BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU ASK FOR, YOU MIGHT GET IT. The Faculty Senate at Louisiana State (it's a .pdf, can't copy and paste, grrr) correctly prays for proper procedure in the investigation of Professor Ward Churchill in Colorado.

Therefore, Be It Resolved that the Louisiana State University Faculty Senate endorse this resolution in support of Dr. Churchill's [c.q.] right to academic freedom, as befits a tenured faculty member, that any review of his professional conduct be initiated and implemented only by the appropriate academic committee and that the review consider only those issues which would normally constitute failure of scholarship, service, and pedagogical standards within the university's mission, and

... First, some observations from the Superintendent. Isn't the fact that this fourth-rate Barrington Moore, Jr. holds a tenured post at a flagship university evidence of a failure of scholarship and pedagogical standards within the university's mission? Would it not be "appropriate" (Fred Kahn had a great riff on the lack of content "appropriate" generally had in a bureaucratic setting ... he was speaking of a regulatory commission, but university governance isn't too far removed) for Colorado to come clean on its diversity boondoggles. Otherwise the administration looks too keen to be covering for expense-preference behavior and the State government has a fiduciary duty to investigate that.

Be It Further Resolved, that the Louisiana State University Faculty Senate censure the Colorado House of Representatives and the Governor of Colorado for their attempts to intrude on the academic freedom of a tenured professor, and to dictate limits to any professor's inquiry and right to challenge accepted belief, even in times of war.

A state university enjoys great immunity from legislative intrusion. With that immunity comes great responsibility. A century ago, elected officials in Wisconsin took umbrage at Wisconsin's employment of Richard T. Ely, (yes, cub economists, as in the Richard T. Ely Lecture at the job meetings) who raised questions about railroads, corporations, and "natural" monopolies, and he might have thought well of socialism. /gasp!/ Wisconsin's Regents came back with this declaration.

WHATEVER MAY BE THE LIMITATIONS WHICH TRAMMEL INQUIRY ELSEWHERE, WE BELIEVE THAT THE GREAT STATE UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN SHOULD EVER ENCOURAGE THAT CONTINUAL AND FEARLESS SIFTING AND WINNOWING BY WHICH ALONE THE TRUTH CAN BE FOUND.

Sifting and winnowing separates the content from the chaff. Colorado's college and university promotion committees confused chaff for content. The history of this case suggests officials acted on unsubstantiated fears of losing an individual they incorrectly viewed as a diversity plus, despite evidence that two Colorado departments had recognized chaff when they were offered it.

In my stints on Faculty Senate, I have sometimes heard colleagues say "we have to do something before somebody in Springfield makes us do it." Those statements tended to set my teeth on edge, as the "something" often involved some unsound fad or some avoidance of the real problem. In this case, however, the onus is on Colorado, and per corollary, Louisiana State, and, yes, Northern Illinois, to take a hard look at whether academic freedom (correctly construed, more on this anon) has translated into academic license and led to the creation of a Division of Cooling Out the Mark in which professional protesters misuse academic respectability for non-academic ends.

TWELVE BEATS FIVE. That's the UWM Panthers getting the better of Alabama in the first set of the Big Dance. The Badgers face Northern Iowa (a news reader at WTMJ said "Northern Illinois" this morning, but that's wishful thinking) on Friday.

EMERGENCY ENGINEERING POSSESSION. Patience.

SIXTY YEARS AGO. Sgt. Karlson has been on the move for the past two weeks. His unit left Manderfeld, Belgium, occupied an empty house in Losheim, Belgium, before crossing the now-pacified Siegfried Line into Germany. Wilkommen Deutschland. "Spent a cold, rainy night on a muddy hillside in a pup tent." Thence to Lessendorf, then a week in Fuesdorf. The entire week was rainy with extremely dark nights. Their next move is to south of Koblenz, again in the mud and rain.

TECHNICAL DIFFICULTIES. Blogger appears to be storing posts but not publishing them, and the dial-up is acting squirrelly. I will take care of any duplicate posts and the trackbacks once things are running more reliably. Here's a little suggestion for people frustrated with posts being eaten: copy your HTML windows to Word Pad, and note the time and date of the post. That gives you the opportunity to restore your posts in case the server is acting badly.

CERTIFIED NEITHER IMPLIES NOR IS IMPLIED BY QUALIFIED. A Constrained Vision picks up a case against teacher certification, with links to related research. The American Mind finds a related story that indicts what is going on in the Colleges of Deaducation.

merican colleges and universities do such a poor job of training the nation's future teachers and school administrators that 9 of every 10 principals consider the graduates unprepared for what awaits them in the classroom, a new survey has found.

Nearly half the elementary- and secondary-school principals surveyed said the curriculums at schools of education, whether graduate or undergraduate, lacked academic rigor and were outdated, at times using materials decades older than the children whom teachers are now instructing. Beyond that, more than 80 percent of principals said the education schools were too detached from what went on at local elementary and high schools, a factor that made for a rift between educational theory and practice.

There are other problems.

Much of the problem, the report said, stems from what Dr. Levine called "the consumer mentality" dominating the nation's education schools. All states, and nearly all public school districts within them, award higher salaries to teachers who take additional courses and earn advanced degrees. One result of this has been an "army of unmotivated" educators looking for extra credits "in the easiest ways possible" during their off hours, the report said.

The universities, in turn, capitalize on this demand by viewing their education schools as "cash cows," setting low admissions standards and offering "quickie degrees" instead of investing in a quality curriculum, the report said. In fact, while criticism has often focused on the questionable academic qualifications of many teachers, the report found that school administrators typically had substantially lower scores on the Graduate Record Examination than the teachers they supervise.

Principals and superintendents need to be better trained than ever, the report contends, a necessity that puts added pressure on already faltering education schools: federal law is demanding that students make measurable academic progress; where local districts once set the bar, more states have adopted uniform exit exams that students must pass in order to graduate; and the population itself is changing, with more immigrants whose English is limited.

But others contend that these same conditions are precisely why education schools cannot be held wholly responsible for the failures of their graduates. In the era of federal demands for quick and consistent test-based results from even the most troubled districts, some defenders argue that education schools have little power to set the tone of what goes on in the nation's classrooms, and therefore are often inappropriately blamed for it.

On the other hand, the slack tone of the classrooms might be a consequence of untested theories that sound good, although I also blame the teachers for making every day a casual Friday. When the jackets and ties came off, much of the respectability also went into the closet.

BUILDING UP THE RAILS. For the first time since World War II, capacity constraints are binding on the freight rail network, which earns a C minus in the American Society of Civil Engineers 2005 Report Card for America's Infrastructure. One ought take such studies with a pinch of salt, as additional spending on "infrastructure" translates into additional work for civil engineers -- an understanding of rent seeking makes one cynical. On the other hand, there has been darned little investment in building new roads or oil refineries, and this observation, while anecdotal, resonates.

“Americans are spending more time stuck in traffic and less time at home with their families,” William Henry, the group’s president, said in a statement.

Although mass transit, including light rail, continues to look like an expensive proposition, it is the fastest growing mode.

“Transit use increased faster than any other mode of transportation – up 21 percent between 1993 and 2002,” the report states. “Yet, many transit properties are borrowing funds to maintain operations, even as they are significantly raising fares and cutting back service.”

That puts a P. J. O'Rourke snark (excuse the redundancy) Professor Althouse chose to highlight in some perspective.

The Heritage Foundation says, "There isn't a single light rail transit system in America in which fares paid by the passengers cover the cost of their own rides." Heritage cites the Minneapolis "Hiawatha" light rail line, soon to be completed with $107 million from the transportation bill. Heritage estimates that the total expense for each ride on the Hiawatha will be $19. Commuting to work will cost $8,550 a year. If the commuter is earning minimum wage, this leaves about $1,000 a year for food, shelter and clothing. Or, if the city picks up the tab, it could have leased a BMW X-5 SUV for the commuter at about the same price.

This comparison is a common canard from the highway lobby, particularly from those individuals who perceive the trolley service as "public," hence tainted with socialism, and the private owner vehicle as "private," despite the public spending on roads, which are congested in part because there's been little construction of new roads. The comparison presents the full cost of the trolley service, including some share of the spending on the permanent way (is it amortized correctly) with the incremental cost of another sport-ute, without contemplating the full cost of providing sufficient capacity for additional sport-utes.

ARMOR AGAINST PLEASURE, COBWEB AGAINST DISEASE. It's Spring Break at several universities, and the health service at the University of Wisconsin is doing its part to encourage the MTV vision of that week. Owen at Boots and Sabers is not pleased with a poster suggesting that female spring breakers off for a week of hook-ups bring along the morning-after pill as a fallback just in case the university-issue condoms break. He raises three objections; apparently others in Wisconsin are also displeased.

"It is a strategy that students can use to avoid the unwanted effects of decisions they make when they are on spring break," [Wisconsin health services director Kathleen] Poi said. "Sometimes they let their guard down, they don't make the best decision that they could. Or they're following the safer sex practices and the condom breaks. If they're here in Madison, they know who to call. If they're in Florida or Cancun, that's not an easy option."

But [Pro-Live Wisconsin director Peggy] Hamill said the ads were, "an insult to women. It trivializes the marriage act to begin with, and I think it's insulting to the self-esteem and dignity of women. We must give women more credit than to assume people are going to get 'crazy' " during Spring Break.

If the condom fails and the kids don't have the morning-after pill, they still have three months to deal with one "unwanted effect" in the feminist way. The chlamydia or the herpes will be another matter.

SEE-EE-OH. Northern Illinois University hires Carol Owens '90 to coach the women's basketball team.

“This is a dream come true,” said Owens who became the first Northern Illinois undergrad to serve as a head coach in a revenue program at the DeKalb-based institution since Hall of Fame head football coach Howard Fletcher (1956-68). “I remember when I was a sophomore and I told (then head coach) Jane (Albright) that once I graduated, I would come back as her assistant in two or three years. This is even better. I can’t explain how excited I am to be part of the Huskie family again. I’ve had a few other (head coaching) opportunities, this was the best fit. Things just fell into place. It was just meant to be. Northern Illinois was one of the best times of my life. I hope our kids can experience what I experienced at NIU.

This coach has the proper ambitions, and the proper apprenticeship.

Owens’ ultimate goals in her new Northern Illinois cage role? Win the Mid-American Conference and head to the NCAA. “I want our students to enjoy playing the game, enjoy the collegiate experience, and enjoy the time with their teammates,” Owens admitted. Recruiting? “No doubt, we have to get into Chicago. NIU is a Chicago school.

“I had a great experience here. Playing under Jane, Deb Patterson (now the head coach at Kansas State University), and Kamie Etheridge (also at KSU)---all were huge influences on me. And Muffet allowed me to grow and get ready for the next step in my career. I still seek their guidance in everything I do. They were all instrumental to me as a coach.”

Coach Owens has been instrumental in developing several of Notre Dame's centers. That she came to work for Muffet McGraw at Notre Dame and participated in their national title run might be evidence of a good leadership principle at work: bring in people who might be better than you. There was a game in 1989 or 1990 when a new coach called Muffet McGraw brought a weak Notre Dame team into DeKalb to be destroyed by Northern Illinois. That was Jane Albright and Deb Patterson coaching, Carol Owens, Tammy Hinchee, Denise Dove, Lisa Foss, and several other talented kids playing.

HOW OTHERS SEE US. The Pseudo-Indian Defense is proving to be unsound, and the repercussions are making the academy, and the academic culture, look bad.

(click the image for Cox and Forkum's commentary and some recommended reading.)

Pirate Ballerina has been following the Churchill story aggressively, most recently offering an Out-of-Context, Nonviolent Churchill Quote of the Day, most of which suggest Mr Churchill is at best a fourth-rate, fourth derivative Barrington Moore, Jr. but who takes his research inspiration from Buffy Sainte-Marie's "My Country Tis of Thy People You're Dying." The Los Angeles Times has the details.

Three professors have said that Churchill reinvented history to suit his politics. In one case, he wrote that the U.S. Army deliberately infected Mandan Indians with smallpox-laden blankets in what is now North Dakota. His source for the story was UCLA professor Russell Thornton, whose own account of the incident is completely different and makes no mention of the Army.

Betsy's Page's coverage of the story discovers the existence of a Center for Academic Integrity. Why not? Underwriters Laboratories destructive-tests toasters so as to better calculate insurance premiums. There is no comparable destructive-testing of ideas in the academy. Alas, that's what's sinking Colorado's departing Betsy Hoffman. Several of her Iowa State colleagues were at the Midwest Economics Association and they spoke well of her as a person. Alas, this Newsweek article suggests she's somewhat clueless about the proper role for academic inquiry.

"A university is a place where you're supposed to think deeply about things, where you're supposed to challenge established thought, and it's becoming increasingly difficult to do that in today's political climate," she says. "We are so deeply divided as a country." This division, she says, threatens the foundation of liberal higher education. "The modern research university is a big and complex place," she says, "but it ultimately is about the generation of new ideas and the transfer of those new ideas to students. If we can't even talk about controversial subjects, we can't make progress."

I'd rather not get into the tu quoque mud where people get offended about heteronormativity or about suggestions that the two sexes are wired differently for spatial and intuitive thinking, to introduce controversial subjects that some of the area-studies types would just as soon not talk about. Belmont Club properly takes Professor Hoffman, and the Colorado academic establishment, to task for that omission.

Ironically, the public glare focused upon Ward Churchill's ideas in the aftermath of his "little Eichmanns" essay provided the scholarly scrutiny that the University of Coloardo itself neglected to supply. Did the US government actually specify a 'blood quantum' for Native Americans? Did US troops really distribute smallpox-impregnated blankets to tribes and with what precautions to themselves? Did Professor Churchill really provide the content of books on which his name appears or did he swipe it from some other scholar? Those are questions which have been dissected at length by persons "outside the campus" and even by "Colorado lawmakers". That they were not raised or even contemplated by academic departments at the University of Colorado constitutes a failure of its most basic mission. Universities not in the business of asking these these questions are arguably not institutions of higher learning at all. That neglect, not the discussion which her University went so far out of its way to avoid, "threatens the foundation of liberal higher education".

Victor Davis Hanson suggests that what we are seeing is more of the same.

The usual exegeses suffice: The contemporary campus has devolved into an Orwellian world in which the ends usually justify the means. Diversity really means no diversity of ideas. Unfettered expression is a code word for groupspeak of the Left. Academic freedom and tenure ensure timidity and monotony of thought. The champions of the oppressed and discriminated are, in fact, the affluent and privileged, whose antics are excused only by the irrelevancy of academic culture and properly deplored solely through the accidental discovery of a forgotten rant or taped remark.

Underneath all this is the disturbing fact that progressive campuses are charging their students tuition whose annual increases exceed the rate of inflation, while vocal professors have plenty of idle time on their hands and live lives that most Americans — or their own college staff members — can only dream of.

That bit about idle time is gratuitous. But there is some truth to the groupthink charge. Dave Kopel, in the Rocky Mountain News, which has been covering the Colorado follies, but in his mind not sufficiently extensively, elaborates.

For all the ink devoted to the Ward Churchill case, the Denver dailies have done virtually nothing to investigate the dysfunctional campus academic culture which led to the Churchill fiasco.

Here are some of the questions the Denver media have not even attempted to probe: Why did the University of Colorado Arts and Sciences administration continue to promote and laud Churchill after the late-1990s publication of professor Thomas LaVelle's articles alleging extensive academic fraud and plagiarism on Churchill's part? Are there other academic frauds and plagiarists at CU whom the administration has protected? How did CU become such a racist institution that a patently unqualified man was pushed for tenure in three departments because he claimed to be an Indian? How many other poorly-qualified teachers have gotten jobs at CU, based on their ethnicity or their pretended ethnicity? To what extent does the extreme left dominate hiring at CU, so that highly qualified applicants for teaching positions are rejected, whereas politically correct hacks get the job? How often do other CU teachers act like Churchill allegedly did by punishing students for expressing opinions contrary to the teacher? Has CU protected other teachers who have been credibly accused of making violent threats and/or perpetrating on- and off-campus violent crimes against people who disagree with them?

A news article in the same paper suggests that Mr Churchill's tenure, a special case of defeat, is nontheless an orphan.

University of Colorado regents want to know how ethnic studies professor Ward Churchill was granted tenure without going through the usual process.

The people who made the decision have either gone to other positions or crossed the final summit. But their chickens have come home to roost. Calderon's Call takes a rather polemical look at how those chickens hatched and at their nesting instincts.

The Churchill affair neither is one of academic freedom versus an intolerant thought police nor a problem of tenure. It is the predictable outcome of a decades-long higher educational policy of creating, promoting, and tolerating Leftist-oriented niche programs that serve as outlets to every aggrieved, victim-hood-pleading, second-rate, so-called advocacy-scholar and activist “revolutionary”, crackpots who grow like barnacles on the flagship institutions ostensibly committed to higher learning. The best that can come out of the Churchill Affair is a thorough reevaluation of these niche programs by the consumers of higher education, namely students, parents, responsible scholars, trustees, provosts, alumni and alumnae, and only as a last resort, state legislators who of course funnel billions in taxpayers’ dollars to support
higher education in their respective states.

Tell us how you really feel. But leave aside that "consumer" talk, and learn the Principle of Derived Demand. Naw, better to rant.

Niche programs today run the gamut of aggrieved victimology groups and offer victim-hood courses in departments like African-American Studies; “Black” Studies; Chicano and Chicana Studies; Ethnic Studies; Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual Studies; Hispanic Studies; Middle-Eastern Studies; Multi-cultural Studies; Native American Studies; Asian-Pacific Islander Studies; “Queer” Studies; Transgender Studies; and of course the venerable standby, Women’s Studies (alternately spelled “Womyn’s” Studies by the more radical, man-hating lesbian-feminist separatists). A collective of mediocrities and hardcore ideologues has gained access to full employment largely at taxpayer-funded state colleges and universities, mediocrities that otherwise would have ended up selling books at radical “cooperative bookstores” or herbal tea potions and organic food at any number of communes scattered across the United States.

Face it, these are departments in the Division of Cooling Out The Mark. Their presence gives the academy a bad name, and their graduates can contemplate their oppression while asking "want fries with that," while the serious work on cultural bias or discrimination or power can be done by the departments of long-standing. The Denver Post's Ed Quillen has a modest proposal: turf 'em out.

There's also the "Ward Churchill Problem," which could quickly be solved by eliminating the entire ethnic studies department. It's hardly a necessity, since the university managed to operate until 1993 without one.

It's misnamed, because its focus is on "Afro-American studies, American Indian studies, Asian American studies, Chicano/a studies," where "students gain substantive knowledge and expertise in one of the four specific racial/ethnic fields," according to the department's website.

Other ethic groups in Colorado history - the Irish miners of Leadville, the Italian quarry workers of Salida, the Slavs of the steel mills in Pueblo, the Jews trying to farm in 1882 near Cotopaxi, the Volgadeutsch of Weld County, the Balkan coal miners slain at Ludlow, to name a few - are apparently unworthy of study, or even mention, at CU these days.

So the ethnic studies department does not bother to study more than four ethnic groups, which is made clear in a required class, Foundations of Ethnic Studies. The catalog says this course "applies analytic perspectives, especially racial formation theory, to the experiences of the four principle (sic) peoples of color in the United States."

He'd like to toss the football program, too.

For starters, the new president should eliminate the football program. Without it, there aren't recruiting scandals that involve minors, alcohol, sex and drugs. Without football, no football-camp cash boxes. No football, no players subject to rape allegations. No football, no assistant coaches to be accused of having sex with student trainers.

But doesn't a big-time university need a big-time football program? The University of Chicago enjoys a good reputation, and it hasn't fielded a football team since 1939.

Yes, and that's the same Chicago that inspired the line "champions of the West" in the most-overplayed tune in the least creative college band's repertoire, and the line used to be "run the ball around Chicago" in On! Wisconsin!, and Chicago has been competing, in football, in a lower division, for the last few years. (We build nukes underneath our grandstands!) But I digress. Perhaps, as this commenter to this post notes, the university ought not be a Club Med with a few more books and Power Points than the usual resort.

But if that university is to be neither a Club Med nor a grievance factory, what sort of destructive testing of destructive ideas will it engage in?

M-A-C! Yesterday at about this time the sports guy on a Milwaukee radio station was pointing to a "winnable game" for the Team Formerly Known as the Marquette Warriors. There's Western Michigan from the Mid-American coming into the Bradley Center, no problem, right? Tee hee. (Fifty-four-forty-no-fight!) The Mid-American has provided excellent training for coaches in several of the so-called income sports, and playing at our level isn't for the faint of heart. Mid-majors, indeed.

GOING DANCING. The University of Wisconsin women's hockey team accepts an invitation to the NCAA tournament. First game: at Dartmouth. I spoke with the captain of the 1977-1978 Dartmouth women's team on the Night Owl enroute from Providence south ... here come the Badgers.

The men's third game had 3,423 spectators. BOOOOOOO!

SEEKING ALTERNATIVES TO CHALK AND TALK. University Diaries points to Hugo at Cliopatria who points to Scott Inside Higher Ed all contemplating the evolution of the lecture into entertainment.

I will quote from Hugo at length.

One thing that would improve college teaching immensely would be mandatory drama and speech classes for all new faculty. Forget the expensive technology. Teach them how to use their voices, how to modulate their tones, how to string together an exciting narrative without notes. Teach them to make the passion that is surely inside them manifest in their words and in their movements. Teach them the forgotten art of the genuinely engaging lecture. Twelve years of college teaching (and over 120 classes taught in that time), as well as thousands of student evaluations, have made it clear to me that students really prefer a professor who is willing to bring his passion and energy into the classroom.

This is not to say that good teachers can't be both great lecturers and skilled employers of the latest technology. I have a few colleagues -- a very few -- whom I know to be both. But I do know that the college culture is one where innovation and novelty tend to be prized more than the ability to teach effectively using the same methods used for centuries. No one writes grants to get money to teach professors how to tell good stories using their memories and their voices alone. I think that's a pity. I, as the son and grandson of teachers, delight in knowing that I use little or nothing that those who came before me would not have used. I take inordinate, perhaps excessive, pride in that.

I expect to spend another 25 years teaching, perhaps more. I am always interested in developing new classes and discussing new ideas. But I have yet to see the need to show many videos, or to have a smart classroom, or to put up Power Point whatevers for my students. Don't wire my classroom. Give me a cup of coffee, put chalk in my hand, put me in front of a blackboard, and let me do my damn job.

Technology faddists, note: Power Point is not an "active learning" alternative to lecturing. If anything, Power Point, and the even more unproductive use of technology called the video, provide even less of an opportunity for give-and-take than the lecture. The largest of lecture halls provides opportunity for the lecturer to maintain eye contact, to look for visual cues that people are not following the presentation (it is bad form to bring a stock of tennis balls to catch the attention of the catnapper in the back row), and to encourage and to take questions.

Furthermore, many users of Power Point, or of the do-it-yourself overheads, use them in such a way as to diminish the role of the lecturer either to clarify points or -- to use the language of the College of Deaducation -- as "facilitator." Darned little "facilitating" going on if the presenter limits himself to reading his slide to you aloud while you have read it silently and are waiting for the supporting detail, and the custom of having the slides available for everybody as a handout before the presentation or for later downloading further diminishes the value of the presenter. (But perhaps those uses of "technology" appeal to administrators for just those reasons: once "facilitating" equates to "any dummy can read somebody else's slides^(*)" there's not much point in hiring expensive experts who can distinguish the uninformed question from the subtle but imprecise question, let alone do independent research.

^(*)Knew I had an earlier rant on this!)

THE REAL BRACKET-BUSTERS. Derrick Z. Jackson offers the Thought of the Day.

It must be unrealistic when your eighth-ranked men's basketball team is sitting on an 11 percent graduation rate.

He surveys a few men's college basketball teams that are not currently making grades, and a few that are.

Of the 46 schools, 31 -- a full two-thirds -- had a graduation rate of under 50 percent. Sixteen of the 31 were under 30 percent. Worse, 22 of the nation's top 46 teams -- nearly half -- have an African-American player graduation rate of under 30 percent. Nine schools -- Kentucky, Utah, Pacific, Oklahoma, Cincinnati, Nevada, Louisiana State, Wisconsin-Milwaukee (ugh, my alma mater) and Minnesota -- have a black graduation rate of zero. To be fair, Oklahoma, Pacific and UWM were over 925 for 2003-04. The NCAA will make graduation rates more current by adding successive years until it gets to a new four-year rolling report in 2006-07.

It will be amazing to see these schools scramble to avoid NCAA penalties. Of the 46 teams, only nine have a snapshot score of at least 925 and long-term graduation rates of at least 50 percent for both the team and African-American players: North Carolina, Syracuse, Michigan State, Villanova, Wisconsin, Old Dominion, Holy Cross, St. Mary's of California, and Pennsylvania.

The Heels, the Spartans, Villanova, and the Badgers. How's that for a dream Final Four? (There's probably a bracket conflict in here somewhere, but if I were on the seeding committee ...)

KEEPING THE PSHRINKS BUSY. I picked up a copy of the UWM Post, an unofficial publication for University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee students. There's an advice column called "Sex and Relationships" by Devon Marie Wiesend that describes "Friends with benefits." (The site doesn't appear to have archives up to Northern Star standards, so this transcription from the paper copy will have to serve.) The question for March 9 is about a guy who has been hanging around a girl who is hot but troubled, and he wants to make a play for her but not a commitment. (Do such people come with warning labels?) The columnist answers a question with a question.

Well, to avoid your direct question for the moment, how much do you value your friendship? I've always found that friends with benefits shouldn't be good friends. There's a good chance, even if you become lovers, that the friendship will deteriorate.

Hmm, so if you keep your good friends at a distance, what are you getting involved with? Read on ...

An aside to the girls out there: men are easy...

I believe that many people in this country have quite a few friends they are attracted to -- take advantage of that. Only give this a shot if the friend is disposable. Let's be honest, on the importance scale, we all have friends that fall below sex. These are the friends you hit on.

Lovely. And people study domestic abuse ... will there be sufficient data to establish some connection between this instrumental view of commitment-free sex and a propensity to be mean to people one supposedly commits to?

THE OLD ORDER IS RAPIDLY CHANGING. Has it really been six years since the Tennessee Volunteers last won an NCAA title? And how long has Stanford been in the convex hull of the mix? Michigan State earns the right to wear home whites throughout the regional, with Florida State and defending champion Connecticut also in that regional. Some things don't change, however ... Wisconsin-Green Bay again opens on the home floor of its first opponent, Maryland, a No. 7 seeding.

FAMILIAR FOE, NEW OPPORTUNITY. Wisconsin advances to the WCHA quinta-finals in the Twin Cities, with the North Dakota Fighting Sioux first up on Thursday, the 17th.

LET'S PLAY THREE. Alaska-Anchorage takes game 2 from Wisconsin before 8,100 fans (better, but still BOOOOOOOO!)

OUCH. Word reaches the Superintendent's Office of a collision between a Union Pacific work extra and a Burlington Northern van train on the diamonds at Rochelle. More details as warranted. Sorry, I don't own the proper tools to live-blog a train wreck.

SECOND SECTION: The collision was Friday evening, it looks like a self-propelled rail grinder clipped some containers. By Sunday noon, most of the wreckage had been hauled away, although some remnants of a container were left along the north edge of the parking lot at the railfans' park. These things have jagged edges and are susceptible to being blown around by the wind so I got away from there fairly quickly. No good photo opportunities left.

JUST ASK THE RIGHT QUESTIONS THE RIGHT WAY. Suppose the air-quality people and the Highway Commission want to know something about local trucking, called "drayage," from the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach to warehouses and manufacturing establishments in the Los Angeles Basin. If you're Long Beach State's Kristen Monaco, you take a box of donuts and a stack of questionnaires to the port gates before the dockers report, and you learn all sorts of interesting things about a business in which the truckers own their tractors and act as subcontractors for the shippers or for the consignees. Beats another pass through a panel study or getting the security clearances to use the Census data. Today's Clever Research Tip for aspiring dissertators: don't treat the terms "source" and "Government web site" as equivalents.

STARTING THE PLAYOFFS PROPERLY. The University of Wisconsin hockey team spotted Alaska-Anchorage a 2-4 edge, then came back to win 5-4 at the Dane County Coliseum on Friday night. The attendance was 5,912. Big Ten basketball tournament notwithstanding, BOOOOOOOOO!

CURSED IF YOU DO, CURSED IF YOU DON'T. John in the Shadow of Mount Hollywood notes that the graduate programs in the United States produce more Ph.D.s than there are tenure track jobs for them. This phenomenon, which he correctly notes is glossed over at some of the academic weblogs, has been present since the mid-1970s, with The Progressive once editorializing (let's face it, any article in any opinion magazine is an editorial) "Ph.D., the new migrant." And yes, the effect of excess supply is to drive down salaries as well as to provide incentives to substitute contingent workers doing a lot of teaching for little pay in place of teacher-scholars with some time to think about new ideas, particularly if your vision of higher "education" is more Big Red Subway than Great Steel Fleet.

But what happens when the novices and the postulants notice that the abbeys are full? That's the situation in economics, where one school of thought holds that the occupational birth control is misguided, with "math bigots" controlling access to the graduate programs with dire consequences.

As a result, it is impossible to survive as an economics graduate student with a math background that is less than that of an undergraduate math major.

Methinks he doth protest too much. Most of the fundamental mathematical theorems for general equilibrium or game theory come in the first chapter of a basic real analysis text. (A colleague in math explains that the subsequent chapters tackle the kinds of abstractions that are more likely to appeal to pure mathematicians.) Micha at Catallarchy contends that the mathematization serves the same function as the liquor licensing board, the Interstate Commerce Commission, and the bar exam, namely to lessen competition and restrain trade. (Thanks to A Constrained Vision for the links.) I'm not prepared to grant that (yes, I have a vested interest in the status quo, but there are as-yet unexploited extensions of the existing paradigm for the clever.

A second school of thought is concerned that there is a disconnect between the undergraduate program and the graduate program, and that might be affecting the domestic supply of graduate students. An all-star panel at the Midwest Economics Association convened to address that problem. The share of enrollment in U.S. Ph.D. programs of students who did undergraduate degrees in U.S. universities peaked in 1976 (let's see, that's about when the "new migrant" meme came out), and the total production of economics Ph.D.s has remained constant since then, although total Ph.D.s in all social sciences has continued to increase (more boxcars to convert into coaches?)

This panel looked at the domestic supply of Ph.D. students, identifying the Ph.D.-degree granting universities (the "big football schools," which might describe Northern Illinois) and the elite private colleges (which enroll many children of the existing faculty.) The program at Swarthmore provides future economics Ph.D.s, many of whom you'd recognize if I had remembered to write their names down. But Swarthmore provides an interesting mirror to hold up to look at the demand side of the equation. Future economics majors respond to incentives. We have a downturn in enrollments after 1975, about the same time the Silent Generation and early hippie cohorts snagged a lot of the tenured slots. Then let's compare and contrast two departments with eleven faculty members, Swarthmore, and Northern Illinois two years ago. We have more accounting majors than Swarthmore has majors of all kinds. The work is rewarding, but you have to like it, and you can't be too in love with making money to be happy in the mid-majors. Sure, it would be nice to offer all undergraduates the kind of temptation to do economics and the kind of support that Swarthmore does, but that would be too Great Steel Fleet for all too many administrators still mired in a Big Red Subway, "Lay off six of those men!" mentality. Likewise, a core curriculum for undergraduates with a required derivative-producing calculus sequence as a prerequisite to economics or finance would help break the disconnect between the undergraduate, literary economics tradition, and the graduate, set-theoretic way of thinking. But that would involve REQUIREMENTS. Can't have that.

A participant in the session, who attended the undergraduate program that provides the most U.S. economics Ph.D.,s (Seoul National University, if you're curious) correctly objected to a subtext of the panel, which is "there aren't enough U.S. graduate students in your programs." He, correctly, didn't like being treated as an outsider. Administrators, however, ought keep in mind that if professoring is such a cushy job for such high pay, there ought to be swarms of domestic students lining up for a shot at those jobs. Not the case. I wonder why not?

Wouldn't it be better for those administrators to consider a few more useful actions, such as tightening admission and graduation requirements, and paying entry-level economics faculty more?

NOW TAKE THE REST OF THE ADVICE. Spring break is here, and I recommended that the theory class take a bit of down-time after most of them had confronted three exams within a week in the face of a rather grueling first eight weeks, a busy recruiting season, and a January that won't go away.

Apparently some did.

Now for the rest of my advice.

1. Whenever possible, prepare answers to homework problems and exams as if you were writing for Econometrica.

2. Whenever the objective function is a closed form of two variables, use the constraint to solve for one of the two variables in terms of the other and the parameters, find the zero of one first derivative, and evaluate the sign of one second derivative.

Will I see as much acceptance of this advice as I did of "stand down?"

MARKING OFF. The Midwest Economics Association conference calls at Milwaukee, where the Marquette Not-The-Warriors again avoid having to play the Wisconsin-Milwaukee Panthers, this year by failing to win the Conference USA tournament. Spring Break is next week. Thanks for looking in.

REAL ECONOMISTS DON'T DO INTEREST RATE FORECASTS ON TV. Russell at Cafe Hayek is thinking about the public image of economists, and he provides the Quote of the Day.

It may be the result of our penchant as economists for using the word "competition." I use it all the time. I understand it to mean the propensity of humans to truck, barter and exchange. But for too many, the word conveys the zero-sum game world of sports. Maybe we should stop using it.

I, too, use "competition" a lot, to refer to the discovery and consummation of gains from trade. Let's see, wasn't "intercourse" an archaic term for "commerce?" Time to take a holiday.

THE BIG RED SUBWAY AND THE GREAT STEEL FLEET. I have found several posts suggesting that academic tenure limits the flexibility of the academy to respond to changing enrollment patterns. A number of these posts draw parallels to the passenger transportation industry, something to which I can claim some expertise. Wormtalk and Slugspeak spells out the basic problem.

Administrators would like to address the problem, but if you can't reduce the number of tenured faculty in department A, it's budgetarily dangerous to increase the number of tenured faculty in department B. So things just stay the same, and administrators make up the difference with exploitation of adjunct faculty.

That's the basic flexibility problem. This observation, within the same post, illustrates a problem that requires a separate analysis.

Obviously administrators would have a lot more flexibility in staffing courses if they weren't constrained by tenure. Administrators could also continually replace senior faculty with less-expensive junior faculty. The senior faculty and all the junior faculty who hope to become senior faculty (i.e., all the faculty in TT or T jobs) know this, and it is by far the biggest reason for the ferocity of the defense of tenure.

As an exercise, ask yourself whether you'd prefer to compensate, and then pension off, the best researchers the same way that professional sports does. But that's for another day. I want to focus on the flexibility argument. Blogs for Industry provides a focal point, using budget airlines as a metaphor for flexibility.

The airplanes may be moveable to different routes, but they're expensive, long-term investments. Changing the routing is nontrivial, as an airline also has to deal with landing rights, gate space, maintenance facilities, the various employees from mechanics to pilots who may have to be housed overnight more often in St. Louis, away from homes and families, and moving the planes around the cities they serve so that moving planes to St. Louis doesn't cost them more than they'd make serving the demand. In fact, increased demand is often unmet by major carriers, creating market opportunities for the Southwests and Jet Blues of the world, and driving the Pan Ams and TWAs under. These new carriers, which have more fuel-efficient planes, lower labor costs, and niche market advantages, can drive decreases in the price of air travel - the benefits of deregulation for those of us who travel, and a nice example of why "pro-market" is not the same as "pro-business"...as long as "creative distruction" is happening at the level of companies and not actual airplanes. I'm not an economist but this is my impression of the state of the airline industry.

Why hasn't this sort of thing happened in academia? Where are the Southwests and Jet Blues to teach government to Dartmouth students?

The Southwests and Jet Blues are called Northern Illinois and St. Cloud State, and the lifetime prospects for graduates with comparable talents and ambitions to their contemporaries at the Ivies are just as good. That's the Ivy degree as positional arms race among parents, something else that I've been following for some time. Presumably the "Dartmouth students" who want comparable lifetime rewards at Southwest prices are at Northern Illinois. But that doesn't completely answer the question. John in the Shadow of Mount Hollywood suggests that the oversubscribed course problem at his alma mater, Dartmouth, is comparable to the poor service on Amtrak.

If I were foolhardy enough to book long-distance travel on Amtrak, and in consequence found myself asking the conductor, "Wait a minute -- I paid four or five times to ride on Amtrak what I'd pay to fly to Chicago on Southwest, and here I'm riding in a car that smells like s--t. Why does this car smell like s--t?" I could expect an answer not much dfferent from Prof. Sa'adah's reply to disgruntled students and alumni: "Sir, it's very complicated. And it's just not fair to complain that this particular car smells like s--t. We have several other cars on the train that do not smell like s--t. Any report on the web that all the cars smell like s--t is just inaccurate. The baggage car, in fact, smells very clean right now. And we're doing everything we can to try to clean all the cars when we get to Chicago, but frankly, if you've ever had to get three kids in the car and make it to Sunday school on time with them, you can understand our problem. We're trying to get budget to hire more car cleaners. It's all very complicated. Have a nice day, sir."

Amtrak is probably a poor analogy, as it is even more a political creature and it is less productive than higher education, even if its shameless redefinition of "on time" might have inspired the academy to look at six-year graduation rates. But it's an analogy that gets me thinking about some transportation history, and hence the title of my post. Right now, higher education would be a growth industry. (Enrollments at Northern Illinois are historically high. My department is a faculty of 13 with three adjuncts. When I started in 1986 we were a faculty of 23 with a number of adjuncts, each teaching fewer courses per person.) The tenure system might saddle universities with irreversibilities that makes them less responsive to changes in student demand than some other set of labor relations might allow, and administrators exploit adjuncts (to a larger extent in some disciplines than in others). But the tenure system might also serve as a constraint to encourage universities to ration their services differently. Hence the contrast between the Great Steel Fleet and the Big Red Subway. During and after the Second World War, the New York Central Railroad's Great Steel Fleet (note the precision implicit in "on time!") continued to offer a premium service (although rationing limited the food service in the dining cars, often that was restricted to uniformed armed services personnel) but when the train sold out, travelers were out of luck. (Interstate Commerce Commission regulations precluded the New York Central from raising fares to allocate the space efficiently. University trustees are under no such compulsion.) The Pennsylvania Railroad's Big Red Subway would accommodate everybody, sometimes late, often in a converted box car (I am not making this up, the illustrated caboose is a war emergency caboose and it may have been converted from a box car to a coach before it was converted to a caboose) and there might not have been seats for everybody, but you got there.

Blogs for Industry spells out part of the problem.

The long term question, then, is whether the designer universities can justify their higher cost relative to the coming wave of Outsource Universities to students, parents, and in the case of state institutions, to taxpayers. Having a product that is actually different and better would help. As I am as close to a true believer in the post-WWII research university as anyone I've met, I think this can and should be what we do, and why things like tenure and academic freedom can be justified as more than just special pleading.

The unanswered question is, can the Outsource Universities do as well by their students as the traditional research universities. My position is that the traditional research universities are to the Outsource Universities as the Great Steel Fleet is to the Big Red Subway. The Outsource Universities might offer people an opportunity to talk shop with colleagues in related businesses, but that's not the same thing as a liberal arts education. (And let us not forget Adam Smith: "People of the same trade seldom gather together, even for diversion and merriment ...") Research matters. Tenure as we understand it has a purpose. I will defend these positions, probably next week, which is spring break and it offers some thinking time I haven't had recently.

I pledge also to continue the trashing of the "access" fiction, the "assessment" follies, and the depressingly high defect rate in higher education. But those are a consequence of administrations undermining the authority of the faculty -- sometimes with the connivance of the faculty -- rather than evidence of the shortcomings of tenure.

RETHINKING THE CANONICAL EXAMPLES? One of the questions on the just-concluded graduate price theory exam is a logic question: if x₁ is a complement to x₂, and x₂ is a complement to x₃, must x₁ be a complement to x₃? Answer: no. A counterexample can be a disproof. Many of the students had learned the same counterexample, as I read numerous answers (from people who were sitting well apart from each other and whose answers to other questions were different, no cheating scandal brewing here, move along ...) offering coffee as a complement to sugar, sugar as a complement to tea, but tea as a substitute for coffee.

Fair enough, but the canon will have to be modified in light of the chai latte.

A NASH EQUILIBRIUM. A Constrained Vision links to a Business Weak For Stoners (bear with me, I just finished grading large stacks of bluebooks and problem sets, and there was a diplomatic resolution addressing the shortcomings of the women's basketball team, so this is therapeutic) article questioning the usefulness of game theory. Eclectic Econoclast begs to differ, noting that "as-if" marginalist theorizing stands up to simple questions about how businesses behave. The analogue for game theory would be "Do your forecasts about rival behavior credit them with doing what is best for their company?

I suggest that game theory is more useful in making sense of other behaviors. Consider the recent resignation of Colorado president Elizabeth Hoffman. View From A Height has an interesting characterization of Colorado's problem: he calls it a case of "terminal State-U-ism."

At Colorado, here's what that means.Flash forward to 2005. In the last couple of years, it's become clear that Colorado's branding initiative has yielded a football helmet. And now, the brand is so tarnished that if you tried to polish it, it would break apart like some relic from the Titanic. Sex scandals, recruiting scandals, alcohol scandals, money scandals, CU Foundations, summer camps.

A provocative John Andrews column in the Denver Post notes the same phenomenon. He'd like to unbundle state financial aid for students from state operation of universities. (Heck, in Illinois that is happening by default, one of these days somebody is going to look at the pittance coming from Springfield and the micromanagement that comes with it and find the stones to say "sod off," but again I'm venting.) But read on.

Still, we pour hundreds of millions of tax dollars into all these colleges. Then we're shocked to learn of curriculum meltdown, grade inflation, alcohol deaths, football scandals, foundation slush funds, leftist bullies in the classroom and tenured radicals who taunt that they "don't work for" us poor schmucks who pay their big salaries.

Making college possible is a valid public purpose. Owning and running a bunch of colleges may not be. Why not let nonprofit boards of trustees do that - and devote our whole budget to helping needy students pay tuition? If the GI Bill was good enough for the Greatest Generation, isn't it good enough for 21st-century Colorado?

It is that first paragraph to which I wish to speak. Although it is dangerous to generalize from my own experience, particularly with a small sample, I have yet to encounter a young person in the Midwest who has attended Colorado for the academics, although they will speak highly of the "lifestyle opportunities" (I think that means skiing every day for five months) the university offers them. And hence, the Nash equilibrium. The professors would like to do their research. The undergraduates would like to ski. The payoff to a professor who can use office hours to do research rather than work with students is larger given that the students are on the slopes. The payoff to a student who would like to ski rather than attend class or study is larger given that the professors are dealing in inflated grades anyway. Thus if the reward to a professor is r and the reward to a student is s, both r(research,ski) > r(advise,ski) and s(ski,research) > s(inquisitive,research) . Neither the students nor the professors have cause to regret their actions, given the actions of the professors and the students, which means the students and the professors are using their Nash equilibrium strategies.

That, by the way, puts this Denver Post editorial in a different light.

The investigators are operating between a rock and a hard place - to find fault they must overcome their past decisions to grant Churchill fat salary increases and upbeat job evaluations.

Put another way, they must find reason to regret their previous actions, which might have been Nash at the time they made them. No surprise, then, that the administrators impede the investigation.

Why is it only now that the scandals are coming to light at Colorado?

WHY I KEEP POSTING THE SAME THINGS. Milwaukee's Charlie Sykes links to a disturbing article about shortages of skilled workers.

Manufacturers already are struggling with unfilled job openings because they can't find qualified help, said John Engler, president of the group and former governor of Michigan.

"The emerging problem in manufacturing is not a shortage of jobs, but rather a shortage of qualified applicants," Engler said.

"A full 36 percent of our members have said they have employment positions unfilled right now because they cannot find qualified workers. This confirms what our members have been telling us: that the people applying for manufacturing jobs today simply do not have the math, science and technological aptitude they need to work in modern manufacturing."

So much for shop class as a dumping ground for the stoners and burnouts. Yes, I'm talking about those humanities professors who couldn't carry my calipers too.

"But there are very few companies looking for low-skilled workers," Engler said. "That's not where the demand is."

Instead, companies aren't able to find enough qualified help to work in an increasingly technical and more demanding manufacturing environment, according to Engler.

"I am not saying you have to know complex algebra to get a job on the plant floor, but you do need fundamental math, science and communication skills," he said. "You can't be illiterate and communicate with other members on a manufacturing team."

Why, then, continue to frame math -- particularly computation and estimation, not analysis -- and the lab sciences, not to mention rhetoric and composition as college-prep stuff? (That preparation isn't being done terribly well, either, but that rant is here.) Those are all things the high schools used to do, and in my view better years ago, and it continues to serve all our students ... whether they be desk jockeys, disk jockeys, Dash-8 jockeys or Demag jockeys ... well to have those skills. Call it a core curriculum, not college prep. And the inefficiency of college-for-all is getting the attention it deserves.

Parents and teachers are partly to blame for the shortage of skilled workers, said Phyllis Eisen, vice president of the Manufacturing Institute, the research and education arm of the National Association of Manufacturers. They have promoted four-year college degrees as the key to success, even if those degrees are not well connected with current employment trends, Eisen said.

Hey, King, I see an allusion to your Department of the 3.7 GPA and all of those [your choice here] studies programs.

CARNIVAL CALL. The Carnival of the Capitalists calls at Blog Critics, where the Chief Critic was kind enough to provide a link to my poster contest announcement. Thanks!

DIPLOMACY. Northern Illinois head Women's Basketball coach Carol Hammerle announces her retirement.

“After 32 years of coaching, I believe it is in the best interest of the NIU women’s basketball program and myself to retire,” Hammerle said. “At this point, the team has a strong foundation of talented, young women who have the potential to be successful. I would like to thank Athletics Director Jim Phillips for his outstanding support throughout the season, as well as the administration, the university, and the community for the opportunity to be part of this program."

That's an interesting way of describing the situation.

Hammerle has produced at least one All-MAC performer in each of the last six seasons---Michele Johnson (Honorable Mention in 1999-2000 and Second-Team in 2000-01), Jennifer Youngblood (Honorable Mention in 2000-01 and 2003-04, plus Second-Team in 2001-02 and 2002-03), Kristan Knake (Honorable Mention in 2001-02), and Stephanie Raymond (Third-Team in 2004-05).

The news coverage of Ms. Raymond's honor is also interesting.

"I was a little disappointed because I was looking at the stat sheet and I thought that I could have been on the second team."

I trust that the athletic department is serious about its intentions to conduct a proper search.

A national search will be conducted for Hammerle’s successor, according to NIU Director of Athletics Jim Phillips.

In the past ten years, young women have been denied the opportunity to develop as players at Northern Illinois University. In both of the previous searches, the search committee hired an individual with a strong record at a lower level of competition who also symbolized the university's commitment to diversifying its staff. But are 350 wins in lower divisions the athletic equivalent of fifty articles in Rivista Internazionale Numero Due di Bovini? Will the outcome of this year's search be more of the same?

DIABOLICAL. Okay ... Welcome, Villainous Company readers.

SAME OLD, SAME OLD. Rockets cash in at foul line to end NIU women's season.

Northern Illinois University head coach Carol Hammerle has talked about a marked foul disparity between the Huskies and their opponents all season.

Perhaps it seemed somehow fitting that the University of Toledo shot 32 free throws while NIU was allowed only half that number during Saturday's first-round game of the Kraft Mid-American Conference Women's Basket-ball Tournament. That gap played a role in the No. 6-seeded Rockets gaining a five-point halftime lead en route to an eventual 76-61 victory over the No. 11-seeded Huskies.

Fitting? Or simply par for the course?

IT'S FICTION. Book Review No. 10 is Philip Roth's The Plot Against America (details or compare prices), a counter-fictional that starts with Charles Lindbergh defeating Franklin Roosevelt in the 1940 Presidential election on a peace platform. President Lindbergh works with Christian nativists and some secret help from the Germans to encourage businesses to engage in Jim Crow practices against Jewish customers, as well as to create an Office of American Absorption to answer the "Jewish question" in the U.S. (Canada along with the rest of the Commonwealth is assisting England and the Soviet Union against Germany) by breaking up Jewish communities, encouraging Jewish families to live amongst Gentiles, and otherwise forcing assimilation. (Mr Roth does not serve up his usual gratuitous sex references.)

Walter Winchell becomes a presidential aspirant in part to reverse the policies of the Lindbergh administration. I do not want to give away too many of the plot details as the resolution is a bit contrived, but the United States does end up in the war on the British and Soviet side, and the postwar world is pretty much the world we know.

People who would like to foster greater understanding among people by compelling association might do well to read those parts of the book, to understand the dynamics that compelled association sets up, some positive, many not. Roth's Office of American Absorption comes off as the oppressive scheme it really is. Will the forced association being contemplated in some Nebraska school districts one day be seen in the same light?

HIGH-TECH DIRIGIBLES. Photon Courier reports that Graf von Zeppelin's concept is enjoying a new life, with carbon-fiber framing and helium (not made available by the U.S. Navy to the German government in the 1930s) providing the lift.

GET A GOOD START AND SAIL ON THE LIFTED TACK. Sailing is fun, and learning to win is rewarding for everybody.

Where she once saw fear and danger, Patricia McLemore now finds serenity and challenge. Serenity comes with the flapping of a sail against the mast, the challenge from carefully steering a sailboat into the harbor.

It's an inner peace that wells up from the feel of the helm and the skills McLemore says she has learned from the sport of sailing.

Read the rest.

RULES WRITTEN IN BLOOD. Book Review No. 9 is 102 Minutes (details or compare prices), which tells the story of the attempts by people trapped inside the World Trade Center to get out.

The book identifies a number of lessons learned from the 1993 bombing in the parking garage, some of which the tenants knew and some -- most notably the decision to lock the doors leading to the roof, despite helicopter rescues in 1993 -- which tenants did not know.

New York's emergency services come in for some criticism, as police and fire radios were not always compatible. Police helicopters noted a weakening of both towers above the crash site but police were unable to get the word to firefighters inside the building. The knowledge that one emergency stairwell in the south tower remained open could not be communicated to people above the crash floors, as the 911 operators did not get the word.

Changes in building design philosophy also come in for some criticism. Apparently tests on the floor trusses established that 70 foot trusses would stand up to fire, but those results did not generalize to the 140 foot trusses actually used. Revisions to building codes that permitted builders to eliminate reinforced fire stairs in order to free up more rentable space might have contributed to occupants' inability to leave, although the optimal provision of reinforced stairs sufficiently dispersed that a single plane crash cannot destroy all of them remains as a project for future research.

FRIDAY RAIL BLOGGING. An Eastern train calls at Specht's Ferry, Iowa on the Fox Valley O Scalers layout.

The baggage car is my work, from an All-Nation kit. The combination car is a Walthers kit that somebody else built. I added the interior to it. The coach is a Sunset ready-to-run with lights and interior.

PROCESS, NUANCE, FAILURE. Newmark's Door picks up a message to National Review's Jay Nordlinger drawing a contrast between the people who Get Things Done and the people who like to show off how clever they are.

[Harvard president and economist Larry] Summers is quintessentially an MIT man (of the post-WWII, pre-1980s MIT, after which things changed). This means he focuses at work on solving complex real-world problems in a limited time with available resources. People who are good at this (they can be engineers or scientists) are both extremely creative and completely realistic. They clarify problems, re-framing them in new ways as necessary, aiming for the best solution possible under the circumstances, recognizing that a better one might come along in the future. They have little interest in or patience with talk for talk's sake, talk that isn't relevant to actions, talk focused primarily on establishing the speaker's self-image and status, and they pretty much tune it out. Since this way of thinking and acting isn't part of the, shall we say, skill set of most of Harvard's Arts and Sciences faculty, they haven't a clue where Summers is coming from. So they assimilate his actions into a more-familiar-to-them model of corporate management and complain about his predilection for "hierarchical decision making" and lack of "collegiality." They focus on process (an essentially bureaucratic perspective, though they have more self-flattering language for it) while Summers focuses on interactions and information that produce solutions to problems.

Milt's File finds a K. C. Johnson post at Inside Higher Education that makes the same point.

Many aspects of this case, of course, are peculiar to Harvard: questions about Summers' efforts to expand the Allston section of the campus; a feeling among many professors that the president has not treated them with appropriate respect; a belief that Summers uses an overly centralized approach in running the university. At Tuesday's faculty meeting, Caroline Hoxby, an economics professor, observed that concern over Summers' management style, not a battle of "right versus left" about political correctness, accounted for the faculty uprising.

The linked post, also on Inside Higher Education, has more.

Lawrence H. Summers, Harvard's embattled president, apologized to faculty members Tuesday not only for his comments about women and science, but for a management style that many have said is too domineering.

There is more to this story than meets the eye. Many faculty members take faculty governance seriously and view attempts by department chairmen, deans, presidents and trustees to expand their powers as actions to be viewed with the most serious, and with the most skeptical attentions. It is also true that many faculty members become involved in faculty governance out of a lack of other things to do, a phenomenon that I have encountered frequently here. It is no accident that many of those individuals are of the age group that Vice President Agnew once referred to as "nattering nabobs of negativism." Many such individuals would rather dither over process and posture, which might be fine if one is conferring honorary degrees or matching donations to naming rights, but it's darned annoying when promotions, tenure, or curriculum are at stake. Yadda yadda yadda ...

But these are the people who become individuals that prevent productive work from being done, and the administrative proliferation in response to assorted "crises" that John in the Shadow of Mt. Hollywood correctly predicts (based on my experience) provides additional opportunities for the vicars of vacillation (another great Agnew reference to that age group) to interfere with the productive work.

Somewhere in my cruising through the posts on tenure I found a post suggesting that some senior academics continue to be helpful by serving on committees. Can't provide a link, sorry, but have to use a pet engineering expression to reply to that: Up. To. A. Point.

YOUNGSTERS CLEAR ON THE CONCEPT. One of the pleasures of operating the Office of Economic Education at Northern Illinois University is the opportunity to run the annual Economics Concepts Poster Contest. The winning and honorable mention entries in the 2004-2005 Regional competition are now available for your viewing pleasure.

KUDOS. Florida State's Sue Semrau has been named ACC Coach of the Year and she joins Kansas State's Deb Patterson, along with many of the usual suspects, on the short list for the Naismith Award.

MORE REASONS TO BE CHEERFUL. The mud-season weight restrictions have been posted on the county roads, and WGN Radio have commenced broadcasts of Chicago Cubs spring-training games.

TIME TO START A LIFE AS WELL AS A CAREER? The Chronicle of Higher Education covers a report recommending changes in the way scholars establish themselves.

In particular, the report says, women are being driven away from careers at research universities because of the lock-step nature of a tenure-track career. That is happening even though women now earn 51 percent of the doctorates conferred by American universities (The Chronicle, December 3). If careers in higher education do not become more flexible, the report says, universities will continue to lose out on talented women, particularly those who want to have children. Already, female faculty members say they are much less satisfied with their jobs than men say they are, according to the report.

Part of the problem is that departments are run by men who "typically have spouses or partners who do not work or work only part time to manage their home lives," says the report. Young faculty members, by contrast, are much more likely to have partners who work. "Consequently, faculty homes with spouses or partners to manage the family and household are becoming obsolete," says the report.

That's the Say Aggregation Principle catching up with young workers, and the problem is not limited to the academy.

Playing School, Irreverently, suggests that the job dissatisfaction is not limited to working moms.

And is that why universities lose female faculty? This bit about wanting to have children assumes that by the time one arrives on campus one has a spouse and is ready to procreate. Or has spouse and kids already. It totally ignores that many new faculty have focused on school, not social lives, for years and then suddenly find themselves uprooted to parts of the country where they know no one. They get a demanding job, and then work either in relative isolation (research, writing) or with people who are not suitable friends/dating material (students, departmental colleagues). No one really seems to pay attention to that problem, but I've known 3 women who have left for that reason ... and it is possible that in a year or two I would make myself a 4th.

So, looking at this proposed tenure delay idea ... can I take 10 years to tenure because I need time to meet men, date, and figure out if I want to get married and/or have a kid? Or because I need to travel long distances regularly to see friends and family in order to be happy? Because if I had a corporate job I'd have made my choice in part based on geography.

And presumably working men would benefit by a similar dispensation. How then to balance the income effect of greater prosperity, which works in favor of shorter and more flexible working hours independently of any explicit policy, against the competition effect, in which the individuals willing to work harder (the most independent men and women, for the most part?) will get to the prizes first? The French solution of legislating a shorter work week has not been particularly successful.

MEEP MEEP! The Carnival of the Capitalists calls at Coyote Blog, who has found the right sponsor for his show.

QUESTION OF THE DAY. A professor who wishes to remain anonymous asks,

Is anyone else bothered that our primary feedback on our work comes from children? I'm talking, of course, about course evaluations. But if you think about it for a minute, it's true: most jobs, you complete a project, someone tells you good job (or should). Moreover, the people who observe and evaluate your work are peers and superiors. In academia, the people who observe and evaluate you on a day-to-day basis are distracted 18-year olds who don't understand what your job actually is.

But they say the most interesting things.

"She expects us to be too mature"
"She expects us to actually be interested in the course material on our own" (this was listed as a "weakness" of mine)
"Professor ... doesn't know how to lecture"
"Too much work on WebCT! I signed up for a lecture course, not a distance learning course"
"I do not pay to hear what other students think. I pay to hear what the instructor thinks"
"Her regionalisms [from a different part of the country] bother me"
"By requiring us to post on WebCT before class, she forced us to do the reading ahead of time, which is very difficult and unfair for students with other obligations."

The post has hit a nerve with the professor's readers, there are lots of comments. That last one is priceless (as if a student lacks the life management skills to include reading ahead of time among other obligations but mirabile dictu finds the time to read afterwards!)

Among the comments is this gem:

"She favors smart students over the regular students which is bias."

Hee hee. Life after college is the revenge of the nerds. Deal. Then there's this:

"She's too smart to be my teacher."

You can't make up stuff like this. And, unfortunately, identity politics has appeared to have poisoned the well.

"This was supposed to be a class on great Victorian literature, but half the writers were women."

Let me guess: George Eliot, assorted Brontes, Jane Austen?

I had some fun with course evaluation comments last summer. The sequel will be this June.

COMPARE AND CONTRAST. David Horowitz gave a talk at St. John's in to the west of the Cities (not to be confused with the old basketball power in New York.) King at SCSU Scholars and P.Z. at Pharyngula offer differing perspectives on the presentation.

I'VE BEEN EVERYWHERE, MAN:

Bold the states you've been to, underline the states you've lived in and italicize the state you're in now...

Alabama / Alaska / Arizona / Arkansas / California / Colorado / Connecticut / Delaware / Florida / Georgia / Hawaii / Idaho^(*) / Illinois / Indiana / Iowa / Kansas / Kentucky / Louisiana / Maine / Maryland / Massachusetts / Michigan / Minnesota / Mississippi / Missouri / Montana^(*) / Nebraska / Nevada / New Hampshire / New Jersey / New Mexico / New York / North Carolina / North Dakota^(*) / Ohio / Oklahoma / Oregon^(*) / Pennsylvania / Rhode Island / South Carolina / South Dakota / Tennessee / Texas / Utah / Vermont / Virginia / Washington / West Virginia / Wisconsin / Wyoming / Washington D.C /

Go HERE to have a form generate the HTML for you.

^(*)Passed through on a train, with perhaps a quick trip into a station for a newspaper.

And yes, I have been at the Four Corners.

FOURTH TURNING ALERT. Dean's World has pictures.

Clearly neither dowdy nor frumpy

There's also a new bumper sticker for your consideration.

IT IS TO LAUGH. Virginia Postrel interviews Claudia Goldin, who introduced me to the principles of economics.

Economists dress one way, and people in the English department dress another way.

Katie at Constrained Vision picks up the thread. Economists have nothing to apologize for.

My English-major roommate often delighted in telling me how the English department was much hotter than the economics department. She was undoubtedly correct, but after reading Goldin and Postrel, I realize now that I should have told her that I prefer substance to style.

Why not go for both ... the ladies of the English department, even the younger ones, epitomize frumpy when they're not epitomizing dowdy, if they're not epitomizing butch. At least that's the case here.

JUST NORTHWEST OF KISHWAUKETOE. Jiblog attended Ward Churchill's speech at Wisconsin-Whitewater, and has pictures and commentary. Scrolling, scrolling, scrolling, keep that pointer moving, Though Blogger's disapproving...

Expect additional sections of this post tomorrow as more correspondents from north of the Cheddar Curtain check in.

SECOND SECTION: Sean at The American Mind was there, and took additional pictures. Brainpost also attended, and filed a report. Charlie Sykes noted that some protestors there to defend Mr Churchill's right to free speech found a prayer vigil for the September 11 dead to be an inappropriate exercise of free speech.

When the minister tried to lead the crowd in prayer in memory of the dead -- they continued the shout down, and largely succeeded in drowning out the prayer.

A speaker with a megaphone performed a rap-left-wing-screed shoutdown all through the prayer and the moment of silence. If his fellow radicals had any sense of shame, it wasn't apparent.

This is beyond boorish. It was hate on display.

Professor Althouse covered the story, more out of obligation than to discover any originality (or perhaps -- check the time stamp -- because even the same old arguments from the left that there are no innocents were insufficient to bore her to sleep?)

I find him incredibly boring, saying the sort of tired old things that radicals have been saying for as long as we can remember. He's getting way too much leverage out of a metaphor, and it's not even an inventive metaphor.

The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel's coverage observes, without commentary, the academy's dodge of excluding controversial speakers for safety reasons.

Media coverage, especially on conservative talk shows, has turned Churchill into a villain for people who believe he's unpatriotic and not using academic freedom responsibly. Some colleges, citing security, have canceled his talks.

You'd think, with all that sensitivity training that goes on in freshman orientation, that campus audiences would be more mannerly. Oh, wait a minute, "mannerly" has hegemonic overtones, doesn't it.

A REPLACEMENT POST. This is a restored post from my saved files. If there's one much like it, stamped one minute earlier, the archives have been fixed.

FOR YOUR LISTENING PLEASURE.

On! Wisconsin!

The UWM Fight Song.

Come on, UWM, come up with a snappy title for this.
Or find a suitable beer-drinking tune to adapt. There's more "fight" in this than there is in a bad campaign speech...

These links will remain at the top of the site until further notice.

DUDE, YOU MEAN THERE'S REALLY, LIKE, DOUBLE SECRET PROBATION? Not quite, but in response to a weekend stabbing near a fraternity house, the Northern Illinois University administration has had a Homer Simpson moment (Homer Simpson and false categorical syllogisms, d'oh!) and placed a moratorium on Greek-letter organizations having parties where adult beverages are sold, pending a review. University officials and representatives from the Greek-letter organizations had a confidential meeting to consider policy changes.

The editorial board at the Northern Star does not like the secrecy.

University officials left Greeks out in the cold this weekend by suspending all alcohol-related events indefinitely; they also left the Northern Star and students out in the cold Monday night by refusing to allow the Star access to a meeting where the past weekend’s events were being discussed.

Administrators refused to let the Star cover the meeting headed by Brian Hemphill, vice president of Student Affairs, and hear what both Greek leaders and NIU officials had to say about the recent stabbing, suspensions and safety on Greek Row.

While administrators didn’t refuse to comment on the matter after the meeting held in the Holmes Student Center’s Capitol South Room, there is no reason why members of the NIU community should be kept in the dark and fed bits and pieces of information that concern more than those sitting around the table at Monday’s meeting.

And although NIU’s intention to remedy a "problem" on Greek Row is good at heart, it is unfair and unjustified to punish the entire Greek system because of an incident that happened in the middle of the street outside a row of fraternity houses.

Reality check. Despite all the talk about "celebrating" diversity and "affirming" alternative life-styles (whatever that means), Greek-letter organizations are not eligible for celebration or affirmation, nor is their "marginalization" cause for concern.