QUOTE OF THE DAY:

Football head coach Joe Novak said players are encouraged to get to know new recruits when they first come to NIU, confirming he’s heard of previous get-togethers, but none at an establishment like Amnesia.

Last season, football fans were criticized constantly for “embarrassing” conduct toward fans and members of opposing teams. But, the embarrassing actions of several football players speak louder than those of a stadium filled with more than 20,000 fans.

Tainting the situation even more is the administration’s disregard for punishing anyone who was involved in the party, showing that lack of common sense is something that won’t get football players into trouble.

That's more serious thinking from the editorial board of the Northern Star, who continue to get it right.

("Amnesia" refers to a local watering hole. The editorial describes it as a "night club" which is a bit pretentious for a place that caters to university students.)

BAKE SALES, GOOD AND BAD. Kindly be advised that Rosa Luxemburg nostalgia Women's History Month is soon to arrive on campuses nationwide, and it is likely that the bake sales with cookies sold to men for $1 and to women for 70 cents are likely to accompany it. These bake sales are unlikely to attract the kind of attention the affirmative action bake sales tend to attract from the administration, despite their cavalier abuse of everything we've learned in fifty years of empirical investigation into sex and gender differences in earnings.

The latest anti-affirmative action bake sale, at the University of Colorado (motto: we treat our football recruits like studs), has attracted the usual caterwauling, from the usual suspects, with extended commentary at discriminations, including a suggestion from The Yin Blog, who offers,

We realize that you disagree with affirmative action. However, this bake sale, with the differential pricing based on race and gender, while clever, makes a fundamentally specious analogy. The buyers of your baked goods do not interact with other buyers, so even if you attract a greater number of minority buyers, there is no increased cross-racial interaction; at least, not within the context of a simple sale. In the educational context, on the other hand, our experience with teaching has led us to realize that increased racial diversity improves the education process for everyone involved. Thus, affirmative action in the educational process has a pedagogical purpose that is absent in your bake sale.

Let's take this suggestion seriously. Substitute the Rosa Luxemburg Women's History bake sale.

We realize that you disagree with wage differentials. However, this bake sale, with the differential pricing based on sex, while clever, makes a fundamentally specious analogy. The buyers of your baked goods do not contract with other sellers, so even if you attract a greater number of female buyers, there is no increased workplace interaction, at least, not within the context of a simple sale. In the workplace context, on the other hand, our experience with hiring and promotion has led us to realize that increased attachment to the labor force improves the pay packets for everyone involved. Thus, differing pay packets in the workplace have an efficiency purpose that is absent in your bake sale.

On the other hand, King at SCSU Scholars may have the right idea: some people lack a life. University officials appear to be behaving like adults with respect both to the bake sale and the football recruiting inquiries, hence there are no new nominees for the deck of cards to be found in Boulder.

NOTICE OF EMBARGO. Just Another Soldier has been given orders to cease posting.

AND YET MORE ON VIEWPOINT DIVERSITY AND SELF SELECTION. Callboy, call out a helper crew for this run.

Duke philosophy department chairman Robert Brandon's case for the seven of hearts receives some strong letters of recommendation. Insta Pundit concludes a not-so-insta post (a footnote in a decision, Professor Reynolds?) with "It's no doubt embarrassing for a professor of philosophy to be so corrected by two law professors." Herrn. Schneider and Schwarz, ist Herr Professor Brandon nicht selbstverstaendlich a miserable failure? Expedite a concurrence with the Superintendent's recommendation of the seven of hearts (one of the weakest cards in the sheepshead deck, for readers new to this theme), bitte?

Invisible Adjunct finds yet more commentary on Professor Brandon's statement, as does The Little Professor, The Cranky Professor, and The Naive Humanist. (This last site is a new discovery to Cold Spring Shops, and it's worth a closer look. I have long maintained that the failures of the University are often the failures of failed scholars from failed disciplines, and internal resistance to the corrosive commonplaces of those disciplines is something that merits recognition and reinforcement.)

MORE ON VIEWPOINT DIVERSITY AND SELF-SELECTION. Enough new cargo has accumulated to call a new train of thought rather than run a third section of this post.

Start first with the fallout from the ill-advised comments some senior people at Duke University made. Critical Mass notes,

In fairness, the denial approach documented above is not a response that is unique to the good people at Duke. It's become a standard form of dismissal on just about every campus where party affiliations are cited as indices of the faculty's political homogeneity. In its unapologetic refusal to admit that there is an ideological elephant in the living room, it's a willfully obtuse response--brilliantly, brazenly so. Its power is such that it can withstand even the most reasonable argumentation.

Professor O'Connor's post provides connections to related commentary. (Signifying Nothing sees the sparks flying and decides to stay away. More connections here.) Ralph at Cliopatria worries whether or not the lack of a core curriculum is beginning to affect the professoriate's sanity:

Do philosophy departments teach logic anymore? Or is it, as a philosopher at Antioch explained to me, "We don't teach it because students don't want to take it." That is one place where my libertarian friends are exactly wrong. Whatever happened to requiring students to take courses because we know they need to? Those who haven't benefitted from required courses apparently now chair departments at reputable institutions.

Apparently none of these considerations bother Stanley Fish, the Jack of Clubs. (How soon do I get to "X" him off?) Tightly Wound finds a new Al-Jaz Chronicle of Higher Education commentary by Clubjack, and fisks part of it. There's more. Here's Clubjack, seeing the end of the old core courses as a Good Thing, particularly if viewed in light of the campus culture wars.

If victory for the right meant turning back or retarding the growth of programs like women's studies, African-American studies, Chicano studies, Latino studies, cultural studies, gay and lesbian (and now transgender) studies, postmodern studies, and poststructuralist theory, then the left won big time, for these programs flourish (especially among the young) and are the source of much of the intellectual energy in the liberal arts.

Flourish? If not for the "diversity" requirements that have been heaved onto the curriculum to the exclusion of calculus, logic, and languages, who would take these things? Even in the presence of these work-making requirements, aren't scholars in these victim studies and so-called theory programs the ones most likely to be freeway fliers, adjuncts, or serving coffee at Starbucks (who posted that Bart Simpson story???) I suppose if your standard of "flourish" is the standard by which the Berlin Wall made sense -- it did keep the fascists out of East Germany -- these disciplines are flourishing, but I doubt they would pass any market test.

Dean Fish goes on:

While questions of truth may be generally open, the truth of academic matters is not general but local; questions are posed and often they do have answers that can be established with certainty; and even if that certainty can theoretically be upset -- one cannot rule out the future emergence of new evidence -- that theoretical possibility carries with it no methodological obligation. That is, it does not mandate intellectual diversity, a condition that may attend some moments in the pursuit of truth when there is as yet no clear path, but not a condition one must actively seek or protect

Put another way: there is no elephant in the room, and if there is an elephant in the room, there is no reason to remove the elephant, or to open the room.

Elsewhere on the frontier of non-existent elephants, Best of the Web offers some observations on the remarks offered by the presumptive seven and eight of hearts, and uncovers yet more progressive intolerance, this time by the usual suspects (no fascists in Berlin, certainly none at Amherst College) from the usual disciplines. King at SCSU Scholars is instigating a research project to discover the political orientation of his colleagues along the Main Street of the Northwest. (Doesn't Minnesota allow crossover voting? If so, the party identifications adopted by voters for the primaries might be an imprecise measure of the political preferences of the professoriate.)

Elsewhere in the Establishment echo chamber, Milwaukee's Charlie Sykes posts an ABC memorandum that makes clear precisely what prejudices the highly-paid news reporters (making a lot of money does not exempt you from believing in Roosevelt Claus, apparently) are most comfortable with.

JOB OPENING. Dynamist reports the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education is commencing a search for a President.

THE MORE THINGS CHANGE. I may still have, somewhere in my files, an interview U.S. News did with Boston University's John Silber, wherein he asserted that "Today's high school diploma is fraudulent." That was over 20 years ago. Some things have not improved with time, as Joanne Jacobs and Number 2 Pencil report.

QUOTE OF THE DAY: "The Arab Street has learned -- finally -- to respect American power. But when it comes to garlic-scented europocrisy, Arabs are rightly upset." That's Vodka Pundit. Where, exactly, is all that European nuance and multiculturalism when it comes to headscarves? Are babushkas and the hippie version that's tied in back also not French? Or are those different because not specifically religious?

YOUR GENERATION GAP IS SHOWING: Wokka Wokka Wokka Wokka to link to a description of a week of And Then we Ate, well?

FIFTEEN MINUTES OF FAME. Welcome, Academic Game readers, and thanks to Academy Girl for recognizing Cold Spring Shops as source of the quotation on top.

An op-ed piece I wrote summarizing some research on immigration amnesties has been picked up by the Aurora (Ill.) Beacon-News and the DeKalb Chronicle. Tomorrow: a seminar developing a theory of paying for the right to cut the line. That's for the Northern Illinois University community only at the moment.

SECOND SECTION: I always enjoy presenting my amusement park pricing research at seminars because you can depend on people asking the right questions. No exception today. I had no sooner gotten into my first anomaly than someone piped up with "Did you know what Great America is now doing?" Yup, which is the second anomaly. And the local Midweek has picked up the amnesty essay, complete with a working link to Cold Spring Shops.

SIMULATE YOUR SUBGAME PERFECTION. Truck and Barter discovers a game theory program called Gambit. It's potentially a complement to Maple for doing real theory. (Sorry, fashionable literary folks, many of you couldn't carry my pencil.)

MACROECONOMICS. Get thee to Econo Pundit and inform thyself.

ON THE LIGHTER SIDE

Saddam Hussein Rules Over Cell With Iron Fist, reports Madison's own The Onion. (Hat tip: Common Sense and Wonder.)

73s TO YOU. On the Third Hand hosts Carnival of the Vanities No. 73.

IST'S NICHT EIN HAUFEN MIST? Academy Girl has a new post up, and I want the name of this person. There are some jacks not yet assigned. Get this, this person said, "Tenured people teaching at the graduate level and doing graduate level work and courses work much "harder" than the sessionals at the "lower" level." This person is so clueless I don't even know where to begin fisking him. Tenured people teaching at the graduate level are talking about their own research, or at least they OUGHT to be, albeit not exclusively. They are working with self-selected acolytes who ought to have some sense about why they're in the field and what the important questions are. (Perhaps I'm assuming too much. That is true to an extent in economics.) Let's see, doing what you want and hanging out with people who want to know something about it? That's harder work?

Compare and contrast that with the people enrolled in the lower level class. Here the professor or the adjuncts (is "sessional" a Canadian term, like "chesterfield" or "hoser?") are working with other-selected congregants who may or may not have any sense about why they are in the class and they may have no idea what the important questions in that discipline are. (I hear this lament from people who have taken economics in college and hated it all the time.) A good teacher in such a course HAS to have time to take questions, because the students will have questions. It is a crime to treat these classes as cash cows to be set up as large lectures with quiz sections, where there are few to no opportunities to take questions. Furthermore, a good teacher in such a course HAS to be able to distinguish a truly clueless question (which calls for some convex combination of firmness and patience, which differs from student to student) from a subtle but not well posed question (and these DO come up.) That is less hard work? Give. Me. A. Break.

For the record, I will teach economics at all levels in an academic year, from an introductory level price theory (principles of microeconomics, for those of you in Dane County) which is often a real joy to teach, through the limited industrial economics offerings we have (an antitrust class and a rejuvenated public utilities class) and the first graduate level price theory class (where I had to crack down today on students submitting answers consisting of derivations with no expository sentences.) And I have long maintained (learned it from my father years ago) that it is a mistake to put inexperienced professors -- let alone graduate students, or hires picked up on the fly -- in front of introductory level students. Consider an Army in which the recruit's first encounter with basic training is with a recently trained PFC. Well, maybe you don't want to consider that, ponyemayite?

VIEWPOINT DIVERSITY AND SELF-SELECTION. Pandagon reacts to a story about an advertisement in the Duke University student newspaper detailing a preponderance of registered Democrats on the Duke faculty.

Well, the conservative philosophy tends to be very materialistic. That's not a criticism, it's a simple observation. Conservative economic systems attempt to make it easier to acquire and retain wealth. Liberal systems, by contrast, treat money as an engine for social progress. It's nice if people get rich, but it's even nicer if everyone has health care. That ideological split is instructive. Those who can get into academia are, in most cases, highly educated and intelligent. Usually, they could be making significantly more in the private sector. So those who enter in the public sector tend to rank material acquisition as a lower priority, a value hierarchy consistent with liberal ideals. The flip side of this would be conservatives entering the private sector, as material wealth is more highly regarded within their value system and the public sector is a terrible route through which to acquire it.

If this analysis is correct, the fault lies not with the highly charged, politically active liberals. It lies with the conservatives who are unwilling to go into academia and teach the next generation. If true, then it is not up to the Left to fix the problem by shutting up, it is up to the Right to fix the problem by encouraging their best and brightest to train the young and ensure their values are given a fair hearing.

That's my understanding of the purpose of the Institute for Humane Studies and the Mercatus Center, and there are other such organizations. It would help, however, if academicians whose area of expertise is in writing or in a physical science would understand that there are rules of construction and laws of conservation in the use of money: you can't achieve social progress simply by throwing money in preferred directions.

Kieran at Crooked Timber extends the remarks on self-selection among academics in useful ways.

Returning to the Duke Chronicle article, political science chairman Michael Munger suggests "In at least one case, a department chair [c.q.] has said they thought the function of Duke was to rid conservative students of their hypocrisies." Professor Healy suggests that philosophy chairman Robert Brandon is being tongue-in-cheek when he says, "We try to hire the best, smartest people available. If, as John Stuart Mill said, stupid people are generally conservative, then there are lots of conservatives we will never hire." Tongue in cheek it might be, but I think there's a seven of hearts with his name on it. And Duke lobbyist John Burness, by asserting, "If you look at the humanities in general, there's a great deal of creativity that goes on. In a sense it's innovation, and a perfectly logical criticism of the current society, in one form or another, that plays itself out in some of these disciplines. It doesn't surprise me that you might find people in humanities are more liberal than conservative." This is the kind of sophistry that gives b.s. a bad name. Herrn. Schneider und Schwarz, the eight of hearts, nicht wahr? Tightly Wound has a concurring opinion.

SECOND SECTION: Jesse at Pandagon has more on the parallel network of policy shops for conservative intellectuals, which may or may not be the beginnings of a good industry study.

JUST SUCK IT UP. Rachel Brem is having problems keeping her patience with students who just can't get their acts together. The Superintendent is particularly impatient with the class of student that is in college to get a degree in order to earn a promotion, yet uses that job as a reason to not do the class work. You think there might be a broader behavior pattern at work here?

HURRY, HURRY, STEP RIGHT UP. Carnival of the Capitalists, with proper theming, calls at Trommeter.

BATTLE OF THE SEXES. Apartment 11-D compiles a number of anecdotes that couples contemplating matrimony might contemplate negotiating before they visit the city clerk's office.

A POSITIVE THEORY OF PAYING TO CUT IN LINE? No, Lynne at Knowledge Problem has not scooped my research, but she does have some thoughts, and some links, on the folly of allocating landing slots at airports by methods that do not include priority pricing. There have to be some commonalities between priority pricing at amusement parks and high-occupancy toll roads. Expect lighter posting the next couple of days, I have to think about that.