PERHAPS THE PURPLE FINGERS HELPED.  Reason's Jacob Sullum takes stock of the neocons' democratization efforts.

As hundreds of thousands of Egyptians poured into the streets of Cairo, braving riot police, tanks, and the government's plainclothes thugs in an ultimately successful effort to end Hosni Mubarak's 30-year dictatorship, Elliott Abrams realized something important: George W. Bush was right.

Writing in The Washington Post, Abrams, a deputy national security adviser in the Bush administration, credited his former boss with recognizing that "Arab nations, too, yearn to throw off the secret police, to read a newspaper that the Ministry of Information has not censored and to vote in free elections." Other Bush partisans echoed Abrams, praising the former president for insisting, as he put it in a 2003 speech, that "every person has the ability and the right to be free."

The truth may be more elusive. Mr Sullum's concluding remarks note the tragic tradeoff inherent in any great power protecting its permanent interests.

Mindful of democratic elections that have empowered illiberal forces such as Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, Obama, like Bush before him, worries that friendly autocrats will be replaced by hostile populists. Let's hope this fear, which underlies the long history of desperate despot coddling that Bush continued while condemning, does not become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

At the same time that defenders of the nation building efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq are claiming some credit; critics of those efforts are suggesting that the nonexistence of strong pro-U.S. governments in those countries emboldens opponents of the relatively sympathetic strongmen in Egypt, Yemen, and Bahrain. Iran and Libya are hardly home to friendly governments, and 22 years after Tiananmen Square, a new generation again questions the Chinese emperor.

A dangerous tendency has shown itself of late among many of our personnel -- an unwillingness to share the joys and hardships of the masses, a concern for personal fame and gain.

(Chairman Mao, 1957.)

THE FRUITS OF ACCESS-ASSESSMENT-REMEDIATION-RETENTION.  Universal college: triggering a revolution of rising expectations?

Would you like your college education to be free? Sure, who wouldn't? Well, the people of Tunisia and Egypt are learning that whenever the government supplies something, it is never really "free."

In Tunisia, "free" university education is guaranteed to anyone who passes the government's exams at the end of high school. Largely as a result of this, the number of Tunisians who graduated college more than tripled in the last ten years. This may sound like a good thing, but it has produced a glut of graduates.

Fifty-Seven percent of young Tunisians entering the labor market are college educated. This is while only 30 percent of Americans earn a college degree by the time they are 27. Recent Tunisian college grads have an unemployment rate approximately three times higher than the national average of 15 percent. This is up ninefold from 1994.
The reason for this is not necessarily because having a college education hinders people in getting a job, but because so many college grads are entering the labor market at a time when there are few jobs.

There's no shortage of work in North Africa; a shortage of opportunities to deploy the human capital higher education led young people to believe they were developing, whether because of rigidities in the ruling class, civil society given to corruption rather than transparency, or the legacies of Islamic rigidity means ambition collides, harshly, with reality.

We, in America, might not be as far away from the problems of Tunisia and Egypt as some may be inclined to think.

From 1997 to 2007, full-time enrollment in US tertiary education increased 34 percent. The average college student graduates with $24,000 in debt, a 40 percent real increase from 1997. In 2008, only57 percent of students enrolled in a four year college graduated within six years. The unemployment rate for 16 to 24-year-olds is 52 percent. The underemployed as a group may be as large as the unemployed in America. For example, in 1970 only 3 percent of mail carriers had a bachelor's degree, while today the number is 12 percent.

Although our case may not be as extreme as that of Tunisia or Egypt, we are headed in the same direction. And just like in Tunisia and Egypt, our education bubble is fueled by governmental policy.

Government accreditation laws keep potential institutions of higher education out of the market, which allows the institutions already in the market to raise their prices. Accreditation institutions can also force institutions of higher education to make changes that increase costs.

The saving grace, at least during periods of economic expansion, is that employers complain there are insufficient skilled workers to fill their more demanding positions (there are gains from trade for somebody to exploit, including employers that recognize the labor-leisure tradeoff), and that complaint maps in some approximate way into excess demand for institutions that maintain a semblance of academic standards.  Apparently, although college may be the new high school in the United States, the post suggests that college is the new junior high in Egypt and Tunisia.

WHY EARMARKS WILL NEVER GO AWAY.  Michael at Knowledge Problem shows two maps, one showing Congressional support for continuing an ethanol mandate, the other showing the location of ethanol plants, mostly within the Corn Belt.

If you are among those few people who still believe U.S. ethanol policy is driven by something other than the demands of the U.S. ethanol industry, then you might be surprised. For the rest of us: no surprises here.

So mote it be.  Note, though, a few votes from thickly settled areas.  Perhaps that's satisfying the aesthetics of upscale green constituents, or gentleman farmers.  On the other hand, that's the beginning of a coalition for some kind of Comprehensive Energy Policy Act, otherwise known as earmarks-by-consensus-in-committee.

WHAT IS SEEN, WHAT IS UNSEEN.  Jobs can neither be created nor destroyed, only changed in form.

Enacted in 2009, the federal stimulus bill is providing in excess of $800 billion to repair bridges and roads, plus millions of dollars to make and plant signs that give credit to The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act for these improvements. But why don’t we just spend the whole $800 billion on the signs?  There is no real need to actually repair or build anything. It would put just as many dollars into the pockets of sign-making firms and their employees, who would then buy cars, new appliances, clothing and food with their largesse. 

Foolish you say? It would be efficacious in a simple Keynesian model, though probably not pass many laugh tests. And it is one reason the word “stimulus” has acquired four-letter-word status within the administration. 

The basic point is that there are an infinite number of ways to blow $10 billion—or $800 billion. We could repair roads or bridges, plow it into education or law enforcement, or produce and distribute more porno movies. In the short run the issue might be which of these various actions or projects would create more jobs; longer term we’d be more concerned with which one(s) would make our economy stronger and more humane. Any money spent to create jobs in Activity A could have gone toward job creation in B or C. And, of course, in an economy not run by Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy, how we pay for everything—which either means raising taxes on someone, getting China and Japan to extend our line of credit, and/or reducing spending somewhere else in the public sector—has to enter into these discussions. 

It’s hard to object to  feel-good terms like “infrastructure” or “green” initiatives, but in a world of scarcity and choice, some spending is likely to be more beneficial, or at least less wasteful (Can you say Cash for Clunkers?), than another alternative. Do we choose bridges and overpasses instead of a high-speed rail network, restoring government buildings, more day-care centers and homes for senior citizens, or some elected official’s pet project to placate his or her political base of support?

(Via Professor Mankiw.)

NO CATENARY, NO TILTING TRAINS.  Amtrak's Michigan trains have free rein to 95 over some stretches of the line, with a speedup to 110 coming, possibly from Porter to Dearborn, and ridership and revenues are increasing.

THE COLLEGE BUBBLE, MADE IN WASHINGTON.  Cold Spring Shops's Favorite Administrator gets to the heart of the matter.

[For-profit college] enrollments soared, their profitability went through the roof, and investors rushed to get in on a good thing. The market capitalization of the for-profit sector of higher education shot up to dizzying heights. Much of the growth was due to the efficient way in which for-profit colleges and universities signed up students for federally guaranteed student loans. As a whole, the sector didn’t much concern itself with the academic preparation of its prospective students. Federal loan eligibility was the key to admission.

A bubble it might be, but legacy higher education ignores the non-profits at its own risk.

Liberal education has no real stake in the success of those corporations that draw a tidy profit from convincing marginal students to sign up for federal loans. There may be a good social welfare case for that practice. I leave that for others to decide. But liberal education does have a stake in finding ways to carry on in a culture that is largely hostile to its purposes and in an institutional setting that is increasingly vulnerable to public disaffection.

Perhaps so, but liberal education ought revert to its core content.

SUMMON THE HERITAGE. The Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority takes delivery of some new diesels.

There's too much purple in that maroon, and not enough gold. The lightning stripe is inspiring.

Brunswick, Maine, July 1946
Howard Kirkpatrick photo.

Passenger trains will be returning to Brunswick in the near future, barring political developments in Washington.

THE STEELERS NEVER HAD A CHANCE. Vince Lombardi fires up the 2011 Packers.

Lombardi's Packers were 5-0 in the preseason and 3-1 during the regular season against the Steelers.

The Steelers were the last team to defeat Lombardi's Packers, December 17, 1967, in a game that Jerry Kramer's Instant Replay suggests didn't matter too much, with Pittsburgh getting points off of an interception return and a fumble return, and Bart Starr rested in favor of promising understudy Don Horn.

PERFECT THE ENEMY OF THE GOOD?  The Obama administration continues to push for faster passenger trains.

Vice President Joseph Biden laid out details of the plan in Philadelphia today. He pitched the plan as necessary to keep America competitive with the rest of the world.

“We cannot compromise. The rest of the world is not compromising,” he said.

The Opposition is not interested in compromising.

Rep. John Mica, R-Fla., chairman of the house committee that oversees transportation policy, quickly blasted the plan. “Rather than focusing on the Northeast Corridor, the most congested corridor in the nation and the only corridor owned by the federal government, the administration continues to squander limited taxpayer dollars on marginal projects,” he said.

Would the right honorable gentleman be willing to review the Federal Railroad Administration's safety regulations, to permit faster operation of trains on the existing tracks?

In New Hampshire, the Opposition is not interested in providing commuter rail service to Boston.

The plan would extend Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority’s Lowell Line from Lowell, Mass., to Nashua, N.H.


“If it made sense, the private sector would do it,” said Rep. Donald McGuire, R-Epsom, author of the bill to shut down the extension. McGuire’s bill would repeal the New Hampshire Rail Transit Authority, which the legislature created four years ago with bipartisan support from Nashua-area legislators.

This private sector talk is misleading ... where are the private sector roads in New Hampshire?  Perhaps the commuter service does not have a positive benefit-cost ratio, but let's evaluate the project on that basis, not on some faith in invisible hands against a history of using public money on internal improvements.

And let's evaluate the benefit-cost ratios on a sensible basis.  In National Review, Wendell Cox (via Newmark's Door) sees nothing but doom behind Passenger Rail projects.

Among intercity transport modes, only Amtrak is materially subsidized. User fees pay virtually all the costs of airlines and airports, which (together with connecting ground transportation) link any two points in the nation within a day. The intercity highway system goes everywhere, and nearly all of it was built with user fees paid by drivers, truckers, and bus companies.

The Interstate Highway System is nothing without the city street network, and last time I checked, property tax payers were being assessed for street repairs (and in most jurisdictions it's more than $40 per house and $115 per hotel).  With the Little Ice Age setting in, states and cities are exceeding their budget for plowing and salting, and I don't see the invisible hand refilling those accounts.  Again, if you want to call a service self-sustaining, make a proper accounting of the costs and benefits, and the hidden subsidies.

High-speed rail is a budget buster. Japan, with the world’s leading system, illustrates the financial devastation that high-speed rail can produce. For 25 years, Japan borrowed to build a system serving the ideal rail corridor, nestled along a single coast with a population of more than 75 million people. Ridership was artificially increased by high gasoline prices and one of the highest highway tolls in the world. Yet this modest system, only twice as long as proposed California system, played a major role in driving up a gargantuan rail debt that was transferred to Japanese taxpayers. The rail debt added more than 10 percent to the national debt. This is akin to adding $1.4 trillion to the U.S. national debt.


Virtually everywhere high-speed rail has been constructed, financial liability has fallen to the taxpayers. In Taiwan and the United Kingdom, taxpayers assumed billions of dollars in private debts for much more modest high-speed-rail systems than Japan’s.

Perhaps so.  On a fully allocated benefit-cost basis, passenger rail might still be a proper use of resources.  Rail passengers can avoid parking charges ... I once astonished a British O Scaler who was attempting to make sense of London's urban access charges with my description of Chicago parking charges and the effect those had on Metra ridership; that, yes, and rail passengers are able to work from their seats without being traffic hazards.  Without being annoying is another matter, the Metra monthly commuter newsletter is full of whinges about cell-phone yakkers and self-important types who turn the walkover seats to create a small office.

MARKET TESTS HAVE STEEP GRADING CURVES.  George Leef of Phi Beta Cons isn't impressed with retention and completion rates.

Whether or not a student graduates depends upon his or her willingness to do what the school requires. At schools with low graduation rates, it’s not the case that students are like gamblers in a game where the odds are greatly against them. It’s just that most of the students who enroll are weak, disengaged, and don’t do what is required. The percentage of students who do graduate didn’t get lucky; they did the work to earn the credits they needed.

That's a variant on the subprime party school hypothesis -- the administrators are more interested in securing the tuition revenue than in producing either thinkers or holders of solid credentials.  There's some evidence that the more highly regarded universities have higher graduation rates, but that could be self-selection at work.

Searching for a school with a relatively high graduation rate isn’t necessarily going to ensure success for a student with poor academic skills and habits.

The college boards, letters of reference, and middle-class work habits matter after all.  Social construction be hanged, those poor academic skills show up in the dossier and the thin envelope comes the other way.

Also, it’s possible that schools with higher graduation rates get those rates because they have contrived to make it easy for students to pass courses and stay on track for graduation no matter how weak their ability and how slight their academic progress — the problem Arum and Roksa discuss in Academically Adrift. And as we know, simply having a degree to your name doesn’t guarantee a job that pays even moderately well. Schools that manage to string along weak students until they graduate might be doing them more harm than good.

Complex Proposition alert -- there might be some stringing along going on, but there's probably self-selection as well: the more academically motivated matriculants hope for the thick envelopes from the institutions where a critical mass of other academically motivated matriculants is present.

FASCHING, MIT PACKERSSIEG.

There was a Sprecher Abbey Triple for after the game, and I cleaned the local liquor store out of Capitol City Platinum Blonde Doppelbock last Friday.

And what chance did the Steelers really have after Fox Sports hired Dan Lauria in camel-hair coat and fedora to give a contemporary pep talk as if to today's Packers?

Prosit!

BACK TO WORK.  Cold Spring Shops have been in semester break and football playoff mode for the better part of two months.  The students are back, the Packers are Super Bowl champions, the snow has been cleared, and there's no shortage of our normal fare to work on.  Leonard Pitts will set the mood.

No, stupidity crept over the giant with the stealth of twilight, a product less of one abrupt moment than of a thousand moments of complacency, of resting on laurels, of allowing curiosity to be teased and bullied out of bright children, of dumbing down textbooks so kids could get better grades with less work, of using ``elite'' like a curse word. And, of behaving as if knowing things, and being able to extrapolate from and otherwise make critical use of, the things one knows, was a betrayal of some fundamental human authenticity -- some need to keep it real.

Stupidity stole over the giant until it could no longer tell science from faith, or conventional wisdom from actual wisdom and in any event, valued ideological purity above them all. Stupidity snaked over the giant until science teachers shrank from teaching science, history books contained history that wasn't history, late-night comics got easy laughs from people on the street who could not say when the War of 1812 was fought, political leaders told outright lies with blithe smiles and no fear of being caught and you would not have been surprised to hear that someone had fixed mathematics, so that 2+2 could now equal 17, thus preserving the all-important self esteem of second-grade kids.

We seek a more positive outcome than the one Mr Pitts fears.  Stay tuned.

FREE REIN TO 110 IS CHEAPER THAN DOING STUDIES.  Trains columnist Fred W. Frailey takes stock of Passenger Rail projects, many of which are being undone in the procedural wrangling among the passenger train operators, the freight railroads, and the Federal Railroad Administration.  The money for infrastructure improvements isn't getting much in the way of infrastructure improvements.

Imagine a rail line now handling 20 trains a day that capacity modeling on computers shows could handle another ten freight trains. The railroad wants enough new capacity built into the line through HSR grants to handle new higher speed passenger trains and those ten future freights. FRA’s stance, in turn, is to protect the public purse against giving railroads anything they haven’t paid for. The actual points of contention are over the details, but future capacity remains the 800-pound gorilla.


So impasse results, and a year after the Department of Transportation announced the first of the HSR grants, there’s very little to show for it. New governors in Ohio and Wisconsin returned almost $1.4 in grants, which were redistributed to other states. The governors of Iowa and Florida may do likewise, rejecting another $2.4 billion-plus, and Michigan is concerned it can’t afford the required matching funds. California’s high-speed network has gotten grants totaling about $3 billion, but that’s a pittance for an endeavor to connect San Francisco and Southern California that now carries a $43 billion price tag — this in a state whose public finances now resemble those of a third-world country.

On the other hand, more modest projects, on actually existing corridors, make progress.

The biggest project actually underway is in Illinois, where Union Pacific is upgrading track to permit three 110-mph round trips between Chicago and St. Louis, reducing travel time by as many as 48 minutes from the current schedules of roughly 5 hours 30 minutes. Federal grants will finance almost all of this $1.1 billion undertaking. A second phase, which would involve double-tracking the entire route to permit eight 110-mph round trips, would cost an additional $3 billion. That phase is under review and remains unfunded. UP, by the way, plans to significantly increase the number of freights it operates between Chicago and St. Louis, and says the two-step construction plan provides capacity for both passenger and freight trains.

That double-tracking will restore the track capacity of the old Chicago and Alton (without the color-position lights) and give Union Pacific a more direct line from St. Louis to Chicago than either the former Chicago and Eastern Illinois line it acquired from Missouri Pacific or the former Litchfield and Madison line, with some nasty grades in the Illinois Valley, it acquired from Chicago and North Western.  The proposed train frequency exceeds that offered by the Alton and Gulf Mobile and Ohio: both passengers and the freight train operator benefit.  If the work is done, there will be faster passenger train service, and more freight train capacity.  In many corridors, the only work involves meetings and reports, in other words, non-work.

In all, DOT made 107 HSR grants last year. But looks are deceiving, because the great majority are what I call welfare payments to the consulting business. They pay for state rail plans, feasibility and environmental studies, design of projects not yet funded, and a host of other paper projects.

There is good news outside the Land of Lincoln.

So far as I know, the only HSR construction actually underway outside of Illinois is in New England. There, Pan Am Railway is upgrading tracks between Portland and Brunswick, Me., to permit a 30-mile extension of the five Downeaster round trips to and from Boston, at a cost of $38 million. And in Vermont, $50 million is being spent to upgrade a 190-mile segment of RailAmerica subsidiary New England Central Railroad. Amtrak’s Vermonter will benefit by having top speed raised from 50 mph to as much as 79 mph, speeding its trip by at least an hour. Everywhere else, it’s still big hat, no cattle.

The Downeaster is an excellent example of incremental improvements of ordinary passenger trains, beginning from a very unfavorable position.  Guilford Transportation, or whatever the heirs to Patrick McGinnis call themselves, was more hostile to passenger trains than Union Pacific, and New Hampshire more than willing to host station stops at Durham, Exeter, and Dover, as long as Maine and Massachusetts paid for the trains.  And yet the trains run, and, with a little luck, you'll see swag from L. L. Bean being schlepped home by train in a few years.

NO EXCUSES.  It's a shame that the Packers had to beat the Steelers.  (One of those coastal teams, or one from the Sun Belt, would be a less sympathetic opponent.)

The Steelers didn't deserve to win Super Bowl XLV.

You commit three turnovers and don't get any. Two of your most dependable offensive stars fail you in the clutch. Your No. 1-rated defense in points allowed can't stop the other team's quarterback from throwing three touchdown passes.

You deserve to lose.

I'm not sure Wisconsin sports pundits could be that objective, should that last Steeler drive have succeeded.

"I don't blame anyone but myself," a subdued Roethlisberger said after the confetti finally stopped falling on the Packers. "There were a lot of throws I'd like to have back. I turned the ball over. You can't do that ...


"I feel like I let down the city of Pittsburgh, the fans, my coaches, my teammates ... it's not a good feeling."


Certainly, the Steelers' final drive added to Roethlisberger's dismay. He had a chance to make the two first-half interceptions he threw -- one was returned 37 yards for a touchdown by Packers safety Nick Collins -- a mere footnote to history, as well as a rare killer fumble by running back Rashard Mendenhall at the Packers 33 on the first play of the fourth quarter when the Steelers were threatening to take the lead. I fully expected him to win the game when the Steelers took over at their 13 with 1:59 left.


"You feel pretty good," Roethlisberger said of the situation. Asked what he told his teammates in the huddle, he said, " 'I believe in you guys. We can do this.' I think we all felt like we could."

If there is to be a labor dispute in pro football, at least we had an excellent game to end the season. Good game, Pittsburgh. See you at Kennywood.

APOLOGIZE, AND PROMISE TO GIVE IT AWAY.  Atlas Shrugged, from which I extracted the subject line, is fiction.  It's fiction inspired, however, by nonsense like this.

If you are still passionately following football or, worse, allowing your kid to play, you may just be an old-fashioned imperialist running dog. Not that all football fans are bloodthirsty hounds feeding off the crippled hindquarters of the dying animal of empire. Some are in a vain search for a crucible of manhood that no longer exists. Others are in pursuit of a ticket out of a dead-end life.

Whatever your reason, this is the Super Bowl to watch, even if you are among those who have made an effort to disregard the game since high school jocks shouldered you in the halls.

This is the Big One. Maybe the Last Big One. Never before have so many loose strands of an unraveling empire come together in a single event accessible to those who mourn or cheer America.

Let’s start with the conceit that this game is the only super thing we have left. Super power, super economy, super you-name-it… gone. You can beat the Bushes for that, but we’re all out of super -- except for the Super Bowl. That celebration of an all-American $9 billion industry (estimated because the National Football League has never opened its books), not to mention millions more in subsidiary and dependent businesses, offers us a national holiday that has arguably superseded Thanksgiving (thanks for what?) and Christmas (electronic excess and obsolescence).

How dare you nosh on hot wings and tortilla chips, while Egyptians are protesting, Somalis voting on secession, Australians battling floods and brush fires, and Italians envying their prime minister indulging himself with a showgirl?

If any of this sounds depressingly like real life, how could you not watch what might be the last Super Bowl, the endgame of empire, the two-minute warning before America finally beats itself?

And how dare you enjoy commercials that make light of Chinese oppression of Tibetans, or the hunting of the whales?

CENTENNIAL.

Berlin, 12 June 1987.

THE MID-AMERICAN TITLE GAME.  The Packers are well-stocked with Central Michigan and Western Michigan graduates.

Asked by a reporter how it felt to have three former Central Michigan players as Packers teammates, Jennings smiled widely before drawing in a deep breath and dropping his head.

"You know what, it really sucks, but I'll take it," he laughed. "You got a lot of guys on this team — Chippewa Nation — and it's just me (by myself)."


Since 2006, Central Michigan has won three Mid-American Conference titles and been to four bowl games. It's forced Jennings to endure some Chippewa championship chirping.

"They are (riding high). Trust me, they bring it up a lot," he said. "They wear their Central gear all the time. And they beat us this year, so I had to go through that. But it's fun, it gives us something to talk about."

There are more than a few Mid-American graduates at Pittsburgh, as well.

The MAC's representation is tied with the Big Ten for the second highest amount of players from FBS conferences. Both trail the SEC, which will have 18 players represented.

One of these days, Northern Star editors will grasp the distinction between number and amount.  Northern Illinois players have all been excused, Garrett Wolfe and the Bears, and Michael Turner and the Falcons, both by the Packers.

That hasn't stopped Northern Illinois from high aspirations.

“We have a belief here that we could be the first team from the [Mid-American Conference] to compete in a BCS bowl game,” [athletic director Jeff] Compher said. “We talk about that. Because I’ll tell you, if you don’t dream it, it will never happen. Now it’s gone beyond dream (to) how we can execute that.”


During the recruiting process, Compher and coach Dave Doeren set that goal for the 22 recruits who committed. They told them they wanted NIU to become the next Boise State, the next TCU. It’s a bold standard to compare a mid-major program to.

These aspirations come, and sometimes they go.  When I hired out here, the ambition was to replace Northwestern in the Big Ten (that was a sports aspiration, probably not an academic aspiration), but resources for sports were more easily obtained in those days.  A few years later, the state austerity regime proposed to lower the academic profile and go cold turkey on sports.  The student fees that underwrite sports losses came in at that time.  We've since raised our academic profile in some areas, and made a BCS run or two, but student attendance at sporting events is erratic.

POSSIBLE SOURCE OF COMPANY MAIL.  Longtime Cold Spring Shops supporter Matthew K. Tabor has started a new service, Education Debate.

WHERE THE DECLINE SET IN.

A football game in a Dallas stadium, without cheerleaders?

Is a Super Bowl without cheerleaders -- at Cowboys Stadium, no less -- pure heresy?

One of the league's major marketing tools -- the sideline sex appeal of young women wearing revealing outfits and performing enticing dance routines -- will be on hiatus in Super Bowl XLV.

Sunday's game featuring the Green Bay Packers and Pittsburgh Steelers will be the first Super Bowl without cheerleaders since Super Bowls I and II, NFL Films President Steve Sabol said Wednesday.

Six teams don't use official cheerleaders, including the Packers and Steelers. "We don't need eye candy," the Steelers' Trai Essex said, laughing.

Teammate Antwaan Randle El, asked if he cared, replied, "Yeah, I care -- I'm glad they're not here. They are a distraction. If you look at the (giant screens), it's, "Oh, my Lord!' Especially in Dallas."

Let the record show that Super Bowls I and II were simply the AFL-NFL Championship game, both before the merger (the football merger, not Penn Central), both won by the Packers, and both before the counterculture wrecked The America that Worked^(TM).

But perhaps it wasn't the counterculture's fault.  About the same time as the merger, the National Football League went much more Hollywood and the Dallas Cowboys began to shed their reputation as chokers and build their brand as America's Team.  The eye-candy on the sidelines, and the flamboyant players sometimes showing more interest in their own fame than in the success of the team were part of that effort.

That helped Dallas shed its reputation as the city where "they" (as author William Manchester put it) killed President Kennedy and threatened Adlai Stevenson (Jacqueline Kennedy expressed dismay that her husband was murdered by a "creepy little Commie") and turned it into a symbol of Sunbelt emergence.  The excesses of the noveaux riches that provided the script material for "Dallas" had their echo in life with Cowboy owner Jerry Jones firing underlings that dissatisfied him (the most recent being Wade Phillips, who had a bad day in Green Bay) in the best J. R. Ewing tradition.

The Republic can survive the excesses of new money.  Whether the Republic can survive the effects of Texan sports culture is another issue.

The diagram, from Voluntary Xchange, may be humorous, but apparently a lot of children are being left behind in Texas.  Get behind the news of the Packers using a high school practice facility, and note the players expressing doubts.

Highland Park's facility opened in August, and is comparable in quality to the one at [Texas Christian] that the Pittsburgh Steelers moved into Wednesday. Both buildings are NFL-caliber.

Such quality at TCU is one thing. But, a high school?

That's how it goes in Texas, especially the Dallas-Fort Worth area. There are megamillion prep palaces all around, with a $60 million outdoor stadium going up.
Highland Park is among the wealthiest suburbs in the nation, so the district could afford the pricetag on its facility. A $1 million donation from the booster club helped, too.

"That's ridiculous," Packers receiver James Jones said. "We barely had a football field at my high school in California. There's too much money out here. They need to send some of that extra cash out to California."

"We barely had grass," added defensive lineman Ryan Pickett, who grew up in Florida. "An indoor practice field? That's unreal."

Ultimately, I'd be more concerned if the creative money pulls out of Silicon Valley, but I'd be happier if somebody from Highland Park could send me a picture of the high school's planetarium, or its math team, or its space campers.

PRESENTATION MATTERS.  Retired Northern Illinois sports information director Mike Korcek, longtime Bears fan, evaluates Jay Cutler's Rate Your Students moment.

Observation No. 2: Sorry to say, my only perception (and remember, perception is reality) of Cutler comes through the media as a fan. The past two seasons, the majority of his postgame news conferences on Comcast SportsNet Chicago have been PR disasters. Tilted head, poor body language, no eye contact, curt answers, rolling eyeballs, shrugging shoulders, you name it. All on camera. For every Cutler twitch, the ex-SID in me shuddered. This is your franchise QB? Playing in one of the nation’s top markets? Are you kidding? No one from the Bears front office noticed this? In a league where everything resonates image – is this what commissioner Roger Goodell desires?


Observation No. 3: I’ve always felt that our Huskie student-athletes were the best walking-talking advertisement for Northern Illinois intercollegiate athletics. For the most part, they are exceptional “spokespeople” for our institution and its mission. I never worried when Tim Dillon, Garrett Wolfe, Denise Dove, P.J. Fleck, T.J. Lux, Josh Haldi, Doug Kieso, Lisa Foss, Rodney Davis, Nicole Jeray, and 99.9 percent of our student-athletes addressed the media. My staff and I would work with most of them or we had specialists Randy Minkoff and his wife Sue Castorino to help their external education.

Sorry, there’s no excuse for a professional athlete being such a poor public speaker. No one expects a JFK inaugural address after an NFL contest, but part of being a professional requires some interpersonal communication skills. You mean Cutler can’t do the “grin and bear it” Hollywood smile for 10 postgame minutes?

Let alone look more involved on the sidelines?

Observation No. 4: I understand both sides of the situation. In a position such as mine, you had to know that there were media people with agendas and, sometimes, goofy ideas on the other side of the microphone. And there also were professionals asking very little except reasonable access to the athletes/coaches/participants and a forum for interviews. Again, Cutler is not the only guilty party.

Media people with agendas?  Ever watch the recently departed Keith Olbermann serve softballs to his Nation TV buddies?  He learned that as part of sportswriter etiquette.

Just for one week, I'd like to see the Washington press corps interview the losing coach after a major sporting event.  Heck, the Washington press corps can find fault with a victory ...  Red Smith calling the Bears "dirty" in the New York Times for knocking Y. A. Tittle around doesn't rise to the level of Sam Donaldson badgering Ronald Reagan on a daily basis, or Dan Rather rediscovering homelessness during Republican presidencies.

GETTING THE MISSION RIGHT.

The dean at Anonymous Community finds time on a snow day to read Academically Adrift and offer comments.

- Instructor expectations matter. Students who have more professors with high expectations learn more than students who don’t. Given that students will often go out of their way to seek out ‘easy’ professors and avoid ‘hard’ ones, this suggests a dilemma.

To whom?  Work with the 'hard' professors to develop their people skills, such that they're perceived as firm but fair, approachable, and helpful, and change the reward structure to remove the perceived incentive to buy good evaluations by being 'easy' and never mind the anonymous whinges on Rate My Professors.

- Reflecting on my time at Snooty Liberal Arts College, I could see why its students would do markedly well on tests of critical thinking. It had no ‘business’ or ‘communications’ majors; it had very selective admissions and therefore a strong ‘peer culture,’ and it lacked frats. My cc also lacks frats, but the other components don’t really carry over.

- ‘Peer culture’ is huge. If you run with a crowd of high achievers, you will adapt to it; if you run with a crowd of hard partiers, you will adapt to that. In an open-admissions institution, this presents a substantial challenge. (Some peer cultures are trickier than others. Coming from a public high school in a middle-class suburb, it took me a semester to raise my game when I got to SLAC. I didn’t know that the prep school kids affect insouciance in public while studying like crazy behind closed doors.)

That's why I like this guy.  In some ways our paths are similar.  I was fortunate enough to meet up with enough high achievers to not be destroyed by hanging with the hard partiers on occasion.

- Many students see college (and here the fact that it’s a sample of four-year colleges may matter) as primarily a social experience. It’s a chance to get away from Mom and Dad, to make new friends, to explore lifestyle options, and to get a credential. If that’s your orientation, then ‘learning’ is fine, as long as it doesn’t require time and effort. In that climate, lone instructors who raise academic expectations may pay a price in student anger.

That's within the control of the faculty and the administration.  Anonymous Community and Wayne State and Northern Illinois are in the same line of work as Columbia or Michigan or Chicago and ought not be discouraged to not be as well known or regarded as long as they don't have to apologize for not being Columbia or Michigan or Chicago.

A study (via University Diaries) of the benefit-cost ratio of student fees devoted to athletics at Ohio University (in the perpetually parlous Mid-American Conference) suggests that sports are overrated as a component of the collegiate experience.

[Matthew] Denhart [of the Center for College Affordability and Productivity] and [Ohio sport administration professor David] Ridpath found that of the more than 900 undergraduate or graduate students at Ohio who agreed to participate in their survey, 54.4% said that prior to taking the survey, they were not aware that a portion of their general fee is used to subsidize intercollegiate athletics. (Ohio does not itemize an athletics fee on its billing statements to students, although it does say on its website that the intercollegiate athletics is among the programs receiving money from its general fee charge.)

The researchers also found that 40.8% of the general fee money collected by Ohio during the 2010 fiscal year went to athletics, most among eight campus units receiving general-fee allocations. When asked to rank those those eight units in order of their importance "to you personally," 5.6% ranked athletics as the most important unit; 56.2% ranked athletics among the three least important units.

Asked the extent to which they would prefer that the university itemize on bills to students the amounts of fee money that go each of the eight units, 76.8% of the respondents said they "supported" or "strongly supported" the idea.

Denhart and Ridpath write that their study "may have implications for public policy," including the prospect of what they term a " 'truth in spending' requirement mandate notifying students of use of special fees levied to support" athletics. Denhart, however, said he was most surprised by two other findings.

He and Ridpath asked their respondents, in open-ended fashion: "On average, how many Ohio University intercollegiate athletic events do you attend per year?" In exchange for receiving student fee money, Ohio's athletics department allows students to attend home games for free. The average response was 5.8 events attended per year; the median was two, and 35% of respondents reported they attend none. USA TODAY, in a figure cited in the survey's case study, reported in September that Ohio is allocating $765 of each full-time student's general fees for the 2010-11 school year to athletics. (USA TODAY obtained this figure from the university, which charges fees on a per-quarter basis.)

"I'm a big sports fan, and I went to a lot of the games, so I kind of assumed everybody did," says Denhart, an Ohio graduate.

The survey also asked respondents to rate "how important a factor was Ohio University's intercollegiate athletics reputation in influencing your decision to enroll at this institution."

More than 78% of the respondents said it was either "unimportant" (24.8%) or "extremely unimportant" (53.7%).

The results "seem to contradict the conventional wisdom that athletics is a major admissions factor that students consider before enrolling at an institution," Denhart and Ridpath write.

It might be, as a University Diaries commenter notes, that Ohioans are primarily Buckeye or Browns or Bengals fans, if they're sports fans at all, and whether the place that Ohio has provided for them is at Kent or Bowling Green or Miami is less about prowess on the playing field and more about degree programs on offer.  Strictly speaking, a commitment by a state to provide a place in college for any state resident finishing in the top third, or top half, of his or her graduating class, is a commitment to offer a suitable intellectual challenge or suitable career preparation.  There's probably been an element of tracking present from the day the land-grant universities structured themselves differently from the normal schools, but there's nothing in the study that argues against Kent or Bowling Green or Miami attempting to be more like Ohio State in the classroom and research lab.  It's also instructive to see the sports enthusiast learn the folly of generalizing from his own experience.  (That's a frequent occurrence in any conversation with male economics majors involving stadium subsidies or ticket prices: your reservation price is high, but the allocation of resources depends on the marginal buyer, not the inframarginal enthusiasts.)

TRACING THE BLOOMINGTON MORAINE. From space, the polar ice cap current snowpack can't be distinguished from the Wisconsin glaciation.

National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration image
courtesy London Daily Mail.

The picture is one of several images from Chicago, elsewhere in the States, Asia, and Australia in a London Daily Mail photo essay (via Instapundit.)

Ice Road Trucking is different on the Russo-Chinese border.

Newmark's Door recommends The 40 Most Amazing Pictures Of The Blizzaster Of 2011.

The Gutsiest Bicyclist in Milwaukee.

Classes resume at Northern Illinois Friday morning, but that's a lightly-attended day even in the best of circumstances.

The dig-out continues at Cold Spring Shops headquarters, and work continues on the new house at the top of the street.

NO DUMPING ALLEGATIONS.  Mexico supplies electricity to wintry Texas.

Mexico's state electricity company on Wednesday started supplying electricity to the US state of Texas, where demand shot up amid unusually cold temperatures and caused power outages.

Mexico's Federal Electricity Commission "was determined to support Texas with electrical energy faced with the problems the state is suffering due to climatological conditions," a statement said.

An energy transfer of 280 megawatts began at midday (1800 GMT) via the north Mexican border cities of Nuevo Laredo, Reynosa and Piedras Negras, it added.

I believe that's called a gain from trade.  I suspect the electricity could be procured more cheaply from the Mexican producers than from the Bonneville Power Authority or the Tennessee Valley Authority, or from Exelon.  Outsourcing ... what a concept.

Before the imported kilowatts arrived, there was a rhubarb involving the power supply to ... Cowboys Stadium.

Oncor is among the utility companies which are implementing rolling blackouts. Company spokeswoman Megan Wright said that public safety is crucial. “The Central Business District in Dallas has multiple high rises where there could be lots of people,” Wright explained. “If they lose power, it could be a bad safety situation.”

But there is another, unavoidable reason that Cowboys Stadium will not experience a blackout. That venue sits on multiple power grids. If one goes out, another flips on seamlessly, without any interruption to power. So, although one grid might see a blackout, the rolling outage process ensures that the stadium is always receiving power from another grid.

Downtown Dallas and Fort Worth are also on multiple, redundant power grids.

According to Oncor, businesses and residents can pay extra money to be on multiple power grids, but it could cost hundreds of thousands of dollars for the infrastructure to be set up. And even then, technically, rolling blackouts could still be possible to those people.

After further review, the power on the field is confirmed.

CHOOSE THE COMPARISONS CAREFULLY.  Milwaukee has the Fonz and Violent Femmes; Pittsburgh boasts Mr. Rogers and a great skyline. "More alike than different, both made their reputations as manufacturing powers, and both are finding their way in a postindustrial era." A few more comparisons.

Passenger Rail.  The Capitol Limited calls at Pittsburgh in the early morning eastbound from Chicago to Washington, D.C., and westbound around midnight.  The Pennsylvanian is a convenient eastbound connection to New York; the westbound arrives in time for a late dinner before continuing to Chicago.  The Empire Builder arrives in Milwaukee from the west coast mid-afternoon, the westbound leaves for the west coast just before the dining car opens for supper.  There are enough 85 minute Hiawathas to make a day trip from either Chicago or Milwaukee and back.  Advantage: Milwaukee.

Roller Coasters.  Milwaukeeans can journey an hour south to Six Flags, on the Chicago side of the Cheddar Curtain, or two hours west to Wisconsin Dells.  Muskego Beach closed 30 years ago.  Pittsburghers have Kennywood.  'Nuff said.  Advantage: Pittsburgh.

Sailing.  The South Shore Yacht Club in Bay View is home to the Queen's Cup.  (We are not amused.)  There are numerous member clubs of the Inland Lake Yachting Association in the lake district.  Pittsburgh industrialists built the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club, which inspired the folk song "Sailboats on the Mountain."  The lake subsequently emptied into Johnstown, Pennsylvania, one afternoon in 1889.  Advantage: Milwaukee.

VEGETARIANS HAVE BETTER SEX.  Buzz Feed has a PETA video that may or may not become a Super Bowl commercial.  Probably best to view it at home.

TWITTER DID NOT CAUSE STUDENT DISENGAGEMENT.  Reaction to Academically Adrift and related topics continues to come in.  Minding the Campus runs an essay by J. M. Anderson, listed as Dean of Humanities, Fine Arts, and Social Sciences at Illinois Valley Community College in Oglesby (in the same legislative district as Northern Illinois University.)  There's something unusual here, as the division lists a Michael Pecherek as interim dean, since last summer.  Put that aside:  the column calls nonsense on the we-can't-push-[insert protected class]-students-too-hard approach to higher education.

The recent study conducted by the Center of Inquiry in the Liberal Arts at Wabash College shows that only 26 percent of undergraduates at small institutions, and only 18 percent at larger institutions, felt strongly that their professors had high expectations and challenged them academically. At a state university where I taught, seniors who took my 100-level survey course told me that it was the hardest and most intellectually demanding class they had taken in four years at college. Many were actually grateful for having taken my course and felt cheated by their other professors---although others weren't as grateful and eventually dropped the course or wrote negative comments on Ratemyprofessor.com. In an age when higher education exists for credentialing, and anyone can "get a degree," they wanted an easy professor and a blow-off class. I refused to accommodate them.

The problem is not a rigorous curriculum or high academic standards. As a freshman I was neither ready nor prepared for college. I grew up on the South side of Chicago in a working-class family. My mother, a single-parent, raised my three sisters and me. No one in my immediate or extended family (except for one cousin) went to college, let alone to graduate school. College wasn't even an option, and I probably wouldn't have considered it if my high school director hadn't asked me at the beginning of my senior year where I planned to apply. After serving in the army, I attended a liberal arts college where I came under the spell of two fascinating teachers whose ability to stimulate students seemed unparalleled. They didn't dismiss me or write me off or let me slide by because I wasn't college material. Rather, they made me read difficult and challenging books; they took the time to teach me to write; and they showed me by their example how a mature, learned, and disciplined mind approaches various intellectual questions. Above all else, they imbued me with the appropriate habits of thought and mind that defines the liberally educated person. If I had been tested, as a senior, on what I learned in biology my freshman year, or in economics my sophomore year, I probably would have failed; but if one compared my disposition, mindset, and intellectual outlook, as a senior, to what they were as a freshman, one would have seen an entirely different person.

That's where colleges and universities are failing today. They are not turning students into mature, thinking beings with appropriate dispositions. One reason is that modern educators share no common goals about the ends of higher education and are inconsistent with their expectations from students in their courses; another reason is lack of discipline in the classroom, instruction without authority. Professors mustn't dictate what is good for students or what they must know; subjecting students to rigorous academic standards and intellectual discipline is tantamount to punishing them; reason and argument are coercive.

Like many professors, I have dealt with students who thought they deserved good grades simply because they were enrolled in my class and showed up most of the time. When a former student who received a bad grade on a paper complained because I didn't allow him to express his "opinion," I said that first he had requirements to fulfill and to demonstrate his understanding of the particulars of our subject before he could offer an "opinion" on the issue he was writing about. He didn't like my answer. He had been encouraged to express himself throughout grade school and high school and held the assumption that every interpretation is valid and should be given equal weight. He ignored that I was hired and paid for my knowledge, which gave me the authority to instruct him and to evaluate his performance.

This rarely (if ever) happens in the sciences. Budding biologists and fledgling physicists follow a strict curriculum and willingly submit to it, or else they get "weeded out," and then take up a soft subject in the humanities. Nor does it happen in college sports. Watch any college football or basketball game and you'll see coaches often chastising players, who readily submit themselves to their criticisms and demands, but almost never complain that coaches are intimidating or too strict. Why? Because it is understood that coaches know what is best for student-athletes and are pushing them to improve their skills and performance. Only in the sciences and college sports---apparently what really matter---is the demand for excellence taken seriously.

I hope his candor didn't get him bounced from Illinois Valley.  Institutional research at Northern Illinois suggests that community college transfers do at least as well as juniors and seniors as students that begin here.  He intends to read Academically Adrift, but he's not in any great hurry.

A Newark Star-Ledger investigation of the parlous success rates at New Jersey's public colleges and universities rounds up the usual suspects.

College officials say the answer is complex. Some students drop out. Some transfer to other schools. Some work part time or deliberately don’t take a full load of classes so they have easier semesters.

Many also change majors, take remedial classes or find that overcrowding and budget cuts mean they can’t get into the courses they need to graduate on time.

Most colleges are reluctant to reveal their degree completion numbers. The data is rarely highlighted in college marketing materials or mentioned on campus tours.

Read on, though, and another possibility appears.

There are, however, plenty of exceptions. Ed Kwiatkowski graduated from Monmouth University earlier this month in 3½ years with a double major in accounting and management.

Kwiatkowski, 22, earned his degree by taking 18 credits a semester while working full time at night doing heavy lifting in a warehouse. He also served as guardian for his teenage sister after his mother’s death.

At Monmouth, where 37 percent of freshmen graduate in four years, Kwiatkowski said he knows several classmates who are taking extra time to get their degree.

“I really don’t know what’s taking them so long,” said Kwiatkowski, of Long Branch.

The article doesn't mention how one observation turns into plenty of exceptions.  It's encouraging to see evidence, even anecdotal, of people working their way through university.

A Northern Star columnist also weighs in.

While I do think that everyone deserves the chance to go to college, I do not necessarily think that means that everyone is actually meant for higher education. Those who may not be cut out for college usually find out quite early on in their academic careers and rarely make it to graduation.

Thus, I think that the aforementioned statistic may be skewed by the fact that part of those 45 percent who are not learning at an acceptable rate should not have been accepted to the universities in the first place and do not reflect the learning of the undergraduates who actually go on to earn degrees.


While it may not be financially beneficial to universities, I think that increasing the standards for admission would be the first step in curbing this trend.


Another part of the problem is that professors are not pushing students hard enough.


According to the study, half of the students who were tested "did not take a single course requiring 20 pages of writing during their prior semester, and one-third did not take a single course requiring even 40 pages of reading per week."


The truth is that with all of the advantages afforded to the modern student by the Internet, expectations should rise in accordance. Between Microsoft Word's "auto-correct" features, websites like SparkNotes.com and access to an abundance of digital libraries, there is no real reason why a student should be failing or even struggling.


If anything, these resources have made it too easy for students to coast through classes without actually challenging themselves.


I am not sure of what college was like before the Internet, but if course loads have not increased dramatically in the last 15 years, then the second step toward improving our educational system would be for professors to demand a little bit more from their students.


Finally, the third component in addressing this problem is obviously the students. I know that my suggestions so far may not please everyone as they basically amount to making things harder, but think about what you are paying for.


Sure, we ultimately are trying to get degrees that lead to careers, but what is the value of our education if we are not being pushed to grow intellectually?


While I don't think that today's college students are the stereotypes that eat pizza for breakfast and drink until they pass out every night, I do hear too much complaining about assignments and grades.

We pay thousands of dollars a year to get smarter, not to have someone confirm how smart we think we are.

I don't get much of that "I'm-paying-for-a-credential" stuff; my reaction is "would you blame the fitness trainer if you stayed fat because you never exercised or switched from beer to water?"  The financial benefit of enrollment for its own sake is slim in any event, once the cost-benefit ratio of the support services is taken into account.

EXPLAINING THE PRODUCTIVITY SLOWDOWN?  The storm system that's providing an opportunity to catch up on some gruntwork also cooled things off in Dallas.

The Dallas Cowboys don't have an indoor practice facility.  Forrest Gregg's Southern Methodist University doesn't have an indoor practice facility.  Highland Park High School has an indoor practice facility, which for this week has become the southern extension of the Don Hutson Center.

Originally, [Green Bay] was supposed to use SMU’s field in Highland Park, just north of Dallas. However, the field has no roof and is now covered in snow and ice. Now the Packers will use Highland Park High School’s indoor practice facility. When Green Bay linebacker A.J. Hawk was asked about the facility, he didn’t hide his fondness. “I’m from Ohio and high school football is pretty big; at least we think it is,” Hawk said. “Texas football is amazing. Everything in Texas is great.” The Packers will face the Pittsburgh Steelers in Super Bowl XLV on Sunday.

Great for football (In communities with insufficient young men to fill eleven positions, Texas high schools have a seven-player version), but -- research question alert -- might No Child Left Behind have appeared to work in Texas because the resources go to the football programs, rather than the chemistry labs, and no way is the quarterback going to be left behind in geometry?

SNOW DAY. The view to the south at 8.15 this morning, before the street was plowed.

I saw neither my shadow, nor any woodchucks popping out of their burrows.