OUR SILVER JUBILEE YEAR BEGINS.

Cold Spring Shops opened for business on the afternoon of Tuesday, 5 September, 2002, the day after Labor Day.  Our Silver Jubilee year will thus commence during the long weekend.

Britain's investor owned railways recognised the Silver Jubilee of King George V with a train named, er, titled, as they have it there, Silver Jubilee and a series of mixed traffic locomotives named for the countries and colonies of the Dominion and the Commonwealth and for prominent figures or events.  Canadian Pacific got in on the honours with two classes of 4-4-4 fast passenger locomotives.  A representative of the smaller series occasionally polishes the rails at Cold Spring Shops headquarters.

We'll see what the upcoming year brings.  There are a lot of things I carried on about early on that I can still carry on about, although I cannot characterize all the developments of the past quarter century as for the worse.

LAUGHTER IS THE BEST MEDICINE.

Good news as the academic year begins in earnest.

VICTORY! After a FIRE lawsuit, the University of Washington paid $600,000 after punishing Professor Stuart Reges for parodying a university-approved “land acknowledgment” in his syllabus. 🧵 https://t.co/unrBuf5yNU pic.twitter.com/0q63E9Nfx5

— FIRE (@TheFIREorg) September 3, 2026

The best thing to do with those ridiculous land acknowledgements that do nothing to offer, oh, returning that land to the previous claimants, is to mock them, and Professor Reger got himself in some trouble with the Guardians of Correct Thought for doing so.  He took them to court, and rightly so.  His course outline was nowhere near as over the top as it could have been.  “University administrators turned me into a pariah on campus because I included a land acknowledgment that wasn’t sufficiently progressive for them. Land acknowledgments are performative acts of conformity that should be resisted, even if it lands you in court. I am pleased that FIRE joined with me to fight back against University of Washington’s illegal viewpoint discrimination.”

It's not as if he noted the Tsar's claims to the Pacific Northwest, or invoked Holy Scripture.  "I wonder if any academic institutions in Bethlehem have a land acknowledgement that refers to the house and lineage of David."

Cold Spring Shops headquarters is on land that was in Wisconsin Territory before Illinois became a state. We recognize the labor applied by those settlers marking the trails that contemporary Illinoisans use to visit Lake Geneva, the Dells, and Door County, and to watch their teams get owned in Green Bay and Milwaukee.

LET THE POSTURING CONTINUE.

Trust a quartet of Washington Post reporters to put the most favorable spin on it.  "Under pressure, Iran lashes out and ramps up rhetoric."  I suspect they're running out of gas mains to dig up and pack with propellant.  But whatever.  "Amid economic pressure and a fight to retain diplomatic leverage via control over the Strait of Hormuz, Tehran is lashing out with increasingly bellicose rhetoric and, on Thursday, a strike on U.S. forces in Kuwait."

THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF THE COURT INTELLECTUALS.

I've argued that much of the propensity for university faculty to register as Democrats is self-interest concealed in the rhetoric of Governance by Wise Experts.

Tonight, a parable.  Suppose that it's hard to be a Man of System because those refractory citizens recognize what it is the Men of System are doing and change their behavior to take advantage of, or to protect themselves from, the policies those Wise Experts drew up (as if in Vince Lombardi's playbook) and the policy doesn't deliver what its designers anticipated?

In political economy, particularly in macroeconomic policy, what I've hinted at has a short descriptor, "Lucas critique," for the Chicago income theorist who worked through all the possible audibles the refractory citizens might call.

PUT YOUR FAITH IN EMERGENCE.

Religious dogma might be useful.  Consensus is poison.

So argues Matthew Continetti in "Inoculated Against Tyranny," asserting, "The Constitution’s separation of powers and guarantee of individual rights kept America’s revolution from devolving into fratricide."

EXCESSIVE COMPLEXITY PRODUCES DIMINISHING RETURNS.

Anyone who has suffered through endless faculty meetings knows that.  The Credentialed Experts who worship process are beginning to figure it out.

All these ways of seeing our world converge dynamically in the current historical moment: this Fourth Turning, or Long Emergency — however you label it — in the arc of our techno-industrial order of things. A lot of these things are coming apart now, and in astounding ways, and it remains to be seen what we will do with these broken and discarded parts, and whether any of it can be put back together in a satisfactory way.

Saecular entropy, properly understood, cannot be reversed.  The saecular order to come will hold surprises.

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.

GET TO WORK ON THE FIRST DAY.

Inside Higher Ed's Courtney Hook offers "5 Ways to Spice Up Syllabus Day."  I'm slightly heartened to discover less talk about "syllabus week."  Why?  "[Students who welcome a first class with no pressure] are often the same students who cry, 'Yay, snow day! when classes are canceled for any reason. Don’t let slackers rule your classroom."  Years ago, we endorsed doing something subject-relevant first, even before getting into the administrative stuff.

Doctor Hook's medicine show might play well at Pepperdine.  Her specific suggestions don't really get to the core of the matter, which is day one of a college course is day one of a college course.

YOUR SCOLDING IS NO LONGER EFFECTIVE.

I'd really rather the culture warriors types leave Sophie Cunningham be, to sink those trilighters and protect her teammates. But the po-faced common scolds, such as supposed sports pundit Jason Page, have to contextualize her celebrating a milestone birthday at a country bar in downtown Indianapolis and energetically delivering that boot, courtesy of the Red White and Blue.

And again… tell me exactly what you are about without telling me exactly what you are about.

Just own who you are and stop talking about “loving everybody”. https://t.co/bSAUDTD3Mk

— Jason Page (@TheBackPage) August 15, 2026

He ran out of ripostes faster than Iran ran out of missiles, and well down the thread somebody posted, "They're bodying you in the comments and you deserve it."  Maybe the ratio came in a boot.

Any day we discover the Anointed losing their power to scold is a good day.

DESPERATELY SEEKING A UNICORN.

In "Taxes Need a Rebrand," Michael Jarvis makes an argument straight out of the early days of the Clinton presidency, when Hillary was actually wearing the pants.  "Too often, tax is framed as a burden instead of a form of shared investment and discussed as a technical obligation rather than the foundation that allows modern societies to function."  Just reframe 'em as "contributions."  (Try not to think of George Lakoff.)

Too often, tax is framed as a burden instead of a form of shared investment. It is discussed as a technical obligation rather than the foundation that allows modern societies to function. Schools, healthcare systems, transportation networks, courts, emergency services, climate resilience measures, and public safety systems do not emerge on their own. They depend on sustained and predictable collective investment, and taxation remains the primary way societies make that investment possible.

You get your Common Dreams commentator card revoked if you even admit of the possibility that many of the items in that passage emerged through the discovery of trade-tested betterments.

THE OBSCURE HISTORY OF THE WOMEN'S BASKETBALL SIDESHOW.

Indiana Fever reserve Sophie Cunningham has a history of standing up for herself and her teammates.  That's generally something for the court, but somehow the culture wars crop up.

Now, she's teasing a book.  It's probably not about recognizing junk defenses and providing subtle cues to get a teammate a better shot.

We, unfortunately, have precious few details at this point about what might be included in her "tell-all," but two likely topics are treatment of certain athletes by the WNBA and the delusional backlash at her wanting to protect girl athletes.

All those blue-haired weirdos who are showing up at games trying silence Sophie may want to be careful what they wish for, because if Cunningham really decides to open Pandora’s box, they might not like what comes spilling out.

It's been there all along, only the national media generally doesn't notice. Visualize a bench-clearing, fan-involved brawl at DePaul's old Alumni Hall.

IT IS A CONSTANT STRUGGLE TO SEE THE OBVIOUS.

Standardized tests, part of upholding standards.

Professors should be able to instruct at a university level without having to cater to those unprepared for college. Any university system, especially one that depends on public funding, would best serve its students and professors by committing to academic rigor, not revisiting the fundamentals.

Regular readers of Cold Spring Shops are long aware that paying for high school twice is a waste, that the professor's job is to say no and uphold standards, and that universities are failing at their mission.

I took my pension in the face of those problems still being business as usual.

Perhaps business as usual is proving untenable.

CONTROLLING THE POLITICAL PIPELINE.

It's Friday, and a reinforcement of a frequent Cold Spring Shops theme, "Perhaps, instead of asking 'who is John Galt?,' dear reader, ask 'who is running for school board or mayor' and 'what is she proposing?'" is in order.

Town Hall's Ashley Evdokimo suggests that the Donk establishment enabled the Democratic Socialists (who might not really be socialists, but I digress) to position a lot of candidates through their Ahab-like obsession with the Golden Golem of Greatness rather than, to use the Sunday show locution, paying attention to the issues the American people care about.

While Republicans and Democrats have poured enormous amounts of energy into presidential politics, media cycles, and national messaging, the DSA has invested in something much less glamorous—but arguably much more important.

The political pipeline.

School boards become city councils. City councils become state legislatures. State legislators become members of Congress. Members of Congress become committee chairs, governors, Cabinet officials, and eventually party leaders. Politics has always been a farm system, and the DSA understands that.

Ironically, while much of the Democratic establishment spent years defining itself in opposition to Donald Trump, the DSA spent those same years defining the future of the Democratic Party. And unless Democrats outright say they’re against it, we can’t “trust” their alliances.

The emergence of Michael Harrington's disciples is also giving Never Trump conservatives heartburn, as they are personae non grata among Republicans and the irritated rump flexing among the Donks will have no truck with them.

REMEMBERING GORDON WOOD.

Steven Hayward mourns his passing.  "Now we shall mark the occasion next month without his cheerful demeanor and fund of hard-earned wisdom and knowledge, which finds no intellectual equal in this nation of equal citizens. It will not be the same without his presence."  By all means, read his eulogy in full, and pay close attention to his arguments noting that "radicalism" does not have to mean "leftward ho."

It is hard to avoid wondering whether the shocking news of the ghastly accidental death of historian Gordon S. Wood, struck down by a motorist in a shopping center parking lot, is a bad omen, coming within a month of our observance of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Wood has been enjoying a much-deserved spotlight in the runup to the sesquicentennial, but now his voice will be absent on July 4.

Widely acknowledged as the pre-eminent historian of the American Founding in our time, Wood was virtually without peer within academic American history today. There is, however, an arc to his career and thought as a historian that offers encouragement that, in this time of doubt and division about the character and future of American democracy, it is possible to capture and celebrate America’s complex and enduring foundations.

Wood burst onto the scene in 1969 with the publication of The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787, a capacious 653-page exploration of the ideas that crystallized into the American Revolution and the Constitution eleven years after the Declaration. Wood had been a student of Bernard Bailyn, one of the leading historians of American political thought in the mid-twentieth century, and Wood built upon Bailyn’s well-regarded Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, but can be said to have advanced and refined a bold new interpretive strand of American historiography—the “civic republican school.”

The civic republican school argued that modern democracy owed less to Lockean liberalism than to a more classically inspired tradition centering on “civic virtue.” It was an explicit alternative to the liberal tradition of natural rights and rugged individualism. Although Wood was restrained in staking out a clear position, his book offered considerable backup for the civic republicans, many of whom were openly seeking an alternative for understanding America and to displace the “liberal tradition” as defended by Louis Hartz and other mid-century historians.

Mr Hayward's colleague at Power Line Scott Johnson offers Hillsdale's Wilfred McClay an opportunity to extend.

[Professor Wood] may have spent his life working mainly in the Ivy League, but he was no blueblood. He was an affable, hardworking guy from a working-class family in Concord, [Massachusetts], and you could hear his origins in his unmistakable Yankee accent. A great historian could also be a regular guy.

Although he studied at Harvard under the august Bernard Bailyn, and excelled in all he did, he acquired none of the mandarin manners of the higher professoriate, but remained himself. His sympathy for the lives and ways of ordinary people informed his most important work, and was part of his visceral love of democratic America.

His book The Radicalism of the American Revolution was in large measure a tribute to the Revolution’s astonishing achievement in ushering in a genuinely new world, one in which feudalism and monarchy were a dead letter, the elite values of pre-Revolutionary classical republicanism had lost their appeal, and there was a general awareness that, in Jefferson’s famous words, “the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God.”

Instead, Wood wrote, America would find its greatness in a new way: “by creating a prosperous free society belonging to obscure people with their workaday concerns and their pecuniary pursuits of happiness—common people with their common interests in making money and getting ahead.”

Such sentiments are what one might expect from Power Line, which argues from an institutional-conservative seasoned lightly with populism.

WOULD I HAVE SIGNED MY OWN DEATH WARRANT?

Kevin McCullough notes the gravity of pledging "our Lives, our Fortunes, and our Sacred Honor."

Liberty, worth more than comfort.

What united them wasn't that they agreed about everything.

It was that they agreed on one breathtaking truth.

Our rights do not come from government.

They come from God.

That single idea changed the course of history.

Kings believed rights flowed from the throne. Governments believed liberty existed only because governments allowed it. The Declaration turned that thinking upside down. Government exists to protect rights it did not create.

That idea remains every bit as revolutionary today as it was two hundred and fifty years ago.

Now, honesty requires us to acknowledge something else. The nation they launched did not immediately live up to its own creed. Slavery stood in direct contradiction to the words, "all men are created equal.”

History shouldn't pretend otherwise.

But history should also recognize that the Founders wrote down a principle greater than themselves. Because they did, future generations possessed a standard by which America could be challenged, corrected, and improved.

Yes, and everyone who is born here or lives here lives better because that revolutionary idea took root here first, rather than somewhere else where those people would be enjoying the head start of securing the blessings of liberty.

Something about that essay got me hearing "who more than self their country loved" and "confirm thy soul in self-control."  For your perusal, all the stanzas of America the Beautiful.

A LAMENT FOR THE AMERICAN HIGH.

In "The GOP and the Corporate Dems Can’t Red-Bait Their Way Out of a Reckoning," Thom Hartmann argues that the recent successes of so-called democratic socialists in Democrat primaries are another spin on Making America Great, "again" optional.

Strip away the scare word and what’s left is far more truly and anciently American than frightening: a country where a person who works 40 hours a week, no matter how complicated or how humble that work might be, can afford a home and a car, take the family on a vacation every year, put the kids through school and college, see a doctor without going bankrupt, and retire with dignity.

That’s the entire “radical” program that Republicans, corporate Democrats, and our billionaire oligarchs are so flipped out about.

Americans have wanted those things for a very long time.

Put "on one income" in that first sentence and you might be writing about what I call The America That Worked^(TM) or perhaps the American High, which was designed away by Wise Experts.  "I devote a lot of space to documenting the ways in which the Trendy and the Deep Thinkers destroyed The America That Worked^(TM), supposedly in the interest of Social Progress or Inclusion or something similarly high-minded."

CODIFY THE LIABILITY, CONSERVE THE TRANSACTION COSTS.

Sometimes I'll speak in riddles, and with all the algorithms combing through Cold Spring Shops these days, maybe now is a good time to serve an oldie up.  Twenty years ago, frustrated by Student Affairs types continually putting more special education responsibilities on faculty, I proposed to codify the liability the common schools were saddling higher education with.

Perhaps the most salutary reform the public universities could obtain would be to announce something like "Effective 15 April 2007, admission to Enormous State University (flagship, land-grant, compass-direction alike) is contingent on passing the mathematics and writing placement tests. Enormous will no longer offer no-credit remedial mathematics, writing, and speaking courses for high school graduates who have not really received a high school education. Furthermore, Enormous State's Office of Institutional Research will report placement test passage rates by school district." My sometimes sparring partner at Anonymous Community would no doubt be a bit unhappy to receive additional remedial students at the same time that his state is griping about having to pay for the same courses twice. Fine. As part of the reform, bill the school districts for those remedial courses and reimburse the community colleges. Principals now have a choice: offer token academic courses and suffer a budget cut, or spend money to improve their academic content.

Impractical?  Perhaps.  Get pushback?  I did.  "That changes may appear 'pretty screwy' is not necessarily reason to stop thinking along those lines, particularly when the status quo is not working."

STOP CLUTTERING OUR UNIFORMS.

"Minor league baseball team cancels Pride Night game after players refuse to wear rainbows."  We're not talking about the players objecting to some sponsor's logo.  "Fewer than nine players on the 28-man roster were willing to uniforms that featured a rainbow design on their sleeves, a team official said."

IF IT'S THE WEEKEND, THERE MUST BE AN IRAN DEAL.

Here. We. Go. Again.  Again.  "Here.  We.  Go.  Again.  Holding meetings to establish a framework to develop a process will not yield a single gram of fissile material, although it is probably a good way to keep the likes of Danny in McMansions in McLean.  Might be time to punch the mullahs in the mouth again, and let them know that once they turn over the fissile material the anaconda's coils can be loosened."  That was toward the end of May.  Toward the end of last week it was "Here comes another weekend of 'an agreement is near.' The hardliners in Iran and among the Militant Normals are not prepared to be patient."