ONE DOWN, MORE TO GO?

Today is for kicking ass and taking names.  First on the list, University of Pennsylvania president Liz Magill, who first had the smirk wiped off her face in a notorious hostage video, and she's now out.

Elizabeth Magill, the president of the University of Pennsylvania, is stepping down following months of rising tensions on campus and among alumni. Her resignation is effective immediately, according to an email sent to the Penn community today.

Scott Bok, the chair of Penn's board of trustees, will also be stepping down, according to the school's newspaper, The Daily Pennsylvanian.

Magill has been the subject of complaints from donors, alumni, and students for her reactions to the October 7 attacks on Israel and incidents of antisemitism, or purported antisemitism, on campus.

The criticisms escalated when Magill evaded a question during a December 5 congressional hearing on whether calling for Jewish genocide violated school policy.

Following the hearing, the board of Wharton, Penn's business school, called on Magill to resign. Separately, Penn's board of trustees met Thursday, and scheduled a second meeting on Sunday, the school's paper, The Daily Pennsylvanian, reported.

Magill's troubles started before the October 7 attacks by Hamas.

In September, students and alumni signed an open letter to the president condemning the school's Palestine Writes Literary Festival, which they said platformed speakers with histories of antisemitism. (Organizers of the festival denied that anyone involved embraces antisemitic ideas).

The letter was signed by 4,000 people and accused the school of not denouncing antisemitism at the festival.

We'll take stock of the challenges of breaking out of the punishment cycles of the Grim Strategy later this week.  Let me go on record as suggesting that strengthening the existing speech codes to proscribe ever more conduct as "harassing or demeaning" is not the way to go.

Today, though, the Bears beat the Lions (in fact, it was a tough day to be a Detroit team playing an Illinois team) and in that spirit, I'm going to round up some of the ass-kicking and name-taking.

ADVANTAGE, COLD SPRING SHOPS.

How long have I been carrying on about College Sports, Inc. realigning until there are four major conferences of sixteen teams each and the National Collegiate Athletic Association becomes irrelevant?

It's dawning on current association president Charlie Baker, call sign Charlie Baker.

“The courts and other public entities continue to debate reform measures that in many cases would seriously damage parts or all of college athletics,” Baker said in a letter to leaders in Division I, the NCAA’s highest competitive level. “Therefore, it is time for us—the NCAA—to offer our own forward-looking framework.”

The plan Baker laid out after months of study would allow all Division I institutions to directly compensate athletes for use of their name, image and likeness.

Why, it's as if it's the end of the association as we know it.

It would also create a new subdivision for the richest and most powerful programs that would give them significantly more autonomy over how they spent their money, as long as they agree to “invest at least $30,000 per year into an enhanced educational trust fund for at least half” of their athletes.

Sportswriters and commentators described Baker’s plan as “groundbreaking” and “revolutionary,” and in certain ways it would be. It would pierce a historical barrier, self-imposed by the NCAA, that has prevented colleges from paying athletes directly over and above the costs of their educations.

And it would acknowledge the long-standing thirst of the association’s 40 to 60 most powerful football-playing members for more control over their own fates, separating them more formally from the 200 to 300 other institutions that also compete in Division I basketball, and even from the rest of the 130-odd universities that currently play in the Football Bowl Subdivision.

Let's see, "40 to 60" gets us pretty close to 64, doesn't it, and the current bowl structure requires about seventy teams to put mayonnaise company logos on special jerseys, doesn't it?

But it is also clearly a nod to the reality that the NCAA is hanging on to its authority over college sports by a thread: an attempt both to discourage Congress and the courts from undermining its authority further, and to deter the biggest programs from walking away from the NCAA altogether and forming their own freestanding association.

“What Ross calls ‘revolutionary,’ I call belated and reactionary,” Marc Edelman, a professor of law at Baruch College, said in response to a characterization of Baker’s proposal by Yahoo’s Ross Dellenger. “This association, the #NCAA, ignores experts in the field and does nothing to promote reform until their backs are legally against the wall. Right now, their backs are legally against the wall and Baker knows it.”

Karen Weaver, an adjunct assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania who writes widely about college athletics, described Baker’s proposal as “a way to keep the organization together under the NCAA umbrella … while giving enormous flexibility and almost unchecked spending to the highest-profile schools.”

There's not much new there, either, in part the football format we have now is the consequence of the trustees at Notre Dame and the regents at Oklahoma wanting out of what they argued were restraints of trade, because at the time their dominant strategy was to defect from the restraint.

FRIDAY short TAKES.

The Trump presidency was civilization in action.  "On Trump’s watch, there was no full-scale invasion of Ukraine, no major attack on Israel, no runaway inflation, no disastrous retreat from Afghanistan. It is hard to make the case for Trump’s unfitness to anyone who does not already believe it."  Yes, I'm aware of all the ways the process worshippers cringe, and I concur with many of their points.  Their motivation, though, gives people who would rather not think about process all the time more reason to be cranky.  "Democrats try to strip candidates from the ballot, in the name of democracy."  It's politics.  "Voters don’t care about legislative victories; they care about their own families. And despite the best efforts of the left-wing media, American voters will see through the Potemkin presidency of Joe Biden."

It doesn't help that the self-styled progressives are as smug in their convictions as those Ivy League presidents.  "It’s hard to understand. And the great irony here is that progressive Democrats, who are precisely the ones who are most hysterical about the threat posed by Trump and Trumpism, are also the ones most adamantly opposed to making any compromise on border security as part of this deal. Or really anything else for that matter. This is not a recipe for success. I suppose that’s because they don’t really want a popular front against Trumpism but rather a popular front for all the stuff they feel comfortable supporting. But that’s not how a popular front works and it’s certainly not how Democrats are going to rebuild and expand their coalition for 2024."

Make that destructive politics.  "In the name of complaining about Trump's tyrannical tendencies, the NYT is truly worried that he will dismantle the existing machinery of real tyranny."  Wherever someone says "the government," substitute "Donald Trump."  "But isn't it funny that those who have supported expansive executive power over the decades are now crying over the prospect of its falling into the hands of a President they loathe? You had a system of checks and balances, but you didn't like it."

The weekly round-up of pithy elaborations on traditional Cold Spring Shops themes follows.

GETTING THE SELF-SELECTION CONSTRAINTS RIGHT.

Economics is about incentives.  The rest is commentary.

Today's lesson is served up at the seafood buffet.  "Red Lobster says unlimited shrimp promotion was too popular and too cheap."  That's a standard problem in pricing bundles of service, you don't want to make the bundle you'd like the heavy eaters to buy attractive to lighter eaters who you'd prefer to eat a la carte.

Oliver Williamson's 1966 peak load pricing article (JSTOR) lays out the argument with some glorious Lagrangians and some intuitive diagrams. The high-occupancy toll problem (and the related problem of selling cuts in the roller-coaster line) is one in which the provider is simultaneously providing a premium service at a higher price and a congested service at a lower cash outlay, but with the people who choose the cheaper congested service incurring disutility. As a modeling exercise, the marginal commuter is indifferent between the marginal utility adjusted by the higher price of the premium service and the marginal utility adjusted by the lower price of the congested service.

The all-you-can-eat buffet is a related problem.  The way to encourage the lighter eaters to order a la carte is to make the all-you-can-eat bundle more expensive.  Red Lobster management figured it out.

Red Lobster's parent company, Thai Union Group, disclosed earlier this month that the seafood chain took an unexpectedly large loss in the third quarter of the year because its $20 shrimp promotion wasn't very profitable and was more popular than the company anticipated.

"The proportion of the people selecting this promotion was much higher compared to expectation," Chief Financial Officer Ludovic Garnier said in Thai Union Group's investor and media presentation Nov. 7.

Red Lobster has had an all-you-can-eat shrimp promotion for years, but this year it changed the shrimp deal from a limited-time offer to a permanent one. The company wanted to boost traffic in the third and fourth quarters of the year, when its business tends to slow down.

Garnier said the strategy worked, bringing in customers and bolstering Red Lobster’s market share. But the improvement wasn’t as large as the company expected, and combined with the low margins on the surprisingly popular deal, that presented a problem.

He said U.S. consumers are getting more budget-conscious, meaning they are eating at less-expensive restaurants and even ordering cheaper items when they go out. That contributed to the unexpected popularity of "Ultimate Endless Shrimp."

While the deal brought in some more customers, Garnier's comment suggested that people who might have ordered something on the menu that was more lucrative for Red Lobster instead traded down to the unlimited shrimp instead.

Study price theory, people.  The Williamson model and the self-selection constraints stipulate that whatever tariffs are offered generate enough revenue to cover the enterprise's costs.  "Those people who are willing to spend the larger sum of money [on the buffet, in this instance] are, consistent with the incentives of a fixed access fee, willing to consume the experience more intensively."

And that, dear reader, is why Weight Watchers recruits at the all you can eat buffet.

NOW IS THE TIME TO RESTORE A STATE OF GOOD REPAIR.

In the wake of the Congressional hearings that exposed the Diversity Corollary to the Peter Principle in the Ivy League, people with bigger platforms than mine have been reacting and reflecting.  We'll start with Roger "Tenured Radicals" Kimball, whose thinking on the academic monoculture has influenced mine throughout the years.

It was a clarifying moment, wasn’t it? The presidents of MIT, Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania testifying for the House Education Committee about the wave of rabid antisemitism on their campuses. Representative Elise Stefanik of New York asked the same question of UPenn’s Liz Magill, MIT’s Sally Kornbluth and Harvard’s Claudine Gay. Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate your campus’s rule of conduct, yes or no? That was the question.

You might think it was a pretty simple question. Stefanik, exhibiting a mixture of incredulity and barely contained rage, stressed: “This should be be the easiest question to answer,” as one president after the next emitted a pained I-can’t-believe-this-unenlightened-pol-is-asking-me-me-the-president-of-Harvard/MIT/Penn-this-stupid-question.” Each in turn reverted to a script they must have worked out with their handlers/lawyers. “It all depends on the context.”

“Context.” It was the weasel word of the moment. We’re all champions of free speech, don’t you know, so we wouldn’t dream of intruding upon our flock’s exercise of that sacrosanct right in pursuit of their dream of self-congratulatory moral perfection — unless, of course, that dream involves some prohibited attitude, criticizing St. Anthony Fauci, for example, or St. George Floyd, or, heaven forfend, supporting Donald Trump or expressing skepticism about the 2020 election or January 6. Then, of course, it’s open-season on “free expression.”

I almost felt sorry for those three women. Almost. There they were, emanating the self-righteous demeanor they had perfected over years, and, bang, an angry congresswoman exploded that cheap facade in minutes. The upshot was not obvious to them immediately. But the world’s outrage at those moral pygmies instantly washed over the PR offices of those obscenely rich bastions of self-entitlement. “Uh, oh: the girls really stepped in it this time.” That was the universal reaction.

The way those presidents all acted for a do-over the next day, abasing themselves in the fashion of the grade-grubbing student attempting to wheedle a grade bump, or perhaps, as the populist websites have characterized it, in hostage videos strongly suggests either they, or their handlers, suspected that the common room commonplaces weren't going to cut it on Capitol Hill.

TODAY'S RAILROAD READING.

The Democrats tempted the Krampus with a picture of the Biden Express under the Christmas tree, to the immediate glee of the wags of Twitchy.  Let me direct your attention, dear reader, to one response.

Actual photo of the Biden Express pic.twitter.com/BXbJuritYb

— Jason Stafford (@Skeletor_2196) December 5, 2023

So far, nobody has noted that the train under the tree is a model of the life-expired Acela trains, which remain in service because the replacement trains are working about as well as Dementia Joe's brain, and that the power car has separated from the lead coach.

The rebuttal photograph, however, has a long history.  It is a David Carroll photograph that was published on the inside cover of the March, 1976 issue of Trains with the caption "Firefighters fly to Franz, save forest but not F, which is a lot of ferroequinological flummery.  Mr Carroll was with a Wawa, Ontario based fire fighting crew, and they did Smokey the Bear a solid by preventing the fire from spreading to the forest, although the diesel was badly burned out and towed away for scrapping.

And now you know the rest of the story.

HORATIO ALGER IS STILL AMONG US.

Time's Person of the Year for 2023 is Taylor Swift.  The editors' reasoning is instructive.

Every year contains light and dark; 2023 was a year with significant shares of darkness. In a divided world, where too many institutions are failing, Taylor Swift found a way to transcend borders and be a source of light. No one else on the planet today can move so many people so well. Achieving this feat is something we often chalk up to the alignments of planets and fates, but giving too much credit to the stars ignores her skill and her power.

Swift is the rare person who is both the writer and hero of her own story. Her path is untraveled, something she’s known for some time.

Small beginnings we have always had with us. People who achieve prominence because they outwork others with more talent or more advantage we have always had with us.

Yes, as the editors note, there is a lot about the world that sucks.  And yes, the pile-on of the Excessively Earnest People over the honor is well under way.

Country and folk music develop, regularly, the full panoply of the suckitude.  And yet, in that music, there are lessons in becoming antifragile, which matters a lot in writing and living your story.

SPEAKING TRUTH TO POWER.

The affirmative action corollary to the Peter Principle surely applies to ward-heeler politicians, and newly elected representative Summer Lee, who checks all those boxes, found herself taken flat aback and dismasted.

Riley Gaines appeared in a House hearing on Tuesday, and she left one Democrat congresswoman infuriated. Gaines was testifying on the dangers of men competing against women in sports, something that caused Rep. Summer Lee (D-PA) to accuse her of being "transphobic," a lazy retort if there ever was one.

I've always liked the cut of Ms Gaines's jib, and she surely understands what making them play by their own rules is about.

Order of events:
-Lee says my stance is transphobic bigotry
-I respond by saying if I'm a transphobe, Lee is a misogynist
-Lee moves to have my words removed from record
-Her move is withdrawn so technically she's still a misogynist

They can dish it out, but they cant take it pic.twitter.com/MKCd5M1DwO

— Riley Gaines (@Riley_Gaines_) December 6, 2023

The representative apparently believed she could play by Penn's rules, and toss out a "transphobic," not understanding that Ms Gaines has had lots of practice dealing with that stuff and nonsense.

A lengthy discussion ensued, with Gaines at one point interrupting to address the fact that Lee had first called her "transphobic." Then, after the huddle was over, Lee leaned forward and moved to withdraw the point of order, i.e., her demand to have Gaines' words removed from the record.

This is another example of Democrats being able to dish it out but not being willing to take it. When someone accuses a woman of being "transphobic" for simply believing that men beating up on women in sports is wrong, they should be fair game for the same level of criticism. If Lee doesn't like that, maybe she should keep her lazy insults to herself.

It is not bigotry to believe that women's sports should be protected, both because they represent a space for women to succeed and earn accolades (and scholarships) and because, in some sports, the participation of men is physically dangerous. Gaines has put her reputation on the line to stand up for what she thinks is right. If Democrats like Lee disagree with that, they should be expected to make an actual argument backed by data, not just name-call.

The parliamentarian correctly ruled that the witness was responding to an observation the right honorable gentlewoman had made in her opening statement.

What followed was hurried consultation and presumably a few explanations for Lee on why witnesses are allowed to respond to such attacks by a member. Lee then withdrew her demand.

Rule XVII, clause 1(b) prohibits Members from engaging in “personalities.” That is a rule cited to the Speaker or chair to bar personal attacks from other members that are deemed unparliamentary. There is no definition of what words are considered to be violative of the rule.

However, Lee was attempting to use this against a witness who was defending herself against her own personal attack. It is a dangerous extension. Members of Congress generally are protected under the “speech or debate” clause in Article I, Section 6, of the Constitution. The privilege protects legislative proceedings and generally does not apply to news releases, speeches and other public comments. This was the holding in Hutchinson v. Proxmire, when Sen. Proxmire was found to be acting outside of the clause in making media comments regarding his golden fleece award.

Members often knowingly make defamatory comments in congressional debates, but then decline to repeat those same words in public to avoid any legal accountability.

Perhaps in that explanation, Professor Turley has explained why those college presidents were so pusillanimous despite being handled much more roughly by Representative Stefanik. "Democrats have embraced an anti-free speech agenda to silence opposing viewpoints. That desire becomes insatiable even as citizens seek to rebut personal attacks from members in a congressional hearing."  It never occurred to those college presidents that the anti-free speech agenda could be applied to them.

ACADEMIA DELENDA EST.

Business gurus of a certain age are probably familiar with the Peter Principle.  It's tongue in cheek, and yet it's redolent of reality.

It states, "In a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence."

In other words, if you work in an organization with a top-down management structure and you are good at your job, you will likely be promoted until you reach one rung above your level of competence. Dr Peter called this level your "final placement."

While the book is written in a lighthearted manner, there's more than a grain of truth in its well-researched analysis of one of the main flaws in hierarchical structures.

In Figure 1 below, you can see a very simple representation of the Peter Principle. It shows a career path where your success is rewarded with advancement, until you are promoted above your level of competence and success is replaced by failure.

Follow the link for the figure. Today I propose an Affirmative Action and Diversity Corollary to the Peter Principle. People who tick the right Diversity, Inclusion, or Equity boxes will likely be promoted until they reach several rungs above their respective levels of competence.  Look no further than the testimony of three presidents of academic institutions you might be familiar with.

🚨🚨🚨Presidents of @Harvard @MIT and @Penn REFUSE to say whether “calling for the genocide of Jews” is bullying and harassment according to their codes of conduct. Even going so far to say it needs to turn to “action” first. As in committing genocide.

THIS IS UNACCEPTABLE AND… pic.twitter.com/hUY3SgoOOi

— Rep. Elise Stefanik (@RepStefanik) December 5, 2023

That clip has gone viral, and an exegesis of Talmudic proportions has followed. We'll dip into that commentary below the jump.

THE PARTICIPATION TROPHIES HAVE BEEN ANNOUNCED.

Last week, we had some fun with the college football cartel.  Before we take stock of the bowl bids for teams that would otherwise not be eligible, let us correct the record.  That post erroneously had Illinois preventing Northwestern from becoming bowl-eligible.  It was the other way around.  Northwestern was eligible; an Illinois win would have gotten them to six, and that didn't happen.  Northwestern will play Utah on December 23 in the SRS Distribution (not to be confused with Sperry Rail Services) Las Vegas Bowl.

On to the participation trophies, the teams we pay attention to, and the controversies and scandals.

THE DEPRIVATION IS THE POINT.

The usual suspects have flown in the usual executive jets to another climate crisis conference, this time in Dubai.  Hot Air's Beege Welborn describes the gathering as "They Might Want You to Eat Bugs, But They Would Prefer You Weren't Here at All."  She elaborates.

It turns out the most elite, richest, and privileged geniuses among us have very thin skins when it comes to the peasants using their own self-congratulatory recordings to eviscerate their big plans and mock them mercilessly.

But the fact of the matter is, they don’t like us very much and would be thrilled to have fewer of us both to control and despoiling their precious Gaia. Life would be better all around.

Proponents of the idea that the world would be a better place sans a significant amount of the current population have a name unto themselves – it’s “Malthusians.”

Hyperbolic? Perhaps. In that right-populist Hot Air?  Definitely.  But wrong? 

COMPARE AND CONTRAST.

Inside Higher Education reports on the collegiate sports bubble.  "Seeking an Enrollment Hail Mary, Small Colleges Look to Athletics."  There's nothing miraculous about the trans-substantiation.

Over the past sixty or seventy years, that "upwardly mobile" has been a way for empire-building administrators to convert state teachers' colleges and former seminaries into universities.  On the academic side, sometimes that translates into additional graduate and professional schools, and on rare occasions grant-getting and the indirect cost returns therefrom, the better to be plowed back into fancier development offices.

So has it played out at Calvin University.

Calvin University bet big last year on a new NCAA Division III football team, as well as a three-wing athletics complex to house a stadium and facilities for other new teams such as acrobatics and men’s volleyball.

The private Christian university in Grand Rapids, Mich., wasn’t losing students, but it wasn’t growing much, either. Faced with strengthening headwinds, including regional demographic shifts and a shrinking market for small liberal arts institutions, Calvin hired a former University of Oregon offensive analyst as the head football coach, broke ground on the new field and started recruiting players in earnest.

This fall, first-time enrollment grew by 15 percent, from a little over 1,000 students in 2022 to a historic high of 1,150.

Calvin provost Noah Toly said student athletes made up about half of that gain and that the program has already paid for itself. The football team, a 62-man squad that is playing only practice games this year as it prepares for its first season in 2024, drew a crowd of over 3,500 to its inaugural homecoming scrimmage—larger than Calvin’s entire student body.

“It’s a great outcome for us,” Toly said. “It positions us well to recruit more players and nonathletes who just want to come to a college that has football, that has that kind of spirit.”

Older readers might remember Calvin College in Grand Rapids. That was once a Dutch Reformed Church theological seminary, named after John Calvin.  I have to wonder what he would make of mission creep that could involve beer 'n' circuses rather than good works and predestination, although he would no doubt approve of the work ethic of St. Vincent of Green Bay.

THE FRONTIER WASN'T CLOSED IN 1893.

Never mind what the eminent historian might have said.  The latest "Looking Back" from the final MidWeek of November included a reference to frontier justice.

According to report received today, chicken thieves are operating regularly at farms near Shabbona, and unless the thievery ceases, there is likely to be a posse formed and someone given an extra dose of buckshot or rock sale. Reports were received at the office yesterday that the people committing the petty crimes are known, and there is to be a concentrated effort put forth to see that it is stopped.

That Digital History excerpt made much about people from the federal government being there to help, all that talk about rugged individualism notwithstanding.

Turner argued that the conquest of the western frontier as the nation's formative experience, which had shaped the nation's character and values. Western expansion accounted for Americans' optimism, their rugged independence, and their stress on adaptability, ingenuity, and self reliance.

In actuality, however, the settlement of the West had depended, to a surprising degree, on intervention by the federal government. The federal government had dispatched explorers to survey the region and cavalry units to confine Native Americans on reservations. It also provided land grants that funded railroad building, and, in the 20th century, support for dams and other waterworks.

But not, apparently, for bringing chicken thieves to book, although by 1923 the idea that chicken farming was interstate commerce had the force of law.

KURT SCHLICHTER WILL NEVER LACK FOR MATERIAL.

I have my doubts about the geopolitics of his People's Republic series.  That the people turning the People's Republic of North America into an incoherent pesthole along the way do so while saying silly things I have no doubt.  Joanne Jacobs recently came up with another candidate for mockery.

“Marcellus is cooking hot meals to hand out to a small group of twelve Black Lives Matters protestors demonstrating against separating families held at the U.S./Mexico border. He is making a meal of rice, cornbread, and red beans. He wants to make enough red beans for each person to have more than ¾ cup. Determine whether each inequality or number lines correctly models c, the number of red bean Marcellus needs to make."

She quips, "Of course, if Marcellus was doling out Irish stew or if Helga was cooking sauerkraut for neo-Nazis, the answer be the same."  But that wouldn't be social justice mathematics, would it?

Later in the journal article, she complains that test questions are written in standard English, rather than African-American Vernacular English. Solving that would require "separate but equal" assessments written in students' preferred modes of communication. Perhaps text-speak and emojis?

That's right, there's peer-reviewed research, and apparently "separate but equal" is again a thing.  Predictably, the abstract has that stupid use of "interrogate."

Jennifer Randall argues that it is not possible to build race-neutral and cultural-neutral tests, and what the field thinks of as race-neutral actually represents whiteness masquerading as neutrality. She provides a heuristic for interrogating the initial stages of our assessment development process from an antiracist framing to disrupt white supremacist approaches to construct definition and representation.

All the predictable Theory-speak, and when it's done, the students will not be any better at doing mathematics, although the "heuristics" in the paper (unsupported by any field evidence) will create ideological clones of the people play-acting as teachers.  If that sort of language can't make it into a Kelly Turnbull story, it is at least providing entertainment for Real Clear Education's Max Eden.

The mathematical goal is for students to multiply twelve by three-quarters to get nine, and then represent “greater than nine” symbolically. But professor Randall rather butchered the task of making this math question “anti-racist.”

A 6th-grade level literate student might note that the “red beans” is carelessly misspelled in the final sentence. A culinarily literate student might note that the question doesn’t actually ask for the number of cups of red beans that Marcellus needs to make. A generally literate sixth grader might note that Professor Randall misspelled “Black Lives Matter.” A politically literate sixth grader might wonder why, exactly, an organization that recently endorsed Hamas’s rape of women and murder of babies needs to be referenced at all on a standardized test.

But the fundamental idea behind Randall’s work is even more stupid than her exemplar question. In recent years, conservative critics have accused the woke of believing that “2+2=4” is racist. Randall all but agrees that, in fact, it is. “Students are rarely taught ‘2+2=4’ absent of context,” she writes. “And, I argue, that when context is not clear (or seemingly not present), the implied context, historically, has been whiteness.” She is not quite arguing that “foundational math items such as “2+2” are always racist.” But, “[b]ecause we are unaware of this context and the cultural norms/values that students must draw on to respond, “2+2” is not necessarily a neutral item-type and should no longer be referred to as one.”

She means us to believe that it’s better, in other words, to write something like: “Two BLM protestors join two other BLM protestors at a rally against police brutality. How many BLM protestors are rallying for racial justice?”

Even if asking “2+2=4” is the best and most efficient way to know whether students understand the addition of single-digit integers, Randall argues that still shouldn’t ask that question, citing John Rawls. Randall writes, “We understand from the work of Rawls (1999) that policies/practices must be abolished—regardless of their perceived or actual efficiency and standing—if those policies/practices are inherently unjust.”

Professor Randall’s royal “we” here likely refers to critical race theorists (CRT). Her work is shot through with CRT phrases and references to CRT authors.

It has long been the practice of a class of education theorists to invoke Rawls without understanding him, let alone to go behind the veil of ignorance and ask themselves if they would prefer to be born innumerate and raised innumerate.  I never thought that what once circulated as a parody of the Howard Law School bar exam would become a recommended practice in middle school number theory.

I DIDN'T SEE THAT COMING, EITHER.

Sometime during that difficult October stretch for the Green Bay Packers, perhaps it was after that beatdown from Minnesota or perhaps it was one of those close losses to teams with comparably poor records, I observed elsewhere on social media that it was a young team, with players still jelling, and the test for their continued development might take the form of close losses to Detroit and Kansas City, as part of that development is learning how to stay close to objectively better teams.  Then comes the learning to win.

I don't mind being wrong about that meditation.  First came that game at Detroit.  The Packers won the toss, took the ball, took the lead, and didn't relinquish it.

Next, Kansas City came to Green Bay on Sunday night, with Carrie Underwood singing about a "Lambeau showdown," Taylor Swift making an entrance to the skybox, and Simone Biles in parka along the sideline.

I. ADVENT.

A few years ago, when Canadian Pacific's Holiday Train made the jump from Windsor to Chicago, using running powers on CSX, the host railroad objected to the cars being illuminated.

This Festive Season, the United States unit was apparently on Norfolk Southern metals, and the cars were illuminated.

The train continued across Illinois and Iowa on the former Milwaukee Road, once the Byron performance was over.

On that jump, the train continued into Missouri, Arkansas, and Louisiana on former Kansas City Southern metals.  The train is back on The Milwaukee Road, with evening stops in Wisconsin tonight, and Monday and Tuesday nights, followed by a circuit through Minnesota and Iowa.

EVERYONE IS NOW DUMBER.

I watched last week's gubernatorial debate, which Sean Hannity billed as a chance for viewers to compare and contrast populist and technocratic governing styles.  I will credit Mr Hannity for giving the principals, Florida governor Ron DeSantis for the populists and California governor Gavin Newsom for the technocrats, room to expand on their talking points.  In so doing, he addressed a criticism Ben Voth raised to the traditional presidential forums.

Journalist moderators have been chosen for these debates for decades. The problems with moderators are two-fold. First, journalists have come to occupy a prominent argumentative position in the debates. In the 1990s, journalist moderators would occupy roughly 5 percent of the speaking time in debates. In the most recent series, moderator Chris Wallace consumed more than 25 percent of the speaking time.

There are no established limits for moderator monologues about politics to which candidates are expected to respond. Secondly, journalist moderators indicate a pattern of favoritism toward the Democratic nominee.

That is the most annoying part of those performances.  The argumentative journalist offers a Complex Proposition going on for longer than the time limit the candidate is expected to respect.  Does it come as any surprise that under such circumstances the candidate might deflect or resort to tangentially salient talking points?  Make Sean Hannity moderator and claim he shows favoritism to the Republican, and Mr Newsom's behavior is true to the candidate form.

It does little good, dear reader, when nothing of substance gets said.  Reason's Eric Boehm has a Billy Madison moment of his own.

Though it was sold as a showdown between the chief executives of what may be America's most iconic "red" and "blue" states—and perhaps a preview of a presidential campaign next year or in 2028—the debate quickly devolved into a nearly unwatchable mess. The two men kept talking over one another while the moderator, Fox News host Sean Hannity, struggled to keep the conversation focused.

Newsom had little interest in engaging with the premise of the debate: which state had a better style of governance. It's hard to blame him for that. California is losing population, it has a higher unemployment rate than Florida, and its residents suffer under significantly higher taxes. The first 20 minutes of the debate consisted of Hannity teeing up those facts one after the next, letting DeSantis swing away, and then asking Newsom to explain why California seems to suck. That was never going to produce a productive discussion, and it didn't.

Instead, Newsom played the role of loyal Joe Biden surrogate—he started his very first answer of the night with "I'm here to tell the truth about the Biden/Harris record." And since he had little interest in defending his own track record, it quickly became obvious that Newsom was on the debate stage to rope-a-dope DeSantis into losing his cool and looking unserious.

He largely succeeded. "Ron, relax," he chuckled at one point near the end of the 90-minute affair, after hooking the Flordia governor into another loud and meaningless shoutfest.

About the best Mr Newsom could do was note that there's a net out-migration of Floridians to California.

THAT DEFLATING COLLEGE SPORTS BUBBLE.

It has long been the Cold Spring Shops position that institutions of higher education think of themselves as in the same business as the Ivies, and conduct themselves in such a way that matriculants get the intellectual challenges that develop strong minds.

There are a lot more students enrolled in upwardly mobile Compass Point State universities than there are in the Ivies, or the Catholic institutions with or without basketball or football, or in the state flagships. Notionally, the policy within each state is to ensure a place somewhere in the state university system to graduates in good standing of the high schools in the states, and the upwardly mobile and converted teachers' colleges ought not be viewed as consolation prizes for high school seniors who didn't make the cut at their state's flagship institution. The athletic department might view football as the front porch to the university. What goes on in the kitchen and the rumpus room and the study also matters.

Over the past sixty or seventy years, that "upwardly mobile" has been a way for empire-building administrators to convert state teachers' colleges and former seminaries into universities.  On the academic side, sometimes that translates into additional graduate and professional schools, and on rare occasions grant-getting and the indirect cost returns therefrom, the better to be plowed back into fancier development offices.  More commonly, though, the students attracted by the concept of a university disengage, perhaps inspired by careerist professors playing the Glass Bead Game rather than competing in their disciplines.

SEPARATING FOR LIGHT AND TRANSIENT CAUSES?

I'm going to combine observations on Kurt Schlichter's Inferno and Overlord, the two most recent Kelly Turnbull novels, now the seventh and eighth of a series, into a combined post.  The post therefore comprises Book Reviews N^o. 14 and N^o. 15, although we might view it as revising and extending a previous omnibus post dealing with the fourth through sixth novels.  In that post, I noted, "It's difficult to write speculative fiction in the middle of events, and I suspect that turning Kelly Turnbull loose to frustrate the wokies and kill people, whilst mocking the coastal cosmopolitans and their pronoun protocols and other manifestations of effete snobbery might sell more books than, oh, tackling the substantive political economy of separation, which was hinted at in Conservative Insurgency, and which calls for more concreteness as the Jarrett regency continues to flail."  That series of reviews concluded with the liberation of part of the West Coast in Collapse to prevent the Chinese from turning California into a colony.  Afterwards, the People's Republic fragmented further, with a west coast capital somewhere in Washington, er, Hillaryia, and another either in the Douglass Commonwealth or somewhere around New York.  The details don't matter; neither does the involvement of Russia on the side of the eastern half, nor an apparent European war and English civil war going on at the same time.  And, as with the previous books, the Colonel concludes, "Don't let this fiction become nonfiction."

FRIDAY short TAKES.

If everything is a crisis, does it follow that nothing is?  "You’d think people would be tired by now of these 'sky is falling' pronouncements, but apparently you'd be wrong given the sheer bulk of them, and the crazier-than-last-time feel most have."  The bulk of them exist to keep the punditry in work.  "I think of 'permacrisis' as as a political strategy to make people feel that we are always in special dire circumstances, justifying unusual emergency measures, and warranting the sacrifice of our personal pleasure and freedom."  If it's not fifteen days to slow the spread, it's security screening at the airport, or the 55 mph speed limit, or something else that warrants breathless coverage on the evening news, at least until Normals tire of it.  "A counter-narrative is brewing. Will it prevail over the dominant 'progressive' dispensation? No one knows for sure. I take the panic sweeping like a tsunami through the fetid corridors of the Left as a good sign. They are worried, which means that the rest of us have grounds for hope."  None too soon, either.  Corona compliance?  That was for the little people.  "The more we sounded the alarm bell the more we were demonized."  So it always is with credibility gaps.

The weekly round-up of pithy elaborations of traditional Cold Spring Shops themes follows.