A CASE FOR FACULTY STEWARDSHIP.

A few weeks ago, Swarthmore's Timothy "Easily Distracted" Burke counted the ways he'd prefer to be administered to.

1.  I want leadership that understands and respects that decentralized institutional structures are in many ways extremely efficient, highly functional.
2.  I want to led by people who believe that you should move from individual self-sufficiency to collaborations at all institutional scales via consultative, democratic processes.
3.  The #1 thing I need as an effective follower to function as a citizen of the institution is information. I need to know a lot about what goes on in my own institution, about why we’re enacting X policy and making Y change to our organization.
4.  I need to know that my leaders are plugged into the habitus of their institutions.
5.  I want leaders who very profoundly believe in the professional and social values that I want to uphold as a follower, or if they don’t, are coherent and legible in their dissent and are prepared to have a genuine discussion (full of forking paths and possibilities) of why they don’t share my values or the wider values of my colleagues or community.
6.  I want some sense of anticipation of future challenges and problems and some ability to call me and my colleagues (both faculty and staff) to the table to grapple with the future in ways that none of us can do by ourselves.

The elaboration on those points is in some ways idiosyncratic to his college, where some of his colleagues suggested he stand for provost.  He's not interested.  But do you not see in those main points a respect for emergence and self-organization as guiding principles for social organization, and an understanding that the responsibility for the curriculum and student development ought be that of the faculty, and that there might be elements idiosyncratic to the academy that outsiders brought in as so-called disrupters, or professional administrators whose only classroom experience is during registration and orientation, and whose research experience, such as it is, is looking at spreadsheets prepared by novice deanlets will not be able to grasp.

At Inside Higher Ed, Matt "Dean Dad" Reed responds to the essay in a way that reflects his development as a scholar.

Burke’s piece, occasioned by flirting with the idea of applying for a provostship, addresses the nature of leadership in an aggressively decentralized organization. He notes, correctly, that many institutional leaders regard decentralized decision-making structures as obstructionist or unwieldy, and that they often make the mistake of believing that the wisdom of a select few will routinely be better than the wisdom of many. As he puts it, “[a] decentralized institution is one where many people have their eyes on potential mistakes, simultaneously and independently of one another. The trick is to make sure that information flows between these compartments freely and that leadership doesn’t frivolously override or ignore decentralized practices and insights.”

Recall that he and I first tangled, years ago, over administrators being put off by faculty shunning meetings during summer.  Perhaps that's me being obstructionist still, but whatever.  Now, if people in higher education more generally would contemplate the deeper implications in that "mistake of believing that the wisdom of a select few" passage.  Too often, the academy is instinctively favorably disposed to Governance by Wise Experts.  But I digress.

TAP THE KEG OF BOCK!

Fill your steins!  The communist on corporatist fratricide among Democrats is about to get epic.  "Having his way with the Democratic National Committee is a slam dunk because Biden supplies the ball, hires the referees, owns the nets, and controls the concession stands."  It's rich reading Norman Solomon, for the communist wing, accusing the corporatist wing of engaging in Leninist style democratic centralism, isn't it?

There’ll be speeches galore, including one by Biden as a prelude to his expected announcement that he’ll seek a second term. The gathering will exude confidence, at least in public. But if Biden were truly confident that Democratic voters want him to be the 2024 nominee, he wouldn’t have intervened in the DNC’s scheduling of early primaries.

New polling underscores why Biden is so eager to bump New Hampshire from the first-in-the-nation spot that it has held for more than 100 years. In the state, “two-thirds of likely Democratic primary voters don’t want President Joe Biden to seek re-election,” the UNH Survey Center found. “Biden is statistically tied with several 2020 rivals, including Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, all of whom are more personally popular than Biden among likely Democratic primary voters in New Hampshire.”

Those likely Democrat primary voters are refugees from Massachusetts who want to be taxed like Republicans and governed like Democrats. May they be damned.  Or amused.  Funny, isn't it, how quickly Georgia goes from the Poster State for Voter Suppression to a Refuge of Popular Soverignty.

But South Carolina, the state with the lowest rate of unionization in the country, offers the singular virtue of having rescued Biden’s presidential hopes with its 2020 primary. As the Associated Press explained last week, Biden is “seeking to reward South Carolina, where nearly 27 percent of the population is Black, after a decisive win there revived his 2020 presidential campaign following losses it suffered in Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada.”

The president’s rationalization for putting South Carolina first is diversity. Yet the neighboring purple state of Georgia, which has an activist Democratic base, is more racially diverse -- and it’s a crucial swing state, where the party’s general-election prospects would benefit from being the first-in-the-nation presidential primary.

Biden’s intervention has created a long-term political mess for Democrats in New Hampshire, where he’s now less popular than ever due to undermining the state’s first-primary status. Even New Hampshire’s normally compliant Democratic senators and representatives in Congress have been denouncing the move.

I've become less and less enthusiastic about party primaries, particularly of the first-past-the-post sort; and maybe if we saw the primary cycle off there'd be less pandering about ethanol subsidies and other sops to local rent-seekers.  For now, though, quaff that beer and draw another!  "Despite the best efforts of their flying monkeys in the mainstream media to make it seem as if everything is alright, the Democrats have been choking on buyer’s remorse for two years now."

EMERGENCE IN EVERY POT.

Virginia Postrel laments the culture-war dimensions of synthetic meat.

I was naively stuck in the 20th century.

Back then, when I hung out with ideologues more than I do today, people on the American right liked technological innovation and market competition. They celebrated ingenuity and entrepreneurship. They might predict that a given product would fail or choose not to buy it—that’s the system, after all—but they weren’t affronted by the mere existence of for-profit approaches to social or environmental issues. They weren’t insulted by the idea that technology might alter attitudes by changing costs.

Now, everything is personal and I, who write as a meat eater who likes human ingenuity and technological progress, am read as a woke propagandist.

There's a logic lesson in what follows.

The best argument against the development of cell-grown meat is that technocrats believe that anything good must be mandatory, especially if the good thing claims to help the environment. So if someone invents cell-grown meat, government mandates will soon follow. We therefore shouldn’t encourage alternatives to the status quo lest we be forced to adopt them. It’s the same argument we hear from people who believe that saying cities should allow property owners more flexibility about what they build on their land is tantamount to banning single-family homes. This culture-war form of the precautionary principle is as bad as every other form. It’s a prescription for stasis.

I suppose. Somebody invented the motor-car. What followed wasn't quite government mandates, but there was a lot of nudging in the form of infrastructure spending and zoning codes.  Are the zoning codes a tool of the self-styled progressives or a new refuge for latter-day traditionalists?  Same thing with the politicization of streetcars.  Everything gets turned into a purity test.  At any time, though, what we understand as best practice has emerged because it confers evolutionary advantage.

Contrary to this view, ethical standards evolve in a bottom-up way. They aren’t simply imposed, by me or anyone else. Their evolution is influenced not only by cultural ideas but by economics and technology. Authorities may try to impose ethical standards or to hold them still over time (see: the Taliban and women’s education), but standards do shift. To take a simple example, for 10,000 years of human civilization, child labor was completely normal; it still is in some places. It gradually vanished as people got richer and investing in children’s education made more economic sense than putting them to work. We now generally view child labor as unethical—not because that’s an eternal truth but because we can afford to.

Whether synthetic meat will ever pass the "can afford to" test (as well as any taste and texture tests) remains to be seen.

THE POVERTY OF POLITICAL ECONOMY.

Stumbling and Mumbling's "Cargo Cult Economics" takes stock.

In the first pages of After Virtue Alasdair MacIntyre imagines people trying to revive science after it has been destroyed by catastrophes and know-nothing governments. They would, he said, have only fragments to build upon; bits of theories unrelated to other bits or to experimental evidence; and partial ideas unrelated to their context. They would use scientific words but the beliefs and evidence behind such words would be missing.

This, I fear, is the state in which economics has fallen in politicians' hands. They use economicky words, but stripped of the context and evidence in which such words made intelligent sense.

Think of the E Plebnista episode (properly, "The Omega Glory") in Star Trek.  There's enough to antagonize policy advocates of all stripes in that post to make it worth reading.

Dang, there's a lot about E Plebnista online as well.

LIBERATED AND MISERABLE.

Reason's Elizabeth N. Brown reviews a series of books by women who are having second thoughts about the sexual revolution.  Such soul-searching takes place in feminist circles every few years, and there's enough of the traditionalists' reservations about the downside of all that freedom to be encouraging.

Such complaints have been staples of sexual critique since sexual liberation started becoming a core American value. Promiscuity. Casual sex. Hookup culture. The labels assigned to the problem have shifted over time, as have the diagnoses of its origin. Feminism, porn, dating apps—all have taken some blame.

And not without reason. There's no doubt that at least some feminists fought for women's right to "have sex like men." There's no doubt that the internet and smartphone apps have made it much easier to hook up with larger numbers of people. And while pornography's effect on off-screen sex is more debatable, there's no doubt porn has become more ubiquitous and less taboo.

It's not working. It's also not the sort of situation that warrants government intervention.

Expecting others to change their sexual choices to fit our own sexual preferences is entitlement logic. When certain communities do this, it gets condemned—as it should.

Take incels, a mostly male group of the self-labeled "involuntarily celibate," who are prone to bashing women and modern culture because they can't get laid. Incel communities are rife with suggestions that women are stupid and selfish, choosing "high value" men who treat them poorly while ignoring perfectly viable mates out of superficial concerns. Underlying all of this is the idea that incels are owed sex—and not just any sex, but sex with the type of women they desire.

[Christine] Emba calls incels "not exactly a sympathetic bunch" and suggests that "their difficulty in connecting with the opposite sex has turned into a personality-warping obsession." This may be true, but it seems odd coming directly after a section in which straight and bisexual women talk about hating men and swearing off relationships with them. Emba portrays these women as reacting reasonably to the conditions they face. But a more impartial observer might suggest that they have also let a difficulty connecting with the opposite sex warp their personalities.

Incel resentments drove Elliot Rodger to murder six people and wound many others in the 2014 Isla Vista massacre, and they have surfaced in several other mass shootings as well. [Amia] Srinivasan details some of these incidents in The Right To Sex, a collection of essays about sexual desire and politics.

The extension to selectivity among the various alphabet people is straightforward, identity-politics caveats notwithstanding.

Many feminists have long claimed that people are unfairly sexually marginalized because of their body size, their gender presentation, or some other superficial characteristic. Activists of various stripes ask people to reevaluate their desires all the time, guided by the belief that (as Srinivasan summarizes it) "what is ugliest about our social realities—racism, classism, ableism, heteronormativity—shapes whom we do and do not desire and love, and who does and does not desire and love us."

How do we "dwell in the ambivalent place where we acknowledge that no one is obliged to desire anyone else, that no one has a right to be desired, but also that who is desired and who isn't is a political question, a question often answered by more general patterns of domination and exclusion?" Srinivasan asks. There is no right to sex, but might there be "a duty to transfigure, as best we can, our desires"?

Ultimately, that being a Reason article, it's prudent to bet on emergence. "Our desires are, at least in part, socially constructed, political, and mutable. But they are also unpredictable, sometimes unknowable, and highly individualistic—a point that no serious attempt to diagnose people's sexual discontent can ignore."  Let traditionalist readers take the concession present in that "in part" and use that as a point of leverage to put bounds on "mutable".

THE RETURN OF THE MEDIEVAL.

In the rent gradient.  "Walkable urban areas are popular but have an affordability problem."  Well, yeah, you don't have to buy an indulgence any more to live next to the cathedral, but if you're able to make markets all over the world using contemporary information technology, and you want to walk to the office, isn't that going to make the rent gradient steeper?  "Remove the constraints, watch the reallocation to housing and office towers commence." So it is, yet again, and the poor and the ethnics are hardest hit.

It's an emergent phenomenon, and the sort of technocratic order the article suggests is not likely to work well. "To spur walkability and equitable access to walkable areas, cities can advance zoning reform, foster non-car transportation options, preserve and invest in affordable housing, and plan for walkable neighborhoods to be resilient to climate impacts, the report states."  The problem is, the preservation of the houses closest to the office towers is going to make precisely those houses more valuable, and the implicit transportation cost of walking, even with slow motor car traffic in cities, and even slower bus or rail transit, makes the rent gradient even steeper.

While it’s well documented that many office-dominated downtown economies have suffered amid remote and hybrid work trends, walkable urban neighborhoods and urbanizing suburbs grew during that period, “demonstrating a preference for walkable places beyond the traditional downtown.”

“The so-called ‘death of the city’ has been overstated, again, as walkable urban price premiums and increased market share of office, retail, multi-family rentals and for-sale housing real estate in walkable urban places held up, despite impacts from the pandemic,” said Christopher Leinberger, managing director at Places Platform, in a statement Wednesday.  “These findings provide a strong economic base and cement walkable urban places and development as the wave of the future as we move toward a more connected, environmentally-sustainable way of life.”

You can take away the jargon, and the phenomenon is still the same. To the extent that people are willing to pay a premium for the opportunity to walk to work, that rent gradient is going to get steeper.  The economic geography of cities in the United States will be more like Paris or London, with the poorer quarters in the inner suburbs.

WE'VE FOUND KARINE JEAN-PIERRE'S SUCCESSOR.

A controversy of Hearstian proportions has arisen over a Stanford student reading a book.  "Dee Mostofi, a spokeswoman for the university, said, 'No one is being punished or investigated by the university for reading a book.'" Sorry, no, there is an investigation, and the lengthy Inside Higher Ed column from which I extracted that audition for the White House Briefing Room makes clear just how silly the whole bias reporting enterprise is.

It isn’t clear from college officials who filed the complaint, though a Stanford spokeswoman, in response to questions from Inside Higher Ed, said a “concern” was raised by an unnamed student organization.

A screenshot of the image that Inside Higher Ed obtained independently shows a young woman seated and holding a paperback copy of Mein Kampf a bit below her eye level, its cover in the image’s foreground. Another young woman is seated next to her, and they appear to possibly be in a dorm room. The woman holding the book has her forefinger on her closed lips with the fingernail facing outward; her brow is furrowed and eyes are narrowed. The image seems to convey an exaggeratedly thoughtful expression.

Put another way, the photograph might have been intended as some sort of troll.  Mein Kampf is soporific reading, even by the standards of Assigned Readings in Serious Classes, and spelling out the difficult words might be a strategy for staying awake.  That is true whether the reading is in German or in the English translation.  The trolling might rise to the level of Not in Polite Society (oh dear, those bourgeois norms again) and bother people.

“It is an ambiguous photo, and everyone sees what they want to see,” Rabbi Jessica Kirschner, executive director of Hillel at Stanford, a Jewish organization, said Friday in an email to Inside Higher Ed.

Kirschner said some Jewish students found the photo concerning. She and another rabbi at Stanford wrote an email to the university’s Jewish students addressing the concerns raised by the photo.

The investigation followed an anonymous tip.

Kirschner said Mein Kampf is not the problem.

“From the students I’ve spoken to who are upset, the pain point is not the book, it is the possibility of a peer who treats their collective history as a joke,” Kirschner said.

The Stanford Review published the full email co-authored by Kirschner addressed to Stanford Jewish students, which said, “Sometime over the last 2 days, a snapchat screenshot began circulating of a student reading Mein Kampf. Students who saw the picture were disturbed. A Protected Identity Harm Incident report was filed and university administrators are engaged with the issue.”

Good grief. Is a Spike Jones song also treating collective history as a joke, and is nobody aware of what an anonymous tip to the authorities can do in a totalitarian environment, such as a politically correct university, or Occupied Holland?

THE RETURN OF THE OPEN TONNEAU?

It's apparently now possible to purchase a three-row pickup truck with a bed that has the aspect of an open tonneau.

A new F-150 is just a minivan with a doorless trunk. pic.twitter.com/IsRZeyJB4v

— FuckCars (@FuckCarsReddit) January 29, 2023

My thoughts on pickup trucks are simple.  "There are a lot of go-karts masquerading as pickup trucks that can't haul 4x8 sheets of building material or tow a 30 foot racing sloop or the draft horses to the circus parade."  From time to time the culture wars aspects of impractical pickup trucks have amused me.  "For years, the intellectual heirs of Sinclair Lewis have made any sort of powerful motor vehicle a signal of Babbittness. Or, with their kin at the drive-train, the sport-utes, rolling enablers of road rage."  And yes, there is plenty of material to draw upon.

Today, though, let's turn the forum over to Jalopnik's Erik Shilling.  "Now, listen, I understand that people use pickup trucks these days to shuttle their families around, because no one wants to admit that what they really need is a minivan, and I have made peace with that, because other people’s choices are not my own." An open-tonneau touring car identifying as a Dodge Ram?  Fine.  "Your truck is for muddy boots; it is for beer runs and cigarettes; it is for hauling mulch; it is for going slow; it is for towing your shitty trailer, with the finicky tail lights; it is for going to pick up parts; it is for windows-down, no air-conditioning; it is for throwing your crap in the back and getting in; it is for bench seats; it is for trashy dates with you and your love."  He won't buy that touring car, but if others do, fine.  Let other people make their choices, and let you make yours.

Less material for me to mock that way, but it might mean lowered temperatures at the keyboard and on social media.

THAT SLOPE IS SLIPPERY BY DESIGN.

Dear reader, you are familiar with Fabian gradualism, nicht wahr?  "In the early 21st century, the society declared that it sought to define progressive politics from the left of centre."  Where the vanguard leads inevitably to tyranny or reaction, the slow adoption of incremental changes as "common sense" might work.

The Marxists offer to the intellectuals the hope that ideas will become actuality. The evolutionary socialists offer not just temporary employment to intellectuals but permanent positions. Since the evolution is an extremely long range affair, there is no probability that in the foreseeable future the need for ideas will end. To the have-nots, to the down-and-out, to any who conceive that they have not received their deserts (and the number of these is legion) both revolutionary and evolutionary socialism promise that all this will be changed. Both hold up a vision of perfection beside the realities of an imperfect world and proclaim that they know how to attain the perfection. If history is for them (either history whose process was supposedly scientifically discerned by Marx, or history discerned in progressive evolutionary patterns), who can be against them? These are the lineaments of a religion, on the one hand, and of a secular faith, on the other.

Arguably, that might be too recondite an argument if we are talking about home firearms or private automobiles, or gas stoves, or elementary school curricula, and yet are we not seeing, as policy initiatives, precisely what the logicians caution us not to see?  “If we allow the government to remove Confederate statues from public places, then it’s a short road to the government trying to erase and censor history. Next thing you know, all our history textbooks will be altered to remove the truth. You don’t want the government telling you what to think is true, do you?”  Let's leave aside for the moment that the use of public money for government schools is censorship per se, and let the local school board and the local taxing authority with proper local control do its work, for lack of a better practical alternative.  I invoked those gas stoves for a reason.  "Progressives might not be coming for your existing stove, but they are trying to stop any new installations."

YOU CAN'T READ THAT HERE. THIS IS A UNIVERSITY.

Remember the story of the campus custodian at Ooey Pooey who got hauled into Lubyanka for reading a book?  "Charles Bantz, chancellor at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, apologized to Keith John Sampson in a letter dated Friday, saying the school is committed to free expression."  You'd think that would go without saying, but not in today's weird world of hidden cisheteropatriarchy everywhere.

Sampson, a 58-year-old white janitor and student majoring in communication studies, said he tried to explain that the book was a historical account.

"I have an interest in American history," Sampson said. "I was trying to educate myself."

But Sampson says his union official likened the book to bringing pornography to work, and the school's affirmative action officer in November told Sampson his conduct constituted racial harassment.

"You used extremely poor judgment by insisting on openly reading the book related to a historically and racially abhorrent subject in the presence of your black co-workers," Lillian Charleston wrote in a letter to Sampson.

Civil liberties groups and bloggers who took up his cause said Sampson had been wrongly cited for reading a book that is carried by the school's library.

"I am sure you see the absurdity of a university threatening an employee with discipline for reading a scholarly work that deals with the efforts of Notre Dame students in the 1920s to fight the KKK," American Civil Liberties Union of Indiana attorney Ken Falk said in a letter to a university lawyer.

I mean, when even the American Civil Liberties Union sees the foolishness of Ooey Poey's Diversity Weenies.  But because this lesson was taught in 2008, and Ooey Pooey is an urban comprehensive, the rage mob at Stanford probably thought the statute of limitations had run out, or that they could have standards.

Reading a book on a college campus should not prompt formal administrative intervention. But that’s what’s reportedly happening at Stanford University this week, after a photo of a student reading Adolf Hitler’s autobiography, “Mein Kampf,” circulated on campus last Friday.

The Stanford Daily said over the weekend that administrators were working “swiftly” with the students involved to “address” the incident. Two campus rabbis emailed Jewish students saying administrators “are in ongoing conversation with the individuals involved, who are committed to and actively engaged in a process of reckoning and sincere repair.”

Stanford was reportedly alerted to the book-reading via its Protected Identity Harm reporting system. Effectively a bias response system, Stanford says PIH reports help the university “address incidents where a community member experiences harm because of who they are and how they show up in the world.”

If you're put off by somebody reading a book, which is an activity long associated with attending a university, maybe you're not college material.  The money I sent to The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression at Christmas is being well-spent.

Because college students should not have to report to university authorities for merely reading a book — one, by the way, that has been required reading in at least one recent Stanford humanities class and is available to borrow from the university library — FIRE asked Stanford today to provide additional clarity about the way it handles these kinds of “harm” reports on campus.

We have recently seen that the threat of a Foundation lawsuit concentrates minds in the central administration. So let it be with Stanford.  "Stanford’s PIH system can be used, as here, to target and reform views students or administrators dislike, while cloaking it as a purely educational exercise."  We should have further developments from this investigation this week.

EVEN BEYOND RUSH LIMBAUGH'S ABILITY TO PARODY.

He came up with the idea of "male lesbians" somewhere late in the 1990s.  I forget the details.  As early as the beginning of this century, something akin to that concept was still confined to the loopier parts of the victim studies complex.  “The Phallus, a seminar in critical theory and social justice. This class examines Sigmund Freud, phallologocentrism and lesbian phallus.”  "Phallogocentrism," like "cisheteropatriarchal," is a sesquipedalian pejorative for Normal. Heck, "phallogocentrism," "cisheteropatriarchal," and "sesquipedalian" are all longer than any lesbian phallus, but this post should be rated no more than R, dear reader.  

THAT'S NOT A CORONATION. THIS IS A CORONATION.

Never mind Handel, Elgar, or Walton.

The last thing I did before starting work today was put the Imperial March over King Charles' entrance to Westminster Hall and OH MY GOD. SOUND UP. pic.twitter.com/XbWoIDVAne

— Marc Burrows (@20thcenturymarc) September 12, 2022

I don't know, that march at the end of The Empire Strikes Back might work better. It's John Williams channelling William Walton's ending to Battle of Britain.

FRIDAY short TAKES.

As I work through the backlog of links, it occurs to me to recommend reading Reason and Power Line on a regular basis, to get an idea of what structures my thinking.  I read outside my world view as a calibration check.  If I see something on the likes of Common Dreams or Inside Higher Ed that makes me think, that's fine.

The weekly roundup of pithy elaborations of traditional Cold Spring Shops themes follows.

TURN OUT THE LIGHTS, THE PARTY IS OVER.

A doctoral candidate in one of the trendy disciplines at New York University warns readers of Jacobin.  "I am not willing to sacrifice my health, my family’s future, and my well-being to perpetuate a system that is bankrupting my students as much as it is bankrupting me."  Yes, I get that.  From about 2005 on my response to any senior contemplating doing graduate work was "Why?"  And that's in economics, where the adjunctification problem is not as serious as it long has been in history or gender studies.

Many of us who pursued graduate degrees were told that education would be our way out — out of poverty, out of the places where we grew up, out of the bigoted or homogenous communities where we couldn’t thrive — and into something better: a stable career with a clear moral purpose.

Our teachers, seeing our promise, told us to keep going, to the next degree, and the next. And the people who warned us not to keep going seemed cynical to us, or out-of-touch. We were the special ones, we thought. We could go anywhere, do anything.

The sad thing is that those of us who made it through are now in a position where we are meant to tell the same thing to our students. We love what we teach.

By 2005, I was cynical about the higher education enterprise, and probably viewed by many who adhered to the trendy popular perspectives as out of touch, long before then.  It's interesting, now, seeing the left wing taking up an argument that was popular long ago and mostly with the right, to the effect that graduate education is multi-level marketing.

We can’t be the educators we want to be, because we are being forced into chronic precarity by universities that are only concerned with their own bottom line. We have been trained to embrace an almost pathological scarcity complex about academic work, making us undervalue our own labor and accept a myriad of indignities, often working for free or for little pay just to prove our worth. Not to mention the fact that all of this makes it nearly impossible to research and write the scholarly work for which we have, theoretically, been hired (and without which we can be fired, as the “publish or perish” idiom suggests).

At least the people peddling Amway products have shiny floors or tidy pantries to point to.  Those future freeway flyers, not so much.  "I have had the privilege to design and teach several courses on queer and feminist history, and the connections I’ve made with my students have been profound and lasting." There are limits, though, to how far the experiments against reality go. "You may think it’s a bit of a stretch to compare academia to a notorious cult — a sign of my jadedness as a disgruntled graduate student."  You get two cults: the cult of the priesthood itself, and the cult of the false doctrines of critical theory.  Damned, without a single imprecation from me.

THE IMPORTANCE OF TESTABLE IMPLICATIONS TO A THEORY.

I bookmarked a distressing report from Minding the Campus two years ago.

Periodically, professors drop their commitment to objective truth to pursue political agendas. When this occurs, they become prisoners of their own ideologies. In a publication by Professors Ole Wæver and Barry Buzan, the authors reveal that some scholars within critical studies deliberately mislead readers by utilizing deepfake methodology.

The authors refer to this deceptive practice as a technique, one employed to produce meaning “disconnected” from an author’s intent or his original texts. To bolster their claim that Western social science is racist, critical theorists deliberately sidestep relevant evidence, use quotations out of context, and forward fallacious arguments. Wæver and Buzan warn that the debasing of academic values will steer any discipline of study into a “post-truth direction antithetical to its epistemological integrity and social purpose.” According to the authors, those who subscribe to such shoddy practices are guilty of “serious academic misconduct.”

Scholars who engage in deepfake methodology may believe that academic freedom gives them the right to champion a noble cause at all costs, even at the expense of ethics and convention. They could not be more wrong.

Ethics and convention are themselves noble causes to be championed, and when they can be set aside as impedimenta to some even nobler cause, sooner or later, higher education loses its credibility.  "It came to this, dear reader, when the supposedly liberal institutions decided that setting up departments, primarily the so-called area studies departments, specifically for the purpose of cheering on their own."  The loss of credibility follows, gradually, or all at once.

As author John Semley notes in The Walrus, professors cannot hide behind “some reductive notion of freedom as an unchecked intellectual id.” Put simply, scholars cannot disregard verifiable proof in favor of their own personal biases. Semley maintains that academic arguments are “subject to strict standards of inquiry.” Although not exhaustive, these include credible theoretical analyses, calculations of usefulness, and accepted authorities. Thus, academic freedom begins with an individual responsibility to respect these standards.

I prefer that the responsibility come from within the academy, in the form of responsible professors and deans, rather than be imposed from the state house, in Tallahassee or Madison or anywhere else.

THE LACK OF A VALUE PROPOSITION IS HURTING THEM.

The only thing worse than not being able to trade on your image as a college athlete is being able to trade on your image, and nobody is interested.

A higher education policy group wants the Biden administration to launch a Title IX civil rights investigation into collegiate athletics programs because the vast majority of so-called name, image, likeness sponsorships go to male athletes.

In a letter to Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona and assistant secretary for civil rights Catherine Lhamon, the Drake Group said that the disproportionate amount of sponsorship money going to male college athletes, often with the cooperation of university athletic programs, was a violation of Title IX's prohibition on sex-based discrimination and warrants a federal investigation.

There's a Louisiana State gymnast, Olivia Dunne, who is doing well under the new rules, but that's what a value proposition looks like.  Among the men, it's not participants in the Harvard football program or any Mid-American basketball program that are making bank, either, but those inequities are not (yet) worth making a federal case over it.  I'm not sure how the federal government can compel interest in the women's sports, but that doesn't stop Drake from trying.

"We do not write to suggest that [the office for civil rights] stem this flow of cash to college athletes, but rather to alert OCR that this cash is, with the blessing and/or cooperation of the 1000+ universities in the NCAA, flowing predominantly to men," the group said in the letter. "Such inequitable financial aid, treatment and benefits provided to men are a violation of Title IX. OCR must provide guidance to the schools that this is improper and will be pursued with enforcement proceedings as necessary."

NIL deals, which allow student-athletes to profit off of their name, image, and likeness, became a widespread practice across collegiate athletics after the Supreme Court ruled the NCAA's prohibition on non-academic student-athlete compensation violated federal antitrust law.

Squaring antitrust law with civil rights law, two ways our political masters suppress competition in the name of promoting competition, will at least allow cohorts of attorneys to earn a comfortable living, without once doing a product endorsement.  Pushing for more redistribution, in the form of additional royalties for players who don't sell a single Madden game, might appeal to the egalitarian sensibilities, and, surely, the lawyers will make a good living off it (get all the Ivy League law faculties to compose their best amicus curiae briefs on behalf of the ladies, as well as the footballers on their irrelevant-in-January teams, and maybe their sailing teams?) but will that do anything to get a single butt in a seat at a basketball game?  "Look how unfair this is" doesn't sell those tickets?  How do I know?  Because that's been the lament for years. 

WHY DON'T WE JUST BET ON EMERGENCE?

I set a lament about the demise of electric traction in Milwaukee against a background of Technocratic Overreach.

After the War, the promise of Route 66 or the perpetual fun side of high school the Beach Boys were singing about made lamentations about trains being discontinued or streetcars replaced by buses so last year, to use a locution not yet in common parlance. And, from sixty years ago, the congestion to come on the expressways was something to be fixed by smart roads, and the possibility that all that public money spent on building the road network would ineluctably lead to additional public money being spent on a "wonderful transition" to something not a public road network, and sold under the rubric of building back better would likely have been laughed off as delusions.

That lament concluded, "Who knows, preservation railways might provide object lessons identifying all manner of policy failures, from the Public Utility Holding Company Act to the subsidization of excessively zoned planned use developments and the roads the localities lack the means to fix."

LESSONS, RE-LEARNED.

The traditional comparative advantage of the United States has been in producing knowledge-intensive products using advanced technology.  That post also noted, "factor-augmenting technical change augments different factors of production differently, and the political economy gets interesting."  Sometimes, the improved technology makes the work-place safer, in part by replacing teams of skilled workers with machinery.

And for all the Popular Perspective of the Gilded Age steel works being a dark, satanic place, the reality of technical change is one of providing safer working conditions in which fewer men can produce tonnages the old-time puddlers and crucible handlers would find inconceivable. And the safer working conditions turned out to be more productive working conditions as well. For instance, in the early Bessemer and open hearth plants, furnace tapping and ingot teeming took place in the same pit. Rearrange the plant and put in travelling cranes to move the larger ladles, now the teeming doesn't have to stop each time a furnace is tapped. Likewise, the early iron furnaces had to be charged by hand, one wheelbarrow at a time, through an open top. And yes, all sorts of toxic gases came out of that open top. Work out a skip hoist and an air lock that can handle the weight of the charge, and one hazard to the furnaceman's health is mitigated.

If, dear reader, you see Luddites arising among those puddlers and crucible handlers, go to the head of the class.  Sometimes, technical change makes it possible for people with fewer specific skills to do the job.  The flying shuttle could be run by school girls, and the melt shop metallurgist could judge the content of tons of steel at a time from a climate controlled lab.

HIGHER EDUCATION'S SELF-INFLICTED DESANTIS PROBLEM.

I chronicle it.  "After years of higher education being run by people who have not acted in good faith, Florida coming to this pass comes as no surprise."

Its practitioners bring it on themselves.  Consider a recent presentation by a Vanderbilt professor of mathematics education that reads like "an over-the-top caricature", but it's not.  "Undergraduate Mathematics Education as a White, Cisheteropatriarchal Space and Opportunities for Structural Disruption to Advance Queer of Color Justice."  I wonder if "Diophantane equation" or "characteristic and mantissa" are even in this poseur's vocabulary.

I apply my framework and research findings to argue how undergraduate mathematics education operates as a white, cisheteropatriarchal space that limits learning opportunities affirming of queer of color identities and experiences. I conclude by re-imagining undergraduate mathematics education with structural disruptions that advance justice for learners marginalized across intersections of race, gender, and sexuality. This re-imagining accounts for ideological, institutional, and relational forms of disruption that interrogate dominant forms of knowledge production as well as expand access to learning opportunities and departmental support that affirm queer of color identities.

Plus, predictably, that stupid use of "interrogate". Everybody is now dumber for having sat through that.  I wonder if anybody at the session suggested that maybe those "dominant forms of knowledge production" ... dominate because they produce knowledge.

Apparently, some forms of structural disruption are more permissible than others these days.  An art historian shows an old Persian icon depicting Mohammed and the Archangel Gabriel, some Islamic Elmer Gantry riles up the Minneapolis faithful, and Hamline University beclowns itself.  Take a dig at Christians or Jews, or, heck, put Elmer Gantry on the reading list, and maybe that's a way to affirm those allegedly marginalized identities.

Showing an artistic rendition of Muhammad can get a professor fired within a semester’s time, but the evidence is lacking for definitive disciplinary action in cases of anti-Christian or anti-Jewish bias.

To use the words of the Hamline administration letter, “Ideally, each one of us should respect the lived experiences of others, and take appropriate responsibility, as leaders do, when those experiences fall short of expectations.”

One thing is clear: The feelings—and in some cases the physical safety—of Jewish and Christian students do not count in the eyes of the liberal academy.

Yes, and a drag show visit to the convent is all in good fun.

Perhaps, the poobahs of higher education, and their flying monkeys in the diversity, inclusion, and equity hustle ought to dial it back before they get mocked, before the voters find their own version of Ron DeSantis to champion Normals, before they get sued into insolvency.  "Schools Should Think Twice Before Punishing Faculty for Their Speech."  That essay notes, "One might think that school officials would learn from that, but they seem strangely obtuse about the legal ramifications whenever they want to go after someone who has gotten their goat."

Is it any surprise that terminally stupid people would not be strangely obtuse?

A FIELD GUIDE TO STROADS.

Strong Towns's Ben Abramson provides the spotting features.

1. It's Scary To Drive.
2. It's Even Scarier Not To Drive.
3. You Can't Get There From Here.  Applies to walking and to convenient motoring.
4. The Number One Land Use Is Surface Parking.
5. There's No "There" There.  Wal-Mart.  Target.  McDonald's.  What state are you in? 

With all those helicopter droppings being made available for infrastructure projects, the time to find a public hearing on a local stroad patching project and participate is now.

WHO IS TO BLAME FOR THE END OF THE SELF-SERVICE DEPARTMENT STORE?

It's the predictable breakdown of bourgeois norms, yes, but it goes beyond the shoplifters themselves.

To New Yorkers at least, it may feel as if everything is behind showcases already. We know all too well the humiliating ritual of hailing a sales associate to retrieve a topical hair-regrowth treatment, lube, or ice cream from behind locked Plexiglas. The loss-prevention method reached high comedy when someone tweeted a photo of a tin of Spam protected by a translucent security box. Even the Reverend Al Sharpton has had enough, pleading with Mayor Adams on MSNBC’s Morning Joe last year, “Eric, they’re locking up my toothpaste!”

Whether the crisis is real or the continuation of a long-standing trend remains up for debate. Every generation goes through a shoplifting panic, and comprehensive data on this frequently unreported crime is nearly impossible to come by. But [diamond district pawnbroker Roni] Rubinov’s crew offers a window into how the shoplifting industry has evolved over the past decade in ways that have made it more visible and more pervasive. Scratch the surface of an operation like his and you’ll find a criminal enterprise in which nearly everyone, from the world’s biggest corporations to the most oblivious online bargain hunters, plays a part.

That is, the demand for sholplifting services is a derived demand.  Some things you can't make up, but keep reading.

If you’re a New Yorker, you might have bought a cup of coffee from a midtown cart that brews exclusively stolen beans or have eaten an Italian sub from a bodega that uses pilfered salami. If you shop online, the likelihood that you’ve purchased stolen merchandise is even higher. Amazon, eBay, Craigslist, Facebook Marketplace, and others have made it easier than ever to anonymously set up shops like Rubinov’s Treasure-Deals-USA. Fences have never had it so good.

To the extent that there has been a nationwide spike in shoplifting, it correlates to the growth of online retail. As one cop told the Journal, Amazon “may be the largest unregulated pawnshop on the face of the planet.” The problem likely got worse during the pandemic, as more people relied on online shopping and the number of sellers using online marketplaces grew.

It's not confined to New York, if the article is reliable.  Perhaps it has come to the new middleman being one of these "boosters" marking up from a very low price for resale online.

A THEORY IS THE ANTITHESIS OF A FAITH TRADITION.

There are college presidents in Florida who appear to be unclear on that concept.

As such, our institutions will not fund or support any institutional practice, policy, or academic requirement that compels belief in critical race theory or related concepts such as intersectionality, or the idea that systems of oppression should be the primary lens through which teaching and learning are analyzed and/or improved upon. Further, if critical race theory or related concepts are taught as part of an appropriate postsecondary subject’s curriculum, our institutions will only deliver instruction that includes critical race theory as one of several theories and in an objective manner

The notion of "compelling belief" is contrary to the nature of theory, which is at a minimum a framework for organizing observations, and ought generate testable implications that in principle might be found wanting.  Belief is for faith traditions: the Magi are only in Matthew, the shepherds and angels only in Luke, and whosoever believeth shall not perish is not testable in this life.  Critical studies, on the other hand, properly lend themselves to being presented as organizing concepts and subject to empirical investigation.

But for emancipation, how much worse would black life be?  But for voting rights and public accommodation law, how much worse would black life be?  But for school desegregation, how much worse would black life be?  If you want to be provocative, but for urban renewal and the War on Poverty, how much worse would black life be?  Would a peer-reviewed journal publish research that suggested urban renewal or the War on Poverty actually worsened conditions relative to the baseline?

Because the community college presidents are in Florida, though, the role of education as state policy has come into play.  "The news comes on the heels of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis seeking information on the amount the state’s public colleges and universities spend on critical race theory and diversity, equity and inclusion."  Now it might be that, after thirty years of wordnoise dressed up as Theory, or unsubstantiated beliefs given primacy of place in class, a corrective is due.  That prospect, though, has Matt "Dean Dad" Reed worried.

Good teaching—as opposed to a re-education camp—is about exposing students to multiple perspectives and empowering them to reach their own conclusions. Scholars whose work is informed by critical race theory offer certain perspectives; others offer others. Read narrowly, the statement amounts to a carefully phrased defense of free inquiry.

Yes, although after years of the Critical Studies types turning higher education into a re-education camp, does it come as any surprise that a governor championing Normals might arise.  (Now there arose over Florida a Governor who knew not Foucault?)

Carefully parsed splitting of differences may work when negotiating with a good-faith actor. When the other actor isn’t acting in good faith, though, careful parsing won’t save you. If anything, it may come across as appeasement. Had I only read the headline, I would have come away with the impression that the colleges agreed with the governor’s decree to ban impure thoughts.

The actual “compelling” that’s going on is by the state, on the colleges. Colleges know that their funding and licensing may be on the line if they stand on clearly stated principles. The governor has made it clear that he considers politics a zero-sum game of warring camps in which procedural safeguards are optional. AP African American Studies sounds liberal to him, so it’s out. Accreditors might raise an eyebrow at a frontal assault on academic freedom, so he decrees that Florida’s colleges have to switch accreditors every cycle to prevent follow-through. New College sounds liberal, so it’s time to engineer a purge. The pattern is clear and obvious.

In the absence of norms, institutions, and enumerated powers, politics is a zero-sum game of warring camps where anything goes. And the use of public funds to support education, from preschool to particle accelerators, becomes censorship per se. After years of higher education being run by people who have not acted in good faith, Florida coming to this pass comes as no surprise.  Florida state colleges inflicted the DeSantis problem on themselves.

DESTROY WEALTH IN THE NAME OF EQUITY.

Common Dreams regular Sam Pizzigati never fails to amuse.  Last year, we noted him channelling his inner Balph Eubank. "The distribution of income and wealth will remain ridiculously top-heavy until we start limiting the 'rewards' gushing into corporate executive suites."

The top got a little less heavy thanks to the Biden bear market, but even a serious haircut to the largest fortunes isn't good enough for him.

Last year, for instance, ended with a torrent of news stories about how poorly the world’s billionaires fared in 2022. Bloomberg tagged the 12 months that had just gone past “a year to forget,” with almost $1.5 trillion “wiped from the fortunes of the richest 500 alone.”

All global billionaires taken together, Forbeschimed in, lost $1.9 trillion in 2022. Some 148 of the world’s 2,671 billionaires even lost their billionaire status.

The year’s biggest billionaire losers? Some of America’s deepest pockets. Larry Page saw his Google-driven fortune drop $40 billion, Mark Zuckerberg watched $78 billion evaporate off the wealth Facebook created for him, and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos had to swallow a minus $80 billion.

But honors for the biggest nosedive of all have to go to Elon Musk. The world’s richest man at the start of 2022, Musk ended the year losing both his top slot and some $115 billion off his personal fortune.

Sammy could have stayed on his inequality hobbyhorse and noted that small wealth holders suffered a greater loss proportionately, meaning that the usurpers usurped a greater share of a smaller total stock of wealth.  That deprives me of the opportunity to be shown wrong in this conjecture.

[A] great deal of net worth has evaporated just this year.  There's no offsetting benefit to people who had no net worth to begin with, but simple arithmetic says there's less wealth being held, and there's less of it held by the wealthiest people.  "And thus, understanding the dynamics of capital accumulation, or wealth concentration, might be much more work than simply noting the presence of either."

Heck, he didn't even rile up the groundlings by lamenting that, under the current tax code, all those capital losses meant billionaires being able to reduce or eliminate their 2022 tax liability.

No, he went to a truly silly place.

The world’s most celebrated purveyors of pure extravagance actually registered record years in 2022. Rolls-Royce had its best-ever annual sales total, selling a record 6,021 “motor cars,” up 8 percent over 2021.

“Our clients,” Rolls-Royce’s CEO crowed on New Year’s Day, “are now happy to pay around half a million Euros for their unique motor car,” a sum equal to about $540,000 in the United States, the company’s single largest market.

“Our order book stretches far into 2023 for all models,” the Rolls-Royce chief added. “We haven’t seen any slowdown in orders.”

Lamborghini had an even better 2022, with 9,233 vehicles sold, a 10-percent jump over last year. The company’s biggest market? The United States. Americans drove off Lamborghini lots with 2,771 new cars in 2022. The automaker’s most popular model runs about a quarter-million.

Realtors who cater to the ultra-rich set had an equally boffo year in 2022. In a down overall real-estate market, the highest of high-end residences still pulled in mega sums at closing time. The year’s top ten home sales in the United States, notes the luxury-oriented Robb Report, “totaled roughly $1.165 billion, proving that, impending recession or not, luxury real estate will always be traded.”

Yes, and if I had been successful in shorting stocks at the right time, or unloading my FTX holdings, and wanted to give myself a trophy, a Lamborghini or a beachfront house might be just the thing.  But if you're a socialist of Sammy's caliber, all you can do is call attention to is those big houses and whine about how horrible it is there are still people living in small houses.  Real estate trading at higher prices?  Burn your woke manifesto if it raises the possibility that it's not a Musk or a Bezos or a Zuckerberg bidding up those prices.

Sammy?

How can all this luxury be? How can the richest of the rich be spending fantastic sums in a year when they’re seeing fantastic falls in their personal net worths? Simple. In the realms of the super rich, losing a billion — or even many billions — off your personal fortune makes no difference whatsoever in real daily life. Net worth down a few billion? You can still afford anything your heart could possibly desire.

No one alive today needs fortunes worth dozens of billions to live astoundingly large. A mere billion will suffice. So, truth be told, would a mere tenth of a billion. Indeed, in the neighborhoods of our super rich, the number of billions a billionaire may have holds no practical significance. The number of billions our super rich have accumulated essentially only matter as a way of keeping score in the ongoing status competition our deepest pockets so relentlessly wage.

Tell Sammy to put down his keyboard and go to bed early.

LEARNING THE TRAGIC VISION YOUNG.

Ferroequinologists developed the locution, "E-T-T-S," to note the depressingly common phenomenon of something good in railroading going away.  To outsiders, what the enthusiasts lamented might have been karma after a century of the railroads acting like the worst sort of rent-seekers, or it might have been a simple lack of enlightenment.  After the War, the promise of Route 66 or the perpetual fun side of high school the Beach Boys were singing about made lamentations about trains being discontinued or streetcars replaced by buses so last year, to use a locution not yet in common parlance.  And, from sixty years ago, the congestion to come on the expressways was something to be fixed by smart roads, and the possibility that all that public money spent on building the road network would ineluctably lead to additional public money being spent on a "wonderful transition" to something not a public road network, and sold under the rubric of building back better would likely have been laughed off as delusions.

WE WILL BE JUDGED BY THE MONUMENTS WE'VE DESTROYED.

Boston's Park Square Station, shown here, had to go because there was more commuter train traffic on the Boston and Providence than it could handle.  These days, there are people in Boston who regret reducing the size of South Station from what it was.

The Emancipation Monument, in the foreground, also had to go, because people see the wrong symbolism in the freedman kneeling before Abraham Lincoln, who in real life was bidding the man to kneel to God alone and give due gratitude to Him for the liberty he was receiving.  That act, conferring citizenship on freedmen, was what got him killed a week later.  You might think yourself bad-ass, dear reader, but you will never be Abraham Lincoln in liberated Richmond bad-ass.

Bostonians recently received a new monument in the civil rights tradition.  In the way of contemporary art, it is an abstract, inspired by a famous embrace of Reverend King with his wife upon his release from jail.

Comedienne and latter-day ghostbuster Leslie Jones has impressions of that monument. “Has anyone in here ever been eaten out?”

I'm not making this up, dear reader.

“White people, you don’t need to say shit about this statue!” she said. “You need to sit your ass in the back of the bus for this one.”

“This is a civil rights icon,” she added to cheers from the crowd, before concluding her sentence with, “...going down on his wife. You show some damn respect!”

R-e-s-p-e-c-t.

FRIDAY short TAKES.

Our theme for this week. "We’re just realists who know weird when we see it."

The weekly round-up of pithy elaborations of traditional Cold Spring Shops themes follows.

DON'T WRITE A DISSERTATION, EARN A SPECIAL EDUCATION CERTIFICATE.

I used that title previously, opening with "I have long maintained  that higher education has a retention and completion problem because high schools don't properly prepare students, and I've proposed a way of obtaining accountability from those high schools that some states are moving toward."

I've also long maintained that the faculty, as stewards of the university, have a responsibility to say no to developments that lower the academic mission.  Perhaps when the burden of admitting unprepared students and calling it access becomes great enough, they will say no to doing special education: The Student Accommodation Problem No Professor Wants to Talk About.

BEDSIDE MANNERS BEGIN AT THE CLINIC DOOR.

Knoxville columnist George Korda advocates for proper treatment of patients.

A surprising number of people in health care who do so much good for so many seem to not recognize a basic fact of life: people wish to be treated with respect, not as a last name yelled out across a room, and not as someone receiving a command or demand to produce their name or insurance card, right now!

Everyone reading this has experienced the same thing, which frequently comes at a bad time for them. Usually, someone goes to a doctor or hospital because they have a health problem. They may be anxious, uncertain, shaken, apprehensive or scared to death. When the moment arrives for them to be seen, they aren’t reassured or uplifted when their last name is shouted as if they are a kid in a classroom being called down by the teacher.

Even retired practitioners notice something is off.

An example, in Ohio’s Toledo Blade newspaper, is the observations of S. Amjad Hussain, an emeritus professor of surgery and humanities at the University of Toledo: “I am always amazed when a young nurse or a nurses’ aid comes to the waiting room and yells the first name of a waiting patient who happens to be three times her age. Or blurting out the last name of the person without the honorific ‘Mr.’ Recently while waiting to see my physician, a young nurse came to the waiting room and shouted ‘Hussain.’ I kept quiet. She looked around and asked me if I was Hussain. I told her that to her I was Mr. Hussain. To that she said, ‘Whatever.’ You expect such a derisive response from a junior high student and not from a professional working in a doctor’s office.”

Yes, the use of first names by medical staff who nevertheless refer to the physicians and surgeons as "Doctor" is off-putting.  As is the practice of ringing patients, generally to confirm an upcoming appointment, and asking, "Is this Stephen?"  What ever happened to "This is ... from ... may I speak with Mr Karlson, please."  I remember some elementary school lessons in telephone protocols that included such things.  It's got to be particularly annoying for people who are dealing with multiple troubles and multiple practitioners dealing with the clinic guessing game.  Be better.

Mr Korda concludes with a suggestion to patients.  “I want to thank you for speaking so thoughtfully. That doesn’t always happen in medical offices, and I much appreciate your courtesy. It matters.” Positive reinforcement can go a long way.  Be better.

WHEN EVERYTHING ELSE FAILS, DO THE RIGHT THING.

Matt "Dean Dad" Reed offers an instructive analysis of Hamline University's difficulties squaring boutique multiculturalism with scholarly inquiry.  "The 'tl:dr' version is that the university messed up." Yes. Let us count the ways, and let us consider the role of contemporary academic thinking in making the mess worse.

Facts matter. There’s some dispute as to whether the painting was shown after a trigger warning; to my mind, that makes a difference. It also makes a difference that the painting in question is a recognized classic of long standing. Apparently the professor also offered students who might be offended the opportunity to skip that lecture without penalty. All of those shed light on what she was trying to do.

I spent years teaching courses in the history of political philosophy. Those courses included primary texts written in different times, reflecting very different assumptions about what’s acceptable. I’ve taught Edmund Burke, the patron saint of modern conservatism, and Karl Marx, who needs little introduction. Aristotle and Rosa Luxemburg had some starkly different ideas about women, but both made it into my classes. The point was to have students explore different ways of looking at the world over time. Every thinker we read was “serious” in the sense of having been taken seriously by large numbers of people. Or, if you prefer, there was something to offend nearly everyone.

If colleges start caving to anyone who claims to be offended, where does it end? If a student from a very conservative Christian background objects to the biology department’s teaching of evolution, should I fire the biology department? If an avowed leftist objects to the econ department’s views on income distribution, should I fire the econ department?

THE ULTIMATE PRIVILEGE CHECK.

I confess to enjoying a new reality show, Special Forces, in which real veterans of special operations put assorted celebrities, most of whom are a little too old for ordinary boot camp, through a few drills.  It's cathartic, in particular, to hear lines like "You can go back to your luxurious houses and your Instagram followers and feel sorry for yourself" or "Your personal assistant isn't here to help out."  And yes, if you neglect to keep your water bottle (no longer a canteen?) topped off or put your gear in the pack without first putting it in waterproof bags, there are consequences.

THE ROOF STILL HAS A HOLE IN IT.

A few years ago, a Northern Illinois basketball game had to be moved to the practice court because the roof over the main court in the "convocation center" leaked during a warm winter rainfall.  The roof developed another leak under similar circumstances last night.  The teams were able to finish the final few minutes of the game on the main court, although the outcome was not so good for the local kids.

I took a pass on that game.  Today's post reads "convocation center" as it's about the revelation of the lie by which Northern Illinois students and Illinois taxpayers were sold the project.  Several Mid-American basketball teams play at their university's "convocation center" (or some other suggestion of general purpose) to perpetuate the fiction that these were not built primarily to help the basketball teams with their recruiting.  The upsurge in performances and trade shows has not been forthcoming, and the university has been hoping to sell naming rights, thus far without success.

Northern Illinois's teams will next play at Eastern Michigan, which, despite being one of the weakest, financially, athletic programs in the Mid-American Conferences, did sell naming rights to its Convocation Center.  George Gervin, who played at Eastern for a few years, bought them.  It's now the George Gervin Game Above Center.  "Game Above" refers to the athletics booster club.

A THROWBACK THURSDAY RESEARCH OPPORTUNITY.

The spring semester is under way, and students facing senior thesis requirements to graduate or dissertation proposals to retain their financial aid are looking for topics.  I hinted at such a project earlier this month.

For years, economists have understood that people who might have more to lose from suffering injury might be less willing to go out for football: just go to the youth football games in upscale neighborhoods, or see high schools that used to be football powerhouses going to eight or seven players on a side as fewer kids are trying out for the varsity; and reflect on that college admission scam of a few years ago involving upscale parents pretended their kids were sailors or tennis players, while the black kids were developing their skills as football players, including quarterbacks, linebackers, kickers, and left tackles.

In the course of cleaning up the bookmarks in anticipation of a computer upgrade and the joys of file migrations, I found this.

Over the past five years in Illinois, the proportion of high school football rosters filled by low-income boys rose nearly 25 percent – even as the number of players in the state has fallen by 14.8 percent over the same period, according to a story out this week from HBO's Real Sports.

This doesn't surprise Albert Samaha, a BuzzFeed News investigative reporter and author of "Never Ran, Never Will: Boyhood and Football in a Changing American Inner City."

Samaha spent two seasons embedded with the Mo Better Jaguar football program in Brownsville, a small Brooklyn neighborhood overburdened with poverty and crime. The program is for children ages 7-13, who are all aware of the risks of playing football, but play anyway.

"The reason that football is so valuable to them is the fact that it's still the sport that that's the most popular in America, that is getting the most money from high schools and colleges in America," Samaha said in an interview with NPR's Michel Martin on ;All Things Considered. "At a time when the educational gap continues to widen between low income, particularly black and brown kids, and higher income white kids, football offers a path to upward mobility that is not really available through any other extracurricular activity."

There's a doctoral dissertation on the causes of that educational gap, if it in fact exists, and a lot of Popular Perspective noise from loudmouths of all stripes to work through.  The culture-studies types will fall back on their tight priors.

Low-income students who choose to play football know about these risks, Samaha said, but have factored it into a bigger risk assessment calculation. For them, playing football is still worth the risk, because they're trying to avoid other dangers.

"It's a luxury to worry about these long-term, sort of abstract damages to these kids and their parents," Samaha said. "The risks are all around them — the risks of not going to high school, the risks of not making it into college, or the risks of of falling into kind of the street path that they'd seen other people around them fall into."

Football is their ticket out. But Samaha argues that America needs to reckon with the broader ethical implications of the sport.

"America's dual commitments to football and racial oppression have meant that the danger of the sport will increasingly fall on the shoulders of low income black and brown kids," Samaha said.

These are dangers the kids can avoid by, oh, not going out for football. The dangers of street crime, though? That's an opportunity for serious research on the effects of, inter alia, zero tolerance policing or inclusive bail policies.  It's possible to fire up Google Scholar from your office or home desk or favorite coffee house.

GREAT MOMENTS IN MOTORING.

Mixed messages on Denver roundabouts edition.

Four years ago, one of North Denver’s first roundabouts was installed on 35th Avenue and Raleigh Street, but it did not function like a regular roundabout. To the confusion of drivers and bikers, the original stop signs on the two smaller side streets were left in place, leaving those who entered the roundabout lost on how to use it while still obeying traffic laws.

According to guidance from the American Society of Civil Engineers, a modern roundabout is a free-flowing intersection in which traffic approaching the roundabout from any direction must yield to traffic already in the circle. The addition of a stop sign is confusing to users and suggests that Denver didn’t take the time to truly understand how a roundabout works before implementing them.

Read on, and it transpires that the idea of a roundabout is not well understood, even by civil engineers.

A roundabout can be both safer and more comfortable for drivers and walkers alike, but only if the engineer designing it knows how to integrate walkability into the roundabout.

“The priority should be slow speeds; the geometry of the roundabout needs to be tight to require drivers to slow way down and look around,” said urban planner and Strong Towns Editor-in-Chief Daniel Herriges. “And pedestrian crossings need to be highly visible to drivers entering or leaving the roundabout. There are good design precedents for all of this—none of it is rocket science. But a poorly designed roundabout is going to create a less safe environment.”

But if you make the radius that tight, you get semi-trailers using all the lanes to navigate it, or, as the article notes, motorists with land yachts using the bicycle reservation to get through. “Getting them wrong runs the risk of discrediting roundabouts as a valuable tool in the eyes of community members.”  Or you get Wisconsin's overdesigned roundabouts with slip lanes and overhead signage.