TRAINS DON'T HAVE WINGS, LEFT OR RIGHT.  Ezra Klein has the best reaction to a George Will column suggesting public money for trains is one more manifestation of control-freak technocratic tendencies.

I come from Southern California. We have a lot of cars down there and not much in the way of alternative transit options. Driving is a nightmare, as the streets are overloaded. Living in Washington has been a vast improvement for me: The subways and Amtrak take me where my car has trouble going, and I use my car for the errands and travels that suit its strengths. And as long as my tax dollars are going to subsidize transportation networks, I’d like them to subsidize a sensible transportation network such as Washington’s, not the endless traffic that I escaped when I moved away from Los Angeles.

Note that Mr Klein passes on the opportunity to use the California road network as an illustration of the failure of control-freak technocratic tendencies.

The argument, if anybody cares:  You propose to tell me what sort of car I may drive, and what fuel I shall put in it, and yet you cannot properly time the traffic lights.

LOSING THE GOOD OF THE INTELLECT.  Peter Wood stirs up the Transgressive Establishment with a column in its house organ.

Higher education once fostered the aspirations of young people to take possession of some share of their civilization.  The university was never the only means to acquire that aspiration.  Reading good books and joining in conversation with others who have read further may be the better path.  But the liberal arts opened the minds of many to the riches of art, science, philosophy, and literature.  Today?  Not so much.  A tiny fraction of students bother with the liberal arts at all—about 3 percent of students—and a good many of those are channeled into what might be rightly termed the pseudo-liberal arts.   They study the fields that teach disdain for their civilization and the supposed advantages of a vaporous “global citizenship.”

Lady Gaga bears no blame at all for the debased tastes of contemporary culture.   She simply saw her opportunity and took it.  But higher education does bear quite a bit of the blame for this situation.  It gives trash culture a veneer of respectability and encourages students to open themselves to many of their worst impulses—and to take pride in the spectacle.

Predictably, a reactionary defender of the transgressive status quo notes in the comments that higher education, or at least some vanguard elements within higher education, is no longer committed to "the reproduction of culture, including social class," then, arguing in the alternative, notes that her influence is not great, particularly on pre-business students who for all we know see the general education requirements as a hoop to be jumped.

Perhaps, though, the pre-business drones weren't predisposed to tune her out: they might have been pushed.  A Perry Glanzer essay in Minding the Campus gets to the heart of the matter.

Politics got us to this point in the first place.  By politics, I mean two things.  First, the state continually exerts more and more control over higher education in America.  Whereas once ninety percent of higher education was private, today state-governed educational institutions now educate over three fourths of all students in America. This trend means that the humanities are largely government-controlled, and state universities cannot defend the humanities using particular metaphysical foundations.  Second, as a result of the first point,  faculty end up looking to particular political justifications for the humanities.  Such justifications, as I argue below, fail to do justice to the humanism behind the humanities.

With respect to the first point, one could suggest that the aspiring masses are quite happy to vote themselves subsidies to be active participants -- as beneficiaries -- in the replication of existing class relationships. That dynamic is likely to be at work whether the culture-studies types are enabling crudity and failure or not.

The humanities at state universities are discovering what established religions also learned the hard way. When you submit to the state's leadership and rely upon government funding for sustenance, you possess limited bargaining power.  The state's interests always triumph and other interests become secondary. Similar to Anglicanism in England, the humanities are only instrumentally useful to the state.  State universities will offer and fund language study, probably Chinese and Arabic, because these disciplines remain useful for the state's purposes in areas of foreign policy. Legislators and utilitarian citizens want business majors to improve the country's GNP, teachers for public schools, engineers for public works, researchers for military technology, doctors for the burgeoning national health system and police officers and lawyers for a criminal justice system. Universities could try and justify the humanities by playing the instrumentalist game, perhaps claiming they can help the economy and provide some economic value, but as [Stanley] Fish states, "nobody really buys that argument, not even the university administrators who make it."

In part, because advocates for the transgressive have, by their very transgressiveness, marginalized themselves.

GIVING THE TRAIN MONEY AWAY PREMATURELY?  The Superintendent's Three Rules of Travel:

1. Never buy film at the amusement park.
2. Never buy beer at the airport.
3. Never buy shaving supplies at the hotel.

The first has been Overtaken By Events. Per corollary, make sure your digital camera has fresh batteries.  The second is all too frequently Honored In The Breach, thanks to sharp work by the screeners followed up by slipshod timekeeping by the carriers.  The third: if your Superintendent is flying, the aerosols and sharp objects are in checked baggage.  If he's on a train, they're along for the ride in his roomette.

Unfortunately, it is difficult to come up with a workaround to gasoline prices at the service stations nearest the airport.

In Orlando, Fla., two gas stations that are the closest to the airport, and across the street from each other, are selling regular at $5.29 and $5.19 a gallon.

The Orlando airport might be remote from residential areas, meaning these gas stations are competing
only with the tankage charge imposed by the car-rental companies, and those prices are not necessarily Signs of Things to Come.  All the same, Florida is the most recent state to turn down federal funds for Passenger Rail improvement (fine by us, there's a second track from Springfield to Alton begging to be restored), and with gas at five bucks a gallon, some Floridians might be wishing for a rail option to accompany "drive or fly"?

WHEN YOU HAVE EXHAUSTED ALL OTHER OPTIONS.  Perhaps, someday, some university president, finally recognizing that too many remedial students mean frustration for the prepared students, for the faculty, for the remedial students that drop out no closer to a degree than they were the day they enrolled, and for the trustees who face the double whammy of low graduation rates and undersubscribed job fairs, will ask Admissions to experience-rate the high schools, interpret "top third of the high school class" holistically, and send the high schools invoices for the remediation work that's been fobbed off on the university.

That day has not yet arrived.  All the same, City University of New York (via Phi Beta Cons), the canonical people's university, recognizes that it is running out of options.

[T]hat tide of remedial students has now swelled so large that the university’s six community colleges — like other two-year schools across the country — are having to rethink what and how they teach, even as they reel from steep cuts in state and local aid.

About three-quarters of the 17,500 freshmen at the community colleges this year have needed remedial instruction in reading, writing or math, and nearly a quarter of the freshmen have required such instruction in all three subjects. In the past five years, a subset of students deemed “triple low remedial” — with the most severe deficits in all three subjects — has doubled, to 1,000.

It is the People's University, and by law it is required to admit any applicant with a valid diploma.  Some diplomas, however, are less valid than others.

To bring thousands of students up to speed, those colleges spent about $33 million last year on remediation — twice as much as they did 10 years ago. They are expanding an immersion program that funnels hundreds of students exclusively into remedial classes.

But there is concern that the effort is diverting attention from the colleges’ primary mission.

“It takes a lot of our time and energy and money to figure out what to do with all of these students who need remediation,” said Alexandra W. Logue, the university’s executive vice chancellor and provost. “We are doing some really good things, but it’s time that we’re not thinking about our other wonderful students who are very highly prepared. We need to focus on them, too.”

At LaGuardia Community College in Queens, where 40 percent of the math classes are remedial, faculty members like Jerry G. Ianni have been increasingly dividing their time between teaching those classes and teaching courses for academic credit, prompting worries that professors are becoming de facto high school teachers.

That statement is framed in such a way as to suggest that some professors are not happy with being converted into something other than a professor.  And the students are not happy with being told by their high school that they're ready for university, when they're not.

The university’s biggest concern is those students who lag furthest behind in the three subjects. “These students have a really low probability of success, and it’s hard to know how to work with them,” said Dr. Logue, the provost. “There’s no question that the more remediation a student needs, the less likely they are ever to graduate.”

Students are often surprised to learn that they still have hurdles to clear before they can begin college-level work. As a freshman at LaGuardia, Angel Payero, 18, took the necessary assessment tests in August and discovered that he was deficient in reading, writing and math.

There is no direct evidence of somebody in the New York City Department of Education reading Cold Spring Shops. This news report is encouraging.

The New York City Department of Education is also trying to help reduce the ranks of remedial students. It has begun tracking how each high school’s students go on to perform in college, and starting in 2012, it will include measurements of a student’s college readiness in its annual school progress reports. The city and CUNY are working together to align their academic standards and curriculums.

I propose to fight it out on this line if it takes several more summers. Let the thing be pressed. Identify the dropout factories, and put them into receivership.

THE BREAKFAST GARBAGE YOU FLUSH AT TROY, THEY DRINK FOR LUNCH IN PERTH AMBOY.  That's the east coast version of Tom Lehrer's Pollution song.

Lyrics | Tom Lehrer lyrics - Pollution lyrics

Those of us who live along the Great Lakes, except if you live in Chicago, have long understood the value of not using your water source as a sink for your offal.  (Chicago sucks water from the Great Lakes basin and poops on Peoria.)  Milwaukee raised money for its sewer system by selling fertilizer.

The rest of the world is now discovering that water reclamation technologies stretch out supplies dependent on rivers, aquifers, or desalination.

"Water is going to be the oil of the 21st century," predicts Bill Cooper, director of the Urban Water Research Center at the University of California-Irvine.

Clearly, something needs to be done. Roughly 884 million people — 1 of every 8 in the world — still lack access to safe drinking water, according to the World Health Organization and UNICEF. Meanwhile, water use has increased by more than twice the rate of the world's population growth during the past century, United Nations data show. Coupled with climate change that's melting glaciers and increasing droughts, the situation is putting some countries in danger of severe water shortages that could not only stifle their growth, but also jeopardize their residents' well-being, analysts say.

In my more pessimistic moments, I see the Des Plaines River basin, or quite possibly the southern Fox River basin, as the flash point for a future civil war.  Modern reclamation technologies, which simulate the dilutive effect a Great Lake has on treated waste water without a Great Lake at hand to do the dilution, might help to head off the conflict.

Treated wastewater typically doesn't go directly into the tap, but is piped into the ground, lakes or reservoirs. It mixes with water from other sources, and may be cleaned further to meet drinking water standards before being funneled to consumers' taps, often months later.

This "precautionary" step helps to ease public objections, according to Ong Choon Nam, director of the NUS Environmental Research Institute at the National University of Singapore. That's because, for many people, the reclaimed wastewater doesn't carry the same stigma once it's combined with other water.

Inside Orange County's sprawling wastewater purification facility, visitors get a detailed tour of the stainless steel pipes, reinforced fiberglass tanks and membranes that turn wastewater into drinking-quality water. The test of the tour's success comes at the end, when the public is offered a taste of purified wastewater. About 95% end up sampling the clear, flat-tasting liquid, according to [Michael] Markus, general manager of [the Orange County Water District].

"When people taste it, they say, 'If this water is so pure, why do you have to put it in the ground?' " Markus says.

Orange County hopes to eventually pump purified wastewater straight into the tap, without mixing it with other water. But that may be another 10 years down the road because of public wariness, he says.

More sensible pricing of California water might speed the diffusion of this technology. Los Angeles has drained entire lakes upstate, and the Colorado River exists in name only by the time it reaches the Mexican border.

EYECANDY FROM ECONOBLOGGERS.  Professor Palmer offered a series of posters making the point that Israel is more open to religious and ethnic diversity than some of its neighbors.

More here.

Professor Tufte found a site themed Women Laughing Alone With Salad.

If that tomato can bring that tomato to an orgasm, it's a bonus.

CREATING A HOSTILE CLIMATE.

The Pope Center's Wendy McElroy is not impressed with the social constructivists.

In the 1970s, Women's Studies emerged on American campuses to promote research into and discussion of women's issues and history. Currently, close to 700 institutions offer women’s or gender studies courses, according to the National Women's Studies Association. Men's Studies wasn’t far behind; it is typically taught as a corollary to Women's Studies because men's liberation is viewed as a necessary and logical consequence of feminism.

Overwhelmingly, both disciplines adhere to a specific form of feminism that was labeled “gender feminism” by Christina Hoff Sommers, author of The War Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism Is Harming Our Young Men. As Sommers observed, “somewhere along the line, conventional masculinity became politically incorrect. In some circles, it's treated as a pathology in need of a cure.”

A foundational premise of gender feminism (and thus a premise of Men’s Studies) is that male culture or “the patriarchy” oppresses women through institutions such as the free market and through dynamics such as the social construction of gender identity. Gender is considered to be a social creation, not a biological one, and traditional masculinity is seen as inherently abusive to women.

Men’s Studies programs generally focus upon the “social construction of maleness” within a patriarchal society and issues of “male privilege.” In other words, they embrace gender feminism’s complaints—but from a male perspective.

Not really. The men suffer from some combination of false consciousness and oppression by the same conventions, and they, too, must be liberated.

SOMETIMES, DISPASSIONATELY, YOU HAVE TO WEED.  At the NAS Blog, Jason Fertig offers the Trenchant Observation of the Day.  It might warrant the status of Prime Directive for New Academicians.

So do good professors give F’s?  Yes, professors who clearly define what it means to pass courses both to themselves and their students fail students who do not meet those standards.

Why? Because.

If “C means degree,” then “degree means competency.”  For example, if students are to graduate with better writing skills, they cannot pass any graded written assignment while writing poorly.  This has to be true in both colleges of business and liberal arts colleges.  Combating grade inflation and increasing standards cannot only take place in individual classes; it must be a team effort coordinated among all professors across the board. Otherwise students can avoid rigorous courses and graduate without them.

He extends the argument in a commentary at the Chronicle of Higher Education.

In my recent interview with Andy Nash on Inside Academia, I stated that we owe our colleagues the courtesy of not passing students who fail to demonstrate the basic competencies needed for 300- and 400-level courses.  It may be politically incorrect to suggest that some students are not cut out for college; nevertheless, the question of whether weaker students should be weeded out needs to be asked, because no one wins in the end when standards are dumbed down.

So mote it be.

OFFICIAL CONFIRMATION?

Regular visitors to Cold Spring Shops have been receiving Fourth Turning Alerts for years.  Now comes Daily Pundit, who has just finished the fundamental reading.

If there is anything to this cyclic theory of American history, I would contend that the initial spark - the catalyst for all that has, and will, come after - arrived a few years early - a little more than three years in advance of 2005 - on September 11, 2001.

While one might predict some sort of major terrorist attack on the US - if one were a careful student of the growth of Islamic fundamentalism, its increasing violence and its growing global reach - 9/11 was a truly unexpected - and probably unpredictable in the specific - event. And from it, all else has flowed, and will flow.

The event that inspires a Crisis mood might not be known until long after the Crisis takes its shape.  Fourth Turning authors Strauss and Howe were maintaining a Fourth Turning chatroom long before weblogs and the quicker-response social media of today.  One of the topics in that chatroom was the possibility that the 2000 presidential election was the catalyst, not the September 11 terrorist attacks.  Note how quickly the consensus supporting President Bush's counterterrorism and democracy projects came apart, something that makes more sense in light of that hung election.  And note the Daily Pundit's contrast of the emergence and stumble of President Obama's administration with the (retrospective) consensus the New Deal still appears to symbolize.

Obama’s naked and brutal assault on the cultural, political, and financial foundations of the nation has weakened us further, and opened wider the yawning chasm that is our future. It was in the milieu he created that a few impassioned words from a stock trader about the need for a “Tea Party” ignited yet another Black Swan: a true peoples’ movement whose future is yet unclear, yet will be, I predict, a nearly unstoppable force that will sweep away the infatuation with socialism that has infected the United States since the last Fourth Turning under FDR.   Even more unpredictably, the deliberate sub-rosa devaluation of the US dollar has, via the channel of the dollar’s status as the global reserve currency, exported inflation all over the world - where we are now seeing effects of that export arising in the Middle East, to accompany the ongoing slow collapse of the Euromart and the death throes of the Euro itself.

The author is not sure where events will come.  The Depression and World War II secular crisis are probably not the best model, for lack of anything resembling a consensus, or anything resembling the strong socialist counterargument the Deep Thinkers of the era could put forward.  The Secession Crisis and Southern Rebellion might reward more careful study, although the transition to that war might have been thirty or forty years in developing.

MAY THEY FIND HAPPINESS WITH THEIR CATS.  Neo-Neocon predicted that Kay Hymowitz's recent essay about young men being turned off by contemporary women would "engender a fair amount of heated discussion."  Indeed it did, and we've seen only the moderate reaction here.  Ms Hymowitz has received a lot of feedback, some of it negative, and she's responding.

Men are really, really angry. Consider: “We’re not STUCK in pre-adulthood, we choose it because there aren’t any desirable American women. They’ve been bred to abuse men.” This fairly typical response that appeared at the Seattle Post Intelligencer website: “Sorry ladies. In the age of PlayStation 3s, 24-hours-a-day sports channels, and free Internet porn, you are now obsolete. All that nagging, whining, and stealing our hard earned cash have finally caught up to you."

Shocked? I wasn't. During the last few years researching this age group, I’ve stumbled onto a powerful underground current of male bitterness that has nothing to do with outsourcing, the Mancession, or any of the other issues we usually associate with contemporary male discontent. No, this is bitterness from guys who find the young women they might have hoped to hang out with entitled, dishonest, self-involved, slutty, manipulative, shallow, controlling—and did I mention gold-digging?

Her article provides links to some real rip currents. There's a more restrained current, dating at least back to a 2003 Joe Katzman post on the men's marriage strike.

It is not a movement, or a self-consciously political effort... just the aggregate of millions of rational personal decisions. In that aggregate, however, the effects are as significant as they are quiet. Like the DDT-filled birds' eggshells that cracked under their own weight, these decisions are a sign that all is not well in the broader environment. A sign we ignore at our own peril. We get the society, and the circumstances, that we create for ourselves. 

Joanne Jacobs suggested in 2008 that conditions were not all that bad, only to elicit ripostes in the bull session to the effect that conditions were all that bad.  Ms Hymowitz recognizes that yes, conditions are all that bad.

Far worse in the bait and switch category is women’s stated preference for nice guys and actual attraction to bad boys. Now, clearly this is not true for all women. Many, maybe even most, want a guy with the sweetness of a Jimmy Stewart and sensitivity of Ashley Wilkes. But enough of them are partial to the Charlie Sheens of this world that one popular dating guru, David DeAngleo, lists “Being Too Much of a Nice Guy” as No. 1 in his “Ten Most Dangerous Mistakes Men Make With Women.”

That's relatively tame. Go to one of the sites she researched.

According to feminism, which most young women believe, men aren’t meant to be providers, protectors or moral/spiritual leaders. Chastity is out. A boring, good-paying job is out. Morality is out. Sobriety is out. Apologetics and theology are out.

What’s in? Being good-looking, inoffensive, and entertaining. Women are not selecting responsible men because they think that the men can be changed to be responsible, through sex, or maybe through nagging, and eventually through the threat of losing all his money and custody of his children. Men aren’t stupid. They’ve noticed that responsibility and morality are out, and they’re acting like clowns because that’s what women prefer when getting drunk and hooking up, the Duke University student and her report on all the men she slept with – they were graded by physical attractiveness, sexual technique, popularity and athletic ability.

Men do what women expect them to do in order to get sex. Just read the peer-reviewed studies on hooking up. If women don’t select men who can do specific things as husbands and fathers, then men won’t prepare themselves to do specific things. If they are already getting sex for playing the fool, then why should they do more than play the fool? If women obsessed over Paul Ryan and William Lane Craig, then that’s what men would aspire to. They don’t, and so men don’t. Mature men intimidate women with their strong opinions, moral judgments, and exclusive theological claims. Much better to have an immature man who is shallow and politically correct.

Or contemplate the short form, from Captain Capitalism.

In short you have made a life of bachelortude and singledom more attractive an option (economically, socially and romantically) than marrying you.

Put differently, find happiness with your cats.

Manning Up promises to make for an interesting book review.

PATIENCE REWARDED.  The Packer Way requires patience.

For most of the league, the quick fix is the model. Most of the teams in the league delude themselves into believing they’re one player away from the Super Bowl. Those teams spend each offseason chasing that one player. It’s the mistake the Jaguars made; now they’re paying the price.

The smart teams think only in terms of draft and develop. They don’t think in terms of one player, they think in terms of an entire roster.

It does take time. Brett Favre chose to return for the 2007 season because he recognized a very talented young team.  That team came within an overtime of reaching the Super Bowl.

“You can be a good drafting team but you have to have a good teaching team. You have to have a willingness to work with young players. It was obvious at the end of the year that they had a lot of young people on the field in what is the defining game of our profession,” [Jacksonville general manager Gene] Smith said of the Packers.

“If you have the draft-develop philosophy, you have to have patience. (The Packers are) willing to let young people grow. I thought it was wonderful to see two teams (in the Super Bowl) with the same philosophy. I think that’s the winning way,” Smith added.

One part of "not going for the quick fix" was accepting Mr Favre's first retirement, then standing firm with successor quarterback Aaron Rodgers.

The key to that way is being able to stand strong in the face of defeat. Few teams possess that inner strength. They question themselves and their pace of development. They take the short cut and that’s when they get lost.

Losing season and out of the playoffs in 2008, one-and-done in overtime after the 2009 season, now another Lombardi Trophy.

MERIT SCHOLARSHIPS BY ANOTHER NAME?  The new governor of Wisconsin might be considering something called public authority status for what we used to know as The Great State University of Wisconsin.  It might be yet another attempt by the state to reduce its contribution to university expenses whilst retaining complete control over university policy.

University of Wisconsin-Madison Chancellor Biddy Martin told the Board of Regents on Friday that if a plan to split UW-Madison from the UW System did not give her campus more control over tuition, then she wouldn't back it.

"I would oppose that because it wouldn't be a public authority," Martin said. Significant restrictions on tuition or big changes to the shared governance structure of the universities would be "complete deal-breakers," she said.

What intrigues about the article is the way in which posted tuitions serve as signals of excess demand for perceived quality.

Martin was also asked during a special regents meeting whether splitting from the UW System, in a model often described in higher education as a public authority status, would lead to a ramp-up in tuition. 

"My fear is . . . that this potentially moves Madison toward being a higher tuition model that would exclude those very students who have been able to attend Madison in the past," Regent John Drew of Milwaukee said.

Martin said she believes tuition at UW-Madison needs to increase to be on par with other major research universities. The possibility of a tuition increase of about 10% a year that was floated in a January memo was about the same as tuition increases that UW-Madison students have paid over the past two years, Martin said.

Martin also said she's not wedded to any specific tuition increase figure. But Martin would only endorse tuition increases that hold harmless students of need with families making $80,000 a year or less, that are offset with more financial aid, and that are tied with a campaign to let people know that the "sticker price" of a college education is not the real cost, once financial aid is considered.

Nobody pays list price.  Higher education, however, likes to labor under the conceit that nobody meritorious should be deprived of an opportunity to matriculate for something as crass as lack of money.  At the same time, admissions officers have opportunities to tweak aid packages for students in ways that would make the manager of a frequent flyer program blush.  Whether Madison posts the same list price as Oshkosh or a different list price probably doesn't matter much: cheeseheads and Coasties alike know which is the hardcore party school and which is the subprime party school.  But if Madison posts a higher list price, with the excuse that Urbana and Ann Arbor do it, and then offers its promotional discounts financial aid using a different formula than Oshkosh is obligated to do so, the yield it makes from the buckets of seats it sells (yeah, I'm talking like an Amtrak reservation manager, deal with it) might be higher than the yield it could have obtained under a standard formula applied for all Wisconsin universities.

The prospect of Madison going its own way bothers the editors at the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel.

 A system that leaves what has been a resurgent Milwaukee campus weaker with fewer options of its own will not sit well. The Legislature should use a broad lens, and the matter should not be decided simply through debate over the next two-year budget.

Suppose for the sake of discussion that Madison is adapting to the excess demand for perceived quality by admitting more out-of-state students, thereby enhancing its own coffers (the out-of-state tuition is calculated on a fully allocated cost basis: allocate on the basis of a small bucket and admit a large bucket and you're money ahead) and compensating for the state's stinginess, and at the same time displacing Wisconsin residents who on the basis of the small bucket of Coasties would have a space at Madison to Milwaukee.  It is then likely that Milwaukee is admitting students who could cut it at Madison, and to offer them a less demanding course of study is to shortchange them.  Thus the policy discussion Wisconsin ought to be having is whether Milwaukee is set up to serve strong students.

[Wisconsin system president Kevin] Reilly counters that three alternatives are available here, all bad for the Milwaukee campus: UWM becomes a part of a two-school system with Madison (and a weak sister); Milwaukee remains within a weakened system that does not include Madison; Milwaukee spins out on its own, which it isn't ready to do.

Option one is the status quo before 1972, in which Milwaukee was not Madison, but it was more like a university than the converted teachers' colleges in the other system.  In those days the state guaranteed a slot somewhere in one of the systems for any applicant who graduated in the top half of a state high school class, although each university had its own criteria for admission.  The second option is to merge Milwaukee with the former teachers' colleges.

The focus on organizations, however, says nothing about whether there is enough capacity at Madison and Milwaukee to serve some portion of the top half of the high school graduating classes.  In these times, to suggest that the state pick up enough of the universities' expenses to allow a motivated student to meet his or her costs with a part-time job during the school year and a full-time summer job is a bit much.

A NULLIFICATION CRISIS.  According to Detroit News columnist Nolan Finley, the party of antebellum South Carolina is at it again.

Republicans interpreted their overwhelming victories as a mandate to change the course of the states. Specifically, they set about undoing decades of laws put in place by Democrats to favor labor unions over taxpayers.

Instead of staying on the field to defend their positions, Democratic lawmakers in both states fled to neighboring Illinois, where they hope to win with their absence what they couldn't at the ballot box — namely, the right to control policymaking.

Without the Democrats, the legislatures don't have the required quorums to pass budget measures, including cutting pay and benefits for public workers.

The lawmakers in exile call this a defense of democracy. In truth, it's a step toward anarchy. If it catches on as a practice, it will officially end government by, of and for the people.

The notion of checks and balances necessarily implies tensions, as do the competing principles of majority rules and minority safeguards.  Rules of order that specify a quorum, and rules of procedure that provide for filibuster, are ways to contain those tensions.

Spats over quorum calls and filibusters are nothing new.  It's also nothing new to observe holders of a temporary majority seeking to overturn the existing protections.  If you're Harry Reid tonight, you ought to be thinking very carefully about whether to give yourself powers that might be in the hands of Scott Walker's fellow-followers next year.

NO EVIDENCE OF A PLANETARIUM.  The City of DeKalb is building a new high school.  The academic plant has not received much mention, and there might be a planetarium and up-to-date science labs that I'm not aware of.  The big deal, however, is the football field.

When the referendum to build the new DeKalb High School passed in 2008, the cost didn’t include bleachers and lights for the school’s football field. However, a state grant and low bids led the DeKalb School District 428 school board to approve the purchase of bleachers and lights. 

DeKalb has been playing football games at Northern Illinois University’s Huskie Stadium for years. The addition of bleachers and lights will allow the Barbs to play home games at the new high school.

Our youngsters might not be able to work a trigonometric identity to save their lives, but they'll have more flexible practice hours for outdoor sports.  Never mind that the contingency fund (a reserve that might come in handy in the event of sovereign default in Springfield) gets tapped to provide the lights.

OUCH.  Kyle-Anne Shiver dismisses Our President in one sentence.

When candidate Hillary Clinton jabbed that Obama would have to “learn on the job,” she had no idea what an understatement that was. Obama’s real task was to grow up while on the job as president.

She deals unsparingly with Our President.  Her column, however, ought not be viewed as an endorsement of Any [Republican?] But Obama.

CHANGE WE CAN BELIEVE IN.  Washington Post columnist Daniel de Vise adopts the Cold Spring Shops position on higher education.  (Each link goes to that segment of the manifesto.)


***
1. Measure student learning | 2. End merit aid | 3. Three-year degrees | 4. Core curriculum | 5. More homework | 6. Encourage completion | 7. Cap athletic subsidies | 8. Rethink remediation | Which idea is best? Vote now.
***

I exaggerate, but only slightly.  We could spar over national assessment tests (markets are environments in which evaluation and selection is forever at work) or merit aid (don't admit unprepared people and the issue goes away), but your Superintendent is not going to argue with "Generations of Americans went to college to learn a common core of human knowledge: Plato's 'Republic.' Darwin's 'Origin of Species.' 'The Iliad' and 'The Odyssey.' The rise and fall of Greece and Rome. Enough Latin to read the school motto and enough Shakespeare to drop quotes at cocktail parties."  Nor with "Students don't work as hard because they don't have to."  Nor with "Stop re-teaching high school in community college."  It's not quite sending the high schools a bill for the remedial students they heave up, but when the status quo isn't working ...

The dean at Anonymous Community and Historiann are both holding bull sessions.

If one of the house organs of the Eastern Liberal Establishment isn't enough, consider an essay along similar lines in the house organ of the Academic Establishment.

What good does it do to increase the number of students in college if the ones who are already there are not learning much? Would it not make more sense to improve the quality of education before we increase the quantity of students?

Turf out the disengaged and the party animals and the time servers and it's no longer a before and after.  But when The Chronicle of Higher Education takes up the cry of unprepared students and administrative bloat, it's a good day at Cold Spring Shops.

Increasingly, undergraduates are not prepared adequately in any academic area but often arrive with strong convictions about their abilities. So college professors routinely encounter students who have never written anything more than short answers on exams, who do not read much at all, who lack foundational skills in math and science, yet are completely convinced of their abilities and resist any criticism of their work, to the point of tears and tantrums: "But I earned nothing but A's in high school," and "Your demands are unreasonable." Such a combination makes some students nearly unteachable.

Sometimes it's up to professors to develop a spine.

Everybody who is drafted by the Green Bay Packers got some votes for the all-conference team.  But some of those all-conference types will still get the request to see the coach and bring your playbook.  And everybody who enrolls in a top graduate program has a transcript from somewhere with high grades.  But some people can't manage income and substitution effects.

As the college-age population declines, many tuition-driven institutions struggle to find enough paying customers to balance their budgets. That makes it necessary to recruit even more unprepared students, who then must be retained, shifting the burden for academic success away from the student and on to the teacher. Faculty members can work with an individual student, if they have time, but the capabilities of the student population as a whole define the average level of rigor that is sustainable in the classroom. At some institutions, graduation rates are so high because the academic expectations are so low. Failing a lot of students is a serious risk, financially, for the college and the professor.

Access, assessment, remediation, retention, subprime.  Meanwhile striving students who lack the finances or the social connections to get into an institution where some of their classmates might be smart and motivated, even if the curriculum is coreless or trendy, end up in the academic gulags.

 Contingent faculty members, who are paid so little, routinely teach course loads that are impossible to sustain without cutting a lot of corners. One would think that tenured faculty members, at least, would have the time to focus on student learning, but, as the proportion of tenured professors has declined, the service expectations on the ones remaining have increased considerably, turning a growing number of tenured professors into part-time administrators. At the same time, research expectations for tenure-track faculty members have escalated steadily. Teaching becomes a distraction from the activities that are most highly rewarded. The easiest way to save time in the classroom is to limit assignments that require personalized feedback and to give grades that are higher than students expect.

My mood would be better if more students would read, understand, and act on the feedback they do receive.  It would be better if there were fewer trendy projects, started with great fanfare only to be abandoned, that suck up faculty time endlessly tweaking the wording on documents that will later be misplaced or ignored.  It would be better if I could carve out a few more hours of thinking time.

Students may be enjoying high self-esteem, but college teachers seem to be suffering from a lack of self-confidence. It starts in graduate school, when we begin to fear we are destined for unemployment, when we compare our pay with that of comparably educated professionals, and when we realize that—for all the sacrifices that we've made, often with idealistic motives—we are held in slight regard. Many people even think of us as subversives who "hate America." During the latest economic crisis—perhaps the endpoint of a 40-year slide—many of us have felt as if we've become expendable, if we are employed at all. That makes it hard for us to make strong demands on our students, or, perhaps more important, to stand up for any kind of change in our institutions.

This last point is a call for faculty to develop a spine. Tenure might lead to compensating salary differentials. It is also an opportunity to show good stewardship of the institution, perhaps by saying no when it's required.

After the Establishment's case, the Pope Center's proposal for North Carolina looks moderate.

In order to ensure that budget cuts lead to better quality and efficiency, we recommend that the following six criteria be used to determine whether to reduce or eliminate appropriations: 1) reducing excessive costs or excessive growth, 2) improving quality, 3) eliminating politicization, 4) eliminating “mission creep,” 5) eliminating redundancy, and 6) eliminating programs no longer needed due to changing conditions.

Not time to declare victory and go home, but perhaps time to go work on the railroad for a while.

DEVELOPING THOSE MISSING MEN.

Kay Hymowitz's tour of Guyland elicits rebuttals.  Art of Manliness suggests she check her premises.

These kinds of articles also always frame the issue in a way that makes all modern men seem like boobs, with the implication that all modern women are paragons of maturity and success (just look at the picture above that ran with the article!). Are men the only ones who need work? You would never see an article called, “Where Have All the Good Women Gone?”

Also, I have a feeling that these articles just perpetuate the low expectations that society has for young men today. The articles and books simply stereotype all men as loutish, clueless, neanderthals. If you want men to man up, we need to highlight the positive examples of masculinity in society and expect more from men instead of throwing up our hands and exclaiming “Men! What can you do?” How about an article on the fact that tens of thousands of men are extremely interested in bettering themselves these days? How about an article on the fact that while a lot of men grew up without a strong male mentor in their lives, and do in fact feel a little lost, they earnestly want to catch up on what they missed out on and are  eager to become the best husbands, brothers, and citizens they can be?

Although her focus is primarily on Culture War themes, Dr. Helen recognizes the same point.

One professor Hymowitz mentions says:

The men come into class with their backward baseball caps and the “word processor ate my homework” excuses. Meanwhile the women are checking their day planners and asking for recommendations to law school.

If women were showing disinterest or not engaging in conversation at college, the big question would be: “what are we doing wrong, and how can we get them engaged?” When men tune out, they are good-for-nothing slackers. Perhaps if men were welcomed into this conversation, they wouldn’t need to sit back in stony silence.

There is a relatively simple corrective to the slouchers. Printer failed? Have it ready an hour or two before it's due. Stop enabling helplessness, get less of it.  Or is Ms Hymowitz suggesting that too many academic men are capons, unwilling or unable to lean on the lads?

IT'S CALLED A COMPENSATING DIFFERENTIAL, AND IT MATTERS.

Voluntary Xchange explains in the best telegraphic form.

Tenure is a form of compensation, and a pretty good one at that.

If you cut tenure, you’re cutting compensation.

And, cutting compensation makes you less competitive with other states. Utah already knows this: the state is known for lower salaries, higher benefits, and compensation that is comparable to other states.

In sum, if you cut tenure, you’re going to end up having to raise salaries to continue to attract new people willing to take the risk.

Perhaps the bill should be retitled the More Expensive Utah Higher Education Act.

The analysis requires faculty to have other job options.  That's almost certainly true of economists.   Humanities Ph.D.s, they notoriously of coffeehouses and bookstores in college towns, might be different, although if the industrial reserve army of underemployed Ph.D.s comprises participants in a tournament, in which a tenure track appointment is a seeding, and tenure a prize, take away the prize and perhaps the reserve army goes away too.

FASTER AND MORE FREQUENT.  In the current political climate, another round of grants for Passenger Rail projects seems unlikely, but Milwaukee mayor Tom Barrett has a proposal ready to go should a request be issued.

The state of Wisconsin won $810 million in stimulus money to create high-speed rail service between Milwaukee and Madison, but Gov. Scott Walker returned the money to the federal government after his election in November. Barrett said that was a loss to Milwaukee's efforts to attract businesses and people, but said he will pursue rail grants for the Milwaukee-to-Chicago line the next time the federal government accepts applications for rail money.

"Within the next few years, we will need additional trains on the Milwaukee-Chicago run," Barrett said. "That would increase our daily trains from seven to nine or even more and further strengthen Milwaukee’s economy."

The figure of merit for The Milwaukee Road is twelve trains each way each day, perhaps with more even spacing, and the running time to beat is seventy-five minutes. Some of these things could be accomplished relatively cheaply.

It appears, though, as if new rolling stock is being prepared.  The manufacturer is considering moving its train factory to Illinois.  (There's an interurban factory a-building in Rochelle that might be material for a post one of these days.)

Talgo plant in Milwaukee
Fox 6 photograph.

Change the white to orange, make the red maroon, and add some gray trim and gold lettering and you'd have something spectacular.

GETTING THE MODEL RIGHT.

Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel editor Ricardo Pimentel contemplates the quasi-privatization of The University of Wisconsin (at Madison).

The Madison campus apparently wants to secede from the University of Wisconsin System, becoming a more privatized hybrid - still sucking up tax dollars, just fewer.

In an environment of state austerity, such a proposal has its attractions.  State legislatures, or political appointees, continue to micromanage 100% of a state university's work, while paying for 25% or less of it.  Mr Pimentel fears that such a step would contribute further to social stratification.

California, my birth state, has a two-tier, four-year public university system. There is the California State University system and the more exalted, hard-to-get-into, chi-chi University of California system.

The UC acronym appears before such locales as Berkeley, Santa Cruz and Santa Barbara. Though there is some duplication in locales, we're talking about such places as Fresno, San Bernardino and Bakersfield for the Cal States.

If you're getting the impression that "two-tier," as Wisconsin used to have, means two different types of colleges, you wouldn't be far off. When I was growing up, struggling folks with good-but-not-great-grades went to Cal State. Brainiacs and those with money went to UC.

That "as Wisconsin used to have" refers to the structure 40 years ago, in which The University of Wisconsin had its main campus at Madison, a branch in Milwaukee, and some up and coming centers, at the time limited to the first two years, elsewhere in the state, and the Wisconsin State University System operated a number of converted teachers' colleges-cum-party schools in the hinterlands.  The state's policy at the time was to ensure a space in a state-supported university for anyone who finished in the top half of his or her high school class.  The thick envelope from Madison, however, corroborated one's brainiac status; the social set could evaluate Whitewater or Oshkosh on the merits of its parties.  Milwaukee Hamilton's National Merit finalists, however, grasped the caste system; in those days a finalist could request information from any three universities, and the joke ran "Princeton, Harvard, UWM."

UW-Milwaukee aspires to be a major research university. In fact, only two UW campuses have doctoral programs - Madison and Milwaukee.

The California-Wisconsin analogy doesn't totally fit. The UCs remain public. Now, imagine how pronounced the gaps would be if it were "quasi public." It would be an upper-crust, research university and then schools that don't even make the also-rans in that crucial research category.

 Milwaukee has long aspired to something more academically. Pursuing basketball greatness in the Horizon League isn't likely to do that. Putting more resources into engineering and urban planning and computer sciences and business might.

"Access" colleges provide an avenue to higher ed for challenged communities, and then there are those elite, research universities - hard to get into, breaking the bank when you do. And the problem here is that, alone among the state's universities, Milwaukee needs to be both - an access university and a major research university.

Mr Pimentel here conflates two kinds of access, one being the pernicious form of admitting unprepared students, the other being the economic form of subsidizing tuitions for promising but financially strapped students. There are at least two perspectives one can take toward those subsidies.  One is that they are regressive transfers to people who will become rich later in life.  The other is that they are a social contract with future generations that current legislatures have broken.  The reality, as Mr Pimentel notes, is that a striving student can no longer work his way through one of the elite universities with a full-time summer job and a part-time academic year job.

I'm not arguing for another tier for Milwaukee because it's so different from other campuses, but recognition that we lose something when public universities become less so. It communicates an abdication of public responsibility for higher education. We've been abdicating for years, levels of state funding steadily declining.

That puts Mr Pimentel in the broken social contract camp.  Perhaps so.  What matters, though, to the citizens of Wisconsin is that Milwaukee, despite having neither high-visibility football nor royalties from rat poison, now has more Wisconsin residents enrolled than Madison, and Milwaukee's part of the social contract is to make sure that its brainiacs and strivers get the intellectual challenge they might have hoped to get at Madison, had Madison provided a slot for them.  The incentive to the former teachers' colleges ought to be to lift their academic profiles as well.

FINDING THOSE MISSING MEN.  Kay Hymowitz takes a tour of Guyland, suggests different origins.

Not so long ago, the average American man in his 20s had achieved most of the milestones of adulthood: a high-school diploma, financial independence, marriage and children. Today, most men in their 20s hang out in a novel sort of limbo, a hybrid state of semi-hormonal adolescence and responsible self-reliance. This "pre-adulthood" has much to recommend it, especially for the college-educated. But it's time to state what has become obvious to legions of frustrated young women: It doesn't bring out the best in men.

There might be more than one cause, and forty years into the aftereffects of the Consciousness Revolution, it may be too soon to identify any tendency.  An anecdote from pop culture, however, is a bad place to start social science.

Where have the good men gone? Their male peers often come across as aging frat boys, maladroit geeks or grubby slackers—a gender gap neatly crystallized by the director Judd Apatow in his hit 2007 movie "Knocked Up." The story's hero is 23-year-old Ben Stone (Seth Rogen), who has a drunken fling with Allison Scott (Katherine Heigl) and gets her pregnant. Ben lives in a Los Angeles crash pad with a group of grubby friends who spend their days playing videogames, smoking pot and unsuccessfully planning to launch a porn website. Allison, by contrast, is on her way up as a television reporter and lives in a neatly kept apartment with what appear to be clean sheets and towels. Once she decides to have the baby, she figures out what needs to be done and does it. Ben can only stumble his way toward being a responsible grownup.

The plots of movies and sitcoms might identify some causes and miss others. Where have the good men gone?  Years ago, yelled at by a proto-feminist for holding a door open?  In contemporary sitcoms and movies, the sounding board for all her troubles, but never the steady date, let alone the mate?  Where's the incentive to be good, if to be good is to be ignored or relied upon in a crisis only or scorned?  But perhaps a longer perspective is helpful.

Unlike adolescents, however, pre-adults don't know what is supposed to come next. For them, marriage and parenthood come in many forms, or can be skipped altogether. In 1970, just 16% of Americans ages 25 to 29 had never been married; today that's true of an astonishing 55% of the age group. In the U.S., the mean age at first marriage has been climbing toward 30 (a point past which it has already gone in much of Europe). It is no wonder that so many young Americans suffer through a "quarter-life crisis," a period of depression and worry over their future.

Given the rigors of contemporary career-building, pre-adults who do marry and start families do so later than ever before in human history. Husbands, wives and children are a drag on the footloose life required for the early career track and identity search. Pre-adulthood has also confounded the primordial search for a mate. It has delayed a stable sense of identity, dramatically expanded the pool of possible spouses, mystified courtship routines and helped to throw into doubt the very meaning of marriage. In 1970, to cite just one of many numbers proving the point, nearly seven in 10 25-year-olds were married; by 2000, only one-third had reached that milestone.

American men have been struggling with finding an acceptable adult identity since at least the mid-19th century. We often hear about the miseries of women confined to the domestic sphere once men began to work in offices and factories away from home. But it seems that men didn't much like the arrangement either. They balked at the stuffy propriety of the bourgeois parlor, as they did later at the banal activities of the suburban living room. They turned to hobbies and adventures, like hunting and fishing. At midcentury, fathers who at first had refused to put down the money to buy those newfangled televisions changed their minds when the networks began broadcasting boxing matches and baseball games. The arrival of Playboy in the 1950s seemed like the ultimate protest against male domestication; think of the refusal implied by the magazine's title alone.

Do your own thing: coopted by the bourgeoisie? The column is an excerpt from Ms Hymowitz's forthcoming Manning Up: How the Rise of Women Has Turned Men Into Boys.  That's likely to be material for a future Book Review.  The Consciousness Revolution?  Yet another experiment against reality?

THROW-DOWN IN MAD-TOWN.  A week ago, it was a basketball game between Wisconsin and the at the time unbeaten and top-ranked Ohio State men.  This week, it's ... Gettysburg?

Suddenly, all of the nation’s eyes are on Madison, Wisconsin, as a national battle long in the brewing was set off by the sudden reversal of political fortune last fall in the historical home of the “progressive” movement, when Republicans took over the statehouse and governorship. Public employee unions have been the last redoubt of the union movement, with unionized workers less than ten percent of the private work force. They have served to create an unvirtuous cycle of political graft and contribution that has long played a key element in Democrat electoral strategy, one that was crucial to Barack Obama’s winning the White House in 2008 and will be so again next year. And if they lose in this previously most “progressive” of states, others will surely follow, not just in the upper Midwest, but potentially across the country even to leftist bastions like California, whose shores managed to avoid November’s political tsunami.

So the Democrats, including the president, have correctly assessed that if their public-employee union allies lose this battle and are no longer able to demand ever-increasing wages and benefits, and funnel much of them from their (many of them unwilling) members to Democrat campaign coffers, their political fortunes will fall even further from their well-deserved “shellacking” in November. Like the coming loss of seats due to redistricting, this will be an even greater consequence of this election than mere loss of seats, due to its long-term strategic implications. And so concerned are they that they’ve even been willing to let slip the mask of “moderate” and “centrist” from the president to help their minions.

Several historical analogies to this event have been made over the past few days. Some have called it “Greece with snow,” as those receiving state largess have been rioting and protesting over even a slight diminution of it. Others have compared it to recent events in Egypt, which now threaten or promise (depending on one’s point of view of the desirability of the projected outcome) to cause the rest of the region to fall like so many dominoes, releasing a long-pent-up potential energy. It has even been analogized to the Spanish Civil War, a decidedly uncomfortable fit, given that it was a battle that both sides should have lost, from the standpoint of those who favor individual liberty and not various flavors of collectivism.

Pajamas’ own Richard Fernandez, in also noting the Egypt analogy, has pointed out similarities with the Battle of Jutland, an “accidental” naval battle in the First World War, accidental in the sense that its location was contingent on an external event and that, while such a clash was inevitable at some point, the location had not been planned by either side. The problem with this analogy is that, while it was the greatest naval engagement of the war, with huge casualties on both sides, it wasn’t really strategically decisive, and ultimately had little influence on the outcome (unless perhaps one wants to counterfactual that the Lusitania somehow wouldn’t have been sunk in its absence, and America not been drawn in to the war).

From that standpoint, I think that a more interesting analogy is Gettysburg.

It's certainly a major event, and it's flared up quickly.  Fourteen Democratic state senators, using a quorum call in lieu of a filibuster, have decamped to Illinois (one was interviewed from an undisclosed location somewhere in DeKalb), and one of them, elected by a slim margin in a normally Republican district in 2008, is subject to recall.

The dispute between the new Wisconsin governor and the state employee unions might be more politics as usual, or it might be special interests trumping the public interest, and it has Franklin D. Roosevelt turning up in unusual places.

"The process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service," Roosevelt wrote in 1937 to the National Federation of Federal Employees. Yes, public workers may demand fair treatment, wrote Roosevelt. But, he wrote, "I want to emphasize my conviction that militant tactics have no place" in the public sector. "A strike of public employees manifests nothing less than an intent on their part to prevent or obstruct the operations of Government."

And if you're the kind of guy who capitalizes "government," woe betide such obstructionists.

Only two weeks since the Super Bowl, just a week after that basketball game, and those seem so far away.

Meanwhile, Illinois has just raised a flat tax rate in such a way as to reduce the pay of all state employees, and new state employees have a pension with different provisions than long-term employees.

EXCESS DEMAND FOR ONE TYPE OF UNIVERSITY, EXCESS CAPACITY IN ANOTHER?  Tyler Cowen sees the opportunity for universities to move up the academic food chain, should they be so inclined.

The price of higher education is rising -- rapidly -- and yet a) individual universities do not have strong incentives to take in larger classes, and b) it is hard to start a new, good college or university.  The key question is how much a) and b) are remediable in the longer run and if so then there is some chance that the current structure of higher education is a bubble of sorts. 

A bubble there might be, and at the same time it coexists with a positional arms race. Thus, the fix.

I never see the authors utter the sentence: "There are plenty wanna-bee professors discarded on the compost heap of academic history."  Yet the best discard should not be much worse, and may even be better, than the marginally accepted professor.  Such a large pool of surplus labor would play a significant role in an economic analysis of virtually any other sector.

To some extent, that pool is wasted. Interview with a few top departments and a few middling departments, don't make the cut at the top departments, now deal with we're-not-as-good-as and don't-make-us-look-bad and with the guilt trippers who will enable weak students and call it access.

Matt Yglesias suggests that more subprime capacity will help contain costs.

What you could plausibly hope to see happen is the creation of an institution of higher education that’s (a) much worse than the University of Michigan, (b) better than nothing, (c) radically cheaper than the University of Michigan, and (d) scalable. Then you could imagine a model like that moving incrementally up the quality ladder.

Isn't it simpler to have the institutions closer in mission, staffing, and student body to Michigan to be more like Michigan, and for the institutions closer to Eastern Michigan to be more like Eastern Michigan, and so on ... the institutions not capable of lifting their game at all, or of finding students who can meet the demands, get shaken out?