MISPLACED PRIORITIES. The editorial board at the Northern Star, whose writings of late have been too silly to comment on, take a position on Wednesday afternoon football.

For one, the game will be broadcast across the nation on ESPN2, meaning tens of millions of people will have a chance to see Huskie Stadium and the NIU campus on live TV. People need to see a jam-packed stadium filled with loud, passionate fans.

What potential recruit would want to come to NIU if he turns on Wednesday’s game and sees people sitting on their hands in a half-filled stadium? Good recruits usually mean good football teams, and good football teams mean more exposure and more money for NIU. This in turn means a better school for you to attend.

There is so much to fisk here, especially that concluding sentence. But it is not to their silliness I wish to speak. Rather, it is to the silliness of the adults who supposedly run the place.

In an attempt to put more fans in the seats, [director of athletics Jim] Phillips and the athletics department sent an e-mail out to NIU faculty and staff November 4, offering two free tickets to every staff member at NIU. Those tickets are for seats in the student section on the east side of the stadium.

"It was our gesture of good will toward the staff as well as trying to get more people in the stands," said Eric Schultz, director of the ticket office in the Convocation Center. "If they’re staying on campus to work, we’re asking them if they would take a half-day off and come support the team."

A second e-mail went around this morning, repeating the invitation.To repeat:

Under some circumstances I might be willing to take the good director up on his offer, but that Wednesday has been committed for some off-campus research. If he wanted to comp me for a proper 1.30 pm Saturday game my attitude would be different.

And we are supposed to be grateful the scheduling isn't worse.

Before ESPN2 decided to broadcast NIU’s game, the two teams were scheduled to play at 7 p.m. Tuesday night.

Schultz said that NIU is in a better position than Akron and Kent State, who will play at 10:30 a.m. on Thanksgiving on ESPN2.

But those reschedulings have nothing, nothing at all, to do with money. Amateur sport and all that.

IT'S CRUNCH TIME. A story makes the academic rounds about the professor who began a class, "Have any of you ever had a professor who you really thought was mean ... asked too much work ... graded too hard?" Heads begin nodding in agreement. The professor continues, "It has occurred to you that there are some of you we can't stand either?"

Something similar is playing out in print at St. Cloud State. A student, overwhelmed with deadlines, offers the school paper an op-ed.

College is extremely stressful and many drop out. It's difficult to balance a social life with the immense amount of work professors pile onto students.

It gets better.

King at SCSU Scholars fires back.

You later write "Many of those who teach at the college level should not be in a classroom." You know, of course, we say the same thing -- "many of those who attend college should not be in a classroom." And, mirabile dictu, most of you aren't ... until after Thanksgiving.

There's more.

RECEIVING VOTES IN THE COACHES' POLL. Truth Laid Bear's Sunday "Top Posts" includes a link to my free-association about the exit strategy in Iraq and the American Civil War. (Gulp. I do all sorts of serious stuff and then get recognized for straying from my area of expertise. Reminds me of the day I was entrusted with organizing morning clean-up of the cabin at summer camp, didn't take the task too seriously, and the cabin won the cleanliness prize for the day. Maybe there is something to lightening up.) Thanks for the recommendation. That post may have been a bit flip about Blogs for Industry's victory condition; he elaborates here. That's about as unambiguous as the mission statement at No End but Victory.

All the same, the war-related discussion in the saner parts of the blogosphere leaves open the possibility of a resolution satisfactory to the saner elements of the peace faction and the victory faction. For my part, it doesn't matter who claims credit afterward. Continuing the Civil War analogy, some rump of the Ba'ath party or the Iraqi al-Qaeda is likely to hang on much like bits of the secesh army and the Klan did, for a long time after. That's something we've had some practice with taming. The part of the discussion that I prefer to focus on involves establishing sufficient police, Iraqi military, and legitimate government agencies in place to deal with such things that the U.S. no longer has to garrison the place. That's a theme I've heard out of the Bush administration and the opposition alike. That simply says you meet a set of objectives prior to withdrawal, rather than a timeline. Blogs for Industry sees a problem there.

The Senators are asking for a plan with a level of detail that is not useful...except to Senators looking for a way to claim credit for success and blame others for failure if details are not met.

Or perhaps for a way to fulfill a campaign promise? Perhaps "stand up an Iraqi government" might be an ill-posed criterion for performance.

SWITCHING OUT THE GLOUCESTER BRANCH. It's been a while since I've posted any model pictures. Here's an operating session. The layout dead-ends in a corner. In this case, that's exactly what happens at Rockport, Massachusetts, with the Atlantic Ocean rather than the basement walls constraining further extension.


You are looking at a four-track passenger station, a freight house, and a few industry tracks. Behind the camera is the balloon track for Rockport. Yes, a prototype railroad really used a John Armstrongesque reverted loop to turn commuter trains. There is an escape track in the passenger station long enough for one locomotive, and a runaround track that will handle seven cars. I dragged ten cars and a buggy out of Rockport.

Here, the train has finished its work at Gloucester and Everett and is about to go into the lower staging loop.


The power is a Locomotive Workshop Britannia metal cast body on a stretched Atlas F unit chassis. I paid $25 for it at a swap meet and beefed up the transmission a bit. It's a good runner. I do have the detail parts and decals to make this into a believable representation of a Bangor and Aroostook engine.


Ten cars later comes the buggy. The tracks in the foreground go to what I call the Harbor Branch. It's not quite accurate for the Eastern Route of the Boston and Maine, but it adds play value in a smallish basement.

THE NEED FOR SPEED. DoDo's Monday Train Blogging for November 15 highlights the fastest passenger trains, including a note that the German ICE-3 sets, which offer first-class passengers the second best railfan seat in railroading, are authorized 330 km/h (a bit over 200 mph) when recovering time. Some of the discussion there focuses on the opportunity costs of the high-speed service. Apparently the freight service and the branch passenger trains get short shrift. On the other hand, the recently-arrived Great Western issue of Railway showed a Class 66 being tested in France. Condensed SD70s on the Western Front, Dash-8s in Estonia, bring on the Armour yellow.

I mentioned the railfan seat. The best one looks like this. (The Germans are probably relieved that there are no level crossings of the high-speed lines.) And, continuing an earlier conversation, look what I found in La Locomotive a Vapeur, which is a useful technical reference for the erecting shop downstairs.


This is a speed tape M. Chapelon obtained after a cab ride on the northbound Hiawatha on November 8, 1938. The consist is the Four-Spot with nine on. That's a heavier train, which will affect its braking and acceleration. The A class were optimized for a seven-car train. It's a routine run all the same, with the train reaching cruising speed north of Morton Grove, checking to 90 or so for the diamonds at Rondout, checking again for the State Line curve at Russell. (One of these days I must research the history of the survey of the Northwest Territories. None of the north-south section roads line up across 42^o 30' N. There is also a jog in I-94 at Russell Road.) Then a sustained acceleration of a heavy train with a few miles run at 100-plus north of A-68 and the hard checking downhill from Lake into the curves and drawbridges leading into Milwaukee.

THINKING ABOUT EXIT STRATEGIES. Blogs for Industry appears to endorse the idea of declaring victory in Iraq and going home once there is a victory. Fruits and Votes offers a somewhat different victory condition. Both posts bring to mind memories of the American Civil War. Fruits and Votes sees this source of tribal antagonisms.

The elected majority leadership has little incentive to restrain its majoritarianism and its corresponding marginalization of the Sunnis as long as it has what looks like an open-ended commitment from the US.

Radical Republicans during the early stages of Reconstruction, anyone? On the other hand, is it too much of a stretch to draw parallels between Sunnis reclaiming some political power and the long, simmering insurgency that mutated into Jim Crow? (That insurgency, incidentally, despite the surrender terms agreed to by Lee and by Johnston, both of whom dreaded the idea of taking to the hills and resisiting.)

The analogy is not perfect. Emperor Maximilian, even with French help, along the southern border of the old Confederacy is not the same sort of challenge Iran, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Turkey bordering Iraq, each with a different interest in the resolution of the tribal antagonisms, pose to an over-the-horizon force maintained by the U.S.

THIS APPEARS TO BE A LINE RELOCATION. Midwest Conservative Journal now appears to be here. The previous site is still current.

WHAT'S COOKING, DOC? Tonight it's homegrown salsa. Here's the first jar decanted. My tip for quickly peeling tomatoes: put them in the freezer for half an hour, then drop them in boiling water. The skins rupture.

You are looking at the results of three hours of simmering. The salsa is in the rear pot. The front pot has boiling water for sterilizing the jars.


Here's the finished product. Two large jars, four small jars, and a little bit left over for a treat once the dishes are put away.


I really must invest in a better digital camera. The inspection sample is in a genuine Tony Packo's chili bowl, and the picture doesn't do the logo justice.

THAT FAVORITE NUMBER IS 4800 OR 6100.

You're the Pennsylvania Railroad!

Old and established, you have incredible skills of self-advancement which you have put to great use. While many admire the ends that you've achieved, there are those who know your means have been dubious. But in the glory you've created, you believe quite strongly that the ends justify the means. Secretly, you've always wanted to have a mohawk.


Take the Trains and Railroads Quiz
at RMI Miniature Railroads.

Heck, if these guys have already taken it, I'd best.

RUNNING EXTRA. The bill of lading is in error. As a commenter notes, the site text for The Pennsylvania Railroad reads,

Considered to be standard in all ways, you try to set the tone for those around you. Aspiring to push the limits of what others think you can accomplish, you would be a good candidate to aim for the Guinness Book of World Records. With a long history of success and prosperity, you will have a full life. If you were a stone in a building, it would be the keystone. Your favorite number is 65000.

I think the Interstate Commerce Commission ought to look into this.

THE ECONOMICS OF PROFESSING ECONOMICS. I'm not sure what the economics departments are doing differently from other disciplines, such that their Ph.D.s face better odds in the job market and in the face of state-mandated retrenchments, administrators must devote some of the resources they'd rather apply to expense-preference behavior to keeping economists from leaving.

Professor DeLong notes,

Economics Departments appear to have made a conscious collective decision (I still can't figure out how) to downsize their graduate programs in the 1970s--to accept smaller numbers of teaching assistants and larger class sizes in order not to be churning out Ph.D.s for which academic jobs would be absent. Then the explosion of business schools created a large additional demand for economists. Then the expansion of world finance created a host of other jobs--in the Federal Reserve, at the IMF, in private-sector banks--that economists could fill.

That last sentence confirms what the anonymous community college dean suspected about private employment opportunities for Ph.D. economists. The "conscious collective decision" might be no more than an upward-sloping supply curve at work. I started graduate school in the mid-1970s (applied to four programs you'd recognize, got into three, had offers of aid from two.) All I can tell you is what went down at Wisconsin, where the admissions and aid committee made fewer offers of aid as the soft money dwindled (reduced spending on poverty research, fewer grants funded by National Science Foundation.) To some extent that committee may have attempted to extrapolate likely demand for courses requiring teaching assistants over the four years entering students might expect aid. Other departments might have made similar calculations, but that's a purely neoclassical response to changing incentives. No cartel is necessary.

Focus, now, on this statement from Dean Dad.

The big state universities couldn’t survive if they paid full-time salaries to everybody who teaches freshman comp.

Phrase it slightly differently.

The big state universities would be hard-pressed to offer the same in-state tuition discounts if they offered 40 person sections of their core courses taught by regular faculty with research opportunities.

That includes introductory economics. Economics is rarely a major of first choice for people. Sure, there are the Alan Greenspan wannabes and there's nothing like an energy crisis to get people listening, but the reality for economics faculty at any institution with an undergraduate business program is the provision of lots of spaces for pre-business students to complete their economics prerequisites. The term of art the college uses is "service" courses, which those of us with some knowledge of animal husbandry find slightly amusing.^(*) The situation is not much different at institutions with no undergraduate business program. Students have a greater propensity to do an economics major because they perceive it as somehow cognate to business (it isn't). Getting the more careerist of those majors excited about the finer points of game theory or the Welfare Economics Paradigm is a struggle. Where the undergraduate business program has admission standards, the economics program serves that cognate purpose, with a somewhat different set of motivational challenges. As business enrollments grow, more students take the service courses. As business admission standards tighten, more students pursue the cognate major.

So how, then, to cheaply offer lots of slots for those principles students? On one hand, the department could hire lots of tenure-trackers whose primary task is to offer two to five sections of introductory economics a semester, and charge a high tariff, or, if a state university, hit the legislature up for a bigger subsidy. On another, the department could hire fewer tenure-trackers, rotate the responsibility to staff the service courses, find large rooms to offer them, hire apprentices to handle most of the routine questions and the grading, and use the proceeds to subsidize opportunities for those tenure-trackers to occasionally conduct an advanced class with somewhat more connections to the cutting edge of economics research, where there is no dearth of interesting, incompletely answered questions. (I think we have to appeal to one of those Japanese demons with more than two hands here, as there are other models available.)

The second approach is one more likely to appeal to aspiring faculty members. The service courses become a necessary evil one can be induced to do with the promise of additional merit money for larger enrollments (our approach) or overload adjustments (the large course counts as two or more courses taught.) Either method of compensation satisfies overseers whose metric is enrollments or student-credit-hours-per-faculty-member. (If your metric is classroom hours per faculty member, we have ways of adapting to that as well.) The overseers get their productivity, the pre-business students get serviced, and the faculty members get to teach in their areas of expertise. (There are derivative consequences of this outcome, involving a general disinterest among economics faculty in improving the content of introductory economics courses, but that's tangential.)

It's not too much of a stretch to then set up a graduate program in any university with an undergraduate enrollment of over 10,000, using the service courses to simultaneously subsidize the graduate program and lower instruction costs. In economics, there appears to be a rough balance between Ph.D. production and hiring. The forty departments claiming to be among the top 25 turn out tenured faculty for each other, for the other Ph.D. programs, and for the more famous private colleges. The remaining Ph.D. granting departments will turn out the occasional tenure tracker for each other, for the Upwardly Mobile departments not yet ready to commit to a Ph.D., and to less-famous private colleges that sometimes have long-term working relationships with such departments. (Believe me, if you're running a department in a solid if not well-known small college, you do NOT want Harvard's or MIT's tail-end Charlie on your tenure track. There are other pitfalls, but that would be digressing.)

I'm not persuaded, however, that the existence of government and private-sector opportunities for economists suffices to explain the near-continuous market clearing of the job market for economists, and the lack of clearing elsewhere. The opportunities to offer service courses to subsidize doctoral programs appear to be better in two of the disciplines with the tightest job markets. Introductory economics is a required course for business, engineering, and a few other majors, and relatively few of those students will take additional economics. Freshman composition is for everybody, and history of some kind or other frequently turns up in the general education requirements. College enrollments have been rising. Until employers rebel against paying a premium for unproductive credentials, the incentive for people to give college a shot will be present.

Furthermore, the upper division courses in other fields offer more play value for curious students than upper division economics, where there are lots of calculus story problems with the calculus hidden.

Conclusion: why other disciplines have not balanced new production with new hires as effectively as economics mystifies me.

^(*)The college is thinking of definition (4) or (5), we prefer (12).

WHAT, NO DENUNCIATIONS OF CLASSISM?

Joanne Jacobs finds local coverage of the Great Divide between Cheeseheads and Coasties at Wisconsin.

Of the 28,217 undergraduates at UW-Madison, 58% are from Wisconsin and 11% are from Minnesota.
Most of the other 31% come from Illinois, New York, California and New Jersey. These students form a distinct demographic, and are often clumped under the all-purpose category: Coasties.
Their tuition - $20,280 a year - is substantially higher than what students from Wisconsin and Minnesota pay, $6,280 and $7,802. That makes them more likely to come from wealthier families.

(Note the rationality at work. Although that $20,280 is notionally full fare, using arbitrary accounting allocations of unallocable joint costs, it's still cheaper, even with room and board, than four years at one of the Ivies, and with better football -- and hockey -- teams, and a larger pool of hook-up buddies. Since money is fungible, Wisconsin taxpayers are subsidizing well-to-do parents from other states, as well as the intellectual development of their own best and brightest, many of whom, like me, will draw paychecks in Greater Chicago.)

The Coasties apparently are a recognizable sub-species, worthy of satire at Hallowe'en.

The stereotypes go something like this:
Coasties are snobs who self-segregate in private dorms and the Greek system.
Wisconsin students are provincial and unwilling to accept outsiders.
Students say the rivalry is lighthearted and that friendships form across the divide.
"We just like to make fun of each other," Bach said.

The Diversity Weenies are aware of the situation.

Even so, the divisions are now addressed at freshman orientation, and some students say they feel as if they are attending separate universities.

But not quite ready to add new re-education sessions.

Lori Berquam, dean of students, described the cultural conflict on campus as "good-natured," and a lot of students agree.
But Wren Singer, director of orientation and new student programs, takes it seriously. At freshman orientation, students are prodded into discussions of "stereotypes of coastal culture vs. Midwest culture," Singer said.
"Most people think about ethnic diversity, people from different races," she said. "But I think it's much more likely that a freshman would make a derogatory comment about someone from the East Coast than someone of color."

To some extent, there's nothing new about this. My mom is among the six percent from the poorest quartile to finish college -- this during and immediately after World War II -- and to this day she'll gripe about Coasties who would flag down a taxi to go to class on a cold morning.

OCCUPATIONAL BIRTH CONTROL? Welcome, Suburban Dad readers. In addition to my post on the consequences of mistreating economists, this post on economics course content and this on the misplaced priorities of university administrations might be of interest. The Semi-Daily Journal offers some thoughts on the economics department cartel.

[D]eans appeal to all kinds of social-solidarity and other motives to discourage professors in other disciplines from bargaining hard for higher salaries and fishing for outside offers. In Economics, by contrast, responsiveness to market forces is a moral imperative.

Ayup.

I do intend to offer a longer response to Dean Dad's queries, but first, some dossiers to look through (we're hiring!) and a teaching committee meeting (the "why am I here?" committee) to attend. Back this evening, before after the concerts. (Lots of good music around here, and the only opportunity cost is the grading or perhaps the shuffling of freight cars that gets left undone.) I do want to say a few words about "service" courses and the Faustian bargain they present for economics departments, from the perspective of a not-quite-successful-enough-for the bigs researcher with some occasional good things to say about life in the mid-majors.

NORTHERN WISCONSIN OCCUPIED BY 200,000 HEAVILY ARMED MEN. Don't panic, it's deer season. There was a skim of ice on the duck pond and the decorative drainage ditches this morning. Next week, I shall give thanks for a bit of down-time.

I STILL HATE WEDNESDAY NIGHT FOOTBALL. It's a bad concept. But if the kids have to play the games, let's enjoy what we can, such as Northern Illinois 35, Toledo 17, ending a losing streak that goes back to the fall of the Berlin Wall.

THE GALES OF NOVEMBER. Winter makes for interesting radio listening. My usual Milwaukee station cuts power at sunset, but distant legacy clear-channel broadcasting stations often come in five-by-five. Tonight, it's WWL out of New Orleans, reporting on continued troubles recovering from the storms. Tonight's weather forecast has a dew point of 22 (F) with an overnight low of 39 and strong northeast winds, not the best conditions for roughing it in a tent or a partially-rebuilt house.

FINDING THOSE MISSING SCHOLARS. University Diaries discovers the relatively light teaching schedules of the economics faculty at the University of Virginia.

Let us deconstruct this very postmodern phenomenon.

You’re proud of attending U Va because it has a world-class, famous economics department.

But almost all of its economists of stature are absent.

Hence you may boast that X and Y teach at your school. You just can't learn anything from them.

I paid the site a visit and offered a comment.

The departments that would like some research visibility have to make it worthwhile for their faculty to do research. Economics is one field that does not suffer from the overproduction of Ph.D.s, and doing good work is not as easy as it looks. The department that wants greater visibility has to pay for it. Deans don't like it, but when they don't pony up, the ambitious people leave.

This comment appears to square with a report in the Cavalier Daily, unless the first word of the paper's name is an adjective, not a noun.

"Top-ranked universities are hiring very aggressively," [economics chairman David] Mills said. "Duke, Columbia and NYU are taking people that we would like to hire."

The deans have a history of not ponying up.

The problem at the University was exacerbated by a University-wide hiring freeze put into place in 2001 that did not end until recently. During the hiring freeze, the economics department had a net loss of about two faculty members a year.

You would think that people who talk the talk about supply curves sloping upward would walk the walk. The employer has to respond with better pay or better working conditions.

To lure and retain economics faculty members, the University has begun to offer additional benefits not available to the faculty at large, [associate dean Karen] Ryan said. One such change includes cutting the teaching load from four courses a year to three because professors are attracted to the opportunity to do more research.

Cutting teacher course loads creates an additional strain on the number of students who are able to take economics classes.

In order to make up for fewer classes taught by full-time faculty, the University has adapted by bringing in adjunct professors, Ryan said.

Whether that last sentence heralds the camel's nose inside the tent, with future deans compelling the tenure trackers in economics to teach more or authorizing adjunct, teaching-only lines in lieu of tenure trackers remains to be seen. But that will bring tradeoffs of its own.

My comment prompted two thoughtful responses. The proprietor of University Diaries noted,

But if UVa's administration wants to hand out high salaries - courtesy, to some degree, of the state's taxpayers - to faculty, some of whom, by my reckoning at least, undercompensate students and thus the state in terms of teaching (and undercompensate the whole institution in terms of all sorts of other goods that aren't there when the faculty isn't there with any reliability), that's something else again.

On the other hand, legislative cost-cutting has the potential to turn Mr Jefferson's university into someplace where the harried teachers of additional, larger classes might at best be reading somebody else's interpretation of Mr Jefferson's thinking, rather than expanding on it themselves. Here's an abridged list of publications from Virginia's economics department. You think anybody has the final say on unilateral divorce or teen pregnancy or predatory pricing?

Professor Soltan also suggested, citing a Business Week editorial, that a research-intensive, partially (or fully?) -privatized, former public university undoes "the purpose of public higher education." Business Week puts it,

At the same time, creeping privatization accelerates a broader movement by the top 100 or so flagships to hike their tuitions at a double-digit rate. The result is that a public good designed to give all Americans access to higher ed is turning into something more like a private one, open primarily to those whose families can afford it.

There's nothing new about that. Burton Weisbrod and W. Lee Hansen identified the state university system of California as a large regressive transfer (subsidized higher education for the children of the rich, as well as subsidized human capital investment for future rich) over thirty years ago. (Springer will sell you a copy of a comment on the original article, which may be out there somewhere.) Current research (.pdf) suggests the subsidy is still present.

Over three decades ago Hansen and Weisbrod (1969) published a pioneering study of questions similar to these for the state of California. A key finding of their study was that “Public subsidies for higher education in California tend to go disproportionately to students from relatively high income families and are received in quite different amounts by people even within given income classes” (p. 84). Much has changed in California over the ensuring period; the population has grown more racially diverse, the public system has continued to grow in size and stature, and the economy of the state has changed. Yet postsecondary enrollments in the state are still distributed disproportionately in the three sectors.

Although Business Week suggests higher education has public good properties, that proposition is by no means incontrovertible. Perhaps all the spillover benefits of education can be credited to kindergarten, meaning the benefit to a degree holder is a purely private benefit. (The fact that the most popular major these days is business strongly reinforces that claim.) In such a case, there is no reason for the taxpayers to provide subsidies to raise the salaries of those who finish. Where did I see that news article about rich parents sending their kids to Flagship State rather than one of the expensive U.S. News-ranked privates? The same elusive research faculty, better football teams, and a larger pool of hook-up buddies to boot! (I know, cost-benefit is so dispassionate. It might also be the only way to have done with watered down curricula to keep legacy alumni happy and donating money, but I digress.)

But that still leaves unresolved what the universities ought do about those missing professors. Clearly, Virginia's attempt to drive down the wages of its research stars persuaded many to polish up their latest manuscripts and their curriculum vitae and shop the latter to institutions happy to claim affiliation in print on the former. (Mid-majors like that, too. I know.) On the other hand, to leave the required class scutwork to temporaries or to cancel classes is not right. Timothy Burke made that observation.

You say to undergraduates, "Come for the world-class departments!" but the world-class portion of the department is essentially invisible and inaccessible to the undergraduates. So why are the undergraduates there? So that they can get a degree with a major from an institution known to have a world-class department in their area of study--but it's the credential they're buying, then, not anything like actual teaching.

Charlie Sykes made that point in ProfScam long ago. The way in which Flagship State makes the hotshots available to the frosh, if they make such an effort at all, is to count an 800 person lecture as four courses. Then a lot of people can download the hotshot's Power Points (worst case scenario) or perhaps get a few minutes of face time during office hours. It's a good point, but as Professor Burke noted on his own site (with respect to a different problem),

Let’s suppose, however, that there is a tipping point out there somewhere, that higher education is moving towards a collective calamity in its pricing. What would it take for colleges and universities to start reducing their costs and lowering the price? For one, many institutions would have to do it at the same time. That’s because lowering the price is going to involve shucking off at least some of the product being made available. Doing that unilaterally is likely to be suicidal, especially among the top-end institutions. How to coordinate that movement without running afoul of antitrust collusion is a big issue in its own right.

The Virginia legislature is learning that lesson, as are several other state legislatures. The terms the legislature would like to offer, which Mr Sykes endorses (ProfScam, p. 258) imply a wage cut and a shift to a less preferable workload for the best (or best-situated?) researchers. (Professor Burke is contemplating the possibility of tuition-payers rebelling against tuition increases. I envision the real customers, namely the employers, rebelling against unprepared graduates first. Either of those developments would render moot much of the positional competition for researchers.) Impounding the demand for college degrees in ceteris paribus, the problem is one of achieving some sort of cost savings without antagonizing the most mobile faculty. I'm going to have to look at the consequences of those two-tier wage schedules at the legacy airlines from 20 years ago...

But there is another downside to keeping the most famous faculty out of the classroom. Martin Anderson's Impostors in the Temple refers to the use in their place of the young to teach the young as "venal." It is. Professor Burke is correct to refer to the promotion of world-class departments as bait-and-switch. It is furthermore a delegation of the most important teaching responsibilities ... introducing new students to the complexities of a new field ... to the least experienced practitioners, or to individuals not given the respect and compensation of a long-term position. (Imagine flight school taught by somebody who finished ground school three months ago, and cringe.) The best-intentioned of beginners are going to have troubles distinguishing a profound but ill-posed question from a clueless one, and tactfully dealing with both. The best-intentioned freeway flyers may be too stressed. Granted, a student who gets by the first two years of cattle-call classes is likely to have much more access to the famous experienced professor in a junior or senior level class. But what do we know about the sources of attrition in the first two years?

And thus, the problem. Experienced scholars are valuable. Valuable people are valuable because they have opportunities to be valuable to others. That gives them leverage to negotiate pay and working conditions more to their liking. To criticize them for doing so, and to propose that they be forced to accept lower pay and worsened working conditions, might assuage an editorial writer's sense of outrage, but it will not lower the student's tuition bill or speed up his or her graduation date. But to pretend that the experienced scholars are doing something they are not is also a scam.

SIGNS OF A SICK INDUSTRY? More straight talk from the dean at Anonymous Community.

I’d strongly advise against targeting a career as a college history professor. That’s not to say that adjuncting would be out of the question – those opportunities look to be plentiful for the foreseeable future – but I wouldn’t give up the day job.

The reasons have nothing to do with your ability, about which I know nothing. They have to do with the job market in the field, the length of training involved, and the opportunity costs.

The job market for history professors is dreadful, and has been for a generation. In fact, you can strike the word ‘history’ from that sentence and replace it with any liberal-arts discipline without invalidating the meaning. It’s absurdly difficult to find full-time work on which you could make an adult wage. I consider that unlikely to change, since the combination of increased vocationalism among students (the single largest undergraduate major in the US is business), cost pressures on colleges, and the repeal of mandatory retirement for tenured faculty means the only way for colleges to cut substantial costs is through hiring freezes.

All too true. (And those business degrees are in many cases noisy signals of true ability.) The Phantom Professor notes sickness in the working conditions as well, in a setting far removed from community college.

A new workout facility recently opened on the campus where I taught. It’s a marvel, complete with skylights, indoor climbing wall, indoor lap pool, water wall, state-of-the-art weight machines. You name it, they have the dernier cri of health club paraphernalia. To pay for this thing, the school raised tuition 6 percent over the past two years.

Elsewhere on campus, in many of the classrooms, students still sit on cracked plastic half-desks purchased in the 1960s. Ceiling tiles are missing in every building except the very newest. Water fountains don’t work. The main library is beset with mold and mildew. Air-conditioning and heat sputter under the cutting edge technology of the Reagan era.

But those things sit low on the list of repairs when surveys of prospective students reveal that a slick health club-like facility for doing squats, lunges and sit-ups a few times a week is a high priority when the country club kids are deciding which school to attend.

The unanswered question is whether the show rather than the substance is evolutionarily stable. (We have some of the same problems here. The space the deans grabbed for their unfinished showplace for legislators and corporate donors has doors with brass handles for future Monarchs of the Sea to polish up and other upscale trappings. The rest of the building, including the elevator lobby, still has the patched institutional ceramic tile walls and some recently broken ceiling tiles, casualties of the attempt to put 10 foot particle board desk tops onto an 8 foot tall elevator.)

Phantom also has a rather jaded view of enrollment management.

Early in the fall semester, departments throw tailgate parties and homecoming brunches to attract more students as majors. These are fun things to do and being a “fun major” is emphasized above all else.

Too much course work isn’t fun. Assignments and exams too numerous? Get rid of finals. Eliminate Friday classes. Dumb it all down and they will come. It will be more fun. Go drinking with your classes. Order in pizzas. Give more “group project” assignments that will let the strong lead the weak to higher grades. That's fun.

Want fries with that? There are market tests. Perhaps the Afghan unhappy with his experience at Yale was looking out the window the day the Principle of Derived Demand went up. Combine that with "economies of scale," an idea that ought to precede the von Neumann-Morgenstern utility function in the curriculum, and Yale's preparation of economics majors for the Wall Street banking houses, whether there's an element of fun, or not, makes a bit more sense. The student is not the consumer, the banking house, or the Fed's Board of Governors, or (for the adventurous) the economics faculty is.

APPLIED AND PRACTICAL ARTS. A participant in Slate's College Week asks, Will Econ Help Me Protect Afghanistan From Warlords?

For a long time I wanted to be an Econ major. But the other day I was sitting in one of my core economics classes at Yale—a huge class filled with overachievers sitting in the front row furiously jotting down notes and jocks huddled up in the back making obnoxious sounds, laughing at their own jokes (and in case you're curious, I sit somewhere in the middle)—going over the von Neumann-Morgenstein utility function, when a thought popped up: When am I ever going to need this? Sure, plenty of college students wonder this during a dull lecture. But in this case I was studying Econ: Knowing this stuff was actually pretty useful—if you planned on going into investment banking in New York. For Afghanistan, this seemed to be a little ways away.

What follows is even more instructive.

Part of my new dislike for Econ has to do with the difference between Yale and community college. At Diablo Valley College, my economics professor was a World Bank official who had experience everywhere from Yemen to India, and plenty of time—and the interest—to sit with me and discuss economic development in Afghanistan. Before I left, somebody warned me that the professors at "big-name" universities would not be the same.

That's proven to be the case, to some degree. Plenty of professors are great in the classroom. For others—especially some of the bigger names—teaching seems to be the last thing on their mind. One of my professors walks into class and starts copying down on the board exactly what he has given to us as notes, downloadable online from our class server—most of my friends don't see the point in coming to that class (and usually don't).

Read it all. Left as an exercise: would his experience be any different in any other major?

OUR NEIGHBORS AT WAR. Last Friday's Veteran's Day ceremonies at Northern Illinois included recognition of a few of our students recently returned from theater. Although this post is a bit delayed, as DJ at Polipundit notes, Veteran's Day ought not be given token notice. Go there for additional links.

One of the speakers at the local ceremonies noted that Congress has not been funding medical care for disabled veterans as generously as it might. Our medical technology and our armor enable people to survive injuries that were previously fatal, often at the loss of eyes or limbs. It makes sense for the medical care budgets to reflect those changes.

SLACKERS HAVE RIGHTS, TOO. Marquette Warrior has a bit of schadenfreude at the abortive "Student Bill of Rights" mooted for the University of Wisconsin System.

It certainly paints an unflattering picture of the University of Wisconsin system, however. That system acts the way we expect large bureaucracies to act when they are free of the tonic effect of real competition. It’s true that there are plenty of private colleges in Wisconsin, but they don’t get the massive direct taxpayer subsidy of UW system campuses. Thus parents who don’t want to make huge contributions toward tuition, and students who don’t want to pile up a lot of debt, are going to favor a UW campus.

Ouch.

QUOTE OF THE DAY. Joanne Jacobs, with the latest discovery of higher education's high defect rate.

Many students going to college haven't taken college-prep classes in high school. They haven't learned to write a research paper. They have trouble reading college-level texts. They haven't mastered enough math to handle science, business or engineering classes. So they get discouraged and drop out.

Ah, but it's the warm fuzzies that "access" gives the administrators, and the additional work for the "retention" offices, that count, not whether anybody is actually learning.

DISAGREEING, WITHOUT BEING DISAGREEABLE. The dean at Anonymous Community self-identifies a post as a rant.

Since Bush took office on his mission from God, we’ve lost two towers, one side of the Pentagon, the respect of the world, trillions of dollars, 2000+ American soldiers, the bill of rights, and a major Southern city. We’ve started a war we didn’t need to, for reasons that weren’t true, and committed felonies to silence those who blew the whistle. We’ve specifically targeted Social Security, which (not to put too fine a point on it) has been the single most successful anti-poverty program in the history of civilization. We’ve tortured the helpless, on camera, and smiled in the photos. We’ve resurrected Soviet-era gulags, in the name of freedom.

That does peg the rant-meter, doesn't it? A commenter to the post objects. The bull session remains civil, despite one rather silly post that came in not too long ago. The post does have a point, though, in questioning the use of the term "conservative" to describe many of the Administration's initiative. Tammy Bruce is thinking along similar lines.

I've contended for ages now that President Bush is a Classical Liberal who happens to be a man of faith. You liberals out there should moderate your criticism of him--he is actually spending more on social program than President Johnson did on the failed "Great Society" push.

Of course, that attitude in general will bankrupt this country and make it look more and more like France. Something at this stage even liberals might wince at. It is certainly not an image or reality we want to pursue.

I think she means "Crolyist liberal" but that's rivet-counting. Social Security as successful anti-poverty program, though? A canard. Quoting myself, in October 2004:

[A] lot of people are going to hit 70 only to discover that multiple Congresses have drained the so-called trust fund dry.

The word is spreading.

STEP RIGHT UP. Carnival of the Capitalists goes to college at Entrepreneurial Mind this week. Posts organized as if they might be reserve readings in various commerce courses. Carnival of Education 51₍₈₎ returns to winter quarters at The Education Wonks. Teaching Carnival Three, a relatively new carnival hosted by Scrivenings, offers a focus on the trials and tribulations of the higher (?!?) learning, presents a menagerie of student follies, a sideshow of technological fixes, and plenty of patter to keep the townies occupied. There are a number of posts from anonymous academic types who can be more free with the war stories than I dare to be. Check it out.

M. BASTIAT, CALL YOUR OFFICE. Hurricane rips up Gulf Coast. Lots of fallen trees. Sawmills have lots of work, but not enough to support an unprofitable branch line. Governor jawbones railroad into keeping the branch open. Destination Freedom sees the outcome as creating jobs.

Technorati tags: hurricane katrina, bastiat's broken window.

TRANSACTION COSTS. Timothy Burke has a bad day shopping. Frequent buyer clubs and extended-warranty plans provide great irritation.

Leafblower bought from dying chain store. Guy who rings me up: “Your leafblower comes with a two-year warranty, but for a mere…” Me: “I don’t buy extra warranty coverage, thanks.” Him: “I haven’t finished yet.” Me: “I’m not interested, thanks.” Him: “It’s only $30.00 [about 25% of the purchase price] for an additional two years of coverage, with free replacement of your blower in the last two years of coverage if anything goes wrong.” Me: Silent stare. Him: “So shall I add the protection plan?” Me: “No.” Him: “It’s a great deal.”

Yes, it is a great deal, for the store. The very fact that it makes the offer strongly suggests the protection plan is a sucker's bet. That leaf-blower will most likely fail during the regular warranty or some time after the protection plan expires, where "some time" might mean that thing is blowing leaves right up to the Big Crunch.

I, too, find many of the offers of stuff that securitizes future failures of the appliance annoying. There must be a theorem in economics somewhere to the effect that a leaf blower bundled with a chance of failure must be inferior to a leaf blower bundled with a contingent claim in case it fails. That sounds like a step toward the Arrow-Debreu states of the world economy. (Sorry, that last sentence is a bit Teutonic. We're dealing with claims contingent on different outcomes, or states of the world, not globalization.)

So the complete Arrow-Debreu model can be said to apply when goods are identified by when they are to be delivered, where they are to be delivered, and under what circumstances they are to be delivered, as well as their intrinsic nature. So there would be a complete set of prices for contracts such as "1 ton of Winter red wheat, delivered on 3rd of January in Minneapolis, if there is a hurricane in Florida during December". A general equilibrium model with complete markets of this sort seems to be a long way from describing the workings of real economies.

Quite so, because the Great Separating Hyperplane apparently allocates no resources to drafting the contracts and valuing the contingent claims. Fading Department will write an incomplete contract for "1 leaf blower, delivered November 13 somewhere in the east, with repair or replacement if you have paid $30 and we're still around to honor the contract when the blower fails."

IT'S HOW YOU PHRASE IT. Pay for performance gets results. Skip at The Sports Economist finds a report that casts that finding in a positive light. Playing School, Irreverently finds a different report with a similar conclusion, if less felicitously phrased.

FREETHINKERS HALL. Many German Freethinkers emigrated to the United States after the 1848 revolution failed. One such congregation remains active in Wisconsin to this day, the Sauk City Freie Gemeinde, currently the Free Congregation of Sauk City in the Unitarian tradition.

NOTICE OF LINE RELOCATION. The Country Pundit has moved to new permanent way, and the color scheme is classic Norfolk and Western. He has also identified a new source of Company Mail called The Rip Track, managed by a professional railroader who is not pleased with Amtrak's board firing president David Gunn. Just keep scrolling. Go here as well.

(A note for non-rail readers. The Rip Track is not to be confused with the scrap line. The way I learned it, RIP is an acronym, Repair In Place. That's where the rail equivalent of the walking wounded go for replacement of hardware and return to service without a trip to the main shops.)

HOOSIER CHANCELLOR? There's something wrong at Indiana University. Inside Higher Ed characterizes it as a "faculty revolt." Developing ...

NOVEMBER, REMEMBERED. November 10, 1975 was not a good day to be attempting a passage on Lake Superior. An early-season Panhandle Hooker brought some big winds with it, and Edmund Fitzgerald foundered with all hands. Quid nomen illius and William Polley have located a number of tribute pages, including a most instructive analysis of the weather that weekend. Old heads on the Lakes looked out their windows that weekend and recalled the day Bradley went down (in 1958.) Despite better weather radars, forecasting models, and the Global Positioning System, the Lakes WILL kill you if you are not careful.

A tradition on the Upper Peninsula is to drink 29 toasts on November 10, one for each man on Fitzgerald. Marathon Pundit has a tribute, including a list of the names. Another chronology of Edmund Fitzgerald's career (it used to over-winter in Milwaukee) also includes the names, should anyone wish to drink the 29 toasts.

NOTICE OF NEW SERVICE. Joanne Jacobs dispatches some new trains of thought. Her Our School: The Inspiring Story of Two Teachers, One Big Idea and the School That Beat the Odds makes its initial run today. Weblog publicity has been boosting its initial Amazon numbers.

CORNEILLE DE JAMES? Identify the speaker:

"What can a young person hope for who is born in a soulless neighborhood, lives in an ugly building, surrounded by other ugliness, gray walls on a gray landscape for a gray life, while all around him there is a society that prefers to look away and only intervenes when it has to get angry and forbid things?"

If you said Lyndon Johnson in 1965, give yourself a "Good Try." The editors of the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel attribute this to Francois Miterrand in 1999. They elaborate.

Americans who remember the riots that hit our big cities in the 1960s and '70s may be perplexed by what's happening in France. According to a recent New York Times article, the physical conditions in the Paris housing projects hit by the current violence are not as dire as those in poor urban neighborhoods of America. The public schools in these places are better, French social welfare programs are generously financed, crime is less rampant, health care and education are free and family ties are strong. So what gives?

What gives is the emergence of an underclass that, like a counterpart in the United States, suffers from jobless rates that are much higher than those of French citizens generally. This underclass consists largely of young Muslim immigrants whose parents or grandparents came to France from northern Africa in search of work. The children were born and raised in France and have few remaining ties to North Africa. The immigrants have no jobs, no prospects, no roots, no hope and no identity.

Let Mohammed lead me and de Villepin feed me? Were the public schools of Watts or the poorer parts of Detroit or of Newark or of Milwaukee better in the mid-1960s than they were now? Was crime less rampant then? Were family ties stronger? How well funded were the Great Society programs of those days? The perplexitude the editors identify might reflect their own inability to grasp the history. What I'm learning about the riot-torn banlieus of France suggests lessons learned by urban housing authorities in the States never got translated into French. North Africans housed in isolated high-rise housing projects? Are the relevant banlieus separated by expressways and railway tracks from the more prosperous quarters? How like Chicago's Robert Taylor Homes. Were these high rises conceived by intellectuals? How very like St. Louis's unlamented Pruitt-Igoe towers.

Yet for all the criticisms, little is known about why Pruitt-Igoe was designed as a massive high-rise project in the first place. One popular theory blames the Swiss architect, Le Corbusier, and his influential conception of a modernist city of high rises. Another points to segregationist policies aimed at confining African-American residential areas to the inner city. Perhaps the most widely accepted theory holds that the federal Public Housing Administration's (PHA) restrictive cost guidelines for public-housing construction required the construction of a megalithic high-rise project.

Certainement. No bad idea lasts quite so well as your own bad idea. In France, perhaps the bad idea has greater staying power. In St. Louis, despite the grand intellectual pedigree of what the powers-that-be called urban renewal and the resources to build a better class of khrushchoba (also Corbusier-inspired??) the high rises have pretty much bit the dust. (The same rethinking is coming to the universities, where high-rise dorms of the same era are slowly being replaced.)

Under pressure from [newly elected mayor Joseph] Darst to move forward, in January 1950 the St. Louis Housing Authority revived the City Plan Commission's redevelopment scheme for the DeSoto-Carr neighborhood. Meanwhile architects George Hellmuth and Minoru Yamasaki -- who had been hired at Darst's insistence -- persuaded the authority to adopt modernist-style high-rise designs for public housing. The first of these was Cochran Gardens, which later won architectural awards. This was followed by a much larger-scale plan for Pruitt-Igoe which, when completed, contained 2,870 dwelling units in 33 eleven-story buildings.

These structures were no anomaly. Instead, the Pruitt-Igoe project was the product of a larger vision of St. Louis government and business leaders who wanted to rebuild their city into a Manhattan on the Mississippi. Other redevelopment schemes of the time, for example, placed middle- and high-income residents in buildings that actually rivaled Pruitt-Igoe in height and scale.

Yes, that Minoru Yamasaki. He's perhaps best known for the late World Trade Center, but notice some of the same design elements at Butler, Oberlin, and Wayne State.

WELCOME, VISITORS. Newmark's Door received mention by The Main Quad and Professor Newmark was kind enough to note this service's recent recognition there. Thanks for dropping in.

At Newmark's Door today, links to articles describing college officials in Missouri and North Carolina looking for student self-incrimination in something called Facebook. On the one hand, anything anybody posts on the web becomes a part of the ol' permanent record. On the other hand, if speech codes are Orwellian, what description applies to the university official enforcing the disciplinary code by looking for party pictures?

SOME PERSPECTIVE.

Any time you catch yourself thinking that your life might be empty and pointless, just meditate for a minute or two on the concept "Paris Hilton fan." That should set you straight.

(John Derbyshire via Charles Sykes.)

A FOG OF ELEGANT VARIATION. University Diaries surveys breathless reporting on the positional arms race that has become college football.

TO REMEMBER. November 9, 1989.

TONIGHT'S RAILROAD THEORIZING.

Via Jessica's Well.

Make Your Own Einstein Sign Here.

LIBERATING TOLERANCE AT WORK. Marquette Warrior suggests that an amateur practitioner of liberating tolerance chose to welcome a new conservative newspaper on the Marquette (motto: we're scared to schedule Milwaukee) campus by egging the house of the newspaper's business manager. Another campus weblog demurs.

Division of Labour points to a somewhat more disturbing manifestation of the practice covered at Freakonomics, complete with clever quip:

Here is proof that citing Freakonomics can be dangerous to your academic health as well.

Short form of the dispute.

Student: Crime rates fall because future criminals were more likely to have been aborted.

Professor: How can you SAY that???

BONNE CHANCE. Despite logistical snaffles and a weak performance by the Fightin' Illini, (hey, the Huskies came through ...) Illini or Huskie's wedding was "an outstanding time."

CARNIVAL OF THE ANTI-CAPITALISTS. Russia's President Putin brings back the Soyuz nerushimiy as national anthem, but replaces Red October with People's Unity Day, commemorating the 1612 liberation of Moscow from Poland.


Not everybody agrees with the change.

CARNIVAL CALL. Carnival of the Capitalists visits Part-Time Pundit, not to be confused with a dog and pony show, judging by the length of this week's bannerline.

WHAT IS SO SACRED ABOUT THE FIVE-DAY WORKWEEK? Two centuries of the Industrial Revolution and accompanying economic growth have made paid work, rather than subsistence work, the norm among people fortunate enough to have been born into or migrated into the developed world. And in those two centuries, the paid workweek has become shorter, with a shorter working day, then Sunday off, then half of Saturday off, then Saturday off, and it's high time to think about half of Friday off. That is, unless one is being fretful about idle classroom capacity at the university, as someone at the New York Times (via Phantom Professor) is. The headline of the article is "How Thursday Became the New Friday." (I wonder if there isn't a survey of college life immediately after the G.I. Bill lamenting "How Friday Became the New Saturday." My skills investigating newspaper morgues aren't that good.) On to the story.

Most colleges and universities offer fewer classes on Friday, and while freshmen and sophomores might have to take required classes, juniors and seniors can easily schedule their way around the day.

Your mileage may vary.

While there are still hundreds of Friday classes, particularly at large public universities, significantly fewer meet on Friday than on a campus's busiest day: about 40 percent fewer at Indiana University Bloomington and 50 percent at Arizona State University and the University of California, Irvine. At California State University, Chico, 890 classes are held on Fridays compared to more than 2,500 on Tuesdays.

I'll bet Chico is one of those unimaginative universities that has 50 minute classes scheduled on each hour Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and 75 minute classes set for Tuesday and Thursday. The Tuesday-Thursday split is Pareto improving for students and for faculty.

Friday itself is not necessarily about slacking off: about 50 percent of undergraduates hold part-time jobs, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, and many use Friday for work, internships or community service.

They may even hit the library on Sunday.

Administrators are clueless.

Charles B. Reed, chancellor of the 23-campus California State University system, explains the pattern as he sees it: "Student don't think they have to study or prep, then it's off to party on Thursday night, then sleep it off on Friday, then do it again Friday night, go to the game Saturday and do it again Saturday night.

"That is not a healthy atmosphere."

OK, so empower your professors to flunk more people. End the beer-and-circuses atmosphere on game day. What, no Wednesday afternoon games yet? Perhaps your retention problems are self-inflicted.

Colleges that are pushing back primarily want to free up the midweek crunch of classes. "There are literally billions of dollars in facilities that sit empty for too many hours of the week," says Dr. Reed. But they also hope to nibble at more substantive issues: to stem Thursday night drinking and to reassert that academics are the raison d'être of a university.

"It's silly to run a university that has four days of classes and have an entire campus full of people who have what those of us who work for a living would call a long weekend," says Sandra Hurd, associate provost at Syracuse University. After changing its schedule last year, Syracuse was able to add 76 new courses to its curriculum, including a seminar in forensic science and a course titled "Intergroup Dialogue on Race and Ethnicity."

On the other hand, may of those who work for a living have their own way of adjusting. Perhaps the Times ought to ask Metro-North and the Long Island Rail Road whether they strengthen their mid-day trains on summer Fridays, either by adding more coaches or by calling additional collectors and opening more coaches. And there are benefits for the faculty in bunching classes on Monday-Thursday.

The modern timetable has emerged gradually. Some educators trace its beginnings to the oil embargo of 1973, when universities compressed schedules to save energy in classrooms. Students came to like the arrangement, and faculty grew complicit, avoiding Fridays when requesting days for their classes.

"It went like this: faculty need Fridays free to do research, have committee meetings, etc.," says John N. Gardner, executive director of the Policy Center on the First Year of College in Brevard, N.C. "And many administrations did not dare remove what had become another entitlement for the faculty."

It's not as simple as making class schedules less accommodating of the party-school environment, which is the article's main focus. More rigor and less intoxication is a desirable goal; as with any other problem in resource allocation, there are tradeoffs between that goal and other goals, such as serving commuters, providing researchers with thinking time, even scheduling (bleah) meetings.

I HATE WEDNESDAY NIGHT FOOTBALL. Wednesday afternoon football is even worse. But in the Mid-American Conference, football on Tuesday night or Wednesday night is a way of getting that all-important television exposure. (It's for the pro prospects of the players, and to recruit students. Money has nothing to do with it.) So if Tuesday night football is a good idea, and Wednesday night football is a good idea, maybe Wednesday afternoon football is an even better idea. We shall see. In the e-mail today is an invitation from the director of athletics around these parts.

On behalf of the Department of Intercollegiate Athletics, please know how much we appreciate all you do on campus. All of your efforts mean so much to the University, as does your support of Intercollegiate Athletics. You play a key role in assisting our department in providing our 469 student-athletes a World Class Experience-Academically, Athletically, and Socially.

Our last home football game of the season will be on Wednesday, November 23rd at 12:35 PM against MAC rival Western Michigan. In recognition of your tremendous support and efforts throughout the year, we have declared this game as Faculty/Staff Appreciation Day. We would like to offer you two complimentary tickets for this game.

You mean the thought of ESPN panning around the empty stadium the way C-Span doesn't pan around the empty House chamber might give the wrong impression of our football power house and aspiring party school? Wednesday, November 23, is the day before Thanksgiving. The University used to end classes at noon; because so many students and more than a few faculty didn't see the point of the Wednesday morning classes, there are no classes for the students to cut to attend the game. Many students will be off to their home town honeys or the parents Tuesday night.

Under some circumstances I might be willing to take the good director up on his offer, but that Wednesday has been committed for some off-campus research. If he wanted to comp me for a proper 1.30 pm Saturday game my attitude would be different.

BUT WHAT CAN ONE DO WITH AN ART DEGREE? The Chicago Tribune's Janet Kidd Stewart revisits that age-old question. As with anything else involving economics, there are tradeoffs.

Walking the fine line between supporting your children and helping them understand financial realities about college is all about the reflective thinking that Hilliard describes, said Jon Gallo, a Los Angeles attorney and co-author of "The Financially Intelligent Parent: 8 Steps to Raising Successful, Generous, Responsible Children" (Penguin, $12.95).

"Especially if kids are responsible for their loans, they have to be aware that they are entering adulthood with an enormous financial obligation," Gallo said. "Kids not only have to figure out their calling, but also whether they are going to be able to pay off their loans. There's no question that the economic cost of college is in many cases distorting kids' selection of majors."

The problem with this, of course, is that it can lead to successful but depressed lawyers and investment bankers, Gallo said.

At the same time, pursuing a passion in a field that doesn't correspond to an immediate career path can be fraught with economic peril.

Is there a research topic here ... what compensating differentials must the law firms offer to attract people who have a calling as creative artists? Let's stipulate that loans make students more likely to choose fields that will permit them to repay their loans. Is that a distortion, or is the outcome closer to allocatively efficient than one in which low tuition, grants, and other subsidies are available irrespective of major?

LANDING ON HIS FEET. Professor Drezner will be joining the faculty at Tufts's Fletcher School, deep in the heart of Boston and Maine country. (Via University Diaries, who notes the appointment poses more trouble with Tribbles.)

INDISPOSED? From King at SCSU Scholars comes news that the National Association of Scholars seeks a governmental investigation of the practices of two accrediting bodies. In Professor Banian's view, it's time to turf the accreditors out.

Accreditation is a rent-seeking device. By limiting the number of "accredited" universities these bodies reduce competition and push up the prices received by those universities that have accreditation. Because faculty often cannot get money directly as the gains from this rent-seeking, they take it in other forms. One of these is the use of the accreditation process to pursue ideological goals in teaching.

University Diaries is also following the story, including a response from the president of the National Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education on the "dispositions" component of teacher training, which is the source of the Association's complaint.

Arthur E. Wise, president of NCATE, said that the complaint was a “fabrication” about his group. Wise said that the “dispositions” requirements reflected the need for education schools to know how their students would perform as teachers. NCATE needs to know that there is a good system in place, he said.

“We mean that students, when doing their student teaching, are judged that they will do no harm to students,” he said. “Our guidance to institutions is to evaluate behavior in context. We do not encourage or invite colleges to examine the beliefs of students.”

Perhaps not. Apparently some colleges of education interpret the requirement in such a way as to examine those beliefs. I will keep my eyes open as "dispositions" materials come to my attention during the course of our accreditation visit. In other news from that committee, the subcommittee that I participate in engaged in a little ritual sharing of the internal rents this week. Nothing particularly newsworthy there.

TURN, TURN, TURN. Last week's post on Peggy Noonan's rather pessimistic column about the elites losing their way did not quite sound a Fourth Turning Alert. Others have done that. Start with Cicero at Winds of Change.

But while old borders are lowered, I wonder if new ones are raised. I wonder if all this social technology will just tribalize our society into a myriad of globalized subcultures. It simply might be unavoidable. In so doing, people might come to de-emphasize the validity and necessity of nationhood. It's too early to say, and there's not a thing that can be done to stop it. But I think sovereignty is on the wane in the long run -- and what's happening on the Web today is the seed. Just a hunch.

What Ms. Noonan is not seeing or understanding is that, yes, her base is shrinking before her eyes, but it will be supplanted by something else. It's going to be a difficult process, I think. I myself might be hard at work developing the tools and spaces for social networking, but I can't tell you how broad the social implications will be five, ten, or twenty years out. But I think societal transformation will be profound, and not what anyone expects.

To an extent, that echoes Glenn Reynolds at Tech Central urging the emergent meritocracy to bring it, and none too soon. But the difficulties continue to emerge. A more recent effort from Cicero comments on the emergent intifada in Europe.

Is this the point at which Europe collectively recognizes that appeasement has hit a dead end? Misguided policies always reach a point of no return. Is it now? I look forward to reading your thoughts on this. Personally, I'm not sure if the point of no return has been met.

And if so, what the corrective will be. The bull sessions at Winds suggest unease among some of the readers. Start with this comment, which points here. The latter article links to a discussion about the Fourth Turning thinking itself. That discussion is a bit more informative than what has been going on at the Fourth Turning site itself, where careful readers are still attempting to determine whether it was the 2000 presidential election or the September 11 attacks or now Katrina or the European intifada that will finally get people to recognize a great secular crisis. But that discussion, in a nutshell, captures what is wrong with thinking of cycles of history? Are we really trapped in a perpetual Hegelian dialectic with the same sorts of contradictions recurring with some regularity? The very Civil War several of the posters are fearing is itself a huge anomaly in the theory of an Anglo-American saeculum, quite possibly more damaging to the paradigm than the Michelson-Morley experiment ever was to Newtonian physics.

ONE NETWORK, UNIVERSAL SERVICE. Tom McMahon illustrates the devolution and evolution of the Bell System, whose Death Star logo may be headed the way of the Chicago and North Western's bar and ball. Verizon, for what it's worth, is the successor in due course of the last vertically integrated telephone carrier in the U.S., the old General Telephone and Electric.

Fret not about the resurgence of Ma Bell's monopoly. In another fifty years, youngsters will view land-lines as more a curiosity than a one-horse open sleigh.

YOUR TAX DOLLARS, BEAVERING AWAY. Years ago, I heard a professor of political science characterize the Army Corps of Engineers as a beaver bent on damming any stream capable of floating more than a canoe. That's a bit harsh, but the third report on the St. Lawrence Seaway catches a nugget of truth.

The balding, bespectacled and soft-spoken economist [Don Sweeney with the Corps] stumbled into big trouble with his bosses several years ago while working on a study of a proposed $1 billion Mississippi River lock expansion. When he told the Corps of Engineers brass that the costs of the navigation project outweighed the benefits, they ordered him to fudge the numbers so the bulldozers could roll.

Sweeney declined to play the good soldier. He was removed from the project and suspended for insubordination. But he blew a whistle that echoed into the nation's capital, where he ultimately was hailed as a hero who had finally flashed a bit of light on the inner workings of one of America's more controversial institutions.

That dodge of lowering the discount rate to reflect social priorities and including as many benefits as practicable just doesn't go away, does it?

"Corps officials and employees exerted improper influence over the economic study at issue and manipulated the cost-benefit analysis in order to justify the expensive extension of locks," Elaine Kaplan, boss of the U.S. Office of Special Counsel, said in December 2000, after an investigation by the Army inspector general.

Furthermore, the investigation spawned by Sweeney's complaint revealed that the corps appeared to carry an "institutional bias for large-scale construction projects."

But why let mere economics get in the way of some creative beavering? The Seaway appears to have all kinds of potential for same. But on to the economics.

The U.S. Merchant Marine Academy's Jon S. Helmick, in a presentation to Congress several years ago, illustrated just how time-sensitive deliveries involving ships, trains and trucks have become.

He pointed specifically to Toyota Motor Co.'s system of delivering engines from Japan to a Kentucky assembly line.

"Upon arrival in a Southern California port, the containers are discharged from the ship and then loaded aboard an eastbound double-stack train for overland transport to Chicago. At the terminus of the rail move, the containers are pulled from the train and placed on a truck chassis for the final leg of the journey," he said. "The astonishing reality is that after 17 days in transit,
the engines arrive at the plant in Georgetown within pre-scheduled 15-minute delivery windows, at which time they are stripped from their containers and moved directly to the assembly line for installation."

This, of course, could not happen on a Seaway that is plagued by unpredictable weather and closed by ice each winter. And while it may be technically feasible to keep shipping lanes ice-free, the cost and environmental disruption in terms of flooding and erosion have to date made it a political impossibility.

Congress agreed that the potential expansion costs outweighed the benefits pitched in the 2002
reconnaissance report, and told the Corps of Engineers to drop its expansion studies.

And, contrary to what Richard Corfe, who heads the Canadian Seaway authority, the Seaway can be replaced.

"You can't build another six lanes of highway, and you can't build another three or four rail tracks to do what would have to be done," he says.

Let's take that challenge seriously. Head of the Lakes to Chicago, put back the second track on the Omaha Road as far as Camp Douglas and put back the second track on the Milwaukee to Milwaukee. Restore the second tracks on the C&NW freight and passenger mains from Milwaukee to Chicago or the second track on the C&NW from Wyeville to Harvard, Illinois via Madison. East of Chicago, there are plenty of downsized multiple-track mainlines with room to add tracks. Toledo to Albany on the New York Central alone has room for four most of the way. There's also space on the old Canada Southern along the north shore of Lake Erie for additional trackage. Could the Seaway be cost-effectively replaced by restoring the pre-1959 railroad capacity? Possibly. Would you want to put all of the Upper Lakes traffic in ore, coal, and limestone onto trains? Probably not. But the Upper Lakes traffic only hauls the current aquatic life around in ballast tanks.

DOUBLED AT THE OCTAVE ISN'T LIKE YOU, SEBASTIAN. Marginal Revolution points to a survey of musicological research suggesting that the Toccata and Fugue in d is neither by Johann Sebastian Bach nor written for the organ. Never mind the implications for Hallowe'en, can you really imagine Captain Nemo ramming a man o'war and then playing a violin?

THREE-RING MEDIA CIRCUS. This week's Carnival of Education hoists its banner headline at The Dayton Daily News on Scott Elliott's site. He posted it in three parts, I couldn't resist. Step right up! We have a $1,000 reward to any physician who can prove it's a fake!

A CENTENARY WORTH HONORING. Ladies and Gentlemen, The Pizza. (Years ago, my Wayne State students did Sean Penn in real life. At the beginning of the semester, I offered to hold and cash in for the Michigan can deposit all the pop we drank during the semester, and apply the proceeds for a pizza on the last day of class. This class took me up on the offer. The delivery guy was a bit surprised to get a 'phone order from a classroom, but came through all the same.)

Pizza for courtship, pizza for families? Ayup. And Mama Mia's is in the story. Displaced Cheesehead says Yummo!

THE MOST COMMON JOURNALISTIC MISTAKE. A recent Principles of Microeconomics homework problem presented this challenge.

"The supply of hogs increased, leading to a fall in the price of pork. The drop in the pork price in turn increased the demand for pork. The increase in demand for pork led to an increase in price, so it is not possible to tell whether the price of pork rose or fell overall." Where did the writer get confused?

I make the only slightly-outrageous claim that I could randomly select a week's worth of newspaper business sections and find this mistake in print. Apparently I am not alone in being bothered by such confusions. Phil at Market Power catches a CNN reporter in a symmetrical error.

"A short supply increases demand...."

Apparently, so does an augmented supply.

William Polley picks up the story, suggesting that in some observers' minds, a rational-expectations tulip-mania might be at work.

For many the gut-level reaction is to think of gas lines.

The next step in their reasoning is that if gas shortages are on the horizon, then you'd better get in line now. Or, by the same token, if the price is expected to rise, you'd better buy your gas now. Either way, you arrive at the perfectly economically alid argument that an increase in the expected price (or an increase in the robability that the good will be unavailable in the future) causes an increase in demand now. I would be willing to bet that this sort of logic is what drives people to make a statement like that.

Possibly, althought the source of the confusion in many observers' minds might be in the terminology of introductory economics (and nowhere else in economics) itself.

Much of the discipline refers to the act of drawing a new demand or supply curve as a "change in demand (or supply)," sometimes calling that an "increase" or "decrease" in demand or supply. A new choice along the same demand or supply curve goes by the cumbersome locution "change in quantity demanded (or supplied.)" Bleah. I recommend the use of the term "shift" to describe the drawing of a new curve, and I'm continually reinforcing "left shift" and "right shift" as "increase" and "decrease" have the potential for mischief on the supply curve. A new choice along the same curve is a "movement along." (Synonms such as "slide along" are permissible on homeworks and exams.) In any graphing exercise, there is at most one shift per figure.