THINGS THAT CHANGE, THINGS THAT STAY THE SAME. I recently finished David Riesman's Academic Values and Mass Education, a 1970 study of the evolution and travails of Oakland University and Monteith College at Wayne State University. A book is not old if it hasn't been read, and herewith Book Review No. 6.

Oakland University came into being as a Michigan State University project to create a high-powered undergraduate college serving a commuting population. In the Sputnik era, public recognition of a knowledge gap between U.S. youngsters and their overseas contemporaries (sound familiar?) led to public commitment of resources to develop more scientists and technocrats (before the cost-benefit ratios were known.) But rather than set up yet another Albion or Oberlin, let alone another land-grant university, Oakland's founders envisioned something at once elitist and accessible. For a number of reasons (Oakland admitted a local valedictorian whose college boards placed her in the third percentile nationwide being symptomatic of one, the temptations of suburban life providing another) the original experiment did not work well, and Oakland added dorms and athletic teams (their women's basketball team received the Mid-Continent Conference automatic bid Northern Illinois once earned during the time Northern Illinois reconsidered its ambitions to be a major independent) to become yet another suburban-specific public college.

Monteith College at Wayne was an application of the ideas of integrated liberal studies within an urban comprehensive university. Professor Riesman characterized the mindset of Monteith's creators and faculty as "anti-departmentalism." The idea continues to appeal ("The world has problems. The university offers departments.") The execution is another matter. Integrated liberal studies proved popular in the heady 1960s, when the reward to a college degree during the Great Society inflation was high, tenure was a matter of course, and anything-goes criticism of The System was in flower. By the time I arrived at Wayne in 1979, Monteith was being phased out as a college. In some ways the fate of Wayne since then has been a foreshadowing of the academy's fate elsewhere. My position as a specialist in public utilities and industrial economics followed Leonard W. Weiss and C. Emery Troxel. I may not have performed up to the standards they set. On the other hand, my colleagues made me look so good that Northern Illinois made me an offer I couldn't turn down, and in those days Northern Illinois had academic ambitions commensurate with their athletic ambitions. How quickly things change.

But what doesn't change is the questing for a mission for higher education. In 1970, Professor Riesman could still speculate on the end of the Vietnam War changing the educational treadmill, such that ambitious people with a blue-collar bent could prosper without spending the money or the time in college. He could cite legislators pressing for higher teaching loads to preclude professors from using their research time to foment revolution, and revolutionaries pressing for higher teaching loads to preclude professors from using their research time to support the military-industrial complex. Conflicts over curriculum and standards are nothing new, and the 1970 arguments are very much like today's. I found this passage depressing and illuminating.

Deans and presidents of primarily undergraduate institutions are constantly complaining that they have to hire Ph.D.s who have little experience of teaching and little interest in it. In the large universities that emphasize graduate training to do research, T.A.s are thrown into the (usually lower-division) classroom with little grounding in their subject matter and even less development of self-awareness as college teachers.

Currently, much propaganda and a few new structures are being devoted to the efforts to develop a greater interest in teaching on the part of prospective college teachers. One proposal is to create a new degree, the Doctor of Arts, which would be a teaching degree, as against the Ph.D., seen as a research degree. Conceivably, as its proponents hope, the Doctor of Arts degree would not be a second-class degree for those cooled out from Ph.D. programs, but a first-choice degree for those whose commitment would be to college teaching and whose doctoral program would be as demanding as but different from a more research-oriented one. It would include consideration of problems of teaching and learning, practice teaching, and work outside one's immediate field of specialization. Yet, unless major universities hire men, including their own graduates, with Doctor of Arts degrees, it is likely that in fact it will be a less valued degree, somewhat limiting the opportunities of its possessors. Moreover, while deans and presidents of colleges want to hire teaching-oriented faculty, a department chairman may be more ambitious for national visibility -- or vice versa. But beyond such considerations, we think that the emphasis on the purity and virtue of the college teacher who does no research can be overdone.

Whew. Summarize in one paragraph several Cold Spring Shops themes. On one hand, here appears to be a track to what Duke calls "Professor of the Practice of ..." On the other hand, here comes the College of Education bringing its untested notions of pedagogic cosmic justice into the practice of economics.

Some passages in the book tell me more about Professor Riesman than they do about the travails of the experimental colleges. The Monteith faculty were able to obtain cooperation more readily from social scientists other than the economists, although he notes that development economics offered a more congenial set of questions for the other social scientists to engage. The development economics of those days was a curious blend of technocratic statism that failed to deliver lasting prosperity anywhere it was tried, although it made wanna-be technocratic statists in other disciplines comfortable with their prejudices. (Other versions of technocratic statism, such as Russia's instant privatizations and Britain's fragmentation of the railroads failed to perform much better.) Elsewhere, he offers one interpretation of a set of facts that well might be interpreted differently. But overall, he leaves the impression that the current tussle over the role of higher education and the proper balance between teaching and scholarship, let alone access and excellence, is neither new nor likely to go away soon.

A CORRIDOR WORKS BETTER WITH GREATER FREQUENCY. Destination: Freedom notes Illinois legislators planning to spend more money to run more trains.

In the past some Amtrak routes between Chicago and downstate cities have been threatened, but this year legislators want Amtrak to operate two additional round-trips between Chicago and St. Louis.

They are willing to triple what the state pays Amtrak in order to do that.

The proposed increase also would fund one extra round-trip along the Chicago-to-Carbondale route and another round-trip between Chicago and Quincy.

This fiscal year, the state is paying Amtrak $12.1 million. Identical bills in the Illinois House and Senate would increase that annual support to $35 million.

“This proposal is building up a head of steam, and it will likely be altered in the coming weeks to reflect the financial capabilities of both the state and federal government,” said state Sen. Jeffrey Schoenberg, D-Evanston, a bill sponsor.

The extra money would be needed to employ additional crew members, print new schedules and add rail cars.

More trains to Southern and to Western and additional calls at Illinois State, even as tuitions rise and the research missions shrink ...

Transportation bills do require the governor's signature.

A spokeswoman for Gov. Rod Blagojevich said he has not yet decided whether to support the legislation.

The governor has taken some stick for maintaining his household in Chicago and maintaining an office there. He might have to extract a pledge that critics not call attention to additional morning and evening trips into Springfield that would allow him to put in a full day there.

CONTEMPLATING THE TRADEOFFS. Immigrant-rights protests continue as Congress debates competing proposals.

The Senate is set to begin debate Tuesday on the first comprehensive rewrite of U.S. immigration laws in a decade.

“We're facing a difficult situation, because we have approximately 11 million undocumented aliens here and we've got to find some way to deal with them,” Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter, R-Pa., said Sunday on ABC's This Week.

Tackling that problem has been one of Bush's priorities since his first term, but it poses a political challenge or him: He must balance the demands of conservative Republicans who want a crackdown on illegal immigration, business leaders who say the nation needs more immigrant workers and Republican Party operatives, such as national Chairman Ken Mehlman, who have been wooing the Hispanic vote.

The president expressed concern last week about the political fallout. “This could be a fractious debate.”

Fine. Consensus is for easy problems.

RESPECT THE BOX.

A soon-to-be released (to journeyman economists like me; the Recognized Pundits rate advance copies) book titled The Box : How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger draws a great deal of attention.

I read a review in The Economist.

WHEN the MSC Pamela sailed into Felixstowe, Britain's biggest container terminal, on her maiden voyage last year, Hutchison Whampoa, the port's Hong Kong owners, took a deep breath and renewed their efforts to build more deep-water berths. They were looking to the future. At 1,053 feet (321 metres), and able to carry the equivalent of more than 9,000 containers, Pamela is the world's largest container ship. But not for long: leviathans with twice that capacity are on their way.

The point of all the media tributes is the ostensible 50th anniversary of the international shipping container, which offers two advantages, reduced handling and reduced pilferage, over traditional transloading methods.

Consider the economics. Loading loose cargo, a back-breaking, laborious business, onto a medium-sized ship cost $5.83 a ton in 1956. McLean calculated that loading the Ideal-X cost less than $0.16 a ton. All of a sudden, the cost of shipping products to another destination was no longer prohibitively expensive.

This opened up all sorts of possibilities. Instead of manufacturing goods locally, a company could afford to replace its overcrowded multi-storey factory in Brooklyn with one in Pennsylvania, where taxes, electricity and other costs were lower, and then ship its goods to New York in a container. Later the factory might move to Mexico; it is now probably in China.

An article I recall contrasted traditional shipping with containerization by using the example of a cask of olives. At each transload, a few got crushed and a few got eaten. Normal costs of business and all that. Virginia Postrel's farewell column at the New York Times (her new print medium port will be The Atlantic) notes the change.

Just as the computer revolutionized the flow of information, the shipping container revolutionized the flow of goods. As generic as the 1's and 0's of computer code, a container can hold just about anything, from coffee beans to cellphone components. By sharply cutting costs and enhancing reliability, container-based shipping enormously increased the volume of international trade and made complex supply chains possible.

She links to a Spiegel article that observes the half-century with musings about the latest generation of ships to round the Horn.

Vessels that accommodate 6,000 to 7,000 standard containers -- or TEUs ("twenty-foot equivalent unit") as they are known in the industry -- are becoming a common sight on the high seas. And designers have already dreamed up huge freighters capable of accommodating 13,000 TEUs.

According to one rule of thumb, a single medium- sized ship can move as many containers as are transported on a typical German autobahn during a whole day. When goods are shipped in such vast quantities, the transport costs become negligible.

These ships are too big for the Panama and Suez canals, let alone the St. Lawrence Seaway. What happens when they hit land? Back to The Economist, with more on the challenges facing port authorities (the government agencies that own the port facilities and have the responsibility for providing the infrastructure that companies in Dubai and elsewhere manage.)

As to the future, the author looks to ships that will approach the “Malacca-Max”, the maximum size of a vessel passing through the Strait of Malacca, the shipping lane between Malaysia and Indonesia. Some container ships are already too big to get through the locks in the Panama Canal. The future giants will be a quarter of a mile long, 190-feet wide with their bottoms 65-feet below the waterline. They will be able to carry enough containers to fill a line of trucks 68 miles long. Hutchison needs to get digging.

A quick calculation: 13,000 TEUs = 6,500 40 footers = 3,250 standard well cars = 26 standard stack trains. It's more manageable that way. But The Superintendent's favorite expert on Pacific port operations notes that there is currently no direct rail access to quayside at Los Angeles or Long Beach: anything headed east is rubbered to the railhead. And when those 26 extra stack trains converge on Greater Chicago (which includes the Union Pacific yard at Rochelle -- there are a lot of short cuts of well cars, bare-table moves, and light engine movements through DeKalb now) they're adding to growing congestion on the rails.

Elmhurst, Illinois, 16 June 2002.

The train-spotters are awaiting the arrival of a steam locomotive, No. 3985, which, as is often the case with special events, arrived just as a rain shower ruined the exposures. The train is a bare-table move (empty well cars) reflecting the loads east, empties west (it's sometimes cheaper to sell the container to a scrap metal merchant than to find a westbound load for it) traffic the articles reference. In Chicago,

After 90 years, the railroads finally have run out of excess capacity. That in turn has restored their ability to raise rates, according to James Valentine, a research analyst for Wall Street giant Morgan Stanley.

"These positive trends in pricing and better returns are likely to continue for years, maybe decades," Valentine said.Because "all roads lead to Chicago," he added, the region will get a generous slice. "It should receive a disproportionate benefit from the railroads' resurgence."

Union Pacific's western competitor, BNSF, expects a near-quadrupling of container traffic from 2004 to 2007.

AUTHENTICITY, OR SELLING OUT? Chicago Tribune columnist Dawn Turner Trice calls readers attention to an academic conference.

"That's just what we need, more mainstreaming of the pimp-gangsta-thug lifestyle."

What irks me so much about this type of rap music isn't that it's so negative and denigrating and, well, vile--but that there just isn't enough positive stuff to serve as a counterweight.That lack of balance with rap music is just one of the topics V.P. Franklin, Ortique professor of politics and history at Dillard University in New Orleans, will be discussing on Wednesday when he provides the opening address for a four-day conference at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

"Race, Roots and Resistance: Revisiting the Legacies of Black Power" will commemorate the 40th anniversary of the black power movement. (The conference is free. For more information, call 217-333-7781.)

Performance can be a way of making a statement. Performance can be a way of making a living. Hence the tension.

My focus here is the arts segment of the movement because I look at what's happening today with rap music and I worry that its power--its profound reach and influence--is far more destructive than constructive.

Many of the artists who aligned themselves with black power saw a connection between the arts and the other struggles of the day."The art would serve the larger cause of black liberation," Franklin told me. "The paintings, the poetry, the dance, the song lyrics would raise the consciousness of people of African descent and show them what they could accomplish in solidarity."

But those of us who came of age in that era recall that "sell-out" was an insult. Among white kids, the sell-out would imply acceptance of corporate America. Hence yuppies.

Apparently the tension is present in African-American music as well.

"Now [rap music] is much more individualistic," Franklin said. "Once hip-hop became commercial, then the artists felt they had a broader audience. And, in order to please that audience, they had to do certain things that didn't necessarily uplift the black community.

"Three decades later, rap artists use their voice, their power, most often to attain the "bling" rather than to further some cause.

Franklin believes the new artists undermine artists committed to creating more positive work and images that benefit the collective.

But does art or music have to benefit a collective? Why can't rap artists sing what they want and present the images of their choosing?

"The problem is we no longer have any control over the images or the styles," Franklin said. "A lot of young people don't see the alternatives. There's just one way of dressing, of speaking, of behaving--the negatives are being validated on so many different levels."

But is entertainment -- whether it be music or painting or sport -- the sole instrument of validation for anybody?

WE. WANT. MORE. In three overtimes, Wisconsin 1, Cornell 0. Do you remember the spring of 1973? After two periods of a national semifinal game, it's Cornell 4, Wisconsin 0. With 18 seconds to go, Dean Talafous ties the game at five ...

I like the tournament field.

Wisconsin takes on Maine in an NCAA semifinal April 6 at the Bradley Center in Milwaukee. Boston College and North Dakota will meet in the other semifinal.

At one time, there was an alliance between the Western Collegiate Hockey Association and Hockey East. All four of the teams playing in Milwaukee ... hey, another Hiawatha ride? ... are members of that alliance.

SIEVE!

Badgers are also effective Gopher hunters. The women's team denied Minnesota a three-peat, with a 3-0 win in the Cities.

SIEVE! SIEVE! SIEVE!

ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION, PRO AND CON. Virginia Postrel expresses a preference for an immigration policy that can separate the dishwashers from the terrorists. I doubt that anyone would gainsay that. But designing such a policy is harder ... does anyone even have a guess how many terrorists might be masquerading as dishwashers? She links to a Dallas Morning News editorial (I'm going to quote freely before this goes behind the firewall) that pursues multiple goals.

The Judiciary bill would offer the 11 million to 12 million illegal immigrants in the U.S. a chance to earn citizenship. They would have to show they have a job, pay a fine, pass a background check, get their taxes in order and go to the back of the line to apply for citizenship.

Let us repeat that last part, because it often gets misread as amnesty. Illegal immigrants who do the above would not cut in front of anyone else applying for citizenship. They'd have to line up behind everyone else seeking the same citizenship that many legal Americans' own immigrant ancestors sought.

Operationally, it is an amnesty. Irregular workers become regular workers and pay taxes. Citizenship and voting rights are for another paper. Here's a harder problem.

The nation's security is far stronger if we know who's here to frame houses, change linens, bus tables and build microchips – and who shouldn't be here to profit from true criminal activity or worse.

Although now you have a Bayesian inference problem. Does anyone have a subjective probability that a putative dishwasher is a sleeper agent?

There's also a resource allocation problem.

A citizenship plan also makes sense because we simply can't enforce existing laws and send the illegals back where they came from.

That refrain, a staple among some readers and on talk shows, would require rounding up a population the size of Ohio. We don't have enough border agents, police officers, holding cells, judges, courtrooms or buses to make that happen.

Paying several billion dollars to do something of that scale would be fiscally imprudent.

What are the opportunity costs?

The committee would be best served to go with the idea presented by Sens. John McCain and Ted Kennedy, who would allow as many as 400,000 foreign workers each year to receive three-year work visas. They could earn two three-year visas before returning home or earning U.S. citizenship.

That number matches the estimated annual flow of illegal immigrants. If we take those workers and give them forge-proof, biometric ID cards, we ease the burden on law enforcement agents. They will know immediately who's here legally and who's not.

Is there such a thing as a forge-proof identity card? On the other hand, if the authorities knew who was here legally, wouldn't it be straightforward enough to deport the equivalent of the population of Ohio?

Illegal immigrants make up about 5 percent of our workforce. Yank all of them out of the economy, and we have a serious financial problem. You can't punch that big a hole in the workforce without upending industries, farms, manufacturers and the hospitality industry – not in today's nearly full employment economy.

Yes, fewer American high school dropouts have jobs today, but even the authors of a recent study about this admit there is no evidence that illegal immigrants have their jobs. It's more likely that many jobs would go overseas or disappear altogether if immigrants didn't do them.

Um, how big is the job churn in a "nearly full employment economy" and how does one send Vermont's cows or Las Vegas's hotel rooms to India?

In related commentary, InstaPundit received a favorable report on Chicago's illegal immigrants' rally and links to a local source that had a less favorable impression.

ENOUGH IS ENOUGH. Indiana's William Becker delivered the Presidential Lecture at the Midwest Economics Association. His message: teach the controversies. He's not happy about the attempts of legislators and administrators to introduce K-12 thinking into higher educations.

Doing in universities what is arguably legitimate for high schools is remedial education and not higher education.

Amen.

MASSACHUSETTS LIBERALS USED TO BE MORE RESOLUTE. I've taken delivery of Sea of Gray, a story about Confederate commerce raider Shenandoah, a fairly advanced merchantman purchased from the British to be used as a privateer against the whaling fleets, to persuade Yankee abolitionists to contemplate the price of their principle (sound familiar?) The ship remained at sea after April 1865, continuing to prey on Yankee whalers, despite the protestations of captains that the Southern Rebellion was over. It has been some time since I last provided a book review. This will be among the next few releases. The politics I started with aren't interesting. The adventures are. In keeping with good sea stories, you could start this one with "no s***, this really happened."

I'LL NEVER LACK FOR WORK. The editorial board at the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel weighs in on illegal immigration.

In proposing tougher enforcement standards and a guest worker program, the president simply got the facts right.

Borders must be secure, employers should have the means to discern legal residency and much of the economy would have some difficulty surviving without immigrant workers. But he seemingly recognized also that those already here have been doing yeoman-like labor to keep the economy humming, and he saw also the basic injustice in the country both demanding these workers' presence and condemning it. This speaks to the need to give guest workers a shot at permanent legal residency.

The president must foster compromise and break the congressional logjam. A country that speaks proudly of its immigrant past needs to act to remove the contradictions and injustice existing in its immigrant present.

What contradictions? The policies are completely coherent. In the face of a pool of uncredentialed and low-skilled individuals willing to provide a cheap labor subsidy and able to cross the border in both directions (I told you that Midwest Economics Association conference was productive) the occasional regularization, or periodic offering of in-state tuition for college-age kids, or amnesty by some other name, is optimal.

WE WANT MORE. Wisconsin 4, Bemidji 0 in Green Bay. Cornell is a worthy second opponent. For a different perspective on Wisconsin hockey, go here.

Gotta give this one to Wisconsin. Plus it's in Wisconsin....well, not that that matters for Wisconsin fans.

Indeed not. The legend lives on from Beantown on down of Elroy Hirsch buying for all the Badger fans in Providence. It really happened. I was there. Wisconsin had just lost the 1978 consolation game to Bowling Green (yeah, Northern Illinois nemesis Bowling Green. Midwestern Axis of Evil Bowling Green.) Mr Hirsch plunked $500 on the bar and said "Serve anybody wearing red."

There is no joy in Dinkytown, as Holy Cross eliminated Minnesota in overtime. A few years ago, I remember a Minnesota team that was much stronger on paper being taken to overtime by Harvard in the finals, and Harvard got a lucky bounce in the second overtime.

SIEVE! SIEVE! SIEVE! SIEVE!

THE NEW, THE OLD, AND THE SAFE COURSE. Although I have reported on the Elburn extension previously, here are the first pictures. These date from my Milwaukee trip at the beginning of Spring Break. Very little had changed today, when I made a trip to Chicago for the Midwest Economics Association.

The Elburn coach yard is now the terminal for all trains, including a few weekday trips that load their first passengers at West Chicago. (There are no interlockings between West Chicago and Elmhurst, precluding the onslaught of zonal expresses the Burlington unleashes.)


The Elburn station has only one platform, on the south side of the tracks. Here is the empty stock for the 8.25 Saturday departure backing into the station.

The Union Pacific Metra operation won a safety award. This polished locomotive bell is on display in front of the station master's office at North Western Station.


The sign reads

This bell represents the 2005 safety efforts of more than 1200 Union Pacific Commuter Operations employees in and around the Chicago area.

Not only was their safety effort good enough to win this prestigious award, it was also the best safety percentage ever achieved for a service unit in the Union Pacific Railroad's storied history.

The North Western Station is now the atrium of an office tower. I believe Chase (the old Chase Manhattan combined with a Chicago banking house) now owns the upstairs. CORRECTED 26 MARCH ... The building is now the CITICORP CENTER.


Get off the trains on the second floor, ride one of two escalator sets to street level, or spend your money in the various clothing stores on the first two levels first, or eat at the food court. (The food court is out of the line of traffic. Eating without getting trampled, what a concept.) It doesn't look much like a train hall, but there's more light coming in than is the case at Union Station just to the south.

Commuters can avoid some climbing by passing through the riverside entrance of the old Chicago Daily News building, walking up a ramp past some coffee shops, and emerging at track level. The passageway from the Daily News to North Western Station crosses Clinton Street, and the current owners of the building have thoughtfully left this link to the past in place.


The North Western stopped being the operator of record in the early 1980s and merged into Union Pacific in mid-1995. Look for this sign in a museum eventually.

That's the end of the train riding for conferences for a while. (But I do have a weekend pass and my mental health could use a boost ...) The conference proved to be a productive one. There's an open bottle of Sprecher Winter Brew receiving the Wisconsin treatment as a reward.

FRIDAY'S MODELS ON SATURDAY. Once the conference crush is over, I'll get back to this project. I have to work out the bracing for the cab floor in order to secure the rear of the cab to the tailbeam.


The cab sides have the numbers and Soviet railway emblem attached, and some detail parts that the kit designer left out are being snipped out of brass pieces elsewhere.


Taken together, it looks something like this.


Friday morning, at the conference, the topic of economists indulging in excess rigor accompanied by oversimplification came up again. The point of modeling is to come up with a believable representation that captures the essential elements. I'm thinking of a non-cumbersome way to suggest that such criticisms are tantamount to replicating the real thing, rather than this brass miniature.

SHE'LL LOOK BETTER IN RED. The Chicago Sun-Times discovers that getting into the University of Illinois is not easy.

Stacey Kostell, director of undergraduate admissions, acknowledged the school had gotten more competitive this year but said admission criteria haven't changed and that she still expects to accept close to two-thirds of students who apply. She said last year, the school saw an uncharacteristic decrease in applications; this year was closer to levels in the recent past.

"Students who had traditionally been admitted didn't always get admitted this year, not because they weren't good students, but because we had this very large increase without additional space, especially in the business program," said Kostell.

And although the school does plan to increase its nonresident enrollment in the future, she said that wasn't a factor in more residents getting denied. "We've had just as many upset out-of-state students call," she said.

Illinois admits applicants by college. A high school senior who declares an interest in the business college competes in a different pool of applicants from one who declares an interest in engineering who competes in ... I'm not sure I like that idea. Sorry for going Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain again, but one reason to attend college and deal with gen-eds is to get some sense of your strengths and weaknesses, which is why junior year is for declaring majors.

The young lady features in a sidebar about the calls the admissions committee at the College of Business made.

Allison Seymour and Brad Terry seem like students any college would want.

Seymour, 18, of Lincolnshire, had a 3.74 grade point average on a scale of 4.0, scored a 31 on her ACT college admission test, including a perfect math score, took six advanced placement courses, and played volleyball and ran track for four years. Terry, 17, of Buffalo Grove, had a 33 on the ACT and played varsity baseball. Both were student council members.

But both also were rejected by the University of Illinois College of Business this year.

Shed no tears.

Terry, who said U. of I. was supposed to be a backup, said he is leaning toward attending the University of Michigan. Seymour, who got scholarship offers from the University of Iowa and Indiana University, says she plans to attend the University of Wisconsin.

SIEVE!

DOING IRISH MILWAUKEE STYLE. Kodachrome provides sharper pictures but there's still that matter of sending them to the lab and waiting for them to come back. Here is the visual accompaniment to this post about the Milwaukee St. Patrick's week and selection show parade. First, a bit of a contrast. Yes, that is a Chinese band practicing. The local supporters of Falun Gong received permission to follow the parade as an unofficial extra unit, trailing a local step dance group that earned some sort of national honor.

In the background is the Wisconsin Electric Power office building that occupies the site of the 1886 Milwaukee Road station. Question for my Milwaukee area readers: is the Wisconsin Avenue facade of the Midwest Express Center inspired by the roofline of that station?


I don't recall what was once at the corner of Plankinton and Wisconsin. Mo's Irish Pub is a recent addition. The banner is counting down ... six days to St. Patrick's day (by which time all but one of the Wisconsin-based basketball teams that were celebrating on Selection Sunday were free to drink the green beer.)


Along both sides of the street are the replica harp-case streetlights the city has been installing. Milwaukee, you're overdoing it with those streetlights. The originals were on side streets and somewhat further apart than these replicas. The tall pole with a single streetlight is correct for Wisconsin Avenue. The lamp housing is the same design as the one for the harp-case lights, but the more austere bracket was the design of choice on the main streets.


Milwaukee is the home of Harley-Davidson, and no Milwaukee parade is without an escort of Harleys. The Prussian helmets are on the Germania building that was built as the Germania building and renamed the Brumder building in the Great War era. I didn't see any bikers wearing Prussian helmets. But I did see a trolley that never got anywhere near the original Cold Spring Shops.


Parade participants were tossing candy to the kids, providing the policeman with opportunities to engage in patient crowd control. And yes, the weather was changeable, with occasional raw sou'easters and rain squalls off the lake, and sunny and fine by day's end.

THE MIDWESTS ARE IN THE CITIES NEXT YEAR. This year, a hockey tournament is there. The Lady Badgers defeated St. Lawrence 1-0 and will face off against Minnesota for the national hockey championship on Sunday. SIEVE!

MOVING THE MASSES. This morning, I presented a paper at the Midwest Economics Association conference in Chicago. Session starts at 8.15 am. Path of least resistance: the 6.07 Naperville Zephyr.

The morning rush hour on the Burlington involves loading long trains at four or five outlying stations and running them non-stop into the city. Here is the situation at 6.20.

I have shown the path of my train, which will load at Naperville and leave at 6.25. Ahead is No. 1214, which might have crossed over at West Lisle to leave Lisle at 6.26 and follow my train from Downer's Grove Main. No. 1218 has run empty stock from Aurora to Fairvew Avenue to make all stops between Fairview and Hinsdale. Off screen, No. 1216 will begin accepting passengers at Highlands. These four trains will reach Union Station between 6.58 and 7.12, and the next arrival will be the next Naperville Zephyr at 7.18 participating in a similar cycle. It's quite the kick to watch all this when it's working properly.

Y'ALL COME BACK NOW, HEAR? I go away for a conference and it's hit after hit after hit ... Max Speak looking for a new Washington Post columnist who is honest and readable but not "too wonky." That's how I earn my modest living, being wonky. University Diaries looking for a quotable quote. (Quotable wonk? Max, you wanna reconsider?) The dean at Anonymous Community suggests there is a downside to faculty governance out of the Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain era. Perhaps so, but the past 30 years of administrative usurpation of faculty discretion has not brought forth a flowering of great scholarship and innovative teaching. Our president, John Peters, is a fine man. But I'd really rather hear Co^l. Chamberlain assuring me, "Got your back, Steve."

(Here's a history quiz. Category: Incompetent Mississippi leaders. Assignment: Compare and contrast P. G. T. Beauregard with Shelby Thames.)

Thanks, all, for looking in. To quote from Rip Track, "Check it out, and see if your brain benefits from an overhaul in the Cold Spring Shops." Come on back. Post a comment. The virtual Sprecher is flowing.

EATING THE SEED CORN? Craig at Division of Labour links to a University of Pennsylvania self-study that reports the modal undergraduate lecture or seminar is taught by a tenured or tenure-track faculty member, although the majority of such courses have a lecturer, graduate assistant, or other staff responsible. His observation.

With more press like this, we will all be on four-four teaching loads sooner than later.

Chris at Signifying Nothing links and notes,

Confidential to parents: drop the 40 large per annum on a liberal arts college education for your kids instead.

Or check out a mid-major. The money outlay is smaller and the faculty participation in the undergraduate program greater.

WITHOUT COMMENT. Read and understand.

THE GENESIS OF THE GENSET. The first of Max Essl's patents for a diesel locomotive with modular power units is No. 2,249,628, granted July 15, 1941. The narrative to the patent asserts an improvement in the prior art in being able to quickly remove and replace a small power unit for repair at a workbench, rather than have the locomotive out of service while one large prime mover is being repaired or replaced.


The elements of the genset are in this figure.


Subsequent patents No. 2,299,420 describe improvements in the modules to permit some servicing to be done by a maintainer while the locomotive is in use (Mr Essl would probably not appreciate me joking about the real Centipedes requiring an "oiler" and a "wiper" in the nautical mode), and No. 2,317,849 is recognizably a Centipede, with further improvements in cooling systems, ventilation, and balance.

VOTES OF NO CONFIDENCE. According to USA Today,

Universities are in a tug of war pitting traditionally powerful professors against a new generation of business-savvy presidents hired to control costs, boost research and make classes more relevant in a global economy.

There are two themes to the article. One is the conflict between what trustees see as businesslike methods, with a president as primary decision maker; and traditional faculty governance, with a president in the Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain mode.

Harvard's departed president Larry Summers is mentioned in the article, but he declined the invitation to comment. Kentucky's president Lee Todd, recruited out of IBM, [is that like hiring an AT&T guy to run Penn Central? Behave yourself.] is more talkative.

Professors felt Todd had not been deferential enough and failed to communicate well with them, says faculty [senate] chairman [Ernie] Yanarella.

Easily Distracted has been thinking about whether a more clearly defined hierarchy is superior to shared governance. There are several different themes there. I'll limit discussion to this.

There have been times where I would have preferred centralized control or at least a greater weighting on centralized authority in various decisions at Swarthmore. That has something to do with a perception on my part that I would have agreed with what I took to be the preferences of various leadership figures. That, of course, is the first simple problem with centralized leadership in any institution. It’s fine as long as you’re happy with the leaders, not so fine when you’re not. If a more decentralized model tends towards collective outcomes that don’t suit you, at least you can usually opt out or evade those outcomes in your own autonomous domains. Not so with strong centralization.

That dynamic is where many of the academy's troubles began. Drop consistent standards in the service of some notion of justice or compensation without much in the way of debate and as long as no Ward Churchill shows up, you're fine. But I have to wonder whether Professor Yanarella's colleagues on the faculty senate might not have acquiesced in many an administrative usurpation as long as it was a usurpation on the side of the senate's angels only to discover that their moral and procedural authority (they are different) had been surrendered by default?

The other theme is the mission of Mr Todd and other recently hired university presidents with business backgrounds. The article mentions research emphases and economic development. The subtlety ... which a newspaper reporter can be forgiven for missing ... is in the nature of that research. We're no longer talking about disinterested inquiry into whatever seems interesting whether the outcome will have any lasting effect or not. We are talking about inquiry into projects that have a commercial payoff. The compromise that might be emerging is one in which legislatures might provide additional real resources while changing the roles of their state schools. Thus Mr Todd might receive some help for technology commercialization at Kentucky, but departments at Kentucky that don't do that kind of research, and entire campuses elsewhere in the state, might receive more explicit orders to phase out the research programs. (A similar dynamic might be at work in Illinois, but neither the legislature nor the administration of any comprehensive university has come out and said so. Legislators have conflicting visions. Presidents and provosts are reluctant to voluntarily reduce the scope of their universities.) That might entail what the dean at Anonymous Community describes as "retire the euphemisms and face reality," as well as moving toward his Easter Bunny treat, "So Flagship U could keep its doctoral programs, but Eastern Teachers State U couldn’t. Faculty at Eastern Teachers State U would actually have to teach undergraduates. Graduates of Flagship U would eventually actually have chances to get jobs."

That compromise might be honest, but it might also be unsustainable, for a different reason. Here is the current Faustian bargain at the Upwardly Mobiles, again, from the Easter Bunny post.

There are very, very powerful incentives for individual institutions and departments to “raise their academic profile.” A department that ‘moves up’ gets lighter teaching loads for incumbent faculty, more graduate student labor to do the scut work (freshman composition, survey courses, lab work, etc.), more prestige, and more money. Faculty in that area are freed from tedious undergrad courses, and allowed to teach graduate ‘seminars’ in which they essentially have talented, eager-to-please apprentices to help them do their research. What’s not to like?

Institutions that move up gain prestige (which pays off in a higher caliber of undergraduate, which leads to higher retention rates, which leads to higher tuition revenue…). They also gain research funding, but most importantly, they gain cheap labor. The big state universities couldn’t survive if they paid full-time salaries to everybody who teaches freshman comp.

Let me rephrase that slightly. The Upwardly Mobile recruits ambitious Ph.D.s who might not be doing the currently most fashionable or currently most difficult or currently most fundable work. "Help us establish our visibility. Compete in the profession. Publish your way out if you can, we understand." That might be sufficient compensation for teaching the service courses to individuals who think of Upwardly Mobile as a safety school, or as something that was there when the mugging by reality happened, or as a great place for underage drinking. And thus the cynicism.

OK, tell the truth instead. Drop the pretense of "competing in the profession." Hold-up the existing tenured faculty to teach more classes if their scholarly work is not commercializable. But do so quickly, so as not to recruit any more ambitious Ph.D.s under what is now clearly a false pretense.

Now for the reality check. People who have a vocation for teaching and more modest research aspirations have avoided the Upwardly Mobiles for years. Does Newly Honest Safety School (properly, a four year community college with a climbing wall and good parties?) improve its chances of competing for those people? It is likely to be more difficult to give away economics Ph.D.s under those circumstances. Perhaps a university can deal with its enrollment-impacted departments in the short term by holding-up the existing tenured faculty. Replacing those people in the long term might not be as easy as "Graduates of Flagship U would eventually actually have chances to get jobs," because fewer people will attend Flagship U. with the circumscribed prospects the end of the Faustian bargain implies.

Might there be reason to develop an alternative to the Ph.D. as a credential for college teaching? That's an old idea, one that I wish to address in the future. I would be reluctant to encourage anybody with an academic vocation to act on it in the face of a market for ... state subsidized summer camps where little learning takes place?

A COMMUTER RAILROAD THAT DOES THINGS RIGHT. Greater DeKalb expat Passenger Rail praises Metra.

Another routine performance this morning. I had to judge the Fed Challenge, at, no surprise, the Fed. Two more punches on the ten-ride, with a fast ride in on the 7.07 Naperville Zephyr and out on the 4.28 Nai-Mev-Org Zephyr.

THE EVOLUTION OF THE SYLLABUM OMNIUM. It's probably over the top to mention the "Ashley rule" or the "Justin clause."

"I began teaching at NIU in 1991 and my syllabus contained few, if any, rules," said Scott Short, a mechanical engineering professor. "Since then my syllabus, unfortunately, now contains a long list of rules."

Those rules, however, usually are the result of an individual student's behavior, Short said.

"Most of the rules were 'named' for a particular student who tried some funny business," he said.

The students, however, see the benefit of the rules.

"As far as the whole cell phone thing goes, I think it's really annoying when a cell phone rings during class," said ... a freshman undecided major. "Once in speech class, a cell phone went off during someone's speech and it completely threw the guy off."

Yup. Sometimes there are side benefits to active learning projects. I helped a colleague with a math education class project and the day's presenters were a bit miffed that some of their classmates took advantage of their presentation to take a nap. They may encounter worse in the common schools.

CARTELS IN THEORY AND PRACTICE. Northern Star columnist Jessica King discovers that the city council has been restricting output.

The DeKalb City Council has repeatedly voted to keep the number of Class A liquor licenses at 16, despite the growth of the city. This trend is a long one. In fact, according the original DeKalb liquor policy from more than thirty years ago, there should be two more Class A licenses in town.

The DeKalb City Council raised the minimum population needed for another liquor license twice, without a good cause.

Oh, but there is a good cause.

In addition, there is no reason why current bar owners should receive special protection from competition. They should have to feel the pressures of the market, just as the owner of a candy store or clothing store should. If new bars close down because they can't attract customers, then so be it. If old bars have to close because the newer bars have better prices or pool tables, so be it.

Reason, meet cause.

Yes, I have been following this liquor cartel kerfuffle (Kartuffle??) for years, and it never ceases to offer material for public policy classes.

The column quotes the mayor, a retired economics professor, advancing a public interest argument for limiting the number of bars. Presumably there is also a public interest argument for limiting the number of outdoor events at bars to not exceeding one per day. I leave that to the reader as an exercise.

CARNIVAL CALL. The Education Wonks have hoisted the bannerline for Carnival of Education No. 73₍₈₎.

WHY GENERATIONAL MORPHOLOGY MISLEADS. The local coffee house has been helping a used-book seller liquidate his inventory. One of the titles on the rack is part one of William L. Shirer's 20th Century Journey. I flipped through it. Let me quote from the opening chapter, for the further edification of those who might think the world-view of the parents might shape the world-view of the children.

Paris loomed as paradise, the City of Light and Enlightenment, the Center of Civilization, after our growing up in the American wasteland. We wanted to get away from Prohibition, fundamentalism, puritanism, Coolidgeism, Babbittry, ballyhoo, the booster antics of Rotary and the Chamber of Commerce -- all the cant of the bourgeois who dominated our land and made it, we thought, such a mindless, shoddy place to live in.

We had grown up in our college years, despite the efforts of our teachers to keep our minds off current literature, on the novels of Sinclair Lewis, Main Street and Babbitt, and the thunderings of H. L. Mencken in The American Mercury against the homo boobiens of the American hinterland. They had rubbed in what we knew all too well from our young lives: the cultural poverty of the Midwest small town; the tyrannical pressures to conform to a narrow, conservative puritan norm; the hollowness of the small-town booster Babbitt businessman; the worship of business and profits and financial success by our sanctimonious and churchy Christians.

Leave aside for the moment that a septuagenarian Mr Shirer would describe the era in those terms. Abstract from the contemporary Culture Wars division in which the puritan norms might be the sexual strictures of the Christian Right or the pleasure strictures of the Environmental Left. And don't dwell on Mencken's subsequent adoption by the libertarians. Consider instead the strength of self-reinforcing structures of conformity in a pre-television, pre-Internet, pre-Civil Rights, pre-Super Power United States. If ever the correlation of forces would have favored the parents replicating their own norms, one would expect them to have been at work in the early 1920s. All the same, the worldview of Mr Shirer and his co-cosmopolitans had a non-trivial effect on the culture to come.

PLAYER WITH RAILROADS, AND STACKER OF DERIVATIVES. The Economist offers a favorable survey of Chicago. The full text is behind a firewall. I purchased a copy the old-fashioned way. Dan Drezner has observations and some recommended reading. Let me focus on the rail content.

A town of 20,000 souls with not a mile of railway in 1847 had ten years later become the centre of the country's entire rail system.

Yes, and the first miles of railway (the Galena and Chicago Union) were laid from Chicago west with the expectation of moving minerals and the reality of moving agricultural products to the Lakes. The eastern trunk lines that became the Baltimore and Ohio, Erie, New York Central, and Pennsylvania reached the Lakes in the late 1850s to connect with an existing railroad network that was the beginnings of the Chicago and North Western, Chicago Burlington and Quincy, Chicago Rock Island and Pacific and the Wabash. (The Illinois Central was projected as a Freeport to the Ohio River and ultimately New Orleans -- those minerals again -- with the Mattoon to Chicago segment an afterthought.) And thus The Economist's interpretation of history misleads.

The antitrust laws that stopped any one railroad from carrying goods from coast to coast ensure that Chicago is still the place where freight is transferred to other carriers. Logically, St. Louis would have made a better transfer point, but the people there were loth to pay for railway bridges across the Mississippi, so Chicago grabbed its chance and became the nation's entrepot.

Bad history. Rate regulation became national policy in 1887, with the Sherman Antitrust Act signed by President Cleveland three years later. The reluctance of St. Louis to permit bridges is a matter of record, but the bigger problem confronting the eastern trunk lines was that an alliance, say, of the New York Central with the North Western would subject the Central to the vagaries of the harvest in northwest Illinois and Wisconsin as well as putting the Central at a disadvantage soliciting traffic off the Burlington or the later-developing Milwaukee. The eastern trunk lines preferred to compete for the long-haul traffic out of Chicago and leave the hard work of soliciting the agricultural traffic to the existing railroads running west. That choice was not without consequence; for many years the nation's "railroad problem" was the weakness of the farm-belt railroads, with the Burlington, North Western, Milwaukee, Illinois Central, Wabash, Chicago Great Western, and Rock Island all offering occasionally tenuous connections between the Union Pacific at Omaha and the eastern trunk lines around Chicago.

Thus, a location somewhere near the Great Lakes is the best location for a connection between the farm belt railroads and the eastern trunk lines. Had that connection been established near Hammond, Indiana, or Hegewisch, Illinois, the traffic might have avoided a thirty-mile jog around the foot of Lake Michigan. A thirty-mile mistake using the information available to railroad promoters in 1857 isn't much of a mistake.

St. Louis as the gateway instead? The Nickel Plate and Wabash attempted to combine agricultural and long-haul traffic out of St. Louis with varying degrees of success, but the Baltimore and Ohio, New York Central, and Pennsylvania lines to St. Louis via Terre Haute and points south were at least two lines too many.

POSITION FILLED. Chris at Signifying Nothing accepts a temporary assistant professorship at St. Louis University. Persevere.

A LITTLE AHEAD OF ITS TIME? You're looking at a Baldwin Centipede, generally viewed as an evolutionary dead end from the early days of the diesel era, when "diesel-electric" involved more emulation of electric locomotive technology than current best practice does.

Photo courtesy North East Rails.

The production Centipedes mounted two turbocharged inline-eight 1500 hp diesels for a freight engine the equivalent of a cab and booster set from Electro-Motive or Alco, or a passenger engine with 1.5 times the power of those builders' standard passenger unit. Had it been a reliable locomotive (those early turbochargers and big cylinders posed lots of engineering problems, and Baldwin's pipefitters never figured out that joints in lubricating lines ought be kept at a distance from the wiring harness) it would have allowed economies in dieselizing many passenger trains that were a bit much for a 2000 horsepower diesel but overpowered at 4000. (Yes, fantasize about one of these babies storming through Sturtevant at 110 with nine on the Afternoon Hiawatha.)

But the Centipede was an attempt by Baldwin to salvage some of their investment in an even more ambitious project, to pack 6000 hp into a single diesel carbody. The plan envisioned mounting eight 750 hp modules comprising a normally aspirated V-8 turning a small generator, with the electrical cabinet and radiators mounted on the same skid with the engine and generator. These modules were to be installed crosswise, instead of the usual longitudinal axis configuration on single- or double-engine diesel-electrics. A Swiss-born engineer, Max Essl, developed the modular concept for Baldwin.

I think in contemporary usage we'd call such a module a "genset" (referring to the engine-generator-electronics on its own skid.) And Union Pacific has purchased some 1400 hp switchers powered by twin Cummins gensets from National Railway Equipment Company, with some 2100 hp triple-genset ... Union Pacific calls 'em yard engines, but they look like ... road switchers on order.

The advantage of the small gensets is that with modern control systems, the engines can be fired up or powered down as required, reducing the emissions compared to the standard single-engine driving one alternator. Mr Essl didn't have that technology at his disposal.

And then the irony ... Union Pacific was negotiating with Baldwin for a large order of Centipedes, until word of the units' troubles on Pennsylvania filtered back to Omaha. Union Pacific instead replaced its big steam with gas-turbine electric units that were fine as long as exhaust and noise emissions weren't problems. But perhaps the last laugh will be Baldwin's, if the genset technology can be scaled up to an eight-pack of 750 horses, although the package would probably look more like one of these.

Clinton, Iowa, 26 March 2005
Courtesy Rail Pictures.

ABOVE ALL ELSE, INTEGRITY. The Quote of the Day comes from physicist Carl Wieman, leaving Colorado for British Columbia.

"Forefront science is a tough game," Wieman said. "Rather than be a third-rate physics researcher, I just figured it made more sense to put my full effort into (science education)."

This from a researcher who with Eric Cornell won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2001 by creating the Bose-Einstein condensate.

One would expect that someone conversant with laws of conservation at the sub-atomic level might recognize laws of conservation on a larger scale. Economists call them opportunity costs.

"If you want to have any sort of large-scale education initiative, where you're really focusing on education, you need people at the highest levels to put thought and attention into it," he said.

"If our Board of Regents spent half the time on discussions of how to improve the education for students that they do on athletics, it would be a very different university," Wieman said.

The recent CU football recruiting controversy was a major distraction that diverted attention from the classroom, Wieman said.

"My personal view is that there's a considerable overemphasis (on athletics) that takes time and attention away from what we could be doing to improve education."

Via University Diaries, who mocks administrative attempts to spin the professor's comments.

REVEALED PREFERENCES. Northern Illinois rearranged some of the traffic patterns on the west campus, closing a through street and relocating a bus turnaround. The land scraped up for construction allowed the creation of a hillock, just the right size for hanging out, or, during less trafficked times, tossing a Frisbee.

But that isn't what the landscape architects intended, oh, no. So this morning a fencing company is at work installing decorative fence posts, preparatory to closing off the short cuts that have emerged on the hillock and rendering casual Frisbee-tossing hazardous.

But there are no resources for enrollment-impacted departments.

IT'S PRIMARY DAY. Illinois allows voters to pick a party ballot on the day of the primary. I want to say "a plague on all your houses." The Republican gubernatorial hopefuls are giving the Democratic governor all sorts of material. There is a particularly nasty Republican race to find an opponent to first-term Democratic Representative Melissa Bean. Fortunately, that is not my district.

What really annoys me, however, is all these promises to "fight" for this benefit or that law. Come off it. We all understand that the purpose of an omnibus appropriations bill is to put all the pet projects into one authorization along with sufficient sweeteners to build a veto-resistant majority. Some fight, that.

A QUICK BASKETBALL UPDATE. DePaul had too much bench for Tulsa, reeling off most of the points at the end of the game to advance. Stanford ended Florida State's run.

The Ray Meyer farewell continues. But some of the tributes got me thinking. A broadcaster on Saturday said something about associating Ray Meyer with DePaul, or was it the other way around. Consider DePaul. Consider any basketball school in the Big East (by definition, that's all of them.) Name a Nobel Prize winner or other great academician in the lot.

SPORTSCASTERS SCOOP THE NEW YORK TIMES. Saturday's post mentioned Liberty University's debate team, with me mentioning chancellor Falwell's interest in raising a cadre of persuasive witnesses for The Cause. Sunday's New York Times had a longer article on ... Liberty University's debate team. Bill at Atlantic Blog has some fun imagining the latte-sippers reading about the country's top-ranked debate squad, with "intensely competitive" coach Brett O'Donnell.

He is a political junkie with autographed photos of Karl Rove, Oliver North and Newt Gingrich on display in his small office. His heroes are Jesus Christ and Ronald Reagan — closely followed by the 79-year-old Penn State football coach, Joe Paterno, whom he admires for his work ethic. In 2004, Karl Rove brought O'Donnell in to help the Bush presidential debate team, and O'Donnell expects to be working with Republican candidates again this year.

The article offers some insights into a different kind of speech code.

"A few years ago," O'Donnell recalls, "the topic dealt with the right of privacy. That means, among other things, abortion. The question arose, can we let our students argue the pro side of the case? Some conservative Christian schools decided that they couldn't argue both sides of certain issues. Bob Jones University wound up dropping policy debating."

O'Donnell took the matter to Falwell. "Doc decided that if we wanted to compete, we'd need to accept the rules," O'Donnell says. That season, by special dispensation, Liberty's debate practice rooms became the only place on campus where students were free to argue in favor of Roe v. Wade.

"Not all the Liberty debaters are all that pious," says the George Mason coach, Warren Decker. Decker was raised in a Christian home in Kansas, but he has long since traded his Sunday-school innocence for a marked skepticism. "Besides," he says,"debate is a liberalizing activity. I doubt that Falwell is producing a lot of people who, when they finish at Liberty, are going out to spread the
Word."

O'Donnell disagrees, mostly because he says he doesn't fear the power of secular ideology. "If there's a challenge to belief, it's better that the kids face it now," he says. "We don't need to shelter them. We want them to know the best arguments they will be up against. What determines how they ultimately fall out on this is their relationship with God."

It's also the case that the more conventional colleges have attempted to marginalize Liberty's team.

Liberty is not currently ranked at the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education's Speech Code project.

THAT GRIM CALCULUS. The liberation of Iraq began three years ago. Read and understand "Sacrifice, fear, and hope" at Iraq the Model. It offers a balanced look at the invasion and the aftermath. As a good news, bad news couplet, the invasion can be summarized thusly. "First the good news: Saddam is gone. The bad news: the friends of Israel did it."

The efforts by Jim at the Volokh Conspiracy to compare the total war deaths in Iraq to one bad month in Vietnam (or one bad day in France) are less impressive. I read the biographies of the war dead and wonder what I was doing in my early 20s that was so important, and I deplore the calculus that puts such men and women at risk there in order that we continue to avoid another September 11 here.

A Gateway Pundit post comparing the worst-case scenarios of war opponents with the historical record is more instructive.

For the most part, I have left the war coverage to others. For the record, here is where I stand.

First, I do not want to have to explain to my nephew why he has to pray with his nose pointed at Cudahy and his butt in the air because a few querulous people insisted on standards of evidence far beyond what peer review, or a court of law, would demand.

Second, I have little patience with critics of the war effort who would note that the Second World War was over by December 7, 1945. That comparison leaves out the British, who were in it for two additional years, and the Soviets, who absorbed most of the German fury. Yes, Sgt. Karlson and a lot of other green kids were thrown into the Ardennes with little seasoning. But it also took the pattern-bombing of German and occupied European cities and the nuking of two Japanese cities, with a bluff to deliver more nukes, to expedite the job. John Pina Craven's The Silent War, reviewed here, recalls that in December 1941 the submarine commanders were expecting the Pacific War to go on for at least ten years. And the griping about "the tallest man in Afghanistan" evading capture for four years similarly fails to impress. Al-Qaeda operates in somewhat more hospitable neighborhoods than der Organisation der ehemaligen SS-Angehörigen did (does? -- yes, there was a movie about it, and it may have arranged a car bombing as recently as 1979.) And "Adolf calibration man" (the real one, not a bond trader for Cantor Fitzgerald -- internet translation engines are so cute sometimes) was at large until 1961, with several other prominent Nazis dying at large.

The Superintendent continues to note with respect and regret the deaths of our soldiers, sailors, air forces, Marines, and Coast Guard postponing, if not cancelling, further attacks on the United States.

This site will leave the day-to-day discussions of the war effort and geopolitics to others.

JUST SLIGHTLY AHEAD OF MY TIME? USA Today has a story on a rails-to-trails-with rail project in Atlanta, and a sidebar on other rails-to-trails efforts. I can't claim to have invented the railroad right of way as a bike trail, but abandoned stretches of the Milwaukee Electric's Muskego Lakes Division and Lakeside Belt Line near my house were sufficiently well-graded that I could ride my coaster-brake bike on them, making interurban noises as I accelerated.

A graphic in the print edition of the article compares Atlanta's 7.8 acres of parkland per 1,000 residents with Milwaukee's 16.1 acres and Jacksonville's 67.6. If memory serves, Jacksonville includes a great deal of unimprovable land best left as nature preserves. Milwaukee's is a legacy of the "sewer Socialists" we were talking about last week.

CARNIVAL CALL. Casey Software hosts the Carnival of the Capitalists. Take the time to read and understand Ripples on the Friday downsizing ritual.

Has anyone seen an instance where repeated layoffs have saved a company and put it back on track?

But because everyone else was doing it, it must have been the right thing to do.

EXPECT TRAIN MOVEMENTS AT ANY TIME, ON ANY TRACK, IN EITHER DIRECTION. Sad news from Texas.

The reigning Miss Deaf Texas lost her life last Monday while walking next to the Union Pacific tracks, struck by a snowplow that extends about 16 inches on both sides of the tracks. The accident happened about 2:30 pm in South Austin, according to the Austin Police Report.

With the tracks better maintained, the ground-shaking that used to alert people to the presence of a train isn't always there.

Austin police said McAvoy had text messaged her mother just minutes before the accident happened. The 18-year-old said she was going to take a short cut down the railroad tracks to meet her mom at work.

“We believe she may have been sending text messages to friends and family as well during that time,” [Austin Detective David] Fugitt said.

That’s a factor, plus her deafness, police said, that could have kept her from noticing the train.

The railroad track is NOT a short cut, even if you have full use of your senses and are not preoccupied with your electronic shackles. Kindly be governed accordingly.

WE COULD DO OUR JOB, IF WE KNEW WHAT OUR JOB WAS. The dean at Anonymous Community is not impressed with Strapped. (Apparently neither are many of the volunteer reviewers.)

It is to the dean's smackdown of a stupid statement about community colleges that I wish to speak.

“Unlike universities, community colleges aren’t geared solely to the needs of undergraduates.”

That was the stupid statement. On to the smack-down.

Although it’s only March, this is a strong contender for Howler of the Year.

If you’ve ever been to a university, you would have noticed graduate students. You also would have noticed faculty who only teach graduate students, and graduate students who teach undergraduate students. You would have noticed faculty jockeying to avoid lower-level undergrad courses like the plague. You would have noticed gargantuan sums of cash going into football stadiums, and research labs, and student centers with climbing walls.

If you wander around your typical community college, you would find actual faculty teaching lower-level undergraduate courses. You would not find a football stadium. You would not find substantial research labs. You would not find climbing walls. You would also find much lower tuition levels, reflecting the no-frills atmosphere and allowing the non-wealthy to attend.

What the dean has confirmed, indirectly, is that the hardest job in higher education is being a professor at a mid-major (in the old Carnegie classifications, a "public comprehensive.") The mid-majors tend to have aspirations, sometimes realized, more frequently frustrated, for national prominence in research and the performing arts, as well as the occasional bracket-busting or appearance in a BCS bowl. My own biases may have placed these items in the wrong order.

Why do I make this claim? Start with that "If you’ve ever been to a university, you would have noticed graduate students. You also would have noticed faculty who only teach graduate students, and graduate students who teach undergraduate students." Certainly true of the Ivies ... some of them are so well-endowed and so well plugged into the grants machinery that the undergraduate program is window dressing. The academic stars can be characterized as "trained bears" that put on the odd performance in an undergraduate class (I saw that metaphor someplace but can't recall for the credit) while the undergraduates are often self-motivated or parentally guilt-tripped enough to synthesize the material in coffee house or tavern with an encyclopedia behind the bar. The state flagships often credit a star professor with multiple courses for showing up before 800 people in an auditorium plus others watching on television, and they make promiscuous use of graduate assistants to conduct "discussion sections" and grade the papers, that is, if the assessment hasn't been converted to quickly-graded fill in the bubble exams. Faculty in the mid-majors might not receive that sort of support (put another way, their universities might not get away with that sort of neglect of teaching) but they're competing for journal space and grant money with their more favorably-treated colleagues at the private Research Is and the flagships.

Then consider the football programs and climbing walls. Herein lies another source of frustration. On one hand, some administrators and some legislators have ambitions to convert their public comprehensive into something more highly thought of. (Northern Illinois, for example, at one time received an infusion of state money to strengthen several graduate programs. The athletic department had visions of replacing Northwestern in the Big Ten -- that despite Northwestern recently ending a long football losing streak with a non-conference win over a California Bowl-bound Northern Illinois team.) On the other hand, there are administrators and legislators that view their public comprehensives as community colleges with climbing walls. (If you're at a public university not named for a cardinal compass point, you probably have sensed this for some time already.)

That tension makes recruiting faculty, let alone maintaining faculty morale, difficult. The faculty at the Research I know what the mission is, as do the faculty at the community college. At the mid-major, a department might advertise for faculty with the expectation that they will be competitive as scholars. But that might not be the future mission of the university.

CAN'T GIVE A PH.D. AWAY. I received a message today from an economics e-mail list.

Does anyone have a promising student that is looking to pursue a masters or doctorate? We still have slots open for next year's class of students and financially competitive assistantships are still available.

I'm going to withhold judgement on this missive as the website for the department in question offers scant information about its faculty publication performance or the placement of its graduates. (And it would be mean to identify the department. Sorry.)

But it does shed some light on why there is no industrial reserve army of unemployed economics Ph.D.s. Apparently admission to a doctoral program, ANY doctoral program, is not that great a prize.

TONE-DEAF, AGAIN? It's supposedly the first day of spring, although there's a howling blue norther and apparently enough of last week's dry air in place to keep Nebraska's snows south of Interstate 80. It's also the first day back from spring break. So whoever is responsible for programming the electric carillon decided this would be a great day to ring out the Song of the Volga Boatment. Just like the last cheery occasion.

ON THE READY TRACK. The State of Maine Northern recently took delivery of some GP9s from Atlas. The undecorated models come partially assembled, with a variety of optional fittings included in the box. In these pictures, I have not removed some of the foam padding from the original packaging. I am likely to read the manual for the final assembly instructions, then disassemble them for painting, and put them in service as painted. These are smooth running engines that will run well at low speeds.


Here, they have delivered a load of coal to the cement plant at West Gloucester.


Next, they are setting out a load of sides at the Swift distribution center. The boxcar will be placed on the team track.


The engines have now run around their train to work the facing-point industries on the east end of Gloucester, but first they must clear the time of the first-class train with the mail and express for Rockport. The Gloucester Branch is close enough to the sea at this location that a lighthouse is not excessive artistic license.