PUNISHED FOR BEING CHARITABLE.

I'm not alone in asking the eleemosynary institutions to dial back the clutter.  Six years ago came this complaint.  "It's really annoying, so close to the end of the Festive Season, and before all of my Festive Season gift checks have even been cashed, to receive mailings labeled 'Renewal Notice' or laid out in the form of a government notification, with a request for another contribution."  And yes, I have stopped sending money to some organizations whose causes don't excite me as much, particularly for pretending to be sending an invoice along.

WHY "PEER REVIEWED" ISN'T THE QUALITY ASSURANCE YOU THINK IT IS.

Higher Education Quarterly just confessed to being pranked.  "The retraction is agreed because data in the article has been identified as fabricated and the authors have not disclosed their true identities."  The authors gave their names as "Sage Owens and Kal Avers-Lynde III." Doesn't anybody think of an acronym here, or was the title, "Donor money and the academy: Perceptions of undue donor pressure in political science, economics, and philosophy," just too appealing to The Narrative to call for more careful review?

The paper, titled Donor Money and the Academy: Perceptions of Undue Donor Pressure in Political Science, Economics, and Philosophy, includes the Olin Foundation and the “Randy Eller Foundation” among the “right-wing donor sources” subject to research. However, the Olin Foundation disbanded in 2005, and the “Randy Eller Foundation” does not appear to exist, a detail noted by Steven Hayward at Powerline.

The paper also lists the Federalist Society among donors to four-year universities and colleges. However, a Federalist Society spokesperson told National Review in an email that the organization “does not donate to undergraduate programs.”

National Review has reached out to Higher Education Quarterly and its editors for comment. The nature of the review process for the article was not immediately clear.

It's malpractice for an editor to send a manuscript on the behavior of eleemosynary institutions to reviewers who are so unfamiliar with the foundations (particularly, if there are economists helping review the paper) as to let that "Randy Eller" (it's easy enough to check the sponsored projects office at a university for that one) slide or to be unaware that Olin have not been calling for proposals for over fifteen years.  The Narrative, notes Pierre Lemieux, was Just.  Too.  Convenient.  "The specter of Koch money appears often in the article along with code words such as 'neoliberalization of higher education' or 'market fundamentalism.' That might have been sufficient to have the article accepted, despite fabricated data and obvious errors."

Academia delenda est.

ANOTHER DOOMSDAY ENVIRONMENTALIST REFUTED.

Look, it borders on cruelty to call attention to the failed predictions of doomsday environmentalists.  Every so often, though, something comes to light that offers a little play value in a winter of discontent.  To set the stage, consider a passage in one of the doomsday tomes of the late 1960s, I forget which one, which was contrasting the wastefulness of single-use metal cans in the developed countries with the great value a single metal can might have to a poor family somewhere in the developing world.  That might have been the same tome that raised the prospect of people in the rich countries mining their dumps to get at the metal in those long-ago-discarded, now rusty, cans.

Reality turned out somewhat differently.  First, there's a lot of recycling value in those cans, and the steel companies have been able to make better grade product out of scrap.  Second, in the developing world, those metal cans might be more valuable as scrimshaw than as an electric furnace charge.  "Crude and very funky, but very desirable models of some real classics. These are totally Third-World. Fabricated out of metal scraps and hand-painted, in outdoor workshops. Incredibly interesting that these find their way to our markets, and are even sanctioned and licensed by Volkswagen! We find them very interesting and desirable, and think they fit into any collection."

That's right, dear reader, the clutter in my mailbox from merchants and eleemosynary institutions seeking to separate me from my money is rising to Festive Season levels.

But if you're looking for something to do during those long winter nights, there are ways to scratch-build your own beer can models.  And learn a few things, such as you can field strip a nine volt transistor radio battery to get six AAA cells.

Let the record show that at least one of the old-style silk-screened metal boxcars populating the model railroad uses what might have been discarded can-stock, based on what's printed on the inside of the sides.

FREQUENCY, CONNECTIVITY, AND SCARCITY.

Matt "Dean Dad" Reed makes a case for funding colleges that starts with a transportation story.  "Transportation scholars probably have a more elegant term for this, but 'induced nondemand' at least gets to the gist of it." It's probably simpler to treat his story as the contrapositive to Field of Dreams.  They won't come if you didn't build it.  But when you don't have the ghost of Babe Ruth assuring you that carving that base-ball diamond out of that corn field is a winning proposition, you'd better have a solid case that going to the trouble of providing it was worth doing.  There are some general principles applicable to government provision of transportation or education alike, and an exegesis of Talmudic proportions will commence beyond the jump.

I FIND YOUR LACK OF GRATITUDE TROUBLING.

Last year, I decided I'd had enough of eleemosynary institutions behaving like cable companies.

It's really annoying, so close to the end of the Festive Season, and before all of my Festive Season gift checks have even been cashed, to receive mailings labeled "Renewal Notice" or laid out in the form of a government notification, with a request for another contribution.

I'm considering reviewing my donation habits, in particular to reduce funding or end it completely, for any cause, no matter how meritorious, that engages in this form of official-looking begging.

Habitat for Humanity were the first to be sanctioned, and DeKalb's Salvation Army are on notice.

Chicago's Anti-Cruelty Society are also, effective immediately, on the Index.  No acknowledgement of my Christmas present, yet, but in addition to the annoying "Renewal Notice" they're also sending out mailings marked "Second Notice," as if I'm late on my electric bill, or something.

Sorry, no, we're done.  The principal mission of the society is to care for stray cats and dogs, although they're complicit in the banning of elephant acts in Illinois circuses, meaning children of all ages have at best a dog and pony show in their neighborhood.  Buh-bye.

AT LEAST ACKNOWLEDGE MY CHRISTMAS GIFT FIRST.

Last year, I decided I'd had enough of eleemosynary institutions behaving like cable companies.

It's really annoying, so close to the end of the Festive Season, and before all of my Festive Season gift checks have even been cashed, to receive mailings labeled "Renewal Notice" or laid out in the form of a government notification, with a request for another contribution.

I'm considering reviewing my donation habits, in particular to reduce funding or end it completely, for any cause, no matter how meritorious, that engages in this form of official-looking begging.

In July of 2020, I put Habitat for Humanity on notice.  Their ratio of charitable works to swag is probably low, given their propensity for sending out note pads and offering to send stuffed animals to donors.  Naughty list, again, this year.

But the Salvation Army????  They do good works in DeKalb County, and I have seen socially distanced queues of people at their food pantry as the Pritzker maladministration continues.  I don't want to take them off the Christmas distribution list, but an "Annual Renewal Notice" complete with a return envelope with the glassine window for the return address to show through is precisely the kind of treating donors as people to be billed I'm objecting to.

THIS IS WHAT I'M GRIPING ABOUT.

At the beginning of the year I posted a generalized gripe about eleemosynary institutions carrying on like spoiled children whose Christmas haul wasn't as big as they would like.  "I'm considering reviewing my donation habits, in particular to reduce funding or end it completely, for any cause, no matter how meritorious, that engages in this form of official-looking begging."

Here's a specific example of the "emulate the utility bill" approach.  "Our records show Habitat for Humanity has not yet received a contribution from you in 2020."  No, and sending a quasi-invoice complete with a menu of "suggested gifts" to choose among, isn't going to expedite anything their way.  Never mind that for $20 or better they have a stuffed toy as a thanks.

What's up, by the way, with the inducements?  I have enough address labels that if I did run a mail order business, I'd never have to have any printed up.  I have enough scratch pads that I'll never have to go to the office supply store to keep the household in grocery lists or project lists for the railroads.  Getting subjunctive, if I had a nickel for every solicitation that includes one, and a time machine, I could do a lot of streetcar riding.

Presumably the people who run the charities are of the view that more people are induced to contribute rather than, as I am, are put off by the evidence of administrative excess all those labels, cards, note pads, nickels, and stickers represent.

I'M PUTTING THE ELEEMOSYNARY INSTITUTIONS ON NOTICE.

It's really annoying, so close to the end of the Festive Season, and before all of my Festive Season gift checks have even been cashed, to receive mailings labeled "Renewal Notice" or laid out in the form of a government notification, with a request for another contribution.

I'm considering reviewing my donation habits, in particular to reduce funding or end it completely, for any cause, no matter how meritorious, that engages in this form of official-looking begging.

HIGHER EDUCATION FAILS MARKET TESTS.

Our favorite recovering administrator, Peter Wood, detects intellectual smallness in higher education.

His hypothesis: that the academic left has destroyed higher education's credibility.

Partly this has happened because the academic Left is scared. Having completed its long march through the institutions, it has noticed that fewer and fewer people are accepting its rule. College enrollments peaked in 2011 at 21 million in 2011 and are now down to 18.8 million in fall 2017, and will drop again this fall. This has prompted colleges and universities to redouble their marketing. They are trying to entice more “adult learners,” more international students, more illegal immigrants, and more and more academically under-qualified students to enroll. Generally, that means pitching programs tailored to the interests and abilities of busy adults, nervous illegals, and bewildered blockheads.

Plummeting enrollments would be of concern to college administrators no matter their politics, but politics has exacerbated the problem. A large majority of conservatives now view the university as hostile to free speech and free inquiry. The traditional humanities are now so dominated by the race-class-gender-is-everything crowd that students shun their courses and elect instead to major in less polluted subjects, such as nursing and accounting.

The academic Left thunders that students are deserting the “liberal arts” in favor of “vocational training” because the business community and right-wing philistines have led them astray. But the real reason is that students are simply turned off by the Left’s incessant monologue about injustice and oppression. Is there nothing else?

I'm inclined to agree with the broad outlines of his claim, and would add that, although running a university (or some kinds of eleemosynary institutions) like a business is a mistake, there is still a market for higher education, not to mention a marketplace of ideas, and that "incessant monologue" is a failure of the stewards of the market to deliver on some kinds of ideas.  Teach the controversies.

Furthermore, I've groused, repetitively and at length, about Distressed Material and the follies of access-assessment-remediation-retention and the proliferation of subprime party schools and the chutzpah of griping about vocationalism after peddling that "to get a good job, get a good education" starting about the same time the first Interstate Highways opened.  Mr Wood is simply making a point that regular readers will find familiar.

“Emergent coherence” is the sure path to post-modernism, where the controlling narrative of Western civilization gives way to a prevailing sense of randomness and disorder. We can hardly blame the students for that. It is what the universities offer. Sometimes they offer it straight up as part of a cultural studies course. Mostly it is conveyed in the form of curricular entropy: the lack of a comprehensive intellectual vision of what is worth learning, why, and in what order. The lack of such a vision is masked by the emphasis on such fatuities as “diversity,” “multiculturalism,” and “critical thinking,” and by the promise of small packages of useful skills, which is the substance of “micro-credentials.”

All of these together may seem to those who don’t know any better a perfectly good agenda for the American college or university. But they do not add up to an adult who understands much about history, civilization, or culture—which is to say, a liberally educated person.

Put more simply, emergent coherence has its place, but that's at odds with paying forward the accumulated wisdom born of lots of prior mistakes.

I wonder, though, if there isn't more at work.  Our President's impromptu diplomacy has caused no end of consternation for the Front Row Kids who might be confronting their irrelevance, and that consternation appears to have motivated Mr Wood's essay. "Why has the vanguard of world history and multiculturalism suddenly settled into a fascination with the equivalent of collecting intellectual lint?"

Perhaps the Front Row Kids among the diplomatic corps and the establishment press, and the lint-collectors of higher education are in the position of the operators of seminaries and monasteries five centuries ago.

The elite keep getting the basics wrong.

And when the old gatekeepers preach the old creeds, and urge the sinners to change their ways and pay their indulgences, and recant or be excommunicated, the deplorables say, pound sand.

I'm seeing enough parallels to the upheaval in the one apostolic and catholic church to consider additional posts on this theme.

POP IS A LIQUID ASSET.

The New York Times interprets a government report on where the taxpayers' food stamp money goes.

The findings show that the No. 1 purchases by SNAP households are soft drinks, which accounted for 5 percent of the dollars they spent on food. The category of ‘sweetened beverages,’ which includes fruit juices, energy drinks and sweetened teas, accounted for almost 10 percent of the dollars they spent on food. “In this sense, SNAP is a multibillion-dollar taxpayer subsidy of the soda industry,” said Marion Nestle, a professor of nutrition, food studies and public health at New York University. “It’s pretty shocking.”

For years, dozens of cities, states and medical groups have urged changes to SNAP, or the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, to help improve nutrition among the 43 million poorest Americans who receive food stamps. Specifically, they have called for restrictions so that food stamps cannot be used to buy junk food or sugary soft drinks.

But the food and beverage industries have spent millions opposing such measures, and the U.S.D.A. has denied every request, saying that selectively banning certain foods would be unfair to food stamp users and create too much red tape.

Read the entire article, and note the Wise Experts Being Fretful about the People in Their Charge spending their money foolishly on pop rather than on More Nutritious Things.  Ah, the technocratic impulse, and the continued conceit that somehow there is an Order of People Born Booted And Spurred to Ride the Rest of Humanity.  (And it's For Your Own Good, so Do as I Say.)