MEMORIAL DAY RAILROAD READING.

Classic Trains contributor and longtime Passenger Rail maven Kevin P. Keefe calls the roll of trains honoring members of the military.  On the honor roll is The Pennsylvania Railroad's Red Arrow, so named for the 32nd Infantry Division.  "The Pennsylvania didn’t stop with the Red Arrow. On April 28, 1929, it debuted the new Rainbow, a Chicago–New York train named for another gallant World War I outfit, the 42nd Infantry Division, or Rainbow Division. This time, the credit for the name goes directly to PRR railroaders."  In addition, The Pennsylvania Railroad had trains named for generic flag officers, namely The General and The Admiral.  Streamliner honors included Burlington's General Pershing Zephyr.

VOTED OUT OF OFFICE, STILL STAYING OUT OF JAIL.

Former Illinois governor Bruce Rauner, who might have been turfed out in the 2018 response to Donald Trump, engages in a wide-ranging interview with a Dartmouth alumni magazine.

Indeed, if Illinois had been a business, a lot of managers might have declared bankruptcy and started over.

The state had one of the largest unfunded pension obligations of any state—roughly $110 billion. Illinois’ credit rating had sunk to the worst in the nation. A deepening budget hole had left billions in unpaid bills. A steady population decline was accelerating while neighbors such as Indiana, Wisconsin, and Iowa were enjoying population growth. Financial analysts called Illinois the worst-run state in America.

Campaigning for the office—his first venture into elective politics—Rauner had a casual, everyman style, riding to events on a Harley and boasting that his beverage of preference was beer. Still, he ran on the premise that his business acumen could rescue the situation, and his message was strongly anti-tax and anti-regulation, an agenda that faced daunting obstacles in the heavily blue state. On Election Day he narrowly beat the Democratic incumbent but still faced Democratic majorities in the state assembly. “If we work together, Illinois can be great again,” he promised in his inaugural speech.

That didn’t happen. Rauner battled constantly with Democratic legislators, a conflict that left the state without a budget for more than two years. He fought so hard for financial reforms that even some in his own party turned on him. The state’s credit rating approached junk status. His talk of endemic government corruption and his attacks on public-sector unions made hard-wired enemies. Over his opposition, the state’s income tax rose.

As my colleague David Smyth would say when somebody griped about a provost or dean, "his successor will be worse." Indeed so.  "Not long after, Rauner sold his principal Illinois home, a Winnetka mansion, and spent more time at his out-of-state residences. In 2020 he voted in Florida."  There's a lot of that going on these days.  The problem is, in politics well-intentioned novices have to deal with a lot of careerists and grifters.

Today Rauner splits his time evenly between business activities and philanthropic work. But he emerged from government service with insights on the fraught state of American politics and—even though he estimates he spent $150 million on the effort—doesn’t foreclose the idea of going at it again. “If good people don’t get involved in the process,” he says, “bad people run it with bad outcomes.”

His home state’s dire financial condition led Rauner into the political arena. “I got very concerned about government regulations and taxes that were pushing businesses out,” he says. By his account, the business community urged him to run and, after declining twice, he took the matter to his family. “We talked about it around the dinner table, all six of the kids, debating if Dad should run for governor,” he says. Several of his older children warned he would face “a nightmare” of attacks. “Daddy, I don’t want you to go to jail,” said his youngest daughter, 13 at the time.

The former governor is still optimistic about electoral politics, particularly if the partisans could trim toward the median voter. "[Term limits and nonpartisan redistricting], he thinks, would ease the path for centrist politicians to regain power from the extremes."  On paper, perhaps; reality might be more stubborn.

FRIDAY short TAKES.

Here comes this week's roundup of posts that caught my attention, generally because they could be reduced to one pithy remark, which too often was buried in the concluding paragraph.

1.  The starlet pays for the consequence-free sex.  "When we watch sex-saturated movies, we are complicit in the denigration of these actresses."

2.  Lift the ukases, Karen. "As more people arrived, the tables were pushed together. Because we were all vaccinated, we didn't stop to think about it."  Sic semper tyrannis.  "[T]here will always be an elite class that thinks it doesn’t have to play by the rules it imposes on the people. "  Just lift the ukases, Karen.  "Tori Sachs, executive director of the conservative Michigan Freedom Fund, on Sunday blasted the Democratic governor, saying it was time for Whitmer to end her restrictions that she's isn't even following."

3.  The vapidity of culture-studies interrogations.  "That’s a commonly used word, and it’s amusing, as it makes you think of some hard-boiled precinct captain propping up a dead body in a chair under a single light and grilling him. Confess! You were there, we know it!"  Plus, "Stupid article. Another White Woman finding sins from seventy years ago to expiate her own complicity."

4.  Make Every Road a Toll Road.  Old, but worth repeating.

5.  Today's potted Welfare Economics Paradigm.  "The new, often unstated dominant ideology is a mix of wokeism and center-left Democratic technocratic policy reasoning."

6.  Hurry up with the pragmatic populism!  "American Jews, the overwhelming majority of whom still support the Democrats, have a very serious reckoning coming. The attacks in one American city after the other aren’t spontaneous outbreaks; they’re the direct outcome of a political party enabling a populist movement to redefine the boundaries of acceptable conduct."  Hint: it's not in defense of storming the Capitol.

7.  A signal, or a failure for higher education to develop human capital?  "Education’s failure to narrow class divides isn’t an accident."  The failure begins in kindergarten? "There are no classes in good manners or dressing appropriately, let alone speaking clearly."  That's been a long time in coming, and the culture-studies types are still not listening.

8.  Trumpland is more honest than parts of higher education.  "Both places promote people – even nutty scuzzy people – who satisfy deep dark desires."

9.  Journalism is not something people learn in classrooms.  "It is a truth universally acknowledged that professors of journalism are among the most genuinely worthless specimens walking God’s green earth and that any halfway self-respecting society would exile them to the moon, and I am not at all sure that an advanced degree in journalism is more of a qualification than a disqualification when it comes to instructing students."

10.  At least two cheers for emergence.  "The imperial system is evolved, organic, Burkeian, while the metric system is imposed, arbitrary, Cartesian."  In addition, too much educational effort goes into preaching about the logic of Cartesian measures while fooling about with cumbersome and unnecessary conversions.

11.  "[D]epriving people of their liberty simply because the government doesn’t know whether it is necessary should surely have no place in a civilised society."

12.  "The Soviet era joke 'we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us' has been replaced by the Biden joke 'they pay us more not to work so we don’t.'"

13.  No.  Next question? "But will the political-media establishment of Washington use this moment to reexamine itself and reflect?"

14.  Two trillion dollars down the drain?  "Democrats want to lower carbon emissions, improve access to opportunity, and address public health while Republicans want to get really good value for the taxpayer and support a strong economy — and [roads and bridges as usual] does none of those things."

15.  Sometimes you have to be cruel to be kind.  "Insanity Wrap is feeling too kind to remind [Atlanta] Councilman Brown that generational poverty can most often be traced to fatherless households, subsidized by the very government he seeks to enlarge, and celebrated by the progressive-dominated popular culture."  Read on and discover what sort of ward heeler he is.

16.  Sociology with better econometrics?  "The recent Papers and Proceedings issue of the American Economic Review has 34 sessions, with 13 of them devoted to gender or ethnicity. If it were not for sessions devoted to COVID, the American Economic Association would now be 50 percent focused on race and gender." I did find a little industrial economics among the abstracts.

17.  That's the way the infrastructure crumbles.  "One-time investments are precisely how we got into this mess. We build all this stuff and we don’t make sure it can pay for itself, so we rely on mechanisms like the Highway Trust Fund, which we also don’t bother to fund because raising the gas tax to keep up with the rate of inflation is politically unacceptable." If you're in the transportation business, be businesslike!

18.  Green virtue signals.  "American environmentalists have never been particularly good at saving the planet and all that sort of thing, but they are world-beaters when it comes to subsidizing the household consumption of upper-middle-class Americans of the sort who support environmental organizations."  Plus an 1837 electric traction engine, and wait for that all-electric civilian Hummer.

19.  Freedom needs good stories.

20.  Sic transit Donald Trump?  "Trump gave [his voters] symbolism, not tangible victories."  Also,  "Having Trump out on the trail pounding Democrats over inflation and rising violent crime would be fine with [House leader Kevin] McCarthy (R-California) and [Senate leader Mitch] McConnell (R-Kentucky). Having him out there muttering about stolen elections is less fine, especially now that Liz Cheney (R - Wyoming) has been excommunicated allegedly because she won’t stop revisiting the same topic. But Trump is Trump and he’ll carry his own message, not the party’s."

THE FEVER WILL EVENTUALLY BREAK.

David Brooks, who might have made his way to national pundithood documenting the bourgeois bohemians, suggests that the current manifestations of the counterculture will run their course.

In the 1960s, left-wing radicals wanted to overthrow capitalism. We ended up with Whole Foods. The co-optation of wokeness seems to be happening right now.

The thing we call wokeness contains many elements. At its core is an honest and good-faith effort to grapple with the legacies of racism.

Sixties activism, redux, and the hysterical parts run their course, while the excesses inspire corrections.  Steven Hayward has also seen the story play out.  "Liberals were slow to perceive the rising backlash to their misgovernment as the 1960s wasted away their long-run political dominance."

Rod Dreher is less optimistic.

Anyway, I don’t believe in the slightest that the core of racial wokeness is “an honest and good-faith effort to grapple with the legacies of racism.” I believe it is a naked attempt to exercise tribal politics, and to do so by (brilliantly) deploying moral language and victim status to disguise what is being done. It is a war on Deplorables justified by the same kind of linguistic chicanery that allowed, say, the Soviets to declare their subjection of Eastern Europe to be those countries’ “liberation.”

I truly don’t understand how my friend David can blithely hand-wave the effects of this poisonous ideology’s spread away, trusting that it will be co-opted by capitalism in the end.

It's likely that the deadliest toxins will prove destructive, as the communities rendered uninhabitable by reimagined policing, and the social lives rendered barren in the name of gender-fluidity, will be more powerful forces seeking a state of good repair than any ticked-off Deplorables will ever be.

Does David not understand that teaching an entire generation of white kids to despise themselves because of the color of their skin is likely to spark a bitter racial backlash? The only people who believe that any of this is in “good faith” are those who already believe it.

Fifty years ago, the counterculture, such as it was, argued with an establishment that was still strongly influenced by notions of a Vital Progressive Center and heirs to a Victory Dividend earned by Collective Action.  Today's Wokesters have no such establishment to contend with.

“We meant well” is the excuse that the Social Justice Warriors of the 1960s and 1970s made when their revolutionary plans produced destruction. Let’s say wokeness will run its course, and be co-opted by the establishment, and defanged. How long will that take? What will be its effects on the lives of real people?

I do call this “soft totalitarianism,” because this ideology’s proponents have to resort to totalitarian methods to impose it. David should ask himself how far someone would get in a university or corporation by challenging any of this, no matter how politely?

Yes, it all seems scary now, the way the late 1960s and early 1970s seemed scary to people who weren't into the Consciousness Revolution. And how quickly it passed, in part because of the counterculture's own excesses, and in part because there were plenty of people who could opt out, keep their heads down, and thrive.

A discussion of the classic themes of civil rights, Vietnam, the counterculture, and feminism—is longstanding. Glorifying the radical 1960s, however—the loud, exceptional, interesting, wonderful, psychedelic 1960s—gets in the way of getting to know everything else—the “Cs,” the contributors, the quiet producers, the innovators who don’t self-promote or march, are not brought forth by historians, and have no obvious advocates. These are the men and women who made the era what it was in a variety of fields including athletics, engineering, technology, science, medicine, entertainment, and others. It is these who are always left out, deserve credit, and to whom I want to pay some attention.

I hazard to state that the large number of less-written-about events, people, and inventions of this storied time are equally—possibly more—enduring than some of the higher profile things identified with the 1960s today.

It is as likely fifty years from now that the loudest voices and the most outrageous behaviors of today will not any longer be the principal stories. Reality is socially conservative.

MORE COMICAL THAN AN EARLY METS GAME.

Their manager, Casey Stengel, famously asked, "Does anyone here know how to play this game?"  But for all their gaffes, they probably knew this fundamental rule of baseball.  "In baseball, when there are two out and the ball is in play, what happens on the base paths is irrelevant until the batter reaches first."

Watch the embedded video.  Cub batter Javier Baez hits a ground ball to Pirate third baseman Erik Gonzalez, whose throw to first baseman Will Craig pulls him toward home plate, with Baez approaching.  You wouldn't expect Javier Baez to just give himself up for the tag, would you, particularly after the Brewers have gotten into the Cubs' heads on the base paths the last couple seasons!  He backs up.  Will Craig gives chase.  First rule of sailing, stay between the follower and the mark.  If Mr Craig had simply stepped on first base, inning over.  Instead, he and Pirate catcher Michael Perez do the rundown thing.  The point of the madness, though, is that Cub Willson Contreras is on base, running on contact, and while the first baseman and catcher are working on their rundown, Mr Contreras slides into home, safely, provided Mr Baez can get to first.  "Baez took off for first again, and Perez's throw in that direction went into right, allowing Baez to go to second on what was officially a fielder's choice, with the run counting for a 2-0 Chicago lead. [The next Cub hitter, Ian] Happ drove in Baez with a single, making it 3-0."

Hot Air's Allahpundit offers the coaching point.

To make this run count, in other words, Craig had to commit two of the most absent-minded blunders since Fred Merkle forgot to proceed to second base against the Cubs 113 years ago. And even then, he could have been bailed out with a bit of luck. If Baez hadn’t had the presence of mind to break for first, reaching safely, he might have been tagged out by the catcher and the run wouldn’t have counted. Or if the Pirates’ second baseman had had the presence of mind to cover first, the catcher could have thrown down there before Baez reached the bag and gotten a force out. Again, the run wouldn’t have counted.

The only way the run could have scored was if everything happened here just as it did. The batter buys time for the runner to cross the plate and then, bizarrely, the entire defense forgets that all they need to do is record the out at first to nullify the run. It’s never happened before. It’ll probably never happen again.

No doubt this point is being impressed on Little Leaguers all around the world even as we read this.

TRUST IS A MUTUAL OBLIGATION.

A Morale Conditioner masquerading as a professor of English comes up with a new twist on an old paranoid theme:  "Unlike the controlled environments of physical classrooms, online education can directly expose those of us doing antiracist work to unintended and hostile audiences."  The horror!  Those outsiders, who might be parents, or who might be lurking the online classes, are up to the same old tricks, now calling attention to critical studies terminology the same way they used to count all the titles with "Marx" or "Marxism" in them.  When somebody is teaching institutional economics, or perhaps comparative politics, in the guise of  a literature class, perhaps somebody should call attention.

Most colleges and universities are committed to multicultural interpretations of social justice, as long as it also serves the professional interests of white faculty and students. But it remains to be seen if this commitment will extend to an active antiracism. The former is a type of interest convergence, and it lends itself quite easily and naturally to professionalization and can be broken down into assessable skills that can be marketed to corporations and educational administrators without much disruption of the status quo. But the latter, informed by critical race theory, openly questions professionalization as such and demands interrogation and reorganization of the status quo -- precisely because the professions and their educational tributaries are rooted in systemic racism.

While antiracist pedagogy may sharpen skills that many employers seek, such as literacy in a diversity of perspectives and cultures, that is not its primary goal. On the contrary, it aims to reassess its assessors by understanding white supremacy as a key organizing principle of Western history, culture(s) and institutions. It then reimagines them, recognizing the violence that made them possible and then demanding that those long denied agency have full participation.

In the same way that "reimagining police" has made Minneapolis less safe, is "reimagining institutions" going to make interest convergence more difficult, or graduates with proper antiracist dispositions less employable? Perhaps English departments ought to stick to literature, and let other disciplines marshal the empirical evidence on whether professionalism leads to more poverty.

Never mind that: Matt "Dean Dad" Reed sees online lurkers as more dangerous to learning than the politicized priors of so-called critical theory.  "Having a third party -- whether a parent, a self-appointed political watchdog or whoever else -- lurk in the shadows, waiting for a “gotcha” moment to dive-bomb the instructor, makes serious inquiry of controversial subjects impossible."  He continues with an observation that is probably irrelevant to that politicized English class.

When I taught the great works of Western political thought, I’d often role-play someone who agreed with that week’s author. The idea was to help students see how certain ideas worked. So one week I’d be a Hobbesian, fantasizing about a Leviathan that would keep everyone in line, and the next I’d be a Lockean waxing rhapsodic on social contracts. At various times I’d be a Platonist, an Aristotelian, a Machiavellian, a Marxist, a utilitarian, an anarchist and even -- the most fun -- a Nietzschean. (Villains always get the best lines.) I’d ask students to try on different schools of thought for size. A voyeuristic creep looking to score points could easily isolate a single line from a moment like that and run with it. Out of context, it could look damning. But the context is the entire point.

Read that other essay, dear reader, and see if there's any role-playing, or code-shifting, going on.

Here's the problem, though.  It doesn't take a "voyeuristic creep" cherry-picking snippets of an online class or a reading list to assert that a professor is indoctrinating students.  Students themselves dip in, zone out, have reasons fair or frivolous for missing a class, and they'll misunderstand even the most anodyne of statements.  Doesn't matter how conscientious you are, it happens.

It doesn't help for higher education to be perceived as offering ideological conditioning dressed up in recondite jargon.

PROCESS, NUANCE, FAILURE.

That has long been a Cold Spring Shops theme.  I claim no special insight in labelling former president Jimmy Carter as an indecisive Silent Generation type twenty years ago.  I'm pleased to see people with bigger platforms seeing the pattern repeating.  "On policy issues, Mr. Biden, 78, takes days or weeks to make up his mind as he examines and second-guesses himself and others. It is a method of governing that can feel at odds with the urgency of a country still reeling from a pandemic and an economy struggling to recover."  Yes, we saw that coming as well.

Not to mention that at the height of The America That Worked^(TM), these people came of age thinking that process mattered and that big institutions, such as the United Nations and Congress could work.  Thus the Watergate hearings.

But process-worship has since degenerated into booth review, endless committee meetings of the referees at the same time that the players can function without a huddle, and "completed the process of the catch" means nobody knows anymore what a catch is.

Just like the coot, who apparently can never be burdened with too much detail. Doing the opposite of his predecessor, who came up in a world of executive summaries and no more than three bullet points in a recommendation, has value, but only up to a point. "Embedded in Biden’s mindset is the micromanaging social engineer."

It might be, as Power Line's Steven Hayward is hinting at, that the Times released that criticism as battlespace preparation, with a handoff to Mrs Emhoff coming sooner rather than later.  "The timing of the Times story is interesting, as Biden’s 'honeymoon' period looks to be over, his ambitious legislative and spending agenda is in trouble on Capitol Hill, and multiple self-induced crises are piling up in ways that bring back memories of the ineptitude of Jimmy Carter."  The Carter comparisons keep coming.  "It’s stunning how much success Biden has managed to reverse in not even four months. With long lines at the pump, slowing growth and rising inflation, it’s looking like the Jimmy Carter era — except that it took Carter years to produce the disasters that this president has fostered in scant months."

It might not be the empathetic mind-set that's causing the troubles.  Rather, it might be the process worship and the misplaced enthusiasm for some sort of consensus.  "We have two major parties beholden to electoral bases with very different interests. That reality is itself a result of a compromise (Republican support for the so-called voting rights act enabled state legislatures to craft majority-minority districts safe for Democrats in such a way as to create other districts safe for Republicans). That makes splitting the difference in a conference committee more difficult."  It can't help the coot to have small legislative majorities that comprise a divided caucus, and that his ability to knock heads together isn't that of Lyndon Johnson.  Perhaps people will grow tired of the talk of consensus, anyway, because the pursuit of consensus fails at anything more significant than a bike shed.  Not to mention that between the wrangling and the implementation all sorts of things can go wrong.  "If the President’s progressive agenda proceeds, then history teaches that Americans will endure more years of failed policy initiatives, enhanced coercion, further social frustration, and yet more social and political incivility."

Fortunately, two forces are at work that will limit the coercion.  First, the very intrusion of conflicting goals, even in something as simple as issuing vaccines, makes the technocrats look bad.

[New York Times editorialist David] Leonhardt hints at a stronger explanation: government finds it increasingly difficult to do anything because it is increasingly rare for government to do any one thing. Vaccinating everyone as quickly as possible isn’t a sufficient goal for government even in the worst epidemic in a hundred years. Additional, complicated imperatives must be folded into the pursuit of this public health objective, ones that take time to formulate because they require input from many constituencies and experts. After that, the implementation of the multi-faceted plan inevitably becomes complex, contested, and protracted in ways that a program to realize a single objective would not.

In William Voegeli's view, it's the process worship, and he'd like to unbundle "progressive" as the contemporary euphemism for "communist" from "progressive" as shorthand for "Governance By Wise Experts:" "[P]rogressivism is more process-oriented than goal-oriented."  Ideas may persevere, but their advocates change over time.  So, too, with Team Biden's gerontocracy.  "The country in which a young Joe Biden came into his own politically was one in which there was a sizable industrial base, in which vast swathes of the economy were yet to be subsumed into high finance, in which uncreative Fordist assumptions that now seem unthinkable dominated many corporate boardrooms."  Life expectancies increase, which makes current retirement options untenable for the long term; on the other hand, intellectual agility probably deteriorates with age, and the current crop of process-worshippers are still in charge. "This is what happens when you let geriatrics run your country. The average age of the three most powerful politicians in the country is over 76. President Biden is 78, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is 81 and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer is the spring chicken at 70. Fauci is 80." None of them are the second coming of Winston Churchill. We give them grief and we wait them out.

AND JUST LIKE THAT, THE TAXI CARTEL EXPANDS.

Anybody remember this? "[O]n-demand autonomous cars are likely to have surge pricing at levels that make Uber's rush-hour or bar-time tariffs look like Bargain Thursday at a White Sox game."  Those current levels are too much for at least one Chicago alderman.

Downtown Ald. Brendan Reilly (42nd) is proposing a cap on ride-hailing fees to rein in what he called “predatory” charges routinely imposed by Uber and Lyft.

At Wednesday’s City Council meeting, Reilly plans to introduce an ordinance requiring companies licensed as “transportation network providers” to charge no more than 150% of their “current regular fare,” even during snowstorms and other periods of high-demand.

The ordinance would require Uber, Lyft and Via to notify Business Affairs and Consumer Protection Commissioner Rosa Escareno of “each regular fare rate used” by the company for each class of vehicle and type of service. That includes both “black cars” and sedans, shared rides and solo trips.

Ride-hailing companies would be free to continue “surge pricing” when demand is high — but within limits. If the normal fare is $10, the companies could charge no more than $15.

That sounds very much like city government trying to turn the ride-sharing services into the cruising cabs that apparently were wiped out by ride sharing and the corona tyranny.

At [former mayor Rahm] Emanuel’s behest, the City Council allowed the ride-hailing industry to “operate under less restrictive rules” than cabs — without first obtaining livery licenses from the city, Reilly said. That allowed thousands of ride-hailing drivers to “flood the market.”

The competition worked — for a while. Reliability and service improved. Cabbies were “feeling the pressure from their rideshare competitors.”

>But, over time, Reilly said Chicago paid a price for, what he called “imbalanced regulation of the taxicab industry and the lax regulation of the rideshare industry.” Cabs “started disappearing from the road.”

“Then, the pandemic hit. With central business districts across the country closed for business and millions of commuters working from home, the taxicab industry totally collapsed,” Reilly wrote.

“Today, incumbent monopoly ride share companies have vanquished and replaced their predecessors in the monopoly cab industry. Once again, consumers have fewer options. The lack of city regulation over rideshare fares, combined with a lack of competition, has empowered companies like Uber and Lyft to dramatically increase their prices.”

Isn't the purpose of surge pricing to induce the casual participants in Uber and Lyft to fire up their cars?

On the other hand, didn't I warn you?  "[I]t should come as no surprise that transit authorities and taxi companies might make common cause to suppress Uber or otherwise incorporate ride-sharing into the cartel."

FREEDOM IS THE FREEDOM TO SAY TWO AND TWO MAKE FOUR.

Cato's Neal McCluskey questions the political economy of higher education.

Fundamentally, academic freedom – the grounds on which it is argued that only university faculty should make academic decisions – is incompatible with forced funding of an institution. There is good reason that academics should be able to pursue ideas as they see fit – progress comes when untested and sometimes unpopular ideas can be explored – but academics must not be more free than everyone else; their freedom cannot mean others are forced to fund them.

Matt "Dean Dad" Reed objects, correctly, that freedom of inquiry comes with obligations.  "Academic freedom isn’t license to spout whatever you want. It’s a hunting license for truth. It’s a suspension of disbelief in the name of discovering or confronting truth. Sometimes the truth is unpopular, or in conflict with powerful interests."  Yes, and sometimes those "powerful interests" are within the academy, and they're exceeding the agency their principals (taxpayers, acting through legislators) have entrusted to them.  Dean Dad continues,

Academic freedom is based on the recognition that the truth is independent of the whims of the powerful, and that we, as a society, are better off knowing the truth. Academic freedom is freedom to do the work. And it’s important not because one group of people is special -- nobody is -- but because the truth matters. The unique burden on academics -- the payback for subsidizing inquiry, if you want to look at it that way -- is that academics are professionally obligated to share what they find. In exchange for being granted the room to explore, they’re obliged to report back on what’s there. Because we don’t know what will be found until it’s found, we can’t rely on the price system. Scholarship is inherently public; public funding is a perfectly rational response to what would otherwise be a market failure. Putting scholarship out in the public helps move discovery forward; paywalling all scholarship would desiccate inquiry.

Unfortunately, there's too much deconstruction of truth going on these days, too much rent-seeking, and too often the agents are not honoring that obligation to seek truth.

Any virologist who challenges the community’s declared view risks having his next grant application turned down by the panel of fellow virologists that advises the government grant distribution agency.”

This is consistent with everything we know from the sociology of science. With the centralisation and bureaucratisation of scientific funding, defection from a well-institutionalised consensus is even more costly now than it was when Thomas Kuhn wrote The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. He showed that it is almost always from outside a research community that challenges arise. Progress happens when a prevailing scientific consensus is revealed to rest on the loyalties and intellectual affinities of an established research milieu, and not simply on correspondence with reality.

Something is left unexplained in the consensus view, and to focus on this lacuna is to be an outsider. Reliably, such challenges are fought tooth and nail by the research empire built on the encrusted consensus.

I leave the generalization to prestige journalism and "genius grants" as an exercise.  Matt and I are likely to agree that turning legislators and trustees loose to question each tenure decision and each hire is likely to have bad consequences.  I repeat from last week, "That ship might already have sailed, as explicit or implicit political litmus tests have made their way into hiring and tenure deliberations.  A countervailing exercise of power by trustees or legislators, though, is not likely to turn out well."  We're not going to agree on his "Reducing academic freedom to a job perk held by people of the opposite party misses the point."  In the same way that taxpayers might object to telephone excise taxes initially enacted to finance the Spanish-American War, taxpayers might object to being taxed for institutions of higher education that aren't delivering on the truth, that aren't holding up their end of the social contract, that are indulging in bad history in support of a journalistic consensus that rests on loyalties and intellectual affinities.

HOW DARE YOU BE RICH?

A fan site for electric cars is not amused by Ford's battery F-150.

In 2018, the US had just 4% of the world’s total population, and yet it consumed 17% of the world’s total energy production.

By continuing to commit to producing large, heavy vehicles the US is committing to consuming more than its fair share of energy.

That same four percent of the world's total population is going to produce well more than four percent of the coronavirus vaccinations that the world's population will receive.  I wonder if the author even considered that before launching into the usual sort of redistributive cant.  "Crucial to this is considering the role of the Global South – typically lower income countries which have historically had the lowest carbon footprints, and which are most vulnerable in the face of the Climate Crisis."  Now, whether those countries could produce, for instance, coronavirus vaccines, or thin-slab casters, or a good five-cent cigar with fewer resources never comes up.  More fun it is to dump on metrofexuals channelling their inner lumberjack with something bigger than a shitbox Prius.

This either means vastly higher levels of energy consumption – meaning more investment in renewable energy, or the consumption of more fossil fuels to produce electricity – a reduction in performance and range, or the production of larger batteries to make up for the shortfall in range due to weight.

Again, the latter does not represent a just transition, as the US would be consume more than its fair share of batteries and drive greater exploitation of people and land in order to produce them.

Not to mention child labor in Africa and convict labor in China extracting those rare earths and building or scrapping those batteries. Advantage entropy.  But even if that's beneficial from a greenhouse gas perspective, it's still a bad bargain.  "As such, by committing to the continuation of these heavy, oversized vehicles – and using the incumbent President to promote them – the US is committing to a highly unjust climate transition that will only further exacerbate the gulf between rich and poor nations, while putting the safety of their own citizens at even greater jeopardy."

The political economy of metrofexual subsidies came to George Will's attention as well.  "Biden’s policy to use less affluent Americans’ money to entice more affluent Americans to buy [electric vehicles] is only one of the contemplated regressive policies by which his administration would transfer wealth upward."

Perhaps the best observation about the electric Big Pickup goes to Wired.  "Electric Vehicle of Dystopia."  Not because there's a zombie-stunning phaser embedded in the running lights.  "Ford says the extended battery in the more expensive version of the electric F-150 will be able to power a blacked-out home for three days. Potential users will likely have to pay to install a home integration system, price to be determined."

GOVERNOR PRITZKER TRAILS BY 10,645.

The geographic area and population of Illinois are both similar to those in Sweden, and there are similarities of the Chicago and Stockholm metropolitan areas.  But  Springfield politicians are hazardous to your health.  Governor J. B. Pritzker (D-Lake Geneva) continues to micromanage and destroy local businesses.

A service called Worldometers has been keeping track of coronavirus infections and deaths, disaggregated in a number of ways.

The latest report from Sweden counts 1,058,341 infections and 14,366 deaths.

The latest report from Illinois counts 1,376,441 infections and 25,011 deaths.

Conditions in Illinois are such that a transition to a full reopening is in order.   Illinois is currently in the bridge phase, with an expected transition to a modified full reopening in mid-June, and most of the ukases remain in effect to the end of May.  A number of businesses are publicly changing their mask requirements, we'll see whether the ukases will end with gubernatorial assent, or vanish by common consent.  More people are opting not to bother with the masks in businesses that only recommend their use.

If I have to keep extending this post until Anthony Fauci comes to his senses, or resigns, or until the governor is primaried, or until the ukases are vacated, or until the cows come home, I will. 

The state continues to administer vaccines.  The latest count is nearly eleven million injections (the page doesn't disaggregate among finished and pending) and the latest count of those scary variants notes all of 7,700.

Last week, the governor trailed by 10,520.  Note the time series: a margin of terror that used to be growing by hundreds in a week is growing by around a hundred, or less.  The body count is growing faster than the variant count. The details for the past six months are on page 2.

THAT'S ONE WAY TO BUILD THE FAN BASE.

Australian Olympian Shares Photo Breastfeeding Baby While Doing Headstand, Responds to Feedback.  You now know that there are Australian snowboarders.  Not safe for work.

THAT'S ONE WAY TO EXPLAIN THE CONCEPT.

Florida's Brightline are building a new backshop near Orlando, part of the extension of passenger service from Miami to Orlando.  Orlando's Sun-Sentinel describe the project as "Brightline shows off progress on huge train garage at Orlando International Airport."  That's a little less jarring than calling it a train hangar, and yet it highlights how railroad-unaware people are.  The more formal description dispenses with "backshop" as well: "Brightline’s Vehicle Maintenance Facility, which will have separate structures and areas for washing and fueling trains, resembles the rest of Brightline’s project in progress, which includes a 170-mile extension of tracks from West Palm Beach to Orlando’s airport."  It's a 170 mile extension of service, the cross-peninsula jump makes use of some existing tracks along the way.  I'm not sure, though, about setting up the maintenance depot for fixed formation trains in this way.  "Initially, Brightline will operate trains with two locomotives and five coach cars. Those trains will fit inside the garage under construction, which is 628 feet long and as much as 140 feet wide. But Brightline expects eventually to run longer trains with 10 coach cars and the garage will be extended to handle the greater length."

The Orlando trains might be running as soon as 2023.

WHAT IS THE NATURE OF ACADEMIC TENURE THESE DAYS?

The journalism faculty at the University of North Carolina, a university otherwise known for their basketball coach taking his pension after Wisconsin knocked them out of the most recent tournament, recently offered a job to a New York Times star.

Nikole Hannah-Jones, the New York Times journalist who developed the magazine’s controversial “1619 Project,” will no longer join UNC-Chapel Hill’s journalism department as a tenured professor after the school’s board of trustees expressed concern about awarding tenure to someone outside of academia, according to a new report.

Instead, Hannah-Jones will join the university’s Hussman School of Journalism and Media as a fixed-term “Professor of the Practice,” with the option of being reviewed for tenure within five years, according to the [Raleight] News & Observer. She will serve as the Knight Chair in Race and Investigative Journalism.

The predictable political posturing ensues.  "Bows to conservative crazies."  "Conservatives in charge."  "Procedurally correct."

The appointment in question is controversial, for a number of reasons.  The procedural problem is the same whether somebody notorious or somebody competent is brought into a university, particularly into a professional discipline, without the terminal degree.  It's altogether fitting or proper that an astronaut be brought in as professor of the practice of engineering, a governor brought in as professor of the practice of public administration, an editor brought in as professor of the practice of journalism.  Institutionally, the term implies a different job description than that of the conventional professor, who must teach, seek external funding, publish, and sit on faculty committees.  It might even elicit more respect from students than the other job titles (instructor, visiting lecturer) that carry a similar job description.  I wonder if university rules spell out different shared governance voting rights and committee obligations for professors of the practice than apply to conventional tenure-track faculty of all ranks.

Ms Hannah-Jones's appointment as professor of the practice, with the possibility of a future tenure review, strikes me as the correct procedural decision.  Inside Higher Ed's Colleen Flaherty suggests her journalistic chops are sufficient.  "Indeed, it would be difficult to find a candidate for tenure in journalism or maybe any field with stronger credentials than a Pulitzer and a MacArthur fellowship."  That Pulitzer wasn't peer reviewed.  The interpretations her 1619 Project put forth don't necessarily stand up, and some of them the Times subsequently retracted.  That despite a public endorsement from a Columbia journalism professor.

Jelani Cobb, the Ira A. Lipman Professor of Journalism at Columbia University, said the board’s decision about Hannah-Jones was “outrageous.”

“This is a person who has a Pulitzer Prize and a MacArthur award. But by any standard, any metric, this is someone who would qualify for tenure. And certainly, if this were to be evaluated on the basis of her standing among her peers, which is the general standard for tenure, she would meet that. So what we're seeing is a blatant intrusion of politics into what is supposed to be protected by academic freedom. And tenure exists precisely because faculty members need to be protected from this kind of politicized decision making.”

I suppose it's churlish to suggest that Pulitzers and MacArthurs are political, but it is what it is.  In the usual course of promotion and tenure, a university-wide committee of faculty reviews dossiers.  It's possible that once the home college of journalism's faculty committee and dean concur, the provost and the university committee accept that judgement.  That, however, keeps any skeptical historians from weighing in on that appointment.  At the same time,

If it is accurate that this refusal was the result of viewpoint discrimination against Hannah-Jones, particularly based on political opposition to her appointment, this decision has disturbing implications for academic freedom, which is vital in allowing faculty members to voice divergent views and in avoiding casting what the Supreme Court called a “pall of orthodoxy” over the classroom. When decisions on academic tenure incorporate a form of political litmus test, this freedom is gravely compromised.

That ship might already have sailed, as explicit or implicit political litmus tests have made their way into hiring and tenure deliberations.  A countervailing exercise of power by trustees or legislators, though, is not likely to turn out well.

FRIDAY short TAKES.

Here comes this week's roundup of posts that caught my attention, generally because they could be reduced to one pithy remark, which too often was buried in the concluding paragraph. Follow the links for elaboration. Sometimes that includes a refresher on fundamental Cold Spring Shops.

1.  Don't complain (about the play-in tournament). Win more games.

2.  The streets are productive assets.  "We've priced parking too low for decades."  Sometimes, though, the small details are annoying.  "Parking is a public good, but it isn't free."  I call dibs.

3.  Unser Giftzwerg.  "With Trump gone they assumed they could rule as before, spend as before, lecture as before."  When a whiny self-styled progressive is all "Give us what we want, or PEOPLE WILL. DIE." it's useful to have multiple influential voices, not necessarily in public office, telling them to pound sand.

4.  Tyler Cowen, "Republicans understand that their party’s base wants Trump-like ideas and methods, with or without the man himself."  That's in part a response to Democrats and their "poorly designed" technocratic responses.

5.  Speaking of poorly designed technocratic responses, "How can there be any expectation that people trust 'the science' when bureaucrats citing said science continue to mislead for political purposes?"  See also "False information was peddled by 'civil servants' invoking unchallengeable expertise."

6.  Steven Hayward, "Colleges won’t rid themselves of the many repulsive ideologues who have ruined them until the pain gets too great for their boards of trustees to tolerate."

7.  "We were encouraged to jump on a bandwagon of deceit."  That included never learning technique.  "In the fine arts, we were told, we were beyond trivialities like accurate representations, traditional techniques, and displays of competent craftsmanship."

8.  The Biden muzzle: "Team Blue's version of the Make America Great Again hat."

9.  Is Brad Polumbo asking for pragmatic populism?  "The problem with the right-wing culture warriors is that they end up devoting their time and energy to distractions like kneeling & pronouns instead of socialism that could destroy the economy, lockdowns that ruined lives, & threats to our constitutional order like court-packing."

10.  Anomie and alienation are subjective.  "Bad for all of us when people think they're entitled to our tax money if bureaucrats don't get them the exact job they want."

11.  Too bad Hamas destroyed all the casinos in Lebanon?  "Mighty Babylon fell in 539 BC. If you’re wondering how this current mess resolves itself, ask a Potawatomi, if you can find one."

12.  Be sensitive to trade-offs.  "Pursuing one goal to the utter exclusion of all others is not to make a choice but to run from it. It’s not leadership; it’s abdication."

13.  There are some parts of the Universe it's wise not to invade.  "Maybe we are best watched from a safe distance."

IT WAS A LIVING.

Back in the day, televised pro wrestling had the headliners generally building up to the paid confrontations with each other by winning bouts against journeyman performers.  Thus Nick Bockwickel might make short work of Kenny Jay, and Da Crusher would beat George Gadaske, and then each of the headliners would use the post-bout interview to fulminate against each other, or perhaps against the Vachon brothers or Black Jack Lanza or Vern Gagne, hyping an upcoming event at the old Milwaukee Auditorium or what have you.  Meanwhile, you might see the journeymen refereeing other bouts on other days.  Those journeymen had a classification, Job Man, which you could read about.  And yes, their job was to make the headliners look good by putting up a good fight and ultimately losing.

CECI N'EST PAS UN SPEECH CODE.

The morale conditioners at the University of Wisconsin at Oshkosh decided to take a stand against disrespectful interaction, envisioning "An environment that is free of harassment and free of insulting and demeaning comments and epithets based on race, ethnicity, gender, religion, sexual orientation, age, disability, military status, socioeconomic status, family status or political views; and consistently enforces federal, state and university protections against discriminatory treatment yet is free from any official speech codes."  Anybody catch the internal inconsistency?  "So students have a right to expect an environment free from insulting and demeaning comments and from any official speech codes?"  Good luck with that.

I wonder if asserting that a statement is "racist" or any of the other -isms or -phobias is insulting or demeaning on its face.  Or if referring to someone as "neanderthal" or "deplorable" or generally engaging in the usual casual common-room smugness is also grounds for a harassment complaint?  The policy appears to leave that opportunity available.  "Members respect and accommodate the views and needs of others in order to allow the development of individual potential."

Clearly, "UW Oshkosh needs to clear this up."  Sure, but we might be looking at a policy that somebody put forth simply to comply with some mandate that such a policy exists (much in the same way that there were medical officers in corrective labor camps?)  In that same statement I found this.  "Students have the responsibility to keep up with and complete all class assignments and requirements and to participate fully in the learning process."  Years ago, Oshkosh was notorious as a party school, and if faculty and student affairs types took that provision seriously, nobody would graduate.

THE UKASES ARE LOOSER.

The latest public health diktat from Illinois governor J. B. "10,520 more dead on my watch" Pritzker dropped after yesterday's tally was posted.  "Fully vaccinated people will no longer be required to wear a face covering in most situations."  As of yesterday, the tyranny was crumbling: one grocery store posted "recommended, but not required for fully vaccinated patrons;" one building supply store still required face coverings, as did the coffee house.  There's room for emergence.  "Businesses are free to still require masks, and people are still required to wear masks while riding trains, planes, buses or other forms of public transportation, as well as at airports."  Modified full reopening is still due for June 11, we'll see how modified that is when we get there.

THE VALUE OF A TRAIN IS IN THE INTERMEDIATE STOPS.

That has long been a Cold Spring Shops argument, with the primary focus on the interior of the United States.  For instance, "West of Galesburg, Ill., only a handful of coach passengers are California-bound, but virtually every seat is occupied with people going to Iowa, Nebraska, and Colorado stops. They are replaced later with others headed to Denver, but also to Grand Junction, Colo.; Helper, Provo, and Salt Lake City in Utah; plus Sacramento, Martinez, and Emeryville in California."  Or, in elaboration,

Trains' Malcolm Kenton makes the point.  "A long-distance train should be thought of as serving multiple corridors with one vehicle, thus minimizing the net unit costs of equipment and crews by spreading them out over more passenger-miles. Instead of thinking of the Southwest Chief as a Chicago-Los Angeles train, for example, think of it as Chicago-Kansas City, Kansas City-Newton/Wichita, La Junta-Albuquerque and Flagstaff-Los Angeles corridors, and many more, all rolled into one."  Yup.  Connectivity matters too.

That comes as a bit of a surprise to an observer of Britain's residual Cross Country services. "The distances covered by their trains can be significant with Aberdeen to Penzance at just over 500 miles taking over 13 hours being the longest train ride in Britain. The duration of the train rides means that one train could actually be used for morning commuting and later in the day evening commuting i.e. the trains serve many different markets." The current Cross Country map puts all the Scotland services on the old London and North Eastern line, whilst once upon a time the map of the service looked like Conrail's "X" with the crossing at Birmingham, rather than Cleveland.  And yes, a shopper bound for Plymouth, Bristol, or Edinburgh in the morning might be returning on the opposite working of that train later in the day with the train being more of an Aberdeen - Edinburgh, Edinburgh - Birmingham, Birmingham - Bristol, Bristol - Plymouth, and Plymouth - Penzance, only with additional puddle jumpers or corridor trains run by other operators fleshing out the timetable.  That appears to be the way Cross Country view the trains, as well.  "It does appear that Cross Country do not want long distance passengers on its trains and prices its tickets accordingly. The reason for this is a lack of capacity on its network at key times of the day. Long-distance passengers travelling on cheap advance fares would simply clog up the trains."  Well, if you didn't run fixed formations, you wouldn't have that problem, but adding or cutting cars, whether at Michigan City or Birmingham, has become a lost art.  Thus people might be flying, as the elapsed time is better, or driving, despite the road fatigue.  "With the demise of many inter-regional city air connections pre and during Covid , a major opportunity for rail to step up to the plate and offer a sound alternative to the pre-Covid 19 air travel option has been missed. There will be lots of very tired long-distance motorway drivers and more air passengers."  (There's apparently an arbitrage opportunity here, as it's possible to book tickets for segments of the journey and string 'em together to go over a longer part of the run for cheaper!)

Ultimately, though, it's about frequency, dependability, and having space available at the times people want to travel.  "The longer term solution, in my opinion, is for Cross Country to get more trains to offer more seats and relieve capacity constraints in their network and thus allow them to offer better value long distance fares."  That's the same whether you're doing the Aberdeen to Penzance for the thrills, or you're banking on a six minute connection to go from Vienna to London in a day, or you're going to take a couple of days away from the grid on the Empire Builder.

DOUBLEPLUSUNGOOD.

The selection criteria for high government officials blend capability and box-checking.  But is it too much to ask that somebody doesn't advise the likes of current Centers for Disease Control honcho Rochelle Walensky on camera angle, lighting, and background?

I keep seeing this.

Freedom is the freedom to say the public health bureaucrats got it wrong.  "The more the CDC insists that everyone should adopt its view of acceptable risk, the more Americans will rightly ignore its advice."

GOVERNOR PRITZKER TRAILS BY 10,520.

The geographic area and population of Illinois are both similar to those in Sweden, and there are similarities of the Chicago and Stockholm metropolitan areas.  But  Springfield politicians are hazardous to your health.  Governor J. B. Pritzker (D-Lake Geneva) continues to micromanage and destroy local businesses.

A service called Worldometers has been keeping track of coronavirus infections and deaths, disaggregated in a number of ways.

The latest report from Sweden counts 1,037,126 infections and 14,275 deaths.

The latest report from Illinois counts 1,366,268 infections and 24,795 deaths.

Conditions in Illinois are such that a transition to a full reopening is in order.  "Illinois will move to the bridge phase when 70% of the population 65 years and older has received at least one dose of vaccine, and to Phase 5 when 50% of the population 16 years and older has received at least one dose of vaccine."  We are currently in the bridge phase, with an expected transition to a modified full reopening in mid-June, and most of the ukases remain in effect to the end of May.  A number of businesses are publicly changing their mask requirements, we'll see whether the ukases will end with gubernatorial assent, or vanish by common consent.

If I have to keep extending this post until Anthony Fauci comes to his senses, or resigns, or until the governor is primaried, or until the ukases are vacated, or until the cows come home, I will. 

The state continues to administer vaccines.  The latest count is in excess of ten nine million injections (the page doesn't disaggregate among finished and pending) and the latest count of those scary variants notes all of 6,600.

Last week, the governor trailed by 10,417.  Note the time series: a margin of terror that used to be growing by hundreds in a week is growing by around a hundred, or less.  The body count is growing faster than the variant count. The details for the past six months are on page 2.

RECOGNITION AND IMPLEMENTATION LAGS.

Our Political Masters have finally decided that people who receive their Trump shots can lose their Biden muzzles.  "Long overdue," according to Robby Soave.

If even the notoriously risk-averse CDC says the vaccinated can put away their masks, then there's no reason to keep local restrictions in place. If you're not vaccinated, get vaccinated; if you are vaccinated, do whatever you want. All government mandates should reflect this reality.

All of it needs to go, according to Robert Verbruggen.

We should not be imposing restrictions on Americans to protect those who’ve chosen to put themselves at risk — and who, disproportionately, oppose the restrictions just as much as they distrust the vaccines anyway. We also should not impose restrictions in deference to the folks who have managed to become addicted to the thrill of being stricter than everyone else about COVID protocols, even long after they’ve been vaccinated.

Those addicts, and their enablers in state and local governments, and some punctilious business owners, ought be governed accordingly. "Given all the above, it is a travesty that so many schools are still operating in hybrid, that mask mandates are still in effect, and that some venues still have to limit their capacity."

Looks like even Illinois governor J. B. "My ukases have a higher death toll" Pritzker is going to revise his dictates.  Look for that information in Monday's weekly update.

FRIDAY short TAKES.

Here comes this week's (somewhat unwieldy) roundup of posts that caught my attention, generally because they could be reduced to one pithy remark, which too often was buried in the concluding paragraph. Follow the links for elaboration. Sometimes that includes a refresher on fundamental Cold Spring Shops.

1.  Kevin D. Williamson smacks one Donald Trump.  "He’s not Ronald Reagan — he’s Brett Favre."

2.  Soporific, boring, Normal-antagonizing public broadcasting.  "They’ve had one too many sermons from one too many condescending, nasal-toned grandee."

3.  "Really dumb," according to Matthew Yglesias.

4.  An empty intersection of race and class?  "If non-rich white voters believe that redistributive policies take money from white people like them and give it [to] racial others, then it will be easier for the anti-redistribution party to prevail in elections; if such voters believe that redistributive policies take money from the rich and give it to working people like them, then the pro-redistribution party will have the upper hand."  It's a grand fiction either way, but that short take takes elaboration.

5.  Put some malaise on that crap sandwich.  "How much financial pain are we going to have to live through to get to the next Reagan?"

6.  Speaking of malaise, "The root of the problem is that Jimmy Carter is the first Process President in American history."  From 1978.  You could have listened to me, dear reader, now you can learn for yourself.

7.  No, you can't write off those New York State and City income and property taxes, plutocrat.  "I can't stress how much that I believe that is a giveaway to the rich."

8.  Kids are screwed.

9.  Tradeoffs, everywhere.  "Democrats can be the party that demands wealthy Americans pay higher taxes or they can be the party that favors [unlimited deduction of local taxes]."

10.  More wisdom from Harvey Mansfield.  “Harvard’s standing has fallen, and I would blame the three evils of affirmative action, grade inflation, and political correctness.”

11.  Lowered standards in the name of equity give equity a bad name.

12.  The technocracy skeptic in me concurs.  "The hybrid driver in me suspects that this won’t be the last gas supply shock."

13.  Efficiency tends to look messy.  Plus a pretty good smackdown of zoning: "Splitting a city into residential, commercial and business zones is like throwing dough, cheese and pepperoni into the different compartments of a bento box and calling it a pizza."

14.  "Deans should not take official positions on contested matters of public concern."  See also entry 18.

15.  The value of being able to make connections, and continue to learn.  "The idea that history isn’t an employable degree is just bizarre."

16.  Compensating differentials exist.  "The wages for a harder, riskier job should be higher."

17.  Back to the Carter years?  "A new malaise is spreading, and it's intentional."

18.  Careers can be destroyed for stepping out of line.  See also entry 14: if the dean issues an official position, that's an orthodoxy.  The competition for research grants also establishes an orthodoxy.  " Any virologist who challenges the community’s declared view risks having his next grant application turned down by the panel of fellow virologists that advises the government grant distribution agency."  That's part of a long and technical article, and it hints at a tradeoff to gain-of-function research.  "Now the logical progression for vaccines is, if you are going to develop a vaccine for SARS, people are going to use pandemic SARS, but let’s insert some of these other things and get a better vaccine."  The research papers are waiting to be written.

19.  Many of the experts whose judgments guide official government policy are living in a fantasy land.

20.  Politics are dangerous to everybody.  "Some say an idiot did get control of it for a while. And some say another idiot is in control now."

21.  Voters should take note.  The malaise is not going to get any better.

22.  Exchange, specialization, and cooperation.  "[P]rivate property rights provide the institutional framework that allows individuals to learn how to compete for goods and resources in a peaceful and productive manner. This peaceful and productive form of competition manifests itself in the form of specialization and exchange, the defining attribute of private property."

23.  Let the ruling classes tremble.  "Now the ruling class is trying to blame those who were right [about the corona tyranny] from the start. Don’t let them."

24.  Enlightened self-interest for the win. “Lockdown jurisdictions were not able to prevent noncompliance, and non-lockdown jurisdictions benefited from voluntary changes in behavior that mimicked lockdowns.”

25.  "Money has a way of clarifying certain things."

26.  There is no such thing as a free bridge.  "The Hernando de Soto span connecting Memphis to Arkansas on one of America’s most important interstate highways is closed until further notice after dangerous cracks were found."  I've crossed that thing a few times, never once paid a toll.

27.  Susan Collins is mugged by reality.  "I always considered the [Centers for Disease Control] to be the gold standard. I don't anymore."

28.  Weltverschlechterer.  Das ist alles.  Prosit.

A HALF CENTURY OF HIGHER EDUCATION BREAKING THE SOCIAL CONTRACT.

My "Costs of Correctness" essay from spring, 1991 relied on the work of others who diagnosed the same ills.  Columbia's Richard Hofstadter attempted to work during the madness of the late 1960s, and he might have been mugged by reality.

Hofstadter correctly foresaw that strong forces were building up to turn American higher education away from the search for truth and into an engine of political change. In his view, education was about unfettered inquiry into all sorts of truths. He was right to see danger to that. Many questions are now forbidden because they challenge entrenched “progressive” ideology.

It used to be that ethical professors could keep their personal views separate from their classroom work.  If you have a long memory, dear reader, consider a Paper Chase episode in which the law students got caught up in a protest to save a campus watering hole, and their foil, the imposing Professor Kingsfield, was serving as general counsel for the university in the condemnation case.  But he also chided one of the students about not taking the time to read some case, which the student read, then understood that it offered legal grounds for the historic preservation of the tavern, then muttered, "Kingsfield didn't know what he was doing;" then, after a moment's reflection, the penny dropped, "He did know what he was doing."  Which was equipping students to do the work.  That's work in the real sense, not in the sloganeering version the student affairs types and their enablers in the senior administration invoke.

The problem, though, might be that there's a tension between learning for its own sake, and learning for the sake of individual advancement.  The noisy lefties of the late 1960s and early 1970s were eternally about raising consciousness in vocational disciplines like commerce or engineering ("work, study, get ahead, kill") or affixing a zero-sum stigma on earning grades ("your success ensures somebody else's failure.")  There might also have been reflective faculty who were not happy about public funding for applied research, whether that was splitting atoms in the squash courts, calculating trajectories that might have worked equally well for communications satellites or nuclear warheads,  or even finding the right balance between ameliorating income poverty and encouraging participation in the labor force.  I'm not making any of this up, younger readers.

The individual advancement for students might well have become, increasingly, in those "vocational" degrees, and the retreat of the intellectual types into obscurantism might have deprived several generations of nurses, engineers, therapists, accountants, and dairy scientists of the ability to diagnose ills in the body politic more generally (there's an elaboration on this point in a post to come); while the individual advancement for faculty turned into a quest for sponsored research, whether it's nuclear physics or poverty or what the National Science Foundation called "Research Applied for National Needs" (if an economist said "ran" that probably wasn't a reference to the morning jog) or a juried award from one of the national endowments, all of which became golden fetters on intellectual inquiry.

Thus, although Jay Schalin might credit Professor Hofstadter with correctly identifying what ails higher education, neither the pundit nor the professor correctly identify all the causes of the illness.

He also said that politicization of the academy would be even worse on a practical level (Hofstadter was in agreement with many of the goals of the protesters) since it is “a curiously self-destructive strategy for social change:”

If an attempt is made to politicize completely our primary centers of free argument and inquiry, they will in the end be forced to lose their character and be reduced to centers of vocational training, and nothing more.

As any casual observer of academia today can attest, his warning went unheeded and politicization has become a major force on the American campus. However, he was only partly right about the effects.

Arguably, when part of graduate training becomes learning how to recognize what areas of pure research, or of artistry, are more likely to be funded, and when the best-connected graduate students are those who have learned who to cultivate in the funding agencies, he's only partly right about the causes.  If some degrees lose status as a consequence, that's incidental.

On one hand, much of academia today has indeed been reduced to vocational training, just as Hofstadter predicted. Humanities majors are disappearing from many schools, especially small private colleges that once specialized in the liberal arts and do not have prestigious reputations. The most common majors at such schools now tend to be those geared toward entering a specific profession, such as nursing, accounting, K-12 teaching, computer science, or business management. Even pure science majors other than biology are disappearing at many such schools. The social sciences have not suffered as much enrollment loss because they are often perceived as less-than-rigorous programs favored by those who wish for easy college diplomas to serve as employment credentials.

There are market tests for those credentials: perhaps the return of Carter-style malaise will bring those tests back. But, to reiterate, those nurses, accountants, and the like won't know what they don't know until the reality that knowing some of those things might be helpful smacks them upside the head.

Furthermore, academia’s increasing ties to both the corporate world and the government bureaucracy are perhaps an extension of this vocational emphasis. For the government largely sees academia as a source of economic development and corporations see it as a source of talent and as a means to solve technical problems through research. And universities have been all too eager to sacrifice scholarship and tradition for the largesse offered them to shift priorities in a more corporate direction.

Those influences might work against the fashionable leftism in the common room: all you have to do is read any day's offerings at Inside Higher Ed and find somebody carping about them.  Thus, the argument for faculty stewardship of the university might be more compelling than Mr Schalin thinks.

[Hofstadter] grounded the institutional existence of the university improperly, suggesting that there was universal agreement that “in ultimate reality the members of the faculty are the university.” That assumption contradicts the legal and traditional views that the corporate body of a private academic institution is vested in its board of trustees and that the board is a perpetual body which holds the ultimate authority.

This error had dire implications. For, if the faculty is the university, the basic values of the university—which Hofstadter identified as “freedom, rationality, inquiry, discussion, and its own internal order”—become highly susceptible to ideological change over time as the beliefs of the faculty change. And that is exactly what has happened; freedom, inquiry and discussion are being replaced by rigid codes of political correctness, and rationality is being replaced with pragmatism.

Perhaps the pragmatic stance is in favor of freedom, inquiry, and discussion. Even if it means Professor Kingsfield's students figure out how to save the bar by legal means.