END OF THE LINE? President Bush's budget does not provide for the continuation of Amtrak. National Corridors reports that the National Association of Railroad Passengers, a lobbying organization that combines train enthusiasm with occasional careful introspection, is not pleased.

“The National Association of Railroad Passengers condemns this proposal as radical and irresponsible.”

NARP executive director Ross Capon declared, “It would end virtually all intercity rail passenger service in the nation, including through service on the Northeast Corridor between Boston, New York and Washington, D.C. This places the burden of funding intercity passenger rail entirely on states that do not have the financial resources to assume such an unfunded mandate.”

He said, “States with limited resources would place first priority on saving the commuter operations within their borders. The $360 million the Administration proposes is to allow freight and local commuter rail operations over the Northeast Corridor to continue. It is not clear that this would be enough to accomplish these purposes, and not even the Administration claims it would allow continuation of any Amtrak trains.”

Capon added, “Past experience suggests that the only way to fund services which cross multiple state lines is at the federal level,” and added, “The Bush Administration misleads the public by saying that a ‘restructuring’ based on zero federal support ‘should lead to the development of short-corridor routes between major population centers.’"

The Chicago Tribune takes a somewhat different view.

In a few places, like the Northeast Corridor from Boston to Washington and possibly the Chicago-Milwaukee area, Amtrak does draw a noticeable number of people off the roads. But that fact only lends weight to the administration's preference for letting states decide which operations warrant continued support.

Under its proposal, Washington would offer a 50-50 match for state capital investments. Deprived of operating aid, Amtrak has various options: ending service in most places while cutting costs so it can make a profit on selected routes, letting private companies take over some trains, and transferring particular segments to state or regional agencies.

Rail buffs say the money given to Amtrak is a pittance compared to that spent on infrastructure for drivers and fliers. In fact, on a passenger-mile basis, which measures how much it costs to transport a given number of travelers a given distance, the subsidy to Amtrak is huge. The Bureau of Transportation Statistics reports that from 1990 to 2002, Amtrak averaged a subsidy of $186 per thousand passenger miles. Commercial aviation, by contrast, got just $6--and the government actually got more from highway users than it spent.

Given its meager performance, which shows no sign of improving, it's impossible to justify that expense. In a time of many urgent budget needs, Amtrak is a luxury that the nation would be better off without.

These observations merit further consideration. Although Amtrak is not supposed to be a commuter train operation, it is difficult to interpret its Philadelphia-New York and Sacramento-Oakland service as anything but a commuter service. Some of the Western trains currently operate as a convex combination of cruise train to the national parks and accommodation train to intermediate small towns, a compromise that pleases nobody, as schedules optimized for sightseeing imply prairie towns served in the wee small hours, but those stops add to the running times of the trains. The interstate corridors might work better if express trains coexist and exchange passengers with local trains, something not currently encouraged on those tracks shared by Amtrak and Metro-North, New Jersey Transit, Metra, Metrolink, and other commuter rail authorities.

THE PSEUDO-INDIAN DEFENSE. To review, the King's Indian and Queen's Indian involve the fianchetto of the King's or Queen's Bishop, respectively; the Nimzo-Indian is the development of the King's Bishop at such time as putting the question to it is unsound.

The Pseudo-Indian is somewhat different, as it involves identifying the best square for a Bishop when one is not clear what color that Bishop is. And, unfortunately, we cannot ignore this story by arguing that the Pseudo-Indian is so much fantasy and science fiction. That is true of Von Goom's Gambit.

In the Pseudo-Indian, a university that seeks to score a higher diversity rating by retaining a faculty member claiming Native roots overprotects that faculty member.

Kaye Howe, a vice chancellor at the time, had warned Middleton in May 1990 that the university could lose Churchill to another school if a role for him was not found. But Howe has said she never expected Churchill to get tenure.

(Hat tip: View from a Height.) The statement is unsound. Tenure is an up or out decision, and most universities will not retain faculty in teaching positions without tenure. Under some interpretations of the AAUP statement on tenure, adjunct faculty of long standing presumptively have tenure. Perhaps Mr Churchill could have obtained a long term contract without tenure and perhaps with a pay raise by resigning from Communications before his tenure case had to be considered, then hiring on in some administrative role with teaching duties. Such dodges are not unknown in the Diversity Boondoggle, disclaimers about Native American Studies being unable to grant tenure notwithstanding.

The Pseudo-Indian offers a way out. The overprotection redesignates the Bishop as a Special Bishop that can be deployed to a square of any color.

Ward Churchill was rejected by two University of Colorado departments in 1991 before the communication department agreed to give him tenure. Even in the communication department, the chairman-elect was "uncomfortable" with the decision, according to documents released Friday by CU.

At the time, CU officials were shopping for a department that would accept Churchill, fearing they would lose him to another university.

A communications department, otherwise known as the refuge of scholarship basketball players, with a shred of propriety. There may still be hope for the academy. (Hat tip: Stephen at Vodka Pundit.)

YOU MEAN I GET MORE PAY AND BETTER WORKING CONDITIONS? Yes, in California school districts that's true, reports Joanne Jacobs (thanks, Joanne, for reopening the San Jose gateway!)

California schools with the poorest students spend less on teachers, concludes an Education Trust West report on the hidden gap in teacher pay. Experienced, higher-paid teachers move to schools serving more affluent, easy-to-teach students, leaving low-income, high-stress schools with inexperienced, low-paid rookies.

Is it time for another lesson on compensating differentials?

ARISE, YE PRISONERS OF STARVATION. King at SCSU Scholars finds an employment opportunity for a chekist.

Human Relations and Multicultural Education is an interdisciplinary department that emphasizes student-centered pedagogy and examines the impact of power, resources, cultural standards, and institutional policies and practices on various groups in our society.

Make sure you understand Prof. Blogger's translation of a related discipline description. Apparently the succesful applicant at St. Cloud will have an opportunity to teach outside his or her home department.

May teach other appropriate courses in human relations and multicultural education when needed, as determined by department. The theoretical base of the department includes a global critical framework of structural oppression, social and environmental justice and the interrelationship of race, gender, class, sexual orientation, disability, xenophobia, imperialism, environmental issues, etc.

Don't you love that "etc?" Apparently it's also a plus to understand non-intellectual ways of intellectualizing.

Demonstrated knowledge of: theories of racism and other forms of oppression and the interrelationships between them; theories related to social and environmental justice; non-dominant, non-western "ways of knowing"; connections between global and personal issues.

The scare quotes and the use of the catch-all term "issues" speak for themselves. I wonder, however, whether someone who ran an affirmative action bake sale would satisfy this qualification.

Demonstrated experience in social action to challenge oppression effectively.

It's job searches like this that give ammunition to the advocates of the so-called academic bills of rights. I have some reservations about such bills and hope to post more about that over the weekend. On the other hand, to prevent the advocates of those bills of rights from prevailing, somebody within the academy must step up and be adult enough to recognize that while challenging the dominant paradigm has its value, there is also value in the dominant paradigm. I'm still looking for a suitable trade-off to address.

USE A SEX TENT TO SHOOT WHAT? Ian at Truck and Barter observes that along the German coast, lighthouses might be rendered obsolete as more skippers rely on their Global Positioning System, hereafter GPS, receivers to navigate. He's not impressed with the argument that the lighhouses are a useful backup to the GPS.

Individuals that decide to ply the Germans seas without proper training and without the appropriate tools are choosing to take risks. The public receives no benefit from it, and isn't really in danger of being hurt the way drunk drivers end up hurting others. The larger companies, on the other hand, have invested time and money into preparing for the eventuality of a GPS failure. Seems to me that Germans (and others) are being taxed to protect someone's sense of nostalgia.

Although that statement makes sense, it conflates two phenomena: paying for uneconomic backup systems, and incompetent recreational sailors. This quote from the linked Spiegel article is really recognizing the second phenomenon.

[Naval historian Heinrich] Bauermeister fears hobby captains are losing more and more of their skills as a result of modern technologies. If their GPS systems were to malfunction, they could face serious danger. "The sense of orientation is one that must be constantly trained," he cautions. "Those who now only rely on GPS are losing this important ability, which can save lives in dangerous situations."

The problem, however, is a separate problem from the closure of lighthouses, as sailors are more likely to get into trouble on the high seas.

"Navigation with GPS may seem easy, but in truth it isn't," said Georg Fries of the Nautical Association in Brunsbuettel, a German coastal hamlet northwest of Hamburg. For one thing, GPS can never be 100 percent reliable -- extreme weather conditions like hail or snowfall or even solar winds are known to disrupt service. The Pentagon, which operates the system, also has the ability to suspend or scramble service during major crises, as it did briefly during the war in Kosovo. "If that happens, ship captains will lose their orientation at sea," warns Fries. "It will be like getting lost in a dark forest."

The former marine traffic controller says he was especially disquieted after reading a recent article in Lloyd's List, an influential shipping industry publication, stating that US President George W. Bush was considering a plan to scramble GPS during times of "extraordinary threats to national security." The Europeans have also left open the option of scrambling Galileo, the EU competitor to GPS scheduled to go into service by the end of the decade, during times of crisis. Fries finds this equally unsettling.

Problems aboard a ship, including engine room fires that could temporarily cut off electricity, can also disrupt GPS equipment. Once the juice is sucked out of a ship's back-up batteries, the monitors flickering with the electronic ocean maps and satellite-supported positioning information will go black -- possibly putting a ship close to shore into a dangerous position.

The lee shore is no place to be with no power and no knowledge of one's position, but the featureless open ocean will also kill you if you don't show the proper respect. The ocean may still kill you if you know how to reckon your position with a sextant and a good watch, but your odds are a bit better.

THIS ABOUT SUMS IT UP. Six years of experience teaches nothing.

NIU coach Carol Hammerle said that she isn’t concerned about her players that are losing often for the first time in their career."It’s always good to recruit players from successful programs with winning attitudes," Hammerle said. "We are still trying to figure out what it takes to win on this level."

For the record: Northern Illinois University played in the Mid-American Conference in the 1998-1999 season, the current coach's first season. Several recruits to the team have been honored as part of the conference All-Newcomer team. What does that tell you about figuring out how to win "on this level?"

This comment at View From a Height, which is addressing the continuing Ward Churchill saga, is on point for the basketball program.

They're saying that you got to the point where an ideological commitment to ethnic bean-counting led to a complete suspension of judgment.

Success at a lower level of competition (although Wisconsin-Green Bay is doing better since 1998) plus making a diversity point with a coaching hire does not equal a successful team in the mid-majors.

THINGS THEY DON'T TEACH YOU IN GRADUATE SCHOOL. Northern Illinois University is one of the institutions of higher learning that does not provide bluebooks (examination booklets) as part of a department's used and useful supply budget. Students must procure their own bluebooks before an exam. One local bookstore has had some fun with this penny-wise but foolish policy, making two bluebooks available per student per visit. On the back is the slogan, "Nobody should have to pay to take a test," a dig at the university-operated bookstore, which has a rack of bluebooks for sale at each checkout station.

What is instructive, however, is many students' familiarity with essay tests.

Inevitably, some questions will come up that I will always answer straightforwardly and without editorial comment, although they raise questions in my mind about what is going on elsewhere in the P-20 world.

Prior to the exam, I announce, "Please bring one bluebook." Inevitably somebody will ask, "what's a bluebook?" I don't mind explaining, but it makes me wonder what has gone on in that student's prior college experience. By the fourth week of freshman year at Wisconsin -- this was in 1971 -- we all knew what a bluebook was. The bluebooks were Department Issue.

During the exam, it is likely that someone will ask if it's OK to answer the questions out of order. I don't mind; all I ask is that students clearly identify that they are answering No. 4 first. (A big "4." before the first words suffices.) Again, that makes me wonder what prior experience that student has had with essay exams -- or was there some excessively anal [what, the Superintendent calling somebody excessively anal? Oh, stop it.] teacher somewhere in that student's past who insisted that students answer the questions in order. (Here are two reasons why that is a bad idea. First, people differ in their style of attacking questions. Some will focus on the ones they perceive as easiest first, others will tackle the hardest ones first. There are advantages or not to either approach. Second, cheaters -- provided their peripheral vision is good enough -- will be frustrated in sneaking peeks at other papers if the writers of the other papers are working on different questions.)

Likewise, students will sometimes wonder if they can use both sides of the bluebook pages. My response is always "yes," why let half the book go to waste. Again, I have to wonder what sort of experience with essay tests these students have had.

SIXTY YEARS AGO. Sgt. Karlson spent his 20th birthday in Belgium.

MORE ON THE EVOLUTION OF THE DIVERSITY BOONDOGGLE. Comrade Snowball is making life difficult for the little Napoleons that would like to privilege their particular points of view.

It must be a reflection on the political clout of geographers that academic historical geography is seen to be possible in departments of history and economic geography is not out of bounds in departments of economics or political science. Contrast this with departments of Ethnic Studies or Women’s Studies in colleges that also house departments of History or Sociology or Political Science. Or consider universities that have both a department of English and a Department of Reading. This really exists but I’ve yet to come across a Department of Subtraction in a university already paying for a department of Mathematics. I know of a Department of Biological Sciences that used to be two separate departments of Biology and Biochemistry until they saw the light.

Now I’m no less interested in folks studying women’s history or women’s politics than folks studying subtraction but I contend there are both practical and intellectual reasons not to subdivide these investigations into overly-fine categories.

All educations are equal. But some educations are more equal than others. (Leave aside the Subtraction of Mathematics from the University for the moment.) Comrade Snowball has also linked to a Richard Mitchell essay worth your careful reading.

A RESEARCH OPPORTUNITY. Professor Blogger notes the February slump.

The Professor wondered aloud to his students today: has any serious scholarly work been done on the psychology of a semester, or does all this remain in the realm of anecdotes?

If memory serves, the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor has its spring break the last week in February, and the institutional wisdom was that student suicides were most likely at that time of year. I have not seen any institutional research corroborating this. I can tell you that late winter in southeast Michigan is miserable: lots of overcast, lots of rain, if it does snow, it melts to slush, and it can only be worse if the Wolverines are floundering on the basketball court. DeKalb has 40 more sunny days a year than Ann Arbor. The timing of our spring break is purely instrumental: there are eight weeks before the break and eight weeks after the break, which provides a little extra time for people teaching eight week courses to get grades in and prepare for their next stint.

SEPARATING EQUILIBRIUM. University of Illinois puzzled by drop in undergraduate applications.

The U of I has followed the lead of the University of Michigan and other schools that have added essay questions to their applications. For the first time, applicants now are asked to write a 500-word "professional statement'' along with the 800-word personal statement that has long been part of the application.

"That could have the effect of reducing applications because a student who is applying to 10 different schools ... will decide not to apply,'' Marshall said, adding: "If those are the students we're losing, they weren't terribly committed to coming to Illinois anyway.''

I'm a bit uneasy about asking people whose experience is limited to high school, or sometimes high school with a stint in the work force or a hitch in the military, to write a brief "professional statement." College is supposed to be an opportunity to discover talents, not necessarily to validate one's adolescent ambitions, or those inculcated by one's parents. On the other hand, if the essay has the effect of discouraging applicants who haven't thought through why they want to attend college (no, the party scene and the opportunity to act foolish on MTV's Spring Break are not good reasons) there might be something to research further.

HELPLESS. Women’s losing streak reaches 7.

"We had no answers for [Toledo forward Danielle] Bishop and she single-handedly beat us," said NIU coach Carol Hammerle, whose team lost its seventh in a row. "As soon as we would make a run Bishop had an answer and it was disheartening."

Such a splendid confession that time devoted to reviewing game tapes and practicing adjustments was wasted. Egad. Any patzer could tell you the way to deal with a troublesome Bishop is to put the question to it.

THE MAKING OF A MODEL RAILROADER. If one Thomas is good, and Thomas needs a trip to the backshop, doesn't it make sense to have James on hand also? And more track, of course!

WELCOME TO HARD AMERICA. Yep, life'll burst that self-esteem bubble. The headline makes claims that don't quite stand up.

Kids born in the '70s and '80s are now coming of age. The colorful ribbons and shiny trophies they earned just for participating made them feel special. But now, in college and the workplace, observers are watching them crumble a bit at the first blush of criticism.

"I often get students in graduate school doing doctorates who made straight A's all their lives, and the first time they get tough feedback, the kind you need to develop skills," says Deborah Stipek, dean of education at Stanford University. "I have a box of Kleenex in my office because they haven't dealt with it before."

To be clear, self-esteem is important to healthy development... But empty praise — the kind showered on many kids years ago in the name of self-esteem — did more harm than good.

"Instead of boosting self-esteem, it can lead you to question your competence," says developmental psychologist Sandra Graham of UCLA.

The phenomenon these observers are commenting on is at least as old as the competition to get into good colleges, and I conjecture that the self-esteem effects are second-order at best. Consider the usual college-admission tournament: the best students from several high schools wind up at the same college. Sorting goes on, aided and abetted by MTV Spring Break and the fraternity scene. Some students who cruised through high school now have to work for the first time; some might still be able to cruise.

To the extent that college now serves as a graduate or professional school admission tournament, the drama repeats itself. Now the survivors of the best high schools that have also excelled at the best colleges all wind up in the same graduate program. Sort and repeat as before. Sometimes a 21 year old factory rat from the south side of Milwaukee gets through.

The article notes there is still room for attitude adjustments.

Overall, research shows that self-esteem scores have increased with the generations, says Jean Twenge, a psychology professor at San Diego State University who compared studies on self-esteem of 66,000 college kids across the USA from 1968 through 1994. Such studies are typically based on self-ratings.

She also has noticed that the undergraduates she teaches tend to have an inflated sense of self.

"When you correct writing, they'll say, 'It's just your opinion,' which is infuriating. Bad grammar and spelling and sentences being wrong is not my opinion, it's just bad writing," she says.

So when the criticism flows, some college students are increasingly seeking counseling.

Sam Goldstein, a neuropsychologist at the University of Utah, likened some students to bubbles — on the surface they seem secure and happy, yet with the least adversity they burst.

OK, fire the purveyors of crying towels and repeat these instructions silently while I read them aloud:

Suck. It. Up. Do. It. Right. Stop. Whining.

RUNNING EXTRA: The Phantom Professor faces the hotshots who have to come to terms with the meaning of "level playing field."

I'm a tough grader. I've written "This stinks" on student assignments. I tell students when I think they're B.S.'ing me or when I think they've gotten lazy. I push and prod to get them to work harder. I give them D's and F's when they deserve it. And when I do, I always tell them "It's not personal. It's about the work."

And boy, do they NOT take it well. I've had young men and young women in my office sobbing over a grade or over a comment on a paper. They say, "I always got A's in high school!" And they run through every excuse, from ADD to eating disorders to writer's block (which I don't believe in, even for real writers).

I've had to learn how to criticize creatively so that I don't have to face the nervous breakdowns. And I blame parents for this. Trying so hard to be their children's pal, they forgot how to toughen them up for real-world criticism. Too many pats on the back for stupid stuff: "Way to stand at the plate, Travis!" "Good job finishing that sandwich, Ashley!" The kids don't know what it feels like to actually accomplish something worthy of praise.

Of course they always got A's in high school. So did everybody else in the writing class. Let the sorting begin. But "This stinks??" That's a bit over the top.

STARTING TOO YOUNG? Voluntary Xchange finds the critical determinant of Ph.D. completion.

When I directed a Ph.D. program, I went back and got all our files on every student who'd ever been in the program, and did some regressions of whether or not they graduated (I also looked at other dependent variables that interested me because of the way our program was evaluated by my administration).

The message was that virtually nothing had any predictive power - GRE scores, GPA, degrees, majors, native language, and so on.

But, there was one variable, and its square, that were highly significant. In fact, with these two in the regression, no other variable was even close to being significant. The variable was calender age (at the start of the first year in graduate school). Age was positively related to finishing, and the square of age was negatively related to finishing. The fitted values of the regression suggested a probability of graduating with a Ph.D. that peaked quite strongly if you were 28 when you entered the Ph.D. program. The "sweet spot" around that peak was fairly small - about 3 years either way.

I don't seriously think that age was the true determinant; I'm quite sure it was proxying for something else.

For what it's worth, both Professor Tufte and Professor Karlson entered Ph.D. programs at the age of 21 (in my case, just turned 21.) I finished in 4 1/2 years.

WELCOME, MISTER TWISTER RIDERS. Thank you, View from a Height, for the link. Welcome to the flatlands. Please don't be put off if this site has kind things to say about Badger hockey.

A BREATH OF FRESH AIR. Number 2 Pencil has discovered some recommendations from the K-12 Committee of the National Association of Scholars (this makes sense: our efforts can be only as succesful as our students' attitudes and preparations, many of which are set in high school) on the high school to come. The recommendations are remarkably clear and free of the usual word-noise that passes as educational "theory" these days. There is a lot of work to be done.

The typical comprehensive American high school serves no group of students well today—its highest performing students, its so-called average students, nor its low-performing students.

Read the whole thing.

YOU THOUGHT I WAS KIDDING? For years, this site has debunked the fiction that admitting unprepared students qualifies as "access." Now ... to borrow from Malcolm X, or Ward Churchill, or perhaps from my grandfather ... the chickens are coming home to roost. Villainous Company has located a Guardian article on the parlous state of mathematics departments in England, beginning with the University of Hull.

Hull University has announced it is to close its maths department because of falling interest among students.

The university said it was phasing out its degree course because of a shortage of UK-based undergraduates and reduction in funding.

The decision follows a series of high-profile closures at universities, including the pure physics course at Newcastle and the chemistry and music departments at Exeter.

Last night, the London Mathematical Society said the decision was part of a wider trend and warned that the UK was in danger of becoming a "maths wasteland". Peter Cooper, the society's executive secretary, said: "Maths is perceived as a hard subject by many students. There is a real difficulty in attracting sufficient numbers of people in many institutions."

Four other maths departments in England have closed since 1999 and the number of students has fallen by more than 2,200 in the same period.

Of the 175 people studying maths at Hull, more than a third are overseas students, compared with an average of 16% across other courses. A university spokeswoman said it was "not good business sense" to rely on the volatile overseas market.

Lovely. No point offering the British version of a green card to an immigrant math major who might accept a more attractive offer from the States, or perhaps back home. Presumably the remaining matriculants keep their self-esteems well-intact, even if a simple problem such as the closed-ness of a budget set is beyond them.

RUNNING EXTRA. King at SCSU Scholars offers additional observations on the effect of visa regulations on the exporting of math degrees and related topics.

THE EVOLUTION OF THE DIVERSITY BOONDOGGLE. Professor Althouse and Sean at the American Mind have been trading fours on the proper focus of criticism of the academy for turning polemicist and potential academic fraud Ward Churchill into an academic star, at least in some disciplines. This comment from Professor Althouse is a good place to begin.

But if your outrage at things Churchill has written is creating a fund of energy that you want to expend on something useful, what I have recommended and continue to recommend is to focus on the institutions that hire and promote undercredentialed political ideologues like him. By focusing on Churchill, you make it easier for those institutions to avoid responsibility for what is a much broader problem. You make it all too easy for these institutions to retaliate against the one individual that critics have locked onto. You help them make it seem as though they've done enough.

Agreed. Mr Churchill is a symptom. The cause is somewhat more deeply rooted. The following commentary will be somewhat cold-blooded. View from a Height points to a column by Colorado law professor Peter Campos that reveals the secret objective of the multicultural university.

Academics claim to despise censorship, but the truth is we do a remarkably good job of censoring ourselves. This is especially true in regard to affirmative action. Who among us can claim to have spoken up every time a job candidate almost as preposterous as Churchill was submitted for our consideration? Things like the Churchill fiasco are made possible by a web of lies kept intact by a conspiracy of silence.

The University of Colorado hired Churchill onto its faculty because he claimed to be an American Indian. Anyone who has the slightest familiarity with research universities can glance at his résumé and state this with something close to complete confidence.

Churchill thus represents the reductio ad absurdum of the contemporary university's willingness to subordinate all other values to affirmative action. When such a grotesque fraud - a white man pretending to be an Indian, an intellectual charlatan spewing polemical garbage festooned with phony footnotes, a shameless demagogue fabricating imaginary historical incidents to justify his pathological hatreds, an apparent plagiarist who steals and distorts the work of real scholars - manages to scam his way into a full professorship at what is still a serious research university, we know the practice of affirmative action has hit rock bottom. Or at least we can hope so.

Unfortunately, the freefall is likely to continue. Mr Churchill was originally hired in the communications department, which, although it might be home for serious rhetoricians and decent forensics programs, is also the major of choice for many scholarship athletes. He later became chairman of the ethnic studies program, which, if our administrators were honest con men, would be acknowledged as serving the function of "cooling out the mark." In this case the con is the invitation to enroll in university -- the fiction of admitting unprepared students and calling it access -- and the cooling out is the provision of a program that provides something resembling a degree. Professor Blogger (via Quid nomen illius?)has a fisking of the Colorado ethnic studies major that would be amusing were it not so accurate. My favorite excerpt, with the description in plain text and his interpretation in italics:

...involve learning and thinking within interdisciplinary frameworks ...You'll only have to take sophomore-level courses in traditional departments...encourage participatory, experiential, diverse and student-centered learning ...You won't have to study much, either, just so long as you parrot the right ideas.

The summation is about right, also

.... and prepare all students to live and contribute to an increasingly diverse America, in an ever-interdependent world.

You might never be able to find work with this degree, but you'll be able to posture with the best of us.

But you will have a degree, and perhaps a separate graduation ceremony. The mark will be cooled out.

Furthermore, the scam is entrenched. Professor Blogger has also discovered a new journal prospectus for participants in the Diversity Boondoggle. This journal makes no pretense of receptivity to differing methods of analysis or different interpretations of data.

(an academic juried journal designed to confront and expose the lies of the right)

We can only hope that their jury work will be more careful than their use of the shift key. Here is their call for papers.

The editors of this on-line journal seek manuscripts that critically examine and expose the lies perpetuated in the larger neo-liberal and right wing assaults on democracy and the public sphere. Authors must demonstrate genuine academic rigor in addressing specific sets of lies and deceptions currently used to manufacture consent for increasingly draconian domestic policies and imperialistic foreign policies. We are soliciting submissions that are not simply based on opinion or conjecture. What is significant to changing public opinion and public policy is academically grounded and sound research.

Unlike federal funding agencies, we do not restrict research to “experimental design.” On the contrary, we heartily encourage humanities based, arts based, narrative, ethnographic (including autoethnography), visual, cyborgian and other methodological approaches. Submissions are welcomed from across the academic disciplines, and we encourage the submission of interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary works. We also solicit articles that can document this traumatic and critical juncture in both American and world history and culture. Therefore, submissions from teachers, students, citizen groups, and teacher educators are encouraged.

From my perspective, working as an economist, I can think of three or four papers off the top of my head that had the effect of changing public policy and public opinion despite appearing in the not-explicitly-ideological American Economic Review Proceedings or Review of Economics and Statistics. (If I left out your favorite Econometrica article, sorry; sometimes going from the set theory to the policy implications takes a few more years.)

The new journal, however, has a board of editors at established universities, and authors of accepted papers will be able to list their publications as peer-reviewed at tenure time, whether that review is genuinely rigorous or not will be up to the department and college committees to evaluate. External observers, such as trustees or alumni, will be hard pressed to distinguish publications in this vanity press journal from publications in more traditional journals that also offer teacher educators and area studies scholars outlets for their work.

Furthermore, the proliferation of journals requires that as a matter of institutional integrity, explicitly ideological journals, and journals with weak reviewing standards, in other disciplines ought also be subject to external scrutiny. (Should I name names in economics?) To summarize, the Diversity Boondoggle has provided cover under which pseudo-journals have entered the corpus of peer reviewed scholarship alongside the more traditional journals.

And, as King at SCSU Scholars puts it, the Diversity Boondoggle has crowded out more traditional serious scholarship.

Where are the Washington thinktanks that will support the Democrats' time in the wilderness? Years ago, they were at places like Harvard and Yale. Now radicals make sympathizers like Larry Summers walk the plank and hand over precious tenurable lines for another chair of ethnic studies, people who could not create a sound policy paper if their lives depended on it because they've spent too much time reading Derrida and not enough time reading economics.

The problem is that original thinkers creating new ideas for the Democrats are being squeezed out of higher education in many places by the Ward Churchills, the departments of {fill-in ethnicity or area} studies. The Republicans were able to respond by creating Cato, Heritage, Ashbrook, AEI, and a host of other think tanks where people could think and write. The Republicans had to do this because they were not welcome on American campuses. Liberals are, but to be a liberal on American campuses today requires you to waste enormous amounts of time defending the likes of Ward Churchill, and sacrificing a few seats in traditional disciplines to the Next Great Hope of Deconstruction (if Hope has any real meaning).

King's context is slightly different, focusing on serious policy work (some of which still goes on in the academy, some of which will make partisans of all stripes unhappy.) But as long as Departments of Cooling Out the Mark coexist with what remains of the serious disciplines, the university's image problem will persist.

RETHINKING MY POSTING PHILOSOPHY. Some recent observations from Virginia Postrel are on point.

Even the few brilliant scholars (Tyler Cowen, Eugene Volokh, Grant McCracken) who make blogging seem like it should foster serious thought limit their posting to topics they want to mull over in public. Current-affairs blogging of the Sullivan/Instapundit/name your favorite type is inherently quick, dirty, and disposable. It may add to the public discourse, but it doesn't tend to deepen the blogger's own thinking.

Must. Consider. This.

GOOD NEWS. The First Mate's pancreas transplant has worked well thus far.

She's looking better every time I see her, and she's been conversing with me today. She's not strong enough to take phone calls and she doesn't want visitors at all besides me, but she responds well to my jokes (she's the only one who laughs at them anyway) and she wants me here even if she's asleep.

King's prayer cannot have hurt.

WE. WILL. GET. THROUGH. THIS. Never mind the grippe, the coughs, the continued overcast that can't make up its mind whether to provide cold rain or wet snow. Pitchers and catchers are reporting.

YOU GET WHAT YOU PAY FOR. The 'Net and Blogger are moving kind of slow right now. More tomorrow evening.

A SIMPLE DEBUNKING OF CONSPIRACY THEORIES. Voluntary Xchange proposes a simple exercise.

Every time this comes up in a class I ask the students if they've ever tried to order a pizza for 3 people, and if yes whether it was difficult to agree about what to get on it and how to divide it up. Occassionally a light bulb goes on over one of their heads when they make the connection that if pizza is this hard than conspiracy must be damn near impossible.

The linked readings are worth your consideration.

IF GRANDMOTHER HAD WHEELS, SHE'D BE A TRAMCAR. The Northern Illinois University womens' basketball team extends its losing streak to six.

"This is extremely frustrating," [guard Stephanie] Raymond said. "In the beginning of the season we felt we couldn’t win the first half. Now it’s switched and we can’t win the second half. We just don’t know what to do."

Umm, isn't that why teams have coaches?

"I’m very disappointed," said NIU coach Carol Hammerle, whose team has lost six in a row. "I thought our team executed throughout the majority of the game. We just didn’t win."

For this we are paying in the mid-hundred-Ks?

CARNIVAL CALL. Carnival of the Capitalists visits Weekend Pundit.

SOME GOOD NEWS. Please welcome Tran Thi ThanhChi Sjostrom, whose daddy also won an Irish weblog award.

ALLOCATING AWARENESS AMONG COMPETING ATROCITIES. Economics is everywhere, even in a discussion of the remarks Northern Illinois University's adjunct Professor Myron Kuropas made in his online column. I have had the opportunity to read the two columns, and agree with the position of the University. In neither column did Mr Kuropas exploit his stature as a faculty member or as a Littlejohn School teacher to advocate a position outside his area of expertise in those callings. The editorial board at the Northern Star comes to a sensible conclusion.

As uncomfortable as it is to confront, a public conversation on the issue is valuable. Discussion sheds light on how the Holocaust continues to be interpreted.

Inflammatory speech will always exist. It is society’s examination of it that determines if the speech is completely useless or if we can learn from it.

In an interview with the DeKalb Chronicle, Mr Kuropas observes,

"I regret this very much," he said of the media attention he's received. "I don't regret writing what I wrote. ... On occasion I can be a little strident. Perhaps some of my stridency should have been tempered."

Perhaps one would have reason for concern about the internal structure of any term papers students produced under Mr Kuropas's supervision based on the internal logic of his columns, but the conversation in which he is participating has an interesting twist.

Ukraine suffered in the 20th Century under the Soviet yoke and during the Nazi occupation. Ukrainian activists would like museums devoted to the Holocaust to pay more attention to other instances of mass death organized by government powers. In the earlier of the two columns, dated 5 September 1999, Mr Kuropas comments on Peter Novick's The Holocaust in American Life (details or compare prices), in which Mr Novick uses the phrase, "Jews were intent on permanent possession of the gold medal in the Victimization Olympics." The Amazon review goes on to note that Mr Novick asks the somewhat more pertinent question, why a national Holocaust memorial museum but as of yet no memorial to chattel slavery? So how does one allocate awareness among competing causes? Knowledge of the Holocaust is useful, as is knowledge of the Middle Passage and of the Famine? But How Much knowledge, and what else gets crowded out.

To me the most troubling part of Mr Kuropas's first column is his attempt to secure a stronger victim status for Ukrainians relative to Jews. That neither brings back the dead nor engages people in a conversation over the reasons for government-organized mass death, the real heart of the matter. There is neither Holocaust denial nor libel against Jews in the column.

The second column, dated 20 August 2000, comments on Norman Finkelstein's The Holocaust Industry (details or compare prices), a work that documents Israeli exploitation of the Holocaust as a way of keeping the United States allied after the Six Day War. What damages Mr Kuropas's commentary on the book is that the final seven sentences (the controversial "big money" passage) are non sequiturs. Had he stopped by calling out defenders of inaccurate if polemically appealing memoirs, one of Professor Finkelstein's lines of research, as besmirching the memory of all those killed by state action, his argument would have held more force.

In doing the research for this post, I found another opportunity cost argument in which an activist with a case for greater awareness of past atrocities raised the Holocaust-crowds-our-story-out argument. The activist: controversial Colorado ethnic studies professor Ward Churchill. Ace of Spades, who pointed to the story, notes that Professor Churchill's A Little Matter of Genocide (details only; he's PNGd at Price Compare) suggests Holocaust awareness crowds out the behavior of the European powers toward Native Americans as well as obscures Israel's behavior in the occupied territories.

Ultimately, then, is the debate over Mr Kuropas's policy advocacy, and Professor Churchill's policy advocacy, one of establishing some core principles for evaluating the behavior of governments that systematically kill off inconvenient residents, rather than over whether the behaviors existed? There appears to be no disagreement about the existence of specific policies aimed at eliminating Jews, Ukrainians, and Native Americans, or at enslaving Africans. That turns the debate into an economics problem: what is the equilibrium level of conceptual development -- a theory of atrocity, if you will -- and which examples make the most sense to include, and in what detail?

SIGNALLING. Professor Bainbridge discovers a little "thank you" from Citizens United, a political fundraising organization that supports President Bush's policies, to Hollywood's most famous friends of the opposition.

THE FOLLIES OF TRADEMARK YIELD MANAGEMENT. Triticale scoffs at attempts by prototype railroads to harvest rents from their heralds.

Altho, lucky for them, model railroaders are not political enough to rise up and organise a boycott, it is wondrously easy not to model the Union Pacific. Aside from the many competitors who see no need to resort to such measures, there is also a glorious tradition known as freelancing. One of the first truly great model railroads was the Gorre and Daphetid and I can expect as much acceptence and nearly as many contest points for models of Phoenix - Durango rolling stock as for those with known prototypes. There is also a trend toward starting over in a new scale and/or gauge; there may well be a disproportionate number of HO scale UP models cut up by people switching to On30.

The biggest reason that the Union Pacific is foolish for being so anal about trademark and IP is that altho their business is booming right now they are in competition with other railroads and with other forms of transportation. There are demographic reasons why antagonizing model railroaders and railfans is likely to be detrimental to the marketing of transportation service.

I think that last sentence means "traffic managers might have model trains, or kids who have model trains."

THE EVOLUTION OF THE INTERNET PROTOCOLS? Blogger allows its users to visit randomly selected weblogs, and I peruse my referrals from those random visitors. Sometimes an interesting tidbit turns up. For example, 36-173 offers some history of computer hacking.

The first group of people to be titled hackers was a group of students at MIT who were involved in the Tech Model Railroad Club. The TMRC was separated by members interested in the model trains and those fascinated by the system underneath the model trains. It was this group of students that would become highly involved in computer programming in the coming years.

One wonders if the MIT railroad was wired in the common rather haphazard fashion or if track feeders and signals were arranged systematically. The convention oh the real railroad for structuring an interlocking has some principles that would generalize to the creation of a network. The levers or circuiting must be arranged in such a way that all lineups are made toward an approaching train: the switches farthest away, working back toward the train's track; next, any switch locks, finally signals, again, with the innermost home signal cleared first, then any intermediate home signals, and last the approach signal. (Thus, a train cannot be given indication of a clear road until the road, truly, is clear.) The signalling version of rebooting was as frustrating as it is for contemporary computer users: if the signal operator changes his mind, he must start a timer that locks all the levers for three or four minutes. The purpose is to prevent a switch from being thrown under a moving train.

ANOTHER MYSTERY SOLVED. Hermann Goering's guard unwittingly assisted the highest-ranking Nazi captive commit suicide. (Via Owen at Boots and Sabers.)

MAU-MAUING A COLLEAGUE. The exchange of opinions about Northern Illinois adjunct Professor and official U.S. delegate to the Ukrainian inauguration Myron Kuropas continues. Mr Kuropas has written a statement in his own defense to the DeKalb Chronicle. His defense offers an echo of the show trial. Will it ever be possible for somebody accused of a racist remark to simply say "you are wrong" without having to preface it with a litany of one's civil rights bona fides. Do we have to wait for public intellectuals of a certain age who still approach any civil rights problem as if it is the Selma Bridge to die off?

On to the substance. Mr Kuropas's perspective is that Ukrainians have been falsely accused of collaboration with the Nazis.

Unfortunately, as some Ukrainian dialogue partners and I became more involved with the defense of John Demjanjuk, accused of being "Ivan the Terrible of Treblinka," our dialogues became more strained. Soon it was obvious to all of us that we were getting nowhere, so we decided to issue a statement in which we essentially agreed to disagree. The Ukrainian-Jewish dialogue was postponed.

After spending six years in an Israeli jail, Mr. Demjanjuk was found not guilty by the Israeli Supreme Court and he returned to the United States, his citizenship restored. When our Jewish partners remained adamant that Mr. Demjanjuk must be guilty of other crimes against the Jews, any hope of further dialogue ended. Today, I continue to support Mr. Demjanjuk, and it appears that certain members of the Jewish community have never forgiven me for my beliefs in this regard.

He also insists that the Congressional press release from Representatives Rahm Emanuel (D-Gold Coast) and Henry Waxman (D-Malibu) are the consequence of careless reading of some book reviews he wrote for a Ukrainian emigre newspaper.

All of the statements attributed to me regarding "the Holocaust industry" were taken out of context from my biweekly columns in the Ukrainian Weekly. The particular quotations in question were actually part of a review of the book "The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering" by professor Norman G. Finkelstein of City University of New York. Another column of mine was a review of "The Holocaust in American Life" by Peter Novick. All of my commentaries can be accessed at http://www.ukrweekly.com/.

The site does not have a search engine. Searching from this desk will resume after an evening's rest. His statements can be placed in context if Mr Kuropas's assertion is true.

A retired psychology professor now living just to the northwest of Rep. Waxman's district has decided that the continued employment of Mr Kuropas as an adjunct is simply intolerable. In an open letter to Northern Illinois's John Peters, he claims,

Your public statements on the issue are, to any person familiar with the academic world, surprisingly lame: "It would be inappropriate (for NIU) to comment in specific terms on what this man has written or what he has said in the past." Good grief, President Peters, all hires are based on a faculty member's past behavior! "There is not enough of a connection between Kuropas' private affairs and his teaching at NIU to warrant (a review of his statements)." Now, President Peters, are people not called to task at any reputable university for exceedingly offensive behavior? Basketball coaches have not been renewed for less! Whether one's prejudiced behavior is related or not to the course one teaches has not been a criterion in any reputable institution in my memory. One's antisocial behavior, as it affects the fabric, unity and respect for diversity of a campus, is a matter for weighing in instructor reviews. I argue that his past behavior is relevant to his representing NIU and his impact on a campus environment allegedly oriented toward respect and tolerance, whatever the narrow content of the course he teaches.

What if Mr. Kuropas' remarks had been directed at racial minorities? Would we see less ducking and weaving on your part?

Pedant's note: basketball coaches don't have tenure, and they are paid somewhat more handsomely (sometimes to make the same mistakes again and again.)

Would my retired colleague (the letter writer used to participate in the same exercise program I still participate in; this letter appears to be somewhat intemperate) have been so quick to seek the denunciation of a colleague who repeated a canard about Eichmanns in the World Trade Center or mocked the adoption of snipers as adopting Nazis? Isn't the real issue whether his statements are truthful or not? Is my retired colleague suggesting that telling the truth about diversity admissions would be reason for denunciations? Infelicitous choices of words are a lesser transgression. Genuine prejudgements are another matter, but without a careful review of the online record, I'm not ready to go that far. More after an evening's rest.

STATUS ANXIETY. University Diaries has the right attitude on the gratuitous use of Ph.D. and other honorifics on business cards, correspondence, and door placards.

Any professor who routinely puts Ph.D. after his or her name is, UD assumes, an unimpressive, provincial, vain, and insecure person. The use of Dr. is even worse. It's just like the Wizard of Oz sticking all those letters after his name.

Ayup. The Ph.D. was a hard-won prize for me (in a number of ways.) But I'm still standing because two papers out of that dissertation plus some followups that built on the original methods and evidence made it into print within the time limit.

Now if I could persuade the office staff to tone down my door card, and the Illinois Council on Economic Education (is it an accident that the proliferations of Ed.D., M.Sc., D.D.L.M., and the like flourish most robustly in Colleges of Education?) to simply address invitations to Professor Stephen Karlson, Department of Economics ...

A colleague who had a similarly jaundiced take on the promiscuous use of "Doctor" used to threaten to start giving physicals. With my reputation I'd best not go there ...

A NEW SOURCE OF COMPANY MAIL. Via King at SCSU Scholars comes word of a new weblog operated by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. The newest post addresses what happens when you turn a grievance movement into an academic discipline and apply the same standards of disciplinary freedom to that movement that established disciplines -- perhaps once upon a time parvenus themselves -- enjoy.

Oh, and if the operators of Fire's Torch are tracking back, did you know there is still a free speech zone policy at Northern Illinois University?

WE. WILL. GET. THROUGH. THIS. Grippe and coughs affect many of the students and faculty at Northern Illinois. To add aesthetic insult to injury, our pretty snow melted although the snow cover may be replenished by morning. Such aesthetic compensations will not be available in Jackson or Knoxville.

MORE ON WARD CHURCHILL. Welcome, Poliblogger readers. The post Professor Taylor linked to is here. There is more today, and Sean At The American Mind has also been following the story. If you haven't read the Poliblogger post, which is extensive and rich in links, get over there.

SIXTY YEARS AGO. Sgt. Karlson's unit is quartered in a farmhouse outside Manderfeld, Belgium. "20 GIs slept all over the floors, while the family stayed in one room. Rainy, cold, but not so frigid. Rest of the Battery lived similarly in 4 nearby houses."

On February 7, the Russians crossed the Oder River.

ROLLING UP THE WEB OF TERROR. Book Review No. 7 is Endgame (details or compare prices), written by two retired Generals. This is a rather sobering book, considering a number of worst-case scenarios for further terrorist attacks, including those abetted by governments. It offers a look at several countries that offered or offer haven for the web of terror, including Afghanistan (the establishment of a fully functioning civil society is years in the future), Iraq (the authors recommend staying the course; the recent election is probably a step in the right direction), Iran (reminds the authors of the Soviet Union in 1989), North Korea (complicated diplomacy involving the other Pacific Rim states), Syria (a domino waiting to fall; the authors argue that Syria has Saddam's chemical and atomic weapons, and Israeli intelligence knows that), Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan.

The authors propose a message of five freedoms that the United States ought communicate to the citizens of nations disposed to harbor or fund the Web of Terror. These are freedom of education, of the economy, of information, of the person, and of governance.

On the other hand, the authors also suggest the creation of a special counterterrorism agency -- a cabinet department -- with secure Special Terrorist Courts. That's a bit much. Does security of the nation trump individual liberties to that extent?

THE DOWNSIDE OF COMPARATIVE ADVANTAGE. All too often, middle managers at universities are failed scholars who have little understanding of what is involved in producing research, and cannot comprehend how destructive of real research their efforts are. Mungowitz End has a lament about middle managers at Duke.

Whole floors of academic buildings are being converted from faculty office space (ie, place where work is actively done) to administrative office space (ie, places where work is actively prevented).

King at SCSU Scholars sees the same thing.

No faculty member is safe when the Faculty Senate and Academic Affairs Council are in session. Send 'em back to their offices, let them read and write, if they can.

If memory serves, a useful metric for the quality of a university is the difficulty of obtaining a quorum at the faculty senate.

A POLEMIC. Book Review No. 6 is Mona Charen's Useful Idiots (details or compare prices.) Ms Charen is unlikely to change many minds, and a reprise of Communist sympathies by policy makers and public intellectuals is somewhat dated. All the same, on what would be the 45th occasion of President Reagan's 39th birthday, this quote, from p. 212, seems in order.

For the hard Left, Nicaragua became a hero state as soon as the Sandinistas took power. The usual political pilgrims -- Susan Sontag, William Sloane Coffin, Richard Falk, Pete Seeger, Benjamin Spock, Noam Chomsky, Jessica Mitford, and many more hopped the nearest plane to breathe in the invigorating revolutionary air in Managua.

President Reagan's insistence on stopping the spread of Communism in the Caribbean and in Latin America might have angered the Angry Left more than his reference to the Soviet Union as an evil empire.

Note also that many of the individuals named in that passage are also critics of the liberation of Afghanistan and Iraq.

THE DOWNSIDE OF BRAND NAME U. A Constrained Vision links to a sobering USA Today article about expectations clashing with reality in the freshman year.

Recent studies also show that many low-income and minority students who aspire to college are poorly served by their schools and their families, arriving at college unprepared and forcing colleges and universities to spend an estimated $1 billion a year on remediation.

"There is a real gap between the aspirations teenagers have and the realities of what happens to them," says Christopher Swanson of the Urban Institute, a think tank in Washington, D.C. "Teenagers grow up hearing these 'college for all' expectations, and they internalize this. While rhetorically it makes sense, in reality all students are not going to go to college."

The problems begin in the common schools.

Swanson and others applaud schools for raising their standards but say they need to do more to help more kids meet them so that they can succeed in college.

"We're not being honest with a lot of kids today," says Thomas Toch, author of High Schools on a Human Scale and co-founder of Education Sector, another Washington think tank.

"We're telling kids that they can do it, when we're not giving them the academic tools to be successful. We're not giving them an education that will truly prepare them to be successful in college."

And perhaps the incentives are wrong at the high schools, particularly where there is performance testing.

Meanwhile, business and education reform groups like Achieve simply say schools' expectations aren't high enough. They point to high failure rates on many high school graduation exams and say schools need to spend more time teaching the basics. But some research shows that states with graduation exams tend to "push out," or encourage students to drop out or transfer, so they won't bring down overall pass rates.

Things that make you say D'oh! If the easiest way to raise the pass rate on the assessment test is to pay the underachievers not to show up ... And it shouldn't be that hard to teach the basics, beginning in kindergarten.

So there you have it ... meaningless branding at the top of the product line, and meaningless remediation in the economy line.

A SIGNAL, OR A CREDENTIAL? University Diaries links to a James Twitchell essay in Wilson Quarterly arguing that the famous universities function to certify students to enroll in famous graduate and professional programs.

When Consumer Reports rates and compares cars, it measures them on the basis of categories such as performance, safety, reliability, and value. It tries to measure “outputs”—in short, what the car does. U.S. News mostly looks at “inputs” (money spent, class size, test scores of students, degrees held by faculty), rather than assessing what the college or university actually accomplishes for students over the lives of their enrollment. If Consumer Reports functioned like U.S. News, it would rank cars on the amount of steel and plastic used in their construction, the opinions of competing car dealers, the driving skills of customers, the percentage of managers and sales people with MBAs, and the sticker price on the vehicle (the higher, the better).

The emphasis on “inputs” explains why the elite schools aren’t threatened by what others fear: the much-ballyhooed “click” universities, such as the University of Phoenix and Sylvan Learning Systems, Inc., because those schools generate no peer effects. So, too, there’s no threat from corporate universities, such as those put together by Microsoft, Motorola, and Ford, or even from the Open University of England and The Learning Annex. The industrial schools have not yet made their presence felt, though they will. The upper tier on the small side of the hourglass is not threatened by “learning at a distance” or “drive-through schools,” because the elites are not as concerned with learning as they are with maintaining selectivity at the front door and safe passage to still-higher education at the back door.

One wonders, however, whether that approach is sustainable. There's a passage in Freefall of the American University (details or compare prices), reviewed here, that ought give the elite colleges pause. (It's p. 311)

At a dinner party discussing this book's premise, most guests were shocked to hear about the decline of the university, especially the Ivy League. Not so with one guest, president of one of America's top companies. "Yes," he said, "I've noticed the decline in the quality of graduates. I used to travel to the Ivy League every year to interview potential executives, but no more. The elite university graduates had a real lack of general knowledge -- they were not helpful to my company. They were smart, all right, and thought they knew it all. They knew nothing. Now I never recruit from the Ivy League, only from second-tier colleges and state universities. These grads have been much more satisfactory; they're willing to learn."

One anecdote does not a trend make; on the other hand, the market test for a university must include employer and graduate program satisfaction with the graduates, as well as student satisfaction with the waterparks.

QUOTE OF THE DAY. The Onion takes an unusual look at work and play.

"Americans simply can't keep up with the European leisure force," [Deborah] Kletter [of the Five-to-Nine Foundation] said. "In such fields as suntanning, skiing, and cooking elaborate meals that can be eaten over the course of an entire evening, Europe has us beat."

(Via Eclectic Econoclast, who commends the article as a great study in opportunity costs.)

IN VILLAINOUS COMPANY. Welcome, visitors. There is a lively discussion at her site about the meaning of self-esteem.

IT IS TO LAUGH. The American Association of University Professors has issued a statement on the Ward Churchill case at Colorado (motto: our football recruiting parties rule.)

The critical test of academic freedom is its capacity to meet even the most painful and offending statements. A college or university campus is, of all places in our society, the most appropriate forum for the widest range of viewpoints.

Right. Academic Game, post-game, is not impressed.

Elsewhere in the academy, an economist at Nevada-Las Vegas (motto: no felon with a jump shot refused a scholarship) is facing denial of his next pay raise and a letter of reprimand in his dossier for making a statement about time preference and homosexuality. The American Civil Liberties Union has taken up the professor's case.

ACLU officials said the validity of Hoppe's economic theories does not matter. It is his right to espouse them in class.

"We don't subscribe to Hans' theories and certainly understand why some students find them offensive," said Gary Peck, the ACLU of Nevada's executive director.

"But academic freedom means nothing if it doesn't protect the right of professors to present scholarly ideas that are relevant to their curricula, even if they are controversial and rub people the wrong way."

Hoppe said he is dumbfounded by the university's response to the student's complaint. It is not his job, he said, to consider how a student might feel about economic theories.

"Our task is to teach what we consider to be right," he said. The offended student, he said, should have been told to "grow up."

"Grow up" is a tenet of Hard America. The university, alas, is part of Soft America. Or is it part of Delusional America?

UNLV's general counsel, Richard Linstrom, would not talk about Hoppe's case, but said the university values free speech.

"The administration of UNLV is fully committed to academic freedom in all respects," he said. Linstrom said he was in a Board of Regents meeting most of Friday and had not seen the ACLU's letter.

The symbolism is more important than the substance, apparently. Jim at Volokh Conspiracy has run the numbers, suggesting that Professor Hoppe's assertion is unsubstantiated. "[T]here is more evidence in the data I examined that Hoppe is wrong than that he is right."

WILL YOUR STORY BE PERSUASIVE? Jeff at Quid nomen illius? offers some reflections, heavy on the sarcasm, on the student who feels obligated to offer an explanation for missing a class.

WHAT, HE WAS STILL ALIVE? Mitch at Shot in the Dark has observations on the recent passing of German boxer Max Schmeling, who, despite being Joe Louis's nemesis in those interwar years, paid for Mr Louis's funeral.

LEARNING NOTHING. Bowling Green tops Huskies with second-half blowout.

"They just continued to nail all of their three-pointers in the second half and made us turn the ball over," [coach Carol] Hammerle said. "We are a much better team than we showed tonight, but there's nothing we can do but watch tape and let this one go."

This team has a history of giving up large runs by opponents and turning over the ball. Is the team is incapable of learning from this experience, or is the coach incapable of finding any teachable moments? Or indulging in phony self-esteem building?

WHAT'S THE PROBLEM? Vodka Pundit live-blogs the State of the Union Address.

7:22pm Bush just promised to close the borders to bad people, but leave them mostly sort of kind of open to anyone willing to pick lettuce for sub-minimum wage. Run that by me again?

Those sub-minimum-wage jobseekers sneak across the borders because they'd be refused entry at the usual checkpoints. If there is a cheap, effective way to enter through the usual checkpoints, there is a stronger presumption that people hiring coyotes or hiding in freight cars are doing so for purposes other than picking lettuce.

TRADEMARK INFRINGEMENT METASTASIZES, OR ANOTHER REASON TO SCRATCHBUILD. Via InstaPundit, the distressing news that manufacturers of military equipment seek to maximize the return on their intellectual property. I am not making this up. Quoting Strategy Page,

For over half a century, kits have been sold that enable military history buffs to assemble scale models of military ships, aircraft and vehicles. But that era is coming to an end, as the manufacturers of the original equipment, especially aircraft, are demanding high royalties (up to $40 per kit) from the kit makers. Since most of these kits sell in small quantities (10-20,000) and are priced at $15-30 (for plastic kits, wooden ones are about twice as much), tacking on the royalty just prices the kit out of the market. Popular land vehicles, which would sell a lot of kits, are missing as well. The new U.S. Army Stryker armored vehicles are not available because of royalty requirements. Even World War II aircraft kits are being hit with royalty demands.

Why?

These royalty demands grew out of the idea that corporations should maximize “intellectual property” income. Models of a companys products are considered the intellectual property of the owner of a vehicle design. Some intellectual property lawyers have pointed out that many of these demands are on weak legal ground, but the kit manufacturers are often small companies that cannot afford years of litigation to settle this contention. In the past, the model kits were considered free advertising, and good public relations, by the defense firms. The kit manufacturers comprise a small industry, and the aircraft manufacturers will probably not even notice if they put many of the model vendors out of business. Some model companies will survive by only selling models of older (like World War I), or otherwise “no royalty” items (Nazi German aircraft) and ships. But the aircraft were always the bulk of sales, and their loss will cripple many of the kit makers. Some of the vehicle manufacturers have noted the problem, and have lowered their demands to a more reasonable level (a few percent of the wholesale price of the kits).

Idiots. I would hope that financial analysts track companies engaging in these practices. There is an opportunity cost to litigation that wrings a few dollars out of hobbyists. A company with a legal department able to take on such cases has either too large or too ineffective a legal department.

Not only that, the companies that do so will lose goodwill. Although railroads have from time to time sought royalties on model trains that carry company logos, they've probably lost more credibility as hobbyists mock them than they've gained in royalty revenue. And with terrorists reduced to kidnapping G.I. Joe (it's time for Spike Jones and Der Fuehrer's Face) it's time for a few more figures of fun. Licensing lawyers for defense contractors, you're next!

PUBLIC INTELLECTUALS MAY HAVE PRIVATE LIVES. More coverage of the attempt by two Members of Congress to convince Northern Illinois University to disavow private statements by adjunct Professor of Education Myron Kuropas.

The American Association of University Professors specifies that when speaking or writing as a private citizen, professors are free from institutional censorship. The same guidelines apply to the Kuropas case, [Northern Illinois publicist Melanie] Magara said.

What was also understood was Kuropas is an NIU employee and his association ends there.

"Whatever he has written about Ukrainian history is unaffiliated with us [NIU]," Magara said.

Put a complementary way, academicians ought not exploit their stature as an expert in one field to unreasonably influence thinking about topics over which intelligent laymen might otherwise disagree. I will cut the student journalist some slack over the use of the infelicitous phrase "institutional censorship." Believe me, any cases of genuine institutional censorship that come to my attention will be a topic for a post, or several.

Mr Kuropas gave the Northern Star a story about his trip to the Ukrainian President's inauguration. Blaze orange at that inauguration did not mean a lot of observers planned to go deer hunting afterward.

SOME CANDIDATES FOR THE DECK OF CARDS. At Milwaukee's Marquette University, "supporting the troops" is distinct from "helping the troops do their job," at least if that job is a sniper. (In popular parlance, any criminal who holes up in a tower or the trunk of a car and takes shots at random targets is a "sniper." The military sniper is part scout, part sharpshooter, and often a sniper will go into cover for several days until a high value target presents itself. Enemy at the Gates depicts that behavior, as well as the one-on-one contest that emerges as snipers hunt snipers.)

Charlie Sykes has provided a list of Marquette officials who asked a student organization to stop a fundraiser explicitly for snipers, on the legally correct but aesthetically dubious claim that the request to set up a support-the-troops table was insufficiently clear about the intended support for specific troops, namely snipers.

RUNNING EXTRA. Charlie Sykes has now posted a statement from Marquette's Student Development department and a rebuttal from the College Republicans. It is possible to carry guerrilla theater a bit too far: if, as this exchange suggests, the College Republicans were a bit vague about their intended display, or if Student Development were a bit careless in approving it, we have a failure to communicate that has turned into a PC atrocity. Consider an excerpt from the Marquette statement that Sean at The American Mind holds up for scrutiny.

In the context of the university’s Jesuit, Catholic mission, we could not allow fundraising in the student union for a group whose rhetoric regarding "snipers" could be widely misinterpreted as having a cavalier attitude toward the taking of a human life. In this case the display of the materials that promote the use of violence without appropriate background information was unacceptable.

Put another way, we have to add ignorance of military affairs to the list of other formerly common knowledge items that members of a university community are ignorant about. In the context of the university's Jesuit, Catholic mission, one could not allow fundraising for an auto-da-fe without proper understanding of the fate of a heretical soul that hasn't been properly absolved in this life. Got it?

THERE'S NOTHING NEW HERE. U.S. students say press freedoms go too far.

One in three U.S. high school students say the press ought to be more restricted, and even more say the government should approve newspaper stories before readers see them, according to a survey being released today.

(Via Villainous Company.) Mitch at Shot in the Dark rounds up the usual suspects.

The temptation is to say "thanks for nothing, liberals - your speech codes and a monolithically leftist educational academy and education system have finally done what the right has been warning you about for decades; created a generation of students that have no idea about this country's civic traditions, beyond an ability to regurgitate key facts about the civil rights movement.

I suspect that if students knew the key facts about the civil rights movement forward and backward, the hip-hop culture would wither and die.

On the other hand, surveys of citizen attitudes have for a long time revealed discomfort with the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights. During the 1960s, the "whiff of fascism" (with genuine fascism still too real a memory for most of the population) manifested itself in surveys, often breathlessly hyped in collegiate American Government texts, suggesting widespread misidentification of the aforementioned documents as so much Communist propaganda.

Yes, there are problems with the way the common schools do things. But providing fertile soil for fascism?

IF YOU'D PUT THAT MUCH EFFORT INTO PREPARATION. Number 2 Pencil discovers a student who installed a keystroke monitor on a teacher's computer in order to obtain advance copies of examinations for sale.

The problem with corner-cutters who think they are so clever is that they cannot keep their cleverness secret, which is how that miscreant got caught. (There is an incentive problem as well: wouldn't the dominant strategy be to keep the secret secret, so as to submit stronger answers than those of others not in on the hack?)

A RESEARCH PROBLEM. What effect will a reduction in college aid by the national government have on the completion rates of university students? The editorial board at the Northern Star, not surprisingly, do not like the policy.

Some students will have to pay more for college this fall, and that’s not a good thing.

It would be a rare beneficiary of public policy, whether it be a Turbotrain into the mountains of West Virginia, a performance art subsidy from the National Endowment, or a Pell Grant, who would accept the policy change as being in the public interest. But to evaluate the effectiveness of the policy, one must evaluate the gains and losses. The editorial writers don't yet get this.

This change in [eligibility] will cause about 90,000 students to be cut entirely from the Pell Grant program and 1.3-million more students throughout the country to receive less money. The change also will help relieve a deficit in the program.

The students most affected are those who now are awarded the minimal amounts of aid.Although the most needy will still get full Pell Grants, the students in the middle-lower class may have to increase loans or work more jobs to pay for the reduction.

Public policy questions. Is a student who is working his or her way through college more likely to finish than a recipient of a government grant? Might there be other benefits to society from having more self-motivated people in the university? Has the Administration acted on the efficient margin of decision making?

WHAT GOES AROUND COMES AROUND. Hamilton College in New York cancels a presentation by controversial University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill, who has abdicated his chairmanship of the Ethnic Studies department. Gerald at Left2Right assesses the situation accurately.

Being a free speech fanatic I will hold my nose and defend Churchill right to speak at Hamilton (if there are threats of violence then protect the speaker), and against any attempts to dismiss him from his academic position.

How things change. The Regnery series of academy-bashing polemics recite anecdote after anecdote about conservative speakers who had to cancel their talks or move them to off-campus locations as the host university expressed inability to guarantee the speaker's safety. (For that matter, Chief Justice Rehnquist once had to postpone, briefly, a speech at Northern Illinois University in order to allow the local Perpetually Aggrieved, in those days known as the John Lennon Society, to make their objections known.)

To what extent the academy has been complicit in fostering conditions in which "verbal terrorism" becomes acceptable behavior as well as grounds for denying facilities to controversial speakers remains to be assessed. Perhaps college resources are insufficient to provide speakers with a safe environment, whether they be controversialists of the left or of the right.

The story gives defenders of academic tenure an opportunity to present their case. University Diaries sums it up:

Churchill enjoys freedom of speech. He has been granted tenure. While his colleagues are wrong to claim that Churchill's ideas invigorate intellectual debate at their university -- Churchill's ideas are horseshit -- they are right to defend his employment. You can't have governors running around hounding tenured professors out of their jobs.

Who will rid me of this troublesome priest, indeed? Protein Wisdom concurs, with additional linkage.

Colorado granted this lanky-haired mudflap tenure. And a public university threatening to fire a professor because it disapproves of his thoughts—and because it is being pressured by outraged conservatives and grandstanding politicos like Colorado congressman Bob Beauprez—is precisely the reason why tenure remains important, at least in theory.

At one remove, what happens if the legislature, or the trustees, perform an audit of the area studies departments and courses? Does that qualify as getting rid of the troublesome priest by closing the abbey?

The Churchill imbroglio has touched off the equivalent of a flame war over whether Professor Churchill has counterparts in the academy elsewhere along the political spectrum. King at SCSU Scholars has been watching the debate (done hiring already?) and suggests that perhaps the academy set up the abbey where the troublesome priest discovered his vocation.

The syllogism Conquest is arguing runs like this: Many Western university professors hold anti-American sympathies; some students of these professors adopt these sympathies; some act on them, occasionally in ways that lead to violence and tragedy (Rachel Corrie says hello*); some of the 9/11 attackers went to western universities where such faculty were. Yes, that's circumstantial, and I would not have been comfortable making the statement, but asking me to back away from Conquest as the left should back away from Churchill is hyperventilation.

And an attempt to obscure the tracks that lead from Churchill to the comfortable, tenured Left.

Henry at Crooked Timber (whose post preceded King's) raises this point.

Conquest’s language and claims are less inflammatory and offensive than Churchill’s. On the other, Conquest is one of the right’s most senior and respected figures, a fellow of the Hoover Institute, and a key player in the Anglo-American right’s intellectual network. Churchill, in comparison, is a relative nobody who represents no-one except himself. I’ve always had a fondness for Conquest; he was dead right on Stalinism, and he comes across as a very human figure (and a first rate composer of limericks and light verse) in his letters to Kingsley Amis. But if he’s seriously trying to claim, on the basis of no apparent evidence, that leftwing professors in Western universities shoulder some of the blame for September 11, he should be deeply ashamed of himself. It’s a vicious, disgraceful slur, and it’s every bit as unacceptable as the claim that the West and the US had September 11 coming to them.

The flamewar erupts as reaction to the release of Conquest's new Dragons of Expectation. As if I don't have enough books, but I'm not obligated to stop at fifty reviews.