JUST CALL IT THE CONDITIONS OF CARRIAGE.

The process-worshippers in higher education have made the relatively simple task of preparing a course outline only slightly less onerous than preparing conditions of carriage for approval by the Interstate Commerce Commission.

Now comes M. S. Stewart, just in time for the end of the academic year, offering advice to Inside Higher Ed readers.  "Print the syllabus out and return to your own student days in your mind. Is this a course you would have wanted to take yourself?"  That comes, only after blocks of text that includes nuggets such as this.  "If offices such as campus security, disability services, the registrar and so on require boilerplate sections, do explain to students that the voice may be different but the shared values are there."

Those offices are a useful place to begin a search for the stupid people running the universities that richly deserve to be turfed out.

A RESTORATION.

Last year, we noted Amtrak's elimination of Traditional Railroad French Toast in favor of hotcakes.

I am pleased to link to a Travel and Trains report that the French Toast is back.

That same report complains of Häagen-Dazs ice cream giving way to Blue Bunny on the California Zephyr.

Doesn't bother me.  Arch Deluxe off, Iowa Stolid on.  I write train stories, not railroad literature.

IS HER CAT NAMED LINDA ELLERBEE?

The house organ for business as usual in higher education runs a "where are they now?" story on former Missouri communications professor Melissa Click.

The assistant professor of communication at the University of Missouri was just doing what other professors and administrators were doing there, too, she says. So why did she lose her job?

She has one idea. Under pressure from state legislators, she says, Missouri’s Board of Curators fired her to send a message that the university and the state wouldn’t tolerate black people standing up to white people. "This is all about racial politics," she says. "I’m a white lady. I’m an easy target."

Oy.  Ashe Schow rolls her eyes.  Robby Soave isn't impressed, either.

But Ms Click has forgotten nothing and learned nothing.

"I do not understand the widespread impulse to shame those whose best intentions unfortunately result in imperfect actions," she wrote in The Washington Post last month. "What would our world be like if no one ever took a chance?"

I am heartily tired of hearing about good intentions as an excuse for bad behavior or worse policy.  At The Chronicle, nobody even blinks.  Let the self-congratulation continue.

"I believed at some point, somebody would care about the truth of what I was doing," she says. "I am a woman who made some mistakes trying to do what she thought was right." That, she says, could have been anyone.

That could be the easiest way to make Twitchy.

It gets better.  "What was right" is another opportunity for Chronicle writers to make the gentry comfortable with their own prejudices.

The transition from Amherst to the Midwest was difficult. But eventually, Ms. Click found a farmers’ market, she says, became a visiting instructor at the university, and befriended other East Coast transplants.

Still, she didn’t quite fit, even in the communication department, where she got a tenure-track job in 2008. A common textbook used at UMass, Media/Society: Industries, Images and Audiences (SAGE Publications, 1999), featured a Marxist critique of the media. "I came here and used it, too," she says, "and students’ heads nearly popped off."

Yes.  Bringing Enlightenment to the Rubes is the way the Smug see the role of the graduates of the coastal universities.  The horror.  No antique stores.  No artisanal cheeses.  Never out of radio range of Sean Hannity.  Students push back against indoctrination.

The article also notes faculty governance rights are at stake.  Apparently Ms Click had submitted a portfolio her department had seen as meriting continuing tenure, and her case was about to move to the more pro forma parts of the review when she crossed the line from annoyingly self-righteous to intolerant ideologue.

Ben Trachtenberg, chair of Missouri’s faculty council, says the curators uncharacteristically took a faculty personnel decision into their own hands — skirting the campus’s formal procedures designed to weigh charges against professors while preserving their rights to due process. "It’s pretty clear our rules weren’t followed, and that’s bad for faculty morale," says Mr. Trachtenberg, an associate professor of law. The American Association of University Professors is investigating Ms. Click’s firing and may censure the university. Hans-Joerg Tiede, senior program officer for the group’s department of academic freedom, tenure, and governance, calls the episode "fundamentally at odds with basic standards of academic due process."

I agree, administrative usurpations are not good.

Perhaps, though, one sign that universities are no longer playpens for really stupid people will be when faculty hirings are not so obviously skewed toward annoyingly self-righteous ideologues.

VANDERBILT INSTALLED, CSX DESTROYS.

The mandate for positive train control induces railroads to consolidate trains on fewer routes, to reduce the total expenditure on signalling and road crossing upgrades.  As a consequence, we might be seeing the end of the old New York Central directly to Columbus, Ohio.

All CSX locomotives are being equipped with PTC, so for the 60-mile Columbus-Galion line, this installation is likely limited to a trackside investment. But that investment, which averages about $100,000 per track-mile depending on local conditions, could be a $6 million investment for CSX along the Columbus-Galion line.

If it had no other routing alternatives to reach Central Ohio or southern states, CSX probably would make this investment. But they do have alternatives. It can reach Columbus via their Mt. Victory (Greenwich-Bellefontaine) and Scottslawn (Ridgeway-Columbus) subdivisions. And they can reach the southern states by continuing west of Bellefontaine to Sidney, then south on CSX’s Toledo Subdivision to Dayton, Cincinnati and Dixie. Those are high-quality mainline corridors that are being equipped with PTC. There are also high-quality, interlocked (i.e., dispatcher-controlled) track connections in the southeast quadrants of the Ridgeway and Sidney junctions that will permit Galion-Columbus and Galion-Dixie trains to avoid the 3C line south of Galion without much if any infrastructure modifications.

Freight trains can go a slightly longer way around without shippers being much inconvenienced.  Passengers, less so.  Although Cleveland - Columbus - Cincinnati has potential as a regional corridor, Penn Central's success in getting rid of almost all the cross-Ohio trains before Amtrak continues to shape the difficulties confronting Ohio's Passenger Rail advocates.

STOP THE ENABLING.

Here's Christian Schneider in Milwaukee's Journal-Sentinel, responding to the latest spring riot at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. Adults need to stop excusing bad behavior.

It's difficult not to enjoy a little bit of schadenfreude when arguably the most progressive campus in America is forced to confront the victimization that such leftism has wrought. These are the progeny of the "ism" culture — young people who believe racism and sexism are everywhere, leaving them incapable of dealing with actual transgressions when they occur.

If anything, appeasing counterproductive behavior among young black students is its own brand of racial paternalism, as is expecting less of students of color. In 2014, Michigan State professor Dorinda Carter Andrews told Wisconsin State Journal reporter Molly Beck that, "When you're not tough on me and you accept less from me, I see it as a lack of respect and a lack of care."

Why are they allowed to do things that we’re not allowed to do?

Surprise me.  Crack down on the administrators who enable.

THE FATAL CONCEIT.

Rod Dreher is discussing the challenges facing the use of military force, elaborating on suggestions Andrew J. Bacevich offered on the folly of U.S. interventions short of total war.  Both essays will reward careful study.  Mr Dreher's observations are focused toward military adventurism, but they generalize to other attempts by Wise Experts to Fix Things.

America keeps making these catastrophic mistakes because we believe that wanting a certain outcome is enough to make it happen. We are rich enough, powerful enough, and, in our own minds, righteous enough that it should happen. It’s interesting to contemplate how this hubris plays out on the foreign policy and military fronts, while we also observe the same dynamic expressing itself socially and culturally.

For example, most of us, it appears, have come to the conclusion that biology does not matter, that it is nothing more than a conceptual barrier that prevents us from exercising our will, and can therefore be destroyed. Because freedom. We have come to believe that there are no moral strictures or structures (like, say, the natural family) that ought to bind us and guide our conduct.

Or it's the Technocratic Vision ("If we can put a man on the moon ...")

Or it's the Postmodern Delusion (Structures are social constructions ...)

There are limits.

THE TRAGIC VISION.

Green Bay radio talker Jerry Bader has a daughter who is crossing.  Here he spells out the tradeoffs that confront anyone who would like to find a lasting armistice in the bathroom wars.  By way of background, his daughter was reluctant to use the assigned bathroom at school for years.  That might generalize to people who are crossing being the least likely predators.

I take someone who is transgender at their word when they say it is very difficult for them to use a bathroom intended for a gender with which they do not identify. But where my son and I, and Trump for that matter, disagree is that the fear that male predators would manipulate all inclusive bathroom policies is an irrational one. Be clear; the fear here is not that transgender persons would cause harm to women and girls in the bathroom. The fear is of men who would pretend to be transgender to exploit the situation. And such men may factor in the real possibility that women may be slow to report such activity out of fear of being accused of bigotry against someone who is actually transgender.

Perhaps we are rich enough to build public buildings that feature a few status-unassigned bathrooms, useful for dads changing their daughter's diapers, as well as for crossers.

Or perhaps a return to minding your own business, and not calling attention to yourself, is in order.  That goes for the aggressively normal (in the scheme of things, is gender dysphoria more threatening to the public order than low-functioning sociopathy?)  It also goes for the aggressively transgressive.  Just because it works for Madonna or a Kardashian won't make the rest of you any more interesting.

So what is the answer? Honestly I don’t know. I’ve seen several “third way” possibilities, including private facilities for those who are transgender. Even that option is considered discriminatory by many in the LGBT community. The desire by transgender individuals to be comfortable in public restrooms is real. The fear of inclusive bathrooms being exploited by predators is real. We’re going to have to find an answer that accommodates everyone.

The category error is in that "answer." At best there will be a Pareto improvement on the status quo.  Mind your own business might be that Pareto improvement.  "Accommodate" is a more restrictive condition than "satisfy."  It's also a condition that might be more easily achieved by something other than legislation and court tests.

DONALD TRUMP'S GREATEST APOSTASY.

Sometimes I'll tune into one of the Sunday shows and the truth will come out.  So it was this morning, when the Meet the Press panel fretted, as they often do, about the Damage that one Donald J. Trump is doing to business as usual.

Here's the key clip from the transcript.

CHUCK TODD:

Listen to what he said about being presidential. Watch this.

(BEGIN TAPE)

DONALD TRUMP:

Presidential's easy. You know what presidential is? I walk on. So you walk on. Ladies and gentlemen, of Waterbury. It is a great honor to be with you this morning.

(END TAPE)

CHUCK TODD:

Katie, he mocks the process. And he actually mocked his own guy, Manafort.

KATIE PACKER:

Well, it would be funny if it weren't so frightening. I mean, this is a guy that's running to be the leader of the free world. He's not running to play a part on a reality TV show. And I do think he's mocking the process. And the notion that you're going to take a guy that's 70 years old, and he's going to adopt a whole new personality, he doesn't even know that what he's doing is offensive.

I've seen more of the clip in question. Mr Trump goes on to pretend to be Crooked Hillary Clinton reading something soporific from a prompter.  If what he's mocking is the ritual that begins on January 22 of the year after each leap year and goes on way too long, that's good.

The ritual begins too soon.

It lasts too long.

People who should know better vest it with more consequence than it deserves.

The outcome never delivers on expectations.

If ever a process deserved to be mocked.

But what would Chuck Todd or Katie Packer or any of the rest do if somebody told them the presidential possibilities ought not be treated like the Big Crunch at the end of the universe.

DISPEL THE SMUG.

We took a long look at the weakness of liberal smug last week.  Here, from Kyle Smith in New York's Post, is the to-the-point assessment.  "Ridiculing opponents is easier than arguing with them. Liberals don’t want debate, they want affirmation."

TO THE AMERICAN PRESIDENT: NUTS!

That's the message of Janet Daley in London's Telegraph , although she expands the basic argument.  "Why should we take advice from a president who has surrendered the world to chaos?"  Our President, apparently, offered unsolicited advice to Britons on how to vote in an upcoming referendum affecting continued membership in the European Union.

The iron fist of a message inside that velvet glove of carefully recited claptrap about the special relationship is that Obama’s America wants us to stay in the conveniently monolithic, homogeneous trading bloc with which it can most easily do business. In other words, the tentative US economic recovery needs us to sacrifice our country’s judicial independence and the primacy of our parliamentary system, just as the US once sacrificed so many of its young military officers for our survival. That’s the deal.

The analogy is strained, but at the moment Our President's behavior is not filling Britons with confidence that the Arsenal of Democracy would return if called.

But there is no indication, either in Mr Obama’s words or his actual foreign policy, that America would now be prepared to make another such sacrifice for its allies.

Feckless is as feckless does.

THE DONKS DILEMMA.

Vanity Fair's T. A.Frank suggests that Democrats provide policy nostrums and virtue signalling for the gentry, while pretending to care about oppressed and marginalized people yet doing nothing.

The combination of super-rich Democrats and poor Democrats would exacerbate internal party tensions, but the party would probably resort to forms of appeasement that are already in use. To their rich constituents, Democrats offer more trade, more immigration, and general globalism. To their non-rich constituents, they offer the promise of social justice, which critics might call identity politics. That’s one reason why Democrats have devoted so much attention to issues such as transgender rights, sexual assault on campus, racial disparities in criminal justice, and immigration reform. The causes may be worthy—and they attract sincere advocates—but politically they’re also useful. They don’t bother rich people.

Catch that "offer the promise" with "social justice" mutating into "identity politics."  Or, stated simply, symbolism over substance.  Rhetoric, but never results.  That sounds like the past fifty years, from Great Society to Hope and Change.

The challenge, however, is for Republicans, or some other coalition of Not Democrats, to encourage the gentry's mascots to stop letting themselves be treated as mascots.  The gentry have a long history of sticking their metaphorical fingers in the eyes of what used to be mainstream Americans, and I've been documenting the push-back over the past year or so.

But in the following paragraph is an outline of the strategy by which Not Democrats might be able to liberate the mascots.

The more that Democrats write off the white working class, which has been experiencing a drastic decline in living standards, the harder it is for them to call themselves a party of the little guy. The more that the rich can frame various business practices as blows to privilege or oppression—predatory lending as a way to expand minority home ownership, outsourcing as a way to uplift the world’s poor, etc.—the more they get a pass from Democrats on practices that hurt poorer Americans. Worst of all, the more that interest groups within the Democratic Party quarrel among themselves, the more they rely upon loathing of a common enemy, Republicans, in order to stay united.

Inasmuch as those predatory lending practices wiped out the net worth of the poorest and least liquid homeowners first, with ethnic minority communities hardest hit, while the Congressional Diversity Caucus mau-maued the people who pointed out that a disaster was coming, the opportunity for Not Democrats to win hearts and minds exist.

It does not have to become a tribal tussle, Mr Frank notwithstanding.

Things get darker still, for, if the G.O.P. becomes ever whiter, failing to peel away working-class voters of other races, then partisan conflict could look more and more like racial conflict. That is the nightmare. Our politics are bad enough when voters are mobilized mainly by culture-war issues, such as abortion, because compromise is often impossible. But when voters are mobilized by issues of identity, something most people can’t change, then nothing works. It’s just war.

Here's your mission. "Put another way, there has to be a traditional conservative message that expands the base of support for law enforcement and against the pernicious cult of authenticity that enables the crazies as somehow deserving of celebration."

REDNECK EMERGENCE.

Nolan Gray of Market Urbanism suggests that relatively nonintrusive private governance, as manifested in mobile home parks, might be something for Wise Experts to consider.

Where policymakers deem top-down regulation necessary, it should be designed to support rather than replace emergent orders that low-income communities have developed over time. When we stop treating low-income communities as objects of scorn, to be subjected to top-down, paternalistic planning, we might find that we have a lot to learn from them.

Everything else is commentary.  Particularly in light of the failures that have followed wherever the Wise Experts have gone.

CLARIFYING THE LANGUAGE.

Jonah Goldberg illustrates precisely the nature of recondite and obscurantist academic prose.

There is a slice of the Left that really needs very bad writing. Horrid, opaque, impenetrable prose and jargon plays a dual role. First, it makes very dumb or simple ideas sound vastly more sophisticated than they are. Second, it lends an air of authority to very dumb and bad ideas that could not be earned via plain speaking.

He goes on to note that impenetrability is something different from technical jargon, such as subgame-perfect Nash equilibrium, the Say Aggregation Principle, or the modularity of elliptic curves precluding nontrivial solutions in integers to Diophantine equations of order greater than two.  You can't fake your way into proving Fermat's theorem or working zeta functions.  You can fake your way into culture studies.  And look Cultivated and Thoughtful while doing so.

The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.

That's from an electronic mail gripe somebody once sent to Mr Goldberg.  Or perhaps it's something he ran through a postmodern phrase generator.

We can render the first and second clauses loosely as "The power of capital over social relations used to be a given.  We now understand it as emergent."  We might propose a counter-hypothesis to the concluding passage, perhaps along the lines of "Institutions evolve to conserve on transaction costs."  Try it.

A few paragraphs later -- this is, after all, Mr Goldberg's weekly stream of consciousness, we see, "To the extent they ever were real, live, socialist societies, it was back when they were ethnically homogeneous (and poor). Socialism can “work” for a while in small, ethnic mono-cultures, because the economic inefficiencies can be papered over by nationalistic or tribal sentiments."  But the way in which that socialism works might give anthropologists pause.  "One of these days, a social scientist of great courage will look at the emergence of self-segregation, or of the more contested 'othering' as a logical outgrowth of allocating resources and status on the basis of kinship ties." I ended that post with a suggestion for future research.

[O]ppression might be a collision of emergent social systems following different evolutionary stable strategies. But when practitioners of one strategy interact with practitioners of another, the strategy that confers advantages on adopters might look like oppression to defenders of the losing strategy. Thus, structural, but not a consequence of animus on the part of its practitioners.

Thus, although structures are historically contingent and path dependent, there are constraints on the ways power gets rearticulated, which is a clunky way of referring to political processes at work, or something similar.

Your research, dear reader, might be challenging.  But if you can't explain the basic ideas ...

THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS SETTLED SCIENCE.

And that's a darned good thing. "These garden-variety authoritarians are eager to regulate us into conformity with the “settled” consensus du jour, whatever it is. But they are progressives, so it is for our own good." And Eclect Econ calls the roll of consensuses no longer so settled.

No.  Final.  Say.

No matter how many out of how many experts currently agree.

THIS IS WHY THEY FAIL.

Charles Siegel lays out the progressive roots of new urbanism.  New urbanism describes a Technocratic Mentality that responded to the failings of the previous Technocratic Mentality.

Modernist urbanism was centered on new technology: cities were designed around high-speed roads for automobiles and around large-scale superblocks planned by experts. Modernists designed what Clarence Perry aptly called “housing for the machine age.”

New Urbanism centers on creating good places for people. The New Urbanism rejects the modernist idea that cities should be made up of single-use superblocks with interior streets for local access and surrounding arterial streets for through traffic. Instead, it creates continuous street systems with small blocks, with development oriented toward the street and sidewalk, and with a variety of different land uses within walking distance of each other. This sort of design works for both pedestrians and automobiles, while modernist design does not work for pedestrians.

New Urbanists developed form-based codes as an alternative to conventional zoning. Zoning laws are typically proscriptive, telling developers what they cannot do, while form-based codes are more prescriptive, telling developers what they should do. These codes have guidelines to define the building types allowed on shopping streets, streets of single-family houses, streets of row houses, and so on. In addition to these urban codes, which control the massing and location of buildings, many New Urbanist developments also have architectural codes, which specify materials that may be used, the roof overhangs that are required, and other design elements that give the entire development a consistent architectural style.¹  These architectural codes generate the consistency with variation that is typical of traditional design, but the styles can seem artificial when they are imposed from the outside in this way—different from old cities and towns that have a consistent style because they had a coherent culture.

The error is in believing that a coherent culture is something that can be codified. Encouraged in its good features, perhaps.  But subject to taming or reconstruction by a vanguard, or by Wise Experts?  Good luck with that.

Modernist urbanism began as part of the progressive movement of a century ago. In the early twentieth century, when most people were near the poverty level, its faith in technology seemed justified as a way of lifting people out of poverty by promoting economic growth.

By the 1960s, most Americans no longer were near the poverty level. Rather than seeming progressive, the freeways and sprawl became symbols of failure. The official goal of national economic planning was to promote rapid growth of the gross national product, but many progressives began to suspect that promoting the most rapid possible growth was not as important as promoting a higher quality of life.

Rromotion by example, or by reinforcement of good habits, yes.  Promotion as the national version of scolding the youngsters to eat their peas, no.  "But twisting a complex system somewhere, even with the best intentions, may have unintended consequences elsewhere. An evolution might be a better approach than just allowing technology to disrupt." Everything else is elaboration.

A CAMEO APPEARANCE.

Rockford's WIFR covered several of the public scoping meetings in re Great Lakes Basin Railroad.

Your Superintendent makes a brief appearance about a minute in.

OUR UNIVERSITIES ARE BEING RUN BY STUPID PEOPLE.

Colorado State University has installed Digital Measures as a way of automating and standardizing faculty service reports, the better to keep track of how much merit faculty have demonstrated, if there is any money for merit raises.  Which there isn't, but there's a lot of scut work for Historiann and her colleagues.

I’m sure like me you can see the advantage of this system for administrators.  “Let’s see which colleges and departments are publishing more articles?  I’ll just push this button and generate this cross-tab, and voilá!”  (In fact, we were told by a colleague in the know that the reason Baa Ram U. bought this garbageware is because the president of our institution didn’t know how many articles each department had published in a given year.)

But what exactly is the value of this system for faculty?  I can see none.  It all seems like a massive timewasting exercise, one moreover designed to disadvantage anyone working in the humanities or other book-intensive disciplines.

Of course History, Philosophy, and English departments (among others in the visual and performing arts as well as humanities) will look less productive than economists and scientists!  We write single-author articles of 25-40 pages that are often based on archives outside of the country and which use information written in languages other than English.  We don’t have graduate students or postdocs to do our research for us.  We don’t write articles with 10-15 supposed “co-authors.”  Also, we write books for the most part, not articles.

Silver lining?  There’s nothing like stupid from the central administration to bring a faculty together.  I told my colleagues that I have a rule when it comes to any technology or software:  it works for me, I don’t work for it.  End of story.

By all means, dear reader, read and enjoy the comments.  When you see unfavorable comparisons of university administrators with the Leonid Brezhnev era in the Soviet Union among academicians that might have, back in the day, cringed at President Reagan referring to an evil empire or the Mickey Mouse system of communism, and reports of information recorded on lists that are later misplaced, perhaps there might be faculty willing to make common cause with critics outside the academy when it comes to turfing out the stupid people and making higher education great again.

EDUCATION IS ABOUT SOCIALIZATION.

The details, and the scholarly elaboration, are at Marginal Revolution.

We develop, test and find support for a theory of class cultural norms: these preferences are partly traceable to socialization that occurs on predominately affluent college campuses, especially those with norms of financial gain, and especially among socially embedded students. The economic views of the student’s cohort also matter, in part independently of affluence.

I'm not surprised.  Evolutionary stability beats social construction by six touchdowns.

THE WAGES OF SMUG IS TRUMP.

Thus does Emmett Rensin argue in Vox.  His argument is rambling, often repetitive, overlong.  But he calls out the gentry liberals on their tone.

Finding comfort in the notion that their former allies were disdainful, hapless rubes, smug liberals created a culture animated by that contempt. The rubes noticed and replied in kind. The result is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Financial incentive compounded this tendency — there is money, after all, in reassuring the bitter. Over 20 years, an industry arose to cater to the smug style. It began in humor, and culminated for a time in The Daily Show, a program that more than any other thing advanced the idea that liberal orthodoxy was a kind of educated savvy and that its opponents were, before anything else, stupid. The smug liberal found relief in ridiculing them.

To some extent, the Smug can get away with it because the people who are in a position to recognize forty or fifty years of failures of the fatal conceit and offer substantive correctives are not often prepared to offer a succinct way out.  Thus, when a libertarian-inclined politician announces for high office, you can count on some media type asking "How can you be against government and run for president?"  Simple answer: better to seek the consent of the governed in rolling back the failures of government in constitutionally structured ways, than to bring out the pitchforks and torches.  Or the militias.

Substantively, when the poverty rate has not budged in the fifty years since the war on poverty, and the economic stimulus failed to stimulate, and the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is two lies for the price of one, there's plenty to back up that claim.  Mr Rensin suggests a reason current Republican and libertarian voters get it.  The challenge, however, is in prying the people rendered helpless by Democrat policies away from Democrats who take their helplessness, and their votes, for granted.

Republicans score higher in susceptibility to persuasion. They are willing to change their minds more often.

The Republican coalition tends toward the center: educated enough, smart enough, informed enough.

The Democratic coalition in the 21st century is bifurcated: It has the postgraduates, but it has the disenfranchised urban poor as well, a group better defined by race and immigration status than by class. There are more Americans without high school diplomas than in possession of doctoral degrees. The math proceeds from there.

The smug style takes this as a defense. Elite liberalism, and the Democratic Party by extension, cannot hate poor people, they say. We aren't smug! Just look at our coalition. These aren't rubes. Just look at our embrace of their issues.

Embrace? More like drunken baby smothering.  But explaining the ways in which the Democrats keep the poor poor requires both careful analysis, and the proper marketing strategy.  "That's going to take something more substantive than "We're governed by losers." But perhaps naming the losers is a first step."   A subsequent step, perhaps the second step, is to rethink, with a view toward ending, the cult of the presidency.  In a response to Mr Rensin, Fredrik DeBoer looks in that direction.

It’s hard to get liberals to take problems seriously because Democrats currently hold the presidency, which always instills liberals with overconfidence. But the Democratic party has major structural problems. State legislatures do more to determine the day-to-day life of average Americans than the federal government, and Democrats have lost 900 state legislature seats since 2010. It’s a crisis happening under the nose of the liberal intelligentsia, but as long as the White House stays blue, they’re unlikely to notice.

Particularly because the palace guard media and the court intellectuals in the academy and the talking heads can blame all the failures of the Obama administration on the empty candy store they inherited from President Bush or Republican obstruction in the House and Senate or those retrograde governors and legislators.  It's possible to call B.S. on all of those claims.  But the calling of B.S. must be backed up by substance.  "It may take the failure of one or more of the New Deal or Great Society or Hope and Change constructions to trigger the emergence." The pond is well stocked with fish, but the opposition must bring working tackle all the same.

SLOWLY THEY CATCH ON.

If you set the bar high, people will rise to the occasion.  Too often, though, the high schools don't set the bar high, and the Distressed Material turns up at college, and now the house organ of gentry liberals recognizes (via College Insurrection, they read National Pinko Radio so I don't have to) that their donor base winds up paying for high school twice.  "When they attend private colleges, underprepared students from the top income strata are spending $12,000 extra to study things they should have learned in high school."  That's why I'm so enthusiastic about Wisconsin requiring universities to keep track of the sources of Distressed Material.  Perhaps a few more dollars into the science club, and a few more news reports about the chess team, and less spending on athletic facilities and coverage of sports is in order.  What people celebrate they get more of.

"Because of underpreparation and poor performance, we're seeing people having to pay more for college," says [Education Reform Now's Michael] Dannenberg. "High school policy changes could make college more affordable. And higher ed policy changes could promote better rigor and academic preparation in high school."

Another, not necessarily contradictory, interpretation of the data is that remedial education is simply inefficient.

"Students are 75 percent less likely to complete college if they have to take a remedial course," says Mary Nguyen Barry, the report's other co-author. "It's making college a poor value proposition for many families because there's such a high dropout rate."

Inefficiency persists as long as there are no incentives to remove the inefficiencies.  The status quo continues not to work.  The incentives are present, if the universities would but provide them.