WHY IT MATTERS.

Chicago Tribune business correspondent Gail Marks Jarvis looks at research into the college earnings premium.  It transpires that the premium is greater for graduates of more highly regarded institutions, and for graduates who came from more prosperous families.

Immediately after college, the pay the low-income grads received was about a third lower than graduates who had come from families with more money. But by the time people reached midcareer, the advantage of a college education slipped. In their 40s, the college graduates from low-income backgrounds were making only half of what graduates from nonpoor households were earning.

By their late 50s, earnings for college graduates who grew up poor decreased substantially. Their earnings fell to the same level as at the start of their careers, the researchers report. The graduates who had been raised by higher-income families experienced some decline late in their careers, but a much smaller decline.

The researchers have not yet identified causes for the vast difference in pay and are continuing to dig through data.

There are always opportunities for future research. Ms Jarvis offers provisional hypotheses.

Students from low-income backgrounds tend to choose lower-quality colleges. Studies show that the quality of a college — not just a degree — matters. More selective colleges may provide a broader network for students, giving them advice on how to advance and introductions to people who can help them.

In fact, in one study, economists Alan Krueger and Stacy Dale found that attending elite colleges was not significant in outcomes for affluent students but helped low-income students considerably. Krueger noted that people from more affluent backgrounds have networks through their families and other contacts that can help them advance. Low-income students, without built-in networks, can gain access to influential networks through highly selective colleges.

[Upjohn researcher Brad] Hershbein said low-income students that would qualify for more selective colleges often don't apply to those colleges because they have not had contact with them.

Growing up in low-income communities, the students haven't seen their friends going anywhere but state college nearby, he said. And selective colleges also "are not reaching out to low-income students."

I've long been of the view that it doesn't matter much whether any real learning takes place in the hundred or so institutions claiming to be in the top twenty, as long as there is a critical mass of motivated and in many cases well-connected students to emerge as the matriculants' social network at graduation and beyond.

The challenge for the regional comprehensives, the land grants, and the mid-majors is to cultivate the same sort of motivation and connection among students in order that the critical mass can eventually emerge.  A pedagogical commitment to access-assessment-remediation-retention doesn't strike me as useful.  The sub-prime party school model is a loser.  An institutional commitment to a tuition break for attending football games, likewise.

DONALD TRUMP PICKS UP MORE VOTERS IN MICHIGAN.

Going into Tuesday's primary, he and Mrs Clinton are ahead in a recent poll.  And the two Democrats will elaborate on "No True Progressive" again tonight, in Flint, on CNN.  It's unlikely to be as wild as the recent Republican throwdown in Detroit, but yet, there is potential.

Also in the weekend's news, "Chaotic Crowd Looking To Buy New Air Jordan Shoes Forces Eastland Mall To Close."  Eastland Mall is one of the compass-point malls that used to surround major cities, e.g. "in the Dales" from Prairie Home Companion, or on the ridges north and south of Milwaukee.

You know the comment section at that report is going to be nasty.  (It is.)  You know that the punditry and the experts in social psychology will be trotting out all the usual "isms" and "ologies" to make the Trump voters (and there are many, and they are neither impressed with ruling class posturing nor likely to be guilt-tripped) out to be, shall we say, Retrograde and Socially Unenlightened.

Perhaps, but the elite that emerges in the new, no-ethnic-majority United States that is baked into the demographic pie is going to have to tackle the deleterious consequences of the cults of "authenticity" and "transgressiveness" and "intersectionality" that rationalize the ruling class looking the other way at Shoppers Behaving Badly, while that same ruling class sneers at what we used to view as mainstream Americans, who don't need to hear dog whistles when they can see the social rot all around them.

THE NEW TIME OF THE TROLLEY.

Monday's edition of Destination: Freedom had several posts about streetcars.

In Boston, the Ashmont - Mattapan High Speed Line is the last rapid transit property using Presidents Conference Committee streetcars.  That's posing problems for the Master Mechanic.  "T workers have to make some parts for the World War II-era trolleys by hand at their Everett shops. Only about 5,000 riders use the trolleys every day, less than the ridership on some bus lines."  The point of the Presidents Conference Committee was to come up with a standard streetcar design that could be deployed anywhere.  "Mod Desire" is a model of a hippie-era paint job Pittsburgh applied to at least one car.  Cars of similar vintage serve the tourist-catering car lines of Kenosha and Market Street in San Francisco, and at least one is in regular service with several nearing service at the Illinois Railway Museum.

Thus, there ought to be possibilities for the master mechanic for Boston to work with several other operators of the cars to induce a manufacturer to produce parts in commercially feasible lots.

Alternatively, Boston's managers might look at working with other transit authorities purchasing new cars to participate in their orders of rolling stock.  The controversial and questionable Washington, D.C. car line just opened.  Kansas City will get a car line in early May.  A line in the story suggests that the Presidents Conference Committee were wise in one way, creating a standard design.  "The company that made the streetcars did not deliver them as quickly as expected."  The sense I get is that each streetcar authority has its own ideas about what a streetcar is, and the companies that build streetcars and light rail vehicles have their own ideas.  We're a long way from Pullman or St. Louis Car building city cars to Presidents Conference Committee specifications.

But with Virginia Beach seeking to extend a light rail line, perhaps there are enough commonalities between what that operator wants and what Boston wants to agree on a car that can be assembled in larger lots.

LIFE CAN BE STRESSFUL. GET A PICKELHAUBE.

At the beginning of the week, a comedian called John Oliver devoted his show to a sketch titled "Make Donald Drumpf Again."  That's caught on around the internets, with some observers going so far as to install an algorithm that turns "Trump" into "Drumpf."  It also gets Washington Post columnist S. I. Rosenbaum exercised about inappropriate cultural appropriation.

The names we use to talk about a thing determine how we think about it, too.

“Drumpf” feels so satisfying to critics of the Republican front-runner partly because it sounds funny and foreign; it sounds funny BECAUSE it is foreign. Specifically, Drumpf sounds funny because it sounds German. Drumpf, to an American ear, conjures up a dough-faced Bavarian Nazi on his stumpy way to murder all the Jews in his village. (At least, that’s what I think of, as a progressive Jew who opposes Trump.) In the face of a campaign that’s drawing support from white supremacists by a candidate who promises that he would ban Muslims and build a “beautiful wall” to keep out Mexicans, it’s nice to think of Trump that way — as an interloper, a false face that conceals a creeping foreign influence. As not one of us.

Perhaps that will make people who aren't going to vote for Mr Trump anyway confident in their positions, but the people who are on board with Mr Trump may not be interested in substantive arguments or allusions to the Volksbund anyway.

Go read the first link if you want Mr Oliver's video.

Go read the second link if you want to be warned that Team Red and Team Blue are irrelevant.

It's this part of Ms Rosenbaum's column I wish to reinforce.

Germans don’t deserve to be tarred as shifty-eyed Nazi foreigners. Plenty of German Americans were so slandered during World War II; it wasn’t cricket then, and it’s not now.

I suspect that there are enough people made in America of German parts, and there is so much of what Germans brought to the Americas that is now part of buying into America that you're not going to hear much griping about smearing all Americans of German descent or about cultural appropriation.

Much better to have some strong drink to accompany the political madness.

And be grateful that German style courtesy titles did not catch on the way bratwurst, beer gardens, and Sunday picnics did.

Otherwise you would have to address me as Herr Doktor Freiherr von Masuren.

WHY SHOULD THIS CYCLE BE DIFFERENT FROM ANY OTHER CYCLE?

Paul Krugman contemplates the unicorn that is Senator Sanders's macroeconomic policy, then concludes by confronting the tragic vision head-on.  "It’s a rough time for progressives who don’t believe in magic." Somewhere Michael Munger is smiling.  Jeffrey Tucker identifies the fundamental problem.

Presidents were managers of a limited government that didn’t intrude into any intimate aspects of life, much less on the whole population. The governments these men headed had strict, meaningful, and practical limits on what they could do. They had no policy plans to speak of, because policy as we know it barely existed.

Leviathan as we know it had not been invented yet. That came later, in the 20th century. Whatever great ambitions of Gilded Age presidents, they couldn’t be realized through their official capacity. Therefore, the stakes of any one election were extremely low for the country at large. That's why these men’s names are barely known. Even back then, hardly anyone paid attention to the presidency as such. The president was a caretaker, holding an honorary position, of interest to only those directly affected.

As bad as the candidates are this year — as threatening as each of them is to someone’s rights and liberties — none would pose a threat if the power to act on ambition were still limited.

Put another way, there is no cult of the presidency in the presence of proper enumerated and limited federal powers.

There is a sense, then, that when we talk about how grim the policies of a Trump or Sanders or Rubio or Hillary or whomever would be, we are not getting to the core of the problem. We should not have to worry about the character or ambitions of the person we elect. A good system of government is one that is protected against control by wicked people. It should even be protected against good people who want to use state power to realize noble ideals. Government should be impervious to the personal zeal of its temporary managers.

It's so tempting, though, to suggest that Wise Experts can in fact Find Consensus and Fulfill the Promise. Until the wise experts discover that Ordering the People About is more fun.

Power once created will be used. That the special interests and then the masses clamor for it to be used on their behalf is the inevitable result.

With power also comes a divided population, people seething with hatred against those who stand in their way, interest groups consumed by loathing for anyone with a chance of using power to their own advantage.

The presence of power itself, not the people who seek to turn it to their advantage, is the source of conflict. And such a conflict threatens to destroy friendships and even the social fabric itself. Overweening government is the reason we all can’t get along.

Most of the people who created this mess are long dead, but they still rule us. They bequeathed us a monster that the present generation must contend with. There is really only one responsible way forward: dismantle Leviathan before it destroys us.

Perhaps, in a Democratic race that has degenerated into "No True Progressive" and a Republican race best summarized as "short fingers, short schlong" it might yet dawn on the electorate that the contentiousness will persist as long as the presidential cargo cult does.

THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS FREE PARKING.

But what the government subsidizes it gets more of.

In a world without benefits, driving commuters will increase and public transit riders will decrease. The same patterns and results held true in Baltimore (Maryland), Philadelphia (Pennsylvania), Newark (New Jersey), and New York (New York).

The passage refers to what appear to be survey outcomes.  Change the incentives, and that changes the behavior.

It seems that offering commuters incentive to use public transportation just is not enough. In order to truly change the minds and decisions of commuters, cities must simultaneously create disincentives to drive and park.

Sometimes, the authorities have to do very little. That appears to be the case in Chicago, where ever-more-crowded expressways (widening, no widening, changing the traffic flow at the Mixmaster, removing the left-side slip ramps notwithstanding) and increased downtown parking charges likely contribute to increases in Metra riding, even off-peak and at weekends.

There's a provocative Strong Towns post suggesting that government-subsidized parking is an upscale failure of socialism.

And while Vancouver prides itself on multi-modal transportation options, with less than half of trips into its downtown in cars, free parking is still sacrosanct for many. Jens [von Bergmann] makes a good point that Vancouverites pay lots of money to buy private property to live on, and then continue to pay property taxes for that privilege. However, we pay nothing to store our vehicles on public roads.

The article goes on to note that, whether the parking involves no cash outlay, the land devoted to parking lots is land that has an alternative use.  There always is an opportunity cost.

BAD WRITING OUGHT NOT BE READ.

Here's Professor Bainbridge, slogging through a few lines of theorrhea.  "There are lots of explanations for why people write this way, but I think a lot of it has to do with obfuscation. How do you assess the merits of an idea if you can't parse it?"  Precisely.

WE'RE NOT QUITE HOLDING OUR OWN.

The Economic Innovation Group recently issued an interactive map featuring a Distressed Communities Index.  The more the map looks like a bad case of measles, the sicker the neighborhoods are, as measured by some weighting of housing vacancy, unemployment, absence of middle-class markers.  My zip code has a "distress score" of 64.8, ranking as the 323rd most distressed county among 1129 state zip codes.

The housing market remains flat.  With the El Nino influenced weather pattern (or is it climate chaos?) it's possible to go for a walk around the neighborhood in shorts last Sunday and then have to put on extra layers Wednesday and Thursday.

Since I took this picture, the owner of the house at right has since installed a deck, and there are several dogs and kids enjoying the yard.  My trees are much bigger.

On the other hand, many of the houses along that street, and elsewhere in the neighborhood, are empty, sometimes for a long time as evidenced by wind-strewn trash in the yard, or fading paint on the woodwork (the decorative headboards on the fronts of many of these houses are apparently not durable.)

THE TRUMP TRAIN MAY NOT REACH ITS DESTINATION.

Professor Bainbridge read some of the articles I rolled into two posts last week.  He, too, notes that it's too late for the mature adults to put the groundlings back in their places.  "Trump is the unprotected class' beta test for a cure for the revolt of the elites. And its about damned time."  It's not going away, whether it's the Republican Establishment making three-no-Trump, or whether it's Mrs Clinton winning through.

REVEALED PREFERENCES.

In Psychology Today, Ray Williams asserts, "There is a growing anti-intellectual dumbing down of our culture."  First he lists some examples.  He then states the general proposition.

In American schools, the culture exalts the athlete and good-looking cheerleader. Well-educated and intellectual students are commonly referred to in public schools and the media as "nerds," "dweebs," "dorks," and "geeks," and are relentlessly harassed and even assaulted by the more popular "jocks" for openly displaying any intellect.  These anti-intellectual attitudes are not reflected in students in most European or Asian countries, whose educational levels have now equaled and and will surpass that of the U.S.  And most TV shows or movies such as The Big Bang Theory depict intellectuals as being geeks if not effeminate.

As he notes, the enabling of superficiality has been present for some time, whether we're looking at the spending priorities of high schools or at high-concept contemplation.

It should come as no surprise, though, that when people get a platform to communicate with like-minded people more cheaply, and when they're encouraged in their outrage because it's trendy and transgressive, they'll do so.

Fashion, entertainment, spectacle, voyeurism – we’re directed towards trivia, towards the inconsequential, towards unquestioning and blatant consumerism. This results in intellectual complacency. People accept without questioning, believe without weighing the choices, join the pack because in a culture where convenience rules, real individualism is too hard work. Thinking takes too much time: it gets in the way of the immediacy of the online experience.

Reality TV and pop culture presented in magazines and online sites claim to provide useful information about the importance of The Housewives of [you name the city] that can somehow enrich our lives. After all, how else can one explain the insipid and pointless stories that tout divorces, cheating and weight gain? How else can we explain how the Kardashians,or Paris Hilton are known for being famous for being famous without actually contributing anything worth discussion? The artificial events of their lives become the mainstay of populist media to distract people from the real issues and concerns facing us.

The current trend of increasing anti-intellectualism now establishing itself in politics and business leadership, and supported by a declining education system should be a cause for concern for leaders and the general population, one that needs to be addressed now.

It may not have been given me to finish the task, and yet I will not give it up.

And yet, perhaps we are really seeing the advance of civilization, as Alfred North Whitehead would have it.  On the other hand, being able to follow the latest Donald Trump smackdown or Kardashian family drama on a smartphone the owner has no clue how to build or to service might be what Mr Whitehead was counseling us to fear. "The art of free society consists first in the maintenance of the symbolic code; and secondly in fearlessness of revision, to secure that the code serves those purposes which satisfy an enlightened reason. Those societies which cannot combine reverence to their symbols with freedom of revision, must ultimately decay either from anarchy, or from the slow atrophy of a life stifled by useless shadows."

DO THINGS DECENTLY AND IN ORDER.

State legislators might well push university governing boards to exceed their authority.  William Bradley, a graduate of the University of Missouri, before its football team, its president, and its board of curators beclowned themselves, explains why caving in to the legislature establishes a bad precedent.

If politicians are now allowed to dictate an institution’s personnel decisions, what is to stop them from abusing this power even further? Will scientists researching climate change be safe in such an environment? How about a religious studies professor whose scholarship isn’t dogmatic enough for some politician’s tastes? Can the theater department still perform Lysistrata, or is Aristophanes’ antiwar sentiment and frank discussions of carnal matters unsuitable for the commissars of the new political correctness? God help the political scientists, the sociologists and the artists if we decide to allow politicians this kind of power to meddle in academic affairs.

Or, to extend the argument, if there's Hayek or Sowell on somebody's reading list, or a faculty member serving as county chairman for the Republicans.  Procedural protections exist for a reason.

Had the board been confident that Melissa Click was truly unfit to teach at the University of Missouri, it could have stepped back and let the faculty members and administrators in charge of Click’s case do their job and come to that conclusion on their own. Shared governance may be slow, but it is effective, despite what proponents of “disruption” and critics of the professoriate tend to believe. If Click needed to go, then that would be the appropriate way to get rid of her. That the board could not wait for others in the campus community to come to the same conclusion it had come to suggests that the board is not as confident in its assessment as its members have publicly said they are.

Boards do not function solely as rubber-stamps, and there are ways for a board member to communicate to a department head, dean, provost, or friend on a college or university promotion board (depending on what the by-laws stipulate about where a divided vote is meaningful) that a particular tenure case is going to put the university in a bad light.

It's in Mr Bradley's continuation, however, that you see the way in which higher education has broken the social contract with the polity that sustains it.

When I started graduate school, I thought that being a university professor would be the coolest job in the world. And in some ways, it was and still is. I mean, you get paid to read and write and think. You get to work with idealistic young people excited to make a difference in the world. You get to make a difference in people’s lives. It’s awesome.

Unfortunately, though, there are forces in our culture that resent academics, and intellectual pursuits in general. We hear it in the voices of governors who insist that college is about the acquisition of job skills and that a pursuit of anything artistic or literary is a luxury that young people can’t afford and don’t really need. We read it in “trollish” online comments that say that people who have dedicated their lives to teaching and research live in “ivory towers,” untouched by the concerns of the “real world.” We witness it when a presidential candidate sneers about the discussions going on over brie and chardonnay in the faculty lounge.

The smug in which gentry liberals, including the alleged brie and chardonnay set in the faculty lounge (in 35 years in higher education, I don't recall ever setting foot in one, but I mostly enjoyed the gig all the same, for similar reasons), marinate, is real.  The expense-preference behavior of administrators, who on paper report to the trustees, is real.  The recondite and incomprehensible scholarship, particularly in disciplines artistic and literary, is real.  The practical degrees that have value, no matter where the student matriculates, are real.

By all means, insist that trustees do things decently and in order, and defend the work of the university.  Is it too much to ask, though, that the people who do the work of the university also do that work decently and in order?

NO RAILROAD IN MY BACK YARD.

The promoters of the Great Lakes Basin Railroad (think a resurrection of the Chicago Milwaukee and Gary and the Kankakee Belt) recently rethought their planned routing.

The original concept (which demonstrates that contemporary mapmakers don't get railroads) featured a belt line running to the west of Rockford and Rochelle.

Image retrieved from WIFR TV.

The promoter now wants to change the route.

The route, which previously ran to the west of Rockford, is being moved to the east side of Belvidere because of environmental challenges in Brodhead, Wisconsin. With so many state parks and water obstacles, the prices would have jumped because of added bridges.

Founder Frank Patton says everything worked out for the better.

“If we went all the way through, once we got out of Winnebago County, we couldn’t get into Wisconsin. That was the killer. We ended up with a better route I think. It’s all a part of the process,” says Patton.

I remain skeptical of a Chicago Outer Belt that ends anywhere in southern Wisconsin, which has become a railway desert in a prairie country.

Belvidere residents, however, are taking seriously the prospect of an eminent domain taking.

One landowner says she's been in her Boone County home since 1956 and she just found out a train could soon be chugging straight through her property and there may be nothing she can do about it. Dozens like her said they were too angry to go on camera after hearing the news.

Boone County's board says it's too early to make any judgments. Railroad organizers are expected to hold public hearings by April.

The former grades of the Northern Illinois Railroad, which was last a Belvidere to Sycamore to DeKalb branch of the Chicago and North Western, and the Gary Route, which was last a Kirkland to DeKalb branch of The Milwaukee Road, are still intact in the prairie, although there has been extensive construction on those grades closer to DeKalb and Sycamore. The Great Lakes Basin plan, however, is to avoid thickly settled areas wherever possible.

If public hearings are coming, more coverage here might be coming.

MEET THE NEW BOSS, SAME AS THE OLD BOSS.

Chicago State University, which has cancelled this year's spring break so as to finish the academic year before the money runs out, gives new meaning to the expression "all-administrative university."

After the first layoffs occur on April 30, and after the university ceases to be able to make payroll after that date, these 9 persons will be entitled to $615,987 in compensation. Of course, with the staff laid off after April 30 and faculty all laid off after August 15, it seems unclear what these administrators are going to administer. I guess that's OK in this state. In any event, these layoffs are going to be damned expensive for someone in Illinois.

The charitable explanation might be that compliance with contracts and statutory protections (for example, faculty must take their nine month salary over twelve months to remain on health insurance during the summer, and academic year contracts run August 15 to May 15.)  The cynical explanation is that an expense-preference playground remains an expense-preference playground, even unto financial exigency.

WATCH THIS SPACE.

Winter continues into meteorological spring.  Plenty of time to work on the railroad.

When we last looked at this section, late last November, it was a tabletop  Installing a proper ladder of N^o. 10 turnouts is slow, painstaking, but ultimately rewarding work.

Yes, there's now track along the south wall, and those turnouts will handle the longest of passenger cars in a way that looks right.

In the northeast corner, two tracks in place for the Eastern Route Main Line, plus three tracks serving the Midvale Steel works.

BLAMING THE VICTIM.

It's the presidential season, and the developments thus far have pushed the chattering classes into Bertolt Brecht territory, thinking it's easier for the punditry to abolish the people.  When it comes to the Republican voters, we have Juan "How the U.S. Went Fascist: Mass Media Make Excuses for Trump Voters" Cole and Sean "America, you're stupid: Donald Trump's political triumph makes it official -- we're a nation of idiots" Illing.  Follow the links if you want the supporting arguments, such as they are.  David "The Governing Cancer of Our Time" Brooks at least makes the reader read the column to see that, he, too, would prefer to cut out the cancer abolish the people.

Over the past generation we have seen the rise of a group of people who are against politics. These groups — best exemplified by the Tea Party but not exclusive to the right — want to elect people who have no political experience. They want “outsiders.” They delegitimize compromise and deal-making. They’re willing to trample the customs and rules that give legitimacy to legislative decision-making if it helps them gain power.

Ultimately, they don’t recognize other people. They suffer from a form of political narcissism, in which they don’t accept the legitimacy of other interests and opinions. They don’t recognize restraints. They want total victories for themselves and their doctrine.

Which, because Mr Brooks doesn't go far enough in shaming the Republican establishment, allows Sean Illing, apparently a Salon regular now, to engage in concern-trolling.

Republicans have played to the populist Tea Party id for years – fomenting fear, demonizing immigrants, and exploiting cultural angst. What we’re seeing now is the fulfillment of this strategy, which has helped them win elections but has failed to produce meaningful legislative change – and that’s precisely the point.

That argument, and Mr Illing's elaborations, might go well on a Sunday show or in the common room, and yet, we're seven years into a non-recovery recovery, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care act is two lies for the price of one, and the cultural left is in full cry in the academy and the vulgar culture.  Doesn't look like total victory or meaningful legislative change from my perspective, or, in all likelihood, from the perspective of Trump voters.

WHEN THE SOCIAL CAPITAL LEAVES TOWN.

Steven Shultis reflects on becoming a homeowner in a rough part of Springfield, Massachusetts.

Being poor is hard. Whether the poor living here think so or not, in many ways this is a great neighborhood in which to be poor. Whatever the general state of public transit, living where I do gives people a tremendous mobility that no other location in the region does. Just about every governmental body and institution has a branch or outlet here. Living in an urban center gives the poor access to many of the services which cater to their needs. Residing near the region's hospitality industry (7 hotels now, 11 by 2018 with thousands of guest rooms), universities, and medical centers makes access to thousands of entry level jobs possible.

But these are mostly not actually benefits of the concentration of poverty, they are the benefits of living in a city center. One problem of the concentration of poverty is how it normalizes dysfunction. I see the dysfunction every day. Some gentrification is what the neighborhood needs. Concerns that it could go so far as to displace tremendous numbers of people here are misguided in my view. That is not to say that it wouldn't create new challenges for the people living here--far from it, of course it would. But in many cases what these people need is for a buffer of "function" between themselves and their neighbor's dysfunction. Someone needs to call the police. Someone needs to care enough to pick up the nips bottles, the used condoms, and the dog poop. Someone needs to be at the city council meeting, and the PTO meeting.

Gentrification is emergent, and the critical mass of service industries suggests it is likely.  What Mr Sultis is writing, however, is a suggestion both to the new arrivals to see the grit and determination of many of the current residents, rather than to think of those people as those people ...

At the same time, he's suggesting that the life management skills of the middle class matter.

With school desegregation, white flight created a vacuum which has (in a paradoxical turn of phrase) given concentrated poverty a chance to expand. With the middle class and the wealthy having fled to the suburbs and the exurbs, one result is that many of the rich not only do not ever see poverty, they also have a very warped sense of their own disproportionate wealth. That is to say: I know families with incomes a quarter of a million dollars a year that think that they are middle class.

The concentration of poverty does not just isolate the poor in their behaviors, attitudes, and dysfunctions, it does the same to the middle and upper classes. The recent epidemic of opioid overdose deaths in more suburban and rural parts of the country has led to a spate of articles acknowledging that "we can't just incarcerate our way out of this problem.” Funny how that same realization never occurred to people when most of those being locked up over drug problems were from "that place, that class, and that race.” When "that place" is your place, and people of that class and that race are your neighbors, that realization might well come sooner.

A fact became clear to me a short time back, it is now almost something of a mantra: Were I to find a billion dollars, my dream would be to stay here. Were most of my neighbors to find a thousand, their dream would be to get out. It isn't the place so much as it is the people around them. When you have resources you can be in this world, but not of it, so to speak. The poor do not have that luxury; the poor are always with them.

Whether your bogeyman is "social engineering" or "snob zoning" or "self-segregation" the message might be that your place, wherever it is, will be a more livable place if you and your family are capable of living competently, and more so if your neighbors also are.  I'm likely to return to this argument again, although it's being crowded out by the electoral crack-up going on this spring.

PRIVILEGE CHECKING.

You expect a conservative to enjoy the discomfiture of the culturati being called out, and David French does not disappoint.

Conservatives should never stop noting that the three primary targets of contemporary race protests — big cities, universities, and Hollywood — are staffed top-to-bottom with leftists and have been for decades. And in each of them we can see a common thread — racial justice is cool mainly when there’s something in it for the white liberal activist. The progressive elite gets to have its cake and eat it every day. They live at the top of the cultural food chain, their children inherit their wealth and connections, and they get to feel simply awesome about their politics and world view. Because they hashtag. Because they vote the right way. Because they’re good at condemning other white liberals on command. It’s the greatest activist gig in the world.

It's a different matter when, elsewhere in California last weekend, Donna Smith of the Progressive Democrats of America gets marinated in the smug.

I went to the California Democratic Party's convention in San Jose this weekend, and I decided I would attend the Women's Caucus and try to say a few words on behalf of Bernie Sanders. I had no illusions about the situation, so grabbing a few moments to speak was my goal. But not only was I excluded from doing so, I also watched the women convening the caucus celebrate what it means to be a wealthy and privileged woman during this campaign season. And I was clearly in a class of working class women not invited to this table.

As a woman who strongly supports Bernie Sanders in this race, my position was dismissed. But it was more than that. I was dismissed. I felt at first annoyed, then sad, then more angry than I have felt in a long, long time. And that sort of anger may well be what makes some voters steer clear of political involvement all together if the Democratic powers that be aren't careful. No amount of superficial reassurance will overcome a genuine disdain for the working class that I experienced in what should have been a friendly crowd.

By all means, dear reader, go read and understand the whole thing. South Park has nothing on the real smug of the gentry liberals.

After witnessing the good old girls network in full swing this weekend in support of Bernie's opponent, I was completely sure that I won't matter if the cotillion set stays in charge of my government. Republican or Democratic, arrogance is arrogance. I expect and demand more of my party and my government. This weekend inside the CADEM convention, it felt a little like being in high school when the rich girls giggle and hug one another in restless anticipation of their next dinner party. I've seen Mrs. Trump adorned in her diamond belt standing behind her man, and that overt show of wealth was less offensive to me than what I witnessed as a show of elitism at the CADEM Women's Caucus.

During the same weekend, though, I also watched as more than 1,000 convention goers marched and rallied for Bernie just outside where Vice President Joe Biden was set to speak to those inside the ballroom. Security was very tight. After all, keeping the riff- raff class at a distance from the ruling class is critical if the message is to be controlled. When I saw the Vice President on the Academy Awards television program later in the evening, I'll admit that I saw him in a different light too. Good old girls and good old boys seem pretty much the same to me.

Bernie's vision is a massive change from the country club set's control of our government. Bernie says this government belongs to all of us. But it will only be so if we make it so. We cannot do that if the ruling class only allows our engagement as props in commercials or press ops.

A Tea Party libertarian could not have said it any better.

THINGS DONE DECENTLY AND IN ORDER.

At Mount St. Mary's University, it's now former president Simon "I'll drown the bunnies, and the tenured faculty too" Newman.

After months of turmoil and criticism, Simon Newman leaves, effective immediately. He calls recent controversy "too great of a distraction."

The distractions are mostly self-inflicted, as Adam Steinbaugh of the Torch explains.

Newman’s transparent contempt for dissent and mild criticism—off-hand remarks about a plan that was never implemented—demonstrated an utter lack of appreciation for free speech and academic freedom.

Plus evidence that even a short-fingered vulgarian can overreach.

Had Newman simply weathered the initial criticism and left his critics in place, he almost certainly wouldn’t be resigning now. There would have been little continuing attention from the public and likely no attention from MSMU’s accreditor. It wasn’t Newman’s “kill the bunnies” remark that doomed his presidency—it was his cynical attempt to quell criticism through terminations, risking the credibility of his university in the process.

Better, though, to have worked with the faculty, respecting their stewardship of the curriculum.

An Alex Morey post at the Torch properly calls out the curators of the University of Missouri for caving too readily to legislators.

While FIRE has been critical of [fired assistant communication studies professor Melissa] Click’s actions during the Mizzou protests, it in no way lessens the importance of ensuring faculty members are afforded due process. A renewed commitment to procedural due process by Mizzou not only would comport with the institution’s promises to its faculty, it would also give students and faculty increased confidence that a fair and accurate result will be reached in every termination proceeding.

Melissa Click—like everyone else—is entitled to nothing less.

It is up to the faculty to teach the controversies, to the students to grasp the subtleties of the complexities, and to the administrators and the trustees to provide an environment in which the sifting and winnowing can be continual and fearless.

AVOID THE STRAIN, TAKE THE TRAIN.

Your vacation begins when you get on.  Travel and Trains's Jim Loomis knows this; his tablemate in the dining car discovers it while taking some system improvement time at the Greenbrier.  Plus flying to the Greenbrier takes more time or money than even a high roller might like.

THE CRASH HAS BEEN A LONG TIME COMING.

Dean Dad looks at the continued standoff in Springfield over the lack of an appropriation bill for the state universities.

From an administrator’s perspective, it’s a colossal nightmare.  Chicago State has sent out a raft of layoff notices to all employees, including the president, and cancelled Spring Break so it could wrap up the Spring semester (and stop paying employees for Spring) sooner.  Southern Illinois University is in “full-on fiscal triage mode,” according to its president, and looking to cut tens of millions of dollars from a budget that had already been cut badly.

What makes it a nightmare, beyond the obvious, is that they have remarkably little agency, but will be held responsible for whatever happens.  Some have already declared “financial exigency,” which allows for the layoff or termination of tenured faculty and staff.  Even if the money comes through in enough quantity, and early enough, to say “never mind,” you can’t un-ring that bell.  Illinois is still heavily unionized, and I expect that the unions will be watching like hawks for any procedural irregularities.

Worse, the funding shortfall is essentially collateral damage from a political battle, meaning there’s no way of knowing the exact size of the problem.  It may end tomorrow, or it may go into next year.

That's mostly true. The political battle has historic roots, however, and the institutions mentioned above are not blameless in the matter.

URBAN STRUCTURE IS EMERGENT.

Complex adaptive systems tend to do what they d**n well please, including the complex adaptive systems we know as cities, or as metropolitan areas.  And somewhere (perhaps it goes back to Daedalus sketching pretty lines in the sand) comes the idea that something so built must require intelligent design.

For most of the field’s history, prominent urban planning theorists have taken for granted that cities require extensive central planning. With the question framed as “To plan or not to plan?” students and practitioners answer with an emphatic “Yes,” subsequently setting out to impose their particular ideal order on what they perceived to be, as Lewis Mumford put it, “solidified chaos.” Whether through the controlled centralization of Le Corbusier or the controlled decentralization of Ebenezer Howard and Frank Lloyd Wright, cities were to be just that: controlled. When in 1961 Jane Jacobs set out to attack the orthodox tradition of urban planning, it was this dogma that landed squarely in her crosshairs. With her characteristically deceptive simplicity, she invites us to ask, “Who plans?”

At the Market Urbanism post, the answer is "Not the Wise Experts."

Where grand plans of this kind are necessary, planners should emphasize flexibility in order to support the dynamism of decentralized planning. Where grand plans are not necessary, planners should stick to the trial-and-error of decentralized planning. Jacobs makes this case when she argues for embedding individual subsidized housing units into already functioning neighborhoods rather than tearing down and replacing whole neighborhoods. While an individual building may fail, its failure won’t be nearly be catastrophic as the failure of a grand housing project plan. Meanwhile, a small success can be studied, replicated, and scaled up when appropriate.

As Hayek did in the case of economics, Jacobs stood up to an urban planning orthodoxy that enjoyed the support of policymakers, academics, and all the “Very Serious People.” She celebrated the wisdom of everyday people when the relevant experts found answers only in statistical aggregates and economic calculus. Hayek and Jacobs defended the importance of local knowledge, illustrated the power of decentralized planning, and celebrated the sublime spontaneous orders that organize our lives. Yet their theoretical innovations went largely unnoticed long after their respective publications. Here, the two thinkers diverge: while Hayekian ideas have largely driven centralized economic planning into the dustbin of history, I suspect the Jacobsian urban revolution has only just begun.

Where the concrete hits the forms, there are encouraging signs.  Start in Chicago, where Marisa Novara makes a provocative statement about gentrification driving homeowners of more modest means out.  "If I told you that the key to minimizing displacement of long-time, working-class residents is to build housing that’s not for them, would you believe me?"  That's straightforward for anyone who understands economics (even a relatively un-nuanced version.)  Build houses for the people who want to buy houses.

GIVING BULLSHIT A BAD NAME.

The latest Higher Education Watch posted at The American Interest asserts, Academia Is Losing Its Mind.  The conclusion: it's not just the yahoos of the Angry Right that have a point.

At a time when tuition and student debt are reaching crisis levels, the public is right to demand that the work it is funding (both directly, at public universities, and indirectly, at private universities, by subsidizing student loans) has some bearing on reality and some benefit to the rest of society. It’s time for academics to stop turning up their noses at reasonable critiques, and actually get their house in order.

You want to find the bullshit? Head to the barnyard.  No, head to the "Absence of Absences" conference, which, a few years ago, was scheduled for Tokyo.  This was too much for policy academician (it's complicated) Peter Dreier.  He had some fun with the conference (think Alan Sokal and Social Text) and decided that readers of The American Prospect ought to be in on the story.

Sokal’s ruse was more ambitious than mine. He wrote an entire article. I simply wrote a 368-word abstract. He submitted his for publication. I just submitted mine to a conference. Although his paper was filled with absurd statements, it actually reached a conclusion—however bogus—that gravity was still an idea open to serious debate. In doing so, Sokal actually had a serious point to make about the silliness of much “post-modern” thinking that viewed science as a version of the humanities where all views should be given equal weight.

My paper had no point at all. It was filled entirely with non-sequiturs. I didn’t even bother to mention anything about “the absence of absences,” because I had no idea what it meant and would have thus revealed my ignorance of the panel’s organizing theme.

In writing my abstract for the “Absence of Absences” panel, I violated every rule of good writing to which I usually try to adhere.

Mr Dreier decided that filling thirty pages with violations of every rule of good writing was too much, and he bailed on the conference.  Other participants in the panel took the theme seriously, and their papers are in print.

NEVER CHECK ELECTRONIC MAIL IN THE MORNING.

That advice has been present for over ten years.  But it still appears to be honored more in the breach than the observance.  And, if anything, the ability to send communications cheaply (is it really cheaply?  Why do I keep hearing about $400 a month for data plans?  So clueless I am, doing everything the old fashioned way, with a landline and a desktop computer) lowers the barrier to sending clueless communications, one of the things I was grateful to walk away from once I got out of the university.

But the people still attempting to meet classes and conduct research and deal with the administrivia are still grappling with electronic mail hell.

To be fair, electronic communication has radically transformed the spatial boundaries in which we can work and collaborate with others. But it’s hard not to see the practice of sending an old-fashioned interoffice memo and receiving a response a week or two later as a lost gift. What proportion of today’s emails would never have materialized if the sender had to type out a memo or arrange a meeting?

By lowering the barriers to communication, email has encouraged hyperimpulsive messaging behaviors. Such escalating work transactions are further exacerbated by the asynchronous nature of email, which allows messages to pile up at all hours of the day and night. It’s no wonder our colleague wants email therapy.

And it takes a bit of the Crusty Old Roundhouse Foreman to make "I never check electronic mail before noon" a standard operating practice.

Technologies like email demand the intentional adoption of good practices to ensure that we get the most out of email, rather than letting email get the most out of us. Some professors take a stand by posting their policies and expectations of email communication in their syllabi. But like any tragedy of the commons, a real solution requires institutional change. Standardization of email culture should be directed not just at students, but also at administrators, faculty members and staff members.

A number of useful suggestions follow.  I'm glad to see that the plague of document attachments comes up.

The convenience of email sometimes leads people to think that they needn’t plan ahead. Wrong. One common complaint from faculty members is receiving an attachment with no time to read it. As one professor told us, “They think that because they can send you an attachment instantly, you can read it instantly.” We recommend that meeting-related documents be sent at least two working days prior to the meeting time.

The internet is a sewer of viruses and malware and Microsoft office products are vectors.  I thus had a line in my course outline to the effect that assignments were due in class on paper at the specified time, with language (less strong) about viruses, and I enforced it.  So, dear reader, can you.

Ultimately, though, any new norms involving wired work away from the office or bench will be emergent.

To a certain extent, email is simply a bellwether of the cultural work overload that already exists. But it has also introduced altogether new forms of labor that pile on top of our collective workload.

It's difficult to push back. The high achiever can probably negotiate terms of work that include "leave me alone from six pm to seven am."  But that's not how high achievers get recognized in the first place.  Even high achievers have to establish boundaries.

But for today's fun read, note how Huffington Post's Five Things You Don't Owe Your Boss becomes Six Things You Don't Owe Your Boss at Forbes.  It's the same Travis Bradberry column at both sites, and it relies on the workplace telepressure research that came out of Northern Illinois University just after I ran away with the circus.  I'm not sure what to make of "integrity" coming in at the bottom of the list, or the ways in which being barraged with clueless inquiries at all hours destroys your integrity.  But without integrity, none of the others matter.

THE FRONTIERS OF THE CULTURE WAR.

This morning on Meet the Press, somebody speculated that Donald Trump's tax returns aren't yet public because there might be an inconvenient truth in them.  Perhaps a yuge donation to Planned Parenthood.  It's the Sunday shows, and it's still the silly season, although Mrs Clinton's victory speech in South Carolina last night sounded a lot like a convention acceptance speech.

Meanwhile, the Republicans might either be close to having Mr Trump bringing enough delegates to Cleveland to win, or to having a convention that doesn't ratify a primary outcome, which would be precious, precisely because the Republicans have done a lot of tweaking to their primary schedules precisely to have a definitive primary outcome.  The Democrats, on the other hand, have a lot of party elders who get to vote their conscience, the votes of primary participants or not.

It's to that Planned Parenthood speculation, though, that I wish to speak.  Here's Rebecca Hagelin, illustrating the contested culture war frontier.

It's no wonder that Donald Trump still supports and extols the virtues of Planned Parenthood, the organization that betrays women and girls at the most vulnerable time in their lives; the organization that encourages our teen daughters to be sexually active; the organization that is now notorious for selling baby body parts. It is the very philosophy of Planned Parenthood that Donald Trump uses to justify his decadent lifestyle choices. To both, women are largely sexual objects and men are allowed to treat them that way.

There's a lot of clickbait in that passage. There are also defenders of Planned Parenthood who will protest, perhaps correctly, that explaining options to sexually active teenagers is not the same thing as encouraging teenagers to be sexually active.  Undoubtedly the more rigorous old-style feminists will see in protecting those options, for women of all ages, anything but converting women into objects.

But it's not intentions that matter, it's outcomes.  And a man who brags in his writings about cuckolding other men is a man who is going to benefit from contraception and abortion.  Sex without consequences, forsooth!  Whether that is what the base of Planned Parenthood contributors wants, or not.

ENGINEERING IS HUMAN CAPITAL, SOCIOLOGY IS SIGNALLING.

In the course of arguing against the soft bigotry of low expectations, Naomi Schaefer Riley swerves into a case for insisting that the elementary and secondary schools, no matter where they might be, do their jobs.

Who doesn’t realize computer engineers get paid well? The real problem is that too many black students are getting a hopelessly inadequate K-12 education and by the time they get to college, their best bet is to major in a subject whose exams have no wrong answers and whose professors engage in rampant grade inflation.

Carnevale also argues that’s because blacks are concentrated in open-access schools that have fewer choices of majors. But this, too, is questionable. Plenty of open-access universities offer courses and majors in STEM fields.

The implication is that black students at lower-tier universities are actually less likely to graduate in STEM majors than those at higher-tier ones. Which is patently false. Indeed, the historically black colleges and universities, many of which aren’t selective at all, tend to have among the highest rates of graduating STEM majors.

Study a technical discipline in a class of your intellectual peers, you and your peers master it. Study a technical discipline as the weakest student in the class, you might struggle or wash out. But mightn't there still be a premium to having a technical degree from an institution featured in the U.S. News rankings?  Not necessarily.

And if you want to get a job in a lucrative STEM field, your chances of completing your degree are much better at a lower-tier school. But here’s the real kicker: A recent survey by the Wall Street Journal found that in “fields like science, technology, engineering and math, it largely doesn’t matter whether students go to a prestigious, expensive school or a low-priced one — expected earnings turn out the same.”

For instance, if you go to Manhattan College, where the average SAT score is around 1620, and major in engineering, your mid-career median pay will be $140,000. If you go to Rice, where the average SAT score is 2180, and major in engineering, your pay will be $145,000.

Thus my provocative post title.

If you want to know why there’s still a big salary difference for kids majoring in humanities and social sciences between elite and non-elite schools, it probably has something to do with the substance of the major.

Since most employers have no idea what you learned in your sociology classes, they’ll just assume the kids who went to Harvard are smarter.

But they’ll know exactly what you learned in your math and science classes and so they’ll compensate you well if you did reasonably well no matter where you took them.

If liberal elites really were concerned about increasing the graduation rates and career earnings of minority students, they would realize that the Ivy League is not the answer.

Likewise, policy makers will do better to focus on strengthening the primary and secondary schools, no matter where those might be, in order that the youngster who enrolls at Metropolitan Regional or Directional Comprehensive will be able to handle physics or calculus and finish that engineering degree.

BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR.

Slate's Ashley Balcerzak reports on efforts in several of the states to call an Article V convention to amend the Constitution of the United States of America.  There's the obligatory fretting about the John Birch Society, the American Legislative Exchange Council, and for all I know the non-sailing Koch brothers and the Freemasons.  There's also evidence of participants, working from a left-wing perspective, seeking such a convention to clarify the distinction between natural and legal persons.  The article reinforces a warning I recently issued.  "Would make for an interesting constitutional convention if the libertarians and the non-vanguardist leftists showed up in force."

For bills to count toward the necessary 34 applications, though, they must seek the same amendment to discuss at the convention. So far, a balanced budget amendment is the closest to that requirement. But bills have also called for conventions about a cornucopia of issues, ranging from reforming campaign finance to congressional term limits. Critics are concerned that other topics could be introduced once the convention begins.

Perhaps, gridlock, or the difficulty true believers have in compromising, will more effectively preserve the existing Constitution than the political class or the courts can.

RECLAIMING THE WORLD.

It is difficult for me to believe that income inequality or inadequate schooling matter that much, when the marquee capital project in a school district is a 12,000 seat high school football stadium or a locker room that would put many a small college basketball program to shame, and when the bulk of educational coverage on the local television stations comes on Friday or Saturday nights during football and basketball season.

Here's Bardiac, thinking about the same phenomenon.  In her neighborhood, letter of intent signing day gets a lot of coverage.  The fawning coverage isn't present for other kinds of achievers.

In my fantasy, come graduation season, the local news broadcasts would go to each graduating class and do similar short interviews with the valedictorians or top students (in various ways, top math student, maybe, or top art student, or student with an outstanding record of service) about their plans, future schools, whatever. And they'd put these little interviews on the news with the same attention that they put the football players on the news.

More to the point, the interviews might be part of a larger, "where are they now?" feature.

And then, here's the real fantasy: in six years, they'd reinterview the same students, the football players, the art students, the valedictorian, all of them they could find, and they'd ask about the past six years and the students' future plans.

And I bet they'd learn that those valedictorians were graduated or graduating, had jobs, grad school, or other stuff planned going forward, and had become the sorts of adults we hope our K-12 educational programs will help create. My guess is that a lot of the football students will have become those sorts of adults, too, and will be doing good stuff. But I bet it would be exceedingly rare for the football student to still be playing football, while the art student would still be making art, and the student noted for outstanding service would still be doing good service work.

And then they'd actually think out loud about the supposed "career" oriented education that so many of our governmental folks desire and about what sorts of high school activities we should support with our attention and money and such. Maybe, just maybe, instead of having a football coach and two or three assistants, the local high schools would hire another art teacher.

Indeed. We can not speak of returns to human capital that is not being developed.  Nor should we be surprised that dual to the proposition "what we reward we get more of" is the proposition "what we don't reward we get less of."  Probably easier to ask the band to play the fight song one more time.

ORPHANED TRAINS.

The first modernization of Amtrak service came with fixed-formation RTG turbotrains, imported from France.  They were first assigned to regional service out of Chicago, with the most common assignment being the Milwaukee service.  Yes, in those days, the Milwaukee service featured food service.

Here is such a train leaving Milwaukee sometime in 1979.  One power coach was configured with 2-1 business class seating, although that was never sold as such, and the food service car had a cafeteria setup that later appeared in the Superliner lounges.

But a fixed formation train is not easily adapted to peak loading, such as the morning departure for and evening return from Chicago, or for the holiday rushes.  The power plants weren't adapted to cold weather, and a small fleet of trains equipped with French parts and metric fittings isn't going to make the Master Mechanic happy.  All the same, Rohr Industries later built similar trains for use in New York service, and some of the French units received new cabs to look like the Rohr units.  And some of the New York trackage was upgraded to permit the trains free rein to 110 mph, something that did not happen on the Chicago-based services.

Now, all are gone.  A cab car and possibly another car or two are still in a scrapyard somewhere in Indiana.

Mike Woodruff photograph retrieved from Destination: Freedom.

As of late 2012, the New York sets were idle but offered for sale by the state government.

Nathaniel Brooks photograph courtesy New York Times.

By the end of 2012, the trains were sold for scrap.

A SPECIAL CATEGORY FOR MISSOURI'S TRUSTEES.

Not too long ago, we noted another rogue's gallery of illiberal institutions of higher learning.  Missouri at Columbia did not make the cut, although departed president Tim Wolfe made an earlier list of worst college presidents.

The University of Missouri's Board of Curators recently voted to fire assistant communication professor Melissa Click.  You may remember her.

The way in which the board proceeded, however, is another administrative usurpation.

The board voted 4-2 to dismiss Click. [Board Chairwoman Pam] Henrickson said she voted against the decision, but did not say why when asked. She said the board had been hoping that a faculty member would file a complaint against Click to be reviewed by an elected body of faculty members, according to university policy. But when no faculty members filed such a complaint, she said, the board moved forward on its own.

It has long been my position that misbehaving faculty members be disciplined or brought before a for-cause hearing through established channels.  Arbitrary procedures for getting rid of troublesome leftists, whether they are Melissa Click or Ward Churchill or Richard T. Ely are arbitrary procedures, procedures that can be unleashed against individuals with less use to the professional protest communities.

If Dean Curly and Provost Moe and President Larry say nothing about a dishonest faculty member when all that dishonest faculty member is doing is raising Colorado's retention rates in the Department of Cooling Out the Mark, they have forfeited all right to say anything about it when the evidence comes to the attention of individuals less willing to look the other way at the identity politics fraud being committed in prominent universities?

But Department Head Shemp or Dean Curly or Provost Moe all have standing to review faculty conduct, whether, as is the case with Ms Click, in a tenure review, or in the case of Mr Churchill, in a dismissal-for-cause hearing.  Thus Ms Henrickson's statement suggests something else at work.  A Chronicle of Higher Education report suggests it's cowardice.

The news of Ms. Click’s firing may be a step toward repairing the university’s strained relationship with the General Assembly, said State Rep. David Wood, a Republican and chairman of the Joint Committee on Education, in an interview with The Chronicle.

"I support their move," said Representative Wood, who oversaw a recent committee hearing at which several legislators asked university officials about the terms of Ms. Click’s contract and what actions they were taking to respond to her actions as caught on video.

Mr. Wood said he didn’t think legislators were necessarily intent on having Ms. Click fired, but they wanted to know if the university was taking steps to make sure a similar occurrence didn’t take place in the future. "Her actions were not justifiable in any way," said Mr. Wood.

Intrusive legislatures are an occupational hazard for the governing boards of state universities.  Sometimes, the intrusion is over controversial faculty members who are doing something much more subversive than anything Melissa Click ever did.  It's called teaching the controversies.  And when the controversies are about socialism, and the legislature wants the university to get rid of Richard T. Ely, there is only one possible response.

WHATEVER MAY BE THE LIMITATIONS WHICH TRAMMEL INQUIRY ELSEWHERE, WE BELIEVE THAT THE GREAT STATE UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN SHOULD EVER ENCOURAGE THAT CONTINUAL AND FEARLESS SIFTING AND WINNOWING BY WHICH ALONE THE TRUTH CAN BE FOUND.

Although I still maintain that academic freedom too often serves as cover for trendy grievance scholarship, and that the diversity boondoggle is creating an academic environment devoid of intellectual diversity, none of which is consistent with the public interest, I must also object to Missouri's board of curators conceding powers to a legislature that will almost certainly be used in a situation where curricular integrity, rather than excessively zealous protesting, is at stake.

THAT TRAIN HAS ALREADY LEFT THE STATION.

We go into the weekend with USA Today commentary editor Jill Lawrence lamenting the Donald Trump phenomenon.

To really appreciate the fix we’re in, imagine an entire nation of Donald Trumps.

Anarchic classrooms filled with child bullies flinging insults at kids cowering in corners. Marauding adults in a 24/7 frenzy of baiting and scapegoating. Everyone feeling they have license to attack everyone else — journalists, women, immigrants, Muslims, companies, political leaders, foreign nations. Just make sure to laugh as you’re hurling the sneers and mockery. If you’re tweeting, finish off with an exclamation point.

The classrooms have been like that in too many places for a long time already. You want baiting, scapegoating, sneering, just tune in to opinion radio or television or a culture-studies class.

It's a little too late for the Mature Adults to engage in sober reflection and the issuance of policy papers.  That has been business as usual, and it hasn't worked too well.  Former Reagan speechwriter and Wall Street Journal regular Peggy Noonan recognizes what's really at work.  Think of it as the Mature Adults having to check their privileges.

The protected make public policy. The unprotected live in it. The unprotected are starting to push back, powerfully.

Thus, when Mr Trump refers to the ruling class as stupid people, or when Mr Sanders goes after hedge fund managers, there's more to it than policy failures (and there are many.)  Her thesis is that the mockery is permissible among the ruling class, and one ruling class privilege was to mock with impunity.  No more.

What marks this political moment, in Europe and the U.S., is the rise of the unprotected. It is the rise of people who don’t have all that much against those who’ve been given many blessings and seem to believe they have them not because they’re fortunate but because they’re better.

You see the dynamic in many spheres. In Hollywood, as we still call it, where they make our rough culture, they are careful to protect their own children from its ill effects. In places with failing schools, they choose not to help them through the school liberation movement—charter schools, choice, etc.—because they fear to go up against the most reactionary professional group in America, the teachers unions. They let the public schools flounder. But their children go to the best private schools.

This is a terrible feature of our age—that we are governed by protected people who don’t seem to care that much about their unprotected fellow citizens.

And a country really can’t continue this way.

In wise governments the top is attentive to the realities of the lives of normal people, and careful about their anxieties. That’s more or less how America used to be. There didn’t seem to be so much distance between the top and the bottom.

Now is seems the attitude of the top half is: You’re on your own. Get with the program, little racist.

That last line might generalize too much.  The "racism" smear is still comfort for Democrats wishing their way past Trumpmania, and perhaps among transnational Euroweenies.  There has been, however, discontent among the unprotected for some time.  It might have emerged first among the Republicans, in the form of the Tea Party.  But the conventional wisdom, to use Nick Gillespie's words at Hit and Run, is "cartoonish and self-evidently phony and overblown."  And, pace Ms Lawrence, the political media are part of the protected class.  Thus, suggests Chris Lehmann at The Baffler, they're part of the problem.

The media wants to be treated, much like our lawyers and hedge funders, as a group that merits unquestioned deference in our top-heavy political economy.

The lawyers, who have everything tied up in process or converted into a Federal case.  The hedge funders, who get themselves caught up in rational expectations bubbles.  The media, who sit around under pictures of the Capitol forever talking about the same things.  Check your privilege, pressies.

At present, the discontent of Republican leaning voters, and Reagan Democrats, is more evident.  But the Democrats' turn is coming, suggests Chicago's John Kass, a man with much experience with corrupt Democrats.

Trump's arguments about Iraq resonate with the Republican voters. And that's a dramatic shift among the rank and file, coming only over the past few years.

The anger you see on the Republican side will hit the Democrats in the next election cycle. As much as I'd hoped, I think it's too early for that kind of revolt this year. The liberal media ripped on the GOP for having so many candidates running for president, but it is the Democratic Party that has insulated itself against democracy.

All those millennials feeling the bern for Bernie Sanders will soon realize that Clinton and the Democratic Party have already rigged the game with all her superdelegates and Wall Street cash.

But that's in the next cycle.

Perhaps sooner, if the senator can flip some of the superdelegates.

THE GOVERNMENT AS CRIMINAL CONSPIRACY.

Yes, that might be true of any government, but that was the special task of counsel for the prosecution at the Nuremberg war crimes trials, as documented by Joseph Persico in Nuremberg: Infamy on Trial.  It will make for a brief Book Review N^o. 4, as most of the history related therein is relatively well known.  The prosecution had to make the case that the defendants were acting on behalf of a lawless government, so as to make the trials about the motives for the war, rather than about the methods of war (which is cruelty, and you cannot refine that, even if it is necessary to destroy Dresden to stop Nazism.)  That's where most of the legal and procedural action is, for example, establishing that the government conditioned otherwise moral Germans to see the Slav or the Jew as less than human.  But along the way, the reader discovers that the American assault on the English language did not begin with MBAs in the sixties.  Here's Sir Norman Birkett, alternate British justice. "Words I never intend to use again while life lasts: concept, applicable, ideology, and contact (as a verb!)"  Plus "privatize, finalize, visualize, argumentation, and orientation." Perhaps because the Yanks never had a proper classical education.

(Cross-posted to 50 Book Challenge.)