, but were demonstrably false the moment they were presented.

Where Mr Hanson's analysis breaks down is in his analysis of the Perpetual Campaign that follows.

Why should he suddenly be held accountable in a way he never was prior? He signed up to be a transformational president who was above politics, not someone subject to the vagaries of Washington scandals.

The result of the serial dishonesty is that Obama almost immediately reverted to his natural campaign mode, the soaring rhetoric and non-traditional persona that won him everything on the guarantee that there would be no audit, no assessment, no final appraisal. In other words, Obama never really became president of the United States. He simply kept running for the office against “them” even when he is now “them” holding the highest office. So Pavlovian was his campaign mode that he never quite stopped to wonder why he was running against himself — now damning the very abuses of power that he committed, upset only that someone might be disturbed about a record in a manner that they never were at Harvard, in the Senate, or during his first term.

There's no reversion to campaign mode here. It's to be expected of ward-heeler politicians. "There's a symbiosis between desperate people who like having a ward-heeler "fighting for them" and a ward-heeler who mau-maus the rest of the polity about the continued parlous condition of his or her constituents." Watch for more such behavior as additional evidence of government malfeasance trickles out.

PLATO, ARISTOTLE, LOMBARDI.

The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel interviews Packer alumni, about whether Vince Lombardi's methods would still work, 100 years from the date of his birth. "Lombardi would be successful today, his players maintain, because his coaching foundation was built on fundamentals, hard work, discipline, execution and the pursuit of perfection — building blocks that never go out of style."  It's about saying no and upholding standards.

There is no denying Lombardi was a task-master, a stern man who relentlessly demanded more from his players than they thought they could give. At times, they hated him for it.

But with few exceptions, they put up with it because the payoff — victories and titles and glory — far outweighed the pain of grass drills and the humiliation of Lombardi's stinging rebukes.

Retrospectively, though, too many Lombardi "imitators" make too much of his one-liners, and too little about his efforts to get to know the motive powers of his players. "A master psychologist, he knew instinctively when to get in a player's face and when to pat him on the fanny or tousle his hair." The real nasty people were elsewhere in professional football, and those nasty people don't have the Super Bowl trophy named for them, let alone many Lombardi Trophies in their teams' offices.

Lombardi's teams were superior, quite simply, because they blocked and tackled better than did the other teams. He drilled his players, over and over, until execution became second nature and mental mistakes were all but eliminated.

"He would be successful in any era," said UW-Milwaukee basketball coach Rob Jeter, whose father, Bob, played cornerback for Lombardi. "The fundamentals are constant over time. Being a professional, how you handle yourself, those messages are all still good."

Furthermore, whatever Lombardi demanded of his players, he demanded of himself. He was in the trenches with them, exhorting and imploring and teaching.

[Safety Tom] Brown said Lombardi had an astonishing grasp of his offense and knew every assignment for every play for every position. He took no shortcuts as a coach.

"I think the first thing everybody noticed was what a hard worker he was," [offensive tackle Bob] Skoronski said. "When we got ready to open the season, we were going to be working on the power sweep for hours, not for minutes. He was 100% committed on his part with time and energy.

"I can't imagine that part of it is any different in today's game."

I once had a student inquire whether we would ever stop thinking about comparative advantage. Nope: if you get opportunity cost, specialization, substitution, and arbitrage you will get economics.

Where do you suppose I got that from?

FOR A BRIGHT SMILE, SAY CHEESE!

Seriously.

Researchers found that the fermented dairy product made the mouth more alkaline, which in turn reduced the need for dental treatment.

They also discovered that cheese created a protective film around teeth.

Make mine aged Wisconsin cheddar.

OBAMASCLEROSIS.

The latest labor market report looks like "slow but steady" economic growth.  But manufacturing growth is lagging.  And Professor Newmark's mentor, Edward Leamer, says, "It's not a recovery. It's not even normal growth. It's bad."

VISIT THE COLD SPRING SHOPS.

Not mine.  The ones in Cold Spring, New York.  I Ride The Harlem Line strayed to the Hudson Line for a photo essay.  A New Yorker took a getaway day there, by train from Grand Central.  On one perusal of the business directory, I found several outlets selling those wooden children's train sets.

IT'S NOT WHAT YOU SAY, IT'S WHO YOU SAY IT TO.

Lynne Kiesling's "America's surveillance state: Can you hear me now?" links to several instructive sources on what metadata surveillance is all about.  Reason's Nick Gillespie offers responses to several simple arguments defenders of Our President, or of National Security, might offer.

I commend a point-counterpoint on surveillance activities by business of its consumers.  Slate's Amy Webb notes we consent to it all the time.  Reason's Declan McCullach suggests it's for the good.

There's a small part of both essays I'd like to expand upon.  Think about the canonical price-takers' market, which operates under conditions that can be as stringent as complete and perfect information.  Actually existing markets operate far from those conditions, although contemporary databases move them closer.  Here's Ms Webb, contemplating getting delayed with only rain clouds overhead. "I’d have been soaking wet, lost, and clutching a piece of notebook paper covered in illegible shopping lists and reminders."  Mr McCullach has a longer elaboration.

It's easy to complain about a subjective loss of privacy. It's more difficult to appreciate how information swapping accelerates economic activity. Like many other aspects of modern society, benefits are dispersed, amounting to a penny saved here or a dollar discounted there. But those sums add up quickly.

Markets function more efficiently when it costs little to identify and deliver the right product to the right consumer at the right time. Data collection and information sharing emerged not through chance but because they bring lower prices and more choices for consumers. The ability to identify customers who are not likely to pay their bills lets stores offer better deals to those people who will.

Tradeoffs, everywhere.

All the same, perhaps increased public awareness of governmental snooping will raise consciousness about corporate snooping.  Take those rewards cards.  Please.  A shopper who wishes to take advantage of all the offers all the stores offer has to schlep around a little card for each store and remember to scan it.  And it's annoying to have to play Twenty Questions at the checkout counter in order to make a small purchase.  It used to be that the weight of the currency and coin exceeded the weight of the Green Stamps.  Now the weight of the rewards cards exceeds the weight of the one debit card (which itself is probably supplying purchase tracking information to somebody.)

THINK OF THE STARVING ARMENIANS.

Or the Indians, or the Africans, or the Hungarians.  Thus did generations of parents guilt-trip generations of children into cleaning their plates.  Now comes Pope Francis, calling attention to the sin of wastefulness.

“This culture of waste has made us insensitive even to the waste and disposal of food, which is even more despicable when all over the world, unfortunately, many individuals and families are suffering from hunger and malnutrition,” the Pope said.

“Once our grandparents were very careful not to throw away any leftover food. Consumerism has led us to become used to an excess and daily waste of food, to which, at times we are no longer able to give a just value.

“Throwing away food is like stealing from the table of the poor and the hungry,” he said.

Since taking office in March, Pope Francis has called for the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics to do more to defend the poor and to practise greater austerity itself.

The most logical austerity for well-off parents and well-off eaters might be to put less stuff on their plates. A great deal of restaurant food gets thrown away because the portions exceed the capacity of all but the most ravenous stomachs. Smaller portions might also help at home.  (And what good does it do a hungry Armenian for a prosperous American to clean his plate?)

How much obesity started with children guilt-tripped into cleaning their plates?  Less stuff on a plate, less struggle to finish it.  Perhaps leaving the table neither hungry nor full is the best strategy.

MISPLACED CREATIVITY.

Summertime, when construction delays make your journey even longer in order to give you the same travel time you had before the construction started.

David Levinson found this gem on xkcd three construction seasons ago, along with a short Slashdot feature on the merits of traffic-light timing.

PUSHING ON A STRING.

In introductory macroeconomics, forty years ago, the received wisdom about fiscal and monetary policy had fiscal policy as the throttle, and monetary policy as the brake.

Perhaps that simplification is still valid.  Consider Edward Lazear's latest analysis of the unemployment numbers.

The Fed may draw two inferences from the experience of the past few years. The first is that it may be a very long time before the labor market strengthens enough to declare that the slump is over. The lackluster job creation and hiring that is reflected in the low employment-to-population ratio has persisted for three years and shows no clear signs of improving.

The second is that the various programs of quantitative easing (and other fiscal and monetary policies) have not been particularly effective at stimulating job growth. Consequently, the Fed may want to reconsider its decision to maintain a loose-money policy until the unemployment rate dips to 6.5%.

There are other influences at work, including unemployment and disability benefits, to depress labor-force participation. Perhaps, though, the traditional Keynesian argument in favor of borrowing cheaply to build capital assets has bite.

NO TARGET IDENTIFICATION IN CHICAGO.

A nine-year-old boy is among the casualties from another night in Chicago.

The boy shouted from the backseat, "Mommy, I'm shot," and his mother drove him to Comer Children's Hospital, about a mile and a half away. He underwent surgery overnight for a gunshot wound to the chest and police said he was expected to survive.

Other children were in the car but they were not hit, police said.

The boy's mother told police she was driving near East 67th Street and South Evans Avenue around 5:30 p.m. Wednesday when she heard as many as five gunshots.

Police said someone on the street had either spotted the boyfriend in the front seat or recognized the red Aveo and opened fire, hitting the boy. The boyfriend fled the car as the mother drove to the hospital, police said.

Wednesday: eleven people shot, two fatally. In the fall, NBC will be releasing a Chicago P.D. drama to accompany Chicago Fire. Mayor Emanuel made a cameo appearance in Chicago Fire. How much government failure will the new show have to conceal in order to get another cameo from the mayor?

IT'S WRIGLEYVILLE ON RAILS.

Britain's Trans-Pennine line from Manchester to Leeds via Huddersfield puts me in mind of what a ride on the Lehigh Valley might be if somebody saw fit to run Budd cars from Allentown to Ithaca.  There's a lot of old, idled factories, and abandoned railroad grades to speculate on, as well as enough hills and grades to slow the pace of the trains.

There are also a lot of modern-day brew-pubs up in those hills, and letting the West Yorkshire Passenger Transport Authority do the driving doesn't sit well with the locals.

The rail ale trail runs over the Diggle route from Dewsbury to Stalybridge and encouraged real ale drinkers to take the train to sample the various brews on offer at pubs along the Pennine route. The popularity of the trail increased after it was featured in a TV programme fronted by James May and Oz Clarke.

However, the trail has been hijacked by hen and stag parties or other all male or female groups, often wearing fancy dress, homing in on Marsden or Slaithwaite, and has led to drunkenness, abuse of residents, urinating and vomiting in the streets, and trespass on the railway line, causing delays to other services.

Now a number of pubs have said they will not be serving lager, shots, double or triple measures of spirits to deter binge drinkers. Fancy dress is also banned.

I wonder what qualifies as "fancy dress" in Yob Nation.  In Wrigleyville, or on the Jersey Shore, it's a clean t-shirt.

QUESTIONING THE CULT OF THE PRESIDENCY.

It's some cat-fight on the left, but there might be something more substantive at work.

[Jessica] Valenti now views the feminist situation is so dismal that the likeliest available consolation is the symbolic victory of electing a moderate Democratic female president.

After resisting the siren song of identity politics for one entire election cycle, namely 2008, where Valenti rejected the “vagina litmus test” when choosing Barack Obama over Hillary Clinton, Valenti is prepared to vote for a woman “not because I believe the female Democratic candidate…is guaranteed to be the most feminist, but because I’m just too fed up to do anything else.”

The trap of valorizing any woman, and particularly Clinton, as an icon and losing sight of her as a politician was foreshadowed by the “Texts from Hillary” phenomenon and her social media renaissance, as I noted in The Nation last year. There are arguments to be made for and against Clinton as a candidate, but the problem is less about her than about a voter’s self-indulgent investiture of the nation’s highest office with redemptive powers.

That's a lesson for voters, no matter what their political leaning.  The presidency is a job.  It is a mistake to attribute redemptive powers to the office, let alone to the individual holding the office, or to suggest (as Hillary! herself did) that conditions in the Republic would be improved by the election of Barack Obama.  Her concession-cum-endorsement had some litany of the Good Things that would follow, and no doubt, more than a few of the women of the fevered brow went right along with it.

As the essay concludes, better not to "go for a feel-good fix -- especially one that may be no fix at all".

NO PLANS TO CHANGE THE WORD-MARK OR THE TAG-LINE?

And yet Harvard sets the pace for higher education, adding people to its public affairs office.

Obviously Harvard has good reason to “advance its interests.” As the article explains, however, most colleges of similar size employ only 20 or 30 people. In the last five years HPAC has more than doubled.

The institution’s communications department now appears to be about the same size as its physics department.

Harvard Crimson offers the full story.

Juliana DeVries at The Torch suggests that the offices full of spinners might have the kind of thinking time the faculty is supposed to have, although in the case of administrators in public affairs and student affairs, that thinking often turns to some new contrivance to suppress free thought.

Unattributed photograph from The Fire.

Well, maybe somebody in communications has to re-examine the branding.  That building, decked out as it is, makes a great background for the Leibstandarte Musikkorps.

NOTHING MORE TO ADD.

University Diaries, on the fruits of beer-'n-circus.

If any particular enterprise with university in its name loses its seriousness, as expressed in a scholarly atmosphere, a liberal arts curriculum, and the training of students for higher study and for jobs, state legislatures and citizens will begin to question the special forms of financial support (there are many besides tax exemption, of course tax exemption is shorthand for them all) they are providing. Politicians will appropriate less and less money; alumni will offer fewer and fewer donations. Eventually, for the worst among our universities, students will stop applying.

Her focus is on the sports enterprise consuming the university president's job. Go, read, understand, and contemplate the generalization to the other ways in which higher education abdicates its seriousness.

THE SPILLOVER BENEFIT OF LIMITED TRAINS.

I'm reverting to ancient interurban terminology in the title.  A "local" car will stop on signal anywhere (street corner, road crossing, possibly in front of your house) upon the proper signal to the motorman.  An "express" car stops only at designated stations (possibly including some of the corners and crossings, perhaps designated by the notation f -- stops on signal, use light at night.)  A "limited" car has no conditional stops, and may be scheduled to stop only at a limited number of the designated stations.

In contemporary parlance, high-speed rail may be serving the function of the limited trains, without the necessity of trundling through city streets or sharing the elevated with rapid transit cars, generating traffic and enhancing property values to boot.

“The bullet train offers the possibility,” [UCLA economist Matthew] Kahn said, “that they effectively become suburbs of those communities. And become desirable to a subset of people who live there.”

Small cities need to be too far to drive to but too close to fly to the nearest “megacity.” Kahn used Philadelphia as an example. Right now, he said, a trip to New York City takes 80 minutes by high-speed Amtrak, which averages 150 miles per hour.

“If that became a half hour away because of the high-speed rail, I think Philadelphia home prices would jump sharply,” Kahn said. “There’d be much more demand to live there.”

Kahn and his co-author Siqi Zheng found bullet trains unintentionally created new suburbs called “sweet spots” about 60 to 470 miles from mega cities. Bullet trains provide big-city benefits despite the distance without “downsides like high housing costs, overcrowding, or air and water pollution,” Kahn said.

“It really comes down to," Kahn said, "is there a train that moves at 150 miles per hour" and are there good local connections to it? "Then there's certainly some potential there."

For instance, he added, “if the train moved fast enough between Cleveland and Chicago, I think there’d be similar gentrification in Cleveland.”

Not to count rivets, but Amtrak's trains don't average 150 mph on The Broad Way.  There are enough Clockers and Acela Expresses running between New York and Philadelphia to make possible a day of business in one city by a resident of another city.  There's also enough Hiawatha service to turn Milwaukee into a suburb of Chicago, even without the 100 mph speeds and 75 minute timings of the 1930s, and some of the wealthier banlieus of Chicago have non-stop service to and from the Loop (Naperville Zephyrs every 20 minutes for two hours each weekday morning, most notably, and the down Elburn 400 just after 5 pm.)  In New Jersey, Trenton, Princeton Junction, New Brunswick, and Metuchen enjoy enhanced property values from the presence of New Jersey Transit and its limiteds capable of speeds that don't delay the Acelas and Clockers.  Faster service between Cleveland and Chicago: possibly beneficial to property owners in Cleveland, but look for enhanced property values in Toledo or Elkhart and South Bend.

PORTE DES MORTS.

Wisconsin's Door County exists today as a place for Illinoisans to sink their money, although it got its name for Lake Michigan's propensity to sink ships.  The first European ship to sink, Rene-Robert Sieur de La Salle's Griffon, may have foundered near modern-day Charlevoix, Michigan.  (Wisconsin legend has her foundering off Washington Island, perhaps aided by Thor claiming Sister Bay for the Swedes.)  After protracted negotiations, a research team has permission to explore a wreck that may be Griffon.

WHEN JUPITER ALIGNS WITH VENUS.

All of this spring's rains have been good for the garden and the lawn, both of which were stressed most of last summer.  The timing of the overcast and the rain could have been better, though, as the triple conjunction of Mercury, Venus, and Jupiter took place above the clouds all of last week.

Mont-St.-Michel, France, 26 May 2013.  Thierry Legault photograph.

See more at Universe Today.

Jenny Williams of Geek Dad had clear viewing conditions from Arizona.

I'm pleased to report that Mercury hung around high enough until Monday, the 3rd, in order to show up about 45 minutes after sunset, and a few degrees higher than Venus, which came out nice and clear immediately after sunset.  Jupiter had already set, though.

The grass and vegetables are doing just fine, though.

WHEN YOU HAVE ELIMINATED THE IMPOSSIBLE.

Neurosurgeon Eben Alexander had all the scientific reasons to be skeptical of other peoples' near-death experiences.  Then he had a particularly bad case of meningitis, in the middle of which he might have had such an experience himself.  His after-recovery report appears in Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon's Journey into the Afterlife, today's Book Review N^o. 9.  Dr Alexander makes every effort to interpret his recollections in light of medical science's working hypotheses.  In his view, those explanations come up wanting.  Whether he has proof of heaven, or whether we're all still in the position of the New England agnostic who had "Gone to find out for myself" carved on his tombstone, is left to the reader as an exercise, or possibly as the Final Examination.

(Cross-posted to 50 Book Challenge.)

THE CASE FOR EMERGENT ORDER.

Don Boudreaux doesn't quite call the good-government types mystics of muscle.

Uncivilized people, children, violent criminals – these are people whose first instinct is to demand the seemingly simple solution of brute force to all problems, real and unreal.  But there’s surprisingly little difference between the base, instinctive attraction to force of such people and the base, instinctive attraction to force of academics, “activists,” pundits, and politicians who, dissatisfied with some aspect of the world, immediately propose to use force to remedy the problem.  Awareness of the great potential for society to progress undesigned, organically, bottom-up, spontaneously, piecemeal through a marvelously complex process of multitudinous tiny mutual adjustments – that is, awareness of the only process by which society has in fact progressed from subsistence and incivility to prosperity and civilization – is lost on the advocates of force, the most intellectually celebrated of whom call themselves (irony of irony) “Progressives.”

It's interesting how, in the comments, the dissenters focus on the necessity of someone to use force against violent criminals. As if that is reason to expand the ability of that someone to use force against anybody who makes a bad decision.

TO BE A UNIVERSITY, CONCENTRATE ON BEING A UNIVERSITY.

The University of Montana at Missoula makes repeated appearances at University Diaries as a case study of football players behaving badly.  The good news is that several faculty members have submitted a column to the local newspaper calling out their administrators for misguided expense-preference behavior.

The problem of low enrollment and the need for budget cuts stems not from bad luck or unfortunate circumstances, but rather from mismanaged budgetary calculations. In the interest of maintaining a quality curriculum that can attract students, the UM administration must assume responsibility for its poor decisions and balance the university budget by cutting its own administrative expenditures.

This effort can begin in several ways: UM should impose an immediate freeze on all bureaucratic searches, hires and salary increases. It should also cut all expensive and frivolous travel, receptions, as well as unnecessary administrative positions.

An example of the latter is the university's recently hiring of a vice president for integrated communications at an annual salary of $147,000 to "manage" news and information. In the wake of a budget slashed by millions, is it not reasonable to expect that the UM president – who at an annual salary of $289,466 is the highest-paid public official in Montana – speak on behalf of the university he was hired to lead and not rely on another individual to speak on his behalf? And is it not sensible and ethical for the UM administration to use this $147,000 to save faculty positions and the classes that have been eliminated?

Another example is the costly "rebranding" of the university and its subsequent adoption of the motto "thrive." First, there is no objective evidence to indicate that a new brand will attract more students to UM. Second, studies have repeatedly shown that students choose a university because it provides a rich, diverse and robust curriculum, and a productive and nationally recognized faculty. Instead of wasting money on superficial concerns, such as a new brand, the university administration should focus its efforts on improving the substance of the university, maintaining a strong curriculum, and keeping talented and hardworking professors in the classroom.

The recent instructional cuts were determined and implemented during the spring break while students and faculty were away from campus. Only after numerous letters, complaints and a rally did the UM administration scramble to assure the university community that it would organize task forces to discuss the budget in a more open and transparent fashion. This apparent change of heart came during the last week of the academic calendar when faculty and students were preoccupied with their final examinations, thus making their active participation nearly impossible.

It's the usual administrative abuses and usurpations.  I'm incapable of thinking like an administrator, and thus not able to explain why spending money to redesign the trademark or come up with a new (or borrow an existing) tagline is more important than, oh, fixing the roof in a building used for classrooms, or staffing the academic departments in line with the enrollments they currently are attempting to serve.

And people keep asking me if I intend to teach any courses or share office space after I've retired. What for, it only encourages the REMFs to think they can get good help for free?  There's been enough of that under the rubric of "downsizing" or "productivity" or "service" already.

PUT ASIDE THE FALSE GODS.

I'd collected a few observations from last fall, as the presidential election approached.  In light of the accumulating evidence that Our President is more interested in campaigning than in governing, and in the face of the rent-seekers crowding out the idealists, and the idealists becoming dizzy with success, it's useful to return to those observations.

Start with Sarah Hoyt, counseling possible Romney voters to beware the presidential cult.

None of us was born when this nonsense started. In a way it is a twentieth century brand of nonsense, at least for the United States, the idea that a superior man will be found who will embody the virtues of the republic and flawlessly lead the people. Let’s face it, until World War Two showed us the horrors behind the curtain, Western Civ had got all jiggy with genetic superiority and the idea of the great man. And even World War Two didn’t wipe it out completely. FDR was to an extent our Caesar, the man who was perfect to take the ship of state and sail it to a “progressive” future where only the enlightened would make decisions and all would be as it should be.

In light of recent developments, a subsequent passage is on point.

Obama is no Carter. And our situation is in many ways far worse than it was.

But it is good, most of all, because Obama was bad enough that he woke the force that protects this country. It had been asleep for seventy years, sleeping beneath the dark hill of statism. It is now up, and roused and active. It is moving. The tea parties are proof of that, as is the massive swatting the Lords of Political Correctness got over the Chick-fil-A business.

President Obama and his willing accomplices in the legacy press weren't enough to awaken an electoral majority. It's going to take hard work to keep awake people upon whom it is dawning that the President's willing accomplices in the Internal Revenue Service investigating ordinary people extends the threat of Overweening Government to everybody.

Whether it's enough to produce the outcome George Will desires also remains to be seen.

Someday, someone is going to seek the presidency by demystifying it. Many voters will be astonished by, and even be grateful for, the novelty of being addressed as adults.

There's an intriguing observation at Mahablog about the propensity of self-styled progressives to seek the Savior President.

What [Erik] Loomis is calling “Green Lantern presidencies” I’ve called the “magic candidate,” which is the syndrome that makes people believe all we have to do to counteract 50 years of relentless wingnut organizing is elect the right guy to be president.

Perhaps, if politically active people of all stripes abandon their presidential cargo cult, they might find a way to resolve some of the tussles that seem so intractable.

DUMBING DOWN, BEGINNING WITH HARVARD.

I was under the impression that lawyers had to be particularly quick and improvisational speakers, whether cross-examining the other side's witness, or conducting a congressional hearing, or defending a malefactor at a congressional hearing.  In the name of inclusion, though, a useful mind-training tool comes in for criticism, despite the fact that law students have traditionally feared being called upon.

For many in the Law School, the Socratic method is an outdated teaching style that reinforces gender imbalances in academia.

“Women take longer to process thoughts before they feel comfortable to say them out loud than men do,” [law student Jessica] Jensen said, adding that men feel more natural in that kind of classroom atmosphere.

Not in my experience, and I suspect the man-o-sphere could produce all sorts of horror stories about nagging ex-wives or chatterbox ex-girlfriends, whether in the law or not.

I'm intrigued that, even among the self-selected overachievers that make up a Harvard Law class, there's still some sort of peer pressure not to engage with the course.

Others suggested that the pressures of the classroom environment contribute to women not raising their hands as often as men. “Women are more likely to be called ‘gunners’ or ‘teacher’s pets’ if they participate in class,” said Jean N. Ripley, second-year Law School student and co-chair of the Shatter coalition.

In his study, [law graduate Adam] Neufeld, who said he supports the Socratic method, found that women assessed themselves significantly lower than men did, suggesting that different confidence levels may account for the disparity in classroom participation.

“Volunteering is a fairly socially aggressive act,” he said. “You are making all the other students listen to your comment, you think it is unbelievably important and something that no one else has thought of.”

Sometimes it is. Sometimes it isn't. If you're at Harvard Law, and fearful of saying something for fear of being thought a pudd'nhead, perhaps you have no business at Harvard Law.

“It’s an extreme form of sexism to say that essentially women in general aren’t capable of dealing with the demands of the Socratic method,” said Harvard Law professor Alan M. Dershowitz.

Dershowitz noted that some of the best Socratic students in his classes have been women. “You cannot generalize about men and women when it comes to their ability to be law students or practice law,” he said. “We have to keep inquiring as to why this disparity exists but we have to do it without divulging into stereotypes.”

Dean of the Law School Martha L. Minow pointed to an ongoing debate over the possibility of gendered dimensions of certain forms of argument and reasoning, saying that it “can’t be the case” that “certain types of reasoning are beyond the reach of a group of students.”

And many professors, including Dershowitz, defend the Socratic method as a critical component of the Harvard Law School education.

“The whole practice of law is Socratic,” he said. “You can’t be an effective advocate without mastering the Socratic method.”

Apparently, there are advocates who think differently. In an era of expanding reserve armies of unemployed lawyers, perhaps there's an opportunity for Harvard, or other law schools that aspire to high standing, to hold the line on standards.

PUBLIUS VERGILIUS MALTHUS.

There's a large stack of books finished, awaiting a review to be posted.  The logical thing to do, thus, is to get back to work by making Book Review N^o. 8 the recently-released Inferno by Dan Brown.

STOP ENABLING IGNORANCE. THE CARPENTERS WILL THANK YOU.

During the recent circus modelers showing in Baraboo, I participated in a conversation with some of the modelers whose day job is in the building trades.  Let's say that these men were less than happy with the preparation of aspiring laborers, helpers, and apprentices to do simple tasks like reading a tape measure or scaling up a dimension.  To make good use of a roofer's square, after all, requires a working knowledge of similar triangles.

One of them asked me if conditions were similar in higher education.  I noted that the most commonly offered course in the mathematics department was often junior high or high school algebra.

Whether I've brought the Carpenters and Joiners on board with sending high schools the bill for doing their work, or expanded the set of employers who require an associate's degree where previously a high school diploma suffices remains to be seen.