SERVE IT UP COLD. From Columbus, Ohio, Badgers 58, The One Year Wonders 53. I distinctly heard some booing, probably motivated by the home team's clock management in the final minute.

REGROUPING.


We've been back to our offices, and talked, and taken stock, and learned who among us will be facing empty seats or the memories of students from classes past. Several among the economics faculty were passing between buildings at the time of the shootings, or in class and locked down. (My insistence on breaking general education classes into smaller chunks is what turned Thursday afternoon into a research day where little progress occurred.) This first-person account from a colleague in the theater department is representative of what I've heard from others.

It was less than a year ago that our students stood in support of their contemporaries in Blacksburg.

Northern Star photo by Ben Woloszyn,

On Monday evening, the people of Virginia Tech stood for Northern Illinois.

Virginia Tech University photograph by Kim Peterson.

My first image reveals the theme for our resumption of the semester. FORWARD, TOGETHER FORWARD (from the Huskie Fight Song) is on the message boards of businesses everywhere in Greater DeKalb and Sycamore, and on street banners, including the new ones on the recently-boulevarded Annie Glidden Road south of the tracks. The image is available in a variety of formats, including displays for technologies that I'm learning about for the first time. The Chicago White Sox will wear black Northern Illinois caps for their first Cactus League game. The caps will be auctioned to raise money for our memorial fund.

Many of my colleagues have mentioned e-mails and phone calls from people long gone other ways, or from total strangers wishing to be helpful. Your efforts have been a great help. I also appreciate the calls and e-mails, and welcome the visitors to this site, and the links that have brought people here.

Selig sind, die da Leid tragen, denn sie sollen getröstet werden.

PROGRESS OF TWO GENERATIONS. Forty years ago, Alabama's governor George Corley Wallace carried several southern states as an independent candidate for president. He frequently fulminated against the eastern establishment, which he colorfully described as "pointy-headed pseudo-intellectuals" who scorn the ordinary man or woman. The governor didn't quite campaign as a segregationist, although many of his constituents were waiting for him to do so. Later in life, he apologized for some of his positions and made peace with many civil rights advocates. I wonder how the governor would react to a Peggy Noonan column that describes the Obamas as, well, read and judge for yourself.

Are the Obamas, at bottom, snobs? Do they understand America? Are they of it? Did anyone at their Ivy League universities school them in why one should love America? Do they confuse patriotism with nationalism, or nativism? Are they more inspired by abstractions like "international justice" than by old visions of America as the city on a hill, which is how John Winthrop saw it, and Ronald Reagan and JFK spoke of it?

Have they been, throughout their adulthood, so pampered and praised--so raised in the liberal cocoon--that they are essentially unaware of what and how normal Americans think? And are they, in this, like those cosseted yuppies, the Clintons?

TONIGHT'S RAILROAD READING. Here's an interesting Ryan Kertis photo scanned from Issue 234 of Passenger Train Journal.


Story here.

THE CHURCH BELLS CHIMED.


A week after Cruel February began, we paused for a tribute, during which bells both metal and electronic of DeKalb and Sycamore tolled for five minutes.


Our neighbors in Chicago were here, with video.

NASHE LUSHCHE. The Chinese buy diesel locomotives from the U.S. The Russians ought to join the Kazakhs and Estonians and do likewise. Perhaps these onetime Communist powers have other high-tech deficiencies.

The U.S. Navy successfully fired a ship-based SM-3 missile at a decaying satellite that was falling to Earth. The missile's make, the general location of the launch vehicle and the target are all known -- because the U.S. government has publicly stated these facts. Still, the Chinese and Russian governments are raising a fuss.

Contrast this operation with what happened a year ago January, when Beijing surprised the world by shooting down one of its weather satellites in a test of its antisatellite capabilities. Not only was the test unannounced, but it took China days to concede that it had happened. Because the satellite was destroyed at an altitude of approximately 850 kilometers, it left countless hazardous particles drifting in orbit that could harm future space flights.

The Chinese and Russian complaints are tied to broader political gamesmanship over the "militarization of space" and efforts to get Washington to sign an international treaty restricting space defenses. China appears to have an antisatellite missile program of its own, while Moscow opposes U.S. efforts to place missile-defense sites in Eastern Europe.

I liked Charlie Sykes's reference, this morning, to sphincters tightening in the Kremlin and the Forbidden City and in assorted pestholes in Asia Minor.

QUOTE OF THE DAY. Patrick Deneen, in Minding the Campus.

In a similar manner, our radicals in the Humanities reject not only the books they once taught, but the very idea of humanity. They consider all natural features of human beings to be mere constructions, social constructs that effectively cease to exist when they have been "deconstructed." Sex becomes gender, family becomes "living arrangement," community becomes "the social." They seek to do through deconstruction what our scientists attempt in the test tube: the transformation of humanity into something wholly different.

WE USED TO HAVE A CORE CURRICULUM. A professor at a nearby institution sees in its absence a reason for assessment.

Whereas the Best-Student Fetish asks who the great students are before we see them, outcomes assessment changes the question to what students can do as a result of seeing us.

Furthermore, once we start asking whether our students are learning what we want them to learn, we realize pretty quickly that making this happen is necessarily a team effort, requiring us to think about our teaching not in isolation but in relation to that of our colleagues.

My colleague's invocation of the Best-Student Fetish is a thinly veiled rationalization for admitting unprepared people and calling it "access." That's for another day. At one time we taught a common core of ideas that each educated person ought have. The resulting enterprise was so successful that many people assessed the outcome as "Let's make it available to more." The resulting expansion of enrollments provided incentives for the departments, or programs, to scrap for more slop from the trough. Or got screwed: the accounting practices by which academic departments get compensated, or not, for the remaining quasi-required general education courses would embarrass the Interstate Commerce Commission.

Turning back to the columnist, consider his assessment of the situation.

For all its obvious value, excellent teaching in itself doesn’t guarantee good education. The courses taken in a semester by a high school or college student may all be wonderfully well taught by whatever criterion we want to use, but if the content of the courses is unrelated or contradictory, the educational effect can be incoherence and confusion. As students in today’s intellectually diverse university go from course to course, they are inevitably exposed to starkly mixed messages. Though this exposure is often energizing for the high achievers who possess some already developed skill at synthesizing clashing ideas and turning them into coherent conversations, the struggling majority typically resort to giving successive instructors whatever they seem to want even if it is contradictory. Giving instructors what they want (assuming students can figure out what that is) replaces internalizing the norms of the intellectual community — that is, education.

I'm surprised he doesn't peddle another bottle of deaducationist snake oil, namely the enunciation of clear objectives. (Wasn't that a management fad of the early 1970s?) Grammar. Rhetoric. Logic. The absence of one or more of those frequently is the root of a Rate Your Students whinge. But perhaps he sees his lack of salesmanship skills. There's no real case for outcome assessment here.

The freedom that is granted us in higher education (at least at high-end and middle-rank institutions) to teach our courses as we please should have always carried an obligation to correlate and align our courses to prevent students from being bombarded with confusing disjunctions and mixed messages. Outcomes assessment holds us to that obligation by making us operate not as classroom divas and prima donnas but as team players who collaborate with our colleagues to produce a genuine program. We all use the P-word glibly, as in “our writing program” or “our literature program,” but we have not earned the right to the word if it denotes only a collection of isolated courses, however individually excellent each may be.

That's exactly what a core curriculum did.

By bringing us out from behind the walls of our classrooms, outcomes assessment deprivatizes teaching, making it not only less of a solo performance but more of a public activity. To be sure, with such increased public visibility may come greater vulnerability: Though it is students whose learning is evaluated in outcomes assessment, it is ultimately the faculty whose performance is put in the spotlight. If we have nothing to hide, however, then less secrecy and greater transparency in our classroom practices should work in our favor. At a time when attracting greater financial support for higher education increasingly depends on our ability to demonstrate the value of our work to wider publics, anything that makes teaching more visible and less of a black box figures to be in our interest.

If you say so. I'm not persuaded that greater financial support to expand the universe of meaningless degrees is in the interest of the students conned into sitting for them, the professors who must swallow hard and confer them, or of the donors or taxpayers.

SAYING GOODBYE.

Catalina Garcia.

Dan Parmenter.

Gayle Dubowski.

Julianna Gehant.

Ryanne Mace.

Sie ruhen von ihrer Arbeit; denn ihre Werke folgen ihnen nach.

MARKET TESTS HAVE STEEP GRADING CURVES. The dean at Anonymous Community reflects on a restructuring at a proprietary technical institute flying the college flag.

During the late 90's boom, and even for a little while after, the rhetoric at [a competing proprietary] was a capitalist version of Khruschev's “we will bury you.” Rapid expansion, and rapid rises in the parent company's stock price, contrasted strongly with continued struggles among the public colleges. The narrowness of curricular focus – if it won't get you a job, we won't teach it – was touted as a breakthrough. (Those of us in the evergreen disciplines were always a little uncomfortable with that, but it came with the gig.) Nobody ever asked of PU's grads, “what are you going to do with that?” The tuition was considerably higher than at the nearby publics, but the job-market payoff for students was obvious, and that carried the day.

As, at one time, corporate downsizing, which followed corporate raiding, which followed corporate conglomeration did.

A couple of years into the crash, [the proprietary's] signature programs clearly weren't hot anymore, it wasn't so obvious anymore what the next hot thing would be. That made it hard for [it] to decide what to teach, and made it hard to justify the premium tuition to prospective students. The unapologetically utilitarian bent of a [proprietary] education meant that, when the market winds shifted, the cost was suddenly a lot harder to justify. So the cost-cutting began, and the employee-blaming, and the layoffs. From what I've seen and heard, [it] still hasn't figured out what the next hot thing is going to be.

Perhaps in two or three thousand years of elaborating on the trivium and quadrivium, we've gotten a few things right.

TONIGHT'S ECLIPSE.


Good night.

O-BLA-DI, O-BLA-DA, LIFE GOES ON.

Context.

Contest.

Kein Bier hier.

TAKING CARE OF BUSINESS. Wisconsin 71, Not-the-Hus-kies 57.

OUR NEIGHBORS AT WAR. Ilona Meagher of Rockford, author of Moving a Nation to Care, is a veteran and journalism major at Northern Illinois. Her website focuses on combat-related post-traumatic stress disorder, with observations on the Northern Illinois shootings. She was taking a break at a student organization bake sale at the time. She has also provided a photoset from campus on Saturday.

FIRE ON THE UPROLL, MR HORNBLOWER. Naval gunners still face that challenge.

The Pentagon counted down Wednesday toward an unprecedented effort to shoot down a dying and potentially deadly U.S. spy satellite, using a souped-up missile fired from a ship in the Pacific.

The timing was tricky. For the best chance to succeed, the military awaited a combination of favorable factors: steady seas around the Navy cruiser that would fire the missile, optimum positioning of the satellite as it passed in polar orbit and the readiness of an array of space- and ground-based sensors to help cue the missile and track the results.

That's more challenging than calling the layline from ten miles out in an offshore race. The Navy claim a hit, although there is not conclusive visual evidence that the fuel tank is broken.

OUR NEIGHBORS STAND WITH US.

DeKalb Chronicle photo.

The support we have received from the people of DeKalb and Sycamore and Malta and Cortland has been outstanding.

BAYESIAN UPDATING.

Otherwise known as a mugging by reality.

Two years ago, I wrote an essay expressing skepticism about arming school personnel. But that was before the mass murders at Virginia Tech, Louisiana Technical College and Northern Illinois University, among others.

My perspective has changed because the country is changing cataclysmically. The rash of cold-blooded serial killings on campuses is now less an anomaly than a wave of terror. It demands new initiatives to safeguard the lives of people seeking a college education.

I remain adamantly opposed to permitting students to carry concealed weapons. The prospect of thousands of teenage and 20-something students carrying guns on college campuses is only asking for trouble.

But training and equipping seasoned adults, who also happen to be select and exhaustively screened college professors, is a hopeful solution.

I am not suggesting arming all teachers. I have had many brilliant colleagues, who are my betters when it comes to teaching, who, nonetheless, do not inspire trust when they use the office paper cutter, let alone a 9 mm Glock.My suggestion, rather, is for the institution of a voluntary program for willing, able and properly trained school personnel to carry weapons.

I'm not without sympathy to this suggestion (and I love the echoes of my "couldn't carry water for a patternmaker" meme), although the skill of getting into a bad guy's O-O-D-A loop requires a different cast of mind from that developed through the patient sifting of evidence and winnowing of argument. Perhaps, though, it's a less bad solution than forting up. There's at least one weblogger who would close campuses in the manner of a maximum security prison. That's ironic. We had the Disney organization offering training on guest relations last summer; perhaps they could come back and consult on security for our theme park. Commerceland over here, Laboratory Land over there, and Readers' Row in the middle?

BE PREPARED. Newsweek provides the stories of student Harold Ng, who was injured in the Cole Hall shooting, and Jeff Merkel, Northern Star reporter and Marine medic.

A cop was there and this is when I stepped out of the reporter's role obviously and said, "Look, I'm a Corpsman, maybe I can help. Give me some gloves." He gave me some gloves and I swiped his first-aid bag and I took off through the building. I've been working at the paper for two semesters, but I've got five years of real life programming. It definitely overrode anything in those two semesters.

There was a lot of tension. There wasn't a lot of screaming, it wasn't running around. The people that were there were more than willing to listen to [what] the police had to say. The first responders did a great job. All I had to do was put gauze on [victims' wounds] in place of T-shirts and paper towels.

A couple of other students, one who was an Eagle Scout and one who was a lifeguard, said they were willing to help. I said, "This is what we need to do. Get on line and talk to every single person you see. If they are not hurt, they go to this side. If they are hurt, my name is Jeff and they should come this way and call my name." They did a wonderful job. They made it as easy as possible.

He also notes,

I've been telling my wife the only thing that DeKalb has on the other places we have been is that no one has shot at me yet. I know that I wasn't shot at in this case, but this is too close to home.

Elsewhere, the university and law enforcement are putting together information on the shooter. He left a laptop behind, but removed the hard drive first. There's a sitemeter hit I received a week or two ago that I'm going to let the authorities know about.

The sociology department, out of which the shooter won a dean's award and subsequently coauthored a publication, is having a rough time.

Students and faculty at NIU's sociology department were coming to terms with the realization that the man they knew as a warm, charming and high achieving student carried secrets they may never unravel.

"He was gracious, he was generous with his time and he engaged the other students," department chairwoman Kay Forest said.

Kazmierczak confided in a few people at the department that he had spent time in a "halfway house" before college. No one pushed him for more information, and he didn't provide details.

"It's the kind of thing where later you look back and think, 'Why didn't I ask more about that,'" Forest said.

The department is receiving extra counseling, beyond the briefings being offered to each department later this week. I would advise outsiders, however, not to second-guess. Yes, perhaps a parasuicidal doing research on parasuicidal behavior is a warning signal. On the other hand, good social science work requires the researcher to suspend judgement in order better to elicit information from the population he is observing. (The press corps doesn't get this: questions that effectively accuse a person of a misdeed get the fighting spirit up. Or visualize the Church Lady investigating the coming of age of Samoans.) In addition, a university in the United States is a place of second chances. We work with former prisoners and GED recipients and Harvard dropouts for a reason.

That noted, the nonjudgemental stance of the observer is not a proper moral code for a society. There's a long Sigmund, Carl, and Alfred post on Northern Illinois and the parallels to Virginia Tech that includes the obligation to judge and set standards and marginalize.

What makes us human and distinguishes us from the animal kingdom is the singular truth that we can consciously choose to control our self centered desires and urges. We can make moral decisions and choose ethical behavior notwithstanding those urges and desires- a very unanimal-like condition. The healthy human being is one who is aware of these attributes and chooses to live ethically and morally.

No matter how much the media and ’science’ try to tell us otherwise, we are not simply ‘more evolved animals.’

Man is responsible for his behavior, no matter how hard media and pop culture desperately want it to be otherwise. We are all accountable, ‘root causes’ notwithstanding and we all charged with elevating ourselves.

Put another way, the burden on my colleagues upstairs -- nay, on higher education generally, will be lighter once the common culture recognizes that judging "judgemental" behavior harshly is not evolutionarily stable.

MUST WE FORT UP AGAIN? At one time, the residential college was a self-contained unit, in which living, dining, worshiping, teaching, and study facilities were contained in a compound that could be gated against intruders. Oxford University, for example, is a collection of thirty-some colleges, many of which have all of these facilities. I offer a look at Oxford's Christ Church College, where the dining hall is the prototype for the Hogwarts refectory.


Early college administrators recognized the possibility of forting up with an open space to allow more sunlight in. Hence the quadrangle, as pioneered at Oxford's Merton College.


Thus, the use of "Quad" to refer to the open space surrounded by free-standing buildings on the more open campuses (the martial connotations of that word played down) of today. The forted-up quadrangle design survives in some of the free-standing buildings, such as Adams and Tripp Halls among the Lakeshore Dorms of the University of Wisconsin. Note, however, that the university itself is open to visitors, whether driving or walking in from the south, or boating in from the north. That's consistent with the Wisconsin Idea that the boundaries of the university are the boundaries of the state (and there are more than a few expat Badgers carrying the idea to Siberia or DeKalb.)

Now come suggestions that universities install metal detectors, either in buildings or at the gates of campus. That is, if there are gates. (We have two sets of ceremonial gates at Northern Illinois, one establishing a formal setting on the old Normal School grounds, another attempting to class up the Lucinda Avenue entrance to the west side residential complex and the athletic fields. Both sets are for show.) I suppose one could reconfigure college campuses in the style of a theme park, with all the parking in one place and all the attractions in another. The mind boggles. Or put them in the buildings? There are five entrances to the Cole Hall concourse, as well as the rear entrance used by the shooter. At class changing time, all entrances are in use, with students coming and going, often in a hurry: our ten minutes between classes on Monday-Wednesday-Friday is insufficient to get from Cole to Barsema or Stevenson to Montgomery. They're toting cell phones and laptops and car keys and we're going to go TSA on them? Come off it.

For that matter, added security is going to have trouble identifying a threat. With the help of some Associated Press video (click the "NIU Shooting" link, be alert to some squirrely add-ons) and the interactive campus map, dear reader, imagine you are tasked with campus security. You observe a Goth-looking male removing a guitar case from a car parked in the visitor parking lot. He crosses the bridge leading toward the Watson-Zulauf-Cole-Stevens complex. The theater department is in Stevens. Do you keep observing him, or do you judge it as business as usual? Perhaps from your vantage point you're not able to observe whether he goes into Stevens or continues past Stevens to the fork in the footpath. If you continue to observe, does it matter whether he goes left or right? To the left is Watson, where a guitar player would not be out of place in the languages departments, or in forensics. But if you're wrong, and he's on his way to DuSable Hall, a maze of twisting passages, all different ... To the right is Cole. Business as usual? But also to the right is Reavis, home to the English department. Or perhaps he takes the more direct path, around the Stevens Annex and up the steps that lead directly to the back door of Cole. Threat alert, or perhaps he has a gig at the coffeehouse after class?

Now let's consider concealed carry by professors and students. The class of advocates for concealed carry includes many fans of this weblogger, who never uses ten words to describe something when a thousand will do. I'll keep it short. You Observe a stranger on stage. You Orient yourself to the presence of a shotgun in his hands. You Decide to shoot back. Did you Act fast enough? Too slow: you're down anyway. Too fast: he's down. Did you really see the gun? What if there's no gun? What weight does your loss function place on false positives?

There's more information to come. For now, think about the tradeoffs inherent in forting up.

UNRAVELING. It started fifteen years ago.

The NYPD has dramatically enhanced its counterterrorism measures, with random bag checks at subway entrances, heavily armored patrols and plans to install biological and radioactive detection devices.

The drumbeat of security enhancements rolls on, with the blueprints of a new World Trade Center being altered to improve security.

Still, the improvements can't restore the sense of security, however naive, that existed on Feb. 25, 1993.

It's in the economy.

Even when experts were declaring the economy healthy, many Americans voiced a vague, but persistent dissatisfaction.

True, jobs were relatively plentiful over the last few years. It was easy to borrow and very cheap. The sharp rise in the value of homes and plentiful credit cards encouraged a nation of consumers to get out and buy. But to many people, something didn't feel right, even if they couldn't quite explain why.

Now the economic tide is receding, and the undertow that was there all along is getting stronger.

Take away the easy credit and consumers are left with paychecks that, for most, haven't nearly kept pace with their need and propensity to spend.

The frustration of $3 gas and $4 milk, the worries about health care costs that have risen four times the rate of pay, become much more real. The retirement security that is only as good as the increasingly volatile stock market seems much less certain.

Americans' declining confidence in their economy is triggered by a storm of very recent pressures, including plunging home prices, tightening credit, and heavy debt. But it is compounded by anxiety that was there all along, the result of a long, slow drip of worries and vulnerabilities.

Developing. Note, however, that those health care "costs" (and dare I say "tuitions") are unadjusted for quality. Note also the subjective redefinition of well off.

Even the consumption made possible by easy credit has helped turn up the financial pressure. The number of products - from air conditioners to cell phones - that Americans say they can't live without has grown substantially in recent years, according to the Pew Research Center. About 6 in 10 working Americans polled by the group say they don't earn enough to lead the life they want.

I'm surprised that proportion isn't closer to nine in ten.