THIRSTDAY BITTERS.

Now fall semester commenceth, and sorority rush season is upon us.  A year ago, Jared Gould took a jaundiced view of the sorority recruiting videos out of the Southeastern Conference, at a time when nobody envisioned exiling Louisiana State, which caught on with the Wrong Sort of People.

Greek life is, in practice, a class marker. Those who can pay in gain access to mentorship, alumni networks, internships, and lifelong professional connections. Those who can’t are left outside the gates.

Nothing illustrates this more vividly than the recent “RushTok” phenomenon, which turned the University of Alabama’s sorority recruitment into a national spectacle.

Videos of young women in coordinated outfits dancing in front of columned mansions went viral. A friend of mine pointed out that many on the right embraced these clips as a sign of a cultural vibe shift. “In Trump’s America,” the videos implied that, “women are once again unapologetically hot, sociable, and patriotic.”

What the right misses, however, is that these clubs are for the wealthy, by the wealthy, and sustained by wealth. The New York Post reports that some recruits spent thousands on handbags to impress sororities, while parents hired consultants to polish résumés and wardrobes to improve their child’s chances of getting into top houses. Reports also suggest that some sororities weigh a recruit’s zip code—and body count!—as heavily as her GPA, effectively filtering out students from less affluent backgrounds.

The Greek-letter organizations have long been for students to engage in positional arms races.  The passage above follows Mr Gould's meditations on the same sort of thing in the Ivies, where there are eating clubs and there is nothing so crass as a kegger to be seen, and the positional arms race began in day care.  Yeah, right.  That's nothing Mad didn't notice way back in January 1962.  "The layout juxtaposed the idealistic promises of the fraternity recruitment pitches against the cynical, harsh reality of what membership actually looked like."

YOU CAN'T RELEGATE US, WE'RE GOING INDEPENDENT.

The corona shutdowns led to the National Collegiate Athletic Association extending years of eligibility, primarily by allowing more generous "redshirting" or designating players for a variation of injured reserve status.  Recently the association reverted to its pre-pandemic eligibility and redshirting rules, but a few players who had corona-era eligibility left finished their collegiate careers and signed with the professional leagues.

At least for the time being.  Consider, dear reader, a college player who signed a pro contract, didn't make the team, and then treats that remaining year of eligibility as a kind of option to return to his college team.  Sounds like the sort of thing lawyers could litigate all day.

Does a collegiate coach, athletic director, or conference commissioner use a variant on "card laid, card played," to tell such returning players, NO, we are pleased to count you among our alumni, and our recruiting pitch offers opportunities to catch the eye of pro scouts, it does not guarantee it.

LET THE REPOSITIONING FOLLIES CONTINUE!

I've long been on record doubting using college football to attract enrollment.

The thought process of some university administrators must run something like this:  Flagship universities are visible in football.  There are lots of people in the stadium six or seven Saturdays in the fall.  So let's get some football visibility and play in a big stadium.

It hasn't worked so well for the University of Massachusetts.

Or Rutgers.

There was some controversy about turning back time in Ann Arbor, but I'm not going to get into that.  Rather, it's the follies that get administrators in New Brunswick thinking about playing in the Big Ten and administrators in Amherst seeking a return to the Mid-American.  "UMass turned a second-quarter takeaway into the decisive scoring surge and defeated Rutgers 37-21 for a Fly the Flag victory to open the 2026 season on Sept. 3."  Plus Pop-Tarts.

Those two programs are perennial poster boys for making relegation a thing in college football.

Yes, years ago Julius Erving played for the Minutemen, and their men's hockey team recently won a national championship, perhaps begging forgiveness from the wokies for that Minutemen. That "storied athletic tradition" also included the Minutemen serving as crash test dummies for the Northern Illinois football team, at least until the football-only affiliation with the Mid-American ended.

Massachusetts scheduled a home-and-home with Northern Illinois in 2024 and 2025 and they learned a lot.  Now Northern Illinois play football in the Mountain West, and their latest attempt to be the next Boise State ran into reality at Iowa City.

Over the years, our meditations on attracting students by offering that game day (note, not game night) experience have raised the possibility that offering beer-'n-circus doesn't attract the studious sort of student.

LOOK TO YOUR RIGHT, LOOK TO YOUR LEFT.

I never heard that speech in any classes, nor did I ever offer it.  "In the Bad Old Days when College was Not. For. Everybody., incoming students would allegedly encounter the curmudgeonly professor who would continue, 'By semester's end, one of those people will be gone.'"

Perhaps, notes Timothy "Conversable Economist" Taylor, a variation on that theme should be in order.

Some of the negative reaction to elite institutions is of their own making — a sense of superiority that we’ve got the answers figured out. If you’re inside the gates, you deserve something that people outside the gates don’t. If you think back to the very early days of the preeminent, Northeastern institutions, which all arose from one version of Protestantism or another, the president would have said to incoming students, “You are all worthless sinners. You’re here entirely by the grace of God. You haven’t earned it. What you should hope to achieve is a true sight of your own sinfulness and your own imperfection.” The speech today is: “Welcome to our great university. You are the best and brightest who have ever walked through the gate. We’re privileged to have you here.” That message should be mitigated or modulated.

He's quoting Columbia's (!) Andrew Delbanco in a not-linked essay in the house organ for business as usual in higher education.

Perhaps, as the evidence accumulates that business as usual is not working, most notably in the Ivies, reflection in the higher reaches of higher education on the failures of business as usual is a desirable outcome.  It's long overdue: the stresses involved in getting into Japanese universities were such that matriculation was the goal and a four-year party the reward, and that "we're privileged to have you here" rhetoric could have the same effect.

LOSING THE GOOD OF THE INTELLECT.

"Confidence in College Has Collapsed."  People who have the best workarounds are using them.  It has nothing to do with all wokeness, all the time.  That's for the spawn of the nomenklatura.

The ideological battles being fought on many campuses are almost exclusively waged among elites. Debates over DEI initiatives, Gaza, antisemitism, and transgender rights dominate public attention rather than conversations about what can be done to make colleges work for the working class. The students who need the most. When public support for higher education wanes, the biggest losers are those who need them to work—not as bastions of progressive thought, but as drivers of economic opportunity, civic responsibility, and social solidarity. It’s no coincidence that some of the fiercest critics of higher education are found among those who have amassed considerable wealth and influence.

The people most willing to denigrate societal institutions are typically those who need them the least. Wealthy people can probably afford to choose an alternative pathway for their children—although most do not. For many working-class families, college is the only way for their kids to get ahead. It turns out that, whatever their politics, college-educated parents generally stress the importance of attending college to their children. In our survey of American teenagers, girls were more likely than boys to say they were going to college—but the education gap was equally as large. Teens raised by college-educated parents were far more likely to say they were planning on going to college than those with noncollege parents, regardless of their parents’ politics. More than six in ten teens with college-educated parents who supported Kamala Harris are planning to attend a 4-year college after graduation. The number for teens of college-educated Trump voters is identical—61 percent say they are college-bound.

Put simply, gender and class background, not politics, predict college attendance. The people who have lost faith in higher education are working-class men. It’s why, in our own study, boys from working-class backgrounds are the least likely to expect to get a college education.

I never explicitly called higher education out for denigrating people who look like me as responsible for all the evils of the world, without acknowledging that maybe we got a few things right.  Incoming matriculants might have read between the lines in my posts, or, more likely, heard the message coming from the higher education establishment, loud and clear.

For many Americans, higher education is one of the primary pathways to financial stability, to creating enduring social connection, and instilling a sense of civic responsibility. When colleges become overly focused on advancing the discrete interests of certain groups, it undermines the entire effort. It’s not only a matter of ideological openness. The waning interest in college among boys might have less to do with notions of masculinity. If you’re a boy from a working-class background, how welcome will you feel on some of these college campuses? How curious will your classmates be about your background, life experiences, and perspective?

The chances for such individuals might be better at the regional comprehensives or in the mid-majors, if they don't get lured into game day beer-'n-circus.  Their chances of excelling in class might be better as well.

DENY THERE'S A PROBLEM, CHANGE THE SUBJECT, AND QUESTION THE CRITIC'S MOTIVES.

That's the standard politician playbook for avoiding doing the necessary work, and two contributors to the house organ for all wokeness, all the time in higher education adopt the formula in their "Enough With the Performative Apologia."

THE STUDENTS ARE BACK ON CAMPUS.

Well, most of them.  "NIU student charged with attempted murder ousted from fraternity, not living at chapter house."  There's always at least one zoo fraternity, this year's first candidate is Tau Kappa Epsilon.

“The Delta Eta Chapter of Tau Kappa Epsilon is aware of a serious incident involving a former member of our organization this past weekend,” the post reads. “Effective immediately, the individual has been removed from the chapter and is prohibited from participating in chapter activities or returning to the chapter house.”

The fraternity’s statement doesn’t mention a stabbing specifically, but said the incident, which was not fraternity-related, “occurred independently” of the chapter, based on available information.

“The Delta Eta Chapter does not condone violence or serious misconduct,” the statement reads. “The alleged actions of this individual do not reflect the values, expectations, or standards of conduct expected of our chapter and its members.”

Nearly four and twenty years of Cold Spring Shops with no prior mention of the Tekes in our posts.

The usual sorts of start-of-semester follies are under way, at Northern Illinois University and elsewhere, and we'll have more coverage of them next week.

LET THAT HARD RAIN FALL.

In the early years of Cold Spring Shops, I devoted a lot of attention to the ways in which universities were failing at their mission.  Twelve years into retirement, I don't have to bother as much with such things, although perhaps conditions have gotten sufficiently bad that people on the inside, or with establishmentarian platforms, can no longer ignore them.

OH, THE HUMANITIES!

Joanne Jacobs notes, "You can major in Taylor Swift and minor in K-pop -- but shouldn't."  That's in endorsing a recent lament for the kind of work students get away with to earn degrees.

In its early years, the University of Wisconsin-Madison offered courses covering Virgil, Cicero, Livy, logic, calculus, ethics, chemistry, constitutional law and other touchstones of a classical education.

In the year of our Lord 2026, students can stroll past Lincoln’s statue looming atop Bascom Hill on that very same campus to study video games through feminist, queer and ecocritical lenses.

Culture warriors are busy bludgeoning universities for their ideological monocultures: founding civics institutes, prohibiting diversity, equity and inclusion statements in hiring and cutting federal funding to questionable research — but mediocrity is arguably as large a problem as ideological capture.

Maybe the humanities disciplines should have stuck to close reading and creative writing.  It's not as if nobody's noticing.  "Dear reader, it's straightforward enough: think of 'the humanities' as 'those disciplines that deconstruct reality as a hobby' and you won't go far wrong.  That reality has a say in what gets deconstructed never ceases to catch the academy by surprise."

NOT THE JOB I SIGNED UP FOR.

Senior deanlet Gillian R. Hayes offers a column with the misleading headline, "On Leading People Who Don’t Want to Be Led."  Read on and note the deception.

It is a common joke in meetings: “Thank goodness I got that Ph.D. so I can …” followed by whatever administrative task is most frustrating that week: approving time sheets, navigating compliance forms or filing expense reimbursements. A few years ago, I was part of a joint senate-administration group on faculty engagement that spent much of the year discussing reimbursement practices. At the end of his ninth year in a demanding administrative role, one colleague told me the moment he felt most proud was not after launching new academic programs or mentoring countless faculty. Instead, it was after successfully arguing that receipts should not be required below a certain dollar threshold. We laughed—that awkward laugh you do when it’s that or cry.

But some conversations carried no laughter at all. One faculty member who came to meet with me recently, a senior professor who is by all accounts thriving, told me something I have not stopped thinking about. “I imagined shaping young minds and creating knowledge,” he said. “But that’s not what I do.” His daily reality had come to feel dominated by compliance tasks, student crises he was never trained to handle and an unrelenting sense that the institution had quietly redefined his job without telling him. For the first time in his career, he was considering leaving for the private sector. He wasn’t fighting me or acting entitled. He was resigned. He was sad. He was asking what we could do together to make things better.

Yes, there are faculty who get off on the procedural minutiae of meetings, seeing in them an opportunity to demonstrate their erudition, or something, by straining at the most minuscule of gnats.  Is it any accident, dear reader, that such faculty members are probably pulling for the mullahs to string Our President along from now until the return of the twelfth imam?

YOU HAVE DONE THAT YOURSELF.

Georgia State's Rob Jenkins correctly reminds the poo-bahs of higher education of a fundamental truth.  "Higher education has completely abandoned its mission—or at least many institutions, and many departments within those institutions, have done so."  I wonder why that is.

I WONDER WHY THAT IS.

"Humanities Chairs ‘Pessimistic’ About Their Departments’ Future."  We've been on that beat for a long time.

Of course, the people whose salaries depend on not paying attention to what Cold Spring Shops does will deflect, deny, or cry.

Humanities chairs—anxious about increasing political interference, declining enrollments and students’ skepticism toward the value of humanities degrees—are largely pessimistic about the future of their departments, according to a new report from the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.

Chairs told researchers that they are perceived as “a necessary evil” or “troublemakers” by institutional leaders. One chair described their department as “persecuted.” Another asked: “Where’s the respect for my expertise?”

Well, yes, four decades of denying coherent beliefs and turning out the next generation of baristas will have that effect.  As far as respect for expertise, well, there might be people who can tell you all the ways in which 1940 Schlitz beer bottles are different from the ones on the beer truck in 1955, and there are organizations for the collectors of bottles and other breweriana, and undoubtedly those people enjoy great respect among their fellow collectors, but they don't go awarding each other tenure, grants, fellowships, and endowed chairs.

ACADEMIC INTROSPECTION MUST BEGIN WITH APPRAISAL OF FAILURES.

Penn historian Jonathan Zimmerman engages in constructive self-criticism in the house organ for business as usual in higher education, noting, correctly, that "Condescending dismissal is a terrific way to avoid the hard questions about our own complicity in the degradation of the university."

His article opens with an anecdote in which his colleagues re-enacted a cartoon.

The anecdote with which he opens his article has already received widespread play and mockery among the Militant Normals in social media.

In March of last year, about two months after President Trump returned to the White House, I traveled to Washington for a meeting of American education scholars. The opening panel focused — appropriately enough — on Trump’s threats to university funding, free speech on campus, and more. Then it was time for questions, and I raised my hand. I said that I agreed with all the critiques of Trump, but I also wondered what those of us who work in higher education might have done — or not done — to bring about this awful moment. Could we use it to look in the mirror, I asked, and not just to circle the wagons?

Dead silence. Then another member of the audience spoke up. “I just wanted to say that I was deeply offended by Professor Zimmerman’s use of the term ‘circle the wagons,’ which connotes a hateful history of Native American displacement and genocide,” she said, as I remember it. More awkward silence. Finally, the moderator of the panel interjected with something along the lines of: “Thank you for reminding us that we need to be careful in the language that we use to describe others.” So the panel began with a diatribe about Donald Trump’s assault on free speech and it concluded with a warning to watch our words.

Yes, I can easily envision the pursed-lip indignation, or perhaps the finger-wagging, or perhaps the "Azza" preface. Such people deserve the mockery that they get.

THAT'S HOW IT IS WITH SACRED PRIORS.

I did not expect "For 'Sensitive Issues,' Read 'Sacred Priors'" to be validated so quickly or by an academician so highly placed.  And yet here we are.  "Garber Says He is ‘Disappointed’ by Student ‘Ignorance’ on Israel-Palestine Conflict."

Harvard President Alan M. Garber ’76 said he was “disappointed” by the widespread ignorance of Harvard students who expressed strong opinions on the Israel-Palestine conflict — and their disinterest in learning the facts of the issue.

Speaking at an event in Manhattan, Garber said he was struck both by students who held firm views without a grasp of the underlying history and by those who chose to avoid forming views altogether.

“If you’re going to have strong views about an issue,” he said, “I would hope that at a University you would have the curiosity to learn the facts.”

The remarks mark a shift in emphasis for Garber, who has spent much of the past year warning about deteriorating conditions for free expression on campus. In a December podcast appearance, he argued that Harvard “went wrong” by allowing faculty to inject their personal views into the classroom, a shift he said discouraged open disagreement.

On Monday, Garber made clear he sees the problem extending beyond faculty.

Garber described the attitude among students as “disturbing” and “ignorant,” saying he was especially troubled by a combination of shallow knowledge and reluctance to engage in disagreement.

“What I really felt was most disturbing as a Jewish president, but also somebody who cares personally a lot about the issues that were being discussed, is the level of ignorance among people on all sides of this issue,” he said.

“The lack of knowledge and this unwillingness to have open dialogue pain me even more,” Garber added.

Where to begin?  What is the effect of nearly a half-century now of cracking down on speech that "creates a hostile environment" or is "harassing and demeaning?"  What is the effect of enabling some people to live their illusions because it is "their truth," and you get written up for questioning it, on that curiosity to learn the facts?  And how often have people learned that "dialogue" is a worship-word meaning the relevant deanlet gets to set the wrong-thinkers straight?

AS SPRING BREAK WINDS DOWN.

Passover has begun, as I post this churches are about to offer Maundy Thursday services, with Good Friday and Easter to follow, and spring break winds down with the return of the collegians, and the latest strains of the common cold, to campuses.  And Charles C. W. Cooke is not amused with the genre of shock journalism called "ask chicks in bikinis about Serious Things."  Summarized, he asserts, "There is no great need to berate clueless adolescents for enjoying the tail end of their childhoods."  And for the simplest of reasons: sometimes letting it all go for a while is healthy.

For a start, it’s not at all obvious to me that the people on that beach are any less knowledgeable about current affairs than those of a similar age who spend their days being indignantly political on social media and beyond. It is true that the figures whom Fox interviewed do not know anything useful about immigration or foreign policy or economics. But, frankly, neither do most “engaged” 18-year-olds, many of whom, by dint of their peculiar obsessions, have talked themselves into holding some of the stupidest ideological opinions ever witnessed by the tired eyes of man. I am not, as a rule, an advocate for ignorance, but I am willing to bet, for example, that the median beachgoer in Fox’s video has a better instinctive understanding of American politics than the median attendee of a Brooklyn DSA meeting. Now, as ever, intensity does not wisdom create.

I’d also be willing to bet that those beachgoers are far happier than most political obsessives — and, at age 20, happy is a pretty important thing to be. When you read the various judgments that have been rendered in this case, it is impossible to miss the whiff of Puritanism, which was famously defined by H. L. Mencken as “the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.” Left unspoken in every condemnation is the insistence that, rather than remain ignorant in their bliss, those people should be serious, focused, vehement, and miserable. But there will be plenty of time for that. A few years after they have left the beach, those “revelers” will have jobs, mortgages, and children. Life, as the meme has it, will come at them fast. And, when it does, they will learn about politics — or, in many cases, not learn about politics — in much the same pattern as human beings typically do.

If anything, the existence of people who can play like grasshoppers in the summer suggests that things are not as bad with the world as our Excessively Earnest People would have us believe.

Historically, it is a great privilege to live in a time and place in which one’s primary concern can be “what bikini I’m gonna wear next.” To see young and unencumbered people with such habits is not a national disgrace or a societal failing or a civilizational problem to be solved, but a sign that our system is ticking along nicely. If one accounts for the changing fashions, the videos from Fox’s beach party could have been taken in 2005 or 1990 or 1975 or at any time in the modern era in which the United States was not engaged in a totalizing catastrophe. If, in our passion, we are determined to censure the oblivious, then let us do it within more appropriate climes. Harvard, say. Or Congress. Or, dare I say it, the press.

Perhaps, after such a long time between one totalizing catastrophe and the next, the ensuing catastrophe will be more totalizing.  That's the logic of the ekpyrosis.  On the other hand, if you're complaining about spring breaking kids who don't know much about history, or, for that matter, about vendors of artisanal pet food delivered to your door, you might be crying with your mouth full.

FIRST PANAMA CITY, NOW DAYTONA?

Ten years ago, Margaret "University Diaries" Soltan observed that Spring Break festivities weren't, shall we say, opportunities for people to use DeMoivre's Theorem or Mendelian genetics as pick-up lines.  "Allow certain ingredients to be put together in a concentrated way in a specific location, and you can actually destroy civilized life."  Panama City would just as soon not be a Spring Break destination.

Now, it's Daytona's turn.  "When other Florida cities decide they’re deathed-out by it all – when they finally close their doors to the bloodiest, trashiest, weekenders in America – the few scummy holdouts, like Daytona Beach, get everyone."

Maybe not everyone.  An observation by Sgt. Mom at Chicago Boyz is relevant.

I have had to read endless news stories (both mainstream and from various blog-teams) about the depredations committed by one subset. How often does one read about some violent and sometimes vicious assault in a public place, a brawl in a fast-food outlet or entertainment venue, or a smash-and-grab robbery … and scroll down to the mugshot(s) of the arrested perpetrator(s), the surveillance camera stills or on-the-spot posted video, and think to oneself, “Yep, about what I thought…”

Town Hall's Matt Vespa, after posting the reporting from Daytona, asks readers not to judge.  "Look, not trying to harp on stereotypes here."  His call for restraint in the comments is mostly honored in the breach.

WOKE, BROKE?

Portland State University have long been on our "shake out the suboptimal capacity" list.

Perhaps it's time for Portland State to think about its mission and purpose.  It sometimes gives the impression of being a state-supported version of Brown (or Reed) without the starlets paying bribes to get their underprepared spawn in, or perhaps of Oberlin with a less upscale food court, or perhaps Evergreen State with a broader offering of courses.

That despite, or is it because, of a trolley running through the middle of its student center.  The only sane thing you find in some self-styled progressives is their respect for things that run on rails.

THE PROFESSOR'S RESPONSIBILITY IS TO SAY NO AND UPHOLD STANDARDS.

That's what you're paid to do.  Preening on stage or pontificating for local television or, if you're famous enough, testifying before Congress, is what compensates you for doing your work.

How much irresponsibility is there these days?  Try Minding the Campus's David Randall.  "Grade inflation has gotten so bad that a 1968 C+ might clear the bar for a Yalie A today."  The student he refers to is, famously, our 43rd President, who might have used his academic standing self-deprecatingly.

Bush’s example tells us, by the by, that a C+ Yalie is perfectly capable of running the country. It helps, though, when the C+ Yalie knows he was only a C+ student—that knowledge breeds a useful humility. The C+ Yalie who thinks he’s an A student tends toward an unfounded arrogance when put in charge of things.

Unfortunately, in the intervening years, the "gentleman's C" has become the "gentleman's B minus" and these days, Mr Randall suggest, an A minus on the transcript is grounds for a grade appeal.

Commentators a generation ago cautioned that grade inflation meant a C+ in 1968 was roughly equivalent to a B+ by 1999—and we’ve had another quarter-century of inflation since then, so by the same measure, Bush’s C+ might now clear the bar for an A at either school. Not that the grades mean much anymore either way: a straight-A Yalie today may be weak on basic grammar, and who knows whether he’s ever seriously engaged with the history of America or Western civilization.

(Even the young Joe Biden might have earned a B+ at Yale in 2026. One fears that Biden, as he is now, might still manage a B-.)

Mr Bush's opponents, Al Gore and John Kerry, also Ivy types, earned similar grades.  Perhaps politicians, to be successful, have to have some of that hail-fellow-well-met about them, and that doesn't show up on the transcript.  I'll be nice and not ask too many questions about why Barack Obama's transcripts are deep secrets.

THE ADVERTISING PRISONERS' DILEMMA.

I was under the impression that metaphor was well-known.  There's a Minimal Publishable Unit, at least, in rediscovering it.

Auto insurance companies are some of the largest advertisers, with top brands spending upward of $1.5 billion per year, even though they’re household names. When Geico runs another spot featuring its ubiquitous gecko mascot, or Progressive cranks out another Flo ad, are they wasting their money?

“That’s where the puzzle starts,” says Navdeep Sahni, a professor of marketing at Stanford Graduate School of Business. After a century of research on advertising, scholars still don’t have an empirically solid grasp of exactly how or why it works. One leading theory suggests that advertisements provide consumers with new information. If that’s the case, why do the most prominent brands need to advertise? Another influential theory suggests that advertisements create associations in consumers’ minds, hitching a particular brand to a category.

“But if you push that thinking further, it doesn’t actually tell you what to expect,” Sahni says. “If you’re primed to think about Geico, that might also make you think about Progressive because the two things are associated. Or it might make you think about Progressive less. The theory isn’t diagnostic or precise in what it says.”

Sahni and doctoral candidate Yifan Yang go a long way toward resolving these issues in a new working paper that shows the dramatic benefit of auto insurance advertising. They found that ads not only boost visits to an advertiser’s website but also interfere with consumers’ recall of alternative brands, dislodging the competition from their minds. The findings help explain why spending millions on repetitive campaigns, even by well-known brands, is essential to remaining in people’s memories.

Some of what the researchers did to influence their research subjects to follow insurance company links comes close to treating those shoppers as fish to be hooked.  That concluding paragraph suggests the repeated prisoners' dilemma is at work: although the messages look duplicative and repetitive (and among the property and casualty insurance companies, often silly) they serve as counter-programming to the other company's silly messages.  Although their work is about strategies for staying in consumers' minds, and they wonder if the work generalizes, their discussion does not contemplate another possibility, which is that repeated advertising is an expensive signal of permanence.  Ask yourself, as Steven Landsburg once did in his Armchair Economist, whether a fly-by-night company would hire a celebrity to endorse a product of unknown quality.

MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING.

Campus Reform lodges a complaint.  "Marxist ideologies found in University of Utah's economics department."  That prompts Glenn "Insta Pundit" Reynolds to quip, "Leaves found on trees."

Here's how Campus Reform's Austin Brown reports.

The University of Utah’s Department of Economics claims to prepare students for a wide variety of economics-related careers, yet it appears to place an emphasis on promoting left-wing political ideologies.

The department has gained a reputation over the years for the amount of time dedicated to teaching students about Marxism. An article published in 2018 in The Daily Utah Chronicle stated that it “has been labeled a center of Marxist thought” and that its “Marxist characterization has been documented by numerous publications.”

One doctoral student told the Chronicle that nearly everything in the department is “built on Marxism.”

In defense of its economics curriculum, the school asserts that it “offers students an exposure to an unusual breadth of economic thought, as is reflected in elective offerings that examine feminist, historical, and institutional approaches.”

It might be, as Mr Brown suggests, that the course content of “Political Economy of Race, Class, & Gender” or “The United States of Inequality: Political and Economic Remedies and Challenges” can be taught from a perspective of tight priors in which whatever inequalities or disparate outcomes exist are the consequences of an entrenched Ruling Class deploying its powers to keep the Oppressed oppressed.  They do not necessarily have to be taught that way: the challenge is to establish whether a student could ask whether sex roles or labor market outcomes or the amassing of fortunes is in part emergent.