SUBSIDIZING SLACKING. The powers that be at St. Cloud State decided to begin the spring term on a Thursday (!?) You know the incentive that sets up.

Most students simply stayed out through the weekend and wandered up earlier this week.

Northern Kentucky University has adopted a policy, which has the Superintendent's endorsement, under which students who do not show up for the first week of classes may be removed from the course rolls. That prompts one miscreant to object.

I have never been a fan of the attendance policy. This isn't because I have bad attendance myself, but because I have never agreed with the university having the right to dictate to the students how many times they may miss class without consequence.

Stick around. You are about to witness a Group Fisking^(TM). Jonathan at Cliopatria, of the Northern Kentucky faculty, starts it in the university paper.

First, let me respectfully point out to Mr. Dressman that every student who attends NKU is subsidized to the tune of about 50 percent of costs. These funds come from state funding, the campus endowment, grants, donations and the like. Think of this as an automatic scholarship provided by the fine people of the Commonwealth of Kentucky, along with people from a host of organizations, corporations and alumni groups who have seen fit to invest in NKU students. They do so because they believe that a liberal arts education is good for both the individual and the wider community. Students are not simply customers; they are also the product.

Further, Mr. Dressman needs to be aware that he is attending an institution that was built with money other than his own. Current tuition only helps maintain the facilities and services that others generously helped to establish. When you cut class - missing class for a good reason is another matter - you throw away not only your own money but that of the generous people who helped to build this campus. That is a rather ungrateful thing to do.

Professor Reynolds is being rather kind. The miscreant's ingratitude includes ingratitude to others less well off, or perhaps less capable, who nonetheless pay taxes to make those partial scholarships possible. I have the advantage of also being able to point out to such gripers that under the Principle of Derived Demand, the consumers are really the graduate schools and the employers. A griper stupid enough to use the "I'm buying a grade argument" on an economist is generally unprepared to answer that. But there's more. Professor Reynolds also notes,

Hiring a teacher isn't just hiring somebody to help you learn, it is also a process of hiring someone to make you learn. Think of us as very demanding personal "brain trainers." We are here to get your flabby cerebral cortex off the couch and whip it into a lean, mean, critical-thinking machine.

He was kind enough not to lay some additional smack on the miscreant, who is genuinely asking for it. (What's that Texas line? He needed Fiskin'.)

To me this university has one job: provide the means to get an education and help people grow and learn. The teachers have one job: to teach and give students a good education. They should not be allowed to dictate our attendance. We pay to be here. You don't. This should be kept in mind.

Not. Wednesday night, Milt Rosenberg hosted Emory historian Patrick Allitt, shopping his recent I'm The Professor, You're The Student (it's late, I'm just grabbing Professor Rosenberg's link.) Emory is one of those places where some students believe they're buying a prestige credential: during the interview Professor Allitt observed that the most students could be said to be buying was the "opportunity" to obtain such a credential, but the onus was on the students to earn that credential. And part of the growth the miscreant is seeking is having sufficient life management skills to show up for your appointments. The worst the professor can do is give the student an empty transcript or some failing grades.

The Donald says, "you're fired."