NO DUMB IDEA EVER GOES AWAY. University Diaries has been following the corrosive effect of big time football on the academy for some time. Most recently, she's turned up what we refer to as an opportunity cost, here at [Southwest] Missouri State and at Colorado. Start at [Southwest] Missouri State, where one observer sees the folly of dropping some non-revenue sports in preference to football.

One of the main reasons given for not cutting the football program by university officials has been that in doing so, the university would lose face recognition amongst the community and prospective students. Somehow, students make their decision to attend Missouri State based on the fact that MSU has a mediocre football program in place.

Doubtful. A recommendation to new readers: pick up Murray Sperber's Beer and Circus (my regular readers are about to get a review session) and read about the potential reverse effect. Quoth Publishers Weekly,

Sperber argues that an ever-growing number of state universities lure undergraduates to their schools with halcyon images of booze-filled parties and prominent sports programs while abandoning their commitment to the students' education. Administrators use the students' sorely needed tuition dollars to fund sports, build research facilities and hire world-class faculty members, who give the school prestige but scarcely give their legions of undergraduate charges the time of day. With an eye fastened on the dangerous phenomenon of binge drinking, Sperber (College Sports Inc.) backs his assertions with responses to a questionnaire he circulated to students across the country, interviews with professors and administrators and frequent citations from sociological studies. Sperber methodically attempts to persuade readers that at the largest universities, where the majority of young Americans attain their undergraduate degrees, "the party scene connected to big-time sports events replaces meaningful undergraduate education." Though he admits his work deals mainly with anecdotal rather than scientific proof, the wealth of evidence Sperber amasses to support his convictions makes for a striking, sobering read.

Professor Sperber offered a case study of the attempt of the powers of the [State] University of [New York at] Buffalo to reposition their respectable, if sports-invisible university as a joke member of the Mid-American, to the detriment of all concerned. I don't know of any noteworthy academic programs at [Southwest] Missouri State (Golden Bear fans, enlighten me), but I do know they have a solid womens' basketball team, their coach's trailer-park hairdo notwithstanding.

Then head over to Colorado, where embattled party director football coach Gary Barnett has stepped down. Read a Denver columnist's version of Imagine.

"I want it to be clear that I'm going to bring a great football coach to this university," University of Colorado-Boulder athletic director Mike Bohn said last week.

It won't be Don Morton.

Tulsa football coach Steve Kragthorpe does not want to replace Gary Barnett as coach at Colorado.

Sorry, I'm being mean.

But read the entire Denver Post column.

"Ironically, at a time when higher education has never been more important to our nation ... confidence in the university has been badly damaged by the corruption of big-time college sports," [former University of Michigan president James] Duderstadt said. Until universities confront this pig in the parlor, "they will be unable to earn the public trust."

Forget the myth that football pumps millions into university budgets every year. Even if it were true, it wouldn't matter. As the tattered reputation of CU demonstrates, football - and our obsession with it - has cost us dearly.

And it deludes others.

During their time at Marquette, every student inevitably discusses our lack of a football team.

Most students want a football team because it would be fun or cool. While it would be fun, a football team could propel Marquette into the upper echelon of universities.

After Marquette’s Final Four appearance in 2003, the group of student applicants for the following year was the largest ever. This result of larger applicant pools has changed Marquette’s reputation and has allowed the school to be more selective.

Many gifted students disregard Marquette because we lack a football team. While this may be shortsighted on their part, it does refl ect the general sentiment surrounding our school.

I bet Marquette’s strong alumni base feels the same way. Ask any alumnus what they missed out on during their Marquette experience and a majority will say football. In a time when many Marquette alumni feel isolated from the school after last year’s nickname controversy, the best way for Marquette to reach out to students and alumni would be to reinstitute a once-proud program: Marquette Football.

With a football team, Marquette would attract better students. A proud tradition would be restored and alumni interest would grow. Alumni donations would increase providing additional funding for student projects. In turn, this would attract even stronger students and professors. This cycle would propel Marquette into the highest tier of universities.

Right. (Not to generalize from my own experience, but the high price and skimpy academic reputation of Marquette more than offset whatever drawing power Al McGuire had. Milwaukee, which was off the sports radar screen completely, and Madison, where there was a strong hockey team exactly one member of my graduating class knew about, drew for the academics. The social set weighed the relative merits of Oshkosh and Whitewater. Revenge of the nerds, forsooth!) As far as football, anybody remember George Andrie? (He'll sell you logo-wear if you're interested.)

Again, not to generalize from my own experience, but the recent successes of Northern Illinois football have not been without consequences: classes disrupted on Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday evenings, longer police blotters on home-game weekends, and resources openly reallocated away from the academic departments. Is that really where Marquette and [Southwest] Missouri State want to go?

BUYING BOWL ELIGIBILITY. Phil Miller at The Sports Economist discovers that the hottest college football program at schedule completion time is ... Buffalo.

Buffalo became such a hot commodity in the off-season that it broke contracts with West Virginia and Rutgers because Auburn and Wisconsin were offering at least double the money. Troy State of Alabama will receive $750,000 from Nebraska to play in Lincoln this season. Louisiana-Lafayette will get the same amount from Tennessee next year.

With the weakest teams in Division I-A becoming more expensive, top programs are stooping lower for competition. Iowa, a Big Ten favorite this year, wooed Montana, a Division I-AA program, for $650,000.

“It’s all about the money — any administrator will tell you that,” said Rich Rodriguez, the head coach at West Virginia. Buffalo dropped West Virginia from its schedule, without even a courtesy phone call, to earn an extra $300,000 to play at Wisconsin. Mr. Rodriguez added: “It’s not for the excitement of college football. Let’s not kid ourselves.”

The joys of life in the Mid-American. Poor Troy University, last seen in these pages giving Northern Illinois an opportunity to come from behind at the Silicon Valley Bowl, is still Troy State as far as the New York Times is concerned. (Sorry, Richard.) Northern Illinois has climbed out of the "bought win" category, going for the two point conversion and a shot at a win in Evanston and getting robbed on their last trip to Madison, thereby extracting a visit from Iowa to Soldier Field, but the opener at Ohio State and the Iowa game, as well as a division winner's schedule in the Mid-American, expose the guys to a risk.

When the N.C.A.A. proposed allowing 12 games, most coaches objected. Some saw the proposal as exploiting players to fill athletic department coffers. When the extra opponent is a bigger, faster and stronger team, not only does the risk of embarrassment rise, but the potential for injury also increases.

N.C.A.A. officials agree that the change was about money. Football home games are typically the primary source of revenue for an entire athletic department. Other than football, the only college sport that makes consistent money is men’s basketball. The other men’s and women’s sports, except in rare cases, cost more to run than they generate.

David Berst, the N.C.A.A.’s vice president for Division I, said the organization’s board authorized the 12th game because universities could increase revenue. He said data showed no significant injury risk in playing one more game. Coaches are resigned to the change.

Catch that "no significant injury risk." Small sample!

That is because the 12th game means another Saturday to fill hotel rooms, pack restaurants and bring in millions of dollars more in ticket and concession sales. Wisconsin and Auburn, for example, have stadiums that hold more than 80,000 fans and can usually sell out any game, regardless of the
opponent.

Adding a weak team like Buffalo can be beneficial for two reasons. First, it practically guarantees a victory. Second, weak teams will visit for a lower price than better teams, meaning a higher profit on each home game. And many of the weaker teams do not insist on a home-and-home series that would require the better team to visit the next year. That means the better team has an open home date for the next season, which it can use to play another weak team.

But Buffalo, which was once a solid State University of New York operation with no athletic aspirations, is unlikely to attract the kind of beer-and-circus student buzz its decision to join the Mid-American and obtain visibility in athletic programs. (Read Murray Sperber's Beer and Circus for the elaboration of this argument.) The newest member of the Mid-American is Temple, where the attendance and revenue pressures will also be growing.

One suspects, however, that the Times reporter has never been to Madison.

Fans at Wisconsin may complain about sitting through home games against Western Illinois, San Diego State and Buffalo. But the coaches love it, even if they oppose the idea of a 12th game. Wisconsin will be favored in all three games and, by winning, would be halfway to qualifying for a bowl game.

Answer me this, New York Times: how many Badger fans are actually watching those games? Western Illinois, incidentally, is not an opponent to be taken lightly. But the bought wins are not prostituting selling themselves cheaply.

[Wisconsin associate athletic director John] Chadima, who has arranged Wisconsin’s schedule for 17 years, said he had seen a sharp increase in the cost for nonconference foes over the past five seasons.

For the weaker teams, a bigger appearance check means a chance to upgrade. Buffalo Coach Turner Gill said the Bulls were able to buy new furniture for their football complex and improve their weight room with the $1.5 million from their three nonconference road games. Buffalo plays in the Mid-American Conference.

But there appear to be some troubles.

Not everyone is so rosy about the frenzy involved in finding a 12th opponent. West Virginia and Rutgers learned via the Internet during the off-season that Buffalo had broken their contracts for 2006. When Buffalo did not return phone calls about whether the deal was off, West Virginia’s president wrote to Buffalo’s president demanding an explanation.

“The manner in which it appears that this situation is being handled has detracted from the considerable respect we have gained over the years for your school and conference,” David C. Hardesty, West Virginia’s president, wrote on Feb. 26.

When Buffalo responded two weeks later, it said that the Mid-American Conference was in charge of its scheduling. Buffalo’s athletic director, Warde Manuel, said he regretted the way the situation was handled and that he, and not the conference, would handle Buffalo’s future scheduling.

“It literally had nothing to do with money,” Mr. Manuel said. “This wasn’t a money grab for me at all.”

Rick Chryst, commissioner of the Mid-American Conference, said he took over Buffalo’s scheduling because of Mr. Manuel’s being new to the job and the poor financial situation for the university’s athletic department.

Question: is Buffalo effectively in receivership with the conference facing being de-rated out of the major bowl circuit? (And $1.5 million for the weight room is well short of the new locker room, weight room, and study hall a-building in DeKalb.)

SELF SELECTION. Some people describe the world.

The introduction of Murray Sperber's Beer and Circus: How Big-Time College Sports Has Crippled Undergraduate Education divides students into four basic groups, of which only one, the smallest, being scholarly/intellectual. This group has probably always been the smallest, but has always represented the majority of the professors, with a few exceptions like Party Girl. Professors are almost set up to feel a certain disdain for their students, as the other categories are not especially attractive, as they consist chiefly of social butterflies, vocational drudgers, and slackers.

College faculty are self-selected from a different subset of the population than the great mass of students. Big deal. That's true of accountants and engineers and model railroaders and golfers and patternmakers. (I hesitate to labor the obvious: why go into a line of work that requires you to interact with a variety of curious, in all the senses of the word, young people? Get to know them as people. They'll surprise you.)

Does it have to be the case that college faculty also self-select for pusillanimity? What is the point of enjoying all the protections of tenure if the best one can do is post anonymous whinges at Rate Your Students?

So why not get involved and change things?

As a result, the general intelligence of students probably is at least somewhat lower than it was, say, 50 years ago, but more importantly, the outstanding students are simply swamped by the masses.

Why? Have your faculty councils and department chairmen acquiesced in a dilution of admission standards that somebody has sugar coated as access? Clearly, the policy isn't working. Say so. Change it.

Numerically speaking, the outstanding students are still probably around, even if they don't seem as prevalent because there are so many of those "other" students professors don't much like—the ones not in Sperber's category of intellectuals.

Did that happen by accident? Who consented to offering retakes of high school, sometimes for college credit, and defended it as remediation? What incentives were your faculty councils, department chairmen, deans, and provosts, responding to when they proliferated content-free courses and majors and explained that such offerings boosted retention? Don't go along. Speak up.

Are you complicit by your silence in the fraud? When the proliferation of image consultants, failed scholars, schmoozers and hack politicians engages in an orgy of self-congratulation and praise and refers to it as a favorable assessment, where are you? Posting anonymous whinges? Call "nonsense" and name names.

LAYING DOWN HIS MARKER.

The editorial writers at The Northern Star are unimpressed with President John Peters's State of the University address. The kids have a point, or several: "During his speech, Peters barely mentioned, and failed to give solutions to, several problems the university is facing.

"In the wake of one of the most serious budget crises in university history, as we often are reminded, Peters failed to mention the current state of the university.

"Doesn’t he realize that faculty in some departments are unable to give handouts because they are trying to save money by not using paper?

"How about other professors who are only able to use their phones in emergencies or when students call?

"Peters also didn’t talk about faculty layoffs, which has been mentioned as a way to combat the budget problems. Job security is one of the main concerns faculty have, and many of them could have been looking to the president’s speech for answers.

"The opening of the Convocation Center and Barsema Hall were two major highlights for the university last year, but failed to get a mention this year. Does the university think their first year was successful? Did they make money or improve education like they expected?"

Spot on. Perhaps President Peters is laying down a marker for a future run at a flagship state university or research university presidency. The speech addresses the scope and nature of the comprehensive university, and what better time to make it than during a time when the football program is generating some buzz, the region remains vibrant and sufficiently leavened by red-state virtues to not emulate the coastal circus, and the faculty's efforts to suck it up and keep going have borne some fruits? Why not take advantage of the correlation of forces to make a statement that establishes you as a forward-thinking leader within the conclave of university presidents?

GETTING THE CASE RIGHT. A lot of higher education isn't, but that by itself won't change minds. It's important that critics, particularly those on the inside, get their criticisms in order. For instance, I wasn't happy with Craig Brandon's The Five Year Party. Neither was Murray Sperber, whose Beer & Circus might have been the opening argument against the college-as-resort business model.

The problem with Brandon’s sloppy writing and referencing is that it allows his enemy—university administrators and apologists--an easy target and a way to avoid confronting the serious and real charges he makes in the book.

Journalism might be the first draft of history, but there's a reason we refer to a first draft.

I have rarely read a more frustrating book. I wanted to agree with many of Brandon’s points but found his method of argumentation and referencing too far from general standards.

If I were grading The Five Year Party as a college paper, I’d write on the first page, “This is a pretty good draft and you have quite a few important ideas, but it needs more work. Above all, you need to carefully reference your claims and sources.”

Richard Vedder, whose What Happens when College is Oversold? figures in yesterday's mini-dissertation about appropriable externalities, also gets referee reports. There's a symposium at Minding The Campus with a long response by Patrick Deneen.

The problem, then, lies not in the ideal of universality of education, but the widespread transformation of the end that education serves. The goal of education toward fostering moral and virtuous members of their communities has been completely displaced by narrow utilitarian ends among students and moral relativism among the teachers.

A society driven by private ambitions of materialistic gain can expect education to become diluted by a utilitarian ethic. The tool will conform to its end, and so education becomes defined by the ethic of the short-cut. Rampant cheating and academic dishonesty are now campus (and societal) norms (students learn ethics from widespread practices in sports and business, not from Aristotle and the Bible), and the professoriate in turn emphasizes that all norms and codes are simply expressions of arbitrary power that limit what should be our thoroughgoing autonomy. As David Brooks has noted, there is an absolute consistency between the moral relativism of postmodern academia and the careerism in the student body.

I agree that colleges bear much of the blame for their current crisis (indeed, that they bear considerable responsibility for educating the class that precipitated the financial crisis that now ironically threatens their existence), and I hope and expect that they will have to change their current practices, including a serious effort to reduce tuition costs.

What disturbs me about arguments such as those found in the Vedder report is the implication that education should be fitted to the narrow vocational needs of airline attendants and cashiers, that an appropriate education will prepare them as efficiently as possible for a life of menial labor. I lament that a major thrust is afoot to dismantle whatever remnant of our older liberal arts tradition persists and to replace it with measurable forms of study that produce narrowly-trained careerists. We need virtuous cashiers and moral airline attendants as much as we need virtuous politicians and moral philosophers. Assuming that a major reassessment of the role of education is in the offing, then it is not the ideal of universal education that should be the whipping-boy, but the belief that a society can flourish without a moral core at the heart of its educational mission.

The academic tradition: a self-inflicted deconstruction? There's a line in Atlas Shrugged about missing philosophers once they've all gone away ... Deconstruct that.

Charles Murray concurs in part.

I want everybody, not just an elite, to acquire as much liberal education as possible, for the reasons that Deneen describes. But we don't have to wait until college to get a great deal of that done. E.D. Hirsch's Core Knowledge curriculum is a wonderful example of how much can be done in K-8, and a lot more can be added in high school. At that point, I think this way of formulating our objective is helpful: "The educational system has succeeded when a child reaches adulthood having discovered something he loves to do, and having learned how to do it well." If that's the objective, then of course we want to say to the young person who has high academic ability "Here's why pursuing a liberal education gives you your best chance of finding your vocation." But if the answer we get is "Thanks but no thanks, what I really want to do is study marketing and go to work," that student needs options other than a four-year residential program that will leave him deep in debt and have wasted a lot of his time.

I read a memoir from a futures trader once that included an observation to the effect that one could learn more by going short a contract in beans than any number of years of business college would do. On the other hand, the liberal education might help some people discover, or revise, their vocations. Jackson Toby, author of another insider's report that's on its way to the Cold Spring Shops library, suggests that people view entry level job reports accordingly.

It is true that some youngsters knew all through college that they wanted to be physicians or lawyers and consequently their first jobs reflected their career objectives. However, many college graduates graduate without a clear notion of what they want to do occupationally or even personally. Some work for a couple of years for Teach for America without planning a lifetime career as teachers. Some take jobs as waiters or waitresses while their career aspirations lie in acting or art, careers notoriously difficult to enter. Therefore I hesitate to interpret several years of low-paid jobs that college graduates as a disconnect between what is learned at college and what college graduates do occupationally in their first jobs. Getting back to teaching, it might be excellent for American education have primary- and secondary-school students taught for four or five years by college graduates who lack teaching experience but have the attractive enthusiasm of youth even though they and their colleagues know that they do not plan to be career teachers. If we keep in mind the difference between "jobs" and "careers," the fact that college graduates take low-level jobs in the years immediately following graduation is not necessarily a failure of college education or of the graduates themselves.

On the other hand, the return on that investment might not be so good, adjusting for psychic income notwithstanding.

TENURE CONFERS PRIVILEGES AND DUTIES.

I'm not sure whether saying No and uphold standards is duty or privilege.  The Wall Street Journal recently gave South Carolina State's Geoffrey L. Collier, a utility infielder sociologist cum psychologist the opportunity to riff an old Soviet joke with a lengthy op-ed, "We Pretend to Teach, They Pretend to Learn."

The parlous state of American higher education has been widely noted, but the view from the trenches is far more troubling than can be characterized by measured prose. With most students on winter break and colleges largely shut down, the lull presents an opportunity for damage assessment.

The flood of books detailing the problems includes the representative titles "Bad Students, Not Bad Schools" and "The Five Year Party." To list only the principal faults: Students arrive woefully academically unprepared; students study little, party much and lack any semblance of internalized discipline; pride in work is supplanted by expediency; and the whole enterprise is treated as a system to be gamed in which plagiarism and cheating abound.

Bad Students is in the stack of works to be read and reviewed, a task that is currently preempted by work on the railroad.  I reviewed Five Year Party three years ago and found it wanting, although I there noted faculty complicity in creating subprime party schools, perhaps motivated by egalitarian sentiments.

The faculty is complicit in the failure. Mr Brandon suggests that sub-prime party schools have fallen into what I call the Wayne State trap: the presence of non-traditional or first-generation or commuting students becomes an excuse to lower standards. (That attitude is a libel on non-traditional or first-generation or commuting students, but it persists.)

Professor Collier's argument appears to build on the non-aggression pact Indiana's Murray Sperber introduced in his Beer-'n Circus years ago.

Education thus has degenerated into a game of "trap the rat," whereby the student and instructor view each other as adversaries. Winning or losing is determined by how much the students can be forced to study. This will never be a formula for excellence, which requires intense focus, discipline and diligence that are utterly lacking among our distracted, indifferent students. Such diligence requires emotional engagement. Engagement could be with the material, the professors, or even a competitive goal, but the idea that students can obtain a serious education even with their disengaged, credentialist attitudes is a delusion.

That's a difficult passage to parse, in the absence of an actor responsible for instilling, or for reinforcing, the "disengaged, credentialist attitude" among students. I'm not sure I could even identify that attitude in a student, despite 35 years in the trenches.

The professoriate plays along because teachers know they have a good racket going. They would rather be refining their research or their backhand than attending to tedious undergraduates. The result is an implicit mutually assured nondestruction pact in which the students and faculty ignore each other to the best of their abilities. This disengagement guarantees poor outcomes, as well as the eventual replacement of the professoriate by technology. When professors don't even know your name, they become remote figures of ridicule and tedium and are viewed as part of a system to be played rather than a useful resource.

Wow. Has South Carolina State invested heavily in mass lectures and videotaped (DVDed?) courses as a "productivity" measure? Is the real Soviet joke made life in the discontent of faculty with increased workloads, no pay raises, and legislative disrespect?

To be fair, cadres of indefatigable souls labor tirelessly in thankless ignominy in the bowels of sundry ivory dungeons. Jokers in a deck stacked against them, they are ensnared in a classic reward system from hell.

All parties are strongly incentivized to maintain low standards. It is well known that friendly, entertaining professors make for a pleasant classroom, good reviews and minimal complaints. Contrarily, faculty have no incentives to punish plagiarism and cheating, to flunk students or to write negative letters of reference, to assiduously mark up illiterate prose in lieu of merely adding a grade and a few comments, or to enforce standards generally. Indeed, these acts are rarely rewarded but frequently punished, even litigated. Mass failure, always a temptation, is not an option. Under this regimen, it is a testament to the faculty that any standards remain at all.

And it is a dereliction of duty for the tenured faculty to not push back, to go-along-to-get-along, to let the deanlets and deanlings and assessment weenies preempt the curriculum.

As tuition has skyrocketed, education has shifted from being a public good to a private, consumer product. Students are induced into debt because they are repeatedly bludgeoned with news about the average-income increments that accrue to additional education. This is exacerbated by the ready availability of student loans, obligations that cannot be discharged in bankruptcy.

Let's at least stay on topic, rather than engaging in dubious economics. An instrumentalist view of a credential implicitly suggests private benefits predominate. I'm inclined to agree, but for a different reason: the marginal spillover benefits of higher education are small, particularly if kindergarten and the elementary grades get the socialization right. Share your cookies. Take your nap.

In parallel, successive generations of students have become increasingly consumerist in their attitudes, and all but the most well-heeled institutions readily give the consumers what they want in order to generate tuition revenue. Competition for students forces universities to invest in and promote their recreational value. Perhaps the largest scam is that these institutions have an incentive to retain paying students who have little chance of graduating. This is presented as a kindness under the guise of "student retention." The student, or the taxpayer in the case of default, ends up holding the bag, whereas the institution gets off scot free. Withholding government funding from institutions with low graduation rates would only encourage the further abandonment of standards.

So students get what they want: a "five year party" eventuating in painlessly achieved "Wizard of Oz" diplomas. This creates a classic tragedy of the commons in which individuals overuse a shared resource—in this case the market value of the sheepskin. Students, implicitly following the screening theory that credentials are little more than signals of intelligence and personal qualities, follow a mini-max strategy: minimize the effort, maximize the probability of obtaining a degree. The decrement in the value of the sheepskin inflicted by each student is small, but the cumulative effect is that the resource will become valueless.

Just the opposite. U. S. News and the other providers of league tables make their money helping strivers, and their parents, identify universities that are not sub-prime party schools, and the test-prep and essay-counselor services dissipate some of the rents of the positional arms race.  To the disadvantage of students who wind up in the academic gulags (to use Charlie Sykes's expression from Profscam) where the disengaged, unmotivated, and unprepared adversely select into.  And the further abandonment of standards, or the valuelessness of subprime diplomas simply allows for a market test to work.

There is excess capacity in access-assessment-remediation-retention. The degrees produced from that capacity fail the market test. Perhaps consumer awareness of the nature of the excess capacity will speed the elimination of that capacity.

Professor Collier seems to recognize the dynamic, but with a different inference.

The body politic lately has become aware of the cracks in this game. With about half of college graduates under 25 currently unemployed or underemployed, the income advantage of a four-year degree may be on the decline. Employers are justifiably fed up with college graduates lacking basic knowledge, to say nothing of good work habits and intellectual discipline. Yet the perennial impulse toward bureaucratic command-and-control solutions, such as universal standardized testing or standardized grade-point averages, only leads in the direction of more credentialism.

No, the employers will only be more encouraged to recruit only at institutions that have the U. S. News imprimatur, or to insist on an exit examination administered by someone other than the university.

If the body politic desires this, so be it. However, these are essentially supply-side solutions, in that they attempt to staunch the supply of poorly prepared students or increase the supply of well-prepared students. Such approaches are notoriously problematic, as in the classic case of black markets.

I've learned to be skeptical of any argument that uses "problematic", as it's generally a tic that signifies "I don't like it but I can't articulate why." Besides, there's a simpler solution: let the faculty at South Carolina State resolve that they are in the same business as Harvard or Northwestern or Wisconsin and retake control of the curriculum so as to offer their students the same intellectual challenges as their future competitors face, or to weed them out.

Better to address the demand side. To be sure, there is plenty of student demand for credentials, but there is little demand for the rigor that the credentials putatively represent. Rather than more attempts at controlling output quality through standardization, what are needed are input changes provided by creative alternative routes to adulthood that young people find attractive; a "pull" rather than a "push." It would be helpful, too, if faculty started viewing undergraduates less as whining boors and more as lost souls who have been scandalously misguided by a feel-good "everyone's a star" culture.

Put another way, view undergraduates at South Carolina State or Northern Illinois or what have you as strivers who deserve the same challenges as their counterparts elsewhere. It begins, though, with faculty who view their work, wherever that might be, as a calling worthy of their best efforts, and with the privilege and high honor of upholding standards, and saying No when that is the proper response.

FUND THE ENGLISH DEPARTMENT PROPERLY.  Professor Murray (Beer 'n Circus) Sperber explains why you can't teach writing on the cheap, or pretend that Writing Across the Curriculum is a division of labor that makes everyone's task easier.

Poor student writing is a terrible problem and I offer the following recommendations based on my 40 years of teaching composition.

Many students need to be taught the basic concepts of English composition. Start with words; students often insert totally inappropriate polysyllabic words when common, shorter ones would work much better.  Move on to sentences: Rule Number 1: avoid passive constructions whenever possible. Then on to paragraphs, followed by one-page papers, and finally, 3-to-5 page papers.  (Students should have learned those skills in middle and high school but most have not; colleges and universities must teach them.)

Most of all, instructors must line-edit student work. Yes, line-editing is very labor-intensive, but there is no shortcut for this key function.

Composition instructors should also stress rewriting; students must correct and resubmit all work that the instructor has line-edited. By the end of the semester, students may be able to revise on their own, but instructors should always ask for drafts of a paper—if nothing else, it short-circuits plagiarism.

Learning to write is not a mystical process; in fact, it is quite simple. Someone who knows more about writing than the student goes over the student’s work line-by-line, and demonstrates how to correct specific problems. A grad student in my survey, an excellent writer, attributed her ability to her mother working with her that way on her writing every night during her K-12 years.

Many other students who could write well had attended private colleges and had instructors who line-edited their work. Unfortunately, many graduates of public universities, even the “Public Ivies,” have never had anyone line-edit their work. As a result, they have serious writing problems, despite the fact that they’ve written a huge number of pages.

How to institutionalize my recommendations?  First, make basic English Composition a much more intensive writing course for undergraduate students than at present and hire trained instructors for this labor-intensive work. Some private universities do that, paying their comp teachers well and giving them five-year renewable contracts. Almost no public universities do anything remotely like that, except in some honors divisions.

Too many universities, even those making a serious attempt to include a quality Freshmen Comp course, do not follow up the basic course with subsequent intensive writing classes. Many students improve their writing during their freshman year and then either hit a plateau in their writing or, more often, forget what they learned and lapse into sloppy writing. Educators know that learned skills must be reinforced but many schools fail to do so.

He has additional recommendations, none of which can be accomplished on the cheap, none of which emphasize technology or active learning or any of the other deaducationist fads of the hour.

WHAT'S NEXT, A DEFENESTRATION OF THE COACH? University of Minnesota (motto: ten thousand ways to surrender the Axe) president Bob Bruininks told the Minnesota Daily his expectations for football.

I was deeply disappointed with the loss [to South Dakota]. I think we have done some of the right things in terms of trying to rebuild our football traditions and to put us on the path, I think, to a more successful winning strategy.

We need a stronger football program here at the University of Minnesota. Our fans deserve it and our students, faculty and staff deserve [it].

I’m guardedly optimistic, but I would say to all of our fans, we have high aspirations for Gopher football, and we’re not going to be satisfied with mediocre results and a mediocre season.

Since then, the team visited Southern California and hosted Northern Illinois.

Tailback Chad Spann ran for 223 yards and two touchdowns, including a game-clinching 61-yard run with 6:22 left, as Northern Illinois claimed its second win over a Big Ten Conference team in the last two seasons with a 34-23 win over Minnesota Saturday at TCF Bank Stadium.

Go to niuhuskies.com for the details.

It's that stadium I wish to address, again. A Minnesota sports commentator had an instructive response to Mr Bruininks's choice of words.

Yet, if football wasn't a big deal to the administration, Bruininks and the University would not have used so much of their lobbying and fund-raising clout to build an on-campus stadium.

Seven, eight years ago, this seemed nothing more than a Glen Mason hallucination, and then Bruininks embraced the idea, and the University went hard at their prized donors, and pleaded at the Legislature, and the first new football stadium to be built in the Big Ten in decades opened last fall.

And then Brewster lost to South Dakota in the 2010 home opener, and in an attempt to justify the embarrassment, the coach's bobos passed along some information to the Star Tribune's Sid Hartman that alleged to show Minnesota had the lowest football budget in the Big Ten.

In truth, several Big Ten schools put stadium costs in their football budgets, and the university puts those costs elsewhere, and that greatly distorted the numbers that were given to Hartman.

The university, through Gary Bowman, the head of the sports information department, was quick to refute Sid's information. The athletic department insisted the Gophers are in the middle of the Big Ten when it comes to football spending.

The only thing that really matters is this: The Gophers' football program wants for nothing.

The budgets for recruiting and assistant coaches are competitive. The new stadium is first-class. The Nagurski-Gibson Football Complex is more than adequate. And the university has allowed Brewster to admit many high-risk students - and given him a learning disability specialist to see to it that most any player who takes an interest will survive academically.

The Bruininks administration has gone through contortions trying to give Brewster a chance to succeed. And the reward for that support was that -- after Brewster's humiliation against South Dakota -- a henchman provided disinformation that was supposed to put the blame for this stagnant program not on the fourth-year coach but the administration.

The guess here is Bruininks and [athletic director Joel] Maturi will have no problem making the decision to fire Brewster if this winds up as another 6-6 season, or less. They might even secretly enjoy the task, considering what they went through to get TCF Bank Stadium, only to wind up with a coach who looks at the surroundings and sees himself as a martyr.

I like that use of martyr. Murray Sperber has his beer-'n-circus. Without loss of generality, will the proconsuls have the coach torn to pieces by a pack of (Northern) Huskies or (Nittany) Lions or (Northwestern) Wildcats?

The term contortion is an understatement: it's more like prostitution.

In two weeks, custody of the Axe will be determined in Madison.

SELF-INFLICTED WOUNDS.

Two east coast sociologists take to Inside Higher Ed to sound the alarm against "attacks from the right."

Colleges and universities hire scholars to teach and to produce knowledge. For many years, being a professor was a job where you got paid to read and think, insulated to some extent from the rough and tumble of the rest of society. While there have always been a handful of scholars, usually from elite institutions, who could parlay the life of the mind into a more public career, and universities were happy to bask in the reflected media attention, this was the exception that proved the rule of academic isolation.

Yes, although for many years, professors understood the social contract obligated them to teach the controversies, to be careful about interjecting their own biases into class, to respect the discipline's discourse practices in writing up their thoughts.  Thus, for example, could Hayek and Keynes work together to edit Economica.

HIGHER EDUCATION OUGHT TO BE HIGHER EDUCATION. The Spellings Commission on Higher Education has released a second draft report that Inside Higher Ed characterizes as "offering far more praise and far less criticism of colleges" than the first draft. I'll reproduce the findings and the recommendations without further comment. There is sufficient material in the draft for a follow-on post.

First, the findings.

1. In today’s knowledge-driven society, the value of and need for higher education has never been more important.


2. There is insufficient preparation for, participation in, and completion of higher education nationally – especially for underserved and nontraditional groups who will be the major source of new workers as the baby boom generation reaches retirement age.


3. The system of financing higher education is increasingly dysfunctional: state subsidies are declining; tuitions are rising; cost per student is increasing faster than inflation or family income; need-based financial aid is not keeping pace; the student aid system is playing roles it increasingly can’t support; and public concern about rising costs is contributing to the erosion of public credibility in higher education.


4. The entire financial aid system – including federal, state, institutional, and private programs – is inefficient, duplicative, and frequently does not direct aid to students who truly need it.


5. At a time when we need to be increasing the quality of learning outcomes from a college education, there are too many signs that suggest we are moving in the opposite direction.


6. There is inadequate transparency and accountability for institutional access, quality, and cost.


7. There are barriers to increasing institutional capacity and investment in innovation which will significantly affect our ability to address national workforce needs and compete in the global marketplace.

Can you say tradeoffs? The report pays some attention to the failures of K-12 to prepare their students for university. I hope that this report will stimulate a conversation on the potential disadvantages of using the same theories of pedagogy that have turned K-12 into a disaster area as models for higher education. If we'll see the last of "learning objectives" and "assessment" as a consequence, it will not be too soon.

The recommendations also suggest that tradeoffs matter.

1. To meet the challenges of the 21st century, higher education must change from a system based on reputation to one based on performance. We recommend the creation of a robust culture of accountability and transparency throughout higher education. Every one of our other goals, from improving access and affordability to enhancing quality and innovation, will be more easily achieved if higher education embraces and implements serious accountability measures.


2. The nation should establish postsecondary education as an opportunity for every student. We recommend, therefore, that the U.S. commit to an unprecedented effort to expand college access and success by improving student preparation and persistence, addressing non-academic barriers to college and providing significant increases in aid to low-income students.


3. Higher education is becoming increasingly unaffordable for students, their families, states and the federal government – and too many low income students are shut out from college altogether. In order to address the spiraling cost of a college education and the fiscal realities affecting government’s ability to finance higher education in the long run, we recommend that the entire student financial aid system be restructured and new incentives put in place to improve the measurement and management of costs and institutional productivity.


4. With some exceptions, higher education has yet to address the fundamental issues of how academic programs and institutions must be transformed to serve the changing needs of a knowledge economy. We recommend that America’s colleges and universities embrace a culture of continuous innovation and quality improvement by developing new pedagogies, curricula, and technologies to improve learning, particularly in the area of science and mathematical literacy.


5. In order to prosper in an ever more competitive global economy, America must ensure our citizens’ access to high quality and affordable educational, learning, and training opportunities throughout their lives. We recommend the development of a national strategy for lifelong learning designed to keep our citizens and nation at the forefront of the knowledge revolution.


6. The United States must ensure the capacity of its universities to achieve global leadership in key strategic areas such as science, engineering, medicine, and other knowledge-intensive professions. We recommend increased federal investment in areas critical to our nation’s global competitiveness and a renewed commitment to attract the best and brightest minds from across the nation and around the world to lead the next wave of American innovation.

It is difficult to take seriously a list of recommendations that begins by suggesting "reputation" can exist independently of "performance." The specifics go on to recommend that the Department of Education provide a public database for evaluating "institutional performance." Corporate welfare for U.S. News?

The pundits at Phi Beta Cons have had some opportunity to digest the report, with the expected observations. Anne D. Neal is disappointed.

The report stresses the need to ensure that students graduate with the skills they need to function in an increasingly competitive global economy—but fails to address the fact that students don't graduate with those skills because the undergraduate curriculum is not designed to ensure that they acquire them. The report also fails to note that today's truly educated American needs more than skills—he or she also needs a strong grasp of what democracy is, what citizenship means, and why they matter.

Again, it matters that higher education be, well, higher education, not a make-up of high school. The value of this report will be in both stimulating conversation and encouraging action such that the common schools do their job in order that the colleges and universities be able to do theirs.

George Leef takes a dimmer view.

The trouble with American higher ed is not "access" or the want to innovative teaching methods or insufficient attention to math and science.

The big problem is that huge numbers of kids go to college for four or five or six years to enjoy the beer-and-circus atmosphere (to borrow the title of Murray Sperber's book) and then graduate with little or no gain in knowledge and skills compared to when they entered.

Then, usually burdened by debt, they end up doing the same kinds of jobs that any typical high school student could easily learn to do.

Our low and declining academic standards should have been a centerpiece of the report, but it's hardly even a bit of garnish.

Perhaps what is required is for strong voices in higher education to say Enough to doing the work of the high schools, because the high schools failed to do their work. In the absence of that concrete action, Mr Leef is likely to be correct.