BUBBLE, BUBBLE, DOUBLE TROUBLE. The rebellion spreads. Start at Doctor Housing Bubble.

At what point does formal education become overpriced? How much debt is too much? Many younger Americans are saddling themselves with so much debt that they will not be able to borrow enough to buy a home (at least not at current prices).

It's particularly grim in California. Richard Vedder's research assistants have done some digging in Bureau of Labor Statistics reports to reach a grim conclusion.

Only a minority of the increment in our nation’s stock of college graduates is filling jobs historically considered as requiring a bachelor’s degree or more. (We are working to integrate some earlier Edwin Rubenstein data on this topic to give us a more complete picture of this trend).

A university education is not necessarily job training, but years of access-assessment-remediation-retention have degraded the higher-level thinking skills, let alone the awareness of the Great Questions, that are good alike for the symbolic analyst or the cashier or the engineer. Minding the Campus asked a few of its regulars to contribute to a forum, "Do We Need More College Grads?" Here's Stefan Kanfer.

But the principal reason for the lack of high-grade employment lies with the colleges themselves. Anyone who inspects their catalogues will find a glut of courses designed to separate the student from his cash, without imparting anything that might be defined as wisdom. Core curricula that once discussed the great tradition in literature, art, and science, have been elbowed offstage by banal courses in feminism, black studies and queer theory. All too often, the powerful and useful contributions of Shakespeare, Dickens, Tolstoy, Mann, Joyce et al are dismissed as the work of "dead white males."

The result: students who can spout a line of political correctness designed to dazzle their peers and professors. With that and $1.50 they can get a bus ride downtown to the unemployment offices. And when and if they do land a job, chances are that their abilities will be sorely tested because they come to work with an ignorance of history, economics and society.

It's not necessarily the case that curriculum committees have taken the wrong side in the culture wars. It's more likely the case that faculty get the message to let the intellectual lightweights through, if they're not complicit in the conceit that completion for its own sake is to be desired. Daphne Patai sees it that way.

So, in my view, the scandal isn't that students don't find lucrative jobs after college. No; the real scandal is that we're doing so badly what we are supposed to be doing halfway decently: providing our students with preparation to lead lives as thoughtful and free citizens of a democracy. But this failure shouldn't be laid at the feet merely of university professors. The majority of students reach us already poorly educated but well trained in making the least effort. To that, we then add further disincentives: higher grades for less work; fewer requirements, and more credits per course; shorter semesters, reading lists, and students' attention spans.

If we actually demanded that students put in the time, effort, and work required to become proficient in an area, and were giving students the grades they deserved, at least we could be claiming to be fulfilling one of the implicit promises of higher education. But if we did those things, college admissions and enrollments would drastically drop, as young people not interested in or able to make the serious intellectual effort that ought to be the hallmark of higher education, would seek out other ways of achieving their job goals. Meanwhile, the notion that everybody has a right to higher education would be exploded for what it is: an unrealistic and probably pointless pretense. However, I doubt that my fellow faculty members support the endless expansion of higher education out of a desire to line their own coffers. Many seem genuinely to believe that this is akin to the right to primary and secondary school education -- and so it's no surprise that those levels are what higher education has come to resemble. In such a situation, graduates ought to be disgruntled: they end up without either adequate job skills or the education-for-life that in some way they were promised, which certainly does turn their diplomas into a mere piece of paper, a formal requirement easy to despise.

And, although the professoriate and the administrators fret about strategies to attract and to retain students, the taxpayers are made of stronger stuff.

Low college graduation rates are students’ fault, say respondents to an AP-Stanford poll. Some also blamed parents, but most gave colleges a pass.

The conscience-cowboys are raising the predictable objections, but the taxpayers see the degree-means-more-income argument for what it is: a statement of appropriable private benefits unworthy of subsidies.

While 88 percent say economic prosperity and quality education are closely entwined, only 42 percent favor raising taxes to pay for better education.

Markets, and open voting procedures, tend to reach the right decision, even if participants are not necessarily fully informed.

TRAINS TO DUBUQUE. The wrangle between Genoa and Belvidere over the renewal of service through the North West Frontier of Illinois has been resolved by the Illinois Department of Transportation in favor of the Land O'Corn route.

The selection of routes was based on an independent study by the Decatur office of URS Corp., one of the country’s top engineering design firms. The analysis showed that the southern route through Genoa will require a $26.2 million investment in upgraded infrastructure between Chicago and Rockford. Similar improvements on the proposed northern route through Belvidere would cost $62.3 million, raising the total cost of the route to more than $96 million. The study also determined an estimated annual ridership of 76,357 on the southern route compared to 54,988 on the northern route.

Safety was another deciding factor in the study. The southern route will cross 143 roads and highways. The northern route would cross 176. The southern route also will see fewer delays using only two railroads, while the northern route would require using four railroads. The full report can be viewed [here].

Pending further political wrangling, at least one round trip a day will be in operation sometime in 2014.

PREACH IT, BROTHER. At Caltech, there are no dumb jocks, dumb legacies, or dumb affirmative action students.

Caltech's single-minded focus on academic excellence in its admission's policies is no doubt partially due to the fact that its faculty, rather than its professional administrators, determines its admissions standards. Its uncompromising pursuit of talent and of those with a passion for scientific discovery is surely the main reason why such a small institution -- only one fifth the size of institutions like MIT and Princeton in term of its student body and faculty -- manages to produce world-class scientists and researchers in quality and number sufficient to gain for the university world-class standing.

That model cannot be applied everywhere. Time-serving, page-counting professors who never had an original thought, even in a dissertation; conscience-cowboys who substitute self-congratulation for serious policy; aspiring serial administrators all can poison the atmosphere of a faculty admissions or curriculum committee.

BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU ASK FOR. The incoming Republican governors of Wisconsin and Ohio asked to cancel Passenger Rail projects, but also asked to keep the money for road improvements. The national government awarded the money to Passenger Rail projects in other states instead.

California will get the largest share of the money ($624 million), with the rest going to Florida ($342.3 million), Washington ($161.5 million), and Illinois ($42.3 million).

Smaller amounts will go to nine other states.

The Illinois allocation is for additional improvements to the GM&O line to St. Louis (which has been home to occasional 90 mph or 110 mph speed tests, but as of yet no speeded up schedules.)

Wisconsin will keep an appropriation of $2 million for improvements between Lake and Ranney that might permit improvements on the 1938 timings. Apparently some other improvements to the Milwaukee service are budgeted as the Madison extension.

Wisconsin also was allowed to retain up to $2 million to fund upgrades on Amtrak's existing Milwaukee-to-Chicago Hiawatha line. But that won't cover the $19.4 million cost of renovating the train shed at Milwaukee's downtown Amtrak-Greyhound station or the $52 million cost of building a new maintenance base for two newly purchased trains, two projects that would have been included in the original $810 million budget.

Minnesota still wants faster passenger service to Chicago, but the routing is yet to be determined.

RESERVATION WAGES ARE POSITIVE. A humanities Ph.D. discovers that freeway flying doesn't cover the daycare bill.

The community colleges take advantage of the overproduction of English and humanities Ph.D.s by paying extremely low salaries. One can argue that this is simply supply and demand, and there is some truth to this, especially since Ph.D.s are competing with those with master’s degrees for the same adjunct teaching positions. Many of us stick with it because we get into our heads the idea that teaching experience will help us to get tenure-track positions elsewhere. But that’s not true. The two are unrelated. Publishing papers gets you a tenure- track position, not teaching experience.

In the meantime, colleges that pay adjuncts low wages are getting what they are paying for. As any economist will tell you, higher wages will get greater productivity out of your workers (up to a critical level, of course, which varies from job to job), while lower wages will get you employees who do as much work as they think the wages are really worth. There are exceptions, but one has to look at the average; the problem is structural, not personal.

It's not quite "they pretend to pay us and we pretend to work" but you get the picture. The essayist hints that coolie wages come bundled with hints to teach to the test, which is not necessarily a test of higher level concepts.

THEY'RE NOT WRITING ABOUT OUR BOWL CHANCES. The Student Association Senate at Northern Illinois University flaunts the First Amendment five by five, which draws an observation from Reason's Jacob Sullum.

Given their inflated sense of their own importance and their experience in passing blatantly unconstitutional legislation just because they're offended by something, these guys seem qualified to be real senators someday.

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education has an open case file. Northern Illinois University: Unequal Treatment of Political and Religious Student Organizations, with links to ongoing correspondence with the administration.

LEADING INDICATOR? Put a housing start in the income accounts.

DeKalb, Illinois, 8 December 2010.

The weather isn't conducive to digging, or to pouring concrete, but bales of straw are being delivered to the job site.

THE GRAND ARMY OF THE REPUBLIC. It's the second week of deer camp.

The state of Wisconsin has gone an entire deer hunting season without someone getting killed. That’s great. There were over 600,000 hunters.

Allow me to restate that number. Over the last two months, the eighth largest army in the world – more men under arms than Iran; more than France and Germany combined – deployed to the woods of a single American state to help keep the deer menace at bay.

But that pales in comparison to the 750,000 who are in the woods of Pennsylvania this week. Michigan’s 700,000 hunters have now returned home. Toss in a quarter million hunters in West Virginia, and it is literally the case that the hunters of those four states alone would comprise the largest army in the world.

These numbers are part of why those of us who grew up in rural parts of the country simply don’t comprehend the gun-grabbing impulses of some. Every single year, millions of Americans carry high power rifles into the woods and more or less do as they please – some shoot at deer, some just drink a lot – and it is a complete non-story. The number of people injured and killed by these guns will pale in comparison to those injured and killed in driving accidents during the same time period.

The geopolitical musings that follow are a bit much, even on a night of exam punch-drunkenness, but I bet those hunters skew Republican in their voting.

A tip of the deer-stalker to Outside the Beltway. Give Da Yoopers credit for da title.

THE COLD WAR BETWEEN ADMINISTRATORS AND ECONOMISTS CONTINUES. Two University Diaries posts feature economists throwing the flag on sports subsidies.

At Rutgers, it's Mark R. Killingsworth in the Newark Star-Ledger, questioning the connection between sports visibility and enrollments.

The hoped-for spillover benefits from football to the academic program have also failed to materialize. According to the university’s Office of Institutional Research, there has been no appreciable change in SAT scores or in the enrollment “yield” — the percentage of admitted students who actually attend — at Rutgers’ flagship New Brunswick campus, relative to other large public-research universities.

The article doesn't say opportunity cost, but resources are going into sports facilities, not academic departments.

It reduced the number of classes it offers and increased the size of the classes that weren’t canceled. Hiring of faculty has been restricted; support for research has been cut; faculty pay has been frozen. In my own department, Economics — which has the third-largest number of majors in the School of Arts and Sciences — two-thirds of student credit hours are taught by part-timers, adjuncts, teaching assistants and others who are not tenure or tenure-track faculty.

So the inevitable happened. In 1997, U.S. News & World Report ranked Rutgers 16th among undergraduate programs at major state universities. As of the latest rankings, released in September, Rutgers slipped to 23rd. As of 1995, the National Research Council ranked 11 Rutgers graduate programs among the top 25 in their respective fields. In contrast, in the 2010 NRC rankings of the same departments, only eight programs are among the top 25 in their field.

University money goes to the positional arms race in sports. Tuition money goes to the positional arms race in U.S. News.

At [Southwest] Missouri State, it's Reed Olsen in the Springfield News-Leader. The university has a new basketball arena that's losing money.

Olsen, who last year disputed a university claim that the arena was paying for itself, questioned the makeup of the committee, saying it consists of people who were part of the problem.

Nothing to see here, move along. But the powers that be don't understand sunk costs.

Now the viability of the athletics department is even more important because it is linked to the financial health of JQH Arena.

"If you don't have athletics, you can't pay off JQH," [new president James] Cofer said.

So you lose more money on sports, but gosh darn it, you're slowly paying off the arena. That's called throwing good money after bad, even in the Ozarks, and you might lose less money dropping the athletics and having the bank foreclose on the arena. Springfield is close enough to Branson that some country-music promoter might be willing to work out a short sale.

ALL THE LIVE-LONG DAY. Working on North America's least labor-friendly railroad is more attractive than playing for a contending football team.

[Defensive back Keith] Fitzhugh has been working as a conductor for the Norfolk Southern railroad and says he likes his job. Plus, he's got a family to take care of and being the 53rd man on [the Jets'] roster is not exactly long-term job.

The article doesn't say where on Norfolk Southern he's working, and whether he's 53rd out on the extra board.

WHY SCHOOL CHOICE FOSTERS EFFICIENCY. Rockford public school administrators don't get it.

All the talk of cutting honors classes for some several hundred students has some uncertain if they want their child to stay in District 205 schools.

The idea is meant to be more efficient and reduce costs. However, District 205's latest proposal to cut honors classes is prompting parents to explore options at private and parochial schools.

For the 2^k-th time, for k large, efficiency is the identification and realization of gains from trade. Voluntarily downsizing your school district by driving the motivated students out reduces costs, aye, but with what effect on the children left behind?

"We've seen an increase in the phone calls that are coming in from people asking about our honors program," Don Kortze with Rockford Lutheran School said.

Top educators at Rockford Lutheran School and Keith Country Day School said dozens of parents have reached out to them. Both schools offer a large amount [c.q.] of honors classes and both recently held public events for interested parents.

"Their top concerns are making sure their students are able to get the kind of courses they feel are important for a successful college experience," Kortze said.

"We basically teach all of our classes at an honors level and have numerous AP courses and we have absolutely no plans to change any of that," [Keith's Alan] Gibby said.

The quest of parents to provide opportunities for their children to learn less impeded by unmotivated and uncultured classmates manifests itself in willingness to pay private school tuitions, or to live in school districts with better test scores. What District 205's cost cutting will produce is left to the reader as an exercise.

A COLLEGE PARTY THE FACULTY CAN ENDORSE. Tea Party Students, that is. Inside Higher Ed reports, you decide.

None of the student leaders contacted by Inside Higher Ed indicated that their groups planned to lobby their own campuses for smaller administrative bodies or lower tuition. However, none ruled it out.

The Tea Party has a high contingent of college graduates compared to the general population, but it has made some enemies among academics, due to what some consider a tendency to misread Constitutional law and misappropriate the legacies of various U.S. historical figures in order to make emotional points about contemporary politics.

But on the campuses where students have started up Tea Party groups, some have found support from faculty members — if not for their ideas, then for the fact that they are interested in talking about them.

At Brandeis, an associate professor of American history, Jerry Cohen, says he e-mailed Perdichizzi and told her that he admired her courage after he saw she had put up Tea Party fliers. It is healthier for students who disagree with Tea Party principles to actually engage with their fellow students than to whack at straw men, he says.

“Whether it will prove to be a positive presence on campus or not, I think that overwhelmingly -- and notwithstanding the habitual use of the word diversity four times per sentence coming out of the administration -- there’s very little real commitment to intellectual diversity,” Cohen says.

Call it that continual and fearless sifting and winnowing by which alone the truth can be found.

OPTIMIZATION AT THE MARGIN. King Banaian, long-time member of SCSU Scholars, the Right Honorable Gentleman from District 158.

Congratulations to King Banaian, who was elected in a close race to the Minnesota House of Representatives. On Election Day he was ten votes ahead of his opponent Carol Lewis, and after a recount on November 29, Lewis conceded the race to Banaian.

Does the median voter theorem predict that all elections ought to be that tight?

CLEAN SWEEP. Northern Illinois University Policy Attempts to Overrule 5 out of 5 Rights in the First Amendment.

Last night, the Northern Illinois University (NIU) Student Association Senate denied recognition for the second time in six weeks to NIU Students for Sensible Drug Policy (SSDP). As a result, SSDP may not meet on campus, post flyers, or even reapply for recognition for two years. As we outline in today's press release, the Senate also denies funding to all "political" and "religious" student organizations, including the Model United Nations, which it labels a "political" group. Meanwhile, groups dubbed "social justice" or "advocacy" groups—including student pro-life, pro-choice, antiwar, women's rights, and victims' rights groups—are eligible for funding.

The criteria by which organizations render themselves eligible or ineligible for funding are convoluted.

On November 7, the Senate then issued hopelessly vague definitions of "political" and "religious" groups that guarantee an unconstitutional double standard. Indeed, Advocates for Choice, Campus Antiwar Network, Consumer Education Society, PAVE (Promoting Awareness, Victim Empowerment), Students for Life (NIU), Vegetarian Education Group, and Women's Rights Alliance are eligible for funding as "Social Justice, Advocacy, and Support" groups, yet funding is denied to the Committee for the Preservation of Wildlife and the Model United Nations, an academic simulation of the UN, because they are classified as "political" groups. Similarly, the Baha'i Club, dedicated to discussion of the Baha'i faith, is eligible as a "Diversity and Cultural" organization, while Campus Crusade for Christ, Hillel, Latter Day Saint Student Association, Muslim Students Association, Newman Catholic Student Center, Pagan Student Association, and many more are not.

Under the new definitions, NIU Atheists, Agnostics, and Freethinkers—currently ineligible for funding—will become eligible. And if the Senate is going to be honest about applying the new definition of a "political" group, a lot of groups will suddenly find themselves reclassified and ineligible for funding. The new definition of a "political" group even prohibits a student group from receiving Activity Fee funding if any of its activities result in any individual, anywhere, "petitioning Federal, State, or Local legislative or executive bodies for policies advocated by that group"-amazingly violating the First Amendment right to petition government for the redress of grievances.

FIRE wrote NIU President John G. Peters on November 18, explaining that the Senate is bound by the First Amendment and that NIU is obligated to step in if the Senate fails to uphold students' rights.

The football team might have failed to run the table in the Mid-American, but the student senate has achieved a clean sweep.

The Student Association Senate might have set a record for the most violations of the First Amendment in a single set of campus funding and recognition policies (there are even more violations, but these are the highlights). Indeed, NIU's Student Association Senate has violated all five of the rights codified in the First Amendment. First, the Senate violated the rights of freedom of speech and assembly by denying recognition to Students for Sensible Drug Policy and by
discriminating against all groups it arbitrarily deems "political" or
"religious." Next, the Senate violates the right to freedom of the press by stating that unrecognized groups are prohibited from posting flyers on campus and that publications—such as magazines and leaflets, the nation's oldest media for freedom of the press—will presumably threaten a group's funding. The Senate's policy also violates the First Amendment religion clauses, since Baha'i, humanist, and atheist groups can receive funding to discuss religious topics, but other religious groups get nothing, in practice favoring some religious groups over others. Finally, perhaps the Senate's most stunning achievement of all was to violate the First Amendment right to petition government for the redress of grievances.

They're talking about Northern Illinois in Wisconsin, and it's not a comparison of Badger and Huskies bowl prospects.

STRANGER THAN TRUTH. In the course of the Fifty Book Challenge, I have had several occasions to report on Sherman's March, including the first-person recollections compiled in General Sherman's Christmas, the thinking of the commanders in Grant and Sherman, and the military history from Nothing but Victory.

E. L. Doctorow takes a different approach in The March: A Novel, tonight's Book Review N^o. 31. The background of the novel is Sherman's March, with a number of the famous events of the march, including the intentional unintentional firing of Columbia, South Carolina, the cutting of a pontoon bridge leaving escaped slaves with the choice of swimming a river or surrendering to trailing rebel cavalry, and the extreme measures used against insurgents and their improvised explosive devices providing the background. The novel concludes with the Army of the Tennessee compelling Joe Johnston's surrender. It being a novel, and it being Doctorow, the reader encounters what happens when a bunch of horny guys with guns have opportunities to fraternize with the local population. I think that's called character development. (Did Civil War volunteers talk like frat boys?) Interesting cast of characters to follow, however. I think that's called ambiguity. It's a novel. It's Doctorow, not Tom Clancy.

(Cross-posted to 50 Book Challenge.)

SUBVERT THE DOMINANT PARADIGM. University Diaries uses a recent Inside Higher Ed column to note, once again, the folly of offering online classes and pretending students are educated.

There is much more of note in the column, written, pseudonymously, by a faculty member in the California public system.

Administrators are evaluated by measures that have nothing to do with educational experience, such as cost savings or time to graduation. Faculty want to facilitate growth in students whether it shows up in such measures or not, and are unconcerned with cost/efficiency but very concerned about the insufficiency of resources to educate students properly.

A great deal of the faculty resistance to change occurs because many faculty regard these faddish initiatives, along with the emphasis on assessment, as a waste because they divert resources from the classroom. When tenure-track lines are replaced by adjuncts and faculty are denied lab space, travel funding, or even market-average pay, they come to doubt the sincerity of administrative assurances that the institution cares about quality education.

Faculty believe that their own competence depends on professional preparation, quality of ongoing scholarship, ability to involve students in the generation of new knowledge, and mentoring students toward roles that do not necessarily lead directly to corporate life. The less faculty are paid, the less incentive there is to pursue a faculty career, the lower the quality of teaching and the less well-educated students will be.

What she said. It doesn't matter whether this post is from Berkeley or Santa Cruz or Stanislaus or Humanitarian Bowl invitee Fresno State. They're all in the same business as Stanford or Chicago, and offering matriculants who didn't make the cut at Stanford or Chicago a mass-produced drive-through degree simply reinforces the social stratification. The economist in me cringes at the use of the locution cost/efficiency: a degree on the cheap that produces neither graduation nor human capital is neither cheap nor efficient. And so much for professors being underworked and overpaid: those low salaries and burdensome job descriptions will dry up the graduate school pipeline (in the disciplines where degree holders have outside opportunities first; in the evergreen disciplines when Atlas Shrugged makes its way onto reading lists) and there will eventually be no associate professors to tap for committees. Think I'm joking about Atlas Shrugged? Consider the implications of that "doubt the sincerity of administrative assurances". Those assurances are the leper's bell of an approaching looter.

An administrator’s interest is in having fewer professors teach more students, even though this results in less personal attention to students, the one thing that correlates highest with increased graduation rates.

Their reasons are economic. This year I will be teaching face-to-face a class formerly taught only online. Students are grateful and tell me they hated the previous approach, that they avoid online classes whenever possible. Faculty who teach online have published studies showing that more faculty time is required to teach an online class effectively, not less, so class sizes cannot be increased even though there is no physical seat restriction.

But class sizes are increased and faculty thus are forced to teach less effectively. This kind of experience is being ignored by administrators because they care more about the efficiency of instruction than its quality.

Again, it's a misuse of the word, efficiency. Efficiency is the identification and realization of gains from trade. More online busywork for less learning is none of that.

We lose the opportunity to systematically provide young people with experiences that will make them more than drones. Call me intransigent, but I wouldn’t want to work in such a system, nor would I want to send my son or daughter to that kind of university. You can call it “fundamental change,” but the fact remains that education dictated by financial considerations alone cannot produce minds with the strengths needed to pull us out of a recession, much less produce world leaders.

In particular, the gutting of the former teachers' colleges, and the mid-majors, and the land-grants only intensifies the willingness of people to sign up for the test preparation courses and do whatever else it takes to get into one of the universities at the top of the U.S. News league tables.

The responsibility for the decline, however, cannot be laid off entirely on Dilbertized boards of trustees and serial administrators. Loose talk about access and opportunity appeals to the prejudices of faculty members, too many of whom still pine for the Great Society.

IT'S LIFE, JIM, BUT NOT AS WE KNOW IT. Jim Hu makes the case that the supposed arsenic-based bacterium is life as we know it. Just keep scrolling.

Short form: he isn't saying the NASA study is junk science, but read between the lines.

DESPERATE TO REGAIN THE AXE? The University of Minnesota (motto: ten thousand ways to surrender the Axe) did defenestrate football coach Tim Brewster, and hiring Jerry Kill from Northern Illinois, another team that ran the ball 'round Minnesota. One way to improve your team is to bring in better people.

"I look at things as you could either be a launching pad or a graveyard," [Northern Illinois athletic director Jeff] Compher said. "I'd rather be the launching pad.

"I think it says our program is being recognized as a national level program, that you can come here and you can win."

Despite a hiccup in Detroit, Northern Illinois is headed to the blue fields of Boise for a dog fight in the uDrove [c.q.] Humanitarian Bowl. A Mid-American also-ran, Toledo, gets the bid for the Little Caesars Pizza Bowl (burp) to be played in Detroit. (Didn't I say second place, a week in Detroit?) The Detroit bowl had first pick of Mid-American teams and went for the commuters. (But it's amateur sports, and it has nothing to do with money).

As for Jerry Kill, we will be keeping track of the Axe. The keepers of the Axe are headed to the Rose Bowl.

HO! HO! HO! WHO WOULDN'T GO. The Canadian Pacific Holiday Train will be making an extended swing through the State Line this December.

• Saturday, December 4: Pingree Grove, 10 am; Byron, 1 pm; Savanna, 3.30 pm.
• Wednesday, December 8: Gurnee, 5.15 pm; Sturtevant, 7 pm.

The train will also be calling at Muscatine, Iowa on December 4, working its way north the next day through Dubuque and Marquette to LaCrescent.

LOSING THE GOOD OF THE INTELLECT. John Rosenberg suggests it can happen to an entire discipline. See his Rigoberta's Revenge: The Implosion Of Anthropology. It's a long essay, with extensive quotation and citation of other essays, and those will reward careful study. Professor Rosenberg concludes with what I hope will be the epitaph for cultural studies' attempt to hijack higher education.

Objectivity and truth become not simply unattainable goals; they cease to exist as meaningful concepts. This is post-modernism run amuck, and it reveals a void at the core of a large strain of multicultural academic work that is much larger than simply removing the word "science" from a mission statement may suggest.

When religious true believers take over school boards and install creation science in their curriculum, they are operating from a coherent, if wrong, belief system. When cultural-studies types take over anthropology departments and remove science on the grounds that it's a social construct, possibly a gendered rape manual, they have lost the good of the intellect in an assault on coherent beliefs of any kind, the end product being an academic culture in which a university that operates as a subprime party school is no less useful than a university that insists on coherent thought.

REEVALUATE YOUR LEADING INDICATORS. Victoria's Secret reports strong sales of Miraculous bras, which some optimists see as green shoots.

Strong bra sales at Victoria’s Secret stores could point towards a recovery in high-end retail spending, as the brand caters towards luxury consumption. Still, some experts suggest the industry’s retail spending improvement is rather a release of pent-up demand, referred to as “frugality fatigue”.

That's one interpretation. Another possibility is that appeasing displeased trophy wives is subject to tighter budget constraints. In 2005, the peace offering was a Lexus. By 2008, the model appeared to be repositioning its brand, and the latest offerings continue the theme of Thirteenth Generation Enters Middle Age. (It's not pretty.) The red bows are still there, but the annoying tinkly music is gone.

FIRST YOUR SOUP, THEN DESSERT. I found this advertisement for an online discount service.


You can't buy booyah in a store.

GETTING THE PROPER FOUNDATION. Yes, the trivium and quadrivium matter, but I've long maintained there's more.

I've gone on and on and on about the common schools abdicating their onetime mission of inculcating the habits of effective people, and I continue to maintain that special programs for people who have bad life-management skills that are not crash courses in developing proper life management skills will waste resources.

In Milwaukee, there's something more than a crash course in progress.

On the way to their new elective class, the seventh- and eighth-graders walked under the fluorescent cafeteria lights and past bagged lunches on tables, awaiting the first lunch shift.

What they saw on the other side of the wall at Concordia University School made many whisper and cast surprised looks at their friends: candles amid a 15-piece table setting, white tablecloth, silver platters and fine china, soup bowls and a centerpiece.

Presentation is everything in Camille Monk's etiquette class. The 29-year-old has started a business bringing classic social training to urban schools, in the hopes that teaching tolerance and respect will help the students successfully navigate future social situations. The payoff for students who complete the class: a formal five-course lunch or dinner at Bacchus restaurant downtown.

But at a time when budget cuts have eliminated long-established specials such as gym, art and music in many school buildings, financial support for manners training is a struggle, even though experts say soft skills - from properly eating at a dinner table to managing a Facebook page - are critical for today's students.

"A lot of the children I'm working with are around a lot of negative energy and negative vibes all the time," said Monk, who leads an elective course at Concordia University School and Young Leaders Academy, a charter school. "The bottom line is respecting others and being tolerant. But it's hard to retrain someone when they're planted in a negative environment."

In their first class at Concordia, 8242 N. Granville Road, the children practiced standing up and introducing each other, and adults, to their peers in front of the room. They practiced shaking hands and correctly scooping soup away from the front of the bowl. They practiced tearing off chunks of bread and buttering each one, rather than buttering the entire loaf at once.

They were attentive, thoughtful and respectful, if a little clumsy with the utensils. After class, many could be overheard in the cafeteria, excitedly sharing what they'd learned with other peers or teachers.

Adrianne Hooker, who started the Great Lakes School of Etiquette and also has worked in Milwaukee's urban schools, said manners are a lost art in many communities. Children don't always act rude because they are willfully disobeying social norms. Often, she said, nobody has ever told them that what they're doing is inconsiderate.

"The biggest problem in schools is that people don't necessarily see the value in putting lots of time and training into children's social development," she said. "Your first teachings begin at home. But we have a different generation of parents, many of them are children themselves . . .  and many have learned to accept a lesser way of living. They've become complacent about not having to put their best foot forward."

That complacency perpetuates poverty. Perhaps it's the beginning of the end of social-constructivist attitudes toward traditions.

SIGN OF THE TIMES. The University Council receives a report on student retention.

After the University Council finished the discussion on branding, it turned its attention to a report by Kerry Freedman, University Advisory Committee representative.

There was a moment of confusion when Freedman noticed part of her report was missing. The report asked "with regards to student success, will faculty members be asked to reconsider academic standards in order to improve retention?"

The answer had somehow been deleted, but Freedman was quick to answer it.

"The answer I heard was ‘no,'" she said.

How the sentence was missing from the report is still a mystery.

"I don't know how that could have happened," said Alan Rosenbaum, executive secretary of the University Council.

[University president John] Peters made sure the sentence would be added to the record, and the meeting moved forward.

In a proper world, that question would not even have to be asked. It's encouraging that somebody noticed.

TO REMEMBER. Francis Stroup, composer of the Huskie Fight Song, centenarian, possibly better known for "Fight, North Texas".

More people were affected by Stroup's music this year, when a lyric he wrote for the Northern Illinois University fight song in the '60s — "forward, together forward" — became an unofficial motto after a campus shooting there in February.

"You never know how your words might help someone," he says.

Forever together forward.

STILL A HARD-KNOCK LIFE.

The Public Broadcasting System followed the Big Apple Circus during the 2008-2009 tour, producing a six hour series, Circus, that aired recently. The circus is a non-profit organization (by design, unlike many of the small shows of the late nineteenth century) featuring relatively few animal acts (the broadcast showed a canine comedy act and a rosinback, perhaps the absence of an elephant is a nod to modern sensibilities.)

That noted, the kinker's lot is still an endurance test, with injuries in rehearsal or performance, artistic directors seeking to cut a few seconds out of each act to step up the pace, and performers coming and going. You don't just patch together a trapeze act out of whatever aerialists happen to be available at the time.

The roustabouts aren't doubled up in three-high bunks in a converted coach anymore; they now have crosswise compartments in semitrailers (the show does not show these being used as quarters on the jump, although it's likely that some show hands have the responsibility of driving the tractors) The performers, often long-time circus families, have motor homes now, instead of the staterooms of the train circus.

One sub-plot in the series was the Circus School, a form of organized home-schooling for staffers' children. One of the children finished high school that season, and enrolled at Illinois State. To join the circus. The things you learn ... there's a performance coming up weekend of April 15-16, 2011.

(Northern Illinois steelband performs on April 17. The featured guests for that concert will be Miami of Ohio's steelband.)

IST'S NICHT EIN FROHER SANG? In the Milwaukee area, Ja, das ist.

Members of the United German Choruses of Milwaukee - the five choirs combined - performed their 24th annual Christmas concert at Mount Mary College on Sunday, but their ranks are dwindling.

The remaining choirs are a vestige of the numerous German singing societies that once thrived in the United States, and especially in Wisconsin, as a result of heavy immigration to the area.

There's less immigration from Germany now, and assimilation takes a different course.

In Milwaukee, the wives of some of the male singers decided that they would start their own club, and so was born the Milwaukee Damenchor. Milwaukee D.A.N.K. CHOR is a mixed male and female chorus, and Schwaben Männerchor is another male group in the Milwaukee area. Madison, Kenosha and Sheboygan have singing societies recognized by [Nord-Amerikanischer Sängerbund, and Kroening said Manitowoc still has a small club.

German singing societies alternately flourished and withdrew from the public eye in America as a Civil War and then two World Wars rocked the country. In 1938, the NASB reported that 181 choruses came to a national festival in Chicago.

By 1983 the organization reported 69 member choruses.

Some ties to the past still bind ... I once attended an Italian wedding reception at the Jefferson Hall on Fond du Lac Avenue near the Milwaukee Road tracks ... above the main entrance, FREIE GEMEINDE ... in a display case inside, a blue banner, heralding Schwaben Männerchor; probably at one time the sewer Socialists discussed sound municipal bonds and public parks every three blocks there. The hall was a center of Milwaukee German tradition; the last time I passed by, it had become a storefront church. The Swabians are still belting out the tunes, though.

IT'S A HARD-KNOCK LIFE.

Sons will converse with their fathers about life and work, and sometimes that makes its way into a family reunion booklet or genealogical research for the county historical society. If your name is Robert H. Gollmar, and your father is Fred C. Gollmar, you can claim My Father Owned a Circus, and supplement your income selling a few books, and the impresario of the 1:48 actual size Karlson Brothers Circus will ultimately write Book Review N^o. 30 about it.

The Gollmar brothers, cousins to the more famous Ringling Brothers, founded a wagon show in 1891, converted to a railroad show in 1903, sold the business in 1916, and subsequently leased the name to the American Circus Corporation, operator of the Hagenbeck-Wallace railroad show.

Hagenbeck-Wallace poster,
courtesy Circus Posters in the Princeton University Library.

The book combines recollections of storms, train wrecks, accidents, corrupt public officials, and rumbles with hostile townies, referred to in circus lore as "Hey Rubes". There are some rosters of personnel, travel schedules, and playbills. It may not be the best book to recommend to somebody newly interested in the traditional railroad circus, as it's insider conversation, and Gollmar pere's recollections are supplemented with those of other circus personnel, who sometimes repeat stories told elsewhere. Tom Mix, Buck Jones, and Mamie Ward make appearances.

Somebody looking for additional background on what the railroad circus did and how it did it might also profitably read Joe McKennon's Logistics of the American Circus, which explains each department of the circus and the pecking order within the company. Keep in mind that the public zoological garden is a relatively new institution, and for many years the circus provided education in the form of exotic animals, with a menagerie tent set up between the main entrance and the side show, and lions or tigers along didn't necessarily mean a big cat act. But without the thundering herd of pachyderms, it's not a circus.

The Amazon listing for My Father Owned a Circus offers a few copies at collector prices. I'd best treat my copy, which came from a library de-accessioning sale a few years ago, as an asset.

(Cross-posted to 50 Book Challenge.)

BETTER PAY AND BETTER WORKING CONDITIONS. The Milwaukee Public Schools are trying to steer strong teachers to weak schools. Joanne Jacobs isn't optimistic.

Milwaukee Public Schools hope to develop incentives to improve teaching in low-performing schools, but the focus is on rewarding all teachers in a school instead of singling out exceptional teachers.

That sounds like the variant of the prisoners' dilemma labor economists call the 1/n problem, and it's an inducement for people to shirk. It's almost certainly the wrong approach in the most difficult schools.

There isn’t enough money in the world — certainly not in school district budgets — to get talented people to bang their heads against a brick wall every day.

There is, however, another concept in labor economics called the compensating differential. Owen Robinson of Boots and Sabers got it, four years ago.

The schools dominated by poverty are also generally the crappiest schools to work in. They are generally in bad neighborhoods where crime is an every day issue. Also, the kids generally have less support for education outside of school, so the kids are less enthusiastic about learning and are more likely to have behavioral issues. Did I put that gently enough? To sum it up, it sucks to work in most of these schools.

Not surprisingly, teachers who discover better pay and better working conditions elsewhere, go elsewhere. But neither the Journal-Sentinel reporter, nor the Milwaukee Public Schools, get it.

Most business leaders put the most capable employees in the most demanding situations.

True, up to a point. I call it punishing people for being cooperative, and I sometimes suspect that it's a thinly disguised theft of personal time by less responsible employees that's enabled by management. But in the private sector, there's also a labor market, and a worker who details all the extra time and then has a raise request rebuffed, or is passed over for a promotion, is a worker soon to be circulating a resume.

The same dynamic is at work in the schools, but reporters and school administrators continue to be surprised by it.

But it's also a very tough request, because, in general, that isn't the way it works in education, where quality flows uphill, away from the lowest-performing schools and students. As teachers build up experience, seniority and, experts generally say, competence, they head for higher-performing kids, higher-performing schools and, frequently, the suburbs.

It is not from the benevolence of the teacher that we expect the three Rs, but from their regard to their own interest, right, Adam Smith?

IN MEMORIAM. Northern Illinois library cataloguer and music historian William Studwell crossed the final summit in August. Before his death, he provided the 25th entry in the annual Christmas Carol of the Year. We Wish You a Merry Christmas has been in the repertoire for about 425 years.

“It is a natural last piece for focus, since it is frequently the final piece in carol performances sessions,” he said of the song, which was created 400 to 425 years ago, most likely in the West Country of England.

Is the recipe for figgy pudding that old?

The complete list includes Adeste Fideles and Stille Nacht, as well as a few favorites of a less religious nature.

AWAITING THE ELVIS SIGHTINGS. The rebuilt Zippin' Pippin is taking shape on the shores of Green Bay.

26 November 2010.

The Green Bay Press-Gazette reports a cost overrun.

City officials say the construction project now is expected to cost $3.5 million, up from the original $3 million estimate.

[Green Bay mayor Jim] Schmitt said $300,000 in city reserves have been tapped, and he believes private donations will cover the rest of the deficit.

"We're still confident that we're going to have more revenues from other sources," he said.

The Zippin Pippin, under construction at Bay Beach Amusement Park, originally was planned to be covered by $2.4 million in city borrowing and $600,000 in expected donations.

On Tuesday, Schmitt said the original $3 million project budget was based on an early estimate that the foundation would cost about $200,000. That estimate was later discarded in favor of a more realistic $600,000 estimate, but it remained part of the project budget, resulting in the $300,000 in cost overruns.

Trains going around in circles, and a cost overrun. The incoming governor of Wisconsin must be informed of this boondoggle immediately.

NOT SO EASY TO DISMISS CRITICISM FROM WITHIN. Richard Vedder surveys recent literature.

Books criticizing higher education are not new, but recently both the number of them and the intensity of criticism has been increasing, and a large portion of them are “inside jobs,” written by people who are intimately involved on a regular basis with the academy and the world of ideas.

Consider Jackson Toby’s The Lowering of Higher Education in America, or Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus’s Higher Education: How Colleges are Wasting our Money and Failing Our Kids, Mark Bauerlein’s The Dumbest Generation, or Craig Brandon’s The Five Year Party: How Colleges Have Given Up on Educating Your Child and What You Can Do About It. All have been written in the last year or so, and this list is not exhaustive.

More are coming: I cannot wait to read Naomi Riley’s The Faculty Lounges…And Other Reasons That You Won’t Get the College Education You Pay For, forthcoming from Rowman and Littlefield. Moreover, other books are scathing about specific areas of the academy, notably intercollegiate athletics, with Kenneth Armstrong and Nick Perry’s Scoreboard, Baby: A Story of College Football, Crime and Complicity, or Mark Yost’s Varsity Green: A Behind the Scenes Look at Culture and Corruption in College Athletics, being but two good examples (I am indebted to the extraordinary Frank Splitt for bringing some of these works to my attention).

All of these books have come out, roughly, within a year. Two have provocative words like “crime” or corruption” in their titles, yet the authors are by and large a group of rather respected persons, one a distinguished English scholar at a major research university, for example; at least two of the books were published by university presses, including Stanford.

I don’t know if writings like this are a leading indicator of a forthcoming firestorm of public protest about higher education, but it is not a good sign. Economists like myself think at the margin. In this context, the storm of protest will manifest itself in real action only when the marginal benefits of complaining become so great that they exceed the marginal costs of engaging in protests.

Perhaps, when sufficiently many people realize the costs of losing the good of the intellect.

MARKING OFF. Happy Thanksgiving. (If the Wall Street Journal runs the same piece the Wednesday in advance of each Thanksgiving, why not I?)

I give thanks for your readership and your comments.

Spare a few moments thanks for the young people in harm's way around the world, for the people in emergency services who deserve to sit down to the turkey without the alarm ringing, for the people in transportation, tourism, and entertainment passing on their family gatherings to enhance yours.

Yes, that includes the people with the blue gloves at the security checkpoints, if you're headed someplace a train isn't going.

PUSH POLLING. A majority of Wisconsin residents surveyed by the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute opposed spending money on extending the Hiawatha to Madison and making it faster. The question given to respondents asked them to react to incomplete information.

“Please tell me which of the following arguments comes closest to your point of view.

“Supporters of the passenger rail project say that it is an important addition to the transportation system in Wisconsin and is being paid for by 800 million dollars in federal money. They also say that the project will create jobs and that if Wisconsin does not go forward with the project, the money will be redirected to other states.

“Opponents of the project say that what we need is better roads and that the federal money for the train will not cover the inevitable cost over runs. They also say that the project will only create a handful of permanent jobs and that the train would not have enough ridership to pay for its annual operating costs.”

Supporters also note that improvements to the roads will require more state money and provide no reduction in trip times.

Opponents fail to tell you that the state will have to pay for plowing, salting, and patching the roads.

WHY DETENTE BEST DESCRIBES THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE ECONOMICS DEPARTMENT AND THE ADMINISTRATORS. Cal State Northridge's Shirley Svorney (via Minding the Campus) mentions the emperor's nakedness.

[L]ow fees attract some students to higher education who simply aren't suited to the academic rigors of a university. Ultimately, the presence of these lower-achieving students hurts those who are more academically inclined, as they end up in watered-down courses in which professors have to focus on bringing the low achievers along.

Who said professors have to focus on bringing the low achievers along? Perhaps there's the opportunity to develop an export industry.

As Philadelphia Federal Reserve economist Tim Schiller has documented, the number of degrees awarded in a state doesn't even ensure a highly educated workforce. As he wrote, "Merely producing college graduates in a state does not guarantee that they will remain there." Businesses and labor are mobile. Unless more jobs are created in the state, some of the students California has paid to educate will probably move out of state to find jobs.

So put together the kind of intellectual experience ambitious students from other states will pay for, and charge them full fare. But, as Professor Svorney notes, that's different from enabling slacker behavior.

SUMMARIZE IN ONE SENTENCE. George Will.

The average American has regular contact with the federal government at three points — the IRS, the post office and the TSA. Start with that fact if you are formulating a unified field theory to explain the public’s current political mood.

It is no accident, comrades, that "Don't Touch My Junk" goes so well with the Gadsden Militia flag.

WORK THIS INTO THE BRANDING INITIATIVE. Three of the top five Anti-Party Schools (via Newmark's Door) are in our back yard. None of them have a bowl-bound football team. One of them has a very highly regarded economics department.

A MODEST WINNING STREAK. The Northern Illinois women's basketball team followed up its win over George Washington in Minneapolis with a win at Western Illinois, where they managed to maintain a ten-to-twelve point lead most of the second half, and a trip to Carbondale where a five point lead dwindled to four to three to two to tied to Southern ahead by two with 1.8 seconds to play.

The kids were so excited when that shot went in that I was almost able to hear them screaming without benefit of the radio.

KEEPING UP IN KNUTE ROCKNE'S BACKYARD.

College football might have been invented by the Ivies, but it was perfected in the Great Lakes, with Notre Dame developing enough of a following to be able to call the National Collegiate Athletic Association a conspiracy in restraint of trade, and going its own way with television contracts; and with Sid Luckman and Amos Alonzo Stagg making the University of Chicago so dominant that beating them inspired one Big Ten fight song (the oh-so-trite "Hail to the Victors") and provided an objective in another ("Run the ball around Chicago", which later became "Run the ball 'round Minnesota", and subsequently morphed into the Wisconsin game plan, "Run the ball on down the field"); that is until Robert Maynard Hutchins decided that building bombs below the grandstands was a better use of resources than throwing bombs in view of the grandstand.

The quintessence of college football is the Big Ten, with each program holding a rich tradition.

Then there's the Big Ten's hardscrabble neighbor, the Mid-American Conference. The big Midwestern industrial states once had the resources, population base, and committment to provide lots of capacity for higher education, and a number of directional teachers colleges became directional universities, with several such universities in Ohio and Michigan particularly becoming the Mid-American.

Unlike the Big Ten, the Mid-American is a major money suck for member institutions.

[I]n the Big 10 only 0.16% of university budgets go to subsidize athletics. Yet, in the poorer Mid American Conference (MAC), subsidies make up over 5% of the schools' overall budgets (see this [College Affordability] study for more on the regressive athletics tax). At some schools this percentage is even larger. For example 10.5% of total core expenditures at SUNY Buffalo go to subsidize athletics. At another MAC school, Eastern Michigan, the figure is 7.9%.

Among the Mid-American universities, students pick up some of the tab, in exchange for prepaid admission to games, a benefit few avail themselves of.

However, even many FBS schools charge high student fees to subsidize sports. Here are a few examples:
Ohio University $765
University of Virginia $657
Bowling Green State University $650
SUNY Buffalo $474
University of Northern Illinois [c.q.] $453
Over the course of their 4+ years in college, students at many schools will have paid thousands of dollars to prop-up unprofitable athletics programs, regardless of their personal interest in sports.

Virginia is not a Mid-American program; Ohio will play Northern Illinois in the Mid-American title game, which will be played December 3 in Detroit. (First prize, a weekend in Detroit. Second prize, a week in Detroit).

And Akron recently borrowed for a new stadium that doesn't do much to draw audiences for a rebuilding football team.

UA Athletic Director Tom Wistrcill said he is disappointed InfoCision Stadium hasn't drawn as expected. But it's easy for fans to become dispirited when the team loses soundly and often.
''You only have 12 [game] days,'' he said. ''You work 365 days a year for 12 days. That's six home games. It's a cruel sport that way.''

Let's see if I understand this: the football coach draws a larger salary for working five hours on 12 days, and the professors, who draw a smaller salary for teaching four classes, are taking the stick.

And, as much as I'm enjoying the current Northern Illinois football season, and, having experienced a BCS run and a campus shooting, I much prefer the BCS run, apparently the football visibility is not the enrollment bonanza some observers would expect. I've learned more about the rationale for the branding initiative: apparently we're losing students to other institutions that don't offer Division I football.

THE SHAPE OF THE WORLD TO COME. Paul Krugman is fretful.

Former Senator Alan Simpson is a Very Serious Person. He must be - after all, President Obama appointed him as co-chairman of a special commission on deficit reduction.

So here's what the very serious Mr. Simpson said on Friday: "I can't wait for the blood bath in April. ... When debt limit time comes, they're going to look around and say, ‘What in the hell do we do now? We've got guys who will not approve the debt limit extension unless we give 'em a piece of meat, real meat,' " meaning spending cuts. "And boy, the blood bath will be extraordinary," he continued.

Think of Mr. Simpson's blood lust as one more piece of evidence that our nation is in much worse shape, much closer to a political breakdown, than most people realize.

In his mind, it's a disastrous transformation in the making.

The fact is that one of our two great political parties has made it clear that it has no interest in making America governable, unless it's doing the governing. And that party now controls one house of Congress, which means that the country will not, in fact, be governable without that party's cooperation - cooperation that won't be forthcoming.

A post from a military wife at Stop Shouting, one that has received a lot of play on the right side of the blogosphere, sees the lack of cooperation as long overdue.

Your side knows you can not prevail on the battlefield of open and honest ideas, so you retreat behind the fortification of expanded regulation, unelected czars who rule by decree and diktat, and a boy-king who is being urged by the janissaries to complete the transformation to a totalarian state by executive orders.

Except, that to emplace your policies and “vision” requires the consent of the people. You can not hire enough guards, build enough prisons, operate enough courts to entrap and control the whole population of these (for-now) united states. It only takes a small percentage of dissenters, non-conformists and cascading acts of strategic civil disobedience to bring your entire command-and-control crashing all around you.

National Opt-Out Day is a potential recruitment bonanza for opposition to the technocrats.

Everyday work folk, alarmed at the rising tide of tyranny and the rhetoric of hate, weary of the false accusations and the lies, joined the libertarian and conservatives and forged an underground resistance. The town halls in that raucous summer were not an aberration – they are the new norm. Get used to it.

And prepare for the long haul.

Yes, we will burn down the house of Progressive Democrats and lay waste to the entire construct of the welfare state. It will be a long, decades-long battle, but we will prevail because we learned the consequences of not teaching our young ourselves. We delegated that to you, and that was our first mistake. We assumed you were honest brokers, but now we know better.

The post concludes: Fix bayonets. Professor Krugman may not have the last word, but he might have uttered the deep word.

It's hard to see how this situation is resolved without a major crisis of some kind. Mr. Simpson may or may not get the blood bath he craves this April, but there will be blood sooner or later. And we can only hope that the nation that emerges from that blood bath is still one we recognize.

It is, unfortunately, the nature of fourth turnings that an unsustainable social order dies, and a new one is born, sometimes messily.

THE CURRENT STANDARD OF UNDERACHIEVEMENT. In the National Football League, it's losing to the Packers.

Three weeks ago, the Packers wiped their feet on Dallas, 45-7. Despite weekly assurances that owner Jerry Jones wasn't the kind of person to can a coaches midseason, that's exactly what he did. Less than 24 hours after the Cowboys staggered off Lambeau Field, coach [Wade] Phillips was fired.

Then the Packers had a bye and jobs were safe for a week.

On Sunday, Green Bay marched into the unfriendly Metrodome in Minneapolis and manhandled the Minnesota Vikings, 31-3.

Less than 24 hours later ...

Three years removed from the Packers but just 10 months after the NFC Championship Game, quarterback Brett Favre looked mentally spent. Yet his dejected look paled in comparison to [coach Brad] Childress' ashen face as the crowd chanted, "Fire Childress!" before it deserted the stadium.

Again, despite reports just a week ago that Childress' job was safe, the Vikings (3-7) announced Monday that Childress was fired.

Boo-Hoooooo!

BOO-HOOOOO! Ryan Longwell might have scored the first points; thereafter it was all Packers. Vikings mathematically eliminated ... put that in your vuvuzela and toot it. Boo-hooooo! Radio reporting the combined score for the past three Packer wins is 85-10. (Indiana put up 20 against Wisconsin in one game, and held Wisconsin to 83.)

PROFSCAM AFTER TWENTY YEARS.

Charlie Sykes's denunciation of coreless curricula, pointless research, and excess access was among the opening shots in the twenty years war on, and in, higher education. At the time, Mr Sykes was in recovery from an early liberalism, and Higher Education could shrug off some of his observations, much as the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers could shrug off the Association of American Railroads lobbying for repeal of the full crew laws.

Now comes Andrew Hacker, a professor at Queens College of CUNY, public intellectual, regular reviewer in The New York Review of Books; and Claudia Dreifus, with Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs, "Science Times" columnist for The New York Times, collaborating on Higher Education? How Colleges are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids -- And What We Can Do About It. Short form of Book Review N^o. 29: the Academic Establishment will have a harder time shrugging off a criticism from within, even if, as Peter Sacks (who also reviewed The Five-Year Party) notes,

[T]oo many chapters that regurgitate the many well-worn complaints about higher education: Students are subjected to uncaring and unsupportive professors -- if they are taught by full-time faculty members at all, since most college instructors are part-timers, adjuncts and graduate students; professors themselves are overpaid, underworked, and preoccupied with the "virus" of research that is consuming colleges of all stripes; and colleges have become simply too expensive relative to the diminishing value that institutions actually provide students.

Perhaps so.

ABANDON HOPE, ALL YE WHO ENTER HERE. Via Joanne Jacobs, The Nine Circles of High School Hell.

Losing the good of the intellect comes early.

TIME TO ROLL BACK THE STATE. A Wisconsin Policy Research Institute survey finds a narrow majority of Wisconsin residents opposing the extension of Hiawatha service to Madison.

Service would start at a top speed of 79 mph in 2013, rising to 110 mph by 2015, and eventually could be extended to the Twin Cities, as part of a larger Midwestern network of fast, frequent trains.

The project wasn't sold well to Wisconsin residents, and there are cheaper ways to obtain 110 mph trains, most of which involve repeal of excessively restrictive safety standards.

Perhaps there's an opportunity for Passenger Rail advocates and the highway lobby to make common cause in restoring the transportation policies of the Eisenhower era.

Toll roads also have been a controversial transportation issue, although they played a much smaller role in the gubernatorial campaign.

Supporters of charging tolls voice concerns that the gas tax and vehicle fee revenue will be inadequate to pay the growing costs of rebuilding and repairing the state's aging highways. But toll road proposals have rarely survived long, beaten back by voters who despise the idea of paying to drive and who particularly dislike the Illinois tollways.

The alternative being mooted is worse.

Federal law prohibits charging tolls on existing interstate highway lanes but allows tolls on newly added lanes. Regional planners have recommended expanding most Milwaukee-area freeways from six to eight lanes when they are rebuilt.

That was not President Eisenhower's original intent. The first proposals for the Interstates envisioned turnpikes beginning outside city limits. Freeways pushed through the middle of cities came later. High-occupancy toll lanes have some redeeming features, but they're administratively more costly than open road tolling.

Perhaps there is an opportunity for the highway backers to make some of their projects self-financing, by working with the railroad backers to restore the train speeds of the late 1940s.

THE VERY MODEL OF THE ONLINE SUBPRIME PARTY SCHOOL? According to University Diaries, that's the University of Central Florida.

A zillion students attend UCF – lots of them take online courses, where the cheating (and dropout) rates are sky-high; lots of them take massively over-populated classroom courses, complete with PowerPoint, clickers, laptops, dimmed lights, high absenteeism, security cameras, and total pointlessness. When you experience university as a series of variously degrading, intrusive, and stupid experiences, you don’t respect your school, and you don’t feel inclined to act toward it with much integrity, since it doesn’t seem to be acting all that well in regard to you.

A New York Times report on methods to maintain academic integrity concludes with an anecdote that might suggest "degrading, intrusive, and stupid" cuts two ways.

As for Central Florida’s testing center, one of its most recent cheating cases had nothing to do with the Internet, cellphones or anything tech. A heavily tattooed student was found with notes written on his arm. He had blended them into his body art.

Here you sit with your transcript full of As and your body covered with ink, and here I sit in my power suit. Tell me what's stronger.

The University Diaries recommendation is unlikely to please Central Florida's management.

UCF is a failed enterprise. It has too many students, and professors can’t handle it. Pretty much everything it does reflects badly on the American university. It should shut its physical campus and enter fully into online oblivion.

That way, there would be no physical classes to cancel in the event of a weekday football game.

It's more likely, however, that Central Florida is a harbinger of things to come. The editors at the Northern Star endorsed class cancellations for Tuesday Night Football. Headquarters is either made of sterner stuff or preoccupied: classes met as usual all day, and some of the parking lots that are sometimes cleared for football were left to their usually assigned purposes.

I wonder if they'd be as quick to endorse Central Florida's staffing decisions. Their total enrollment is twice Northern Illinois's. Their economics department offers degrees up to the Ph.D. Their economics faculty have a few more people than we do but note: no assistant professors there. Good luck grooming department chairmen or possible deans or directors of graduate studies in 15 years.

THE CASE FOR CONNECTIVITY. The Transportationist contributes to a Popular Science article on the difficulty of providing high-speed rail service in the United States.

Unlike Europe and Asia, where the dividing line between urban and rural is far more defined, the northeast corridor is the definition of urban sprawl, with populated cities separated by endless suburbs and smaller burgs that all want access to the train. To bullet trains, sprawl is anathema.

“The very high speeds that China is achieving can be obtained only if you space the stations far apart because it takes time to accelerate and decelerate the trains,” says Ken Orski, a career urban transit expert who served in the Nixon and Ford administrations and is now publisher of Innovation NewsBriefs, a widely read transportation policy newsletter. “If you space those stations very closely you lose the technological advantage of high speed.”

Basic physics and human physiology dictate the limits to how fast a train can gather speed or slow down. The intercity distances – from Washington to Baltimore, Baltimore to Wilmington, Wilmington to Philadelphia, Philadelphia Newark and on to NYC and so on – are all short hauls, too abbreviated to take advantage of bullet trains’ top speeds. That’s not even taking into account all the street crossings, which hinder both automobile and train traffic along the route. Take all that into consideration, and 150 miles per hour is probably about as fast as northeast corridor trains can hope for.

Therein lies the aforementioned quandary: In the northeast corridor, there is enough demand to support an investment in next-gen high-speed rail, but bullet trains simply aren’t practical there. And, as Dr. David Levinson, associate professor of transportation engineering at the University of Minnesota, points out, in more wide-open places like the Midwest where true, 200-plus miles per hour high-speed trains have room to run, populations often aren’t dense enough to justify the trains. “The cost side of this is very high,” Levinson says. “And outside of the northeast corridor and a few other places, the benefits are relatively low, so there are limited places where you have enough demand to support passenger service.”

Of course, if Amtrak really wants to roll out China-magnitude trains in the northeast it could simply eliminate stops between major cities. But where trains go and where trains stop is a political issue, and nothing is so effective a destroyer of a potential public good as politics. High-speed rail tends to enjoy hot-button-issue status in the places where it’s an issue at all. In other places, it’s not even on the political radar.

I suggest that the problem is with interconnections between passenger train operators in the United States. In England, one ticket is good for a ride that might involve multiple passenger train operators, and a change of trains from a Voyager or Pendolino or if you're lucky, a pair of 43s with a High Speed Train, to a puddle-jumper, possibly a nodding donkey bouncing over those opposed joints. For instance, you board the fast from London Euston to Liverpool, making two or three intermediate stops, and ride the nodding donkey onward to Blackpool or Wigan Pier. Or you board the fast from London Paddington to Exeter and change to a diesel railcar for Dawlish Warren.

On the Northeast Corridor, the Acela Expresses already pass through Trenton without stopping. Some commuter trains from Philadelphia or New York make limited stops enroute to Trenton. But a passenger boarding New Jersey Transit has to buy a different ticket for the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transit Authority or for Amtrak, and the trains are not necessarily scheduled to connect.

While the value of a train is that it makes intermediate stops, and the Acela Expresses might exist as upscale hideaways, there are cheaper ways to provide travellers with the benefits of convenient, reliable trains that beat flying and driving times without busting the budget on electrification or new infrastructure that provides only marginal improvements on what we used to do routinely with steam locomotives on jointed rail or diesel locomotives geared for 117 mph.