THE ROCKIES WILL TUMBLE, GIBRALTAR WILL CRUMBLE. The women's basketball tournament isn't quite the "them that has gets" show I feared at the announcement of the field. In the round of 2⁴, for the first time, none of the regionals will be {1,2,3,4}. Despite the practice of using the home courts of the higher-ranked teams (if it really has nothing to do with money, is it necessary to get more fans in the seats?) in the first two rounds, the visiting teams had their moments, with Notre Dame holding a lead most of the way against [North] Carolina, and Wisconsin-Green Bay playing well at Storrs, Connecticut for 22 minutes. In East Lansing, just off the Midwestern Axis of Evil^(TM) [U.S. Highway 23 - ed], Bowling Green became the first Mid-American team to get out of the first weeked alive, excusing Vanderbilt (better known as the home of the American Economic Association).

The home court advantage again eludes Stanford. (Truly truly, I say unto you, a No. 16 seed can defeat a No. 1 seed if the former is Harvard and the latter is Stanford, and this isn't a "Clue" tournament either. See also "Hockey, Minnesota.") The honor this time goes to Florida State, where onetime Northern Illinois and Wisconsin assistant Sue Semrau gets a postgame rinse.

Tallahassee Democrat photo by Glen Beil.

Florida State were in a tough neighborhood during 1996-1997.

It takes a lot of courage to come in here and win. I had a lot of players that believed we could turn this program around. 11 years ago this program was 0-16 in the ACC and it took a lot of players to believe the Florida State could be a basketball school and not just a football school.

The perspective from Palo Alto, is, well, glum.

RUNNING REBELS DON'T SKATE. Badgers do.

Wisconsin (36-1-4), the top seed in the tournament, completed the season with a 26-game unbeaten streak and 12 consecutive victories. Its only loss was to Minnesota Duluth on Nov. 24.

These kids play tough.

Playing with two broken ribs, senior Sara Bauer led the Badgers with a goal and two assists. She was named the Frozen Four's most outstanding player for the second year in a row.

Minnesota Duluth (24-11-4) defeated Mercyhurst College in the quarterfinals and beat Boston College 4-3 in double overtime on March 16, despite injuries to five players.

Badgers understand defense.

Emmanuelle Blais deflected a shot from Noemie Marin past Wisconsin goaltender Jessie Vetter on a power play at 14:23 to end the Badgers' shutout streak at 422:36. It was the first NCAA playoff goal that Vetter and the Badgers had allowed since a victory over Mercyhurst in a 2006 quarterfinal.

Ten seconds later, Wisconsin responded with a goal by Jasmine Giles on the rebound of a shot by Lawler.

Good going, kids.

SIEVE!

ALABAMA-HUNTSVILLE?? The pairings for the NCAA men's hockey tournament are out. Although defending champion Wisconsin won the third-place game in the Western tournament, St. Cloud State had more wins during the regular season, and they join Minnesota and North Dakota in The Best Is The West. At most one of Minnesota or North Dakota will make the semifinals. Boston College and Boston University have separate opportunities to be The Heck With The East in the semifinals. Chad the Elder rates the Minnesota-North Dakota regional as a tough one to open in. Mitch Berg has a few general comments on the tournament as well.

THE RETURN ON INVESTMENT MATTERS. One and done, and Washington women's basketball coach June Daugherty is also done.

We just need to have a positive buzz in our community about our team. And it just wasn't there," athletic director Todd Turner said, after he announced he would not renew the contracts of Daugherty or any of her assistants, including her husband, Mike, following her 11th season at UW.

Daugherty's teams made six NCAA Tournaments, but the final one ended Saturday when No. 11 seed Washington lost to sixth-seeded Iowa State 79-60. The Huskies went 18-12 in the regular season finished fourth in the Pac-10 at 11-7.

The positional arms race in sports facilities puts a lot of pressure on coaches and players to get fans in the seats. Those revenue bonds have to be amortized.

Attendance at remodeled Hec Edmundson Pavilion decreased from almost 5,000 per game to just above 2,500 in five seasons.

In 2003, Washington posted its first 20-win regular season under Daugherty and led the Pac-10 in attendance with a school-record 4,981 fans per game. The Huskies tied for second in the league with their best conference record during Daugherty's tenure, 13-5. That team set a single-game attendance record when 8,408 fans saw Washington crush UCLA.

There's apparently some interest in having local players perform for local fans.

Turner also didn't like seeing top recruits from what he called a "fertile" home state leave. The latest was Regina Rogers, the star center from Chief Sealth High School in Seattle has committed to UCLA.

"Quite a few kids have left our state to play elsewhere .... That is troubling," Turner said.

The money paragraph, as it were, comes at the end.

He also said the Huskies should be producing more for what Washington is paying into the women's program. He noted "hundreds of thousands of dollars" spent to improve practice gyms, meeting rooms and training rooms for both the men's and women's teams and an increase in coaches' salaries.

The article appears on ESPN, a service not noted for contemplating the information content in university administrations' revealed preferences for improved sports facilities while enrollment-impacted departments struggle with deferred maintenance in the classrooms.

MY BRACKET IS BUSTED. Ouch. That pretty well shoots round 2¹ and 2², although I still have some possibilities at rounds 2³ and 2⁴.

In games that still have play value, a different Wisconsin team had its way with Arkansas State, and I'd be keen to see them get a crack at Ball State next. Wisconsin-Green Bay continues a long winning streak, with Connecticut up next. (Is anybody else as tired of Connecticut-Duke-North Carolina-Tennessee every year as I am? Go Phoenix.) Bowling Green carries the Mid-American into the second round.

CHICAGO IS FOR O SCALE. The March Meet has just concluded, with a few bargains to be had at the show, and lots of renewing acquaintances at the show and on the layout tours. Some of the train running is just for fun.

First up, Friday afternoon at the Fox Valley O Scalers prototype operating session. The eastbound meat must get through!


Saturday evening featured a members' day (with out-of-town visitors trickling through all evening.) I borrowed a Milwaukee Road 2-8-0 and tested some of the new baggage cars.


Model railroading is supposed to be fun. Thus a West Virginia-style mining town with C&O-pattern station clinging to the Mississippi River bluffs somewhere south of Marquette, Iowa. So why not test out the New Haven and Pennsylvania baggage cars too?


Another member got into the spirit of things. Here, just after the merger, a Chicago and North Western grain extra enters Marquette from the west. (Something must have gone wrong somewhere between Oelwein and Dubuque.)


Yes, there is more stuff for the workbench.

PERSEVERANCE. Nancy Armour of the Associated Press profiles Wisconsin's Bo Ryan.

Whatever job he's had, he considered himself the luckiest guy in the world to have it.

"I moved to Wisconsin and fell in love with it. Fell in love with the state, fell in love with the people," he said. "I was never really interested in leaving. I never worried about the next job. The rest took care of itself."

For every young coach who thinks he has to sell a part of his soul to get ahead, Ryan is proof you don't. You may not know much about him, but with a career record of 525-157, everyone else in the profession does.

He understands the first rule of productive people.

Loyalty comes naturally to Ryan. Growing up outside Philadelphia, in Chester, Pa., his father was a pipefitter and his mother worked in the business office at a local college.

His father's job wasn't easy -- years of inhaling asbestos fibers eventually forced him into retirement -- but he did it day after day, spending most of his life with the same company. His mother worked her way up to become the school's business manager despite not having a college degree."Having parents that worked that way, if they enjoyed what they were doing, (you) stick with it," he said.

It helps, sometimes, to be noticed by practitioners elsewhere.

Two years later, Dick Bennett stepped down at Wisconsin and Ryan returned to Madison.

"Sure, it was in the back of my mind," Ryan said. "But I didn't sit at Platteville going, `When am I going to get to Madison?' And I didn't go to UWM thinking, `When am I going to get to Madison?' But I got to Madison, and now we're trying to make the most of it."

And in so doing, perhaps reclaiming the game.

And doing a little better than that. His teams aren't flashy or explosive, making their living on defense instead. It isn't always pretty, but it's effective. The Badgers are 141-54 in Ryan's six years in Madison. They won their first Big Ten title in more than 50 years his first season, and added another the next year.

Here's the secret to my bracket: I weighted it towards teams that understand defense and team play. It's about time people who should know better (are you listening, Billy Packer?) stopped referring to showboating against defensive breakdowns as "athleticism." That Wisconsin-Michigan State semifinal in 2000, contrary to the Conventional Wisdom, was one of the best games I've watched, outcome notwithstanding. The press coverage of this year's tournament has made some mention of defense frustrating opponents. That's the way it should be. Nothing defeats a team quite like its own failures to score.

In other basketball news, rumors swirl about the succession at Northern Illinois. As far as I know, there is not a special stove in the Convocation Center that will produce white smoke when the hiring is done.

A BUSINESS MODEL IS SUPPOSED TO PASS A MARKET TEST. Pretending there's a reserve army of unemployed faculty willing to work for peanuts, and pretending to become an athletic powerhouse, makes the college administration look foolish.

The average salary for a full professor at [Northern Colorado] in 2004-05 was $68,583, according to a faculty study, which is about 40 percent less than what a full professor makes at CU-Boulder.

Many say the decline in salaries began when [Kay] Norton took over as president in July 2002. Norton - whose background is in law - led a reorganization of the university based on a business model to cut costs.

The university also opted to move up a step and become a Division I school in athletics. That, critics say, has led to a $604,000 loss in the athletic budget this year.

(Via University Diaries.)

The economists figure prominently in news accounts of the troubles. Northern Colorado offer a B.A. in economics, no B.S., no graduate programs, and theirs is a relatively small faculty which, as one might expect under the circumstances, is not highlighting its presence in Journal of Economic Theory or Oxford Economic Papers. All the same, the economics job market is not so miserable that faculty members cannot secure better pay for primarily teaching gigs at institutions with similar or higher selectivity. At headquarters, the "business model" apparently includes a planning obsession. It's possible to erect a locomotive with fewer plans than these.

SOMETIMES THE STRATEGIC PLAN WORKS. I have had nothing but scorn for visions of higher education that blend open admission with athletic success. That Central Connecticut State have earned a tournament bid (their third in seven years) while the Connecticut men's team is watching ESPN changes nothing. By the end of March, Central Connecticut will still be perceived as a safety school. (As if MooConn isn't?)

The approach of Central coach Howie Dickenman merits mention.

Dickenman requires his players to wear ties to games. No cell phones are allowed in the basketball facilities. Detrick Gym, he says, is a workplace. He asks his recruits what they think of their high school coaches. If they say something disrespectful, the recruiting process is over.

"Coach works us to maximum of our abilities, and prepares us for life," [guard Tristan] Blackwood said. "He works us like we're in last place, and that pays off. We work for each other, and it's paying off."

That approach deserves consideration and implementation by the faculty, safety school or selective institution alike.

WHY I DISLIKE THE EXPRESSION "SOCIALLY CONSTRUCTED," PUT SIMPLY. Some "constructions" are not evolutionarily stable.

Given its unprecedented material wealth — and the green light it generally receives from parents and educators to indulge any and all appetites — this generation of students (not to mention their elders) needs to be morally awakened to (as listed recently by David Brooks) what Thomas Sowell calls the Constrained Vision, what Steven Pinker calls the Tragic Vision, and what E. Q. Wilson calls Existential Conservatism. (“Human Nature Redux,” The New York Times, 2/18/07) This worldview includes the belief that the wholesale discarding of social conventions and institutions based on a respect for legitimate authority, and on self-restraint, can be dangerous.

Amen.

PERHAPS THE SELECTION COMMITTEE GOT IT RIGHT. Janet at SCSU Scholars observes a convincing Minnesota win over Illinois-Chicago, a team I conceded should be in that tournament, and notes,

Because we don't know a number of the teams in the WNIT, each game is partially unknown. There are four Big 10 teams (Illinois, Indiana, Minnesota and Wisconsin) in the tournament. Next game is Monday, March 19 at Western Kentucky. One game at a time but this could become a fun ride and great experience for the young squad.

Several previous winners, including Wisconsin and Kansas State, are in the field.

IN PLACE OF THE PARTY LINE OPERATOR. Tom Maguire, pinch-hitting for Instapundit, discovers a service that could go over to either side of the Force.

Finally have just one number that reaches you everywhere: you decide where you want to pick up your calls. Save on your wireless minutes if youre [c.q.] at home or work and never miss a call, even if you move or change jobs.

Bleah.

David Pogue at the New York Times introduces the service this way.

If you have only one telephone with one phone number, this column won’t be of any interest to you. Skip to another article, you eccentric you.

But first, count your blessings. Millions of people have more than one phone number these days — home, work, cellular, hotel room, vacation home, yacht — and with great complexity comes great hassle. You have to check multiple answering machines. You miss calls when people try to reach you on your cell when you’re at home (or the other way around). You send around e-mail messages at work that say, “On Thursday from 5 to 8:30, I’ll be on my cell; for the rest of the weekend, call me at home.”

Sometimes it's nice to be rich enough NOT to have to be on call all the time, although I suspect there are more than a few Really Useful People who could put a stop to this on-call-all-the-time-everywhere nonsense simply by refusing to participate, either as receiver of calls or as placer of calls.

There is one feature of the new service that intrigues.

GrandCentral maintains a database of telemarketer numbers that is constantly updated by reports from its own subscribers. Your phones don’t even ring when a telemarketer in that database tries to reach you.

Such developments have the potential to take the profit out of telemarketing. There is, however, an eccentric way to deal with the problem: simply do not take any calls at meal time. Yes, that goes for families with kids too.

RUNNING OUT OF MONEY? Chicago's commuter rail, heavy rail, and bus operators face money problems.

Illinois Auditor General William Holland said in his first ever report that mass transit in northern Illinois is in a serious financial crisis.

Holland estimates the CTA, Pace, and Metra together are almost $6 billion away from meeting their needs for new equipment and maintenance.

He says expenses have risen at three times the rate of income.

Elsewhere, the story reports a doubling of fares wouldn't solve the problem. Er, that's particularly true as long as road tolls and parking charges are impounded in ceteris paribus.

AS GOD, AND FIELDING YOST, WOULD HAVE IT. College football is for Saturday. At Northern Illinois University, for once, it will be.

Northern Illinois is scheduled to play all 12 of its 2007 contests on Saturdays, marking the first time the Huskies will play exclusively on Saturday since the 1996 season.

I encourage the powers-that-be to keep it that way. Tuesday night is for studying, Wednesday night is for concerts, Thursday night is for writing, and Sunday night is for cramming.

IN CASE ANYONE WANTS TO KNOW.

(Click image to see it full size.)

There will be 112 points scored in the title game.

PRIOR RESTRAINT. Not at my college paper.

COUNT' EM. Name all 50 states in 10 minutes. I finished the job with 0:47 to spare. (Via Jay Solo. Is it really that difficult to come up with only Arizona and Texas in five minutes? Apparently so.)

CARNIVAL CALL. Carnival of the Capitalists goes on the road with Small Business Trends.

TAKE CARE OF THE O RINGS AND THE SPACE SHUTTLE WILL TAKE CARE OF ITSELF. The integrity of an academic program requires similar attention to detail.

The students were less concerned over being accused of plagiarism and more that I was having the temerity to actually punish them for their actions. They were perfectly aware of the policy, but had never heard of it being applied. It seemed entirely unfair to them.

And it was - not because there shouldn't be consequences for academic misconduct, but because it's unfair for some students to get away with something when others don't. You can complain about the lack of respect students have for their work, their classes, and you - but it doesn't help to make things easy. You're digging yourself deeper.

Amen.

PATH DEPENDENCE. Author Larry Beinhart's Capitalism 104 makes the case for the welfare economics paradigm. He also notes the value of emergent order.

Everyone is stupid sometimes. Some people are stupid a lot of the time and a few, all the time. If one person is in charge of everything, then his or her stupidity affects everything. That’s the seed of the failure of planned economies.

But in a capitalist society – at it’s best – if someone has a stupid idea and convinces some people to invest in it, only he and his investors lose. It’s also important to remember the random part, because we are in a changing world, and the ideas that won last year may turn out to be stupid for this year’s world.

There are supposed to be sequels to this essay. I will follow up as required.

THE END OF CROSS-SUBSIDIES. Amid news of the demolition of the Stardust casino hotel is evidence of the changing economics of legal gambling.

Bob Boughner, Echelon Resorts' chief executive, said while the Stardust was a favorite of the nostalgia crowd, it was missing out on younger patrons and those who come to Las Vegas for conventions.

For many, the Stardust represented the most accessible place to stay in a city that gives VIP treatment to the biggest gamblers. But the concept of discounting rates to keep people coming is rapidly fading from the Las Vegas Strip as many casinos nowadays make more revenue from hotel rooms, clubs, shows and cuisine than from gambling.

"There was this implicit idea that invisible high rollers came in and funded everything, so that Mr. and Mrs. America could have a steak for $2 and see Frank Sinatra for the price of a drink," said David Schwartz, director of the Center for Gaming Research at the University of Nevada Las Vegas.

"Now you can build a 7,000-room hotel and charge $300 a night for rooms," he said. "With slots being so big, it is all the people losing $200 per trip that are driving the growth."

The casino hotels might have been able to engage in such cross-subsidies as long as legal gambling was confined to Nevada. With the proliferation of small-stakes casinos on reservations and the belief of many governments of obsolete cities that a casino strip was a way to reverse economic decline, the small-stakes gambler has ample substitutes closer by. The nature of a Las Vegas hotel is sufficiently different today than it was at the beginning of the Jet Age that there is a Casino Death Watch mourning the end of those historic properties.

The article does not mention whether the 7,000 room hotels are offering the equivalent of a $500 room for $300. The hotel that is to replace the Stardust, however, clearly envisions a different sort of customer mix.

The Echelon is to open in late 2010 with more than 5,000 hotel rooms, a production theater, concert venue, shopping mall and more than 1 million square feet of meeting space.

We're seeing a variation on the shipping the good apples out phenomenon. If low-stakes gambling is as nearby as the closest reservation or rundown city, there is no incentive for the low-stakes gambler to spend a lot of money going to Las Vegas. Those people who are willing to spend the larger sum of money traveling are, consistent with the incentives of a fixed access fee, willing to consume the experience more intensively, either in the form of higher-stakes gambling or more expensive entertainment.

THE JOYS OF SHODDY SERVICE. The major credit card companies are not making many friends, either among their cardholders or in Congress.

Americans use credit cards to pay for everything from groceries to speeding tickets. But they're increasingly besieged by colossal fees and interest-rate increases that seem to hit them without warning or justification.

Now, though, banks are under scrutiny from the Democrat-led Congress, which held hearings on credit card practices last week. Banks also are feeling competitive pressure to become more consumer friendly.

One practice, known as "universal default," is of particular interest.

Ever wonder why your card's interest rate spiked, even though you've always paid on time? The most likely reason is a practice known as universal default. That occurs when card issuers raise rates for those who made a late payment to some other company. Issuers may also raise your rate if your overall debt has increased. Nearly 45% of banks used universal default in 2005, according to Consumer Action, an advocacy group.

Credit card issuers defend this practice.

They argue that borrowers who are having trouble with other debts are more likely to fall behind on their credit card bills. But many consumers say the practice is grossly unfair.

The practice is of particular interest in that without the central clearing houses known as credit bureaus, a creditor only knows which of its own customers are slow to pay or nonpayers. The credit bureaus provide a potential efficiency-enhancing function in enabling any lender to discover which borrowers have bad histories elsewhere (it's more objective than asking your current squeeze's former boyfriend). At the same time, the credit bureau can serve as a facilitating practice for collusion (as .pdf; the shared information relaxes the "incentive compatibility constraint for collusion, in the absence of an explicit agreement among creditors to raise rates in response to the same evidence.) Thus there is a public policy tradeoff: is the public interest better served by expediting the discovery of delinquent and deadbeat borrowers or by making rational cooperation in an already cartelized industry more difficult?

The article also suggests that cardholders make use of the customer service department at the credit card company.

If you've been hit with a high fee because your payment was a day late, call your card issuer and ask for a reprieve. If you've been a solid customer, there's a good chance the issuer will waive the fee, says Linda Sherry, director for Consumer Action.

Getting your interest rate reduced is harder, [Card Rating's Curtis] Arnold says, but not impossible. Even if your bank won't give you your old rate, it might agree to reduce the new rate by a few percentage points, he says. A report by the Massachusetts Public Interest Research Group found that more than half of customers who complained to their card issuer about their interest rate succeeded in having the rate reduced.

Yes, call, but expect to be frustrated. I had a small error to straighten out, and rather than write a letter, I rang the customer service line. The problem was cleared up. In fifteen minutes. After I had spent two minutes working through the "enter this information" nonsense to get in. After I had spent three minutes dealing with an agent who was unable to solve my problem and unwilling to transfer me to a supervisor without requesting irrelevant information. After I spent another five minutes getting the supervisor to concede that the agent was in error. After that supervisor asked me to confirm my mailing address (IT'S ON THE STATEMENT. I RECEIVED THE STATEMENT. ARE YOU TELLING ME THE REST OF YOUR RECORD KEEPING IS AS BAD AS YOUR TRANSACTION POSTING?)

I will be forwarding a complaint about the "customer service" functions at credit card companies to the House Committee on Financial Services, should Members be interested in pursuing further abusive practices. I will also report the facts to the Comptroller of the Currency, with the request that the complaint be held for a reasonable time in their files, should the Committee expand its inquiry.

HOW OTHERS SEE US. The Badger Blog Alliance's Lance Burri tackles an abstract of an article in Child Development.

The abstract begins with a description of the sample.

Using a representative sample of low-income, primarily minority adolescents (N=647, aged 10–14 years at Wave 1), this study examined bidirectional longitudinal relations between nonresident father involvement, defined as contact and responsibility for children's care and behavior, and adolescent engagement in delinquent activities.

As passes through panel data go, this is a relatively small sample. Economists who work with the Panel Study on Income Dynamics and other such longitudinal databases ("longitudinal" refers to observing a number of cases at different times; if the cases are the same individuals or businesses at each time, it's a "balanced" panel) get nervous if their sample size drops below 2,000. I've managed to make do with 52 power companies or 34 steel mills.

Mr Burri quotes the second sentence, with emphasis added.

Autoregressive and fixed effects models found that higher nonresident father involvement predicted subsequent decreases in adolescent delinquency, particularly for youth with initial engagement in delinquent activities.

His response: "duh." What the abstract is really telling us, however, is that the seemingly innocuous decision of a father to get more involved in his kid's life once the kid has had a scrape with the law introduces all sorts of measurement difficulties that the "autoregressive" (meaning the error you committed last year influences the error you commit this year) and "fixed effects" (meaning we can generalize about people with similar characteristics) models attempt to cope with. There's also a phenomenon called "self-selection" that can arise in problems such as this.

The abstract concludes,

As adolescent delinquency increased, so too did father involvement, suggesting that nonresident fathers may increase their involvement in the face of adolescent problem behavior, with this pattern driven primarily by African American families.

Mr Burri notes,

That sounds like good news, and at odds with the usual wisdom. I wonder how true it is? And under what circumstances?

Sorry, I didn’t read the whole study. I know. Bad blogger. Bad. But come on, that was the abstract, and it was barely comprehensible.

Thus one difficulty in making use of academic research in formulating public policy. The conclusion is not that out of line with "the usual wisdom." Put simply, it means "Absentee dads get more involved after their kids have a brush with the law. The propensity of African-American dads to get involved in that way is somewhat greater." In a "low-income, primarily-minority" sample the frame of reference is "compared to other low-income dads belonging to other minorities." Left unsaid is whether greater involvement by those fathers before the kids run afoul of the authorities would keep those kids out of the juvenile justice system, but that's even harder to tease out of the data.

And the "barely comprehensible" nature of the abstract follows from the nature of the research. The authors have to emphasize the use of state-of-the-art methods of statistical inference in order to pass muster with the referees, who, if they are conscientious, will be more interested in the methods the authors used to cope with the measurement errors than they will be with the political reliability of the conclusions.

Academic abstracts are sometimes like that. Here, a relatively turgid abstract introduces a simple message: absentee dads get more involved after their kids get into trouble. That's called "putting out fires." Sometimes a relatively simple abstract introduces a complicated message. Consider "All elliptic curves are modular, thus xⁿ + yⁿ = zⁿ has no nontrivial solutions in integers for n>2." The proof runs some 300 pages.

LET THE GRIPING BEGIN. The brackets are set, and the selection committee gets second-guessed.

Why are mid-majors punished for losses in their leagues more than teams from the power conferences? [Men's selection committee chairman Gary] Walters said that isn't necessarily the case: "We really do look at the full résumé."

Perhaps so. On the other hand, where the stakes are lower, I'll accept Mid-American runner up Ball State and Horizon's Illinois-Chicago, but raise questions about Illinois (with a bye??) and Illinois State (more wins than Wisconsin, but no bye??).

MONEY IS FUNGIBLE. King Banaian at SCSU Scholars calls out the latest maneuvering between the Minnesota legislature and the state colleges and universities.

The budget situation on our campuses is not as bad as this sounds. Holding back tuition increases is another way of saying we're going to give more money to middle-class parents of college-age children. You can hold the headline tuition increase to 4%, but what matters to the university is net tuition, not gross.

The net tuition is a secret number known only to the university's financial aid office and the student, or possibly the student's family. One is more likely to see passengers on a crowded plane paying the same rate than one is to see students in a crowded class paying the same net tuition.

MAKING THOSE CONNECTIONS. In a February interview with the Northern Star, I mentioned the military origins of the DeKalb Taylor Municipal Airport. The reporter subsequently followed up with an investigation of our progenitor of the cruise missile.

During World War II, an airplane was made in DeKalb that was so top secret, it was not declassified until the 1960s.

Imagine a wooden plane loaded with a 500-pound bomb and a television camera in its nose. Then, imagine a person in another airplane watching a TV, aiming the plane into a target.

"The reason it was so top secret is the television camera. It was totally built as a remote control plane, so it would actually take off from a dead stop on the runway," said historic preservationist Roger Keys.

The technology of remotes and joysticks available today was not around in the 1930s and '40s, so a different method was used.

"To control this radio-controlled [plane], they used a telephone dial, an old, little rotary telephone dial. They would dial, like, 3, and it would tell the plane to do something. [Dial], like, a 6, and it would tell the plane to do something else."

I learned about this aircraft at the June breakfast fly-in a few years ago.

ONE AND DONE FOR ARIZONA. No surprise that, but in this bracket, Ohio State, Kansas, and Oregon also make early exits. The details are in the latest report from the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport. (Via Doug Lederman at Inside Higher Ed.)

MODEL RAILROAD READING. Just in time for the Chicago March Meet, evidence of model railroading going down the tubes.

WE SOLICIT YOUR ATTENTION. Via Rick Moran's Right Wing Nut House, an invitation to participate in a college basketball tournament pool to honor PFC Tim Hines, Jr.

Tim was an amazing guy that was filled with life and love, and his absolute favorite sport was basketball. Because of his love of basketball, my family and I have decided that having a March Madness Fundraiser would be a great way to raise funds for the scholarship that is given in his name (each year this scholarship is given to a high school student). This scholarship is a great way to remember Tim and the sacrifices that he made for all of us and to help a high school student attend college (which is the reason why Tim joined the army).

The closing deadlines are noon Thursday, 15 March for bracket sheets (apparently the play-in game is irrelevant) and Wednesday, 21 March for entry donations.

LEARNING TO WIN. Last Friday, Twelve O'Clock High ran on one of the movie channels. There's relatively little aviation footage in the movie (unlike the television show that was inspired by the movie.) The plot is relatively simple. Gregory Peck plays hard-nosed General Savage, who has the responsibility of getting the 918th Bomber Group into shape. He's up against the tendency of his crews to take what seems like the easy course, which in the usual way tends to make their life more difficult, and he's not at all popular for insisting that members of the unit do what looks like the more difficult things, although those more difficult things make the unit's tasks easier. He gets the usual advice from the usual suspects to lighten up, and, at the end of the movie, suffers what appears to be a stroke as his now proficient unit is off to Germany to finish a job they had begun on the previous raid.

What is the explanation for the propensity of people to make their lives more difficult by stinting on the hard but necessary things, and why must the task of the leader who emphasizes the hard but necessary things be so difficult?

TOP AND BOTTOM ALL THE WAY. The coming of spring break offered an opportunity to head to points south. Here, the southbound City of New Orleans changes crews at Jackson, Mississippi, on a sunny Saturday.


The train appeared to be the conveyance of choice for numerous northern academics getting away at spring break. There was probably a quorum for a college senate in the lounge car, although everybody was more interested in getting away than in working.

I had ample opportunity to rest and didn't bother recording times at any of the intermediate stations. The consist was Genesis 8, Superliner sleepers 32026-32043, diner 38036, Sightseer lounge 33045 (with cafeteria style service area belowdecks), and coaches 31011-34099. The train got away from Chicago on time at 8 pm and arrived in Jackson at 11 am with an 11.30 am departure time. I was picking up my rental car by the time the train left for New Orleans. More on the ensuing drive to Vicksburg soon.

The schedule has a great deal of recovery time in it. The Sunday consist replaced the 8-spot (shouldn't that be pulling the Olympian Hiawatha) with Genesis 135 and added a third coach 34082. Something about leaving a rake idle in New Orleans for the better part of a day bothers me. Here's the train arriving Jackson at 5.10 with plenty of time to make its 5.44 departure.


The City appears to be a popular way of traveling overnight between Memphis and Chicago, and more than a few passengers held sleeping car space for a day drawing room on the New Orleans-Memphis segment. Out of Memphis the sleepers were full. I heard one car attendant explaining to another that some passengers were holding tickets for space that didn't exist (roomette 19??) but that he was able to find room for everybody. Although we did wait on some freight trains, including some maneuvers in which the City headed into a siding behind a freight train, met an opposing freight train, then backed out to pass the freight train ahead, our 10.20 arrival in Memphis still provided ample time to grab some pictures in the station, which has some classic Illinois Central neon signage. (There is really only one working platform,)


The fuel and water tanks are topped off and it's time to go.


The Illinois Central has a long tradition of using its sidings intensively. The famous April 29, 1900 wreck in which engineer John Luther (Casey) Jones died involved a time-consuming "saw-by" maneuver of freight trains. That wreck also occurred between Memphis and Jackson, although on a different line east of the one currently used by the City of New Orleans.

MARKING OFF. Several deadlines loom. Next week is spring break. More stuff then.

INVENTION, INNOVATION, DIFFUSION. Nikola Tesla might have solved the problem of transmitting electricity great distances, and Thomas Edison might have turned on the lights in cities. The credit for turning on the lights in the suburbs and farms, as well as providing the capacity to power appliances and machinery and electric railways goes to Samuel Insull, the subject of a recent biography, The Merchant of Power, making up this evening's Book Review No. 4. Mr Insull is one of the more obscure figures in business history today, although in the Crash of 1929, the rumor on Wall Street was that he had been wiped out (one broker quipped, "take off a zero" from his net worth), Orson Welles gained weight and grew a mustache to imitate him in Citizen Kane, and Franklin Roosevelt railed against "Insulls and Ishmaels" in his 1932 presidential campaign. Railroad enthusiasts might be familiar with the "Insull interurbans" without full knowledge of the power conglomerate that included mines, generating companies, railroads, and land developers that shaped and continues to serve the Midwest to this day.

The collapse of that conglomerate in the Crash, and Mr Insull's spending of his own money in a failing effort to save it, may be the best-known part of the story. The disclosure regulations of the Securities and Exchange Act and the ownership limitations of the Public Utilities Holding Company Act are direct, and not unjustified, regulatory responses to the collapse of the Insull holding companies, which were a highly leveraged capital structure vulnerable to a failure of any of the operating companies. Merchant raises the possibility that Mr Insull was creating holding companies on top of holding companies as a way of making it more difficult for Cleveland capitalist Cyrus Eaton, who figures in the railroad maneuvering of the 1920s and 1930s, to obtain board seats or outright control of the Chicago power and traction companies. The acquisition intrigues involving the railroads of that era might be a project for future research. The failure of the holding companies, with the concomitant losses of small investors, rendered Mr Insull less popular in Chicago than Al Capone. Mr Insull, however, was acquitted of any wrongdoing after he testified that he had lost his own fortune in attempting to protect shareholder value.

And what of the infrastructure he left behind? There are still a few Arthur Gerber buildings on the rapid transit, the South Shore interurban still takes over the streets of Michigan City, Exelon produces and Commonwealth Edison distributes the power, his estate (was Hawthorn-Mellody Dairy an Insull property??) is a museum, some people still know the CIVIC OPERA HOVSE as "Insull's Throne", and University of St. Mary of the Lake (not to be confused with the other Our Lady of the Lake at the end of the South Shore) recognizes the Insull role in developing northeastern Illinois.

In 1921, Archbishop George Mundelein opened a new seminary forty-five miles northwest of the original campus. Saint Mary of the Lake Seminary would operate under the same charter originally granted to the University of St. Mary of the Lake, making it the longest continuous academic charter in the State of Illinois. In 1926, the new seminary was host to the world, as one of the sites of the International Eucharistic Congress. The campus made transportation history with that event for it required the largest movement of people by rail in the history of the country.

Cardinal Mundelein offered St. Mary (I really must explore Insullvania in the area of Mundelein) as a wartime refuge for the Vatican, and the North Shore Line was a Catholic railroad. (As was Northern Pacific. Great Northern was Lutheran.)

ON! WISCONSIN! More reason, as if I needed any, to put my full support behind the men's basketball team at Wisconsin.

"Our student-athletes are students first," Wisconsin Chancellor John Wiley tells correspondent Bernard Goldberg. "They are students first, athletes second."

Goldberg mentions the success the team has enjoyed this season, including being ranked No. 1 in the nation. "And they have done it all without a hint of scandal with players who actually graduate," Goldberg says.

Goldberg cites the graduation rates at programs where basketball players are not expected to graduate: New Mexico (7%), Georgia (9%) and Iowa State (12%).

"In fact, of the top 10 ranked college basketball teams in the country right now, fewer than 50% of the players graduate," Goldberg reports.

But at Wisconsin, 64% of the basketball players get their degrees. Alando Tucker, the Badgers' best player, is expected to graduate this spring.

Goldberg refers to coach Bo Ryan as "the most successful coach in college basketball you have never heard of."

Goldberg asks Ryan what happens when he finds himself recruiting a "really, really good" player who is not interested in education and makes no effort to hide it.

"There have been young men who have come here and while the professor or the dean of one of the schools was talking to him, he was text messaging," Ryan said. "We just stopped recruiting the kid."

Ryan said there are "a couple of guys" like that who have joined other programs that the Badgers play or will play. Ryan did not identify these players.

The broadcast, unfortunately, ran on pay-per-view.

In other basketball notes, let me commend the Big Ten for keeping its tournaments on a fairly tight schedule. The Mid-American women's tournament, by contrast, began last Sunday with the winner to be determined Saturday. That means the players on the more successful teams will be away from class for a full week. (Graduation rates in excess of 90% are common in women's basketball, disruption of their studies notwithstanding.) In addition, they are confined to Cleveland for a week, which is cruel and unusual punishment with Cedar Point and Geauga Lake closed until May.

KUDOS. The Northern Star staff announce the 2007 Hall of Fame class, including practitioners of traditional and new journalism.

CARNIVAL CALL. The impresario of Carnival of the Capitalists has hoisted this week's bannerline at a site dedicated to that purpose. The Carnival now appears to be edited, and the editor was kind enough to bend a rule on my behalf.

Cold Spring Shops presses one of my hotbuttons with what might normally be a post excluded for excessive quoted text: Emergence. Ultimately it’s about children discovering property rights, creating spontaneous order, and learning about economics through a Lego game, twisted by teachers ...

He's kind enough to characterize the post as "fascinating stuff." I chose, in the academic fashion, to err on the side of quoting excessively rather than to quote too little and be accused of quoting out of context. Go and check out the other business reading, including a recession watch.

MORE PIECES OF THE PUZZLE.

Robert Sobel's The Fallen Colossus will provide a quick Book Review No. 3. Colossus came out after The Wreck of the Penn Central, which was journalism's second draft of history, and just before The Railroad Mergers and the Coming of Conrail, which in revision as Merging Lines sets the stage for the railroad renaissance chronicled in Main Lines and in The Men Who Loved Trains. Although these books cover many of the same events and many of the same personalities, the sequence of events is a bit different in Colossus than in Main Lines or Men Who Loved Trains. That Colossus suffers from a number of annoying proofreading slips might be an indicator of quality control difficulties elsewhere in the research.

Fallen Colossus does devote more space to corporate intrigues during the 1920s and 1930s that culminated in securities analyst Robert R. Young becoming a rail baron, first picking up the pieces of the Van Sweringen network and then taking control of the New York Central. These intrigues appear to be neglected in business history, compared to the maneuverings of the Vanderbilts and Morgans and Goulds (oh, my!) that conventional wisdom credits with midwiving regulation. There appear to be opportunities for additional research. I intend to reinforce this assertion in a review to follow.

THE AMERICA THAT WORKED. I'm watching Remembering Chicago: The Boomer Years, which is available either as a single CD or as part of a set for a premium membership in WTTW. Riverview Park, people got around on streetcars and buses, kids scrounged bottles to use the deposit money for penny candy, and when the streetlights came on, it was time to go home for supper.

EMERGENCE.

The Case of the Redistributed Legos has drawn commentary elsewhere. Betsy's Page observes,

These teachers are so ignorant that they don't realize that the rights to private property are not only the essence of our democratic system as well as the best guarantee for a thriving economy. Who would want to invest and improve anything in an economy if they didn't have guarantees that they would be able to reap the profits from their invested time and money? And these teachers are so proud of their Lego lesson on socialism that they wrote it up and submitted it to an education journal. Amazing.

What's more amazing is the way in which the lesson, which is a bit more subtle than socialism for preschoolers, emerged. Joanne Jacobs links to a Bizzy Blog post that has kindly saved the case study. It appears that my conjecture about the future of these kids as either screaming libertarians or excessively earnest and perpetually aggrieved is sound.

Hilltop is located in an affluent Seattle neighborhood, and, with only a few exceptions, the staff and families are white; the families are upper-middle class and socially liberal.

What is more interesting is the way in which the original Legotown took shape.

[Children] carefully assembled them to add to a sprawling collection of Lego houses, grocery stores, fish-and-chips stands, fire stations, and coffee shops. They were particularly keen to find and use "cool pieces," the translucent bricks and specialty pieces that complement the standard-issue red, yellow, blue, and green Lego bricks.

"I'm making an airport and landing strip for my guy's house. He has his own airplane," said Oliver.

"That's not fair!" said Carl. "That takes too many cool pieces and leaves not enough for me."

"Well, I can let other people use the landing strip, if they have airplanes," said Oliver. "Then it's fair for me to use more cool pieces, because it's for public use."

Discussions like the one above led to children collaborating on a massive series of Lego structures we named Legotown. Children dug through hefty-sized bins of Legos, sought "cool pieces," and bartered and exchanged until they established a collection of homes, shops, public facilities, and community meeting places. We carefully protected Legotown from errant balls and jump ropes, and watched it grow day by day.

Apparently the kids figured out eminent domain even before the teachers shut them down. What's more instructive is that the town was an example of emergent order. Sure, the kids have been born into a world in which they see others engaged in truck, barter, and voluntary exchange, but the original town reflected no one person's vision.

BUILD IT AND THEY WILL COME.

Earlier this week, I expressed skepticism about Phoenix's super-wide super-highways doing anything meaningful about traffic jams. The basis for my skepticism is Anthony Downs's Still Stuck in Traffic: Coping with Peak-Hour Traffic Congestion, which I picked up in order to map the theoretical foundations of high-occupancy toll lane pricing. (The phenomenon appears to have emerged despite the lack of any formal analysis. That I haven't linked to a working paper of my own yet might tell you something about the cumbersomeness of the necessary and sufficient conditions.) I finished the book anyway and offer Book Review No. 2.

About the same time that the Edens Expressway strangled the North Shore Line, Traffic Quarterly published Mr Downs's "The Law of Peak-Hour Expressway Congestion." In those days, the law was dismal enough: a limited-access highway capable of moving commuters more rapidly than they could move on the existing arterial streets would attract commuters until the marginal commuter was indifferent between using the limited-access highway or sticking to the existing street grid. In Stuck, the Law becomes the principle of triple convergence.

Thus even greatly widening any major commuter expressway cannot long reduce peak-hour congestion there. Additional drivers will shift onto that improved road from other routes, other times, and other modes (such as walking or public transit) until movement on it is just as slow as the movement on alternative routes. Since those other routes are less direct than the expressway, such equalization means expressway traffic is usually crawling at the peak hour. Even most wholly new roads will soon fill up during peak hours.

(Stuck, pp. 327-328). At best, the expansion reduces the duration of the most congested times of the day, but even that is not a given. Meet the principle of the swamping effect.

[R]elatively small reductions in initial traffic congestion in a rapidly growing metropolitan area will be fully offset within a few years by the arrival of more people, jobs and vehicles there.

(Id. at 328.) The book provides an extended inquiry into the nature and causes of traffic congestion, and a near-encyclopedic evaluation of possible policies to deal with congestion. There's a useful summary table at p. 348. Capacity expansion, whether augmenting existing expressways, with or without separate carpool or truck lanes, or of public transit service, grades out as "moderately effective, costly." The "most effective" policies are also those most difficult to sell to the public: peak-hour pricing of all expressways and arterial streets, possibly including satellite tracking of vehicles to enforce time-of-use tolls (invasions of privacy be hanged?); higher gasoline taxes (conscripting soccer moms into the Pigou Club?); expressway expansion in the form of high-occupancy toll lanes only; and surcharges on long-term parking in the morning. The policies favored by technocrats tend to be "very ineffective": concentrating jobs in clusters in new-growth areas; driving bans based on license plate numbers; zoning to put jobs closer to houses; higher automobile licensing fees; growth limitations. I am pleased to note that synchronized green lights receive a "relatively effective" grade. The existence of rapid-response crash teams to remove road obstructions is also relatively effective. The book is a 2004 revision of Stuck in Traffic: one item that escaped greater scrutiny is distracted drivers. Mr Downs notes that congestion is a consequence of a difference between individual and collective costs (the driver sees the delay created by all the vehicles in front, but is not required to compensate all the vehicles in rear for getting in their way.) Is a similar wedge at work when drivers take advantage of the delays to multi-task, thereby leading to inefficiently high levels of distraction and more crashes?

IF YOU WANT TO CALL THE TUNE, PAY THE PIPER. The editorial board of the Northern Star publishes a signed open letter to the governor.

We're falling short on money for faculty salaries, thusly encouraging professors to leave for higher-paying jobs. We lack the funding for much-needed construction on and around campus.

An example of this comes with the Stevens Building, where theater and anthropology classes are held. Garbage cans are used to catch leaking water, and oftentimes overflow. Garbage bags form roofs above computers to protect them from being damaged by water entering through moldy, dripping ceilings. There is a computer lab in an ex-janitorial closet, where pipes are exposed and tarps must be used to create a door. We don't have the money to fix any of this.

According to NIU's 2005-2006 Data Book, state appropriations to NIU covered 80.3 percent of the operating costs for 1976. Only 19.7 percent came from the university income fund. Student fees, tuition, that type of thing. This number makes 2006 figures jump off the page: The book states that for 2006, state appropriations covered 51.4 percent of NIU's operating costs, leaving 48.6 percent to be covered by NIU. Mr. Blagojevich, how have we come so far from 80.3 percent?

To maintain the level of operations currently in place at our school, students will be confronted with higher tuition costs.

Although a state subsidy for tuition is likely to be a regressive transfer, the editorial writers correctly note that at current levels, a student has a difficult time working his or her way through college with a full-time summer job and a part-time job during the academic year.

The editors also note that potential students look beyond the front porch.

Mr. Blagojevich, we're a state university. Our reputation reflects upon the state. This institution can boast of distinguished alumni until faces turn blue, but when prospective students come for visits, it won't matter how many success stories orientation leaders gush out. They see buildings with leaky ceilings, dilapidated resources and classrooms small enough to pass for residence hall rooms, and they beeline for the door.

At the moment our enrollment managers are able to balance applications with capacity, but I am not aware of any efforts to quantify the effect of deferred maintenance on outbound transfers.

MANAGING A COMMON PROPERTY. West of the Great Lakes watershed, aquifer management is not simply a matter of watching your own well. City Barbs considers the Care and Feeding of Aquifers.

How cities can really mess it up for the country cousins is by allowing too much development in local recharging areas, where the water needs to get into the ground to replenish the aquifer. Some of our recharging areas lie west and north of DeKalb, into other counties and another state or two, but at least one local shallow aquifer could be affected by residential development that is pushing DeKalb’s boundaries to the west. We don’t know yet. What we do know is that recharge areas need to be part of local comprehensive planning to ensure that by and large they remain farmland, wetlands or other types of green spaces.

Perhaps such comprehensive planning is administratively easier than attempting to establish ownership of the water by methods other than the rule of capture.

Where DeKalb is said to have “competition” is in sharing the deep bedrock aquifers with other cities that are drawing from same. But is that really competition? If we’re all using the same aquifers and the levels drop, we’re all sunk. Sounds like a job for a regional planning authority to me–perhaps the 11-county Regional Water Supply Planning Group for northeastern Illinois, which just got started on its tasks?

Yes, it really is competition. But under the rule of capture, the dominant strategy for each jurisdiction drawing water from the same aquifer is to draw the water down before somebody else does. That's precisely the Nash equilbrium of a one-off tragedy of the commons game, and when the commons is depleted, yes, "we're all sunk."

I submit, though, that a planning group will not forestall a tragedy of the commons without careful thought about the incentives.

We must distinguish between a drought and a water shortage. A drought may or may not lead to a shortage, but is more likely if the water supply is already stressed. In coming years of growth, shortages may happen in the absence of drought if we’re careless.

Before planning begins, we also have to select what type(s) of drought to plan for. There are four types: meteorological, agricultural, hydrological and socioeconomic. (If you want the fine print, the link will bring you to a good, quick overview.) The range of usage priorities and other management strategies we end up with are dependent on the sort of drought(s) we want to prepare for.

The linked site is worth visiting: it speaks of "shortages" without once considering prices. Here's its description of a "socioeconomic drought."

Socioeconomic drought occurs when the demand for an economic good exceeds supply as a result of a weather-related shortfall in water supply. The supply of many economic goods, such as water, forage, food grains, fish, and hydroelectric power, depends on weather. Due to variability of climate, water supply is sufficient in some years but not satisfactory to meet human and environmental needs in other years. The demand for economic goods is increasing as a result of increasing population. Supply may also increase because of improved production efficiency and technology.

The concept of a futures market for water might strike readers as odd in the extreme, but it's exactly the institution to transfer water consumption from years of abundant rainfall to years of rainfall shortfall. Short of that, the introductory economics notion of rationing by price, which induces consumers to rethink the "needs" they seek to "meet", offers a corrective to a shortage.

THE LANE IS CROWDED. This despite a rule limiting occupancy to three seconds.

Driving in many cities is almost impossible because of the congestion.

However, in this hypothetical case, I’m referring to driving to the basket on a city playground free public basketball court. Shooting a three-pointer isn’t much better with a 50% chance of your shot being blocked by someone else’s shot.

You’ve got your new basketball, but how can you expect to win a college basketball scholarship without an unimpeded chance to practice?

Clearly we have an economic problem of too much demand for the available supply.

BEFORE THE UNIVERSITY OF PHOENIX. In the stack of old Railroad magazines I received, there's evidence of a onetime thriving industry in personal improvement. This advertisement from the mid-1960s offers a representative pitch: enhance your promotion potential and your earning capacity at your own pace. The vendor, International Correspondence Schools of Scranton, Pennsylvania (in those pre-1-800-MY-SUCCESS days) appears to have metamorphosed into Thomson Education Direct, also doing business as ICS in Canada and in the UK.


The advertisements of that era attempted to strike a balance between shame and aspiration. A typical theme was the worker hampered by the lack of a credential and looking for a better way to provide for his family.

The existence of training and credentialing services offering second, or third, or n-th chances is not something to apologise for: enough people are born into tough circumstances or have to be mugged by reality that it's fitting and proper for a pulp magazine published for such an audience to communicate the existence of such services. In what little I've learned, however, about the history of higher education in that era, in which state normal schools were evolving (or is it mutating?) into research institutions somewhat like their land-grant neighbors, I have seen nothing about the legislators or administrators viewing International and the other precursors of distance-learning providers as a competitive threat.

BALANCING TEACHING AND SCHOLARSHIP. Greg Mankiw hosts a discussion.

I am inclined to agree ... that universities should give more weight to teaching relative to research. Yet I am not fully convinced about my own judgments here because I do not understand what market failure leads universities to overweight research.

Let alone to place a higher weight on quantity irrespective of quality of the research.

HEAR! HEAR! What is lamer than fearfulness from people with tenure?

CHORNIY VECHER, BELY SNEG, VETER, VETER.

There is a railroad out there, and the farms on the horizon. As I'm posting this, however, the snow squall appears to have let up. Should be able to keep my feet heading home.

FIRST THE LEGOS, THEN EVERYTHING ELSE. As meddling scolds, Democrats and Republicans are equal offenders.

IT'S CALLED LIBERATING TOLERANCE. In many a fight, the person who retaliates, not the instigator, takes the penalty.

When a few classmates razzed Rebekah Rice about her Mormon upbringing with questions such as, "Do you have 10 moms?" she shot back: "That's so gay."

Best of the Web notes,

We're not sure this is worth making a federal case over, but it's certainly a revealing window into the politically correct mindset. So vigilant is Carrillo High about protecting gay students from harassment that it has declared certain phrases unsayable, even when the intent plainly is not invidious and when--as appears to have been the case here--there were no gays around to feel "harassed" by the comment.

Yet according to Rebekah's parents, the students who actually were harassing her for her religion were not disciplined. Political correctness is not really about sensitivity and courtesy, which require mutual respect. Rather, political correctness entails intolerance for some prejudices but impunity for others.

Exactly, because mutual respect includes respect for the dominant paradigm, but the mission of change agents is the subversion of the dominant paradigm, by any means necessary.

PROPERTY IS THEFT. Pierre Proudhon goes to daycare.

According to an article in the winter 2006-07 issue of "Rethinking Schools" magazine, the teachers at the private school wanted their students to learn that private property ownership is evil.

According to the article, the students had been building an elaborate "Legotown," but it was accidentally demolished. The teachers decided its destruction was an opportunity to explore "the inequities of private ownership." According to the teachers, "Our intention was to promote a contrasting set of values: collectivity, collaboration, resource-sharing, and full democratic participation."

The children were allegedly incorporating into Legotown "their assumptions about ownership and the social power it conveys." These assumptions "mirrored those of a class-based, capitalist society -- a society that we teachers believe to be unjust and oppressive."

They claimed as their role shaping the children's "social and political understandings of ownership and economic equity ... from a perspective of social justice."

Acting as change agents, the teachers decreed that all future Lego projects shall be khrushchobas.

Legos returned to the classroom after the children agreed to several guiding
principles framed by the teachers, including that "All structures are public
structures" and "All structures will be standard sizes." The teachers quote the
children:

"A house is good because it is a community house."

"We should have equal houses. They should be standard sizes."

"It's important to have the same amount of power as other people over your building."

The irony, dear reader, is that the school in question is a private school, in which the teachers' lessons are property of the teachers, and definitely not standard lessons. Pity the kids: if they take this stuff to heart, they're at risk of being excessively earnest at 15, or of being potential converts to the libertarian position, or potential drafters of restrictive covenants and snob zoning codes.

LETS GET REAL. The highway lobby still expects to build its way out of congestion.

A plan to widen part of Interstate 10 in metropolitan Phoenix from 14 lanes to 24 is the USA's latest giant superhighway proposal designed to ease the kind of gridlock that some planners say could stunt economic growth.

For a 2-mile stretch between U.S. 60 in Tempe and State Route 143, the interstate would have six-general purpose lanes, two carpool lanes and four lanes for local traffic in each direction. Work on the first phase, which planners expect to cost about $550 million, could begin by 2011.

Two miles of widened road, which will only generate greater congestion at the end of the widened section, and when the widening is completed, at best it will shorten the duration of the congested period, without shortening anybody's travel times (yes, I CAN document that, and I will have an extended post on this point this weekend) and at an expenditure approximately 80% of Amtrak's annual budget. Is it really in the national interest for all of us to dig down to build a little bit of extra road so that the good people of Phoenix, who are already living off of our largesse in the form of the Salt River and Colorado Basin water projects, can build even more Wisconsin-style golf courses in a desert?

The superwide highway in Phoenix will cut dangerous weaving at interchanges, reduce freeway congestion and add capacity for a booming population, planners say.

"The Phoenix metro area is growing like crazy," says Eric Anderson, transportation director for the Maricopa Association of Governments, the regional planning agency that coordinates freeway construction projects. "We're adding about 125,000 people a year, and we have a population approaching 4 million."

The section of I-10 proposed for widening now carries about 294,000 vehicles a day. That will jump to a projected 450,000 by 2025, says Arizona Department of Transportation spokesman Doug Nintzel.

Do the math: although the capacity appears to expand more than proportionately to the traffic, the perception of a shorter travel time will induce people to leave later for their destinations. In addition, there is no reason to believe that the current projections of traffic for the out-years will be any more accurate than the late 1950s projections of Interstate System use.

"These are really very big bottleneck-improvement projects," says David Schrank, a researcher at the Texas Transportation Institute. "When these highways were designed and built decades ago, the traffic that's there today could hardly be foreseen. A lot of these interstates designed and built in the '50s, '60s and '70s are needing a modernization. … That's happening nationwide."

It's true that the existing Interstate system is clapped out, but is an in-kind upgrade the most efficient use of public funds?

MORE LIKE NORTHWESTERN THAN NORTH CENTRAL? The strategic planning task force appears neither to have been captured by the dictatorship of the sociable nor bogged down in niggling nuance.

"Any time you have [a] committee or a group as large as some of these groups have been, you could just become stalemated and not get anyone to agree on anything, but that hasn't been the case," Ray Alden, NIU executive vice president and provost, said.

Alden says he is happy with the progress the [Strategic Planning Task Force] has made. Before classes started in January, [it] had a major round-table event where members discussed the direction of the university and separated into four groups. Those groups will devote the next two months to reach the goals determined by the [task force] as a whole.

Alden said the different groups engage in weekly meetings. Alden said every third week, external experts from The Learning Alliance for Higher Education come to compare notes, identify cross-collaboration between groups and help to ensure the groups are staying on target.

According to The Learning Alliance, it is "the first, just-in-time provider of strategic expertise to college and university leaders."

My prior estimate of the marginal product of these outsiders: zero. Had there been a "just-in-time provider of strategic expertise" at the Constitutional Convention, there would be no Constitution. Had such hangers-on been riding James J. Hill's business car, the Marias Pass would still be a legend known only to back-country hikers.

Fortunately, the faculty seem to be thinking about the right things.

"I think NIU is at a crossroads and could go three different ways," said Paul Stoddard, Faculty Senate president and [task force] member. "I think this is a good time to give input into what direction Northern ends up taking."

I'm not privy to what these principal directions or variants thereof are. The good news is the vision is something not like a community college that gets occasional bowl bids.

The first group is devoted to developing the learning environment at NIU, Alden said. The group will make sure NIU maintains a culture where undergraduate eduction is a top priority.

"We don't want to go down the path of some research universities where active researchers never see undergraduates," Alden said.

Alden said the second group deals with research areas NIU will be known for in the future.

The third group deals with NIU's relationship with the region and relations between NIU and national labs like Fermilab, and NIU's involvement with private development, for a few examples, Alden said

"The fourth area is the NIU community," Alden said. "How do we identify issues with students, staff [or] faculty and how do we recruit, support, retain and enhance all the components of the university community by making the culture on campus the best it can be."

I agree generally with the principle that professors active in research also interact with undergraduates. (Indeed, a senior professor in an introductory class is the academy's analogue of the grizzled non-com at boot camp or the crusty general foreman of engines.) The danger, however, is that this task force will have expectations for faculty along the lines of "produce the student credit-hours of a junior college adjunct, supervise the senior theses of a private liberal arts college professor, and produce the American Economic Review-equivalent pages of a candidate for the Clark Medal." This year's recruiting season illustrates the folly of imposing all those expectations, at least in economics. I have private information from a number of sources that this year was a good year to be an entry-level Ph.D. in economics. There is no industrial reserve army of people willing to risk those conditions rather than pull mochas at Starbucks.

A HOME GAME AT HOME!!! UW adds Northern Illinois to 2007 schedule.

Madison - The University of Wisconsin has finalized its 12-game football schedule for the 2007 season by adding a non-conference home game against Northern Illinois on Oct. 20, UW officials announced today.

UW and Northern Illinois, of the Mid-American Conference, have also agreed to play two other times.

UW is set to become the first Big Ten Conference team to play at Northern Illinois, on Oct. 24, 2009. Northern Illinois is to play at UW on Sept. 17, 2011.

Northern Illinois will host Iowa at Soldier Field on September 1, and there will be other marquee matchups in DeKalb.

The Wisconsin series marks the third significant scheduling milestone for the Huskies over the last year, including the announcement of the 2007 home opener versus Iowa at Soldier Field and the addition of a home-and-home series with Navy in 2007 and 2008. Northern Illinois will take on the Midshipmen in Annapolis on Nov. 17, 2007, with Navy making a return visit to DeKalb in 2008. NIU's non-conference game at Tennessee, originally scheduled for the 2007 season, has been pushed back to 2008. The remainder of the Huskies' 2007 schedule will be announced later this month.

Anchors, Aweigh! and On! Wisconsin! are so much more dignified than Rocky Top.