I HAVE GOOD REASON TO BE TIRED. Last Friday, the retiring interim dean gave his State of the College presentation. The text is not yet available at the Liberal Arts homepage. In addition to the encouraging introduction of this year's Presidential Research and Teaching Professors and assorted other honorees, he presented some pie charts illustrating the share of the university's recent increased student credit hour production handled by Liberal Arts faculty. Hint: it exceeds 90%. His presentation illustrated the folly of misapplying business models, and the lesson generalizes to the private sector. In the early 1990s, the state's board of higher education decided to capitalize on the business fads of "downsizing" and "strategic planning" to trim the public universities. As a consequence, Northern Illinois was deemed "right-sized" with an undergraduate enrollment of about 16,500, a figure that reflected the tail end of the Thirteenth Generation cohort but that missed the bulging middle schools and the effect of immigration from the former Soviet Bloc and Latin America into Illinois. Many of the other colleges could invoke professional entry standards and tighten admission requirements as the entering classes grew (to a size comparable to our greatest extent in 1987-88, when the economics department had twice as many faculty members.) But each student's first two years are effectively in Liberal Arts.

I'm apparently not alone in feeling swamped.

I have a huge backlog of grading to do, a frightening amount, given that I’m teaching three courses with large (for Swarthmore) enrollments. Tremendous amount of reading that needs completion, and substantial preparations for courses each day, given how excellent and probing a lot of the discussions in each of my classes have been this semester. A whole new course syllabus needs to get out there for students to look at as they think about classes. (Almost done if you’re checking here looking for it.) A few straggler references for students need completion or sending. Many and sundry meetings of various kinds in the next week or two.

The problem we have is not limited to being overwhelmed with stuff to do. Often it is the nature of the stuff. Mike Munger's taxonomy of evaluating projects and obligations introduces two dimensions, which he classifies as "urgent" and "important." Admittedly, a 2x2 chart is easier to post on a web site. To do so, however, leaves out a third dimension that might be even more important. For the moment, classify tasks as "enervating" and "energizing." Thus, for instance, program and performance review items, which often have deadlines, qualify as "urgent, important, and enervating." Referee reports, which in economics increasingly have deadlines (and electronic mail makes the production of automated needling reminders cheaper), are increasingly "urgent," they're "important," if we're supposed to have decent scholarship, but in many cases they're "enervating" (and for all my crankiness I'm not going to put a skull-and-crossbones graphic in my response). Research tends to be important and energizing, but when grades are due, it's postponable.

I leave to the reader as an exercise what happens when the in-basket is brimming with tasks that somebody else views as urgent, although their importance is not great, and they're enervating in the extreme.

LET'S HEAR IT FOR PAPER AND PENCIL. To file taxes electronically, one has to spend money on a package that is compatible with the government's servers. There's always the possibility of something going wrong. Furthermore, I might be using the same pencil next year, and if I have to replace it, it's still going to be cheaper than next year's tax-filing package.

NOT A GLORIFIED COMMUNITY COLLEGE AFTER ALL. The University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee goes forward with its research park.

For the cost of one engineer in the United States, a company can hire 11 in India, according to the National Academies, a U.S. government advisory body. And the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a Paris-based multinational think tank, last year announced that China spends more on research and development as a share of its economy than Japan and became the world's second-highest investor in R&D after the United States.

[Milwaukee chancellor Carlos] Santiago points to a continued loss of jobs throughout southeastern Wisconsin. But he notes that Milwaukee still has an opportunity to retain its cluster of "advanced manufacturing" companies, which require a steady stream of technology workers, software engineers and research and development investment. UWM in January announced that Rockwell Automation Inc. will help UWM build a technology research program to support the region's advanced manufacturing sector.

If the region loses the advanced manufacturing sector, Santiago said, "then we lose the competitive advantage in manufacturing."

Two caveats. One, not noted by the newspaper, is that even the production function for Indian engineers is subject to the Law of Increasing Opportunity Cost. Another, incompletely noted, is that many of the benefits of a research-intensive university are appropriable private benefits.

Santiago, an economist, argues that no big metropolitan area has transitioned into the 21st century knowledge-driven economy without a research-based university at its core. He told the newspaper that he has spent weeks lobbying politicians and flying around the nation to meet with big-dollar donors from the private sector.

Past UWM construction projects have taken eight to 13 years, Santiago said, adding that he's unwilling to settle for anything longer than six to eight years for the entire engineering school expansion.

"His timetable is aggressive, but it's necessary for the metro economy to keep pace with the world marketplace," said Thomas Hefty, retired CEO of Blue Cross Blue Shield United of Wisconsin and an economic-development activist who co-chaired Gov. Jim Doyle's Economic Growth Council from 2003-'05.

But at this point, Santiago freely admits that he still doesn't have the money he needs, doesn't own the land, and has not yet begun expanding the 60 engineering-school faculty members to 100, as he plans.

One potential hitch that could derail the UWM project lies in the Madison statehouse, where some lawmakers for years have opposed increases to the state's higher-education spending.

Doyle, who endorses UWM's expansion, has earmarked an additional $10 million in the state's 2007-'09 budget for the project. If Doyle and the UW System fail to push their UW "growth" budget through the Legislature, then Santiago cannot hire new faculty, donors will go away, and the UWM project will lose momentum.

It's not simply a matter of a few anti-intellectual legislative types finding an opportunity to stiff the university system. There's still a balance between the potential spillover benefits, including keeping educated Wisconsin residents in Wisconsin without an indentured-servitude tuition provision, and the entirely appropriable private benefits, such as entry-level engineers for Rockwell who don't have to be taught on company time how to properly wire a starting circuit.

WATCH THIS SPACE.

THE WORK THAT REMAINS. In last week's tribute to Kurt Vonnegut (which might have been somewhat off point: Scott McLemee's "The Eternal Sophomore" might better capture the essence of his popularity) I noted,

In 1961, the idea of treating any possible source of difference in performance as an unfair advantage might have sounded positively dystopian: the propensity of some people to refer to "impairments" that must be "accommodated" lest the "temporarily abled" act "oppressively" renders the story somewhat more prophetic.

That propensity requires additional introspection and reconsideration in light of this week's events.

The problem with Virginia Tech's policing - and with most other college's approach to security - runs deeper than training or resources or dedication, says S. Daniel Carter of Security on Campus Inc., a nonprofit watchdog group. The problem is mindset, he says.

On a campus, everyone is a big family - the administrators, the students, the faculty and the university's security officers.

As a result, "the tendency is to overlook or downplay potential problems," Carter says. "They don't want to think that their campus community members - their students - could be that dangerous."

Carter believes that mind-set was almost certainly a factor in how Virginia Tech officers handled - or mishandled - previous complaints about Cho. And it was clearly a factor in many of the things that went wrong early on a flurry-filled morning last Monday when a campus just stirring from its weekend slumber was shaken by gunfire, he says.

But even a family has to have standards, and sometimes a parent must take a child's privileges away. That's not necessarily a police matter, as the article also notes.

Schools have to "balance the rights of students with the rights of the communities and with what parents want, and its not an easy thing to do," says Dr. Joanna Locke of the Jed Foundation, which works to prevent suicide and promote mental health among college students.

What about the mental health providers beyond campus who dealt directly with Cho? Couldn't they have done something?

Not unless Cho shared his morbid fantasies, and people like Cho almost never do, says Dr. Michael Welner, a forensic psychologist who has profiled mass murderers.

And here the mindset matters. Does the framing of a person's condition as involving "impairments" that require "accommodation" contribute? Oakland University's Barbara Oakley (via Margaret Soltan) doesn't quite say so, but she suggests something is not right.

In other words, most of the broad social “lessons” we are being told we must learn from the Virginia Tech shootings have little to do with what allowed the horrors to occur. This is about evil, and about how our universities are able to deal with it as a literary subject but not as a fact of life. Can administrators and deans really continue to leave professors and other college personnel to deal with deeply disturbed students on their own, with only pencils in their defense?

Sometimes, alas, one has to temper principle with practicality, as Timothy Burke observes at 11-D in this comment.

It's all about trade-offs. You can resource psychological support even more heavily, but it's not going to change anything until or unless you want to grant institutions and legal systems more extensive forms of authority to coercively detain and treat people who are suspected of the capacity for violence. And doing that is not an obvious fix that comes without a social and philosophical price tag.

As a first step, let's have a conversation about the loss function. What are the consequences of excluding more mildly disturbed or eccentric people from higher education? Will the effect be to exclude more Seung-Hoi Chos or more John Nashes? On the other hand, what are the consequences of doing more to turn non-conformists into conformists?

CYNICAL POPULISM. Frederic Bastiat's characterization of the state as a fiction by which each attempts to live at the expense of others can take a particularly effective form if the state takes great lengths to distinguish its insiders from outsiders preparatory to plundering those outsiders. The effectiveness of such a plunder is documented in Hitler's Beneficiaries by Goetz Aly, this evening's rather sober Book Review No. 7. Professor Aly's work is well-documented, as one would expect of scholarly work, as well as carefully edited and translated, which merits mention. The thesis is succinctly put in the preface at p. 7.

Hitler shielded the average Aryan from [the costs of waging war] at the cost of depriving others of their basic substance. To ensure contentment among its own people, the German government destroyed a number of foreign currencies -- most notably the Greek drachma -- by forcing other countries to pay ever-increasing contributions and tributes to their occupiers. To maintain living standards, the Germans plundered millions of tons of food to keep German soldiers well fed, then shipped what was left over back to the fatherland. And while the Third Reich was gorging itself on food from the countries it occupied, the German army paid its operating costs in the devalued local currency.

Much of the economic content of the book focuses on the creation of special bank certificates that the Germans used to maintain the illusion of paying vendors in the occupied countries for "requisitioned" items as well as the monetary policy manipulations used to prevent what was essentially the printing of money from turning into a hyperinflation. The presentation of German efforts to facilitate the transportation of goods acquired at requisition prices back to the fatherland despite logistical strains are also instructive. Professor Aly's evaluation of the plunder-for-the-Herrenvolk could make some people angry, but the summation (p. 323) is one worth incorporating into an examination somewhere.

The Nazi movement represented the drive to couple social equality with national homogeneity, a concept that was popular not only in Germany.

Left unanswered is why support for the regime, which was predicated on the allocation of stolen goods, did not collapse when the logistics collapsed and the Allies destroyed German housing and manufacturing faster than the occupation authorities could steal replacements.

YOUR RIGHT TO SAY IT. The New York Times visits DeKalb to cover our weekly war-related demonstration and counter-demonstration. The origins of these war-related demonstrations are somewhat unclear although they have turned into a civil and public debate about the Iraq campaign. It's not that the Times doesn't have protests and counter-protests to follow closer to home. The article appears to be part of the paper's discovery of pensioners remaining active in public affairs.

As the number of older Americans grows, retirement for many of them means a chance to devote themselves to social and political causes. They have the time, and since they no longer need to worry about employers, they can speak out without fear of repercussions. Retirees represent a potent force in political movements of every stripe and are likely to become even more important as the number of older people increases.

That is, if their pensions remain as generous as current Social Security benefits relative to taxes paid are. (Via City Barbs)

QUOTE OF THE DAY. Marginal Utility's Tom Bozzo weighs in on James Kunstler v. Thomas Friedman.

Inevitability and immutability arguments should be recognized as having little economic content. The factoid that the supposedly immutable often will give way to adverse price changes is part of the secret to the Big Bucks (or at least some fish-in-a-barrel shooting) for the econ profession.

Deeper into the post, he notes the folly of throwing more money into road construction in the hopes that somehow ethanol-based import-substitution activities will keep the car culture humming. The Illinois Tollway Authority has yet to get the message. It's spring, and the signs apologizing for the inconvenience and promising less future congestion are sprouting, this season along the eastbound Reagan Tollway through Warrenville and Naperville. Dream on. Commuters have to put up with the construction congestion, they have to put up with the inevitable congestion at the end of the widened section, if the widening is ever finished, the improved road will attract drivers who are currently using the Northwest Tollway but will find the widened Reagan preferable, and the congestion will be further exacerbated when the tollway discovers that the Northwest requires widening. As far as the ethanol is concerned, it might displace some Middle Eastern oil, but the ethanol program has turned Mexico from a net importer of corn (for tortillas) into a net exporter of corn (to the ethanol plants.) This week a few of us hosted the chairman of the economics department at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, who alerted us to the policy challenges that presents within his country and between our countries.

HOKIE HOPE.


We dedicate this Friday's post to our colleagues and classmates at Virginia Tech.

EVERYBODY IS A HOKIE ON FRIDAY.


Via King Banaian.

Virginia Tech is asking people to support its students, faculty, administrators, staff, alumni and friends by wearing orange and maroon this Friday. Given the number of colleagues I've worked with over the years that are from that fine institution, count me in, as long as I can find something in those two colors.

Friends of the University of Illinois, the Chicago Bears, the South Shore Line, and the Milwaukee Road ought to be able to do so, easily.

755. 43^o 1.821' N Lat., 87^o 58.347' W. Long. "Who was Dick Drago, Alex?"

HIGH ACHIEVERS GO TO MORNING CLASSES. Stephen Spruiell at Phi Beta Cons reflects on the Virginia Tech death toll.

One of the saddest things about this event is that the victims all seemed to be among the most accomplished and promising people at Virginia Tech. My wife was particularly distraught when she read about Librescu, who we all know by now know survived the Holocaust and escaped from Communist Romania only to be gunned down in his own classroom. I told her that I guess Librescu had to survive those ordeals so that he could save 10 lives on Monday. What else can one say when confronted with something so seemingly senseless?

Early-morning classes tend to have a higher proportion of "accomplished and promising" students precisely because that's a good time for motivated morning people to complete their schedules. There's accumulating evidence that the shooter viewed his shortcomings as the result of the successes of others: what better time than the 9 am class to take out his frustrations?

QUESTION OF THE DAY. Daniel Drezner:

A few questions to faculty readers out there, however:

1) Have you ever encountered a student you suspected of being capable of violence on [Virginia Tech] scale?
2) What action did you take?
3) What, if anything, could or should universities do to improve security?

Hie thee hence and offer contributions.

MENSCH.

Liviu Lebrescu 1930-2007.

(Via Phi Beta Cons, The Country Pundit, and University Diaries.)

VIRGINIA TECH.

We note with great sorrow today's tragedy in Blacksburg.

There will be no commentary on the events or on the commentary on the events until the story is clearer.

Margaret Soltan's University Diaries followed the events as the news broke.

The dean at Anonymous Community notes the vulnerability of campuses.

They're open, they're highly populated, they're lightly patrolled (if at all), and they're full of stressed-out people. In a way, they're almost naive, if it's possible for institutions to be naive. As I've mentioned before, they really aren't built for easy lockdown modes. Most were built before that term was even coined.

Selig sind, die da Leid tragen, denn sie sollen getröstet werden.

APRIL IS THE CRUELEST MONTH. April 16 is not too late in the season for a snowstorm.

April 16, 1961.
William Robertson photo in Eric Bronsky collection
Scanned from North Shore Line: Interurban Freight.

In another ten years, shoppers may be able to ride in this freight train's path as far as Harmswoods, although the stop will be called Old Orchard.

PLAY VALUE. Trains used to run a feature called "Would You Believe It?" where errors from the paint shop would sometimes turn up. Somebody at Weaver Models apparently set up a print pad with OHIO upside down. It's on both sides of the car.


In O Scale, the equipment is robust enough that one can sometimes use a now-illegal prototype practice to move cars and obtain a bit more clearance.


The uncoupling stick is a bit too long and too skinny to be a proper pole, but I suspect all of my switch engines will eventually be equipped with one that looks right, complete with the metal end-bands. Train crews will be advised to not use them too frequently.

PERFORMANCE RATINGS WITH INCOMPLETE COMPARISONS. A Wisconsin State Journal article on Wisconsin's run in the Women's National Invitational Tournament gets off an inaccurate dig at the field.

After all, the tournament determines the nation's 65th-best basketball team, the title can be bought by any school willing to ante up for home games and the crowds are generally limited to family, close friends and a few dedicated fans.

The observation about home-court advantages is accurate in part, with Wisconsin's two losses under the current format coming at Arkansas and at Wyoming. (Wisconsin fans turn out at the Kohl Center in numbers that suggest "few" approximates to "ten to fifteen thousand.") It's also inaccurate to refer to the cartel's tournament as comprising the sixty-four best teams: were that the case the expression "on the bubble" (which applies to teams at risk of being excluded when winners of the conference regular season make unanticipated exits from conference tournaments, requiring the pairing committee to do more work.)

The idea of attempting to construct a unique ranking among teams that sometimes have no opponents in common until they meet in a tournament poses a number of challenges. Subsequent to my griping about the cartel's tournament identifying a champion without requiring the champion to make the equivalent of a grandmaster norm I did some research on the algorithm by which the pairing committee ranks teams for selection to the tournament. There's something called the Ratings Percentage Index, which is pretty simple. The last such indices for 2006, prior to the announcement of tournament pairings, are still available online. For the men, eventual winner Florida ranked sixth, eventual runner-up Ohio State first, with UCLA, North Carolina, Wisconsin, and Pittsburgh between. Eventual Invitational winner West Virginia ranked 57, with Northern Illinois 302. For the women, eventual winner Tennessee ranked first, and eventual runner-up Rutgers ninth, with Duke, North Carolina, Purdue, Connecticut, Vanderbilt, Maryland and Oklahoma between. Invitational winner Wyoming ranked 64, with Wisconsin at 86 and Northern Illinois at 116. There are other ranking methods in use, including one based on the formula for rating chess players. (Do people get paid to run these numbers, or are these hobbyists at work?) The chess method, which is current to the end of the tournament, puts Tennessee 1, Rutgers 5, Bowling Green 15, Wyoming 38, Wisconsin 44, Northern Illinois 102.

In one of the "profound math ideas made practical books" I once read, somebody used a fixed point argument to analyze the relative rankings of sports teams. I don't recall the details of the argument. It appears, however, that relative position can be sensitive to the algorithm being used.

FAILING YOUR MARKET TESTS. The latest trade-union survey of average annual faculty salaries has been released, and Inside Higher Ed presents the salient tables along with a great deal of hand-wringing.

In a new emphasis, the AAUP is drawing attention to the growing gaps between professors in different disciplines. While the trend of paying business and law professors more than those who teach literature and philosophy is nothing new, data released by the association indicate a significant growth in the gaps over the last 20 years. And association leaders want to focus more attention.

Those are the same 20 years over which the rest of the world has noticed literature and philosophy losing sight of intellectual coherence.

The disciplinary gaps are most evident comparing average salaries for assistant professors. The following table uses English language and literature professors as the base and expresses other disciplines’ salaries in comparison. Only other arts and humanities professors earn less, and a few disciplines saw smaller gains — while business professors are now earning twice as much.

Put another way, not all disciplines have industrial reserve armies of underemployed Ph.D.s.

[Research director John W.]Curtis of the AAUP said that the aim in providing this data was not to set some kind of acceptable or unacceptable salary gap among disciplines, but to promote a more open and full discussion of the topic. “The nature of higher education is changing, and has changed — and it’s not the product of any one decision, but the outcome of trends that have been ongoing for decades and that are beginning to show some stark inequalities,” he said.

The large gaps between some fields “raise questions of whether you can speak of faculty members who have a common perspective and a common situation,” he said. Curtis said he worried that those on the high end may be “more concerned about their own careers than the profession.” And while AAUP doesn’t rule out salary differentials by discipline, Curtis said that the association believes that these policies should be set by the faculty — something he does not think is always happening.

Haven't the people on the high end of any salary spectrum, whether it be within a discipline, among disciplines, or among lines of business, always been those with the best outside offers? Is a difference of perspective necessarily a bad thing? Perhaps others who have applied themselves to the task of making their work marketable to others are doing a more effective job of challenging the lowering of standards in higher education by their exit than I have by my voice, and let me assure you, difference of perspective in a curriculum committee is not the road to great popularity.

The reaction of a prominent member of an organization that has contributed much to higher education's poor image amuses.

Rosemary G. Feal, executive director of the Modern Language Association, said she wasn’t surprised by the pay gap, but was worried by it. “I’m someone who thinks the value of a society — and the well-being of its citizenry — is reflected in the value we collectively place on arts and letters. Language and literature study offers students skills that they need to imagine and build a better world, and I think that’s something we should all care about and want to reward and support.” She noted that plenty of English majors end up in medicine or law or business, so those who think they can spend less on such departments may be having an impact on the professions they worry about.

The impact, dear reader, is often in the frustration of a professor in a senior-level course dealing with the poor writing of students, whether converted English majors or otherwise. Perhaps it's time for the Modern Language Association to rethink its oppositional stance.

“We ought to be rewarding those who help us learn the lessons of Shakespeare’s plays just as we reward those who can teach us the lessons of Enron,” [Feal] said.

That is, if there are people teaching Shakespeare. Si quaeris Ward Churchill, circumspice!

And salaries do send messages, Feal said. “The gap in pay worries me because it might discourage those who want to teach language and literature,” she said. “I see some evidence that those who love language and literature and aspire to be college professors are questioning the viability of their vocation. Narrowing the pay gap is a way for colleges and universities to say ‘we value the humanities.’ Market forces are one factor in determining pay, but the value we place on humanistic learning in institutions of higher education should never be subordinated to that factor.”

Restore the trivium and the Canon and then let's talk. But bear in mind that whatever the academy subsidizes, it gets more of. Is an expansion of the reserve army of culture-studies grievance-mongers efficient or fair?

SELF SELECTION. Some people describe the world.

The introduction of Murray Sperber's Beer and Circus: How Big-Time College Sports Has Crippled Undergraduate Education divides students into four basic groups, of which only one, the smallest, being scholarly/intellectual. This group has probably always been the smallest, but has always represented the majority of the professors, with a few exceptions like Party Girl. Professors are almost set up to feel a certain disdain for their students, as the other categories are not especially attractive, as they consist chiefly of social butterflies, vocational drudgers, and slackers.

College faculty are self-selected from a different subset of the population than the great mass of students. Big deal. That's true of accountants and engineers and model railroaders and golfers and patternmakers. (I hesitate to labor the obvious: why go into a line of work that requires you to interact with a variety of curious, in all the senses of the word, young people? Get to know them as people. They'll surprise you.)

Does it have to be the case that college faculty also self-select for pusillanimity? What is the point of enjoying all the protections of tenure if the best one can do is post anonymous whinges at Rate Your Students?

So why not get involved and change things?

As a result, the general intelligence of students probably is at least somewhat lower than it was, say, 50 years ago, but more importantly, the outstanding students are simply swamped by the masses.

Why? Have your faculty councils and department chairmen acquiesced in a dilution of admission standards that somebody has sugar coated as access? Clearly, the policy isn't working. Say so. Change it.

Numerically speaking, the outstanding students are still probably around, even if they don't seem as prevalent because there are so many of those "other" students professors don't much like—the ones not in Sperber's category of intellectuals.

Did that happen by accident? Who consented to offering retakes of high school, sometimes for college credit, and defended it as remediation? What incentives were your faculty councils, department chairmen, deans, and provosts, responding to when they proliferated content-free courses and majors and explained that such offerings boosted retention? Don't go along. Speak up.

Are you complicit by your silence in the fraud? When the proliferation of image consultants, failed scholars, schmoozers and hack politicians engages in an orgy of self-congratulation and praise and refers to it as a favorable assessment, where are you? Posting anonymous whinges? Call "nonsense" and name names.