CLANG, CLANG, CLANG GOES THE TROLLEY. Live from the Third Rail finds radio coverage of New Orleans testing the streetcars on the Canal and St. Charles lines, complete with the gongs and the gear noise. Service resumes this weekend, with your tax dollars paying for free rides "through March," or through Mardi Gras.

STUBBORN, IMPOSSIBLE PEOPLE Thus does University Diaries characterize the late Senator William Proxmire, the Senator from Wisconsin who succeeded Joseph McCarthy, a stubborn, impossible person of a different stripe.

Tenacity was a key to Proxmire's temperament. It fueled his lonely crusade to talk the Senate into approving an anti-genocide treaty - he made 3,000 speeches to the Senate over 19 years to force that vote. He went more than 20 years without missing a roll-call vote, smashing the previous record. His job was his life.

He was no doubt best known for his Golden Fleece awards, many of which fought rearguard actions against what we understand as public choice in action. Although the obituary, in an urban paper, notes critics of the senator who wish he had, just once, made some kind of deal to bring more federal funds to Wisconsin cities, notably Milwaukee, it does not note his understanding of where his bread was buttered. There is a legendary story in the Wisconsin economics department about the day an economics professor got up at one of Senator Proxmire's public sessions and asked about his vote in favor of cheese subsidies. It happened before I got there, but given the independent cast of mind of the professor in the story, I do not doubt that it happened.

FLASH FORWARD. Thursday night's Steve and Johnnie included an interview and performance by Corky Siegel and Jim Schwall, who reunited the Siegel-Schwall Blues Band after a 32 year hiatus. (I was not aware at the time that the Siegel-Schwall concert upstairs at Wisconsin's Carson Gulley Commons, sponsored by the Lakeshore Halls Association, was a farewell tour of sorts.) I had seen some Corky Siegel performances at Summerfest and at the Egyptian Theatre in the intervening years. The new Siegel-Schwall album provides the title for this post. There are upcoming performances in the Chicago and Madison area.

We now end this wallow in the past.

ON THE AIR. The Friday, December 16 Extension 720 will feature Express Messenger Milt Rosenberg interviewing Express Messenger Joanne Jacobs, who will be describing and later taking 'phone calls about Our School, her story of Downtown College Prep, a charter school in San Jose. (The show will be on air 9 pm to 11 pm Central on WGN Radio, 720 on your AM dial, clear channel Everywhere East of the Rockies, or on the WGN website.)

This review gives some sense of what the faculty was getting into.

The staff, young and largely inexperienced, was thrown into the educational equivalent of a boiling cauldron without protective gear. DCP students read far below grade level; educators hoping to teach advanced-placement math found their students didn't understand fractions. It was frustrating.

Moreover, most students didn't understand the process of education. As Jacobs awkwardly writes: "Some hadn't done homework ever."

(Awkwardly? Reads like a proper Milwaukee locution to me.)

Another review pulls no punches about what the school did differently.

"Progressive" educators should not read further unless smelling salts are at hand. Enough "protofascism" (one critic's words) exists in DCP's academic and disciplinary policies to make a touchy-feely educator faint dead away. There is no pretense of the students being at the same level of the teachers, and no condescending sugarcoating of the intensity of the work. Homework is assigned in every class, every day. Students who are still learning English aren't immune from academic probation. English students who haven't done their homework must march "the walk of shame" to update their homework charts in the front of the classrooms. No 11th-grader earns promotion to their senior year without having the GPA and test scores indicating they're eligible for Cal State (for which scholarship funds were raised).

Hoodies are confiscated; rough language is cause for a discipline referral; any student caught with drugs or alcohol is expelled (three strikes applies only in baseball - at DCP, only two referrals are necessary for a disciplinary meeting). One girl gets pregnant her first year; she is allowed to return, but is not allowed to bring the baby on campus for other girls to fuss over, and never mind free daycare. One teacher proudly displays a card, written by a student, that says, "Our teacher makes us suffer." In another classroom hangs an old WWI poster, aflame with images of crashed warplanes: "Consider the Possible Consequences If You Are Careless In Your Work."

You mean setting high expectations and holding students to them ... leads to high performance?

I hope this book's true purpose is to convince truly progressive education reformers to reject the current system and strike out with new charter schools, because that's what it's sure to cause.

Indeed.

HAPPY BEETHOVEN'S BIRTHDAY.

This portrait, which dates to 1806, is among this online gallery.

The Eroica Symphony in E-flat premiered in April 1805, and Beethoven is working on the Fourth Symphony and the Violin Concerto in 1806.

A LITTLE THERAPY. No exams to grade, thus a brief opportunity to treat the day job as a day job, and guiltlessly work on wiring the first O-1 so that it will run properly.


This picture dates from September, 2001. The superstructure is in essentially the same condition today.

THOSE MOUNTAINS ARE MADE TO BE CROSSED. Book Review No. 45 is West End (also available here), Charles S. Roberts's reminiscence, with some history, of the Baltimore and Ohio Rail Road's initial crossing of the Alleghanies.^(*) This work includes sufficient research and commentary to distinguish it from the more common compendium of roster shots that passes itself as a railroad book, thus meeting the minimal standards for the book reading challenge.

This stretch of railroad properly qualifies as the world's first mountain railroad. The builder of the Semmering Pass line in Austria did extensive research on Baltimore and Ohio's efforts before deciding that a railroad could be driven from Vienna to Graz by way of Gloggnitz, Semmering, and Mürzzuschlag. The climb from Piedmont to the summit alone is longer than the Semmering Pass crossing, and there are several long, steep slogs confronting eastbound traffic out of Grafton, West Virginia. To be sure, the summit at Semmering is a bit higher than the "Summit of the Alleghanies," but the difference is not as great as that on the Pennsylvania Rail Road's Main Line, another contender for a mountain railroad antedating the Semmeringbahn. (It's also possible to imagine Brahms or Dvorak taking the air at Deer Park or the Glades and working on some music. The mind boggles at the thought of Brahms in Altoona or Gallitzin.)

West End has in common with Mr Roberts's work on the Pennsylvania an excessive reliance on private information left to the reader to take on faith. Two examples. First, the thesis of the book is that the West End is the toughest stretch of railroad anywhere (others have more traffic or tougher grades) but the author provides no empirical support for that conclusion. Yes, lugging a lot of coal over sixty miles of moutain railroad on unstable rocks in wintry conditions is challenging, but to some extent that describes the Wyoming coal line and much of the Norfolk and Western. Second, the author refers to a Westinghouse plan for electrifying the West End in the late 1920s as daunting the consulting engineers, pp. 158-159. "Westinghouse engineers were obviously taken aback by the severity of West End operating conditions and one has the feeling that they were not absolutely and completely sure that they could get the job done. Electrification for Norfolk and Western, Virginian, Great Northern and others were success stories." That "other" leaves out the Milwaukee's Pacific Coast electrification, the more challenging of the two pieces of the Puget Sound under wire, as the line was cobbled together somewhat hastily in the first place in order to have a transcontinental railroad, rather than a superbly-engineered line as far as Avery, Idaho. Are readers supposed to be so steeped in Baltimore and Ohio lore that the impossibility of wiring it is to be taken on faith, rather than after a review of the evidence, or perhaps as a consequence of the money running out in 1929?

^(*)The marker at the crest of Seventeen Mile Grade reads "Summit of Alleghanies Altitude 2628 Feet." The marker at the crest of Sand Patch identifies the summit of the "Alleghenies."

THIS LITTLE LIGHT OF MINE. Tom McMahon reports that the ancient lightbulb in the Livermore, California firehouse still sheds light after 100 years, and it has its own webcam. I remember seeing a CBS News story on this long-burning bulb, made by the Shelby (Ohio) Electric Company (a lightbulb that refuses to abdicate keeps the spirit of The Mohawk that Refused to Abdicate alive?) sometime in 1972 ...

PLAYING FOR LEASTER? The last mistakes were Detroit's. Packers 16, Lions 13, in overtime. Now comes the dilemma: spoil the Bears' season on Christmas Day and help the Vikings back into the division title?

CULTURAL STUDIES DISCOVERS E-T-T-S^(*)

For Book Review No. 44, a quick look at Talk to the Hand, by Lynne Truss. Buried inside yet another lament about cell-phone gabblers, voice-mail hell, corporate "service improvements" that make consumers miserable, yobbish youth, reality television, and rampant individualism is an attempt at a case for respecting the common good. What she really does, however, is make the case that understanding social institutions is a task better left to economists than to cultural-studies wordsmiths. Toward the end she quotes a passage from The Society of Individuals.

The idea that in "reality" there is no such thing as a society, only a lot of individuals, says about as much as as the statement that there is in "reality" no such thing as a house, only a lot of individual bricks, a heap of stones.

Sure, but by what principles did a builder choose to use bricks rather than sticks, and did those same principles govern the selection of land for houses rather than coffee shops, and did those same principles lead to the emergence of neighborhoods or of cities? It is through such facile analogies that lame ideas such as "social construction" propagate.

There is a better passage earlier in the book.

Politeness is a signal of readiness to meet someone half-way; the question of whether politeness makes society cohere, or keeps other people safely at arms length, is actually a false opposition. Politeness does both, and that is why it is so frightening to contemplate losing it. Suddenly, the world seems both alien and threatening -- and all because someone's mother never taught him to say, "Excuse me" or "Please". There is an old German fable about porcupines who need to huddle together for warmth, but are in danger of hurting each other with their spines. When they find the optimum distance to share each other's warmth without putting each other's eyes out, their state of contrived cooperation is called good manners.

Put precisely, institutions evolve to reduce transaction costs. Incivility raises transaction costs. Incivility is inefficient. Per corollary, voice-mail hell is inefficient.

^(*)Explained here. Author Lynne Truss's predilection for four-word, four-syllable titles precludes that as her title, which is, however, a Springer show quotation.

CURIOUSER AND CURIOUSER. What happens when an underachieving Green Bay hosts an underachieving Detroit? It's going to be difficult to top what just happened. Green Bay stopped Detroit on a fourth-and-goal at the epsilon. On the ensuing series, Green Bay may or may not have been holding in the end zone, and a running back may or may not have intentionally grounded the ball in the end zone, either of which would have given Detroit two points and the lead. After review, the running back was outside the tackle box when he threw the ball (no in the grasp rule any more) and the holding was outside the end zone. No intentional grounding, no safety, and Detroit declined the holding penalty. Can you play football for leaster?

RECLAIMING AN ACADEMIC CULTURE. Start with a recollection by the dean at Anonymous Community of how a proprietary "college" handled retention problems.

At my previous employer (a for-profit college), the single aspect of the job I hated the most was on Tuesdays, when a report would show up on my desk (and the other managers’) showing the top 25 class sections that semester for student attrition. I was supposed to ‘ask’ the instructors of those sections in my departments to ‘shed light’ on the high drop rates, and to keep notes about which instructors showed up on the list most frequently. Persistently high drop rates were cause for termination, and both adjunct and full-time faculty were terminated when they couldn’t bring the rates down.

I hated that. I hated it because as a professor, I saw firsthand how much student attrition has nothing to do with the quality of teaching. (Most of it had to do with transportation, work/family hours, money, family crises, or substance abuse.) As the institution started to struggle financially, the squeeze on instructors tightened. Some, I’m told, consciously lowered their grading standards to keep themselves off the list.

(Here's where anonymity frustrates. I'd really like to know what proprietary college this is, and whether the retention efforts paid off, or if the policy led to inflated grades and employers staying away from the job fairs or requesting additional evidence of competence, such as SAT scores or military discharge papers. Focus on that "as the institution started to struggle financially." Might that be evidence that the real customer of a college degree is the employer, not the student. Inflate the grades, retain students, students don't cut it on the job market, fewer students come, inflate the grades further?)

Focus next on the sources of attrition. The retention dilemma might boil down to whether an institution interprets those sources as beyond individual students' control or as evidence of poor life management skills. (The short version is that both hypotheses receive support from economics research.) What the institution chooses to do about students' difficulties, however, becomes a major contributor to poor faculty morale, particularly when crunch time comes for the students. There's a conversation about that topic at Dr. Crazy's. The money paragraph:

If I didn't care, then I wouldn't be so pissed off when some refuse to take advantage of the opportunities I give them to succeed in my courses. What yesterday's post was about was frustration. I'm sure you all have felt it, too, regardless of whether you're a professor, a student, whatever. I find it interesting that some become so offended when people who teach actually express frustration. The fact that I do doesn't mean that I'm disrespectful to my students or that I hate my job. It means that sometimes my job is frustrating.

The comments (Blogger's internal comment feature does not yet allow links to individual comments, just go and scroll) raise some points that suggest additional thinking. Here's one:

I also teach at an institution where there is significantly more pressure on faculty to work around the off campus lives of students than there is pressure on students to accomodate their classes. At its worst, it feels like you can't expect anything of people enrolled in your courses without seeming mean, insensitive, unsupportive, discouraging, etc. It is only in the past year or so that I've become truly comfortable holding my ground on what I think are pretty basic expectations for student work. I sympathize a lot with the feeling that some students seem to expect that you should, essentially, design a whole new course just so they can tick the credits off of their list.

Again, the problems of anonymity. Do I infer that this poster's institution views the sources of attrition as beyond the students' control? Or is the institution's culture one that encourages lots of extracurricular and service activities even at the exclusion of book learning? But I repeat: there are market tests for institutional performance. Public policy for the past 20-25 years has not been biased toward more rigor and accountability in the schools because a few mean Republicans are running the government. The education system has failed to challenge its charges. Stand your ground. I'm counting on the next cohorts of professors not to give up.

Scroll further.

The problem here is (at least as I see it), is that most academics are "produced" at places at Harvard, Wisconsin, Chicago, Berkeley (these types of places produce the lion's share of PhDs...don't believe me, look it up). These are places where students (undergrads as well, for the most part) actually CARE about learning and what-have-you. Surprise, surprise, surprise when they (newly-minted PhD's) get to So-So State U. and guess what: Students don't care so much about anything except getting the ol' BA and getting out and making cash money.

So, when a students sends an annoying email about "Please give me an extension" or whatever, the instructor/professor is understandably upset..but wait: Why does the professor get upset? Because he/she has put all their ol' eggs in the same basket and is letting the student RUN THEIR LIFE. What I say, is take back the control say, "You get an F", refer them to the syllabus ...

Dig deeper. First, the Ph.D.s are a self-selected bunch likely to hang out with other similarly self-selected people. They're less likely to have seen the time-servers sharing the Harvards, Wisconsins, Chicagos, and Berkeleys with them. (You get a better class of slacker, but you're still dealing with slackers.) Thus, to gripe about how working conditions would be better higher up the food chain is likely self-defeating. Second, think about how a less-motivated culture has emerged at So-So State. (With sufficiently many Ph.D.s from strong institutions saying "Enough," it it might go away.) Did So-So State expand its faculty and take on additional responsibilities during the 1960s, often by hiring further down the food chain? Does So-So's mission statement reflect the questioning of "status hierarchies" popular in those days? Has anybody even given any thought to what So-So's mission is? In the first case, changing the institutional culture might be as simple as waiting out the mediocrities. In the second case, that's why we have market tests (is anybody really interested in "alternative" degree programs any more?) In the third, the simplest thing to do might be to hold the line and take the control back.

Another remark:

As Dr. Crazy points out, anyone who is a professor and does NOT get riled up over rude/slacker/apathetic students is not teaching because they love it. To push down the emotions of frustration is to give up caring, and as soon as you give up caring, you stop being nearly as effective.

Yes, but part of being effective is to set those boundaries and stick by them. What does it say about the times we live in that some people describe such standards as "tough love?"

QUOTE OF THE DAY. InstaPundit doesn't offer commentary frequently, but this is a goodie.

Too many people in academia don't seem to realize that the money has to come from somewhere. And you hear people talk about how academia needs to adopt an "adversarial stance" toward the larger culture, without thinking much about why the larger culture would want to pay for that.

That comes bundled with a George Will column.

A striking alteration of America's political landscape since 1960 has been the marginalization -- actually, the self-marginalization -- of the professoriate.

Don't discount it as the dyspeptic response of a lifetime Cubs (and American Flyer) fan to a Sox win. Read the rest.

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?

I WANT TO HEAR A GOOD SIEVE CHANT. Wisconsin 7, Michigan Tech 0.

ANGELS WE HAVE HEARD ON HIGH TELL US TO GO OUT AND BUY. That's from Tom Lehrer's Christmas Carol, and it's as good a way as any to introduce No Credentials' anthology of karaoke for RINOs.

IMPOSING A POOLING EQUILIBRIUM. Illini or Huskie does not like Chicago's imposition of a smoking ban in all taverns and eateries.

I'm confused about the necessity to make things mandatory instead of voluntary. As a Virginian, I'm aware of the initiative happening up there in Alexandria to ask businesses to voluntarily ban smoking on their premises. 60 businesses voluntarily took up the ban on smoking. (I can't seem to remember where I read that, but you'll have a source for it as soon as I find one)

and what about the poor employees trapped in those smoke-filled taverns slowly marching towards a lifetime of being hooked up to an oxygen tank?

I feel the spirit of Adam Smith within me, "the agreeableness or disagreeableness of the employment themselves... make up for a small pecuniary gain in some employments"

If you're a business owner who wants a clear conscious, but no loss of business from the absence of smoking customers... just pay bartenders a compensating wage differential for all of the additional second hand smoke they're inhaling...I betcha people still take those jobs.

It'll even serve as a pretty good line to use on the ladies, "my job is so dangerous that they pay me a compensating wage differential....oh yeah, everyday I go in there, knowing that I could die....but it's an easy choice to make when you know your purpose on this earth is to serve the people."

You have started well, entered apprentice. Here in DeKalb, one of the east side bars has posted a big sign, "Support Hospitality Business. Oppose Smoking Ban," complete with contact information for the mayor and common council members. DeKalb, also, would like to go the Chicago route, despite the potential inefficiency.

Here's the economic theory. Separating equilibria can more efficiently serve populations with different attitudes toward risk, provided the separation can be achieved more cheaply than a common policy can be provided. (That's the short form. One can devote a month or two of an advanced microeconomics class to the details.) We already have a number of separating equilibria in taverns: gay bars, frat bars, sports bars, jaded-old-man bars, biker bars. Most of these have the property of evolving without any special legislation. Taverns are generally obligated to serve any patron of legal drinking age who does not exhibit signs of incapacitation, but clientele are able to self-select. The dynamics of that self-selection are a bit tricky to model with more than two types of client.

In Alexandria, participating bars put up a special "smoke free" sign (try that with "gay free" or "yuppie free" or "frat free") and those that allow smoking weigh the loss of business from smokers differently.

I'LL NEVER LACK FOR WORK. The grades may be done but there are some things to tidy up at the office. Enroute, I heard a radio commercial objecting to pay radio (this article might provide some context.) Tag line: This message brought to you by America's 13,000 radio stations that believe some things should be free.

I'm not making this up.

MAYBE I SHOULD CALL THE ROLL? Wanted: Skilled workers; Businesses boosting pay, retraining employees in a struggle to fill openings. Read on:

"If you want people who are pretty smart and self-driven, you are not going to hire them for $8 an hour. I think that a lot of manufacturers are asking too much for too little pay."

Pay may be part of the issue. But global competition is changing the skill levels many manufacturers are seeking in their employees. And a new report shows a widening gap between employers' needs and workers' abilities.

The report released Nov. 22 by the National Association of Manufacturers cites the "human capital performance gap" as a threat to America's competitiveness and "our nation's most critical business issue."

Based on a Deloitte Consulting survey of more than 800 manufacturers, the study reports that three-fourths of the respondents said a "high performance work force" is key to success in business, and nearly half said their current employees lacked even basic skills such as attendance, timeliness and work ethic.

We're talking about manufacturing and the skilled trades here, not the (I fear increasingly suspect) college premium. And sometimes the reasoning of the people in higher education is suspect.

The key for manufacturing survival in a global market is figuring out how to produce more and better with fewer workers, said John Stilp, dean of technology and applied sciences at Milwaukee Area Technical College.

"What we want in our economy is the entry level worker with the highest possible skills," Stilp said. Toward that end, MATC has used a federal grant to pilot an assessment of manufacturing skills, which led to the launch Nov. 16 of a national certification system through the Manufacturing Skill Standards Council.

There are limits to what one can extract from a person. Perhaps the secret is to expand the output of people while enabling them to go home sooner?

At Exacto Spring Corp. in Grafton, it takes three years of training to get employees fully up to speed on their jobs. "During that time, there are ups and downs before you see a payback," said Greg Heitz, company president.

Exacto focuses on the work environment along with wages.

"If someone doesn't want to get up in the morning and go to work, the pay won't be enough," Heitz said.

The company wants employees who can work with machinery, tools and blueprints. "If you lack reading and math skills, we can't hire you," Heitz said.

Exacto has done well with more mature workers, who are about 35 and older.

"These are guys who really care about their jobs, once they get a family and start worrying about things like insurance and benefits," Heitz said. "You see a lot of younger people who will go through six or seven jobs. Why waste your time with them?"

There's more. Some of it is frustration with what the schools produce. Some of it is frustration with the nature of office work.

THEY DROVE OLD DIXIE DOWN.

It took more than a night, but the Army of the Tennessee, under Gen^ls. Grant and Sherman, enjoyed Nothing but Victory, our Book Review No. 43. The Amazon site includes at least one reviewer who discovered that the Army of the Tennessee is The Neglected Actor in winning the War of the Southern Rebellion. I have long intuited that. Perhaps it comes from having walked most of the Shiloh Battlefield and later discovering collateral grand-uncles in the 31st and 34th Wisconsin. (And I must confess upon paying my respects at Little Round Top to thanking the 20th Maine for buying enough time for the Midwestern -- at the time of the Rebellion, Northwestern -- units to finish the job in the West and make it possible for President Lincoln to pension off his political generals and get the job done in the East.)

The book will frustrate the military enthusiast who is looking for campaign maps and tactical analysis. On the other hand, it provides a great deal of insight into the thinking of commanders and corporals as well as some contemporary lessons. It provided me with some new information.

Consider, for example, the blunder that might have lost the Rebellion for the Confederacy. (One of the guests on the recent Extension 720 Civil War evening offered that assertion.) Some years ago, I visited the so-called "Gibraltar of the West," a fort overlooking the Mississippi River at Columbus, Kentucky. I was not aware then that this fort, established by Bishop Leonidas Polk, a Confederate general, was the consequence of a Rebel invasion of a neutral state. President Lincoln and his advisors were wise enough to restrain impetuous Union commanders, who saw the strategic value of Columbus, from occupying it and giving secessionist legislators in Kentucky reason to claim the Yankees had invaded. But with Rebel units in Columbus, the Union commanders could petition the Kentucky legislature for permission to eject the Rebel invaders from Kentucky. Although Kentucky remained a battleground for the duration, the clearance of Columbus was ultimately obtained by passing through Kentucky to obtain control of the Tennessee and Cumberland rivers, thus getting in the rear of a Rebel army now stuck on the Kentucky bluffs.

(I'll leave the politics of the Confederacy to others. Commanders enjoyed greater freedom of action than their Union counterparts, often to the despair of president Jefferson Davis, and brain-cramps such as Bishop Polk's were less likely to be punished with a demotion. And many of the Rebel soldiers were fighting for principles of individual autonomy. But it's a bit of a paradox to invoke libertarian-sounding principles such as local control and states' rights in defense of the right to own another human being, the "property gained by honest toil" in Bonnie Blue Flag.)

A careful reader will also discover the origin of Gen^l. Grant's fighting style. At the Battle of the Wilderness, he dressed down the querulous Army of the Potomac staff, "Oh, I am heartily tired of hearing about what Lee is about to do. Some of you seem to think he is suddenly going to turn a double somersault, and land in our rear and on both of our flanks at the same time. Go back to your command, and try to think what we are going to do ourselves, instead of what Lee is going to do."^(*) That thinking was in place as early as the battle for Fort Donelson. I was not aware until reading this book that the Rebels attempted to break out from the fort, and nearly defeated the Union army in the process. The story credits Gen^l. Grant with intuiting that the Rebel army was probably as tired as his own, and the army that made the next aggressive move would prevail. (And I can imagine, can't I, that somebody might have attributed the phrase "fatigue makes cowards of us all" to the General, and that became part of West Point lore, and Vince Lombardi learned it assisting Red Blaik at Army?) We see the same pattern at Shiloh. Rather than retreat across the Tennessee River and fort up with the reserve, the usual Eastern pattern in those days, Gen^ls. Grant and Sherman organized a defensive line along the river and brought the reserves across. The story at Vicksburg is even more interesting. I'm not an expert in getting into the enemy's O-O-D-A loop, but that sure sounds like what happened. The Army of Northern Virginia was not used to being treated that way.

I'm also given to wonder what former Army of the Potomac commander Joseph Hooker, whose units acquitted themselves well at Missionary Ridge and Lookout Mountain, might have thought after observing the western fighting style. "Dang ... Jackson's corps had to have been worn out after marching all day ... if only we'd hit back immediately..."

But in some ways the lessons one might draw from the Army of the Tennessee for today's troubles are the most instructive. Consider a recent New Republic essay by William Stuntz, which addresses the thesis that longer, more difficult wars lead to more careful thinking about the war's objectives and the permanence of the results. Here's his opening.

Abraham Lincoln led what was left of his country to war to restore "the Union as it was," to use the popular phrase of the time. Free navigation of the Mississippi River, the right to collect customs duties in Southern ports, the status of a pair of coastal forts in South Carolina and Florida--these were the issues over which young American men got down to the business of killing one another that sad summer.

It was all a pipe dream. "The Union as it was" was gone, forever. Events proved William Tecumseh Sherman--the prophet of that war--right, and everyone else wrong: An ocean of blood would be required to reunite the United States, and once that blood was spilled, the country over which James Buchanan had presided was as dead as the soldiers whose corpses littered the battlefields of Shiloh and Gettysburg, Antietam and Cold Harbor.

But here is where we part company. (I'm going to leave aside the absence of a loss function with more power against a false positive where the false positive is nuclear weapons in the contemporary part of Mr Stuntz's thesis.) Mr Stuntz suggests the Union war aims had changed by 1864.

Similarly, control over the Mississippi wasn't worth the bloodletting across the length of the Confederacy's border that took place in Lincoln's first term. Thankfully, Lincoln saw to it that the war's purpose changed.

No. President Lincoln earned a second term because the first war aim, reopening the Mississippi, was achieved, and Atlanta occupied. What went on across the Virginia border was in some ways an expensive sideshow. General Lee could have occupied Washington but without the Mississippi and the northern Atlantic ports, what good would it have done? (One of the four battles named in the quote is not like the others. If you've been paying attention, you know which one, and why.) The purpose remained the same. President Lincoln had the political capital to replace some of his political Eastern generals with real commanders, who, well, one of the four battles is not like the others, get the picture?

Then, if you think national politics are fractious today, let me give you some perspective from 1864. (Scroll down for some perspective from 1968.) Open Nothing but Victory to p. 296. Read about the "copperheads (peace Democrats)" who visited Army camps encouraging soldiers to desert. Then flip to p. 454. Vicksburg surrenders.

That afternoon, crowds of boys stood around shouting and ringing cowbells outside the houses of [Mt. Pleasant, Iowa's] three antiwar residents, and the local menfolk made the three Copperheads display the Stars and Stripes.

Or consider how the Army of the Tennessee cleared improvised explosive devices, which is what the land mines of the day were. See page 602.

The use of land mines was still quite new, and it was considered to be outside the bounds of civilized warfare unless they were planted directly in front of a fort, within the range of its guns. Then they were allowable as part of the fort's defenses. But, as Henry Hitchcock of Sherman's staff wrote, to "leave hidden in an open public road, without warning or chance of defense, these murderous instruments of assassination" was "contrary to every rule of civilized warfare.⁽⁺⁾" [Brig. Gen^l. Frank] Blair dealt with the matter by having Rebel prisoners brought up and ordered to clear the road of mines. Just as they were being assigned their task, Sherman and his staff rode up. Some of the prisoners "begged" Sherman very hard to be left off, but" as Hitchcock noted, "of course to no purpose." Sherman told the prisoners that "their people had put these things there to assassinate our men instead of fighting them fair, and they must remove them; and if they got blown up he didn't care." The prisoners went to work "very carefully" and successfully cleared the minefield without further incident.

Nothing quite like a spat among neighbors to bring out the worst. I haven't mentioned the foraging. That sub-story is almost worth another column. Just read the book.

^(*)Rhea, The Battle of the Wilderness (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press 1994, 421-22)

⁽⁺⁾Isn't "civilized warfare" an oxymoron?