LEARNING TO WIN. The Packers went to Miami, where they last won in January of 1968, and prevailed over a Dolphins team that is baffling all the experts that picked them as a contender. That outcome accompanies a Badger win at Purdue, where the Boilermaker offense couldn't carry rivets for a boilermaker. How does that cheer go? E to the wye dee wye dee ex, slipstick, slide rule, goes to zero! Closer to home, Northern Illinois rained field goals on Temple, despite some offensive troubles that the pundits suggest are pushing Garrett Wolfe's Heisman chances toward that absorbing barrier. The game came after a 90 minute parade (the Daily Chronicle's slideshow is a rather long download even with a fast connection) combining the DeKalb sesquicentennial and the first centennial Homecoming anywhere in the world.

IT DOESN'T TAKE A LOT OF BRAINS TO STOP FOR TRAINS. I've discovered that Chicago commuter train operator Metra has announced (if the webmaster notes a misspelled directory name the link could go the way of the North Shore Line) its first poster contest for K-12 students. The theme is "Lead by Example," which ought to work well for first-borns! The call for entries asks schools to limit their submissions to not exceeding eight entries.

The Northern Illinois University Office of Economic Education's Regional Poster Contest will be officially announced on Economic Education Day, Tuesday, October 24. This contest is limited to one entry per student from students in second through eighth grades. We have received as many as sixty entries from one school.

WHERE HOMECOMING BEGAN. Northern Illinois is the first major college to have its 100th annual homecoming football game and related parties. These coincide with DeKalb's centennial. In honor of the occasion, the Northern Star offered a number of retro front pages this week (all .pdf in excess of 1 Mb): Monday, the 1942 stylesheet (despite wartime allocations, there was paper for a college newspaper), Tuesday, the 1954 stylesheet, Wednesday, the 1960 stylesheet, Thursday, the 1972 stylesheet, and Friday, the 1984 stylesheet (still in use when I arrived.)

The restaurant district was full of people this evening, and the reviewing stand in place for tomorrow's parade (once again, the Illinois Economic Association conference is the same weekend). Perhaps there are a few students loosening up their parents. Let me say a few words in defense of the 18-year-old drinking age: my sister and I were able to kick back with our parents at Paisan's after more than a few Badger games well before junior or senior year, and it did all of us some good, and they would drop us off before they headed home.

IT WOULD HAVE TO BE A PROTEST VOTE. Earlier this week, I issued an invitation to Illinois voters.

Write in Stephen Karlson for governor.

He doesn't claim he could do a better job. But he couldn't do any worse.

I did a little research on Illinois election law, which appears not to provide for write-in candidacies in the general election. The election guide includes this language early on:

OFFICERS TO BE NOMINATED AT THE GENERAL PRIMARY AND ELECTED AT THE GENERAL ELECTION

That language suggests that a candidate for statewide office must go through the primary to be placed on the general election ballot. The language on write-in procedures also appears to apply to the primary.

A write-in candidate must file a notarized "Declaration of Intent to be a Write-In Candidate" no later than 5:00 p.m. on the Tuesday immediately prior to the election. The declaration must be filed with the proper election authority or authorities in those jurisdictions in which he or she is seeking to be a write-in candidate. Declaration of Intent forms are NOT TO BE FILED with the State Board of Elections. (10 ILCS 5/7-59, 17-16.1, 18-9.1)

The "Declaration of Intent to be a Write-in Candidate" form can be obtained from the election authority’s office, i.e., the county clerk or board of elections commissioners.

In practice, this means a person running a legal write-in campaign must file declarations of intent with each county's clerk or board. The next paragraph is rather interesting.

To qualify as a candidate for an established political party in a General Election, a write-in candidate at a Primary Election for that party must receive the number of votes that is equal to or greater than the number of signatures required on a petition for that office if the number of candidates whose names appear on the primary ballot is less than the number of persons the party is entitled to nominate or elect to that office at the Primary Election.

The paragraph does not always mean that a properly-declared write-in candidate who wins a primary with a small turnout will NOT be certified as that party's nominee, but it often does. There are no paragraphs that lay out a write-in procedure for the general election, or for an independent candidate not running on a slate of independent candidates (which is effectively a political party.)

The petition criteria for a regular ballot entry make for some interesting reading. It is possible for a declared candidate of an "established party" to be placed on the primary ballot with as few as 500 valid signatures on a nominating petition. (That should give comfort to people who fear that one could get a candidate on the Democratic ballot by leaving a petition in a faculty common room.) On the other hand, a declared "independent" candidate or candidate of a "new" party (and there are precise definitions for both of these) may be obligated to collect no fewer than 25,000 valid signatures in order to be placed on the primary ballot. Bipartisanship (n): the collusion by which elected officials keep some of the rents for themselves.

I'll keep the protest vote option open, but I'll understand if nobody exercises it.

OLD DOG LEARNS NEW TRICKS. There will be only a few postings this evening as I was busy all day with the Illinois Economic Association conference in Chicago. (It adjourned a bit late for me to catch the Elburn 400, but the last Commuter 400 semi-fast of the evening offered some nap time. More conference tomorrow.)

One paper attempted to identify patterns in departmental location. About half the economics departments in U.S. universities are in the college of business, with the other half in liberal arts. Departments are more likely to be in liberal arts in coastal universities, and their affiliation with liberal arts varies directly with a higher research classification for the university, and with the university's selectivity. (Economics is the discipline most likely to have more than one home: psychology and management combined, or sociology and human resources, are nonexistent.)

Another paper describes a service called EH.Net, with all manner of stuff on economic history, including a series of calculators to convert, say, $4000 in 1873 money or $5 in 1905 money into the 2006 equivalent.

ATTEMPTING TO DEFINE AN ELEPHANT? The Chicago Tribune published the efforts of University of Chicago law professor Geoffrey R. Stone to take some of the pejorative out of the term "liberal." Professor Stone made the mistake of laying down a ten-point program, which inspired Arnold Kling to offer ten libertarian points at Tech Central Station, and Jane Galt to essay ten conservative points at her own site. Stephen Bainbridge also comments at Tech Central. There's lots of give-and-take in the comment sections at the various sites, and probably lots of reaction that others have come across. For example, John Rosenberg has some minor objections to Professor Stone up at Discriminations. (Interchange reports all via Econ Log.)

The problem with all such exercises, as more than one commenter noted, is that attempts to aggregate a small number of principles into an ideology can serve more to make like-minded people comfortable with their prejudices. I confront that problem whenever I offer the public policy course. A collection of case studies I use attempts to offer a "Conservative," a "Liberal," and a "Radical" analysis of a public policy problem. In economics, it's relatively simple. In a "Conservative" analysis, emergent distributed networks (such as markets) demonstrate great flexibility in allocating resources and coping with ineffiencies. (But is that "receptive to difference," and thus "liberal"? I find myself saying "disregard what you hear on talk radio" a lot.) A "Liberal" analysis identifies a "market failure" that can be "corrected" with a properly-designed public policy. (But is that "exalting order at the cost of liberty", hence "illiberal"?) The "Radical" analysis focuses on the conflict of interest between profits-as-signals inherent in markets, "failing" or not, and profits-as-ends for traders. (That's always the most frustrating position to teach, because, although we allocate some resources by rules that don't involve buying and selling, that argument doesn't generalize well.)

SHE'S GROWN IN OFFICE. King Banaian isn't impressed with Donna "Queen of Clubs" Shalala's latest response to Saturday Night Fights in Miami.

"This university will be firm and punish people who do bad things," Shalala said. "But we will not throw any student under the bus for instant restoration of our image or our reputation. I will not hang them in a public square. I will not eliminate their participation at the university. I will not take away their scholarships."

This is the same Donna Shalala who responded to a "slave auction" at a Wisconsin fraternity with a "Design for Diversity" that included a (later rescinded) speech code and a Madison Plan (ROTC Off Campus!) that persists as the Madison Plan 2008. In The Hollow Men, where most of the late-1980s efforts to instantly restore Wisconsin's reputation (among diversity hustlers) are mentioned, there is no mention of double-secret probation for the offending fraternity.

The football players can keep their scholarships. The Queen of Clubs must have grown in office. Nothing to do with money. Nah.

RUNNING EXTRA. She's growing slowly, notes Chicago Sun-Times columnist (and onetime Northwestern safety) Rick Telander.

But it has been building, and see-no-evil apologists such as Miami president Donna Shalala -- formerly of the Clinton administration, formerly coach Barry Alvarez's landlord at the University of Wisconsin -- are part of the problem.

She's apparently appended a threat to the statement quoted in the original post.

She added that Miami now has a ''new standard,'' that says, ''Do this again, and you're off the team.''

Not quite like attempting to eliminate fraternities, or ROTC, eh? (Via University Diaries.)

EXPORTING BAD IDEAS? A British reader asks if higher education in Britain is importing the access-assessment-remediation-retention follies from the States. This essay (via Phi Beta Cons) suggests that it is.

The wheels are starting to come off the higher-education juggernaut in Britain. Our school leavers are not the only ones to smell a rat in the empire-building propaganda disseminated by our vice-chancellors and politicians. The business editor of the London Daily Telegraph, Jeff Randall, put it this way:

"...instead of learning useful trades, such as plumbing and carpentry, many of Britain's less academically inclined youth are being lured on to the rocks of unemployment by the siren call of dumbed-down universities and their crackpot degrees.".

Sadly, many of our school leavers are so woefully lacking in basic skills that they can't even train for work in the construction industry. Many school leavers have no idea how to calculate the area of rectangles, let alone more complex shapes. Simple and vital tasks such as calculating the amount of concrete needed to pour a garage floor are far beyond them. Many of them cannot read well enough to understand blueprints. Still less can they write a coherent note, never mind a quote for a prospective customer.

The rush to expand higher education is rapidly destroying British universities, which used to be among the world's best. I attended the University of Michigan in the 1960s without ever being inspired enough to complete a degree. But between 1989 and 1993, I studied English History at the University of East Anglia, a decent but hardly prestigious 'new' university where all the buildings are unadorned concrete block. I was fortunate to study in the last class before the American 'modular' system was introduced. For 6 hours each week, I attended seminars (averaging 15 students) led by some of the best scholars in the field. It changed the way I look at life, and gave me an understanding of what it means to be an educated citizen.

You mean face time with experienced faculty matters? I would object, though, that at Michigan (hardly the largest of the Midwestern flagship universities), getting some one-on-one time during office hours is probably not as difficult as this article makes it seem.

HOW OTHERS SEE US. At Blackfive, Uncle Jimbo tosses a provocative charge at higher education.

Universities discriminate because a merit-based entrance system would not match the rainbow diversity required by the left. Once you accept that as fact, there are two paths you can take. One is the current system of using racial preferences to elevate chosen victim groups until the rainbow is duplicated, the second is the much tougher choice to admit that racism is not the reason there are too few qualified black and Hispanic applicants, poverty and single parent households are.

The left enjoys the current system as it allows them to mother the victims who need their assistance to overcome the racism inherent in the patriarchal, pale preeminence. It fulfills their belief that unequal outcomes are caused by unfair systems or rules. So they feel justified in elevating those underperforming above the level they achieved and fail to notice that they really haven't done them much of a favor.

In a Madison newspaper column he links to some research on the deleterious effects of preferences on retention in law schools. The conclusion ought to be staggeringly obvious.

Taking a B student and forcing them to compete against A students doesn't help the B student at all. The hope was that the B students would be inspired and raise their game, the fact is they were overwhelmed and under performed.

The research, by Stanford's Rick Sander, who discussed some of his work as a guest at Volokh Conspiracy, is an interesting twist on the research that uncovered the Spielberg Effect. In the latter research, the lifetime earnings of students who were admitted to Harvard or the like but enrolled elsewhere compared favorably with the lifetime earnings of Harvard graduates. Professor Sander's research follows the law school completion rates of students who might have received preferential admission but enrolled at less famous law schools. Such students were more likely to finish.

The Madison column includes an observation about university being too late to address many of the disadvantages students face.

If artificially raising specific groups to the level we want them to achieve doesn't work, we might just have to look at the real problem and address the fact that it is not racism that holds back qualified minorities it is a lack of qualified minorities. That is addressed at the primary school level in the childs formative years. If they are not nurtured and motivated at home and school then no amount of bar lowering will change the outcome.

Those, however, are a tougher set of problems.

CLIMBING A WALL OF WORRY? Dow Ends Above 12,000 for the First Time.

The Dow Jones industrial average scored its first close above 12,000 Thursday as Wall Street, showing its growing confidence despite new evidence of a weakening economy, managed to hold on to a slim advance.

The stock market's most prominent benchmark ended the day at 12,011.73, the ninth time in just over two weeks that the Dow has achieved a record high close. The record came one day after the index of 30 blue chip stocks made its first foray past 12,000.

The Dow's latest milestone came on the anniversary of Black Monday in 1987, when the Dow plunged 508 points and also suffered its second-biggest percentage drop in history. The Dow finished that day at 1,793.90, far from Thursday's record.

The finish above 12,000 was the latest sign that the stock market continues a cautious recovery from the losses and despair investors suffered in the early part of this decade. After peaking in early 2000, the Dow and other indexes fell precipitously amid the dot-com collapse, recession and the impact of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.

The main press is still dwelling on bubbles long burst?

NO LONGER BASIC IN ANY SENSE OF THE WORD. At Cato-at-Liberty, some reflections on the continued usefulness of steel tariffs.

By wiping those liabilities off of the books of several major bankrupt steel producers, that intervention paved the way for mergers and acquisitions and new labor agreements that have enabled the industry to retire inefficient capacity, cut its fixed costs, and consolidate production decisions. In 2003, the top three producers of flat-rolled steel (the steel used in autos, appliances, and construction) controlled 25 percent of flat-rolled steel production capacity. Today, the top three control 70 percent.

That concentration has given the domestic industry a high degree of market power, which enables it to prop up prices and weather downturns in demand by curtailing output. There’s nothing objectionable about that (with the exception of the government-assisted jumpstart) unless, of course, steel is a major component of the products you manufacture. What is objectionable, then, is buttressing this emerging oligopoly with continued trade restraints. Consumers of steel should be expected to adapt to the effects of greater concentration of steel production, but that adaptation requires having access to imported substitutes and supplements.

Taxpayers, steel-using industries, and consumers have subsidized this industry for too long.

In some economists' understanding of antitrust policy, the emergence of today's steel oligopoly is a long-term effect of the 1920 U.S. v. United States Steel (251 U.S. 217) antitrust case, in which the company famously beat an antitrust rap by arguing, in effect, "how could we be a monopoly if we had to discuss prices with our competitors?" The case is the basis of many an answer to the question, is protecting competitors equivalent to protecting competition?

IS MARXISM THE OPIATE OF THE WORLD COUNCIL? At Nanodot (via Insta Pundit), some reservations about a World Council of Churches position paper on (what else?) nanotechnology. The writers at Nanodot focus on potential problems with what appears to be a strong form of the Precautionary Principle and the report's emphasis on "democratic control" of technologies.

First, I’m not sure it’s true that public confidence in science is at an all time low. Perhaps this is true in Europe, but I think scientists in the U.S. are still respected, especially compared to some other professions, such as politicians. Second, I wonder whether WCC really wants to say that it’s justified to call for a moratorium on nanotech research until the materials are shown to be safe. Sounds like research to me.

Third, note the repeated use of the term “democratic control” including “democratic control…of science”. Sounds plausible at first hearing. But democratic control means majority control, and in many countries Christians are in the minority. In other countries they are still the dominant culture but losing ground fast. Are the rights of these Christians to learn science and develop and use technologies to be determined by the majority? This may merit further thought.

Alternatively, what happens if the Christians who make up the majority coalition are not the blue-state World Council Christians, but the red-state Special Creation Christians?

But it is to that "democratic control" that I wish to speak. The phrase is one also popular with socialists of the participatory economics stripe. Dig into the Council's report and note,

While there are remarkable scientists who have shown an outstanding sense of responsibility and solidarity with the poor and marginalized, a majority of them have accepted a more and more corporate dominated and market-driven approach to scientific research and its technological applications. Much of the funding for basic research depends today on government funding for military research or on a private sector that takes control of the results through patenting and copyright regimes.

New technologies need to be assessed in terms of social (marginalization), cultural (perspectives of life), economic (monopolies, profits), political (dominance and power), and military (new weapons of mass destruction) impact and consequences. It is important not only to notice, but to understand, the shift away from science and technology as instruments and tools for human development towards the much more sophisticated notion of its power and capacity to transform and to re-design the basic elements of matter – and thus the building blocks – of the community of life as we know it. The newly emerging technology [c.q.] are paving the way for the commodification of life at a much more basic level.

Production for profit, not for use? (As if, without technological change, there would be no poor. Vacuously true, perhaps, if only because everyone would be equally poor.) Commodification? No accumulations of surplus value or fundamental contradictions, but there is a world to win.

While advocating such a paradigm shift, it should be clear to everybody that a major re-orientation of the dominant political economy and culture is not a simple undertaking, but requires an enormous effort of resistance, struggle for alternatives, un-learning of threatening attitudes, habits, values and worldviews, and learning what it means to live in conviviality with all life on earth as our common home.

Question: doesn't "advocating" under "democratic" conditions mean a majority could say "no?" And doesn't the lion lay down with the lamb in Heaven?

The Council report, taken as a whole, reads like a bad parody of a sophomore seminar in cultural studies. When I reached this paragraph, I abandoned further reading.

In a world where human improvement or “enhancement” becomes a technological imperative, the rights of people who do not meet the “norm”, for example people with disabilities, will be further eroded and impairments or disabilities will be perceived as technological challenges rather than as issues of social justice. How long before democratic dissent is viewed as a correctable “impairment” as well?

Cheap debating trick: invoke Logan's Run by way of an allusion to the eugenics programs -- not all run by Nazis -- of the 1920s and 1930s. (Aren't eyeglasses and hearing aids and those electric wheelchairs also responses to technological challenges?) Continue by demonstrating an ignorance of the Sermon on the Mount. Isn't the correction of impairments precisely the goal of "liberating tolerance" and, say, the establishment of "free-speech zones" of order epsilon at Jesuit colleges?

I'LL SETTLE FOR NO. 3 ON THIS SEARCH STRING. Preparing bratwursts.

YOU KNOW, WE CAN'T EVEN SAY SHAVING CREAM. Marquette Warrior notes that Foundation for Individual Rights in Education staff have sent a strongly worded letter to Marquette's administration.

Even by the most conservative standards, the Barry quote cannot be suitably described as “patently offensive,” as South described it in his e-mail. Ditsler did not post obscene photos or even lewd commentary on his office door, but a popular author’s political witticism. The quote expressed a negative view of the government, which could possibly offend the sensibilities of those who are sympathetic to the government, but which was not “patently offensive” to any and all passers-by. If Marquette is to classify all ideological speech as “patently offensive,” then there will be precious little that students and faculty are allowed to discuss. Marquette’s policies have been sculpted to include protections for academic freedom because a policy of open inquiry and discussion best fits the vision of higher education that Marquette wishes to uphold. Those standards are even more important in a philosophy department, where the search for truth should not stop at the faintest cry of “offense.” Ideological political expression is at the heart of free speech and academic freedom, and if it is not protected, then Marquette’s commitments to expressive rights ring hollow.

We are aware that Marquette takes very seriously its values as a Jesuit institution. We also believe that it takes seriously its role as an educational institution and as a leader in academic excellence. These mandates need not and should not be at odds. We ask that you reconsider the decision to remove the Dave Barry quote from Stuart Ditsler’s office door, and that you clarify Marquette’s position on free expression and academic freedom. We request a response by October 11, 2006.

The university has not yet responded. But rather than impose a blockade or unleash a nuke, the folks at The Torch have discovered a more effective weapon. Hey, Marquette administrators: they're all going to laugh at you!

So it is that I invite you join me saluting the heroic Anti-Dave Freedom Fighters of Marquette University, who struck a major blow for our cause recently when they demanded that a grad student in the philosophy department remove a "patently offensive" Barry quote that was posted on his office door. Ordinarily this is a family-friendly blog (provided you are a member of the Manson Family) but for you to understand the magnitude of Dave's offensiveness, I'm going to have to reprint his repugnant words here.

Read the rest.

And now friends, my posting is ended
I think it is time I should quit.
If any of you feel offended,
Stick your head in a barrel of...

YOU CAN'T SEE THE GREAT WALL OF CHINA FROM SPACE. Astronauts have confirmed that. However, at night, you can pick out the Trans-Siberian railroad, and you can also pick out the compound of the North Korean politburo.

THE VALUE OF LOAD MANAGEMENT. The dean at Anonymous Community reacts to the Inside Higher Ed post on inefficient use of adjunct faculty and to my reaction.

Were it up to me, we'd take some pages from the four-year school playbook. We'd develop endowments for purposes other than scholarships, and use the interest income to improve the quality of what we do. We'd shift from 'everyday low prices' to a 'higher-price, higher-aid' strategy. (Obviously, that assumes a considerably streamlined financial aid system.) We might charge different tuition for different majors, based on the extraordinary differences in institutional cost between, say, Nursing clinicals and Intro to Sociology. We'd embrace merit aid, both out of general principle (let's tell high school kids that good grades, as well as a good jump shot, will pay off) and out of a realistic recognition that part of what makes a good education is good peers. Done properly, the wealthier kids would benefit from having another high-quality option, and the poorer would benefit by having a new high-quality option. Yes, there would be more financial aid paperwork, and that's a pain. But it strikes me as far less painful than the continued watering-down of the only option realistically available to many people.

Ah, yes, the joys of managing almost-perfect price discrimination (that financial aid paperwork, painful though it is, enables the universities to tailor prices to students with a precision that the airlines can only approximate.) And encouraging stronger students to apply ought to be the Prime Directive of any strategic plan.

On the other hand, I'm uneasy about charging higher prices for more technical majors, particularly those in stronger demand. (How many times must I repeat: relative prices matter. Cheaper Introductory Sociology means more potential sociology majors. Want fries with that?) The excess demand is for that Clinical Nursing, and Engineering, and Physics, and to some extent Economics. Our troubles serving students are more likely to be problems of preparation. Here's how the Northern Illinois Office of Faculty "Development" sees things.

As the U.S. college student population experiences major changes in demographics in the coming decades and the number of students pursuing certain science, technology, engineering, mathematics and related degrees declines, the need to create welcoming and inclusive classrooms will only increase. This workshop will address this need by increasing participants' awareness of issues affecting educational access, providing information on the challenges that students still face, and presenting techniques on transforming courses and teaching inclusively.

This workshop will introduce a number of teaching techniques and resources that faculty teaching in science, math, engineering and related curricula will find beneficial. All faculty members (not just those in science, math, and engineering) interested in exploring issues of inclusivity in their courses are encouraged to participate in this workshop.

The tone of the announcement turns me off. "Welcoming and inclusive," particularly from these folks, maps all too readily to "dumbing down." And shortages of skilled workers turns into rising wages turns into incentives to master the material, demography notwithstanding.

On the other hand, these disciplines, like economics, are unavoidably technical, but these disciplines, like economics, have some main ideas that are sufficiently intuitive that people who are not necessarily spatial-quantitative learners can grasp them. We struggle regularly with approaches to teaching economics that work for all types of learners (while not appearing patronizing or choosing to dumb down the ideas). But we'd not be receptive to a pricing scheme that would discourage the pursuit of the more technical degrees.

IT HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH MONEY. Peace talks in a hotly contested corner of the world broke down today. I'm not talking about anything as mundane as North Korean nukes or ethnic cleansing in Darfur. These are the talks that would have scheduled some basketball games between Wisconsin-Milwaukee and the Marquette Warriors Golden Porcupines.

Why the deal collapsed is a puzzle. Money was reportedly the issue. Yet, Marquette was offering UWM a generous $60,000 on average for each of three games to be played at MU's home court, the Bradley Center. The teams would have switched between the Bradley Center and UWM's home court, the U.S. Cellular Arena, for the last two games, exchanging no money.

The two sides should have come to an agreement - for their fans' sake. But now, they say they're through trying. We urge them to go back to the table and try some more.

Marquette and UWM played each other regularly until the 1998-'99 season. Marquette, a longtime basketball powerhouse, won all 34 games in the series. But like the skinny kid in the comic book ad who worked out and built muscles after a brute kicked sand on him at the beach, UWM has since morphed into a strong team. Suddenly, Marquette wasn't the only team in town to be invited to the exclusive NCAA tournament. The Panthers have earned three such invites in a row. In 2005, the team made it to the Sweet 16.

So, now, contests between the Panthers and the Golden Eagles could be humdingers. The winner would earn local bragging rights.

RIDICULOUS TRADEMARK INFRINGEMENT SUITS, REDUX. In the past, I have had some fun at the expense of Union Pacific, which charges model train manufacturers a royalty to use the Union Pacific emblem, or the emblems of any of the constituent companies, on rolling stock or simulations thereof. (If you ever see a cut-price 4-8+8-4 Big Boy lettered "Pennsylvania," you're looking at a royalty-evader.) The current list of registered properties includes Alton & Southern, American Refrigerator Transit, Chicago and North Western, Denver & Rio Grande, Missouri-Kansas-Texas (Katy), Missouri Pacific, Pacific Fruit Express, Southern Pacific, St. Louis Southwestern (Cotton Belt), Texas & Pacific, Union Pacific, Union Pacific Fruit Express, and Western Pacific. (Apparently Chicago St. Paul Minneapolis & Omaha is still public domain, although with that fleet of new grain hoppers with CMO reporting marks roaming the Corn Belt, I'm waiting for that one to make the index, and I fully expect to see a fleet of intermodal cars with CGW reporting marks and a fleet of GCU -- do your own research, doggone it! -- boxcars within my lifetime.)

Union Pacific has company, as if the University of Wisconsin wasn't looking foolish enough already.

The University of Wisconsin wants the Waukee school district to X out its W symbol, leaving some students of the suburban Des Moines school district to ask Y.

The Waukee district adopted its purple-and-gold W a decade ago after it was told by state education officials it should not use an image of an American Indian as its school symbol. The district's mascot was the Warriors, but last year students voted to change the mascot to the Spartan Warrior.

Collegiate Licensing Co., which represents the university, sent a letter to Waukee Superintendent David Wilkerson on Sept. 20, saying Waukee's W is nearly identical to the trademarked W used by the university. Wisconsin's W is red.

That's not the first time ?isconsin has brought such a suit.

The university has pressured 20 schools to change their logos in the past three years because the logos looked too much like Wisconsin's.

What a tone-deaf way to kill buzz. Spirit clubs don't redesign their logos to resemble losers. There's a reason Milwaukee Hamilton (opened 1966) has green-and-gold uniforms.

COMPARATIVE ADVANTAGES. Lexington Green on stupid and venal politicians.

Having mediocre politicians is a consequence of our having a superb private economy. We are, actually, fortunate that we have some relatively competent and public-spirited people in public life at all.

This is not a problem with a solution, but a permanent, structural condition.

Nor is it one that needs to concern us much.

Precisely. Ask yourself what commercial progress you'd be willing to give up in order to obtain public officials "better" by some objective standard, and whether governance, which is a messy thing anyway, would be much improved thereby.

QUOTE OF THE DAY. In Turkey, it is illegal to suggest that an ethnic cleansing of Armenians took place in 1915. In France, it is illegal to suggest that an ethnic cleansing of Armenians did not take place in 1915. Seriously. King Banaian at St. Cloud State, who has good reasons to have the truth be told, notes that higher education ought not be getting into this game, "liberating tolerance" notwithstanding.

And if it is to happen anywhere, it cannot be on university campuses, and yet it is, whether it is against Christians, Muslims, pro-immigrationists, or even those who want to make a small joke on a campus door. If you can't even speak on a college campus, none of the rest should surprise you.

Amen.

THREE ACES. Carnival of Education No. 111₍₈₎, complete with a nostalgic look at Rocky Point Amusement Park (wasn't that the site of the world's largest shore dinner hall?) hoists bannerline and teases readers with the brass ring at Poor, Starving College Student.

DON'T BRING THAT AROUND HERE. This morning, I noticed a visit from the search string "getting into northern illinois university with a bad gpa." That's a development I wish to discourage. Fortunately, a college guide site that the search also turned up noted this:

Admission to Northern Illinois University is quite competitive, especially as the number of highly qualified out-of-state students who apply increases with each passing admissions cycle. Last year, over 16,150 students applied for admission to the school, and approximately 10,025 of those students were accepted; of those, about 3,250 matriculated. The admitted students had an average combined SAT score ranging from 1010 to 1090, and an average comprehensive ACT score ranging from 22 to 28. Additionally, more than 65% of those admitted were ranked in the top 10% of their high school graduating class with an average high school GPA of about a 3.58.

Hmmm ... could I have gotten in as a freshman? (Yes, but what were the standards for out-of-state admissions in 1970-71?)

The guide also notes this:

Northern Illinois University has a manageable student to faculty ratio of 18:1, which is quite good for a public school of its size. Some of the general education classes are held in lecture form; however, they are almost always supplemented by a smaller seminar class where students get a chance to discuss the content of the previous lecture. In general, students give their professors high marks in terms of accessibility and willingness to help students out when they may need it.

Professors working even when they're not in the classroom? Quel surprise! Sometimes the most productive work gets done one-on-one or one-on-a-few during office hours.l

LINKS, ZWEI, DREI, VIER. Via Milt Rosenberg, the abnormal psychology of goose-stepping.

Today, the goose step lives on at Iranian military parades. The Kremlin honour guard does it in slow motion. It even shows up at skinhead keg parties, where it's common to find revellers in heavy boots stomping around a roaring fire and sharing drunken dreams of Aryan empire.

The underlying idea is always the same: a heavy boot coming down hard on the enemy. There is no escape.

As George Orwell famously opined, a goose step is "an affirmation of naked power; contained in it, quite consciously and intentionally, is the vision of a boot crashing down on a face."

The step, in fact, bears a message so laden with terrifying meaning that it is one of the few human gestures outright banned by a state — as was the case in West Germany shortly after the Second World War. True to its Soviet state of mind, East Germany retained it.

"It is almost a way of forcing large groups of people unnaturally in unison," Schimmelpenninck explains. "And that is what a fascist society is about or a totalitarian regime is about, whether it be Russian or Soviet."

[I think "Schimmelpennick" refers to University of Toronto psychologist Ulrich Schimmack, who is quoted earlier in the article.]

Frank Capra made a similar point in The Nazis Strike, one of the training films he directed under the Why We Fight rubric. That lesson hit home with Sgt. Karlson, who could be counted on to react to news coverage of those "historic" summit conferences with Communist dictators by grousing, "Never trust a country whose soldiers goose-step." (The other military lesson he could be counted on to deliver was an unfavorable evaluation of marching by the Great Lakes sailors who would participate in Milwaukee parades.)

MONOPSONY-BUSTING. The exclusive right to buy fish at a port looks like a valuable asset, particularly in light of the potential for hold-ups when the fisherman faces the choice of accepting the buyer's offer or risking the fish spoiling before he can land the fish at another port, where there might be another monopsonist. Michael Giberson at Knowledge Problem links to a Washington Post article that "delivers a fantastic story" about the role of information in mastering monopsony.

A convenience taken for granted in wealthy nations, the cellphone is putting cash in the pockets of people for whom a dollar is a good day's wage. And it has made market-savvy entrepreneurs out of sheepherders, rickshaw drivers and even the acrobatic men who shinny up palm trees to harvest coconuts here in Kerala state.

"This has changed the entire dynamics of communications and how they organize their lives," said C.K. Prahalad, an India-born business professor at the University of Michigan who has written extensively about how commerce -- and cellphones -- are used to combat poverty.

"One element of poverty is the lack of information," Prahalad said. "The cellphone gives poor people as much information as the middleman."

Transactions costs still matter, even if they're not a fashionable explanation in academic circles.

[Sardine fisherman Babu] Rajan said that before he got his first cellphone a few years ago, he used to arrive at port with a load of fish and hope for the best. The wholesaler on the dock knew that Rajan's un-iced catch wouldn't last long in the fiery Indian sun. So, Rajan said, he was forced to take whatever price was offered -- without having any idea whether dealers in the next port were offering twice as much.

Now he calls several ports while he's still at sea to find the best prices, playing the dealers against one another to drive up the price.

Markets exist to divide the gains from trade. Profits stemming from ignorance are being competed away, and the profiteers don't like it.

Rajan said the dealers don't necessarily like the new balance of power, but they are paying better prices to him and thousands of other fishermen who work this lush stretch of coastline. "They are forced to give us more money because there is competition," said Rajan, who estimated that his income has at least tripled to an average of $150 a month since 2000, when cellphones began booming in India. He said he is providing for his family in ways that his fisherman father never could, including a house with electricity and a television.

"When I was a kid we never had enough money for clothes and books, so we never really went to school," said Rajan, 50. "Now everything is different."

More evidence of the opportunity costs of ignorance. Information about the brokers' bid prices turns out to be more valuable than knowledge of the fishing grounds.

THE THIRD QUARTER REPORT. I have added another thirteen books to the 2006 Fifty Book Challenge. First and second quarter reports are available in the April and July archives or at the Challenge site or on the European Tribune. I am not optimistic about making the half-century by year's end.

21. Fish on Friday: Feasting, Fasting, and the Discovery of the New World, 10 July 2006.
22. Antitrust after Microsoft: The Obsolescence of Antitrust in the Digital Era, 20 July 2006.
23. Going Broke by Degree: Why College Costs too Much, 3 August 2006.
24. White Guilt, 6 August 2006.
25. Behind the Crumbling Edge, 7 August 2006.
26. Wal-Mart: The Face of Twenty-First-Century Capitalism, 25 August 2006.
27. Midway Magic, 3 September 2006.
28. Civil War Battlefields: Discovering America's Hallowed Ground, 4 September 2006.
29. The Changing Face of Britain's Railways 1938-1953: The Railway Companies Bow Out, 6 September 2006.
30. The Afghan, 8 September 2006.
31. Main Lines, 9 September 2006.
32. Tannenberg 1410/1914, 14 September 2006.
33. The Iraq War, 29 September 2006.

(Cross-posted at the Fifty Book Challenge and at the European Tribune.)

The bookworm has some more segments.

Oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

FACTOR PRICE EQUALIZATION IS NOT EQUIVALENT TO A RACE TO THE BOTTOM. Should I take joy in the realization that higher education in India might be confronting some of the same troubles as its U. S. counterpart? Via Daniel Drezner, two articles that highlight the economic laws of conservation as they apply to outsourcing. First, in the New York Times, the Principle of Increasing Opportunity Cost.

India is bumping up against an improbable challenge. In a country once regarded as a bottomless well of low-cost, ready-to-work, English-speaking engineers, a shortage looms. India still produces plenty of engineers, nearly 400,000 a year at last count. But their competence has become the issue.

A study commissioned by a trade group, the National Association of Software and Service Companies, or Nasscom, found only one in four engineering graduates to be employable. The rest were deficient in the required technical skills, fluency in English or ability to work in a team or deliver basic oral presentations.

(Presumably that addresses the urgency of training Indian engineers to compete in the global economy or some stuff-and-nonsense of that sort. The domestic labor market might be another matter.)

Industry's response is what one might expect in the face of an upward-sloping supply curve.

The university systems of few countries would be able to keep up with such demand, and India is certainly having trouble. The best and most selective universities generate too few graduates, and new private colleges are producing graduates of uneven quality.

Many fear that the labor pinch may signal bottlenecks in other parts of the economy. It is already being felt in the information technology sector.

With the number of technology jobs expected to nearly double to 1.7 million in the next four years, companies are scrambling to find fresh engineering talent and to upgrade the schools that produce it.

Some companies are training faculty members themselves, offering courses tailored to industry needs and improving college labs and libraries. They are rushing to get first choice of would-be engineers long before they have completed their course work. And they are fanning out to small, remote colleges that almost no one had heard of before. The country’s most successful technology concerns can no longer afford to hire only from the most prestigious Indian universities. Nor can they expect recent graduates to be ready to hit the shop floor. Most companies require in-house training of anywhere from two to six months.

The reaction of employers: put pressure on India's less-famous universities (is the mid-major now a global property?) to become more like the prestige schools.

They grilled professors and administrators: How many faculty members have doctorates? Why did so many students have incompletes by the time they entered their fourth and final year? What software programs do they use for the class in mechatronics — a combination of mechanics, information technology and electronics?

They tested the students’ ability to reason and speak, tossing out debate topics, like democracy versus dictatorship, and science quiz questions, like what happens to an iron rod put in a beaker of nitric acid.

They sampled the offerings at the college library and the English language lab.

The exercise was part of an elaborate process by the company to assess whether this campus, the K. S. Rangasamy College of Technical Education, can be added to the pool of colleges from which to recruit.

In the past, Tata Consultancy Services needed only to turn to the top engineering schools in the country: the nine campuses of the Indian Institutes of Technology and a few others gaining admission can be more difficult than getting into the Ivy League. Today the list includes 209 institutions, many of them, like this one, brand-new private colleges that have emerged to meet the need. Mr. Rangasamy, the college’s founder, is himself the product of the Indian economic expansion. His factories produce tablecloths and bedsheets for Kmart and Marriott.

No access-assessment-remediation-retention here!

In the end, the Rangasamy college did not fit the company’s bill. The team found deficiencies in the way basic subjects were taught and deemed the students to be average.

Higher education is still available only to a tiny slice of India’s young. No more than 10 percent of Indians ages 18 to 25 are enrolled in college, according to official figures. Nearly 40 percent of Indians over the age of 15 are illiterate.

The article focuses on the development of programmers and engineers. The challenges confronting the common schools (the causes of school-leaving are probably much more severe than their U.S. counterparts) are for another day. It concludes by observing that India's college graduates are often prospering beyond their wildest dreams.

And in Boston, a more realistic prosperity is returning to the high-tech businesses.

Global demand for technology products, from cell phones to MP3 players, also is boosting Massachusetts tech firms, which make the equipment for manufacturing such products. Booming electronics companies in China, for example, need the advanced manufacturing and testing equipment designed and made in Massachusetts. Those equipment sales have helped make China the state's sixth largest foreign market, as well as one of its fastest growing.

Sales to China and other Asian nations account for at least 70 percent of sales for Axcelis Technologies Inc., of Beverly, a maker of semiconductor manufacturing equipment, according to Mark Namaroff, senior vice president of strategic marketing. The company, which employs about 1,000 in Massachusetts, has reported double-digit revenue growth this year, while adding about 50 manufacturing jobs.

Exports of knowledge products to China, forsooth!

On tap for tomorrow's advanced theory class: the factor price equalization theorem. Tangent planes, normal vectors, and product prices. It's only a race to the bottom if nobody's buying, folks.

WHAT IS SEEN AND WHAT IS UNSEEN. An Inside Higher Ed post reports on research forthcoming in the Journal of Higher Education.

A national analysis of graduation and program completion rates at community colleges has found that institutions with higher percentages of full-time faculty members have higher completion rates.

The story concentrates on the usual suspects.

While the use of adjuncts is widespread and growing in all sectors of higher education, it is particularly prevalent at two-year institutions. In many cases, community colleges seek out part-timers who are professionals in various fields to teach career-related courses. But community colleges also fill many sections (a majority in some subject areas on some campuses) with part timers. Administrators frequently say that given their institutions’ enrollment growth and tight budgets, they have little choice.

[The author] said that he hoped his research might prompt more reflection on this practice. “People need to realize that the performance of colleges is not indifferent to the use of part timers,” he said. “By having a lot of part timers, the college becomes less effective,” he said.

Missing from the column is any discussion of the phenomenon noted in Generation X Goes to College, in which author Peter Sacks discovers that contract renewals at his community college, somewhere in California, are contingent on getting good student evaluations, and good student evaluations are contingent on making the classes easy. (Want fries with that?) The column does suggest that treating adjuncts more like regular faculty might help.

Keith Hoeller, co-founder of the Washington State Part-Time Faculty Association, said he thought [the article's] findings were quite significant. “There is a fiction that you can cut costs with lots of adjuncts,” Hoeller said. “There’s a sense that as long as you have someone in front of the classroom in class hours, everything else is fine.”

Hoeller said that an important fact to consider is that low program completion rates are expensive — to students and their families who have paid tuition and to taxpayers who have subsidized instruction. Everyone saves money if students move through the system, Hoeller said, so the current use of part timers may not actually be saving money.

The study is also a reminder, he said, that there is a middle ground between having a full-time faculty and paying adjuncts for time leading classes. He predicted that the graduation rate gap would disappear if adjuncts were paid for time on campus generally, so they could have more office hours, more time to meet with students, and be more fully part of the campuses where they teach.

(You mean faculty do useful things when they're not in front of a chalkboard? The horror!)

But let's look at that "enrollment growth and tight budgets." I have long maintained that there is excess demand for the kind of collegiate experience the "selective" universities offer (often keeping their prices below the profit-maximizing level so as to appear more "selective.") What's generating the enrollment growth? Are community college administrators also keeping their prices below the profit-maximizing level?

AUTISTIC NUMBER CRUNCHING? A recent Matthew Denhart post from the Center for College Affordability and Productivity compares Illinois favorably with Michigan.

Take for example two Big Ten schools, the University of Michigan and the University of Illinois. Beyond sharing an athletic conference, these two universities share many other similarities. The states themselves are similar in population, economic characteristics and location. Both institutions are the premier public university in their respective state. Statistical categories show even more similarities. Both have enrollments around the 40,000 mark and graduation rates above 80 percent. Each grants similar numbers of Doctor’s, Master’s and Bachelor’s degrees each year. Both universities are continually found among the top of national college rankings such as the US News and World Report. It seems that these two Big Ten schools are nearly identical except in one important regard: spending.

Michigan far out-paces every other Big Ten school (Northwestern has been excluded from this study) in instructional spending with $14,759 per student in 2003. In contrast, Illinois allotted $6,419—less than half that of Michigan. Michigan outspends Illinois in academic support and student services by around $500 per FTE in each category. While this disparity is less, the spending for institutional support also shows tremendous disparity. Michigan spends $2,427 compared to Illinois’s $608. As expected, the sum totals for spending per FTE in these four categories between Michigan and Illinois is immense. Michigan ranks as the highest spender in the Big Ten with $22,296, and Illinois the lowest with $11,037.

The numbers are meaningless. (But I've come to expect that from this so-called Center.) Are we looking at total spending by the universities? What allocations of common and joint costs are the universities making? Is the University of Michigan spending more because the Michigan legislature is appropriating less?

But beyond that, do some legwork. Inspect the Chicago Fed's charts of gross state product by industry. Compare and contrast the magnitudes and evolution of the various sectors. Then inspect the charts of employment by sector. Same assignment. Read the state profiles. Here's one observer's take on Illinois.

The state and local government in Illinois need to deal with the fundamentals of maintaining infrastructure and education in a stable tax and regulatory environment. Business will have to do the rest.

Perhaps legislators starving the University of Illinois and the other state-tolerated universities while denying them the freedom to raise tuitions and tighten standards is not good for the long-term health of the state or the regional economy.

CONFIRMING HER STATUS AS THE BOSS TRUMP. The first person named to the Cold Spring Shops academic administrator deck of cards was Miami (Florida)'s Donna Shalala.

The most powerful card in the sheepshead deck is the queen of clubs. Cold Spring Shops nominates Donna Shalala as queen of clubs, for finding no diversity fad too foolish, for conspicuous loyalty to corrupt athletic departments, and for distinguished service as a Democratic Party court intellectual.

The football team at Miami is making it difficult for her to build a university the team can be proud of. Her response provides University Diaries with ample material for a fisking, as well as a pithy summary.

1. Boohoo.
2. I'll do what the boys at the ACC tell me to.

Why should her response surprise? One of her bosses engaged in acts of sexual harassment that surely would have given her opportunity to rid herself of a bothersome subordinate, had said subordinate engaged in such acts, and her response was ...

hear those crickets?

WHY IT MATTERS. An observation from Jay Nordlinger in National Review:

Every day, for the last several days, I’ve read about Nobel winners — in chemistry, physics, and medicine. And all the winners are American. You have to wonder whether this is purely accidental. Or whether the United States provides the conditions in which such questing and flourishing are possible.

And if the latter is true — why wouldn’t other countries go and do likewise, instead of shaking with resentment?

More to the point for Cold Spring Shops regulars: Many of those winners have positions in U. S. institutions of higher education. You have to wonder what those institutions are doing to make such questing and flourishing possible. And if their ability to do so is being eroded from within or from without.

CAN'T THEY BOTH LOSE? The Illinois gubernatorial race offers voters a choice of bad or worse. (No, it really doesn't matter who you call "bad.")

The poll reveals widespread voter disillusionment even before the latest allegations of corruption, setting the stage for a lackluster turnout in the Nov. 7 election. And as the election moves closer, voters are becoming increasingly unsure about where to turn.

If there is any encouraging news, it is that voters are not worshipping the so-called "two-party system".

More than half the voters surveyed aren't satisfied with the ballot choices for governor. A large majority believe the level of corruption is the same as in previous administrations, and nearly four in 10 think that neither of the major candidates would do the better job in cleaning up state government.

One voter gives me an idea.

Poll respondent Joan MacLennan, 67, of Des Plaines, who calls herself an independent voter, said investigations of alleged corruption involving the current administration have lessened her opinion of the governor, while Topinka's shoot-from-the-hip statements in public have diminished her view of
the state treasurer.

"The things she says, they just aren't very gubernatorial," MacLennan said. "And with Blagojevich, you have all these fraud investigations. I just have no idea what to do."

You could write in my name. I'm going to look at the Illinois rules involving declaration as an independent write-in candidate and post further on this. What's my platform? It's relatively simple: I'm not claiming I could do a better job. But I certainly couldn't do any worse.

For instance, I won't pass off misquotations of the main press as positions of my opponents. The misquoting has become so blatant that the editorial writers at the Chicago Tribune had to hoist the protest flag.

Judy Baar Topinka wants to do away with Illinois' health-care program for children. Tammy Duckworth would give welfare and Social Security benefits to illegal aliens. You read it here first--or so their opponents would have you believe. But you didn't.Gov. Rod Blagojevich, who's being challenged by Topinka, and state Sen. Peter Roskam, who's running against Duckworth in the 6th Congressional District, cite the Chicago Tribune as the source for those claims in televised ads. In both cases, the attribution is misleading.

In the Blagojevich ad, a narrator warns that Topinka "has pledged to dismantle Illinois' health-care program for kids." That's not what Topinka said, and it's not what the Tribune said she said. The accusation was made by John Filan, Blagojevich's own budget director, and the story made that clear. The ad, however, cited the source as "Chicago Tribune, 8/18/06."

If we're going to play by those rules, then it's fair to say the Tribune recently called George W. Bush the devil. Actually, it was Venezuela's leftist president, Hugo Chavez, who said that, but hey, we quoted him. Same thing.

When Blagojevich and Topinka met with the Tribune editorial board last week, a reporter questioned the ad's representation of the quote. The governor ducked. "I guess you should talk to the guy that does the commercials," he said. "I don't know what the Tribune's story was talking about." Now that's taking responsibility for your campaign.

Write in Stephen Karlson for Illinois governor.

He doesn't claim he could do a better job. But he couldn't do any worse.

REDISCOVERING HOMECOMING. There have been a number of changes in the Milwaukee school system over the past three decades, including the effects of desegregation, deindustrialization, immigration, open transfers, and a modicum of school choice. But sometimes things turn full circle. Among the changes that took place at Milwaukee Hamilton was the disestablishment of the band, as in closed, gone, instruments sent as surplus property to other schools. But it appears that the current administration has decided in favor of operating a standard-issue high school. There is still enough parent and student interest in football, for instance, for the school to have the highest attendance in the city (still not up to suburban levels, let alone the kind of interest one sees in the smaller towns of the North West Frontier, but progress in that direction.)


The band director asked the president of the alumni association for the words and music to the traditional fight song.

We're rarin' to go
Ready to show
Hamilton is the greatest school we know
So come on kids, and make the scene,
Get out there and fight that team!
We'll yell a little, shout a little, jump a little, cheer a little,
Hamilton High, let's get out and win!

Despite a few logistical difficulties, some instruments have been located to provide a pep band in the stands. Some of the players in uniform are reserves.

RUNNING EXTRA: In light of last weekend's brawl in Miami and one weblogger's discovery of a cohort of 17 year old ninth graders in the Milwaukee public schools, I'm motivated to mention two salient points. Hamilton won the game, and after the game the players queued at midfield, to pass starboard-to-starboard and shake hands. I have not yet tamed the digital camera to be able to take long shots after dark.

A HOBBY THAT GOT OUT OF HAND. Thus does one Wisconsin microbrewer describe the origins of his business in a Chicago Tribune guide to a Badger State pub crawl (more here.) If you're hungry, the Tribune also has a guide to the best tacos in Chicago.

THE REALITY SHOW I'D LIKE TO SEE. Chris Lawrence invites readers to fisk a foolish column by Eugene Hickok, who makes a number of statements I wish to deal with at greater length in a longer essay. For the moment, read Chris's post and contemplate this canard.

Faculty members typically spend fewer than 200 hours a year in the classroom. That amounts to just five 40-hour weeks.

Evidently my carping about people measuring inputs fails to make an impression.

Perhaps I must play madder music. Answer me this: why isn't there a reality show titled Who Wants to Marry a Ph.D? You'd think that casting would be able to identify gold-diggers willing to feign an interest in Proust or obscure varietals to land someone as overpaid and underworked as columns like Mr Hickok's suggest populate the ranks of the professoriate.

For the fisking, vaminos a La Profesora Abstraida.

SAVE THE CHEERLEADERS FOR THE FOOTBALL PLAYERS. Gordon Smith at Conglomerate offers more details on the misbehavior of the Wisconsin band. The band was able to perform at Saturday's game, which ended the way I like the Minnesota game to end.

Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel photograph by Joe Koshollek.

In other sports news, Western Michigan's defense yielded ground more reluctantly than General Lee, and Ohio became the latest Mid-American team to claim a victory at a Big Ten stadium.

STOCKED WITH GOOD INTENTIONS. When the Doobie Brothers sang of jumping catfish in Black Water, they did not envision the Asian carp that are currently dominating the Mississippi River food chain.

Retired fish farmer and onetime Arkansas gubernatorial hopeful Jim Malone is by all accounts the first person to import bighead and silver carp from Asia in the early 1970s, but a Journal Sentinel investigation revealed that he promptly handed the fish over to government biologists, and he likely had nothing to do with their initial escape into the wild.

Blame the government for that. Even the EPA itself.

The truth, much of it buried in Malone's personal papers housed in the archives at the University of Central Arkansas, is that there are loads of tax-funded culprits tied to the four species of Asian carp - bighead, silver, black and grass - that have now invaded U.S. waters. By and large, the people who unleashed these fish on our environment were well-intentioned government and university biologists who thought they could find a job for the giant foreign fish that are so devastatingly good at stripping nutrients from the waters.

Their goal was to replace chemicals with carp. It was to employ the fish for weed control, or to give them a job cleaning up sewage lagoons and chronically fouled waters on fish farms. They also hoped to cultivate a fresh food source for an increasingly crowded planet.

They had no concept at the time, but they were tinkering with a type of biological fire that escaped their laboratories and is now raging uncontrolled across the continent.

What they did doesn't make sense today, but "I don't think we should be too harsh," said Carole Engle, director of the aquaculture center at the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff.

"What are we doing now that 30, 40 years from now somebody is going to look back and say: 'What stupid fools!'"

These fish are now within a few miles of the Great Lakes, taking advantage of the Illinois Waterway.

It's worth noting that the Lake Michigan sport fishery relies heavily on non-native varieties of salmon that took well to the fresh water, and that had an appetite for alewives. Here's today's trade dilemma: suppose these carp have a naturally-occurring predator that is native to the waters of ... North Korea?

DRAIN THOSE RETENTION PONDS. Joanne Jacobs links to a Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch story about college completion rates. Money quote:

Fifteen percent of remedial students had bachelor’s degrees, compared with 47 percent of nonremedial students.

That's six years out. Some commenters at Ms Jacobs's site note that the six-year completion cutoff misses remedial students who might finish in seven or eight years.

The analysis in the story is telling.

"When students show up for college and need remedial courses, they’re handicapped from the start," said Darrell Glenn, director of performance reporting for the Ohio Board of Regents and head of the study.

"It’s sobering to see the differences in those success rates. We’re losing people who could be well-educated, and that’s the bigger loss."

About 38 percent of incoming freshmen at Ohio public colleges and universities take remedial courses.

The study doesn’t suggest getting rid of remedial classes, but if fewer students needed them, Ohio’s economy could improve, Glenn said. "The states with good economies have well-educated work forces."

Doesn't that start in kindergarten?

The state report found that hardly any students who needed remedial classes earned degrees in Ohio’s areas of greatest need: science, technology, engineering and math. While 9 percent of nonremedial students earned degrees in those areas, only 1 percent of remedial students did.

Glenn estimates that remedial classes in Ohio cost about $100 million a year, with about 30 percent to 50 percent of that paid by the state.

To subsidize the training of exactly what high-value workers?

Note that there's not a lot of subsidization of that kind of training in the regular-admit population either.

The study found that the average cost for remedial students to obtain a bachelor’s degree in six years is less than for nonremedial students. That’s because non-remedial students are more likely to start as full-time students, enroll at four-year institutions, earn bachelor’s degrees and enroll in more-expensive majors.

Of the 62,231 students studied, 75 percent of nonremedial students enrolled full time, compared with 60 percent of remedial students. Of those full-time students, 54 percent of remedial students and 18 percent of nonremedial students enrolled at two-year schools, which generally cost less.

Ah, so those technical majors are more expensive to provide.

I fear, however, that such quantifications of "costs" are incomplete. It's a bit difficult to identify the intellectual breakthroughs and productivity gains lost from a population with fewer engineers and mathematicians. It's slightly less difficult to quantify the efficiency losses from the common schools' failure to provide the preparation in the first place, and to attribute the community and four-year college attrition rates to that lack of preparation rather than other causes.

THE QUOTE OF THE DAY is a important teaching tip, courtesy Frog in a Well.

My father, in his brief teaching career, used to say to his students “If you have a question, you have to ask it. Odds are good that other people have the same question, and they’ll be grateful to you for asking.” He also said that “There are no stupid questions. Only stupid answers.”

Indeed.

CREAMED GOPHERS ON TOAST POINTS. Or is it simply toasted gophers? Wisconsin 48, Minnesota 12 in a game that was settled early in the second half. The marching band performed. The axe stays in Wisconsin.

In Kalamazoo, Western Michigan's defense is containing the Northern Illinois offense. It's 10-7 Western at halftime only because the Western offense and special teams have committed some errors. The Amtrak high-speed line runs close enough to the stadium that listeners are aware of the trains' presence. (No, I'm not checking against the timetables.)

THE GALES OF NOVEMBER CAME (UNPRECEDENTEDLY) EARLY. Thursday's view from my window didn't look like measurable snow, but at the measuring stations, there was a record to measure.

Thursday's snow flurries - a half-inch as of mid-afternoon, according to the National Weather Service - broke the record for the earliest recorded measurable snowfall in DeKalb. Previously, the record for DeKalb stood at 1.8 inches on Oct. 20, 1989. Most of the Chicago area broke local records as well.

The university's Thursday afternoon weather forecast elaborated.

There's been a flurry of activity this morning at NIU Weather, snow fooling, shoveling out of a myriad of phone calls and emails about our early record snow. To be sure, I thought flurries and a very light coating of snow was a given, but the heavy snow bands surprised us all, and broke the record snowfall amounts across many stations of northern Illinois. All of the following amounts as of 11 AM break earliest measurable snowfall records:

Rockford (east side): 2.0"
Belvidere: 1.5"
Palatine: 1.3"
DeKalb: .5"
Chicago (both near O'Hare and Midway, official): .3"
Oak Brook: .3"
Bensenville: .2"

I see a band of heavy snow heading for the Rockford airport, so if they get .1", they tie their all-time earliest measurable snowfall record. Chances are they'll do it. In any case, here's how the last 7 years of first snowfalls of the season compare to this year:

2006---October 12.....trace (our .5" today gets recorded to 7 AM tomorrow morning)
2005---November 16....trace
2004---November 25....2.3"
2003---November 24....trace
2002---November 6.....trace
2001---December 19... .2"
2000---November 14....trace

The average first flurries occurring in DeKalb and the Chicago/Rockford areas is around October 31. The average first measurable snowfall is around November 15. The average first 1" of snow occurs about December 1. And the average first 4" of snow is on Christmas.

It has all melted, which makes the task of uprooting all the life-expired vegetable plants easier.

MORE LIKE NORTHWESTERN THAN NORTH CENTRAL.

Last week, Northern Illinois University president John Peters delivered the annual State of the University address. Before the speech, the audience saw a recruiting video that featured four students speaking well of their experiences at the University. What was seen in the video was was four residential students (including immigrants, Chicagoans, and suburbanites) speaking of the opportunity to pursue their ambitions and work with accomplished yet accessible faculty. What was unseen was any talk of classes at "a convenient time" (translation: I can pick the times of the classes I'm going to cut) or of "a great social scene" (translation: we'll keep you from washing out) or of "designing a major that suits my interests" (translation: want fries with that?)