DON'T LET THE GOOD PLAYERS DO ALL THE WORK. A substitute coach in a youth soccer league experiments with playing to win. (Via Joanne Jacobs.)

Every week you’ve been told that the important thing is just to have a good time. Well, this week it’s going to be different. The number one goal is to win; the number two goal is to have a good time. But I assure you: if you win, you will have a much better time!

They won, they had a better time, and they discovered that free-riding on the efforts of the better performer wasn't quite enough.

THE HOTTEST TICKET IN DEKALB. It's the Elburn Shuttle.

Some students take the shuttle because it is faster and cheaper than
driving.

"I take it because I have to commute, and I don't want my parents coming all the way up from Geneva," said Travis Reed, junior electrical engineering major. "It's a lot faster than driving, though it does get pretty busy on Friday."

It runs Fridays and Sundays, sometimes in multiple sections.

One of these days the county and Metra and Union Pacific will get their act together and we'll have proper commuter trains.

AMERICA'S TEAM. That would be the Packers, not the Cowboys.

NOBODY PAYS LIST PRICE. That's because, where there are third party payments, the incentives to discover the factor-minimal bundle are attenuated.

Cato’s Neal McCluskey writes here about the impact of government student aid; it’s more accurate to call it “college aid” because it helps schools to bring in more money, spend it, and then claim that students need more “help.” He marshals some strong evidence.

Obama is jetting around the country, telling audiences to vote for Democrats because they are so dedicated to keeping college “affordable.” But increasing government subsidy for attending college doesn’t lower costs — it increases them and spreads them to taxpayers who would rather do something else with their money if they had any choice.

To be specific:

Because students are able to cover the incessantly rising prices. And how can students do that? By using more and more money that comes from someone else!

The data scream this reality so loudly even passed-out undergrads could hear it. So why does it get so little attention? In part, no doubt, because many in the media refuse to even consider that there could be a causal connection between ballooning aid and skyrocketing prices.

Case in point: I just purchased The Cars of Pullman, a full-size, lavishly illustrated, short press run book for $40. A similarly-sized paperback textbook of 182 pages would likely set you back almost $100, and the publishers would want to revise it after three years. Our bookstore is now seeking the cooperation of faculty in keeping students' book bill below $700, as that is how much money financial aid authorized. I don't believe in coincidences.

The article, written before the election, speculates on the ability of the Democrats to buy votes by being generous with the grants and loans. How's that hope and change working out?

A related article suggests another source of social waste in the grants and loans.

Just as housing subsidies incentivized people to purchase homes that they otherwise shouldn’t have, higher education subsidies have incentivized people to go to college who weren’t ready or suited for it. In both cases, the cost to taxpayers has been substantial while the alleged benefits have proven illusory.

The higher education establishment's loyalty to Democrats might well be repaid in light of the election results. Think of the Pell Grants and the national endowments as Grenada. The Berlin Wall comes later.

THE LAND OF LINCOLN, REPUBLICAN BY ACREAGE. These maps, from The American Thinker, show the Republican majorities by county or district in red and the Democratic majorities in blue.

American Thinker graphic from Yahoo Elections Dashboard.

Governor Quinn, a Democrat, and Senator-elect Kirk, a Republican, both won narrowly, meaning the colorations are insufficiently nuanced. There are enough Democrats in the State House to make the reapportionment interesting.

SHORTER RACHEL MADDOW. A Fox News pundit can put his money where his mouth is. A pundit at MSNBC can't.

TRENCHANT OBSERVATION OF THE DAY. There's been a lot written about the election results. Peggy Noonan says Americans Vote for Maturity.

Electable doesn't mean not-conservative. Electable means mature, accomplished, stable—and able to persuade.

Conservatives talked a lot about Ronald Reagan this year, but they have to take him more to heart, because his example here is a guide. All this seemed lost last week on Sarah Palin, who called him, on Fox, "an actor." She was defending her form of political celebrity—reality show, "Dancing With the Stars," etc. This is how she did it: "Wasn't Ronald Reagan an actor? Wasn't he in 'Bedtime for Bonzo,' Bozo, something? Ronald Reagan was an actor."

Excuse me, but this was ignorant even for Mrs. Palin. Reagan people quietly flipped their lids, but I'll voice their consternation to make a larger point. Ronald Reagan was an artist who willed himself into leadership as president of a major American labor union (Screen Actors Guild, seven terms, 1947-59.) He led that union successfully through major upheavals (the Hollywood communist wars, labor-management struggles); discovered and honed his ability to speak persuasively by talking to workers on the line at General Electric for eight years; was elected to and completed two full terms as governor of California; challenged and almost unseated an incumbent president of his own party; and went on to popularize modern conservative political philosophy without the help of a conservative infrastructure. Then he was elected president.

The point is not "He was a great man and you are a nincompoop," though that is true. The point is that Reagan's career is a guide, not only for the tea party but for all in politics. He brought his fully mature, fully seasoned self into politics with him. He wasn't in search of a life when he ran for office, and he wasn't in search of fame; he'd already lived a life, he was already well known, he'd accomplished things in the world.

Here is an old tradition badly in need of return: You have to earn your way into politics. You should go have a life, build a string of accomplishments, then enter public service. And you need actual talent: You have to be able to bring people in and along. You can't just bully them, you can't just assert and taunt, you have to be able to persuade.

Although her comments focus on Governor Palin, something in that last line brings a Hawaiian basketball player to mind.

UNIVERSITIES ARE FAILING AT THEIR MISSION. Margaret Soltan reviews Craig Brandon's The Five Year Party.

A recovering Keene State University professor, Brandon is angry that so many of our schools just sit there, stewing in 4 Loko, flunkies, and football; he notes that although almost no one learns anything on these campuses, plenty of party school students graduate -- alcoholic, big with debt, and as intellectually null as they were on entry.

Must add this book to the pile of items to review. Regular readers know that universities leave money on the table by succumbing to these temptations, rather than making the effort to be more substantial.

Brandon rages, chapter after chapter, at the waste of money, time, and intellect party schools represent; he's scandalized by the sheer danger of attending them: "[I]f you concentrate five thousand to twenty thousand adolescents in an area of a few acres and figure that about 40 percent of them are intoxicated at any one time, date rape [among many other crimes] is perhaps the inevitable result." He talks about death by fraternity, sadistic fraternities, fraternities that kill. He definitely doesn't like fraternities.

I don't want to seem glib. Brandon's book is right about almost everything - about the mercenary motives of these schools, their demoralized professors and wasted students... But it's wrong about one big thing. Brandon thinks that serious numbers of the parents of these students care. Or that they would care if they knew what he's telling them in his book. His book's rather patronizing subtitle evokes a world of wee ones whom pa and ma are trying to protect...

That's intriguing. Shorter form: the parents are aliterate, ergo it is no surprise that their children are also aliterate.

Stop enabling aliteracy, you'll get less of it.

HOW OTHERS SEE US. Der Spiegel sagt 'Obama Comes Across as Cold, Arrogant and Elitist'. There's a variety of opinion on offer. Even in translation, it's clear that the Germans don't get the Leave Us Alone Coalition.

Another article from the same magazine makes an instructive comparison.

When America is feeling self-confident and optimistic it can adore this kind of president, like John F. Kennedy was idolized during the Camelot era. However, an America that is uncertain and at odds with itself can find it hard to place its trust in someone who seems so perfect. That too helps to explain why so many people see the former community worker as a member of the establishment -- someone who is allegedly in cahoots with Wall Street and who doesn't take care of ordinary people.

One may find it ironic, unfair even, that the Republicans are profiting from this. But Obama must realize that he himself is part of the problem. That is his only chance of repeating Bill Clinton's success. Clinton shifted towards the center following the crushing defeat for his Democrats in the 1994 Congressional elections.

In the Fourth Turning scheme of things, Mr Kennedy took office toward the end of a High. He was not quite the right man to manage the beginning of a secular challenge to the existing order, but then, neither were Presidents Johnson nor Nixon. Mr Obama is taking office toward the end of an Unraveling. That's approximately the position Herbert Hoover and James Buchanan found themselves in.

THE CHART OF THE DAY. Randall Hoven of The American Thinker has harsh words for Our President.

Say all you want about how Obama inherited this recession; he wants credit for the recovery. So let's give him the recovery. Look at how it compares to all the other postwar recession recoveries. To us ignorant, unwashed hillbillies, it sure looks like Obama's "recovery" is going nowhere slowly.

Out of eleven recession recoveries, Obama's is the only one that did not go above its pre-recession GDP peak by the third quarter of recovery. It is still not there even by the fifth quarter. It is one of only two in which there were fewer jobs fifteen months into the recovery than at the beginning of it. Yes, the hole was slightly deeper this time, but there is little evidence that we are even crawling out of it.

I think I know what some of you might say: Obama is only on the bottom of those charts because he started out in the deepest hole. Sorry, but even the rate of improvement in this recovery is historically anemic. The growth in GDP is the third-slowest of the eleven postwar recessions, and the growth in jobs is the second-slowest.

He's reacting to the Establishment spin, which once again seeks to lay off a failure of The Best And The Brightest on the false consciousness or susceptibility to influence or just plain stupidity of the electorate.

American Thinker chart.
Source: St. Louis Fed/FRED, GDPC96 and PAYEMS series..

Because the trigger for this recession is a financial reset, the path of recovery might be different. The very ambition of the Obama Administration, by changing a lot of laws at a same time that tax rate cuts were about to expire, might have compounded the uncertainty. You'd think that's the kind of thing a professor with a lectern could say.

FIFTY YEARS OF ENABLING FAILURE, ENABLED.

During the campaign season, I recall numerous Serious People ruminating about how the Tea Party was going to turn the Republican Party into a regional reliquary of religiosity. Demography, and fault lines in the Republican coalition, are not yet destiny. (I've encountered versions of this prediction going back to the end of the Reagan administration, often as wishful thinking by the opposition.) Now that the votes are mostly counted, more than a few Serious People are calling the election outcome (which, by all objective standards is a Republican wave of historic proportions) a failure because a few Tea Party candidates managed to prevent the Republicans from securing the Senate.

A DIFFERENT MORPHOLOGY. The Fourth Turning references at Cold Spring Shops come from an hypothesis of social evolution in which the life experiences of different generations shape their attitudes, which feeds back on the responses they make to situations they find themselves in.

Richard Florida's The Great Reset: How New Ways of Living and Working Drive Post-Crash Prosperity proposes a different hypothesis of social evolution, one more amenable to economic analysis, in which financial markets on occasion seriously misallocate capital, in ways that are a long time developing and foreseeable, albeit poorly foreseen, and the resulting disequilibrium takes a long time to unwind.

If his hypothesis is true, Book Review N^o. 27 is at once the gloomiest and the most optimistic report filed for this year. Professor Florida suggests that the current financial crisis, and the attendant stagnation in the industrial and consumer sectors, have more in common with the Long Depression that began in 1873 than with the more famous Great Depression that began in agriculture in the middle 1920s and caught the financial economy's attention late in 1929.

His use of the expression "reset" refers to the adjustment of the economy to new technologies that are emerging at the same time existing patterns of production and consumption break down. These can be frustrating times because at the same time the financial markets are re-evaluating projects that work, the consumer economy is attempting to find new uses for resources, and from among the potential new ideas, the best uses haven't yet emerged. Thus a public policy that attempts to restart a consumer economy based on McMansions financed by bubblelicious loans with obnoxious SUVs in the garage and a flat-screen TV bigger than Edison's movie screen will get the back of the invisible hand, hard.

What, then, is to be done? Professor Florida favors public policies that encourage the agglomeration of creative thinkers, the better to foster that emergence. But those public policies have an element of vanguardism. The National Endowment for the Arts as a way of fostering creativity in design and marketing? Does it really pay for artists to get grants reviewed by other artists to produce exotica that very few people will look at, when upscale businesses are willing to pay for designs Virginia Postrel will rave about? Passenger Rail to allow creative people to think or nap or network during their commutes? Sure, but there are cheaper ways to provide the trains, and a complementary policy that makes the trains more attractive by making roads less pleasant will be a tough sell.

Provocative, worth reading, probably better at anticipating the outlines of what will follow than at providing a plan for getting there.

(Cross-posted to 50 Book Challenge.)

FISCAL RESPONSIBILITY AND REGULATORY REFORM.

A series of articles on the folly of spending money on European-style high-speed electric passenger trains inadvertently make the case for the Cold Spring Shops "give them their head to 110" campaign.

RECOGNIZING THE ROOT CAUSES. David French of Phi Beta Cons reflects on the monuments we have destroyed.

We live in an ignorant culture -- and I'm not just talking about our failing public schools. Our elite universities are failing us also, turning out graduates who are (to borrow Glenn Reynolds' phrase) "credentialed, not educated." In other words, our educated elite -- our ruling class -- often isn't elite at all, but instead their minds and hearts are jammed with fashionable nonsense, including a naïve, Epcot Center view of multiculturalism, hostility, and ignorance toward our own history and culture, and ever-diminishing adherence to orthodox faith.

We live in increasing decadence. And by "decadence" I'm not necessarily referring to the hedonism that's overtaking our youth, but to the selfishness that underlies our spiraling divorce and illegitimacy rates. Our marriage rate diminishes as we want life on our own terms, on our own timing, with children often along for the (very rocky) ride.

We let others fight our wars. In our nation's history no major war has ever been fought with a lower percentage of Americans in uniform than our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. While not all young people are called to serve, it is distressing how few even consider it. During my year in Iraq, I saw heroism that I could scarcely comprehend, as young soldiers gave everything to protect us and to save the lives of their brothers. Yet the war merely hovers on the edge of our consciousness, and these young men and women have less influence on our youth than Lady Gaga.

In "The Cost of Correctness" I wrote "Deny coherent beliefs of any kind: enjoy incoherence."

Thanks, post-modernists and multiculturalists.

VINDICATION. In 1991, I wrote an essay titled "The Cost of Correctness" for a long-since closed down Faculty Bulletin at Northern Illinois. It opened with "Universities are failing to carry out their mission. Contributing to this failure is a collection of ideas we call 'politically correct.'" It may not have changed many minds, but after further review, I have little reason to change mine. The editor chose to highlight this passage: "Given all the competing demands on our time, that people have continued to read and appreciate these dead white males suggests that their work has value." Now comes an essay by Lindsay Johns in Britain's Prospect titled "In praise of dead white men".

Dead white men, the pillars of the western canon, remain supremely relevant to black people in the 21st century, because their concerns are universal. At its best, the canon elucidates the eternal truths at the heart of the human condition. It addresses our common humanity, irrespective of our melanin quotient. Homer, Virgil, Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Dickens—all male, all very white and all undeniably very dead. But would anyone be so foolish as to deny their enduring importance? Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy, Boccacio’s Decameron or Pico’s Oration On The Dignity of Man are as germane to black people as they are to white. There is no apartheid in the philosophical musings of Cicero, no racial segregation in the cosmic grandeur of Dante and no ethnic oppression in the amorous sonnets of Shakespeare. These works can, if given the chance, speak as much to Leroy in Peckham or Shaniqua in the South Bronx as they can to Quentin in the home counties.

It's part of a Prospect special feature on the failings of multiculturalism in Britain that appears to be otherwise sequestered behind a pay wall.

DON'T BE STUPID ABOUT BEING SMART. Our President's supporters, and more than a few of his detractors, credit him for being reflective and receptive to differing points of view. And yet, it is again possible to fly from coast to coast without ever entering the air space of a Democratic district.

Dorothy Rabinowitz suggests that preparation matters.

Whatever the outcome of today's election, this much is clear: It will be a long time before Americans ever again decide that the leadership of the nation should go to a legislator of negligible experience—with a voting record, as state and U.S. senator, consisting largely of "present," and an election platform based on glowing promises of transcendence. A platform vowing, unforgettably, to restore us—a country lost to arrogance and crimes against humanity—to a place of respect in the world.

Perspective matters.

At a Democratic fund-raiser a few weeks ago, the president noted, in explanation for the Democrats' lack of enthusiasm, that facts and science and argument aren't winning the day because "we're hard-wired not to always think clearly when we're scared." The suggestion was clear: The Democrats' growing resistance to his policies was a product of the public's lack of intellectual capacity and their fears.

And the company you keep matters.

What you probably won't hear, at least from many Democrats, is any admission that President Obama and his allies in Congress overreached by pushing a big-government agenda on a country skeptical of centralized government planning and bureaucracy and tired of excessive government spending.

And we now have a Congress in which both major parties are more in thrall to their true believers.

HOW INEFFECTIVE ARE CONNECTICUT'S HIGH SCHOOLS? The Office of Retaining Students Who Weren't Prepared in the First Place never lacks for work. (Via Joanne Jacobs)

Seventy-two percent of Connecticut’s high school graduates who go on to community college aren’t prepared for college work, according to a state education group. The remediation rate is 65 percent for graduates enrolling at four state universities.

“Connecticut has a significant college readiness gap that is threatening our ability to replenish our workforce,” said Michael Meotti, the state’s commissioner of higher education. “We are fortunate that with 3 out of 4 high school graduates going onto college, we have one of the highest college-going rates in the country. But now we are finding that many of these students are not college ready.”

Only 54 percent of Connecticut high school graduates who go directly to college will earn a certificate or degree.

I'll never lack for work either. For five years, Cold Spring Shops has noted the unfavorable cost-benefit ratio of producing dropouts by making a bad job of middle and high school followed by two or three semesters of repeating middle school in college, something that probably discourages some of those collegians. The Cold Spring Shops suggestion is that colleges send the high schools that failed to prepare those students the bill for the remedial courses, and although the idea has not caught on, the liquidity constraint confronting governments has not gone away.

MISPLACED ENTHUSIASM. A Northern Star investigation discovered that Northern Illinois University lost money on its Independence Bowl appearance. Profit or loss, it doesn't diminish the editorial board's enthusiasm for Tuesday Night Football.

Next Tuesday evening, NIU football hosts MAC-rival Toledo, in what is one of the biggest games in program history. With ESPN coming to DeKalb to shine a national spotlight on the Huskies, it is in both the university's and football program's best interest to cancel classes for the afternoon and pack Huskie Stadium.

The idea does not come without precedent. In actuality, it's a trend mid-majors are beginning to embrace more and more when their programs are given the opportunity to be showcased on a national stage: Southern Mississippi in 2007, the University of Texas-El Paso in 2009 and, most recently, the University of Central Florida last month, to name a few notable instances.

Heck, the University of Washington is making football recess respectable among the state flagships.

The students are free to ask for a recess. So far headquarters has gone on with business as usual. That's the proper attitude.

[Washington] will be able to showcase nationally how it doesn’t give a shit about holding classes, and this will persuade thousands of the most brilliant potential applicants that they should apply to the University of Washington.

Saturday is for college football.

NEITHER RAIL FAN NOR RAIL PROFESSIONAL. That's what makes James McCommons's Waiting on a Train: The Embattled Future of Passenger Rail Service, A Year Spent Riding Across America such a compelling read, and, now that the summer Trip Report has been filed, material for Book Review N^o. 26. Part ethnography, part policy advocacy, part business reporting, Waiting on a Train exposes readers to the Springer show that often plays out in the coaches; to the perspectives freight railroaders have about a passenger train, often with unreliable equipment, gumming up their transportation machinery; to the differing visions of successive Amtrak managements; and to the sometimes wishful thinking of state and national transportation planners.

Mr McCommons lives in the Iron and Copper Country of Upper Michigan, and he opens by noting the loss of the Peninsula 400 and the Green Bay corridor. Thus, many of his trips, sometimes solo, sometimes excursions with his sons, begin with a bus ride to Milwaukee to pick up a Hiawatha (generally routine, on time or ahead of time, as regular readers know, but when there's a pedestrian fatality, seriously late: is it necessary for the coroner to hold up a train and several hundred people for three hours as has been the case in my experience?)

Sometimes his trips are for family purposes or recreation, sometimes to interview senior railroad managers or Passenger Rail officials. He manages to cover almost all of the Amtrak system, including the southerly and southwestern segments that have not yet been marked up on the Cold Spring Shops map. Some of the trains are good, some of the trains are not good, some of the cost-cutting measures such as the cafe-lounge that replaces both Sightseer Lounge and diner on some long-distance trains please nobody, some of the crew are helpful, and some are crabby. Mr McCommons gets some details wrong in ways that will annoy serious ferroequinologists; on the other hand his discoveries of the South Shore Line (electric cars outside my window: what's that?) and some other railroading gems the ferroequinologists tend to take for granted are charming.

(Cross-posted to 50 Book Challenge.)

THE TRAGIC VISION, IN ONE SENTENCE. It's a question from the dean at Anonymous Community.

Is there a way to reward colleges for improving graduation rates without inadvertently rewarding stupidity?

The context for the question is Texas's new disclosure requirements, which inter alia condition state funding for its universities, colleges, and junior colleges on completion rates. The tradeoff, which the dean's post and the bull session participants confront, is that being more selective in admissions increases the proportion of students who satisfy the completion criteria, but there are fewer students. At Cold Spring Shops, that's a feature, not a tradeoff, although we probably take a harder line on second, third, ..., n^th chances than some.

The Texas disclosure requirements go so far as to require universities to report the profit or loss generated by each department, and within each department, the faculty member. James Joyner at Outside the Beltway concurs in part and dissents in part.

Many if not most states have too many universities, too many overlapping programs and departments, and are generally run as if it were still the 1940s. Certainly, this was the case in the state of Alabama, where I earned my three degrees. Fifteen public four-year universities is about ten too many for a relatively small state with only 4.3 million people. And that actually understates the number, since many of these schools have satellite campuses in other parts of the state. Troy University, where I used to teach and Steven Taylor still does, has major campuses in Troy, Dothan, and Montgomery. Which means that Montgomery alone has three four-year campuses funded by the public. Twenty-six public two-year colleges is likely too many as well. (There are also numerous private institutions which compete against these, but they’re at least not as heavily subsidized.)

Even aside from the macro picture, there are doubtless plenty of professors who are dead weight. Either they’ve long stopped being effective teachers or researchers but hang on due to tenure, or they were hired in a different demand climate and now don’t have enough students to justify their salaries.

The problem, however, is that the metrics the educrats are likely to use won’t address these problems and, indeed, will exacerbate them. At TAMU, they’re reportedly “weighing annual salary against students taught, tuition generated, and research grants obtained.”

The kicker is in those metrics.

“Students taught” is a useful floor metric. If a professor is mostly teaching sections of three to five students and not doing much in the way of research, they’re likely not pulling their weight. (I qualify only because there may be disciplines and circumstances where those low numbers would be justified.) But the obvious educrat response to this metric is to jam more people into each section of introductory classes and to cancel lower demand specialty courses required for majors, making it very difficult for students to tailor their degree.

Because the educrats also have the silly idea that anybody can teach an introductory class (imagine The Marine Corps without those 20-year veteran drill sergeants), further down that road comes the Rent-A-Prof reading slides to those members of the class that showed up to update their social networks once they'd downloaded the slides. As one of the commenters in the Anonymous Community bull session notes, "It is easy to teach down to a specific set of narrow outcomes and produce students who are unprepared for anything after graduation. How long before Texas employers complain about college grads like they complain about HS grads?" I'm beginning to see the effects of so-called high-stakes testing in my classes. The notion that university students can engage in, in fact are encouraged to engage in, indeed might be recognized for excellence in, original thought, terrifies some people. But wait, there's more ...

“Tuition generated” is not a metric with which I’m familiar. Indeed, aside from a handful of superstars here and there, I can’t conjure how it is that a faculty member will “generate” tuition. Students come to institutions, not to study with individual professors.

In any event, tuition generation is an exercise in cost allocation, and cost allocation is an exercise in arbitrariness. Is the tuition generated adjusted on a per-student basis for the costs of the Office of Retaining Students Who Probably Shouldn't Have Been Admitted in the First Place, or is the revenue of the mathematics department reduced because the sub-numerates place a larger burden on the tutoring service, or the revenue of the communications department reduced because that's where the athletes go, or increased to the extent that ticket sales contribute to the position of the university?

Then there's the issue of how to reward scholarship.

“Research grants obtained” is a very useful metric in a handful of disciplines, notably in the hard sciences. But most research in most disciplines don’t and shouldn’t require research grants. Regardless, the amusing thing about this measure is that it’s contrary to the others. That is, it encourages professors to spend their time and energy chasing grants and writing up research proposals in order to generate revenues that they bring in to the school . . . most of which is spent pursuing the research in question. Aside from PhD-granting institutions, where graduate students can join in on the project and enhance their prospects for future employment, this process will have the effect of taking professors away from their core function of teaching students.

Yes, but remember that the mentality is one of running departments as profit centers. (Never mind that in some disciplines, obtaining a consultantship without running any proposals through the government and foundation mill is simpler, and permissible subject to conflict of interest regulations). The requirement, however, might induce some administrators to emulate the institutions that are at the top of the U.S. News league tables, and draw the obvious inferences about access-assessment-remediation-retention. And Randy Moss will be a perfect gentleman in the locker room.

I'm overanalyzing. Professor Bainbridge is ticked off.

There was a highly annoying article in today's WSJ about the way state governments are trying to turn universities into factories stamping out job ready proles. Not surprisingly, the charge is being lead by my fellow conservatives, who in the last 20 years have gone from prizing the life of the mind to prizing anti-intellectual morons.

Just go there and enjoy.