IST'S NICHT EIN FROHER SANG? In the Milwaukee area, Ja, das ist.

Members of the United German Choruses of Milwaukee - the five choirs combined - performed their 24th annual Christmas concert at Mount Mary College on Sunday, but their ranks are dwindling.

The remaining choirs are a vestige of the numerous German singing societies that once thrived in the United States, and especially in Wisconsin, as a result of heavy immigration to the area.

There's less immigration from Germany now, and assimilation takes a different course.

In Milwaukee, the wives of some of the male singers decided that they would start their own club, and so was born the Milwaukee Damenchor. Milwaukee D.A.N.K. CHOR is a mixed male and female chorus, and Schwaben Männerchor is another male group in the Milwaukee area. Madison, Kenosha and Sheboygan have singing societies recognized by [Nord-Amerikanischer Sängerbund, and Kroening said Manitowoc still has a small club.

German singing societies alternately flourished and withdrew from the public eye in America as a Civil War and then two World Wars rocked the country. In 1938, the NASB reported that 181 choruses came to a national festival in Chicago.

By 1983 the organization reported 69 member choruses.

Some ties to the past still bind ... I once attended an Italian wedding reception at the Jefferson Hall on Fond du Lac Avenue near the Milwaukee Road tracks ... above the main entrance, FREIE GEMEINDE ... in a display case inside, a blue banner, heralding Schwaben Männerchor; probably at one time the sewer Socialists discussed sound municipal bonds and public parks every three blocks there. The hall was a center of Milwaukee German tradition; the last time I passed by, it had become a storefront church. The Swabians are still belting out the tunes, though.

IT'S A HARD-KNOCK LIFE.

Sons will converse with their fathers about life and work, and sometimes that makes its way into a family reunion booklet or genealogical research for the county historical society. If your name is Robert H. Gollmar, and your father is Fred C. Gollmar, you can claim My Father Owned a Circus, and supplement your income selling a few books, and the impresario of the 1:48 actual size Karlson Brothers Circus will ultimately write Book Review N^o. 30 about it.

The Gollmar brothers, cousins to the more famous Ringling Brothers, founded a wagon show in 1891, converted to a railroad show in 1903, sold the business in 1916, and subsequently leased the name to the American Circus Corporation, operator of the Hagenbeck-Wallace railroad show.

Hagenbeck-Wallace poster,
courtesy Circus Posters in the Princeton University Library.

The book combines recollections of storms, train wrecks, accidents, corrupt public officials, and rumbles with hostile townies, referred to in circus lore as "Hey Rubes". There are some rosters of personnel, travel schedules, and playbills. It may not be the best book to recommend to somebody newly interested in the traditional railroad circus, as it's insider conversation, and Gollmar pere's recollections are supplemented with those of other circus personnel, who sometimes repeat stories told elsewhere. Tom Mix, Buck Jones, and Mamie Ward make appearances.

Somebody looking for additional background on what the railroad circus did and how it did it might also profitably read Joe McKennon's Logistics of the American Circus, which explains each department of the circus and the pecking order within the company. Keep in mind that the public zoological garden is a relatively new institution, and for many years the circus provided education in the form of exotic animals, with a menagerie tent set up between the main entrance and the side show, and lions or tigers along didn't necessarily mean a big cat act. But without the thundering herd of pachyderms, it's not a circus.

The Amazon listing for My Father Owned a Circus offers a few copies at collector prices. I'd best treat my copy, which came from a library de-accessioning sale a few years ago, as an asset.

(Cross-posted to 50 Book Challenge.)

BETTER PAY AND BETTER WORKING CONDITIONS. The Milwaukee Public Schools are trying to steer strong teachers to weak schools. Joanne Jacobs isn't optimistic.

Milwaukee Public Schools hope to develop incentives to improve teaching in low-performing schools, but the focus is on rewarding all teachers in a school instead of singling out exceptional teachers.

That sounds like the variant of the prisoners' dilemma labor economists call the 1/n problem, and it's an inducement for people to shirk. It's almost certainly the wrong approach in the most difficult schools.

There isn’t enough money in the world — certainly not in school district budgets — to get talented people to bang their heads against a brick wall every day.

There is, however, another concept in labor economics called the compensating differential. Owen Robinson of Boots and Sabers got it, four years ago.

The schools dominated by poverty are also generally the crappiest schools to work in. They are generally in bad neighborhoods where crime is an every day issue. Also, the kids generally have less support for education outside of school, so the kids are less enthusiastic about learning and are more likely to have behavioral issues. Did I put that gently enough? To sum it up, it sucks to work in most of these schools.

Not surprisingly, teachers who discover better pay and better working conditions elsewhere, go elsewhere. But neither the Journal-Sentinel reporter, nor the Milwaukee Public Schools, get it.

Most business leaders put the most capable employees in the most demanding situations.

True, up to a point. I call it punishing people for being cooperative, and I sometimes suspect that it's a thinly disguised theft of personal time by less responsible employees that's enabled by management. But in the private sector, there's also a labor market, and a worker who details all the extra time and then has a raise request rebuffed, or is passed over for a promotion, is a worker soon to be circulating a resume.

The same dynamic is at work in the schools, but reporters and school administrators continue to be surprised by it.

But it's also a very tough request, because, in general, that isn't the way it works in education, where quality flows uphill, away from the lowest-performing schools and students. As teachers build up experience, seniority and, experts generally say, competence, they head for higher-performing kids, higher-performing schools and, frequently, the suburbs.

It is not from the benevolence of the teacher that we expect the three Rs, but from their regard to their own interest, right, Adam Smith?

IN MEMORIAM. Northern Illinois library cataloguer and music historian William Studwell crossed the final summit in August. Before his death, he provided the 25th entry in the annual Christmas Carol of the Year. We Wish You a Merry Christmas has been in the repertoire for about 425 years.

“It is a natural last piece for focus, since it is frequently the final piece in carol performances sessions,” he said of the song, which was created 400 to 425 years ago, most likely in the West Country of England.

Is the recipe for figgy pudding that old?

The complete list includes Adeste Fideles and Stille Nacht, as well as a few favorites of a less religious nature.

AWAITING THE ELVIS SIGHTINGS. The rebuilt Zippin' Pippin is taking shape on the shores of Green Bay.

26 November 2010.

The Green Bay Press-Gazette reports a cost overrun.

City officials say the construction project now is expected to cost $3.5 million, up from the original $3 million estimate.

[Green Bay mayor Jim] Schmitt said $300,000 in city reserves have been tapped, and he believes private donations will cover the rest of the deficit.

"We're still confident that we're going to have more revenues from other sources," he said.

The Zippin Pippin, under construction at Bay Beach Amusement Park, originally was planned to be covered by $2.4 million in city borrowing and $600,000 in expected donations.

On Tuesday, Schmitt said the original $3 million project budget was based on an early estimate that the foundation would cost about $200,000. That estimate was later discarded in favor of a more realistic $600,000 estimate, but it remained part of the project budget, resulting in the $300,000 in cost overruns.

Trains going around in circles, and a cost overrun. The incoming governor of Wisconsin must be informed of this boondoggle immediately.

NOT SO EASY TO DISMISS CRITICISM FROM WITHIN. Richard Vedder surveys recent literature.

Books criticizing higher education are not new, but recently both the number of them and the intensity of criticism has been increasing, and a large portion of them are “inside jobs,” written by people who are intimately involved on a regular basis with the academy and the world of ideas.

Consider Jackson Toby’s The Lowering of Higher Education in America, or Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus’s Higher Education: How Colleges are Wasting our Money and Failing Our Kids, Mark Bauerlein’s The Dumbest Generation, or Craig Brandon’s The Five Year Party: How Colleges Have Given Up on Educating Your Child and What You Can Do About It. All have been written in the last year or so, and this list is not exhaustive.

More are coming: I cannot wait to read Naomi Riley’s The Faculty Lounges…And Other Reasons That You Won’t Get the College Education You Pay For, forthcoming from Rowman and Littlefield. Moreover, other books are scathing about specific areas of the academy, notably intercollegiate athletics, with Kenneth Armstrong and Nick Perry’s Scoreboard, Baby: A Story of College Football, Crime and Complicity, or Mark Yost’s Varsity Green: A Behind the Scenes Look at Culture and Corruption in College Athletics, being but two good examples (I am indebted to the extraordinary Frank Splitt for bringing some of these works to my attention).

All of these books have come out, roughly, within a year. Two have provocative words like “crime” or corruption” in their titles, yet the authors are by and large a group of rather respected persons, one a distinguished English scholar at a major research university, for example; at least two of the books were published by university presses, including Stanford.

I don’t know if writings like this are a leading indicator of a forthcoming firestorm of public protest about higher education, but it is not a good sign. Economists like myself think at the margin. In this context, the storm of protest will manifest itself in real action only when the marginal benefits of complaining become so great that they exceed the marginal costs of engaging in protests.

Perhaps, when sufficiently many people realize the costs of losing the good of the intellect.

MARKING OFF. Happy Thanksgiving. (If the Wall Street Journal runs the same piece the Wednesday in advance of each Thanksgiving, why not I?)

I give thanks for your readership and your comments.

Spare a few moments thanks for the young people in harm's way around the world, for the people in emergency services who deserve to sit down to the turkey without the alarm ringing, for the people in transportation, tourism, and entertainment passing on their family gatherings to enhance yours.

Yes, that includes the people with the blue gloves at the security checkpoints, if you're headed someplace a train isn't going.

PUSH POLLING. A majority of Wisconsin residents surveyed by the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute opposed spending money on extending the Hiawatha to Madison and making it faster. The question given to respondents asked them to react to incomplete information.

“Please tell me which of the following arguments comes closest to your point of view.

“Supporters of the passenger rail project say that it is an important addition to the transportation system in Wisconsin and is being paid for by 800 million dollars in federal money. They also say that the project will create jobs and that if Wisconsin does not go forward with the project, the money will be redirected to other states.

“Opponents of the project say that what we need is better roads and that the federal money for the train will not cover the inevitable cost over runs. They also say that the project will only create a handful of permanent jobs and that the train would not have enough ridership to pay for its annual operating costs.”

Supporters also note that improvements to the roads will require more state money and provide no reduction in trip times.

Opponents fail to tell you that the state will have to pay for plowing, salting, and patching the roads.

WHY DETENTE BEST DESCRIBES THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE ECONOMICS DEPARTMENT AND THE ADMINISTRATORS. Cal State Northridge's Shirley Svorney (via Minding the Campus) mentions the emperor's nakedness.

[L]ow fees attract some students to higher education who simply aren't suited to the academic rigors of a university. Ultimately, the presence of these lower-achieving students hurts those who are more academically inclined, as they end up in watered-down courses in which professors have to focus on bringing the low achievers along.

Who said professors have to focus on bringing the low achievers along? Perhaps there's the opportunity to develop an export industry.

As Philadelphia Federal Reserve economist Tim Schiller has documented, the number of degrees awarded in a state doesn't even ensure a highly educated workforce. As he wrote, "Merely producing college graduates in a state does not guarantee that they will remain there." Businesses and labor are mobile. Unless more jobs are created in the state, some of the students California has paid to educate will probably move out of state to find jobs.

So put together the kind of intellectual experience ambitious students from other states will pay for, and charge them full fare. But, as Professor Svorney notes, that's different from enabling slacker behavior.

SUMMARIZE IN ONE SENTENCE. George Will.

The average American has regular contact with the federal government at three points — the IRS, the post office and the TSA. Start with that fact if you are formulating a unified field theory to explain the public’s current political mood.

It is no accident, comrades, that "Don't Touch My Junk" goes so well with the Gadsden Militia flag.

WORK THIS INTO THE BRANDING INITIATIVE. Three of the top five Anti-Party Schools (via Newmark's Door) are in our back yard. None of them have a bowl-bound football team. One of them has a very highly regarded economics department.

A MODEST WINNING STREAK. The Northern Illinois women's basketball team followed up its win over George Washington in Minneapolis with a win at Western Illinois, where they managed to maintain a ten-to-twelve point lead most of the second half, and a trip to Carbondale where a five point lead dwindled to four to three to two to tied to Southern ahead by two with 1.8 seconds to play.

The kids were so excited when that shot went in that I was almost able to hear them screaming without benefit of the radio.

KEEPING UP IN KNUTE ROCKNE'S BACKYARD.

College football might have been invented by the Ivies, but it was perfected in the Great Lakes, with Notre Dame developing enough of a following to be able to call the National Collegiate Athletic Association a conspiracy in restraint of trade, and going its own way with television contracts; and with Sid Luckman and Amos Alonzo Stagg making the University of Chicago so dominant that beating them inspired one Big Ten fight song (the oh-so-trite "Hail to the Victors") and provided an objective in another ("Run the ball around Chicago", which later became "Run the ball 'round Minnesota", and subsequently morphed into the Wisconsin game plan, "Run the ball on down the field"); that is until Robert Maynard Hutchins decided that building bombs below the grandstands was a better use of resources than throwing bombs in view of the grandstand.

The quintessence of college football is the Big Ten, with each program holding a rich tradition.

Then there's the Big Ten's hardscrabble neighbor, the Mid-American Conference. The big Midwestern industrial states once had the resources, population base, and committment to provide lots of capacity for higher education, and a number of directional teachers colleges became directional universities, with several such universities in Ohio and Michigan particularly becoming the Mid-American.

Unlike the Big Ten, the Mid-American is a major money suck for member institutions.

[I]n the Big 10 only 0.16% of university budgets go to subsidize athletics. Yet, in the poorer Mid American Conference (MAC), subsidies make up over 5% of the schools' overall budgets (see this [College Affordability] study for more on the regressive athletics tax). At some schools this percentage is even larger. For example 10.5% of total core expenditures at SUNY Buffalo go to subsidize athletics. At another MAC school, Eastern Michigan, the figure is 7.9%.

Among the Mid-American universities, students pick up some of the tab, in exchange for prepaid admission to games, a benefit few avail themselves of.

However, even many FBS schools charge high student fees to subsidize sports. Here are a few examples:
Ohio University $765
University of Virginia $657
Bowling Green State University $650
SUNY Buffalo $474
University of Northern Illinois [c.q.] $453
Over the course of their 4+ years in college, students at many schools will have paid thousands of dollars to prop-up unprofitable athletics programs, regardless of their personal interest in sports.

Virginia is not a Mid-American program; Ohio will play Northern Illinois in the Mid-American title game, which will be played December 3 in Detroit. (First prize, a weekend in Detroit. Second prize, a week in Detroit).

And Akron recently borrowed for a new stadium that doesn't do much to draw audiences for a rebuilding football team.

UA Athletic Director Tom Wistrcill said he is disappointed InfoCision Stadium hasn't drawn as expected. But it's easy for fans to become dispirited when the team loses soundly and often.
''You only have 12 [game] days,'' he said. ''You work 365 days a year for 12 days. That's six home games. It's a cruel sport that way.''

Let's see if I understand this: the football coach draws a larger salary for working five hours on 12 days, and the professors, who draw a smaller salary for teaching four classes, are taking the stick.

And, as much as I'm enjoying the current Northern Illinois football season, and, having experienced a BCS run and a campus shooting, I much prefer the BCS run, apparently the football visibility is not the enrollment bonanza some observers would expect. I've learned more about the rationale for the branding initiative: apparently we're losing students to other institutions that don't offer Division I football.

THE SHAPE OF THE WORLD TO COME. Paul Krugman is fretful.

Former Senator Alan Simpson is a Very Serious Person. He must be - after all, President Obama appointed him as co-chairman of a special commission on deficit reduction.

So here's what the very serious Mr. Simpson said on Friday: "I can't wait for the blood bath in April. ... When debt limit time comes, they're going to look around and say, ‘What in the hell do we do now? We've got guys who will not approve the debt limit extension unless we give 'em a piece of meat, real meat,' " meaning spending cuts. "And boy, the blood bath will be extraordinary," he continued.

Think of Mr. Simpson's blood lust as one more piece of evidence that our nation is in much worse shape, much closer to a political breakdown, than most people realize.

In his mind, it's a disastrous transformation in the making.

The fact is that one of our two great political parties has made it clear that it has no interest in making America governable, unless it's doing the governing. And that party now controls one house of Congress, which means that the country will not, in fact, be governable without that party's cooperation - cooperation that won't be forthcoming.

A post from a military wife at Stop Shouting, one that has received a lot of play on the right side of the blogosphere, sees the lack of cooperation as long overdue.

Your side knows you can not prevail on the battlefield of open and honest ideas, so you retreat behind the fortification of expanded regulation, unelected czars who rule by decree and diktat, and a boy-king who is being urged by the janissaries to complete the transformation to a totalarian state by executive orders.

Except, that to emplace your policies and “vision” requires the consent of the people. You can not hire enough guards, build enough prisons, operate enough courts to entrap and control the whole population of these (for-now) united states. It only takes a small percentage of dissenters, non-conformists and cascading acts of strategic civil disobedience to bring your entire command-and-control crashing all around you.

National Opt-Out Day is a potential recruitment bonanza for opposition to the technocrats.

Everyday work folk, alarmed at the rising tide of tyranny and the rhetoric of hate, weary of the false accusations and the lies, joined the libertarian and conservatives and forged an underground resistance. The town halls in that raucous summer were not an aberration – they are the new norm. Get used to it.

And prepare for the long haul.

Yes, we will burn down the house of Progressive Democrats and lay waste to the entire construct of the welfare state. It will be a long, decades-long battle, but we will prevail because we learned the consequences of not teaching our young ourselves. We delegated that to you, and that was our first mistake. We assumed you were honest brokers, but now we know better.

The post concludes: Fix bayonets. Professor Krugman may not have the last word, but he might have uttered the deep word.

It's hard to see how this situation is resolved without a major crisis of some kind. Mr. Simpson may or may not get the blood bath he craves this April, but there will be blood sooner or later. And we can only hope that the nation that emerges from that blood bath is still one we recognize.

It is, unfortunately, the nature of fourth turnings that an unsustainable social order dies, and a new one is born, sometimes messily.

THE CURRENT STANDARD OF UNDERACHIEVEMENT. In the National Football League, it's losing to the Packers.

Three weeks ago, the Packers wiped their feet on Dallas, 45-7. Despite weekly assurances that owner Jerry Jones wasn't the kind of person to can a coaches midseason, that's exactly what he did. Less than 24 hours after the Cowboys staggered off Lambeau Field, coach [Wade] Phillips was fired.

Then the Packers had a bye and jobs were safe for a week.

On Sunday, Green Bay marched into the unfriendly Metrodome in Minneapolis and manhandled the Minnesota Vikings, 31-3.

Less than 24 hours later ...

Three years removed from the Packers but just 10 months after the NFC Championship Game, quarterback Brett Favre looked mentally spent. Yet his dejected look paled in comparison to [coach Brad] Childress' ashen face as the crowd chanted, "Fire Childress!" before it deserted the stadium.

Again, despite reports just a week ago that Childress' job was safe, the Vikings (3-7) announced Monday that Childress was fired.

Boo-Hoooooo!

BOO-HOOOOO! Ryan Longwell might have scored the first points; thereafter it was all Packers. Vikings mathematically eliminated ... put that in your vuvuzela and toot it. Boo-hooooo! Radio reporting the combined score for the past three Packer wins is 85-10. (Indiana put up 20 against Wisconsin in one game, and held Wisconsin to 83.)

PROFSCAM AFTER TWENTY YEARS.

Charlie Sykes's denunciation of coreless curricula, pointless research, and excess access was among the opening shots in the twenty years war on, and in, higher education. At the time, Mr Sykes was in recovery from an early liberalism, and Higher Education could shrug off some of his observations, much as the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers could shrug off the Association of American Railroads lobbying for repeal of the full crew laws.

Now comes Andrew Hacker, a professor at Queens College of CUNY, public intellectual, regular reviewer in The New York Review of Books; and Claudia Dreifus, with Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs, "Science Times" columnist for The New York Times, collaborating on Higher Education? How Colleges are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids -- And What We Can Do About It. Short form of Book Review N^o. 29: the Academic Establishment will have a harder time shrugging off a criticism from within, even if, as Peter Sacks (who also reviewed The Five-Year Party) notes,

[T]oo many chapters that regurgitate the many well-worn complaints about higher education: Students are subjected to uncaring and unsupportive professors -- if they are taught by full-time faculty members at all, since most college instructors are part-timers, adjuncts and graduate students; professors themselves are overpaid, underworked, and preoccupied with the "virus" of research that is consuming colleges of all stripes; and colleges have become simply too expensive relative to the diminishing value that institutions actually provide students.

Perhaps so.

ABANDON HOPE, ALL YE WHO ENTER HERE. Via Joanne Jacobs, The Nine Circles of High School Hell.

Losing the good of the intellect comes early.

TIME TO ROLL BACK THE STATE. A Wisconsin Policy Research Institute survey finds a narrow majority of Wisconsin residents opposing the extension of Hiawatha service to Madison.

Service would start at a top speed of 79 mph in 2013, rising to 110 mph by 2015, and eventually could be extended to the Twin Cities, as part of a larger Midwestern network of fast, frequent trains.

The project wasn't sold well to Wisconsin residents, and there are cheaper ways to obtain 110 mph trains, most of which involve repeal of excessively restrictive safety standards.

Perhaps there's an opportunity for Passenger Rail advocates and the highway lobby to make common cause in restoring the transportation policies of the Eisenhower era.

Toll roads also have been a controversial transportation issue, although they played a much smaller role in the gubernatorial campaign.

Supporters of charging tolls voice concerns that the gas tax and vehicle fee revenue will be inadequate to pay the growing costs of rebuilding and repairing the state's aging highways. But toll road proposals have rarely survived long, beaten back by voters who despise the idea of paying to drive and who particularly dislike the Illinois tollways.

The alternative being mooted is worse.

Federal law prohibits charging tolls on existing interstate highway lanes but allows tolls on newly added lanes. Regional planners have recommended expanding most Milwaukee-area freeways from six to eight lanes when they are rebuilt.

That was not President Eisenhower's original intent. The first proposals for the Interstates envisioned turnpikes beginning outside city limits. Freeways pushed through the middle of cities came later. High-occupancy toll lanes have some redeeming features, but they're administratively more costly than open road tolling.

Perhaps there is an opportunity for the highway backers to make some of their projects self-financing, by working with the railroad backers to restore the train speeds of the late 1940s.

THE VERY MODEL OF THE ONLINE SUBPRIME PARTY SCHOOL? According to University Diaries, that's the University of Central Florida.

A zillion students attend UCF – lots of them take online courses, where the cheating (and dropout) rates are sky-high; lots of them take massively over-populated classroom courses, complete with PowerPoint, clickers, laptops, dimmed lights, high absenteeism, security cameras, and total pointlessness. When you experience university as a series of variously degrading, intrusive, and stupid experiences, you don’t respect your school, and you don’t feel inclined to act toward it with much integrity, since it doesn’t seem to be acting all that well in regard to you.

A New York Times report on methods to maintain academic integrity concludes with an anecdote that might suggest "degrading, intrusive, and stupid" cuts two ways.

As for Central Florida’s testing center, one of its most recent cheating cases had nothing to do with the Internet, cellphones or anything tech. A heavily tattooed student was found with notes written on his arm. He had blended them into his body art.

Here you sit with your transcript full of As and your body covered with ink, and here I sit in my power suit. Tell me what's stronger.

The University Diaries recommendation is unlikely to please Central Florida's management.

UCF is a failed enterprise. It has too many students, and professors can’t handle it. Pretty much everything it does reflects badly on the American university. It should shut its physical campus and enter fully into online oblivion.

That way, there would be no physical classes to cancel in the event of a weekday football game.

It's more likely, however, that Central Florida is a harbinger of things to come. The editors at the Northern Star endorsed class cancellations for Tuesday Night Football. Headquarters is either made of sterner stuff or preoccupied: classes met as usual all day, and some of the parking lots that are sometimes cleared for football were left to their usually assigned purposes.

I wonder if they'd be as quick to endorse Central Florida's staffing decisions. Their total enrollment is twice Northern Illinois's. Their economics department offers degrees up to the Ph.D. Their economics faculty have a few more people than we do but note: no assistant professors there. Good luck grooming department chairmen or possible deans or directors of graduate studies in 15 years.