FLATLANDERS ARE NOT NEW ENGLANDERS.  The Midwest's worst drivers resist the rotary.

"I've never been on one in America," said Alice Zator, whose business sits at the planned roundabout site on Oak Park Avenue and 183rd Street. "My concern is, are there other options? Why would we do something that's not familiar to the Midwest?"

Her reaction is a common one as Illinois joins neighboring states such as Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio and Indiana in embracing roundabouts for their increased safety.

At least 10 roundabouts have recently been considered or launched in the Chicago area. The intersections consist of a center island surrounded by a one-way lane of traffic where drivers yield to circling cars without the instruction of stop signs or traffic signals.

If I understand Ms. Zator's statement, she has encountered such things overseas, but she's never been to Massachusetts, or to New York, two states with a common border but different right-of-way rules for use of the rotary.

Rotaries are effective at taming traffic and expediting traffic flow, particularly compared to streets with badly timed traffic lights and left-turn reservations at each signalled crossing.  But Midwestern traffic engineers have a tendency to overdesign them.  In Wisconsin, a driver must often choose which lane to use to enter the rotary, and the simple YIELD sign that suffices to enforce right-of-way is overshadowed with an expressway-style gantry designating the lanes to choose.  Worst of both possible worlds.

A MODEST PROFIT.  Economic forecasting is hard.  Northern Illinois University's football program, contrary to the Superintendent's pessimistic expectations, returned about $50K above avoidable costs to the athletic department from their Humanitarian Bowl win.

Avoidable costs are lower for an early bowl game, as the cost of keeping the lights on in the stadium for practice until the New Year are avoided.  Humanitarian Bowl promoters also encourage Boise residents to attend the game for the entertainment value.

There is no such promotion for the Motor City Bowl, the game the Mid-American title game winner automatically qualifies to play in.  The Mid-American title game also takes place in Detroit, and it's very much a case of second place, two weeks in Detroit, first place, a week in Detroit.

On the one hand, Motor City Bowl promoters might encourage Detroiters to attend the game.  There's probably more play value in that game than there is in watching the Lions.  On the other hand, Detroiters don't have a lot of disposable income, attempts to promote car exports notwithstanding.

HERE ONCE THE EMBATTLED FARMERS STOOD,
AND FIRED THE SHOT HEARD ROUND THE WORLD.
(Reprinted from the April 2008 archive.)

Please visit Forward Movement's chronology of the events of April 18 and 19, 1775, with excerpts from primary sources, and the Right Wing Nut House exegesis of "Paul Revere's Ride."

"Concord Hymn" by Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Photo courtesy S. Ells in Thoreau Country.

Let [petty] tyrants shake their iron rods,
And Slav'ry clank her galling chains.
We fear them not, we trust in God.
New England's God forever reigns.

William Billings, Chester. (The version I learned included the "petty.")

HERE I STAND.  Let us not issue meaningless degrees and pretend that we are educated.

We too would be interested to know what President Obama thinks truly educated people should know, and how colleges should teach them. One thing is certain; sending more students to college won’t make the United States the best-educated nation. It may not even make us more competitive globally. As Peter Wood wrote

It could, however, accelerate the decline of many ordinary colleges and universities. That’s because the flood of new students would mean drastically lowered academic standards, a further erosion of the quality of campus life, and an over-abundance of people holding college degrees.

Why sacrifice quality for quantity? Higher education should be marked by rigor, thoughtfulness, hard work, an earnest search for true knowledge, and a certain gravity. Pumping up the size of enrollments to meet the 2020 goal will spread these qualities thin like too little butter on a giant slice of toast.

The article refers to numerous elaborations on the argument.

THE CASE FOR PRIVATIZING INFRASTRUCTURE.  Destination: Freedom notes a request from the trucking business to relax the load limits on highways.

Continuing its decades-long assault on the taxpayer-financed public highway system, the trucking lobby this week engineered the introduction of a Senate bill that if approved would allow states to decide whether to allow 97,000-pound trucks on highways, “breaking a 20-year federal freeze on truck sizes and weights” as reported by the Journal of Commerce. The bill is named “The Senate Safe and Efficient Transportation Act,” although many would disagree with the title’s allusion to “safety.”

That last sentence is clearly editorializing. The distorting effect of road taxes is in the details of the act.

JOC Reporter William B. Cassidy writes: “It’s the latest action in a long-running battle over the freeze on federal truck size and weight limits Congress imposed in the surface transportation law of 1991. The bill would give states the authority to lift the 80,000 pound gross vehicle weight limit, but only for tractor-trailers with six axles instead of the usual five.

The additional axle does not affect truck size, but it does allow shippers to utilize extra cargo space in the trailer, effectively adding capacity without adding trucks. The Coalition for Transportation Productivity, a group of more than 180 shippers and trucking companies, supports lifting the truck weight limit.

One additional axle assembly to beat up the road, no net change in axle loading to beat up the bridges. Would the trucking companies make the same decision if they had the responsibility for maintaining their rights-of-way?

FOLLOW THE EXCESS DEMAND.  Sherman Dorn is not impressed with a local newspaper hyping college-acceptance anxiety.

The truth about college-admission anxieties is that wealthy parents and school officials in wealthy communities have done far more to perpetuate such anxieties than anything George W. Bush did either as governor or president. Quick question: did commercial test-prep books flood your nearest bookstore before or after former President Bush signed NCLB in January 2002? As David Labaree points out, plenty of parents push for public schools to serve their private interests, in this case by helping their children gain admission into nominally elite colleges and universities. As Maryland teacher Ken Bernstein told me when I suggested that Race to Nowhere ignored the fact that most colleges were non-competitive: "parents of my AP kids don't want to hear about non-competitive colleges."

Rightly or wrongly, parents of AP kids might perceive the non-competitive colleges as subprime party schools, or as purveyors of degrees etiolated by the imperatives of Retention and Completion.

He goes on with some suggestions for anxious parents, and for high schoolers contemplating college.

You can control your own academic work; you cannot control idiosyncratic decisions that try to split admissions from rejections for large groups of students who have very similar academic records. The second stage is the part of college admissions that's a crapshoot, and our advice to our daughter was that instead of trying to "look good" by guessing and then gaming what presumably colleges are looking for, it made much better sense just to be herself and not worry about the part of decision-making that was much more random than the "would graduate if admitted" filter. This advice was pretty easy parenting because that was how she was treating the admissions process, and so what we said was more a matter of inoculating her against later anxieties when we thought her friends might be talking about their own admissions anxieties. 

As it turned out, my daughter had a reasonable choice of institutions that admitted her, and of her close friends in high school, I think there was only one case of a rejection by a first-choice school. The limits on where her friends could attend college was not who admitted them but what they and their parents could afford. I can assure you all that the Rutgers and Georgia Tech financial aid offices have missed huge opportunities with two incredibly hardworking young women, but faculty at the University of Florida will gain the benefit.

His favorable mention of Florida contrasts with the attitude of one of the students interviewed by St. Petersburg Times reporter Rebecca Catalanello.

But now, a little more than a week after colleges finished notifying students of their admissions decisions, [St. Petersburg High senior Marcus] Carter isn't feeling like the star pupil people tell him he is. He applied to five schools, then found himself wait-listed at his top two choices and denied at a third. Though accepted at his two safety schools — the University of Florida and the University of Central Florida — he's holding out hope that when things shake out at Duke University, he will rise off the wait list.

In Professor Dorn's view, Mr Carter and many of the anxious students and parents, advanced placement or not, are crying with their mouths full.

I'm not worried about my daughter's friends, nor would I be if they had expressed concerns about all the "problems" of students Catalanello followed. I am far more worried about students I teach (or students like them) who have problems affording books, or being able to study more each week than working, or who make poor choices about how to spend weekends. I worry about students who think a 10-12 page term paper is too long. I worry about students who are in violent relationships. I worry about students for all sorts of real problems, but not whether they got some notional prize for being admitted to all the competitive colleges they applied to.

And his daughter applying to Florida apparently without reference to its Big Time Sports prowess, and Mr Carter treating Gainesville as a safety school, suggest that the Popular Perspective of Big Time Sports as front porch is misplaced.

The latest must-have item for a big-time college football program is a statue, or statues, The Orlando Sentinel reported. The University of Florida, the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa and Auburn University have all recently unveiled statues of football greats (coaches and players). The article noted that these honors are not just coming at the end of careers, as might have been the case in the past.

Sports statues: the new marker of a safety school?

INADVERTENTLY ORGANIZING A COMMUNITY?  Freedom Works have put together what Hot Air's Ed Morrissey describes as a mashup of clips from the recently released Atlas Shrugged movie with soundbites from Our President and assorted other politicians.

The video has already been Instalanched. It responds to a request Mr Morrissey made in his review of the movie.

Politicians and lobbyists scream about fairness and the need to force the wealthy to pay their share in order to show compassion.  In fact, the producers could have placed large blocs of Barack Obama’s entitlement-reform speech from last Wednesday into the film, and it would have fit neatly into the narrative.

The review also suggests that ferroequinologists will never lack for work.

When the novel was first published in 1957, the rail industry was still a central key to the American economy.  The film takes place in the near future, starting in 2016, and cleverly uses a global energy crisis to return rail to a central position in American industry. 

Rail has been returning to a central position in American industry, commencing, oh, about 1986, as the major carriers adapted to the Staggers Act, a policy development that doesn't fit the Randians' narrative.  What intrigues, though, is the profligate use of energy in the casting of tube rounds -- not the billets you'd expect as the starting castings for rails -- of Rearden Metal and the development of Acela-styled power cars for diesel freight trains in the movie excerpts.

BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR.  Run away to Illinois State University for the circus, read about their capital budgeting.

Since its inception in 1961, Hancock Stadium has served as the Illinois State football team’s home landscape.


The venue’s chain linked fences and metal bleachers have also been identified as one of the first welcome gateways to campus with the stadium serving as a visual point at the busiest intersection on campus.


“I hope we can see renovations soon. I’ve seen high school stadiums bigger than Hancock,” Pat Potter, a member of Red Alert and the Big Red Marching Machine band, said—painting a transparent picture for the shape of the university’s 15,000-seat stadium.

It's not a lament about how the misplaced priorities at high schools are straining State's mathematics and writing programs with remedial students. It's not even about the band director having problems recruiting performers.

Daily Vidette photograph by Nathan Kelly.

Looks like a smaller version of Huskie Stadium as it appeared when I first hired out here.  But Northern Illinois has visions of being the next Boise State that have nothing to do with invidious comparisons of economics departments, and Illinois State hopes to be the next Northern Illinois.  But first they hope to beat Southern Illinois into Division I.

Crowds of less than 6,000 filed into Hancock this past season. Attendance could be boosted with renovations. Southern Illinois recently built a state-of-the-art Saluki Stadium, which replaced the worn down McAndrew Stadium. The team’s first game in 2010 was a sellout and the program saw substantial increase in attendance.


Renovating Hancock Stadium is a necessary step in the long-term goal of turning the Redbirds from a Division I-AA FCS football program and into a Division I-A FBS (Bowl Series) program.


“I think Illinois State has a lot of potential in football that has been untapped. When it comes time to move up to [the Bowl series level], it will happen, I truly believe that with my heart. First, though, we have to build a football program to a stature where it’s consistently successful on a yearly basis. Coach Spack has exceeded that in his two years and I believe he’ll continue to grow the program to where it’s nationally recognized and as that happens, with stadium enhancements, then we could be in that position,” [Illinois State president Al] Bowman said.

Southern's football team continues to play in I-AA.  Their use of student fees to subsidize otherwise uninteresting sports teams, particularly basketball, continues to be unproductive.

CREDENTIALS FOR THEIR OWN SAKE.  The Popular Perspective holds that expanded production of college degrees expands opportunity, and the middle class.  See, e.g., the G. I. Bill.

Oops.

Call-center company 24/7 Customer Pvt. Ltd. is desperate to find new recruits who can answer questions by phone and email. It wants to hire 3,000 people this year. Yet in this country of 1.2 billion people, that is beginning to look like an impossible goal.


So few of the high school and college graduates who come through the door can communicate effectively in English, and so many lack a grasp of educational basics such as reading comprehension, that the company can hire just three out of every 100 applicants.

It's not a dystopian novel, and it's not the fruits of bilingual non-education gone sour, or multiculturalism substituting grievance for learning.

India projects an image of a nation churning out hundreds of thousands of students every year who are well educated, a looming threat to the better-paid middle-class workers of the West. Their abilities in math have been cited by President Barack Obama as a reason why the U.S. is facing competitive challenges. 

Yet 24/7 Customer's experience tells a very different story. Its increasing difficulty finding competent employees in India has forced the company to expand its search to the Philippines and Nicaragua. Most of its 8,000 employees are now based outside of India. 

In the nation that made offshoring a household word, 24/7 finds itself so short of talent that it is having to offshore. 

"With India's population size, it should be so much easier to find employees," says S. Nagarajan, founder of the company. "Instead, we're scouring every nook and cranny."

Mercantilists in the United States would be doing themselves no favours by introducing rubrics, self-esteem, assessment, and inclusive learning. Administrative tradition in India, coupled with a belief in the credentials rather than in education, is drag enough.

Business executives say schools are hampered by overbearing bureaucracy and a focus on rote learning rather than critical thinking and comprehension. Government keeps tuition low, which makes schools accessible to more students, but also keeps teacher salaries and budgets low. What's more, say educators and business leaders, the curriculum in most places is outdated and disconnected from the real world. 

"If you pay peanuts, you get monkeys," says Vijay Thadani, chief executive of New Delhi-based NIIT Ltd. India, a recruitment firm that also runs job-training programs for college graduates lacking the skills to land good jobs.

Next, the education lobby and Our President will suggest we can do India one better by ensuring that all baccalaureates have a master's as an entitlement.  On the other hand, perhaps someone in India will borrow a page from Cold Spring Shops and make the high schools reimburse the colleges for the do-overs.

Another survey, conducted annually by Pratham, a nongovernmental organization that aims to improve education for the poor, looked at grade-school performance at 13,000 schools across India. It found that about half of the country's fifth graders can't read at a second-grade level.


At stake is India's ability to sustain growth—its economy is projected to expand 9% this year—while maintaining its advantages as a low-cost place to do business.

Or perhaps somebody will invoke the not-invented here argument.  (Via Phi Beta Cons.)

The critical point to keep in mind is that low wages are a signal of low productivity.  There comes a level of economic activity at which continued economic growth includes competition for workers.

But before you get too cocky, consider the facts on the ground here.

At the margin, the incremental resources (students) produced from higher education investments are adding less and less output (manifested in employment income) to the economy, as more of them are forced to take relatively low paying jobs. The number of new college graduates exceeds the numbers of new jobs that truly require higher level education skills—mostly positions in management, technical areas, or the professions. Moreover, more and more of the incremental enrollment resulting from higher government subsidies in modern times consists of students lacking the cognitive skills, discipline, prior educational training, etc., necessary for mastering higher order intellectual material.

And yet higher education's special pleaders will persist in scouring the country for those not-yet-discovered high achievers who are somehow still being denied their shot at a degree.

A CIRCUS DAY AT COLLEGE.

Illinois State University is home to the Gamma Phi Circus, a program in the College of Applied Science and Technology.

Lyric Hoop.

Saturday was also World Circus Day.

Look closely at the picture, you might see the light sabers being wielded by children.  The median age of the audience is about ten, high for a circus, but a collegiate circus will bring in parents and friends of the performers.  The spotters are performers in other routines, there's no doubling in brass but a lot of filling in as prop roustabouts by the cast.  Clowns, juggling, various acrobatic performances, aerial acts, good show.

PLUGGING AWAY AT THE READING.  There's been little time to post lately, and griping about the workload doesn't make for interesting posting.  Work does progress on the Fifty Book Challenge, with the first quarter report ready for filing.  The links go to the review at the Challenge.  Some books are particularly good (+); others particularly bad (-)

1. How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation, 11 January 2011 (-).
2. Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free, 13 January 2011 (-).
3. Boomer Destiny: Leading the U.S. through the Worst Crisis Since the Great Depression, 16 January 2011 (-).
4. A Liberal Tool Kit: Progressive Responses to Conservative Arguments, 17 January 2011.
5. Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men: Understanding the Critical Years Between 16 and 26, 21 January 2011 (-).
6. Punching Out:  One Year in a Closing Auto Plant, 30 January 2011.
7. Super Sad True Love Story. 27 March 2011.

There are some books stacked and ready for review, and the bookworm will sprout more segments during the summer.

Oooooooo

(Cross-posted to European Tribune and to 50 Book Challenge)

HUMANITIES COURSES MARGINALIZE ATLAS SHRUGGED.  John Galt comes to college, all the same.

In the next two to three years, we will see a level of personnel movement in higher ed that will dwarf anything we’ve seen since the 1960’s.

I’m basing this on two observations. The first is the increasing median age of full-timers in higher ed, especially on the administrative side. The second is the extinction of pay raises.

Some commenters suggest the sluggish economic recovery gives job hoppers little hope. Perhaps so, but if the rewards to entrepreneurship, or to telecommuting from a tax haven, grow more rapidly than the rewards to teaching and scholarship, the effect will be the same.

REBELLION.

The Fort Sumter National Monument presents sesquicentennial events.

THE TRAGIC VISION.  Stephen Balch wonders whether liberty and prosperity are unsustainable for lack of appreciation of what makes it possible.

The vale of tears once taught us that it was wise to underscore the relationship between talent and reward so as to promote maximum effort. In our virtual heaven-on-earth we yearn to deem everyone a winner so as to ice prosperity with a rich coat of self-esteem. This psychological redistribution is a nice luxury, but in less favored lands there are calloused, more driven folk who have escaped its temptation.

Peter Wood, who has made the step from Cold Spring Shops's favorite academic administrator to president of the National Association of Scholars, finds much not to like in a call to religious revival in support of the ancien regime in higher education.

Of course, we can have a very good system of higher education in the United States without “substantially more public investments over current levels.”  Those current levels, driven by the delusion of mass higher education, have had the paradoxical effect of driving down academic standards and luring millions of students into unnecessary debt.  I don’t expect the federal government to extract itself from this mess anytime soon, but I do think it unlikely that Congress will substantially increase the public funds it currently squanders on higher education.

There might be a higher education bubble, and a call for additional resources in access-assessment-remediation-retention is as if a call to jump off a bridge.  And yet it is incumbent on observers of higher education's failures to draw the correct conclusions.

But [Pay Pal founder Peter] Thiel’s issues with education run even deeper. He thinks it’s fundamentally wrong for a society to pin people’s best hope for a better life on  something that is by definition exclusionary. “If Harvard were really the best education, if it makes that much of a difference, why not franchise it so more people can attend? Why not create 100 Harvard affiliates?” he says. “It’s something about the scarcity and the status. In education your value depends on other people failing. Whenever Darwinism is invoked it’s usually a justification for doing something mean. It’s a way to ignore that people are falling through the cracks, because you pretend that if they could just go to Harvard, they’d be fine. Maybe that’s not true.”

There's a reason I quip about the thirty claimants to the top ten spots in the economics league tables, and it's not just because Wisconsin is the Mother of CEOs.  We're all in the same business as Harvard, and I cannot rest until I hear a chancellor at a state flagship or a mid-major acknowledging that, and committing unapologetically to a course of upgrading his institution's academic profile.  You help the people that didn't go to Harvard (or to Yale, to remember the punchline of a song) by offering the same academic material at ZooMass or ZooConn or Northern Illinois or Anonymous Community.  (Heck, Penn State was motivated to become more like Indiana than like ZooConn upon affiliating with the Big Ten, and perhaps Nebraska's academic administration will do the same thing.  Those not skinning can hold a leg.)

YOUNGSTERS CLEAR ON THE CONCEPT.  Judging for the state Economics Concepts Poster Contest is finished, with the winning submissions available for your viewing pleasure.  The state council has posted the names of the state honorable mention submissions.

The Northern Illinois University Center for Economic Education received 300 entries from about a dozen teachers.  There will be a web page showing the regional winning and honorable mention entries.  Our web development team has been busy with other projects recently.

ECONOMICS IS NOT BUSINESS ADMINISTRATION.  Regular readers understand that some cost-cutting measures are false economies, particularly those measures that destroy institutional memory or drive business away.  That holds for higher education, in which there are market tests, even if business-faddish administrators and transgressive faculty don't want to recognize them.

A young friend of ours recently visited a public college which we at Tenured Radical have admired for years.  S/he reported conversations with undergraduates about the effects of the persistent defunding of higher ed in that state, and the ways in which defunding has diminished a quality liberal arts education that people with very little money still have access to.  A prominent problem, in the view of students there, was incessant faculty turnover due to low salaries, poorly maintained library collections and the erosion of benefits. In turn, the constant loss of faculty  made it difficult to establish mentoring relationships, get recommendations for graduate school, or do senior honors work with faculty who had helped them develop the research and had planned to advise it.

If the merit-pay policy of an organization is "we might match a better offer" the managers (or administrators or undersecretaries) have created a situation in which the organization's best people already have one foot out the door.  In higher education, where the excess demand is for credentials from serious institutions, the students recognize the consequences of the perpetual cost-cutting, and in time, cost-cutting will lead to falling enrollments leading to further cost cutting.  The sequence converges to zero.

It's useful, however, to distinguish pro-management or pro-business policies from pro-market policies.

The notion that college teachers are as interchangeable as hamburger flippers at Wendy's follows, of course, on the neoliberal notion that secondary school teachers are also interchangeable.  Furthermore, on no evidence, free marketeers have sold the notion that college professors will continue to work cheerfully, and to a high standard, for as little salary and as few benefits as colleges and universities choose to pay us.

Cheap and incompetent business gurus might be able to push the merits of speed-up to the management, but that advocacy denies the logic of a competitive market, which functions to identify and act on gains from trade. We speak of a law of supply and demand accordingly.

The only teachers you really want at your school, the logic goes, have the personalities of 18th century Franciscan missionaries in the New World, willing to sign on to thankless, ill-paid labor purely out of love for those to whom they will minister. Although this theory goes unspoken in an increasingly adjunctified world of private higher education, attacks on educational employees in New Jersey, California and Wisconsin seem to be giving new energy to strategies for disempowering and intimidating teachers at all levels.  This is particularly heartbreaking in states that seem to want to break with a long history of providing quality, public higher education to ambitious students with little money.

Never underestimate the power of a market test. In Wisconsin, there are rumblings of people turning down contracts when headquarters unilaterally changes the terms.  Eighteenth century Franciscan missionaries didn't have a Protestant Ethic or Adam Smith's society of perfect liberty as intellectual ammunition to question their lot.

One problem with free market theories for reorganizing education is that they lead to a free market in educators.  This, in turn tends not to be conducive to what administrators need to deliver a quality education to students:  faculties who commit to a particular school, and create a culture of excellence, over the long term. 

Never underestimate the power of a market test.  A free market in educators will not be conducive to administrators who dream of protecting that culture of excellence, over the long term, on the cheap.  On the other hand, those administrators who recognize that excellence over the long term cannot be obtained by a sequence of short-term downsizings and restructurings, will harvest the gains from trade that markets make possible, by offering precisely the pay packages and job descriptions that reward, rather than punish, commitment.

Policy makers who believe that free market competition creates better education for the most people have, frankly, never been in a classroom beyond their three-year hitch at Teach for America. While I don't know anyone in teaching who wouldn't consider voluntarily sacrificing money and prestige to make and keep a desired life as a college professor, I also don't know a single college professor who, on balance, believes that year to year contracts, no job security, diminishing benefits and the lowest possible pay are the basis for building a career in education.

That's called a compensating differential.  Tenure, research time during the summer, and some freedom to choose class offerings and hours the classes meet compensate for compressed salaries and short promotion ladders.  Reduce the features of the job description that compensate for, while making less attractive the features that have to be compensated for, and see how long the workforce stays.

PROGRESS. Butler's condition upgraded to serious.  Doctors aren't letting him talk yet, but he can type messages on his I-pad.  The criminal investigation continues.

ACCUMULATION OF SMALL ADVANTAGES.  In small quantities, antifreeze is relatively cheap, and at low fuel prices, the additional wind resistance offered by radiators is no big deal.  Thus, motor vehicles, until recently, did not have radiator shutters.  (Diesel locomotives, which have high-volume cooling systems for which antifreeze becomes uneconomic, have long had radiator shutters, with temperature-controlled automatic shutters being offered as early as the 1950s.)

Rising fuel prices, and competition to offer better fuel economy without turning all automobiles into golf carts, make the automatic shutter in the grille something worth developing.

[Ford vehicle engineering chief Don] Ufford said the shutters notion had been studied for years but was not practical until breakthroughs in engine computers.

Now the shutters could be opened or closed based not just on engine temperature, but outside air temperature, vehicle speed, air-conditioning demand and other factors.

Under constraints that previously didn't bind, or that didn't have a high shadow price to violate, such improvements probably weren't cost-effective.

The goal with the Cruze Eco was to create a car with the gas mileage of a gas-electric hybrid, but without the higher price tag that comes with the hybrid's expensive batteries and electric motors.

Using shutters allowed GM engineers to come up with a car that can handle the worst-case scenario for engine overheating — pulling a trailer up a Death Valley mountainside on a summer day — yet pick up the benefits of less wind drag by shutting the louvers when days or nights are mild.

Makes sense, says Robert Sawyer, a professor emeritus in engineering at the University of California-Berkeley. He says that in order to meet the tougher government gas-mileage regulations, automakers "will need everything they've got" to pick up an extra mpg or two. "Anything that is simple," is sure to be part of the formula.

Simple, however, is determined relative to a cost-benefit calculation.

ENOUGH ALREADY.  NIU football player in critical condition after shooting.

Two Northern Illinois University students have been charged in the Tuesday night shooting that left NIU football player Devon Butler in critical condition.

Wrong place, wrong time.

The DeKalb Police Department and NIU confirmed Butler, a starting linebacker, was shot late Tuesday night in an Aspen Court apartment building. Kishwaukee Community Hospital confirmed late Wednesday morning that Butler had been treated at the DeKalb-based hospital, but said he no longer was a patient there. Butler was airlifted early Wednesday morning to OSF Saint Anthony Medical Center in Rockford, where he was listed in critical condition after undergoing surgery.


DeKalb Police Chief Bill Feithen said that the shooting happened as a result of a drug deal that had gone bad earlier Tuesday. He stressed that Butler had no knowledge of or was involved or present during that drug transaction. He said Butler was at the off-campus apartment Tuesday where he was shot to meet with friends.


Feithen said that the drug deal took place at an arranged location within several hundred feet of the apartment where the shooting took place. He said the two suspects intended to sell marijuana to another person; that individual took the drugs and did not pay for them.

The larcenous customer might have been a neighbor.

The drug transaction did not happen at that apartment, Feithen said, but the suspects believed that one of the individuals involved in the earlier incident was in that residence.


One of those shots penetrated the window in apartment No. 3 and struck Butler. Feithen said that Butler was shot on the right side of his back, and that bullet fragments have been recovered from his body. Butler is out of surgery; Feithen said that he is "cautiously optimistic" that Butler will be OK.

Updates will be provided tomorrow. No more posting tonight.

A FALSE ECONOMY.  Too busy posting to turn David Letterman off; caught tonight's Top 10 List (Southwest Airlines apologies is the theme.)

#1:  Our mechanics are even more tired than our pilots.

Chortle.

THE FAILURE OF THE LAND-GRANTS AND THE MID-MAJORS.  Journalist Andrew Ferguson has a son apply to college, writes about the experience; Christina Hoff Sommers reviews the book.

Ferguson falls into "the bottom quintile of the lower upper middle class," a demographic of parents with huge ambitions for their kids but without the means to pay for elite private colleges, let alone fancy admissions counselors. So he resolves to be his son's own do-it-yourself admissions counselor. Ferguson devours insider's guides, visits Internet chat sites, swaps tips with other parents at parties, and slowly becomes an expert.

Mr Ferguson's son ultimately enrolls, the reviewer does not say reluctantly, at a large state university.  How much evidence must accumulate before the state universities recognize the excess demand for perceived quality and respond to it by, oh, strengthening the academic programs and tightening standards?

A DESTRUCTIVE POSITIONAL ARMS RACE.

Here's Carol Iannone in Phi Beta Cons.

But when you tear down all the civilizing elements that once facilitated proper relations between the sexes in the name of “equality,” you will get offensive behavior, especially from boys, and most often it will be girls who are offended, and nowadays that means a federal case. And women and girls are of course encouraged in this by feminism, which helped destroy the structures that would once have protected them.

But the situation also illustrates a larger truth. In a reign of sexual liberation, only the most beautiful can come out on the top of the pyramid. Lesser mortals will be judged wanting, even by members of the opposite sex who are scarcely Venus or Adonis themselves, because sexual attractiveness has been split off from the larger whole of the human person. People are totally objectified and therefore susceptible to being evaluated like specimens at a slave market. 

Regular readers recognize the argument.

Today the only victors in the sexual revolution are those men and women who are good-looking and clever enough to enjoy multiple partners with a minimum of emotional and financial commitment. The dowdy and the not-so-clever (or not-so-unscrupulous) are used by the well-endowed and find loneliness and frustration where, in a previous generation, they would probably have been able to start families.

That argument dates from 1987. There is great capacity, apparently, for loneliness and frustration.

THE SIGNATURE OF A POLITICALLY CORRECT UNIVERSITY.  Seven questions from Voluntary Xchange.

• Does someone monitor and/or judge what you do?
• Are you discouraged from reading criticism of your group?
• Are you limited in what you may question?
• Is humiliation or guilt used?
• Is the financial or labor commitment a problem?
• Would others consider the leadership extreme?
• Is doctrine knowable to outsiders?

Oh, you say it's to distinguish a religion from a cult? My bad.

NOW THAT THE REAL WINNER IS DETERMINED.  The Pope Center has some fun with the men's basketball tournament, first identifying the winner based on starting salaries.  Duke blows away Princeton and Vanderbilt: intriguing as all salaries are stated in current dollars with no adjustment for regional purchasing power parity.  They follow up with a bracket won by the university with the smallest outstanding student loans.  Hampton University, a sixteen seed according to the pairing committee, does better by its students than Princeton with its endowments or Brigham Young with its Mormon charitable tradition.

WHERE IS THE UNDERINVESTMENT?  Food for thought in a guest commentary by railroader Richard L. Beadles in Destination: Freedom.

Since 1980, national highway route miles have increased about 5%, lane miles a bit over 7%, and vehicle-miles-traveled, 100%. Does this sound like a healthy trend?

That might be a case for committing additional public resources to road-building, externalities and land-use considerations notwithstanding.

About 25% of the nation’s highways, which carry about 85% of all road traffic, are paid for in part by federal user-taxes, but such taxes do not yield enough revenue to support the current level of federal highway spending. Since 2008, more than $30 Billion of federal general fund revenue has been required to supplement road taxes [not to mention more than $70 billion in state and local tax revenues every year that according to AASHTO subsidizes the automobile owner – the editors]

FHWA estimates that to maintain the current level of highway utility would require a 50% increase in current funding levels, which are now in excess of revenues. Automobiles and buses account for more than 90% of all vehicle-miles-traveled, and are the major contributors to urban congestion, thus requiring costly lane-mile expansion, yet we permit anyone to drive anywhere, anytime, without regard for the demand-cost imposed upon the system. Easy solutions are still politically unpalatable.

Trucks account for the other 10% of mileage, yet they have been found to be responsible for almost all of the pavement damage. Depending upon truck weight, number of axels [c.q.], etc., FHWA and the CBO estimate that the cost of truck-related pavement damage ranges from 5 to 55 cents per mile—a huge public subsidy.

The essay is incomplete, in that the author does not make a case for cooperation between Passenger Rail authorities and the freight railroads, in which public monies might be more cost-effectively deployed to provide additional capacity for faster passenger trains (for the moment set aside fantasies of high speed rail and futuristic trains ... variable-formation diesel-hauled trains offering food service and first class accommodation and cruising at 125 mph offer almost the same advantage over air travel on trips of 300 to 500 miles) commingled with intermodal and priority freight trains.

RECANT OR BE EXCOMMUNICATED.  Tomas de Torquemada and Ignatius Loyola are no longer in charge of the Society of Jesus, but their heirs at Marquette University have summoned the heretic John McAdams before the Diet of Worms.

We just got out of a meeting with Provost John Pauly, Interim Arts & Sciences Dean Rev. Philip J. Rossi, and Political Science Department Chair Barrett L. McCormick.

Professor McAdams's sin is not that of questioning papal authority, or the selling of indulgences, or denying the King of England a divorce, or even suggesting that pictures exist of priests in the Archdiocese of Milwaukee with little boys.  He telephoned a student to obtain information about an upcoming performance of The Vagina Monologues, a play with material that might be contrary to Catholic social teaching.  (Cold Spring Shops will remain agnostic on that subject.  Eve Ensler's talkative cooch, as is often the case with characters written with a political point in mind, is not that interesting.  In this backslid Puritan's mind, the topic falls under the category of "Render unto Caesar", or perhaps "When in Sodom, do what ...")

Marquette's chain of command suggests that Professor McAdams has abused his authority as a faculty member by inquiring as a weblogger into student activities.   They may have a point, as there is plenty of play with sophomoric activities among sophomores (as well as the other classes) that ought not be interfered with by the faculty, but something of the "Who will rid me of this troublesome scholar?" comes to mind.

THE MORAL CONDITION OF THE MIDDLE CLASS.  We've avoided involvement in whether the austerity budgets of Republican governors in the Big Ten states are an assault on the economic condition of the middle class.  There's plenty of that elsewhere.

Money makes possible a middle-class or better existence.  It is a necessary, but not sufficient condition.

In the Chronicle of Higher Education, Cuyahoga Community professor Brian P. Hall gets to the heart of the matter: the first-generation, non-traditional student meme is not an excuse for poor life management skills.

I was the first person in my immediate family to complete college. As an undergraduate, I had no idea what my responsibilities were in the college classroom, but I must have innately known that if I wanted to earn the respect of the professor, I should first show the professor some respect.

He'd like to lay off some of the responsibility on the university-as-business, student-as-customer model, but that's clearly incomplete.

Faculty members were being asked to be responsible for students instead of creating a system within the classroom that makes the students responsible for themselves.

It does seem that the customer-care model has invaded the college classroom. Maybe I will just have to learn to accept it, but it will be difficult because any time a teacher focuses on dealing with a particular student, the others in the classroom suffer. No one is paying attention to their needs, which might just be to learn the material.

Put another way, the unprepared, uninterested, unmotivated and disengaged students are not clients in need of special attention, they are drags on the other students.

In another Chronicle essay, Elayne Clift, who holds gigs at several New England institutions, notes that the rot has spread to graduate school.

How could it be that graduate students delivered such appallingly poor papers and presentations? They'd gotten undergraduate degrees; why couldn't they write in sentences? Why were they devoid of originality, analytical ability, intellectual curiosity? Why were they accosting me with hostile e-mails when I pointed out unsubstantiated generalizations, hyperbolic assumptions, ungrounded polemics, sourcing omissions, and possible plagiarism?

The sad thing is, I'm not alone. Every college teacher I know is bemoaning the same kind of thing. Whether it's rude behavior, lack of intellectual rigor, or both, we are all struggling with the same frightening decline in student performance and academic standards at institutions of higher learning. A sense of entitlement now pervades the academy, excellence be damned.

Increasingly, students seem not to realize what a college degree, especially a graduate degree, tells the world about one's abilities and competence. They have no clue what is expected of them at the higher levels of academic discourse and what will be expected of them in the workplace. Having passed through a deeply flawed education system in which no one is paying attention to critical thinking and writing skills, they just want to know what they have to do to make their teachers tick the box that says "pass." After all, that's what all their other teachers have done. (Let the next guy worry about it.)

When teachers refuse to lower standards, those students seem to resort to a new code of conduct that includes acted-out rage, lack of respect, and blame. That behavior is fueled by the absence of clear standards from the administration, and of administrators who care about learning, not just financial ledgers.

Too often the balance sheet, educator apathy, and a fear of resolving difficult situations lead to irresponsible practices such as encouraging grade inflation and ignoring violations of academic integrity. Thus, both students and faculty members are set up for failure.

I'm not sure how these problems should be tackled, but this much I do know: If they aren't dealt with at individual institutions as well as through universal reform, the familiar claim that American college students are "the best and the brightest" will become even more laughable.

The comment section has been hijacked by culture-warrior types, but it is interesting to note some pushback to the trendy constructivist notions of oppression, as well as to observe the Chronicle, long the house organ for all-is-well responses to the growing awareness that universities are failing at their mission, providing more space to reasoned criticism of the sources of that failure.

It's encouraging, also, to note Robert Weissberg making the case for social distance.

Many of the academy’s ills are traceable to diminished professorial authority. We often feel like “I don’t get any respect” Rodney Dangerfield: students day dream, ignore assignments, barely show up, cheat, gossip during class, and send text messages among other contemptuous behaviors. And not even entertaining lectures, grade inflation and dumbed-down syllabi seem able to restore the loss of respect.

His thesis suggests that professors who dress down get less respect. There might be something to that, but taking a stand against laptops (you're not training court reporters) or checking cell phones or taking calls or elastic or nonexistent deadlines has its part too.

It does no good to issue people phony middle-class credentials if they're not capable of doing the work, let alone of giving the impression that they can do the work.

SO NEAR, AND YET SO FAR.  Several Mid-American teams received bids to the women's invitational tournament, and Toledo won it all in front of a full house at Toledo.

There's some carping out there about Toledo buying the victory (frequently, the host teams win in that tournament) and some snarking about Toledo making a relatively quick exit from the Mid-American tournament (at the hands of Eastern Michigan, another also-ran in the invitational tournament.)

Never mind all that.  There's work to be done in DeKalb.

Senior Day, 26 February 2011.

Two years ago, it was Ball State excusing Tennessee from the first round of the national tournament.  That's the same Ball State that had a similar experience in DeKalb.

AND THE REBELLION WENT ON.  DeKalb's Midweek prints nuggets from its archives.  Here's an item from the Sycamore True Republican of March 31, 1961.

Gov. Otto Kerner announced Illinois's Civil War Centennial Commission will not attend the National Civil War Centennial commemoration of the firing on Fort Sumter in Charleston, S.C., April 11 and 12 because all members of the commission will not be welcome at the ceremony. New Jersey and New York have also withdrawn from participation in the ceremony. The unwelcome members the governor referred to are thought to be Negroes.

South Carolina's lack of hospitality only contributed to the era's civil rights debate, with heirs to the abolitionist cause reminded once again that although the South had surrendered, it had not been won over; while heirs of the rebel cause got to work stitching the battle flag of the Army of Northern Virginia into their state flags.

At least this past year, gray suits were optional at a sesquicentennial ball held in Charleston.

EDUCATION ON THE CHEAP? A Pope Center commentary looks at cost-cutting, or perhaps it's service learning, at North Carolina.

UNC-Chapel Hill may have a 14-to-1 ratio of students to teachers, but introductory courses often have as many as 400 students. To help those students learn the material, the university has students attend “recitations,” weekly discussion sessions that are mostly led by graduate students.

Except when they are led by undergraduates.

For at least the past nine years, undergraduate economics students have served as teaching assistants to sections of Econ 101. The practice of having undergraduate teaching assistants (UTAs) is both a cost-saving measure and a way to help the UTAs themselves learn more economics—following the familiar adage that the best way to learn is to teach.

My investigation of this program led me to conclude that, in general, it pleases students on both the giving and the receiving end. Whether it should please parents or taxpayers is a different question. After all, even graduate students lack the knowledge and skills of most instructors, and, according to former graduate teaching assistant Jenna Ashley Robinson, training for graduate TAs is virtually nonexistent.

Is the columnists point that there are insufficiently many teaching faculty in the economics department? It can't possibly be that the economics faculty is underworked and overpaid, as the column itself will illustrate.

And undergraduates are just learning to grasp the subject. Even those who did well in their 101 classes may not be good at explaining it to new students.

To serve as undergraduate teaching assistants, students are expected to have a GPA of at least 3.5 (between a B+ and an A-) and have taken Econ 410 and 420 (intermediate micro- and macro- economics). They must enroll in Econ 496, a class that can cover activities such as internships and special interest projects. Two students partner in teaching an Econ 101 recitation. These undergraduates earn three credits if they lead two semesters of recitations. Approximately forty undergraduates are currently serving as Econ 101 teaching assistants.

Officially, these undergraduates are expected to take a three-hour training session and are strongly encouraged to attend the lectures for which they serve as TAs. However, in a pinch (as occurred recently) some of the requirements are waived.

According to economics professor Ralph Byrns, if there were no undergraduate TAs (UTAs), the recitations would be too large—more than 30 students. (There are about 15 students in the undergraduate sessions, plus the two “teachers.”)

The introductory matter of any course of study is too important to be left to beginners to explain. Militaries have long grasped this; universities less so.

The teaching assistants are grateful for the chance to teach. Stephen Padgett, a UTA, told me, “It is a great opportunity to help people out while reinforcing what you learned in Econ 101.” Another UTA, Morgan Dean, who runs a help session—rather than a formal recitation—likes the flexibility of the program and its relevance to her major. Clearly, it’s a resume booster (and usually an easy A).

It appears that Econ 101 students like UTAs, too. Justin Hardy, a student taking Padgett’s section, sees no problem with undergraduate TAs. “The atmosphere is relaxed and good.”

Students say that UTAs are less intimidating than graduate students, making it easier to ask questions. And most UTAs are easy to understand. It is very common for graduate TAs in economics to come from another country, such as Turkey or India. Although graduate assistants may know the content better, many students struggle to understand their English. “I have had a couple classes with graduate TAs from foreign countries and it really disrupts the learning process,” Padgett said. “It adds a step to learning the material if you have to take time to try to understand what your TA is saying.”

Another benefit of UTAs is that their participation opens up more sections of recitations, giving students more flexibility. Sophomore Charlotte Smith was able to swap her meeting time to complement her work and class schedule. Christina Faison, also a sophomore, said that additional sections give her the opportunity to follow up at another section if she is still having trouble with a topic.

The recitation I visited with undergraduate TAs struck me as similar to any recitation, except that there were two TAs, not one. When one UTA couldn't answer a question, the other would jump in. Stephen Padgett and Patrick McLane, the UTAs who taught the session, didn't run across any questions they couldn't answer at that early-morning session. They did say, however, that when that happens, they promise to take the question to the professor and obtain an answer for the next recitation (or by email if it relates to something due in class).

Since using undergraduates reduces the size of the recitations, will upcoming budget cuts at UNC-Chapel Hill lead to an expansion of the program? No, says Byrns. “This UTA program cannot reasonably be expanded to offset UNC budget cuts because eroding the requirements to qualify as a UTA would be hugely problematic.”

In fact, Byrns will be leaving UNC-CH after this year, and as a result he believes the program will shrink because other economics professors may not be as willing to work with undergraduate TAs.

Break it down: the undergraduate teaching assistants either aren't learning enough, or, more likely, understand the nature of the academic job market well enough, that they're not rushing to enroll in the graduate programs, but those Turks and Indians the columnist frets about see the opportunities as attractive enough.  And there are limits to how far cost-cutting administrators are prepared to go before they recognize a false economy.

HUSKIES PLAY FOR THE NATIONAL TITLE.  These Huskies are from DeKalb, however, not Storrs.

Image courtesy Wall Street Journal via Northern Today.

It is difficult to agree with the idea of sports pundits at the Wall Street Journal.  The article from which the bracket is extracted ran on April Fools' Day, but it appears to be serious criticism of the notion that a college football championship would be more orderly than the current set of bowls games.

To do this, we took the list of overall seeds for this year's NCAA men's basketball tournament and laid it next to the final regular-season BCS college-football standings (the ones that help determine which teams go to which bowls).

We then went through this year's NCAA tournament bracket and replaced every basketball team, by rank, with its corresponding football team. (In other words, Ohio State's basketball team, the No. 1 overall seed this year, was replaced by Auburn, whose football team ranked No. 1 in the BCS standings after the regular season. Kansas, the No. 2 basketball team, was replaced by No. 2 Oregon, and so on.)

Once the bracket was full, we "played" the games just as they've happened so far in the NCAA tournament to create our own "football final four."

The results don't exactly look like must-see TV. In one football final-four game, Northern Illinois (Butler's equivalent) would meet Air Force (our VCU doppelganger). In the other game, Kentucky's stand-in, Oklahoma State, would take on Connecticut's correlate, Virginia Tech.

Northern Illinois - Air Force will happen, perhaps during the regular season. Navy visited DeKalb a few seasons ago, and Army will be here for the season opener.

Perhaps basketball, unlike football, is a game in which a team can get on a roll at the right time and win the national championship.  Unless it's Wisconsin.  In the modified bracket, Louisiana State takes the place of Wisconsin, and Wisconsin takes the place of Florida.  Northern Illinois, taking the place of Butler, eliminates both.  But maybe a national tournament with a strong Wisconsin team isn't appealing.

Before this year, the two Final Fours that had the worst combined seed totals in the modern era came in 2000 and 2006. The 2000 version featured Michigan State, Florida, Wisconsin and North Carolina and didn't have a single game decided by fewer than 12 points. Its contribution to basketball history was a first half between the Spartans and Badgers in which the teams scored a combined 36 points.

That was one of the best defensive struggles ever to air on national television. Michigan State went on to win the national title that year.

Wisconsin recently provided a head football coach to Northern Illinois, and Michigan State a head basketball coach.  And if you want to do comparative oddities, once upon a time Northern Illinois beat Wisconsin who beat Ohio State in football, inspiring some wag at the Chicago Tribune to make Northern Illinois the national football champion.   Odder things happen.

THE DISINTEREST IN BEING AGREEABLE.  Ryan Avent:

Why does it seem to laypeople as though economists can’t agree about anything? I can give you a few reasons. First, Paul Krugman isn’t going to write a column saying, “Here are the many, many things on which both I and my University of Chicago antagonists agree,” and the Journal isn’t going to get Gary Becker to write a column saying, “Indeed, on these many things we see eye-to-eye.” Second, the most riveting economic events are those, like global recessions, that occur infrequently, and about which there is far less certainty than other, more common events. Critics make hay of the fact that economists seem not to have come any closer on these issues in 80 years, but this amounts to no more than academics debating the meaning of the first lab test while they run the second. And third, the stakes of the policy debate are high, and so commentary is passionate and intense. It begins to seem as though economics is riven through by unbridgeable gulfs, and that these gulfs are as yawning now as they’ve ever been. 

But that’s not remotely what economics is like. While Krugman and others bash each other in newspapers, thousands of academic economists are gathering in reams of data, playing with new models, and trying, quite civilly, to figure out what we’ve learned from the Great Recession. Meanwhile, many thousands more are focusing on research related to all the other branches of economics — research which continues to yield solid and useful results.

You don’t have to be able to explain dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models to understand these things about economics. You just need to be prepared to approach an important academic discipline with a tiny bit a humility.

And give as well as you get in the public forum?