FREQUENCY MATTERS.

In the early days of Amtrak, travelers in the Chicago - Twin Cities corridor had a choice of two trains a day each way.  That was a step backwards from the frequencies offered as late as 1968,  but plenitude compared to today's schedule, in which one additional coach east of the Cities riding on the Empire Builder is the only recognition of the corridor.  Despite the political turmoil in Illinois and Wisconsin and the tight budgets everywhere, improvements to the service might be forthcoming.

Wisconsin, Minnesota and Amtrak officials have started talks that could lead to expanding the current passenger train service between Chicago, Milwaukee and Minneapolis-St. Paul.

The two states are working with Amtrak to launch a feasibility study of adding a second daily round trip on the Chicago-to-Twin Cities leg of the national passenger railroad's long-distance Empire Builder line, officials say.

At the same time, a separate Minnesota-led study is advocating a more ambitious - and more controversial - long-range goal: upgrading the same segment to high-speed rail along the current route, bypassing Madison and Eau Claire, disappointing rail backers in both cities.

The current route remained profitable until Interstate 94 was finished in the late 1960s, while through service via Madison and Eau Claire ended in 1963, and the tracks have been removed on both sides of Madison.  Some things don't change.

After comparing more than two dozen possible routes, it concluded the current route - through Columbus, Portage, Tomah and La Crosse - was the best choice, based on cost, geography, projected travel time and population served, [Minnesota passenger rail planning director Praveena] Pidaparthi said.

With Congress balking at new high-speed rail appropriations, Minnesota officials thought it made more sense to improve the current route gradually instead of seeking a major investment in a new route, Pidaparthi said.

Just upgrading the current route would cost $2.4 billion, with track maintenance costs of $10.3 million a year, the study found. Those figures don't include the costs of buying and operating trains or of building or upgrading stations, issues that will be covered in a follow-up study, Pidaparthi said.

High-speed rail advocates disputed the findings.

"Major cities should be within three hours of each other," said Rick Harnish, executive director of the Midwest High-Speed Rail Association. On the selected route, it would take 4 hours 35 minutes to travel from Milwaukee to Minneapolis-St. Paul at 110 mph, and sharp curves on the Minnesota segment along the Mississippi River would prevent an eventual upgrade to 220-mph service, he said.

Regular readers know about the limitations of geography in the Mississippi River valley, and in the driftless area of Wisconsin, as well as the speed potential through the Sand Country and south of Milwaukee.

Faster running times are desirable.  Frequency, however, is more desirable, in order that people have some flexibility in making their trips, and more short-distance trips by rail make sense.  The article doesn't say anything about food service or proper first-class accommodation.  I have some ideas, in case anyone asks.

SEEKING A GEORGE ORWELL FOR CHINA.

In The Road to Wigan Pier, George Orwell describes the condition of Depression-era coal miners in Britain.  A recent documentary suggests working conditions in contemporary China are no better.

In [journalist Yuanchen] Liu's film, the miners venture underground without protective masks. China's mines suffer from inadequate ventilation systems, and Liu told me that dangerous coal dust sparkles like fireflies in the light from the miner's helmets. They use old fashioned pick axes instead of jackhammers, and crouch or lie down in three foot high side tunnels for hours at a stretch, hacking away at the rock faces.

The central government does not lack safety regulations on the books. In practice, however, these rules are often ignored in the rush to get more coal out of the ground.

Columnist Richard Schiffman describes the lot of the miners as "paying in blood for China's economic miracle."  It's possible that there is no Chinese economic miracle, only an increasingly unsustainable mirage, in which case the lot of the miners is the lot of working people in poor countries more generally.

THEY ARE BEGINNING TO CATCH ON.

Self-esteem is the consequence of accomplishment following effort.

A growing body of research over three decades shows that easy, unearned praise does not help students but instead interferes with significant learning opportunities. As schools ratchet up academic standards for all students, new buzzwords are “persistence,” “risk-taking” and “resilience” — each implying more sweat and strain than fuzzy, warm feelings.

“We used to think we could hand children self-esteem on a platter,” Stanford University psychologist Carol Dweck said. “That has backfired.”

Dweck’s studies, embraced in Montgomery [county, Maryland] schools and elsewhere, have found that praising children for intelligence — “You’re so clever!” — also backfires. In study after study, children rewarded for being smart become more likely to shy away from hard assignments that might tarnish their star reputations.

But children praised for trying hard or taking risks tend to enjoy challenges and find greater success. Children also perform better in the long term when they believe that their intellect is not a birthright but something that grows and develops as they learn new things.

Nice to see some new neurons firing in the minds of educational psychologists. Also nice to learn that my resistance to the Zeitgeist is not misguided.

PROTOTYPE LEARNING SPACES?

Cole Hall will reopen for classes on Tuesday.

With the renovation came the new Jameson Auditorium, a “Collaboratory” classroom and new features for the NIU Anthropology Museum.

The Collaboratory classroom includes separate learning pods that seat eight students each. The pods also have 65-inch high definition digital touch screens. Professors can use a larger screen at the front of the classroom that allows them to project and alter images from each pod.

The Jameson Auditorium has 351 pivoting chairs that allow students to participate in large lectures or small groups. High-definition TV monitors are also available for students who sit in the furthest rows of the auditorium.

The Anthropology Museum includes moveable walls, low-iron glass display cases, a 10-foot glass display case in the museum’s exterior wall and humidity and temperature controls to help preserve the museum’s 12,000 artifacts.

The article does not mention whether the Anime Association will regain the use of the workroom they once maintained in the basement.

ASSET REALLOCATION IMPLIES ASSETS GET REALLOCATED.

David (Spengler) Goldman offers the case for corporate raiders.

Want to see what America would look like without private equity? Move to Detroit and contemplate the ruins of a city ruined by the placid conformity of auto industry executives. The  economic impact of the corporate takeover business can’t be measured by the outcome of takeovers as such. Private equity transformed the way American business thought about the world. If managers did a lousy job, outside investors could raise money (a lot of it from trade union pension funds as well as university endowments) and kick them out.

In much of the Rust Belt, the conservative, cash-rich legacy corporations provided a target for outside investors.  Automobile manufacturing might be a special case, but many of the most spectacular conglomerates (until the day they crashed and burned from excess diversification and too many reality checks) came into being as a way of transferring assets out of railroads or steel or textiles or tobacco companies.  There might have been some oligopoly inefficiencies and complacent management practices to wring out, but Mr Goldman's assertion that the resulting lean and efficient corporations are unequivocally for the good is excessive.  One fad gives way to another, while the large companies hive off the institutional memory that might have prevented some of their recent difficulties.

BLANK-OUT.

I've always understood that the Welfare State exists inter alia because private charities are insufficiently liquid or inclusive enough to do the job.  In Greece, however, as the Welfare State runs out of resources, the church is being asked to pick up the burden.

[Ark of the World youth] Centre founder Fr Antonios Papanikolaou told the Mirror: 'Over the last year we've had hundreds of parents who want to leave their children with us. They know us and trust us.

'They say they do not have any money or shelter or food for their kids, so they hope we might be able to provide them with what they need.'

The next paragraph, however, conflates two errors of economic policy.

Further evidence of Greeks feeling the pinch of austerity measures is the lack of aspirin and other medicines now available in the country.

Pharmacists are struggling to stock their shelves as the Greek government, which sets the prices for drugs, keeps them artificially low.

This means that firms are turning to sell the drugs outside of the country for a higher price - leading to stock depletion for Greeks.

Mina Mavrou, who runs one of the country's 12,000 pharmacies, said she spent hours each day pleading with drug makers, wholesalers and colleagues to hunt down medicines for clients.

And she said that even when drugs were available, pharmacists often must foot the bill up front, or patients simply do without.

There's probably some Affordable Care Provision that limits the price a store can post for a bottle of aspirin, and it's an elementary supply-and-demand exercise to illustrate that when the price is below the equilibrium price, excess demand will follow, and suppliers will look for opportunities to obtain a higher price, even if that means evading export controls.  It has nothing to do with austerity.

WILL THE NEW HIRES RESPOND TO THE INCENTIVES?

The Washington Monthly College Guide follows the recruiting habits of the universities further down the food chain.

It looks like, in many ways, however, it’s a great time to be on the hiring committees at some lower-tier schools, who can now take advantage of the economy to attract some rather prestigious junior faculty.

In many cases, these hires are for contingent, non-tenure-track positions, which will preclude many of those hired from participating in departmental, college, and university policy-makings.  The article concludes with the suggestion that universities look, again, at whether their graduate programs are producing excessively many students.

It's also difficult to predict how the presence of Ph.D.s from higher up the food chain will affect policy at those universities, once a few of them make tenure.  Will they argue for raising the academic profile of their department (a good idea at the undergraduate level, possibly futile in some of the graduate disciplines)?  Or will they go along with the we're-not-as-good-as-Ann Arbor (substitute any other flagship) and-there's-no-reason-to-work harder?

TOO MANY MISTAKES.

Packers will begin their next season at the home of the yet-to-be-determined league champion.  Lose as many fumbles in one playoff game as in sixteen regular season games, and home field just gets you booed.

BARACK HUSSEIN OBAMA, NEOCONSERVATIVE.

The most vocal critics of Our President might not be the contenders for the Republican nomination.  Book Review N^o. 2 suggests that a different dissenting point of view is available in Chris Hedges's Death of the Liberal Class.   The reader must understand, however, that Liberal Class is not about Daniel Patrick Moynihan or Hillary Clinton or Rachel Maddow.  Oh, no, no, no.  Turn to page 122.  The New Left of the 1960s, and French poststructuralism are "political sterility" and a "charade of protest."  (On the right, calling these things a lot of wordnoise, or primeval nostalgia, is good enough.)  Just having a bad day, or perhaps an expensive cup of coffee during thinking time?  Not at all.  The message is one in which the policy impulses of the Social Gospel and the era of muckrakers is crowded out by bipartisanship and the corporate media, with a few "fascist" characterizations thrown in for good measure.  Go forward by going backwards, as this call to action at page 156 suggests.

The best opportunities for radical social change exist among the poor, the homeless, the working class, and the destitute.  As the numbers of disenfranchised dramatically increase, our only hope is to connect ourselves with the daily injustices visited upon the weak and the outcast.  Out of this contact we can resurrect, from the ground up, a social ethic, a new movement. We must hand out bowls of soup.  Coax the homeless into a shower.  Make sure those who are mentally ill, cruelly abandoned on city sidewalks, take their medication.  We must go back into America's segregated schools and prisons.  We must protest, learn to live simply and begin, in an age of material and imperial decline, to speak with a new humility.  It is in the tangible, mundane, and difficult work of forming groups and communities to care for others that we will kindle the outrage and the moral vision to fight back, that we will articulate an alternative.

Set the Wayback Machine to 1848 and start over.  The book was written before the Occupy protesters hit the street.  Plenty of outrage, but not much by way of humility there.  Other recommendations in a similar vein might be, with modifications only to the politics, useful for survivalists seeking to withdraw from a society in collapse because of too much preference for the weak and the outcast.

What about Our President?  That's page 199.

Obama had almost no experience besides two years in the Senate, where his voting record was a dismal capitulation to corporate power.  But, once again, the electronic hallucinations that assault us rendered most voters incapable of thought and response.  The superficial, the trivial, and the sensational mask our deep cultural, economic, political, and environmental disintegration as well as the newest political diversion approved by the corporate state.  We remain hypnotized by flickering images we mistake for reality.

The academic Left likes its false consciousness.  Rush Limbaugh likes to denounce slick marketing and packaging.  You're more likely to hear sniping from the Right about Senator Obama voting present.

Ultimately, though, Mr Hedges gives the impression that it's harder for Nation scribblers to get an audience than it used to be, that is, unless you're dorky-looking enough for MSNBC.  See page 209.

Journalists, once able to sell articles to publications overseas, now see their work flash around the globe without hope of compensation.  We are starving our professional critics and artists. We are turning culture and art over to part-time amateurs.

He continues, trying to have it both ways.  On one hand, he writes of "idiotic distractions that draw huge number of You Tube hits or public-relations created propaganda."  With no shame at all, he follows with, "And any work that cannot gain corporate sponsorship or attract advertising dollars will be ignored."  Next comes a gripe about the weakening of intellectual property rights and the destructive effects of what he calls "digital collectivism."

Perhaps boring institutions such as well-defined rules of ownership and contract, and division of labor, have more potential for improving the lives of people than all the voluntary communities of protest can ever do.

(Cross-posted to 50 Book Challenge.)

SPOT THE ENTITLEMENT.

An Inside Higher Ed post documents some recent Occupy Wall Street protests inside Wall Street job fairs at Ivy League universities.  That's fairly standard stuff.  What intrigues is the restricted sense in which the column uses the expression "entitled".

“There’s a sense among students who easily could feel entitled that they have a responsibility to society, as leaders, to improve that society, and that right now for many people that society doesn’t seem to be working,” [Harvard professor of leadership development Rakesh] Khurana said, adding that the number of students interested in solving the world’s problems – environmental, economic, social – is “amazing.”  “I think what we have to do as an institution is to make it easier for students to see the path by which they can do that. We haven’t created, in many ways, the clarity of the career paths in which you get to go do those things.”

There's one sense of entitlement, in which one gets good grades in high school in order to secure admission to Harvard, and gets good grades there in order to hire out with a trading house, or to secure admission to the right business or law program, in order to rack up the big bucks.

There's another sense of entitlement, in which one gets good grades in high school in order to secure admission to Harvard, and gets good grades there in order to go into "public service," perhaps after that stint in law school, in order to spend the taxpayers' money more sensibly than the taxpayers could on their own.

That a Harvard professor is noting a lack of clarity of the career paths might suggest that all of higher education's egalitarian posturing is for nought.

THE UNREPRESENTATIVE REPUBLIC.

The DeKalb Chronicle opens up a can on the Illinois Tollway Authority, going so far as to allude to taxation without representation.

The Tollway board now has three members from Chicago, whose city limits barely touch one toll road near O’Hare International Airport. They are chairwoman Paula Wolff, James Banks and James Sweeney.

Five members live in the suburbs: David Gonzalez of Chicago Heights, Jeffrey Redick of Elmhurst, Mark Peterson of Lincolnshire, Terrence D’Arcy of Shorewood and Tom Weisner of Aurora.

The only non-Chicago, nonsuburban board member is Carl Towns of Rockford.

The editorial calls for board members who live in counties adjacent to the toll roads.  Whether that would have led to the authority being closed down once the original tollway bonds were paid off, as the statutes creating the authority envisioned, or whether such a board would increase tolls in a different way to pay for a different set of pet projects the editorial does not say.

POLITICAL COMMENTARY DISGUISED AS AN ACTION THRILLER.

The first entry in this year's Fifty Book Challenge will be Tom Clancy's Locked On.  I read it rather quickly, and it has a lot of the usual characters going after the usual suspects, with some of the usual antagonists.  Maybe I should call it a work "in the school of Tom Clancy," as one Mark Greaney is stealthily listed as a coauthor.  Maybe I'm getting jaded with the genre, or maybe the electoral tussle between Jack Ryan, seeking to be the first President since Grover Cleveland to serve non-concurrent terms, and a thinly disguised Edward Kennedy with the policy preferences of Barack Hussein Obama, right down to the Alinskyite allies who are more transparent in the book than in real life, is beginning to crowd out the plot and character development.

(Cross-posted to 50 Book Challenge.)

THE PROBLEM WITH CAPITALISM IS CAPITALISTS.

Ed Driscoll is assisting at Instapundit, and he points to an Irwin Stelzer essay in The Weekly Standard.  Shorter argument: pro-market policies are not the same thing as pro-business policies, and the Big Bankers are notoriously demonstrating their ignorance of that lesson.

Most surprising are the objections of leaders of the banking community to quite sensible reforms, their willingness to sacrifice long-term support for the market system to the desire for short-term profits. It is true, for example, that higher capital requirements for banks, requirements that “don’t go nearly far enough” according to John Cochrane, finance professor at the University of Chicago, will reduce their profits. That is so—but only because requiring banks to hold more capital reduces the risk of failure or the need for bailouts, risks that have until now been borne by taxpayers.

Also difficult to understand is their failure to comprehend that some practices, such as imposing retroactive increases in interest rates on bank credit cards, are deeply objectionable to consumers, even if technically justifiable. And their failure to realize that large bonuses at a time when 25 million Americans can’t find any or enough work are an excess they might want to forgo in the interests of maintaining support for the system that has been kind to them—including bailing them out when they hit the rocks. One investment bank warned its highflyers not to be seen in Porsche showrooms, so it’s not as if these bonus recipients are unaware that something potentially unpleasant is brewing out there in the world beyond their office towers.

Bankers are not alone in their failure to understand that something must be done to prevent the opposition to many features of the current system from creating an atmosphere that will support “reforms” so draconian that the resulting system will retain few of the virtues of the existing one. The corpocracy at times seems equally obtuse, as when its leaders call for repeal of the provisions of the Sarbanes-Oxley law that make it easier for shareholders to rid themselves of underperforming directors, and require that directors be truly independent, rather than chums of the CEO, especially when serving on compensation committees. The breaking of the link between performance and reward that results from friends-of-the-CEO boards of directors does as much to undermine capitalism’s claim to legitimacy as financiers’ obtuseness about their responsibility to act as if they are members of a society that extends beyond executive dining rooms and country clubs.

He offers an observation on the political economy of public policy.

I am not one who sees in the Occupiers the wave of the future. They are not the real worry to those of us who fear for the future of market capitalism in America. It is the failure of the major beneficiaries of the capitalist system to understand that openness to reform, combined with a bit of restraint when carving up the huge pie that capitalism is capable of producing, is the best way to head off those people who would alter market capitalism beyond recognition by imposing punitive taxes, onerous regulations, investment-distorting subsidies, along with a bloated government. Those folks are dangerous enough to America’s future prosperity without being handed the gift of obtuse opposition to needed change.

That is one approach. Be receptive, as well, to the possibility that business might go along with the regulatory state with a view toward capturing the agencies, particularly if those agencies suffer from cognitive hubris.

LET THE CARPING BEGIN.

"Others receiving votes" isn't enough for sportswriter Ryan Wood.

I was surprised NIU didn’t crack the top 25 when the final polls were released Tuesday. Of course, we know voters don’t watch many of the games, making results outside the nation’s top 15 teams flimsy – if they have any meaning at all. And the losses to Kansas and Central Michigan dampen the shine beaming from NIU’s accomplishments, notably the nation’s longest win streak and a title in a conference that was 4-1 this bowl season.

But No. 26 NIU was one of 16 teams in the country to win 11 games. None of the other 15 won their final nine games.

If this was a conversation about the nation’s top 20, NIU wouldn’t belong. But you can’t tell me BYU and Cincinnati – two teams that beat nobody, by the way – are better than NIU.

Whatever. Football offers great play value. Monday to Friday, come here to be an Excellent Student and stick around for the steel band or the Avalon Quartet.

HELLO, NEW READERS.

The Fifty Book Challenge, which started as a temporary community, has continued in operation and Live Journal highlighted it for 2011.  An encouraging cohort of new members has begun posting.

I've been playing along since 2005, and here is the final report for 2011.   I no longer feel any pressure to file fifty reports, so the roundup will stop at 36.  Lots of exciting football and some progress on the model railroad and the continued fruits of downsizing at work make for a tired weblogger some days.  The links for the final seven go to detailed reports at the Challenge.  Some books are particularly good (+), others particularly bad (-).

30. The Help, 15 October 2011 (+).
31. Trading Up: The New American Luxury, 16 October 2011 (-).
32. 11/22/63, 22 November 2011.
33. That Used to Be Us: How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can Come Back, 12 December 2011 (-).
34. American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America, 21 December 2011 (+).
35. The Time of Our Lives: A Conversation About America, 26 December 2011 (-).
36. America's Quarterback: Bart Starr and the Rise of the National Football League, 29 December 2011.

The third quarter report is available here, or at the Fifty Book Challenge, or on the European Tribune.

The second quarter report is available here, or at the Fifty Book Challenge, or on the European Tribune.

The first quarter report is available here, or at the Fifty Book Challenge, or on the European Tribune.

The new segments of the bookworm highlight the football season as perceived from here.

Ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo


There are more books stacked for review, and year eight of reports will commence shortly, although the fifty is more likely to be a nice-to-have than a must-do.  New members, don't be put off by my lethargy!

(Cross-posted to European Tribune and Fifty Book Challenge.)

BEFORE THE GERM THEORY OF DISEASE.

Voluntary Xchange contemplates the health benefits of beer, or tea.  The transition from being drunk to being wired matters.

People drank all day at that time because the water wasn’t safe to drink. They didn’t understand the mechanism, but there were clear medicinal reasons for a lot of beer and wine (remember that spirits were in their infancy at this point).

Yet, people had the technology to boil their water. The thing is, they didn’t recognize the advantages of this. There’s an unusual research project there for a Ph.D. student: why exactly wasn’t this discovered. Because what’s interesting is that they did learn to boil water to make a mild drug: coffee or tea. So it clearly took a little extra marginal benefit to convince people to drink hot liquids, but not too much.

It's significant, I suppose, that the legend of James Watt and the steam engine begins with the lid on a tea kettle, rather than on a beer fermenter.

THE FUNDAMENTAL CONTRADICTIONS OF TECHNOCRACY.

David Brooks meditates on the tendency of rent-seekers to capture government.

You would think that liberals would have a special incentive to root out rent-seeking. Yet this has not been a major priority. There is no Steve Jobs figure in American liberalism insisting that the designers keep government simple, elegant and user-friendly. Sailors scrub their ships. Farmers clear weeds. Democrats have not spent a lot of time scraping barnacles off the state.

Am I being churlish, or just old, to point out that deregulation in transportation and the utilities began in the Carter administration, with the support of Ralph Nader and Edward Kennedy, and the biggest cuts to the Amtrak network took place under President Carter's watch.  I know I'm old when Mr Brooks's call to "choose a rent-seeker to hold up for ridicule and renunciation" reminds me of Senator Proxmire's Golden Fleece Awards.

RUSH LIMBAUGH SAYS EXPORT FEMINISM.

It's his part-humorous, part-on-point suggestion for putting a stop to the economic successes of Asian countries, and it's probably deliberate to make the heads of some of his listeners explode.

Now comes Via Media with a variation on the same theme.

The rise of business schools in America led to greedy CEOs milking their companies for multimillion dollar benefit packages, to weird financial market transactions that took down some of the biggest names in American business, and to one destructive management fad after another that left dozens of American companies as hollowed out shells.  Business school grads also pioneered exotic new tax dodges that helped bulk up the federal deficit, to say nothing of the kind of corporate ruthlessness that hollowed out the US industrial base in record time.

With Asia now looking to follow this path, Americans can relax: Asia won’t be eating our lunch anytime soon.

The next step? We need to sell them on the need to build law schools.  Lots of them.

The accompanying comments include a suggestion that, as with anything else that seems promising, there are tradeoffs.

WHEN YOU COME FROM TROUBLE, TROUBLE COMES TO YOU.

The Sports Economist contemplates Chicago Bear and former Northern Illinois receiver Sam Hurd's method of supplementing his income.

Hurd earned $1.5 million playing for the Cowboys in 2009, so even after including other costs in the net income calculation, it’s almost certain that his take from dealing was more, maybe far more, lucrative than what he earned on the field.

Standard economics stuff, to be sure, where the expected return compensates for the risk borne.

On the other hand, the current investigation revisits the receiver's previous brushes with the law.

A review of court documents and police reports from around DeKalb County shows former Northern Illinois University football player Sam Hurd once pleaded guilty to battery and was evicted from a DeKalb apartment during his time at the school.

Hurd, 26, was arrested on federal drug charges in December while a member of the Chicago Bears. According to a criminal complaint, Hurd told an undercover agent he wanted to purchase 5-10 kilograms of cocaine and 1,000 pounds of marijuana per week to sell in the Chicago area.

Hurd played for NIU’s football team from 2002-05. Court documents show a civil case filed in 2006 against Hurd and former roommates Shatone Powers and Jasper Turner, all of which were evicted for failure to pay rent; the judgment amount has yet to be paid.

Past performance is no indicator and all that, but perhaps the history matters.

THE MID-MAJOR TITLE GAME.

Northern Illinois's football team gets it done the hard way.  The title belt even says so.

Northern Illinois University photograph, Day 3: Practice album.

Spot the other team thirteen points, have the starting quarterback hop off the field: all in a day's work.

After falling behind 13-0 quickly in the first quarter, the Huskies roared back, scoring 31 unanswered points and never looking back en route to the team’s ninth straight victory.

Harnish hit Perez Ashford on a 9-yard touchdown pass two plays after a disputed spot on fourth down kept the drive alive, pulling the Huskies to 13-7 just before the end of the first quarter.

The Huskies briefly lost Harnish to an injured left ankle early in the second quarter, but backup Jordan Lynch engineered a seven-play, 78-yard drive that ended on his 3-yard touchdown run to give NIU a 14-13 lead with 4:49 left in the first half.

The Huskies added another touchdown just before the half when Doeren gambled on the final play of the drive, going for the touchdown with 2 seconds remaining instead of opting for a field goal.

Jamal Womble plowed forward for a 1-yard touchdown to give Northern Illinois a 21-13 halftime lead.

In the second half: a touchdown pass immediately after the interception, and an interception return for a touchdown. Something Packer-like about all that.

The official clock and the referee's field radio didn't work very well, and the replay officials are becoming an irritation.  On the other hand, with Alabama's victory in the Confederacy Bowl, er, BCS Title Game, the longest collegiate football winning streak in the land belongs to Northern Illinois.

It's also fitting that the university that introduced Homecoming to the United States participate in the opening of Mardi Gras in the city that introduced Mardi Gras in the United States.  (Yes, New Orleans gets more publicity for its Carnival, but it's ahead of Mobile in being sacked by David Farragut, not in holding Carnival.)

Northern Illinois University photograph, Day 4: Mardi Gras Parade and Fireworks album.

The mascots also made the trip.  The university adopts shelter dogs (Siberian Huskies being very high maintenance dogs) and keeps them on the traveling squad as long as they are able.

Northern Illinois University photograph, Victory album.

One popular activity at televised sporting events is to reverse-acronym ESPN.

Northern Illinois University photograph, Victory album.

There is some truth to their claim, and the university's latest strategic plan proposes to increase enrollments and raise the academic profile.  There's one pitfall.  Both Arkansas State and Northern Illinois are on record among the sports pundits as aspiring to be the next Boise State (a phenomenon we've seen in these pages before.)  That's troubling, as one entry in a Historiann roundup of Excellence Without Money comes from Boise State.

My sense is that our students, and particularly our undergrads, are predominantly working class. Last I checked, our four-year graduation rate is 8 percent, and the six-year is 26 percent, but of course that doesn’t say much about reality, as many of our students are transfers from elsewhere, and they don’t figure into graduation rates.* (Cross-reference.) Many of my students are my age (36) or older.  This semester, I have students born between 1957 and 1993, which, as you can imagine, makes for interesting discussions.  Many are veterans.  Many have fought with addiction in various forms.  About one-third are Mormon.  The overwhelming majority are white.  Many are single parents. At least three of my students have initiated divorces this semester; I can’t remember having any married undergrads at Davis.

Commuter universities are like that. Those tales would not be strange to anyone with experience at Wayne State or Illinois-Chicago or Wisconsin-Milwaukee.  The problem, though, is in attempting to raise enrollments and the university's academic profile on the cheap.

I’m not sure why our administration wants to bring in more students, as we’re having a hard enough time graduating the students we already have.  Perhaps it’s because if we’re investing heavily in the sciences, we’re going to need to recoup the costs somewhere–and where better than by making arts and humanities faculty teach more classes, each with a significantly greater number of students?

There's a lot more in that post, and it will reward careful study.  It's corroborated by a Cold Spring Shops source who notes that the existing Boise State library is inadequate for some areas of research.  The good news is that Northern Illinois's administration is, publicly at least, making clear that a larger enrollment will require a larger faculty.

Meanwhile, the former sports information director advises Mid-American fans generally to savor the moment.

Big Ten and BCS envy? Who needs it? With a Northern Illinois victory over Arkansas State in Sunday’s GoDaddy.com Bowl, not only would the MAC wind up an unprecedented 4-1 in this postseason, the league’s four bowl triumphs would double the previous best (2-0 MAC bowl record in 2001 and 2003, 2-3 in 2004, and 2-2 in 2010) and equal this year’s Big Ten bowl win total (4-6). Eat your heart out, WAC (0-3), Pac-12 (2-5) and ACC (2-6) fans.

There's some campaigning (appropriate on Primary Night) to get Northern Illinois out of the "others receiving votes" category.

It’s time for the Huskies 0-and-forever drought of Top 25 finishes to end as well.

I never thought I would write those words this season. Not after NIU’s defense looked unfit for college football – let alone the country’s upper echelon – in the season’s early weeks.

As they say, Developing.