YOU DID THIS TO YOURSELF.

The fruits of access and retention.

College is about learning how to learn, how to approach and synthesize new information, and how to meet multiple expectations and deadlines. For students like you, Gregory, it is a four-year, dog and pony show. You party with your friends, come to my class reeking of booze, and never complete the most basic of tasks. You will get the College Diploma, because you managed to scrape the bottom of the barrel of your intellect to meet the bare minimum requirements.

You are not educated. You have a piece of paper. Congratulations.

It's at the anonymous faculty gripe site, but sometimes you can learn more from the people on the front lines than you can from the public relations types.

IN CASE YOU REQUIRE CHEERING UP.

The NIU Steelband performs In She Rainorama to conclude the spring steel band concert.

The University has requested that You Tube not share the embedding code.  Open the link in a new window and enjoy it all the same.

THE WESTERN CAMPAIGN GETS ITS DUE.

It has long been the position at Cold Spring Shops that the progress of Grant and Sherman from Kentucky into Tennessee and Mississippi, and thence to Atlanta and onward to the coast, secured the Union, and likely would have done so no matter how the contest between Lee and any commander of the Army of the Potomac prior to Grant coming east had turned out.  Jeff Shaara's A Blaze of Glory: A Novel of the Battle of Shiloh has a note to the reader beginning "This is the first of a trilogy that explores the mostly overlooked stories of the Civil War that take place west of the Appalachian Mountains."  If these works turn out as well as his European Theater trilogy did, Book Review N^o. 17 will be followed by additional favorable reviews of the promised works on the siege of Vicksburg and Sherman vs. Johnson in the Carolinas, a part of the war that is most obscure yet possibly more significant than the better-known culmination of Grant and Meade vs. Lee culminating at Appomattox.  Mr Shaara follows his usual practice of following the actions of individuals on both sides, both well-known (Forrest, Sherman) and less well-known, including one private in the Sixteenth Wisconsin Reg^t, a unit mustered at Camp Randall, thence with Sherman into the Carolinas.  Any further discussion of the Reg^ts role in Blaze of Glory would risk spoiling the tale: let us note that Mr Shaara's research is evident.

(Cross-posted to 50 Book Challenge.)

SUPERFLUOUS SUPERVISORS.

Josh Barro, an economist, suggests that increased spending by universities does not equate to increased performance.

For example, over the last few decades, the typical public four-year college has seen a sharp expansion of its support and managerial staff — from 5.5 per 100 students in 1987 to 7.5 per 100 in 2007. Colleges have also been reducing student-to-faculty ratios, and increasing spending on fringe offerings like gyms and student centers. As a result, expenditures per student by public institutions of higher education rose 48 percent from 1985 to 2009, after adjusting for inflation. Can we really say that higher education has gotten anywhere close to 48 percent better over that period?

With apologies to Bill Clinton, that depends on what one means by better. Better amenities? Check. More support staff for unmotivated or unprepared students? You betcha.  Assistance for faculty who want to put more of their course material online?  Indeed.  Note here that I'm skeptical of Mr Barro's confidence in video and distance education, which you'll see endorsed in his column.

In California, where there used to be two girls for every boy at Surf City, there is now one administrator for each professor.  Details at Marginal Revolution.  Do we have any evidence that those increases in administrators, and their impositions on faculty, have produced any efficiencies?

THERE HAS TO BE A BETTER WAY.

When a pedestrian commits a fatal act of railway trespass, passengers are trespassed against.

Saturday morning, the radio traffic reports indicated that the last two Metra Geneva Sub trains never made it to Elburn late Friday or early Saturday.  A trespasser had a close encounter with a freight train near the Geneva Depot.  The article does not report on bus service in substitution.  The last runs from Chicago are sparsely ridden west of Wheaton and nearly empty west of Geneva.  Perhaps the taxi operators got some business.

Earlier that Friday, a Wauwatosa woman trespassed in front of a Hiawatha in Caledonia.

None of the 145 passengers and crew members aboard the train was injured and passengers were taken to their destinations on buses after a delay of almost three hours, [Amtrak source Vernae] Graham said.

Buses also were dispatched to pick up passengers booked on two subsequent trains from Milwaukee.

Three hours seems to be the norm for investigations by the police and the coroner in fatal occurrences of railway trespass.  I'm sure the authorities have good excuses reasons for delaying passengers and train crews to this extent, never mind the missed connections passengers might suffer because of officialdom's wishes.

OCCASION TO HOIST A SPRECHER.

Yes, the Harvey's Wallbangers began their World Series run thirty years ago this week.

Those Brewers were just above .500 and 5 1/2 games out.  This year's edition has more modest accomplishments and a lot of injuries.  All the same, beating the Cubs is beating the Cubs.  Maybe a sake chaser for the beer?

PLAYER WITH RAILROADS.

Visitors from New York and Boston offer photographic impressions of the 'L'.

Cold Spring Shops regulars know where those prize photo locations are.

SEPARATING EQUILIBRIUM?

Kay Hymowitz of City Journal considers what happens when people who ought to know better decide not to bother with the consequences of bad life-management skills.

At the top of the social order is a positive feedback loop, with kids raised in stable, high-investment, and relatively affluent homes going to college, finding similar mates, and raising their own children in stable, high-investment, and relatively affluent homes. At the bottom is a negative feedback loop, with kids raised by single mothers in unstable, low-investment homes finding themselves unable to adapt to today’s economy and going on to create more unstable, single-mother homes.

Not only do we have more poverty, inequality, and immobility; we have the makings of a caste society, with an inherited elite and an entrenched proletariat. That’s not an America that anyone finds very attractive.

That despite all the best efforts of the diversity establishment to celebrate differences, let alone to mau-mau anyone who points out those deficient life management skills as victim-blamers.

SHORTER COLD SPRING SHOPS.

According to Barbara Kay at Canada's National Post, Higher education needs a rethink.

An entire library could be filled with books lamenting the present state of higher education in the arts and humanities — the lack of intellectual diversity, the dumbing down of courses to accommodate the unmotivated lowest denominator who must not be failed on principle, and other well-publicized grievances. So while knowledgeable observers agree that a university degree is a sine qua non for the job market, they also agree that while it is serving more numerous clients, higher ed is delivering less than it did as an elite institution. Many undergrad degrees conferred today are largely pro forma, as universities are not producing a plethora of critical thinkers or even proficient writers.

Welcome to the fight.

Richard Vedder concurs, with a useful bit of allowing for risk and uncertainty.

The “college-for-all” crowd, personified by President Obama and the Lumina Foundation, argues, correctly, that the average college graduate earns more than the average high-school one. But that calculation fails to use a more appropriate measure (more of a Bayesian approach to the statistical cognoscenti) to analyze the returns to college. Specifically, if 45 percent or so of students fail to graduate in six years, earnings comparisons unadjusted for the high risk of dropping out are totally inappropriate.

The human-capital and job-market-signalling folks can have all sorts of fun now.

PROFSCAM: THE SEQUEL.

From time to time, an author makes some money writing about Radical Occupation of the University, or Lazy Professors at the University, or Administrative Bloat at the University, or Sports Corrupts the University.  It's possible that a papyrus burned by Napoleon or by the Romans at Alexandria might have made similar complaints about Pharaoh's Intellectuals.

Charles Sykes's ProfScam might be the prototype for the current series of such books.  It happened to come out about the same time that Identity Politics captured some disciplines, and Quantity-Dominates-Quality became the model for research visibility among weaker departments, and Falling Test Scores became a public issue.  The country's sports mania did not yet have Michael Jordan or the 'Niners or a strong Wisconsin football team as further evidence of misplaced priorities, although a lady called Camilla Parker Bowles occasionally appeared in tabloids in association with the Prince of Wales.

Naomi Schafer Riley recently offered an entry in the series titled The Faculty Lounges.  The most telling observation I can make in Book Review N^o. 16 is that my copy has no marginal notes, and no page numbers noted on the flyleaf, both common Cold Spring Shops practices as the books pile up in advance of the reviews being posted.  (I learned some years ago that "where did I see that passage" was becoming an inefficient random-access algorithm.)  An observation at University Diaries is spot on with why that is the case.

There is one lesson Ms Riley might have learned subsequently about the value of academic tenure, one of the Abuses and Ufurpations of the Profefsoriate that she would like to end.  About a month ago, she said some unkind things about Area Studies on a Chronicle of Higher Education site, and the Chronicle of Higher Education ... let her go!

One learns, in the course of earning academic tenure, not to take criticisms of one's necessary and sufficient conditions as personal attacks, and how to couch criticisms of other peoples' necessary and sufficient conditions as Improvements in the State of The Art.  Then, upon earning tenure, one is able to be a bit more aggressive in the criticisms of other peoples' analyses.  The lesson is left to Ms Riley as an exercise.

(Cross-posted to 50 Book Challenge.)

LET US SPEAK FREELY

A self-described Obama Democrat explains why he is a board member of the National Association of Scholars despite the perception, in some circles, that the organization represents conservative voices.

In a word, because since I first heard about the NAS from the horse’s mouth some twenty years ago—Steve Balch’s son and my son were childhood playmates, I’ve long been an NAS member, and Steve and I have long been personal friends—I have believed passionately, and have told Steve (and more recently Peter Wood) often, that in my view he, they, and the NAS generally are doing vitally important work in seeking to preserve, and often (lamentably) to restore, the quality of higher education in America.

Moreover, because I believe equally strongly—as do Steve, Peter, and (I gather) NAS members generally—that unless higher education is rescued from the doctrinaire, ideologically skewed, politically correct mindset that has taken hold of academe since I was in graduate school in the early 1970s, not only the quality of higher education in America but, without exaggeration, the survival of Western civilization as we know it will be at grave risk.

Perhaps so, but perhaps the risk to higher education is in the circumlocutions with which he continues.

I believe there is no question that American society still has a long way to go before issues related to race, gender, and class cease to impose arbitrary and unfair limits on economic, social, and other opportunities and progress.

That "issues related to" or the similar "issues of" language looks less threatening than "American society still has a long way to go before endemic racismsexismhomophobia not to mention elitism and classism cease to impose arbitrary and unfair limits ..."  Never mind that institutions of higher learning achieve at least some of their status from determining who does or does not get in or who does or does not graduate or how well the football program fares in bowls.  All the same, that "issues ..." formulation is a dog-whistle for the more radical phrasing I proposed.   Test this hypothesis: suggest to your campus diversity enablers that primitive belief systems or erratic or non-existent life-management skills or just plain wishful thinking contribute to those arbitrary or unfair limits and see what reaction you get.

But there is hope.

I just don’t believe that shoehorning race, gender, class, social justice, sustainability, and/or any other social or political issue into every classroom discussion and aspect of college life is either the way to achieve meaningful progress on those issues or to fulfill the educational mission for which our colleges and universities were created.

Well, we economists have long understood that Marx is at best a minor post-Ricardian and that engaging in discriminations not based on productivity differences is unprofitable.  Perhaps, though, Professor Winnick has discovered, through his own efforts, that his discipline, too, is subject to market tests.

The lowering of academic standards and the dumbing-down of the curriculum—both while the cost of a college education continues to skyrocket—are equally disturbing long-term trends.

To insist that all that really matters in the study of literature are issues related to race, gender, and class is not to centralize, but to marginalize, literature as a subject worthy of serious thought and a source of meaningful knowledge about and understanding of the human experience—including but not limited to what it means to be black, female, gay, and/or poor.  It can only result, over time, in the abandonment of any study of literature at all.

The Theory meat-grinder makes the English electives less attractive, and with fewer students signing up for formulaic and tendentious literature courses, the Ph.D. in literature looks even less attractive, and there are fewer graduate students to supervise.

To make it optional for an English major to study Shakespeare, or for a history major to gain a broad knowledge and understanding of the major events and trends of human history, or for a humanities major to know something about science, or for a science major to know something about the humanities, or for anyone to know any foreign language, is to institutionalize ignorance, and to put at risk the breadth and depth of knowledge on which not just the value of higher education but the viability of our political system, society, and civilization depend.

Some of this sounds very much like an essay I wrote over twenty years ago, that opened thusly.

Universities are failing to carry out their mission. Contributing to this failure is a collection of ideas we call "politically correct." The intellectual foundation of these ideas is an extreme relativism that questions the possibility of objective knowledge and seeks to dispel "coherent beliefs of any kind." A university built on such a foundation cannot stand.

Welcome to the fight, Professor Winnick.

Releasing higher education, and educators, from the political and ideological bondage by which it and they have been confined in recent decades is something in which all of us, professional educators and “civilians” alike, have an enormous stake—and which all of us, regardless of what lever we pull in the voting booth, should be working together to achieve.

Whether we define ourselves as Democrats or Republicans, liberals or conservatives, independents or moderates, we should all be able to agree that colleges and universities have a duty to produce graduates who know how to think critically, evaluate complex evidence, ask difficult questions, and seek answers from books or other credible sources and not just blogs.

We should all be able to agree that every college graduate, regardless of major, should emerge from his or her undergraduate years not just with theoretical job skills and actual debt but with a greater understanding of and (we may hope) appreciation for our political system (both its genius and its imperfections), history (both proud and sometimes shameful), and cultural legacy (including the great books, music, and art our civilization has produced).

We should be able to agree that even in a stronger economy than prevails today, an education which fails to produce those results—be the student’s major English, History, Business Administration, or Physics—is not worth its cost.

We should be able to agree that the imposition of any political, social, economic, environmental, or other agenda on any student or faculty member as a condition of matriculation, academic success, employment, or tenure is unacceptable—and should be prohibited or purged from every institution of higher education worthy of the name.

Although there are no doubt many educators at every college and university who hold these truths to be self-evident, it must be recognized that in most such institutions they are badly outnumbered, under constant attack, or forced to keep their views and concerns on these issues to themselves.

The absence of an agenda is an agenda (sorry for the nit-pick), but the sentiments are proper.  It might be better to propose an agenda in which students learn that there are controversies, often with more than two sides, and that there might be compelling cases for each of the contending sides.  And the absence of that agenda might be holding back that stronger economy Professor Winnick hopes for.

Rising incomes may be rewards to people who learned careful reasoning, mathematics, and science, and who sold their skills to employers who valued them. That others are losing ground may be evidence of diminished skills of more recent graduates of high schools and universities. Economists are sorting out these hypotheses.

I'm closer to calling it a career now than I was in 2005, when that post went up, or in 1991, when I wrote the essay. It's taken more than one summer, but I continue to fight it out on this line.

THE CASE FOR LIMITING GOVERNMENT.

Joseph Stiglitz thinks he's writing about income inequality and plutocracy, but there's a deeper meaning to this passage.

Rent-seeking distorts the economy. Market forces, of course, play a role, too, but markets are shaped by politics; and, in America, with its quasi-corrupt system of campaign finance and its revolving doors between government and industry, politics is shaped by money.

For example, a bankruptcy law that privileges derivatives over all else, but does not allow the discharge of student debt, no matter how inadequate the education provided, enriches bankers and impoverishes many at the bottom. In a country where money trumps democracy, such legislation has become predictably frequent.

The strongest case for enumerating and limiting the powers of government, and changing those numbers and those limits only after careful and lengthy deliberation, might be that in the absence of such restraints,   the temptation to spend money to influence those changes, or, as appears to be the case, with Wisconsin's recall elections, to suggest that money alone influences policy.  Walter Russell Mead suggests it is not yet time to give up on logic and content.

[M]oney does matter in politics, but money alone is rarely enough, especially on an issue which voters care deeply about. When the left — or the right — can summon popular passion and energy to its side, it can not only put up a noble fight. It can win. This actually happens quite a lot in American politics: poorly funded campaigns with charismatic candidates tap into some deep reservoir of popular sentiment and they deal out bitter defeats to the pallid, colorless but well-moneyed Establishment candidates. This has been happening relatively frequently in Republican politics of late. There have been times in American history when it happened also on the left. Milwaukee, Wisconsin has had Socialist mayors.

The left’s problem in Wisconsin wasn’t that the right had too much money. The left’s problem is that the left’s agenda didn’t have enough support from the public. Poll after poll after poll showed that the public didn’t share the left’s estimation of the Walker reforms. Many thought they were a pretty good idea; many others didn’t much like the reforms but didn’t think they were bad enough or important enough to justify a year of turmoil and a recall election.

The left lost this election because it failed to persuade the people that its analysis was correct. The people weren’t a herd of sheep dazzled by big money campaign ads on TV; the Wisconsin electorate chewed over the issues at leisure, debated them extensively, considered both points of view — and then handed the left a humiliating, stinging and strategic defeat.

And perhaps we can return to one dimension of normalcy. It is unusual for electoral events in Wisconsin to make Illinois politics look good, but the past eighteen months have surely had that effect.

THE ZOO LINE.

The Riverside and Great Northern Railway, at the workshop that built a number of miniature railroads for amusement parks and zoos, is open for business.

There was space to build tracks because The Milwaukee Road relocated its line west of Wisconsin Dells.

The [Sandleys, father and son] moved their operation to the Dells off Stand Rock Road, obtaining an abandoned La Crosse and Milwaukee Railroad right of way that they were able to use as a demonstration and test track for their engines and cars.

The LC&M track was moved about 50 feet uphill and is still in use today. (When this writer visited the R&GN, an Amtrak train caused a stir when it rolled by with the Milwaukee Road's restored "Cedar Rapids" multi-windowed Skytop lounge in tow.)

On occasion that car brings up the rear of a 261 steam excursion, and perhaps visitors to the Dells will have an opportunity to witness 261's passage again, or perhaps a passage by the Coalition for Sustainable Rail's test engine.

YOUR TAX DOLLARS AT WORK.

Several impressive time-lapse movies of the Transit of Venus, from NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory.

WE SHALL FIGHT THEM FROM THE BEACHES.

London's Daily Mail offers a colour gallery of England as it was in 1952.

B. Anthony Stewart photo via National Geographic Society.

A HISTORIC FIFTH OF JUNE.

Britain celebrates a Diamond Jubilee.  Two noteworthy observations from this morning's events: the National Emblem march rendered in that British march tempo, and the lead plane in the fly-past sporting D-Day stripes on the wings.

Her Majesty requested the band to play The Star Spangled Banner at the 12 September 2001 Changing of the Guard.

The last Queen to view a Diamond Jubilee was Victoria, and the Transit of Venus occurred during her reign.    John Phillip Sousa wrote a march for that occasion.  Another Transit of Venus coincides with today's Jubilee, although it will not be visible from Britain (and not because of the clouds).

On this day, the Boston and Lowell Railroad was chartered in 1830.  That's the first component of what became the Boston and Maine.

PRODUCTIVITY FOLLIES.

A Counterpunch essay takes on the myths of academic accountability.

Why aren’t professors requiring more of students? Is it because, as some have argued, universities care more about research than about teaching? Or because professors are just lazy and hence don’t want to exert themselves grading lots of assignments? The latter position has lots of proponents. Tenure makes it nearly impossible to fire a professor, so what incentive does he or she have to do any real work?

The point, as Michael Munger frames it, is that tenure is a hire.  It's difficult to fake being assiduous for six or seven years so as to be able to goof off for the next thirty.  There's no shortage of interesting questions to research.  The problem is that counterproductive administrivia and false economies get in the way.

Leaving aside the issue of whether people are more effectively motivated by the carrot or the stick, there’s one huge reason for the decline in the expectations placed on students in higher education that has yet to be given sufficient attention–the increasing amount of university-level instruction that is being done by what academics refer to as “contingent faculty.” Contingent faculty–primarily adjuncts who are hired by the course–are paid so badly that they are forced to teach more courses per term than can be handled well.

Sometimes, doing more with less is a false economy, and the use of cheap and contingent academic labor is destructive in multiple ways, as the essay notes.

I spend almost all my time during the terms when I’m teaching grading quizzes and essays and meeting with students to discuss them. I don’t mind doing the work because I know it’s important. I do mind having almost no free time, but there are breaks between terms and then the summer when I can do some real research. I can’t do much research while I’m teaching. There just isn’t time.

Here’s the kicker though. I’m tenured. I’m one of an increasingly tiny elite of tenured professors who have reasonable teaching loads and rock-solid job security. I teach two courses per term. Sounds pretty cushy, doesn’t it? It’s all I can handle though, if I want to do a good job.

I complained once to another critical reasoning instructor about the amount of time it took to grade essays.

“I don’t give essays,” he said, “I can’t, I’m teaching four other courses.”

He was an adjunct.

Note: no shortage of interesting questions, and "summers off" mean some uninterrupted thinking time to work on them.  Read on.  You can't offer Marshall Field service with a Wal-Mart business model.

I’m fortunate because my job is secure. I have time to give my students substantial reading and writing assignments and I don’t have to worry that they will trash me in their evaluations if I give them a lot of work, or if I’m hard on their papers. I trust them to be fair with me if I am fair with them, and they usually are. Tell an adjunct that, though. They’re hired by the course. If their evaluations aren’t good, they know that they can be easily replaced with some other recent Ph.D. who’ll be more accommodating.

There’s a lot of talk about how the consumer model of higher education is destroying it. I think if it were employed properly, it could save it. Students should be getting more for their money than most adjuncts, through no fault of their own, are able to give them. It’s not that adjuncts are less well qualified than tenured, or tenure-track professors. They’re occasionally better qualified.  The problem is that they’re overworked. Most aren’t able to give students the kind of attention, or assignments, or feedback on their assignments that a tenured or tenure-track professor could give them. If I were paying what students are paying nowadays to go to school, I’d want more for my money than I could get from and adjunct.

But you can't offer Marshall Field service to clients with a Wal-Mart mentality, either.

Most of my students don’t know the difference between an argument and a bunch of unsupported assertions strung together with a lot of non-argumentative rhetoric. Many of them have difficulty even remembering the topics of papers that are assigned in class. I’ll give them the topic and explain the structure the paper should have and still, many will turn in rambling, unstructured musings on unrelated topics. It’s not because they don’t care about doing well. They care very much, but their minds are so completely untrained that even teaching them the most rudimentary of practical skills requires enormous chunks of time, more time than most adjuncts have to give to their students.

People are blaming professors for the crisis in higher education. The decision to turn over increasing amounts of instruction to beleaguered adjuncts is not coming from professors, however, it’s coming from administrators who’ve migrated to academia from the world of business where cutting costs is pursued as if it were a holy grail.

Professors, even adjuncts, care about teaching, but faculties are being squeezed by bloated administrations that need to cut costs to justify their own existence and one of the ways they have chosen to cut costs is to replace tenured faculty with adjuncts. Students need feedback on their work. They need more than just a grade on an assignment if they have any hope of doing well and for many of them grades are crucial to their receiving the financial aid they need to be able to remain in school. Most adjuncts don’t have time to give much feedback though, or to meet with students one-on-one to discuss how they might improve their work. Imagine how frustrated, how desperately frustrated, a student could become who sees his or her grades slipping but can’t get enough feedback from an instructor to halt that downward trend.

Perhaps the reliance on cheap and contingent labor means bad work habits don't get corrected.

Lack of feedback isn’t the only problem associated with the increasing use of adjuncts. I’ve had students who have never been to a single class email me in week eight of a ten-week term with some sob story as to why they’ve never been to class and begging me to make up some special assignments for them so that they can “still pass.” Where, in God’s name, I’ve asked myself, are these kids getting the idea that any instructor would do such a thing? It took me a while to figure that one out. I’ll bet there are a few adjuncts out there who’ll do it. If the student is still officially enrolled in the course, he can still do an evaluation and the instructor may fear he’ll get a bad evaluation if he doesn’t find some way to help the student pass.

Students are being led to believe that they don’t have to do any real work in order to earn an advanced degree. So then, when they run into an instructor who actually requires something from them, they protest the instructor is being unfair. What isn’t fair, however, is blaming tenured and tenure-track faculty for the diminished expectations that are being placed on students when evidence suggests the problem stems from the gradual takeover of instruction by overworked adjuncts who don’t have the time or energy to require much of their students. What isn’t fair is taking money from people and claiming to be educating them when you’re not.

The failure of higher education to be higher cannot be laid off entirely on the cheap labor, overworked teacher business model.  Diminished expectations are also a consequence of admitting unprepared students and calling it "access", of questioning whether any modes of thinking ought be "privileged" over  others, of the pandering implicit in the "first-generation, non-traditional" means expecting less of such students.  That last is particularly relevant for a professor at Drexel, the commentator's workplace.

SMALL-SAMPLE PROPERTIES OF GRADING CURVES.

There's a line in my course outline that reads, "In a class of under 50 people, it is impossible to impose a curve."  An essay on possible grade inflation explains why.

Some professors caution that forced standards could backfire and punish high-achieving students. Others also argue that doling out fewer A’s and more B’s and C’s could result in harsher student evaluations, which factor into promotion and tenure decisions.

“I’ve taught the same course for almost 20 years,” said Joseph Konstan, a professor in [Minnesota's] Department of Computer Science and Engineering. “I’ve had times when 60 percent of the class earned an A, and I’ve had times when 20 percent of the class earned an A.”

What might tamp down grade inflation, he asked, “without disadvantaging the students who happen to come in with a good bunch?”

Or, to use the formulation I use when students ask me to clarify that line, do I want to commit myself to failing two or three or four people simply to get a Gauss-Procrustes distribution?

But the essay goes on to note that the fortunate 60 percent tends to cluster in some fields, not others.

At [Minnesota], grades vary greatly by department. Nearly 61 percent of students who took entry-level courses in the College of Education and Human Development nabbed A’s in fall 2011. In the College of Science and Engineering, 29.5 percent did. The College of Biological Sciences awarded the fewest A’s in those courses — 24.6 percent.

[Minnesota chemist Christopher] Cramer worries that inequality punishes the best students in the sciences when they compete for jobs against graduates from other colleges.

Posting relative performance rankings, showing the percentiles that accompany the grades in each class, will give employers some basis for making those comparisons, although it's likely that a Minnesota computer science or chemistry or biology graduate is competing with graduates held to similarly tough standards elsewhere.  Grade inflation variations by discipline correlate among universities and regions.  There may, all the same, be incentives to inflate.

Karen-Sue Taussig considers herself a rigorous grader but admits to being even tougher when she started at [Minnesota] in 2001. “Looking back,” the anthropology professor said, “I really think there are a lot of subtle pressures to conform to a norm.”

Taussig talked with her students about the rigor of her course, but still, at the end of the semester, students pushed back in course evaluations. “We live in a grade-inflated world,” one told her. Several called her grading unfair.

“I was really struck by that,” Taussig said.

She suspects that attitude is rooted in the growing cost of a degree and the declining public funding for universities. “They’re paying for it, and they worked really hard, and they put in time, and therefore they think they should get a good grade,” she said.

So the public, as much as the professors, must share expectations of what grades stand for, Taussig said.

Yes, it's unfair that there are students at Minnesota who were smart enough to get in and well-off enough to be able to pay for it and growing up in the early twenty-first century.  As P. J. O'Rourke puts it, "You better hope that life never becomes fair."

It's up to the professor to say no and uphold standards, and it's up to the public to encourage both.

CONSIDER THE TOTAL EFFECT.

Cold Spring Shops contemplated an hour waiting to legally recycle electronic equipment.

Math problem: is the carbon footprint of all those cars (including more than a few sport-utes, pickups, and vans) moving up in the queue a net environmental loss, compared to the materials recovered by the recycling company?

Maybe somebody is paying attention.  The county will be holding short collections, more frequently.

“When we do big one-day collections, people are sitting in traffic with their cars running and it didn’t make sense,” [DeKalb County solid waste coordinator Christel] Springmire said. “Doing these short, frequent collections makes more environmental sense.”

Now, if the computer manufacturers would put more durable capacitors in their motherboards ...

HOW OTHERS SEE US

An excessively enthusiastic Packer fan nearly upstages the Queen in London's Daily Mail.

A local news video shows how when the Green Bay Packers wide receiver tossed his cleat into the stands for a young boy to keep as a memento, it was ripped out of his grasp by an over-eager female fan.

The grown woman, identified as Robyn Ereth from Neshkoro, is seen physically trying to body block the young boy as he holds on tightly to his prize but she keeps fighting until she can thwart him.

The receiver intended for the boy to receive the cleats.

Now Mr Driver himself has stepped into the debate, posting to his own Facebook page and hoping for some grassroots help.

'Had a great time at my charity softball game, but I just saw a truly disturbing video of a grown woman snatching one of my cleats from the boy I threw it to in the stands,' he wrote.

'I want to get this boy the cleats he deserves! Can you guys help me find out who he is so I can get them to him??? Thank you Packer Nation!'

He asked and he received, as a Journal Sentinel reporter Tweeted at the star saying that he confirmed the boy's name is Stephen Wagner after speaking with the family.

Here's the video.  The Wagner family hears from Mr Driver, and gets some props for not getting in the gutter with the groupies.

Through this all, Stephen and his family have been class acts. Caught up them briefly after the incident and then again later. They're not spiteful. And, of course, it'll be a generous gesture by Driver once they are able to connect.

Keep calm and carry on.

RUNNING EXTRA.  Story picked up by the I4U traffic bureau.

RAILFANS GET NO RESPECT.

The Onion gets in on the act.

Thomas the Tank Engine told reporters Tuesday that while he's glad trains are a source of fascination and joy for so many children, he often feels uncomfortable with the attention he receives from the autistic fans that make up the majority of his fan base. "Don't get me wrong—I'm grateful that these kids enjoy me so much, but I think the way they're enjoying me is not really so healthy, and honestly not the way I would choose to be appreciated, personally," the anthropomorphic locomotive said between stops on his Mystery On The Rails tour, where he observed that children with autism "outnumber the normal kids by at least three to one."

THE SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME?

One of Santa Fe's seven-foot driver Super Baltics had a streamlined casing.

Image from Allen Dale at Steam Locomotive.

The Coalition for Sustainable Rail's research project at the University of Minnesota intends to give sister locomotive 3463 a streamlined cladding.

THIRTY YEARS AGO.

Milwaukee Brewers at .500, seven games out of first, Harvey Kuenn takes over as acting manager.

By September I was teasing Detroiters by ordering Harvey Wallbangers in bars.

VLADIMIR BADENOV?

Grand opera might be set in the Middle Ages, or in Nibelheim, or in antiquity, and yet it has contemporary resonance.

Last weekend, the latest production to allude to the opposition protests that have brought tens of thousands onto the streets of Moscow opened at the Mariinsky Theatre in St Petersburg, Putin's hometown.

Gone are the tsarist-era costumes favoured by most who put on Boris Godunov, the 19th century opera by Modest Mussorgsky about a ruthless tsar who takes the throne after murdering the rightful heir.

In their stead, police walk the stage wearing their ominous black leather jackets. Camouflaged riot police bearing rubber truncheons hold back protesters begging the tsar for bread.

Fearless Leader will not be pleased. Stalin's Own Ballet has also gone contemporary with a classic.

In Moscow, the grand Bolshoi Theatre has put on its own production targeting Putin's stranglehold on power. Renowned director Kirill Serebrennikov has taken the Golden Cockerel, an early 20th century opera written by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov as the tsarist regime entered its final death throes, and infused it with references to the present-day regime. One of the tsar's sons carries an iPad – a clear reference to Putin's protege, Dmitry Medvedev. KGB-style bodyguards clear Kremlin halls for the tsar's arrival. A grand parade celebrating the tsar features a Topol-M missile, Putin's favourite addition to yearly Victory Day festivities.

The opera opens with dozens of dignitaries and military men arriving to greet the tsar, a paranoid man divorced from reality.

At a performance of the opera on the eve of Putin's return to power this month, whispers of "it's just like the inauguration" ran through the audience.

"You can take any epoch in Russia and bring it to modern times and it will be the same thing," Serebrennikov said. "That's what happens in Russia – it's the same thing, over and over again."

The Romanovs banned Boris and Cockerel, but the Communists celebrated both works, presumably because the directors were well-enough vetted as to resist the temptation to push the limits of glasnost or de-Stalinization.

THE LAWS OF PHYSICS ARE IMMUTABLE.

Transportation companies have to worry about farebox yield.

"The seat is a revenue generator," [seat manufacturer's vice president Jeff] Luedeke says. "Normally if you look at a 737 or A320 there are three seats on each side. If you wanted maximum comfort you could do two on each side -- and make the seats a lot wider. But with the reduced head count the operational costs don't work out."

Apparently air passengers are willing to pay for faster travelling speeds rather than passenger comfort, given their willingness to put up with passenger loading practices that violate livestock handling standards, and a preference for bargain fares never mind how narrow the seats are.

YOU KNOW IT'S TIME TO TAKE A DAY OFF WHEN ...

mathematics intrudes.

Via Voluntary Xchange, who got it from Applied Mathemagics, who got it from Illiterate Alliteration.

SYMPTOMS OF EURO-SCLEROSIS?

Again, unexpectedly.

Employers in the United States added only 69,000 jobs in May, the fewest in a year and not even close to what economists expected. For the first time since last June, the unemployment rate rose, to 8.2 percent from 8.1 percent.

That's against a smaller labor force than that just before the financial markets crashed. Overseas, ominous signs proliferate.

The Dow Jones industrial average fell 275 points, its worst day of the year, and for the first time was down for 2012. The Standard & Poor's 500 index is almost 10 percent below its 2012 high, the traditional definition of a market correction.

The political finger-pointing has intensified.  InstaPundit has a roundup from this morning, as does the Associated Press.  Daniel Mitchell gives the national government's stimulus efforts a poor evaluation.

But I suppose the good news is that the United States is not Europe. Government is even bigger on the other side of the Atlantic and many of those nations are in the middle of a fiscal crisis and the unemployment rate averages 11 percent.

Yes, but we have an executive branch bent on spending money and providing social services more like Europeans, and an Opposition offering only a rudimentary fiscal stimulus, in the form of not changing the tax rates.  And defenders of Our President suggest that he's been practicing fiscal restraint on a scale not seen since Herbert Hoover.  Jonah Goldberg questions the basis for that comparison. "Obama took what was supposed to be a one-time emergency expenditure and made it part of the new normal."  That's based on a different post from Daniel Mitchell, who also provides a lighter look at the fiscal policy, with links to the more substantive analysis.

You'd think that a large emergency spending bill that prevented wholesale liquidation of dubious assets followed by a large Democratic stimulus package would have, well, stimulated.  The stimulus spending as implemented, however, imposed so many constraints on projects as to dissipate much of the effect in process losses.  The uncertainty over the future course of federalized health care plus the changes, or not, in the tax code and in spending, have to dampen even the wildest of animal spirits.

THE RETURN OF TRANSPORTATION CARTELS?

The safety enforcers are cracking down on bus companies.

The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration’s enforcement action primarily targeted three Chinatown operations in New York and Philadelphia: Apex Bus Inc., I-95 Coach Inc. and New Century Travel Inc. The government ordered 10 bus company owners, managers and employees to cease all passenger transportation business, including selling tickets, according to a Transportation Department statement.

The crackdown is reminiscent of efforts the authorities made to ensure safe for-hire transportation by jitney operators, years ago.

Curbside bus operators, which typically sell tickets online and pick up and discharge passengers on the sidewalk, have a fatal crash rate seven times higher than terminal-based operations, the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board reported in October.

The three primary targets in the U.S. crackdown controlled a network of other companies, leading to the 26 separate shutdown orders, the transportation department said. The companies’ networks included one ticket seller, nine active bus companies, 13 companies already ordered out of service that were continuing to operate and three companies applying for permission to operate.

Among those terminal-based operations is a legacy regulated carrier, itself subject to regulation thanks to protests from passenger railroads.

Sophia Xu, who sells tickets at I-95 Coach in New York’s Chinatown at 87 Chrystie Street, said Transportation Department officials came to the shop yesterday and said the company needed to close, without explaining why.

Signs posted on the glass outside and inside at the ticket counter give a phone number to call for online ticket refunds and say people who paid cash can get refunds at the counter.

Chen Chen, a fellow ticket seller, said Chinatown buses are being unfairly targeted.

“This doesn’t happen to Greyhound,” he said, holding a Chinese-language newspaper with pictures from the shop of police he said were rude.

Greyhound's fares, the article reports, are higher than those charged by the curbside bus operators. Next a legacy bus company will invoke cream-skimming.

HYSTERIA

Forever overwrought Chris Matthews really loses it.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

What does Al Gore losing the electoral vote despite successfully getting out the vote in sympathetic districts in 2000 have to do with overreaction, if any, to voter fraud today?

APPLIED SCIENCE.

The University of Minnesota's Institute on the Environment describes the science of renewable coal.

CSR Project 130 has a simple goal: create the world’s cleanest, most powerful passenger locomotive, proving the viability of solid biofuel and modern steam locomotive technology. The Coalition will put its technology to the test by planning to break the world record for steam locomotive speed, reaching 130 miles per hour and demonstrating the viability of this revolutionary, clean transportation technology.

The locomotive will run on torrefied biomass (biocoal), a biofuel created through an energy-efficient processing of cellulosic biomass. Biocoal exhibits the same energy density and material handling properties as coal, but unlike coal, it is carbon neutral, contains no heavy metals, and produces less ash, smoke and volatile off-gases. Since it exhibits such similar characteristics to coal, biocoal has the potential to revolutionize the way the United States generates clean electricity.

The effects of commercial production of biocoal on the freight railroad infrastructure, which exists to move existing fossil fuel coal from mine to market will provide an opportunity for all sorts of research.

I wish, though, that promoters of advanced-technology steam locomotives (the Project 130 simply being the latest; there was a serious effort in the 1980s to develop a freight locomotive, and there's a model in HO scale, for an HO modeler with a lot of discretionary income) would understand the capabilities of the competition.

Preliminary research shows that CSR’s test locomotive will cost less to maintain and less to fuel, and will exhibit greater train handling performance than any diesel-electric locomotives available today. The modern steam locomotive has relied on technology that has been neglected for decades. This is about to change. With the ability to burn biocoal efficiently and without negative impact on the environment, CSR’s modern steam locomotive will also exhibit significantly better horsepower output at higher speeds than the current diesel-electric locomotives that pull the majority of passenger trains in the United States.

Might be wise for the technical team to ask some Milwaukee Road veterans about Fast Fifteen: any world speed record Milwaukee holds for steam locomotives was quickly rendered moot by a standard prewar E-6 diesel set. Might also be wise to talk to the British, where a diesel train that might have inspired a line in an Elton John song attained something like 145 mph on a test run, and thirty years later the production version still cruises at 125 on Brunel's billiard table.

THOSE MISSING BLUE-COLLAR ARISTOCRATS.

Milwaukee used to produce them, but recession or no, there continue to be shortages of skilled tradesmen, and the recovery is going to be slower for their continued scarcity.

The latest findings come from the seventh-annual Talent Shortage Survey being released Tuesday by ManpowerGroup Inc., a globally active staffing and recruitment company that has headquarters in Milwaukee.

Manpower found that 49% of U.S. employers encounter difficulty filling "mission-critical" positions within their organizations. Topping the list for a second consecutive year was a category called "skilled trades," which includes craftsmen such as steamfitters, tool-and-die makers, construction workers, bricklayers, electricians and industrial workers.

Also appearing on the list repeatedly since it began in 2006 are trades such as engineers and information technology specialists. The most common reasons employers run into trouble include lack of available applicants, applicants looking for more pay and lack of experience.

The problem is not new around Milwaukee, where some manufacturers complain they cannot fill orders or keep pace with the economic recovery, and some even chose to expand elsewhere in the United States or at offshore sites. In a regional study last year, the seven-county Milwaukee 7 economic development group estimated that 5,600 industrial jobs went unfilled despite chronic unemployment.

Where applicants lack experience, or seek higher pay, there is something called a compensating differential for employers to consider.

LIFE IMITATES PRELIMS.

What is the effect of no-fault divorce on the labor-force participation rates of married women?

Commitments are not as credible, and paid work is insurance.

Researchers believe it’s because marriage provides “implicit social insurance” for women, who are still more likely to be the secondary income-earners in the U.S. and Europe. So in the U.S., where divorce rates are higher, “women have a higher incentive to obtain work experience in case they find themselves alone in the future,” they write. “European women anticipate not getting divorced as often and hence find less reason to insure themselves by working as much as American women.”

The substitution effect of lower marginal tax rates offsets the income effect for men.

With diagrams.  Via Andrew Sullivan.

CONNECTIVITY, CONSISTENCY, CONVENIENCE.

My recent train ride to Longview, Texas might have been more instructive for what it revealed about Amtrak's passenger base than it did about the railroads' ability to manage an unusual movement.

Let's start with the case for connectivity.  Amtrak's long-distance trains do not exist as entities unto themselves.  Among the passengers I met are the following journeys: New York City to San Antonio, Toronto to Dallas, Pittsburgh to Arkadelphia (family reunion), Texas points to South Bend (Notre Dame graduation), business trip Chicago to Fort Worth and return, circle tour of U. S. baseball stadiums (in coach) originating in London (yes, the one with the Queen).  I was probably the only passenger riding solely for the detour (the serious railfans putting the mileage ahead of things as mundane as submitting grades).  In Longview, an attorney who remarked on my back-pack (certainly not an accessory to accompany a business suit and a court date) noted that the Texas Eagle was conveniently timed for business in St. Louis.  Probably competitively priced, even in the sleeper.  I didn't research those fares, but what I paid for the Chicago - Longview round trip came in as less than the Chicago to Longview round trip air fare, and my parking at Elburn and Metra connection to the train is cheaper than a rental car, choose any car in the aisle or not, and a hotel, which a business trip by air would involve.  Eighteen hours each way on the train, however, may be a losing proposition commercially, the availability of cell phone service and wireless internet over much of the route or not.  But Longview to Little Rock or St. Louis might work for the business traveler, although the Little Rock to Longview is for former members of the military or early risers or devotees of the red-eye, and you avoid the tender mercies of the Transportation "Security" Administration for the most part.  As one passenger put it, he'd like the carriers to treat passengers like a guest, not a suspect.

Conclusion: there is much Amtrak can do to encourage passengers to take journeys on multiple trains.  Much more, that is, than timing the east coast trains to arrive at Chicago in the morning and depart in the late evening, with the west coast trains leaving and arriving from midafternoon on.  (The Lake Shore Limited  deliberately has a late evening departure from Chicago so as to protect connections from late-running Western trains, and even with the timings, a Capitol Limited that was close to time at South Bend ran into the all-too-common Norfolk Southern freight train tangle west of there, and a few passengers transferring to the Eagle expressed dismay at not being able to visit the Art Institute or the Skydeck during their anticipated layover.)

Next, consider the consistency.  Amtrak 22 Texas Eagle, Longview to Chicago via C&EI detour, 17-18 May 2012: diesel 114, transition sleeper 39026, sleeper 32057, diner 38021, buffeteria car 37009, coaches 31042-34062-31003.  Hot but dry temperatures at Longview and dry rail.  Train arrives 6:23, my space in lower level of 32057, an unrebuilt car, conductor checks coach tickets and assigns passengers to seats at trackside, all passengers boarded and train in motion at 6:32.

BY THEIR FRUITS SHALL YE KNOW THEM.

"Be careful what you wish for" is a recent thesis nailed to Newmark's Door.  (I can't resist the Martin Luther reference, kinna hurra or not).  It's all about the folly of Utopian Wonkery, and each of the cited references is worth a visit.  The Trenchant Observation of the Day, or perhaps the Cassandra Award, goes to Victor Davis Hanson.

[F]or 30 years we have been lectured to death about global warming, the brilliant Ivy League technocrats, the genius of Keynesian borrowing, the need for multiculturalism in the White House, if only we had open borders, why lawyers and academics need to be in charge — all on the “what if” presumption that no one in his right mind would let any of the above become gospel. And so we had the constant liberal whine, “if only.…” Now we have it in the flesh, and in cathartic fashion Obama is going to purge us of that unhinged temptation for another generation.

Or not: the Permanent Republican Majority came a cropper sometime between Weapons of Mass Destruction and Terry Schiavo.  Legal pads are still relatively cheap, and with Waterloo Maple it's still easier to design worlds that cannot exist and prove the necessity of Corrective Taxation or Subsidy or Second-Best Intervention in those worlds in ways that reduce to Pithy Soundbites.

A COMMUTER DISCOUNT?

How else characterize a recent Northern Illinois University scholarship?  It's based on geography, not necessarily merit.

One of those tools is a $4,000 scholarship for local high school students who have at least a 2.75 cumulative grade-point average.

“Local students grow up hearing about NIU, and they drive by the campus,” said Anne Hardy, director of NIU’s scholarship office. “This is really giving them the opportunity to see NIU as a choice for higher education.”

The DeKalb County scholarship program started in 2011, and 61 local students enrolled at NIU with the scholarship last year.

Hardy expects as many as 90 students to enroll with the scholarship this fall semester. She said NIU officials won’t know how many students will attend until September, when fall enrollment numbers have been calculated.

Hardy said NIU stepped up its local recruiting efforts through the scholarship program because many local students have chosen to attend community college before entering a four-year school.

“[Community college] is a great choice for many students, but we also wanted to make NIU an affordable option,” she said.

She said students who attend four-year universities as freshmen are immersed in student culture early on rather than as a junior.

A 2.75 in high school? Some of the critics of the common schools who see grade inflation everywhere are likely to be non-plussed: that 2.75 is last century's failing.

More seriously, though, the university has grappled for years with the Illinois Articulation Initiative.  It prevents the kind of game-playing four-year and two-year colleges engage in to increase tuition yields to the inconvenience of students.  At the same time, the four-year institutions face a challenge in filling the general education classes that common wisdom has subsidize the upper division courses, and an economic incentive might be more effective than general education clusters or marketing the student culture (too often, alas, frats 'n football) as a way of bringing freshmen and sophomores on board.

CHAMPION OF THE RIGHT?

It's rare that Wisconsin politics make Illinois look good, but America's Dairyland is into the second year of recalls.

Recall, if you must, the carping the pundits of the right engaged in when Our President rolled out his re-election slogan, Vpereds, er, Forward.  (I've heard Our President say "together forward" but as yet he is not short-listed for our College of Law.)

In Wisconsin, though, current governor Scott Walker is using the expression "forward" (in red letters, no less) with reference to progress in job growth and fiscal stability, and branding the self-styled progressives seeking to fire him as the backward-looking wreckers.  The self-styled progressives take umbrage.

RAILWAY PRESERVATION.

A screen-grab from the Illinois Railway Museum web-camera.

In the foreground: an air-conditioned Chicago and North Western Commuter Streamliner.  There's nothing quite like seeing one's work-a-day conveyance in a museum to make one feel old.  Approaching the station on One: the Nebraska Zephyr, also air-conditioned, and in good enough shape to make occasional sojourns onto the mainline railroads.  Waiting on Two is Leviathan, a replica Civil-War era American Standard.  There are several other replicas of Gilded Age locomotives in steam, and enough Super Power era steam locomotives in preservation that our restoration money goes into returning those to steam rather than building replicas of the ones that were lost, as the British are wont to do.

FOURTH TURNING ALERT.

Via Media sees symptoms of the continuing third-worldization of the West.

That the survey is global offers Americans a small degree of comfort; certain corporate cultures abroad are known for their tolerance of shady behavior, and we can hope that the figures for American business are a little better. But that is no cause to be smug. A pervasive culture of dishonesty in business is more than a nuisance; it is a threat. There are always a few bad apples out there, but if we reach a tipping point where enterprise is habitually and routinely dishonest, the world will grow nasty and poor with surprising speed.

A pervasive culture of dishonesty forces everyone to deal defensively and to think only of the very short term. Systemic dishonest exacts huge costs; it also leads to a commercial environment where avaricious lawyers and ham-handed regulators have the upper hand.

He correctly recognizes the source of the rot, and the consequences of allowing it to spread and calling it inclusion.

We need teachers, headmasters, principals and college presidents and deans who are ready to stand up for (and be held accountable by) serious moral standards beyond the tepid green PC pablum that substitutes for serious ethical and religious discourse in many contemporary educational institutions.

Tolerance of unethical personal and business behavior among the rich and the powerful needs to be recognized for what it is: a deadly threat to all we hold most dear.

Amen.

LEARNING TODAY, LEADING TOMORROW.

That's the latest Northern Illinois University tagline, part of the marketing and branding that obsesses full-time administrators who don't have classes to prepare for.  A similar tagline didn't work for the University of Houston, but something similar works for Griffith (Indiana) Middle School, with farcical results.

Students who have the misfortune to attend school here have virtually no speech rights, pursuant to vague, arbitrary anti-bullying and intimidation rules that include such cryptic provisions as a ban on "innuendos," for which they may be suspended or expelled. They are subject to rules against using or possessing profanity, pornography or obscenity that include a breathtakingly vague prohibition of "other inappropriate materials" and a ban on "using or writing derogatory written materials." I suppose they could be disciplined for reading this post, which intentionally derogates Griffith School administrators.

I wonder if there are full-time administrators in Griffith who prowl the social media for infractions by students for whom they don't have to prepare classes.

THE STAKES ARE SO SMALL.

Yet corruption diffuses into collegiate women's basketball.

Baylor runs the table with its East German center, yet accepts sanctions for recruiting irregularities.

[Baylor coach Kim] Mulkey was stripped of two scholarships and forbidden from recruiting off campus this July. Which will hardly dissuade other coaches from employing the same tactics. What are a couple of lost scholarships and a month off the road compared with 40-0 and a national championship banner, with another one likely next season? The conclusion is that it’s entirely worth it to cheat.

Eastern Michigan displaces Toledo or Bowling Green as the power in the Mid-American, yet becomes the subject of an investigation into "tame violations".

[T]he team had regularly gone over the NCAA rule of no more than four hours per day and 20 hours per week of basketball related activities (practice, film, games).

Graduate programs generally limit students with 20 hour assistantships to nine credits per semester. Presumably basketball players take up to eighteen undergraduate credits a semester so as to graduate in four years.  The end to which some people will go -- just to win the Mid-American and become one-and-done in the national tournament.  The coach has resigned.

The previous day, Michigan's Kevin Borseth left Ann Arbor to return to the Green Bay Phoenix.

ORDER, COUNTER-ORDER.

Apparently there wasn't enough disorder in The Battle of the Crater as interpreted by historians Newt Gingrich and William R. Forstchen, so they took their historical novel so-titled and re-titled it as To Make Men Free.  Whatever.  The book takes its original title from an attempt by the Army of the Potomac to end the siege of Petersburg by undermining a critical fort and dropping it into a pit.  The new title probably refers to the prominent role of United States Colored Troops in preparing for the follow-on attack.

Book Review N^o. 15 will refer to the work as Battle, as it was by that title that I bought and read the hardback version.  I wonder if the book serves more as an allegory of Washington intrigue than as military history, no matter the title on the cover.  The usual maxim in military matters has a thousand fathers for victory, but the failure of the plan to drop the fort is clearly not an orphan: senior generals and senior engineers and more than a few quartermasters were involved.  I'm not conversant enough with the eastern campaigns to recommend a good analysis of the Battle of the Crater for comparison purposes.  Fortunately for the Union effort, the Confederacy was losing the war faster than the Federals could win it, with the failure at the Crater being followed almost immediately by the surrender of Atlanta.

(Cross-posted to 50 Book Challenge.)

MAYBE NOT SO LOST A CAUSE AFTER ALL.

Although the British are reuniting the six surviving Gresley Streaks for the 75th anniversary of a claimed speed record set by one member of the class, that record may not be safe for all time, in the same way that American League hitting records for pitchers, or Roman chariot racing records, are.

Railroad Picture Archive photo from Jeff Carlson.

That looks like a new candidate for the Scrap Line column header, but it's potentially a lively corpse.

A new Minneapolis-based organization, the Coalition for Sustainable Rail today announced plans to rebuild and modify ex-Santa Fe 4-6-4 No. 3463 into “the world’s first carbon-neutral higher-speed locomotive.” The engine was built by Baldwin in 1937 and has been on display in Topeka, Kan., since 1956. The group has already acquired the locomotive from the Great Overland Station Museum and Education Center in Topeka.

The locomotive is the last surviving 84" driver Hudson in the United States (the representatives from The Milwaukee Road going to scrap in the early 1950s, and the representatives from Chicago and North Western surviving in ore-thawing service until the early 1960s, when they also went for scrap.)

It is therefore fitting that a seven-foot drivered 4-6-4 with technical support in the Twin Cities be rebuilt to burn cleaner fuel ... and set a new steam speed record?

Seeking to develop a high profile and prove its technology, the group plans to use a modified 3463 in an attempt to break the world speed record for a steam locomotive, operating it at speeds up to 130 mph. It has named the venture “CSR Project 130.”

The plan appears to be serious.

Once its modernization is complete, CSR 3463 will have little in common with the smoke-belching steam engine it once was. Featuring a gas-producer combustion system, improved steam circuit, modernized boiler, low-maintenance running gear and steam-powered electric generator (to power the passenger train), CSR anticipates 3463 will be able to pull a passenger train with electric-like performance for less than the cost of diesel-electric locomotives. In order to further prove the viability of biocoal and modern steam technology, CSR plans to test the locomotive in excess of 130 miles per hour, out-performing any existing diesel-electric on the market and breaking the world steam speed record. In light of this achievement, CSR has named this endeavor: “Project 130.”

Keep in mind, though, dear reader, that a Milwaukee F-7 spun the dynamometer at Pennsylvania's Altoona test plant at 140 mph.

Steam dreaming aside, let's see how this project progresses.  After two years of frustration with the extension and upgrade of the Hiawatha service, something new in midwestern railroading appeals.

LIBERATING TOLERANCE IS INTOLERANCE.

Canada has hate speech laws too creepy even for Salon, and Quebec has now added a law requiring protesters to designate their free speech zones in advance.  A Montreal brewery has turned its annual sale of a special beer into a protest of the law.

Cold Spring Shops has long been on record against university free speech zones.  Maybe when tolerant, compassionate university administrators consider the implications of students protesting tuition hikes being turned into criminals because all of Quebec is a prohibited speech zone, they might rethink whether free speech zones are means to provide respect for all points of view.

The passing of Law 78 is a direct attack on the freedom of assembly and the right to protest. It not only bans unpermitted marches or any unpermitted gathering of more than 50 people, but the vaguely worded “special law” also threatens to levy enormous fines against organizers, unions and potentially anyone who participates in an unpermitted assembly. The law comes in response to the growing popularity of the student movement and can be read as as symptom of the government’s inability to control the movement; it is a sign that in some ways the students are winning. In fact, since its passage last Friday, the nightly marches have only gotten larger as more people see the struggle expanding from the single issue of university tuition to a broader one that includes the right to protest and the suppression of dissent.

Whether that dissent generalizes to California, where tolerant, compassionate administrators preach respect for diversity until they encounter some, remains to be seen.

STRESS.

The homefront is sometimes the toughest test for Special Forces.

Indeed, the long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have pushed many troops to their limits, with a spillover effect in military families that can test relationships and often end them. Even as the war in Afghanistan winds down, special operations troops — including Delta Force, Navy SEALs, Green Berets and Army Rangers— are expected to continue playing a crucial role, fighting at a high tempo.

The article is instructive. Read and understand. The Special Forces are also working with Olympians, who are getting a new idea what tough training is about.

"These guys are extremely motivated," Kenneth Andreasen, U.S. Sailing's high performance director and head coach, says of his sailors. "Having the Navy SEALs here is amazing. They have the training, the background, and (the athletes) have respect for them.

"The biggest part of this is the mental side of it — that they don't quit, that they keep on going. That's the biggest lesson."

When asked whether these sessions are at all similar to actual SEALs training, one of the SEALs says, "It's really not that close a comparison."

Special Forces work with Olympians in part as a way of recruiting fit, motivated people to the Special Forces. Whether the stresses an Olympic effort might put on a person's private life are comparable with the stresses of a military career is left to the reader as an exercise.