BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU ASK FOR. The incoming Republican governors of Wisconsin and Ohio asked to cancel Passenger Rail projects, but also asked to keep the money for road improvements. The national government awarded the money to Passenger Rail projects in other states instead.

California will get the largest share of the money ($624 million), with the rest going to Florida ($342.3 million), Washington ($161.5 million), and Illinois ($42.3 million).

Smaller amounts will go to nine other states.

The Illinois allocation is for additional improvements to the GM&O line to St. Louis (which has been home to occasional 90 mph or 110 mph speed tests, but as of yet no speeded up schedules.)

Wisconsin will keep an appropriation of $2 million for improvements between Lake and Ranney that might permit improvements on the 1938 timings. Apparently some other improvements to the Milwaukee service are budgeted as the Madison extension.

Wisconsin also was allowed to retain up to $2 million to fund upgrades on Amtrak's existing Milwaukee-to-Chicago Hiawatha line. But that won't cover the $19.4 million cost of renovating the train shed at Milwaukee's downtown Amtrak-Greyhound station or the $52 million cost of building a new maintenance base for two newly purchased trains, two projects that would have been included in the original $810 million budget.

Minnesota still wants faster passenger service to Chicago, but the routing is yet to be determined.

RESERVATION WAGES ARE POSITIVE. A humanities Ph.D. discovers that freeway flying doesn't cover the daycare bill.

The community colleges take advantage of the overproduction of English and humanities Ph.D.s by paying extremely low salaries. One can argue that this is simply supply and demand, and there is some truth to this, especially since Ph.D.s are competing with those with master’s degrees for the same adjunct teaching positions. Many of us stick with it because we get into our heads the idea that teaching experience will help us to get tenure-track positions elsewhere. But that’s not true. The two are unrelated. Publishing papers gets you a tenure- track position, not teaching experience.

In the meantime, colleges that pay adjuncts low wages are getting what they are paying for. As any economist will tell you, higher wages will get greater productivity out of your workers (up to a critical level, of course, which varies from job to job), while lower wages will get you employees who do as much work as they think the wages are really worth. There are exceptions, but one has to look at the average; the problem is structural, not personal.

It's not quite "they pretend to pay us and we pretend to work" but you get the picture. The essayist hints that coolie wages come bundled with hints to teach to the test, which is not necessarily a test of higher level concepts.

THEY'RE NOT WRITING ABOUT OUR BOWL CHANCES. The Student Association Senate at Northern Illinois University flaunts the First Amendment five by five, which draws an observation from Reason's Jacob Sullum.

Given their inflated sense of their own importance and their experience in passing blatantly unconstitutional legislation just because they're offended by something, these guys seem qualified to be real senators someday.

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education has an open case file. Northern Illinois University: Unequal Treatment of Political and Religious Student Organizations, with links to ongoing correspondence with the administration.

LEADING INDICATOR? Put a housing start in the income accounts.

DeKalb, Illinois, 8 December 2010.

The weather isn't conducive to digging, or to pouring concrete, but bales of straw are being delivered to the job site.

THE GRAND ARMY OF THE REPUBLIC. It's the second week of deer camp.

The state of Wisconsin has gone an entire deer hunting season without someone getting killed. That’s great. There were over 600,000 hunters.

Allow me to restate that number. Over the last two months, the eighth largest army in the world – more men under arms than Iran; more than France and Germany combined – deployed to the woods of a single American state to help keep the deer menace at bay.

But that pales in comparison to the 750,000 who are in the woods of Pennsylvania this week. Michigan’s 700,000 hunters have now returned home. Toss in a quarter million hunters in West Virginia, and it is literally the case that the hunters of those four states alone would comprise the largest army in the world.

These numbers are part of why those of us who grew up in rural parts of the country simply don’t comprehend the gun-grabbing impulses of some. Every single year, millions of Americans carry high power rifles into the woods and more or less do as they please – some shoot at deer, some just drink a lot – and it is a complete non-story. The number of people injured and killed by these guns will pale in comparison to those injured and killed in driving accidents during the same time period.

The geopolitical musings that follow are a bit much, even on a night of exam punch-drunkenness, but I bet those hunters skew Republican in their voting.

A tip of the deer-stalker to Outside the Beltway. Give Da Yoopers credit for da title.

THE COLD WAR BETWEEN ADMINISTRATORS AND ECONOMISTS CONTINUES. Two University Diaries posts feature economists throwing the flag on sports subsidies.

At Rutgers, it's Mark R. Killingsworth in the Newark Star-Ledger, questioning the connection between sports visibility and enrollments.

The hoped-for spillover benefits from football to the academic program have also failed to materialize. According to the university’s Office of Institutional Research, there has been no appreciable change in SAT scores or in the enrollment “yield” — the percentage of admitted students who actually attend — at Rutgers’ flagship New Brunswick campus, relative to other large public-research universities.

The article doesn't say opportunity cost, but resources are going into sports facilities, not academic departments.

It reduced the number of classes it offers and increased the size of the classes that weren’t canceled. Hiring of faculty has been restricted; support for research has been cut; faculty pay has been frozen. In my own department, Economics — which has the third-largest number of majors in the School of Arts and Sciences — two-thirds of student credit hours are taught by part-timers, adjuncts, teaching assistants and others who are not tenure or tenure-track faculty.

So the inevitable happened. In 1997, U.S. News & World Report ranked Rutgers 16th among undergraduate programs at major state universities. As of the latest rankings, released in September, Rutgers slipped to 23rd. As of 1995, the National Research Council ranked 11 Rutgers graduate programs among the top 25 in their respective fields. In contrast, in the 2010 NRC rankings of the same departments, only eight programs are among the top 25 in their field.

University money goes to the positional arms race in sports. Tuition money goes to the positional arms race in U.S. News.

At [Southwest] Missouri State, it's Reed Olsen in the Springfield News-Leader. The university has a new basketball arena that's losing money.

Olsen, who last year disputed a university claim that the arena was paying for itself, questioned the makeup of the committee, saying it consists of people who were part of the problem.

Nothing to see here, move along. But the powers that be don't understand sunk costs.

Now the viability of the athletics department is even more important because it is linked to the financial health of JQH Arena.

"If you don't have athletics, you can't pay off JQH," [new president James] Cofer said.

So you lose more money on sports, but gosh darn it, you're slowly paying off the arena. That's called throwing good money after bad, even in the Ozarks, and you might lose less money dropping the athletics and having the bank foreclose on the arena. Springfield is close enough to Branson that some country-music promoter might be willing to work out a short sale.

ALL THE LIVE-LONG DAY. Working on North America's least labor-friendly railroad is more attractive than playing for a contending football team.

[Defensive back Keith] Fitzhugh has been working as a conductor for the Norfolk Southern railroad and says he likes his job. Plus, he's got a family to take care of and being the 53rd man on [the Jets'] roster is not exactly long-term job.

The article doesn't say where on Norfolk Southern he's working, and whether he's 53rd out on the extra board.

WHY SCHOOL CHOICE FOSTERS EFFICIENCY. Rockford public school administrators don't get it.

All the talk of cutting honors classes for some several hundred students has some uncertain if they want their child to stay in District 205 schools.

The idea is meant to be more efficient and reduce costs. However, District 205's latest proposal to cut honors classes is prompting parents to explore options at private and parochial schools.

For the 2^k-th time, for k large, efficiency is the identification and realization of gains from trade. Voluntarily downsizing your school district by driving the motivated students out reduces costs, aye, but with what effect on the children left behind?

"We've seen an increase in the phone calls that are coming in from people asking about our honors program," Don Kortze with Rockford Lutheran School said.

Top educators at Rockford Lutheran School and Keith Country Day School said dozens of parents have reached out to them. Both schools offer a large amount [c.q.] of honors classes and both recently held public events for interested parents.

"Their top concerns are making sure their students are able to get the kind of courses they feel are important for a successful college experience," Kortze said.

"We basically teach all of our classes at an honors level and have numerous AP courses and we have absolutely no plans to change any of that," [Keith's Alan] Gibby said.

The quest of parents to provide opportunities for their children to learn less impeded by unmotivated and uncultured classmates manifests itself in willingness to pay private school tuitions, or to live in school districts with better test scores. What District 205's cost cutting will produce is left to the reader as an exercise.

A COLLEGE PARTY THE FACULTY CAN ENDORSE. Tea Party Students, that is. Inside Higher Ed reports, you decide.

None of the student leaders contacted by Inside Higher Ed indicated that their groups planned to lobby their own campuses for smaller administrative bodies or lower tuition. However, none ruled it out.

The Tea Party has a high contingent of college graduates compared to the general population, but it has made some enemies among academics, due to what some consider a tendency to misread Constitutional law and misappropriate the legacies of various U.S. historical figures in order to make emotional points about contemporary politics.

But on the campuses where students have started up Tea Party groups, some have found support from faculty members — if not for their ideas, then for the fact that they are interested in talking about them.

At Brandeis, an associate professor of American history, Jerry Cohen, says he e-mailed Perdichizzi and told her that he admired her courage after he saw she had put up Tea Party fliers. It is healthier for students who disagree with Tea Party principles to actually engage with their fellow students than to whack at straw men, he says.

“Whether it will prove to be a positive presence on campus or not, I think that overwhelmingly -- and notwithstanding the habitual use of the word diversity four times per sentence coming out of the administration -- there’s very little real commitment to intellectual diversity,” Cohen says.

Call it that continual and fearless sifting and winnowing by which alone the truth can be found.

OPTIMIZATION AT THE MARGIN. King Banaian, long-time member of SCSU Scholars, the Right Honorable Gentleman from District 158.

Congratulations to King Banaian, who was elected in a close race to the Minnesota House of Representatives. On Election Day he was ten votes ahead of his opponent Carol Lewis, and after a recount on November 29, Lewis conceded the race to Banaian.

Does the median voter theorem predict that all elections ought to be that tight?

CLEAN SWEEP. Northern Illinois University Policy Attempts to Overrule 5 out of 5 Rights in the First Amendment.

Last night, the Northern Illinois University (NIU) Student Association Senate denied recognition for the second time in six weeks to NIU Students for Sensible Drug Policy (SSDP). As a result, SSDP may not meet on campus, post flyers, or even reapply for recognition for two years. As we outline in today's press release, the Senate also denies funding to all "political" and "religious" student organizations, including the Model United Nations, which it labels a "political" group. Meanwhile, groups dubbed "social justice" or "advocacy" groups—including student pro-life, pro-choice, antiwar, women's rights, and victims' rights groups—are eligible for funding.

The criteria by which organizations render themselves eligible or ineligible for funding are convoluted.

On November 7, the Senate then issued hopelessly vague definitions of "political" and "religious" groups that guarantee an unconstitutional double standard. Indeed, Advocates for Choice, Campus Antiwar Network, Consumer Education Society, PAVE (Promoting Awareness, Victim Empowerment), Students for Life (NIU), Vegetarian Education Group, and Women's Rights Alliance are eligible for funding as "Social Justice, Advocacy, and Support" groups, yet funding is denied to the Committee for the Preservation of Wildlife and the Model United Nations, an academic simulation of the UN, because they are classified as "political" groups. Similarly, the Baha'i Club, dedicated to discussion of the Baha'i faith, is eligible as a "Diversity and Cultural" organization, while Campus Crusade for Christ, Hillel, Latter Day Saint Student Association, Muslim Students Association, Newman Catholic Student Center, Pagan Student Association, and many more are not.

Under the new definitions, NIU Atheists, Agnostics, and Freethinkers—currently ineligible for funding—will become eligible. And if the Senate is going to be honest about applying the new definition of a "political" group, a lot of groups will suddenly find themselves reclassified and ineligible for funding. The new definition of a "political" group even prohibits a student group from receiving Activity Fee funding if any of its activities result in any individual, anywhere, "petitioning Federal, State, or Local legislative or executive bodies for policies advocated by that group"-amazingly violating the First Amendment right to petition government for the redress of grievances.

FIRE wrote NIU President John G. Peters on November 18, explaining that the Senate is bound by the First Amendment and that NIU is obligated to step in if the Senate fails to uphold students' rights.

The football team might have failed to run the table in the Mid-American, but the student senate has achieved a clean sweep.

The Student Association Senate might have set a record for the most violations of the First Amendment in a single set of campus funding and recognition policies (there are even more violations, but these are the highlights). Indeed, NIU's Student Association Senate has violated all five of the rights codified in the First Amendment. First, the Senate violated the rights of freedom of speech and assembly by denying recognition to Students for Sensible Drug Policy and by
discriminating against all groups it arbitrarily deems "political" or
"religious." Next, the Senate violates the right to freedom of the press by stating that unrecognized groups are prohibited from posting flyers on campus and that publications—such as magazines and leaflets, the nation's oldest media for freedom of the press—will presumably threaten a group's funding. The Senate's policy also violates the First Amendment religion clauses, since Baha'i, humanist, and atheist groups can receive funding to discuss religious topics, but other religious groups get nothing, in practice favoring some religious groups over others. Finally, perhaps the Senate's most stunning achievement of all was to violate the First Amendment right to petition government for the redress of grievances.

They're talking about Northern Illinois in Wisconsin, and it's not a comparison of Badger and Huskies bowl prospects.

STRANGER THAN TRUTH. In the course of the Fifty Book Challenge, I have had several occasions to report on Sherman's March, including the first-person recollections compiled in General Sherman's Christmas, the thinking of the commanders in Grant and Sherman, and the military history from Nothing but Victory.

E. L. Doctorow takes a different approach in The March: A Novel, tonight's Book Review N^o. 31. The background of the novel is Sherman's March, with a number of the famous events of the march, including the intentional unintentional firing of Columbia, South Carolina, the cutting of a pontoon bridge leaving escaped slaves with the choice of swimming a river or surrendering to trailing rebel cavalry, and the extreme measures used against insurgents and their improvised explosive devices providing the background. The novel concludes with the Army of the Tennessee compelling Joe Johnston's surrender. It being a novel, and it being Doctorow, the reader encounters what happens when a bunch of horny guys with guns have opportunities to fraternize with the local population. I think that's called character development. (Did Civil War volunteers talk like frat boys?) Interesting cast of characters to follow, however. I think that's called ambiguity. It's a novel. It's Doctorow, not Tom Clancy.

(Cross-posted to 50 Book Challenge.)

SUBVERT THE DOMINANT PARADIGM. University Diaries uses a recent Inside Higher Ed column to note, once again, the folly of offering online classes and pretending students are educated.

There is much more of note in the column, written, pseudonymously, by a faculty member in the California public system.

Administrators are evaluated by measures that have nothing to do with educational experience, such as cost savings or time to graduation. Faculty want to facilitate growth in students whether it shows up in such measures or not, and are unconcerned with cost/efficiency but very concerned about the insufficiency of resources to educate students properly.

A great deal of the faculty resistance to change occurs because many faculty regard these faddish initiatives, along with the emphasis on assessment, as a waste because they divert resources from the classroom. When tenure-track lines are replaced by adjuncts and faculty are denied lab space, travel funding, or even market-average pay, they come to doubt the sincerity of administrative assurances that the institution cares about quality education.

Faculty believe that their own competence depends on professional preparation, quality of ongoing scholarship, ability to involve students in the generation of new knowledge, and mentoring students toward roles that do not necessarily lead directly to corporate life. The less faculty are paid, the less incentive there is to pursue a faculty career, the lower the quality of teaching and the less well-educated students will be.

What she said. It doesn't matter whether this post is from Berkeley or Santa Cruz or Stanislaus or Humanitarian Bowl invitee Fresno State. They're all in the same business as Stanford or Chicago, and offering matriculants who didn't make the cut at Stanford or Chicago a mass-produced drive-through degree simply reinforces the social stratification. The economist in me cringes at the use of the locution cost/efficiency: a degree on the cheap that produces neither graduation nor human capital is neither cheap nor efficient. And so much for professors being underworked and overpaid: those low salaries and burdensome job descriptions will dry up the graduate school pipeline (in the disciplines where degree holders have outside opportunities first; in the evergreen disciplines when Atlas Shrugged makes its way onto reading lists) and there will eventually be no associate professors to tap for committees. Think I'm joking about Atlas Shrugged? Consider the implications of that "doubt the sincerity of administrative assurances". Those assurances are the leper's bell of an approaching looter.

An administrator’s interest is in having fewer professors teach more students, even though this results in less personal attention to students, the one thing that correlates highest with increased graduation rates.

Their reasons are economic. This year I will be teaching face-to-face a class formerly taught only online. Students are grateful and tell me they hated the previous approach, that they avoid online classes whenever possible. Faculty who teach online have published studies showing that more faculty time is required to teach an online class effectively, not less, so class sizes cannot be increased even though there is no physical seat restriction.

But class sizes are increased and faculty thus are forced to teach less effectively. This kind of experience is being ignored by administrators because they care more about the efficiency of instruction than its quality.

Again, it's a misuse of the word, efficiency. Efficiency is the identification and realization of gains from trade. More online busywork for less learning is none of that.

We lose the opportunity to systematically provide young people with experiences that will make them more than drones. Call me intransigent, but I wouldn’t want to work in such a system, nor would I want to send my son or daughter to that kind of university. You can call it “fundamental change,” but the fact remains that education dictated by financial considerations alone cannot produce minds with the strengths needed to pull us out of a recession, much less produce world leaders.

In particular, the gutting of the former teachers' colleges, and the mid-majors, and the land-grants only intensifies the willingness of people to sign up for the test preparation courses and do whatever else it takes to get into one of the universities at the top of the U.S. News league tables.

The responsibility for the decline, however, cannot be laid off entirely on Dilbertized boards of trustees and serial administrators. Loose talk about access and opportunity appeals to the prejudices of faculty members, too many of whom still pine for the Great Society.

IT'S LIFE, JIM, BUT NOT AS WE KNOW IT. Jim Hu makes the case that the supposed arsenic-based bacterium is life as we know it. Just keep scrolling.

Short form: he isn't saying the NASA study is junk science, but read between the lines.

DESPERATE TO REGAIN THE AXE? The University of Minnesota (motto: ten thousand ways to surrender the Axe) did defenestrate football coach Tim Brewster, and hiring Jerry Kill from Northern Illinois, another team that ran the ball 'round Minnesota. One way to improve your team is to bring in better people.

"I look at things as you could either be a launching pad or a graveyard," [Northern Illinois athletic director Jeff] Compher said. "I'd rather be the launching pad.

"I think it says our program is being recognized as a national level program, that you can come here and you can win."

Despite a hiccup in Detroit, Northern Illinois is headed to the blue fields of Boise for a dog fight in the uDrove [c.q.] Humanitarian Bowl. A Mid-American also-ran, Toledo, gets the bid for the Little Caesars Pizza Bowl (burp) to be played in Detroit. (Didn't I say second place, a week in Detroit?) The Detroit bowl had first pick of Mid-American teams and went for the commuters. (But it's amateur sports, and it has nothing to do with money).

As for Jerry Kill, we will be keeping track of the Axe. The keepers of the Axe are headed to the Rose Bowl.

HO! HO! HO! WHO WOULDN'T GO. The Canadian Pacific Holiday Train will be making an extended swing through the State Line this December.

• Saturday, December 4: Pingree Grove, 10 am; Byron, 1 pm; Savanna, 3.30 pm.
• Wednesday, December 8: Gurnee, 5.15 pm; Sturtevant, 7 pm.

The train will also be calling at Muscatine, Iowa on December 4, working its way north the next day through Dubuque and Marquette to LaCrescent.

LOSING THE GOOD OF THE INTELLECT. John Rosenberg suggests it can happen to an entire discipline. See his Rigoberta's Revenge: The Implosion Of Anthropology. It's a long essay, with extensive quotation and citation of other essays, and those will reward careful study. Professor Rosenberg concludes with what I hope will be the epitaph for cultural studies' attempt to hijack higher education.

Objectivity and truth become not simply unattainable goals; they cease to exist as meaningful concepts. This is post-modernism run amuck, and it reveals a void at the core of a large strain of multicultural academic work that is much larger than simply removing the word "science" from a mission statement may suggest.

When religious true believers take over school boards and install creation science in their curriculum, they are operating from a coherent, if wrong, belief system. When cultural-studies types take over anthropology departments and remove science on the grounds that it's a social construct, possibly a gendered rape manual, they have lost the good of the intellect in an assault on coherent beliefs of any kind, the end product being an academic culture in which a university that operates as a subprime party school is no less useful than a university that insists on coherent thought.

REEVALUATE YOUR LEADING INDICATORS. Victoria's Secret reports strong sales of Miraculous bras, which some optimists see as green shoots.

Strong bra sales at Victoria’s Secret stores could point towards a recovery in high-end retail spending, as the brand caters towards luxury consumption. Still, some experts suggest the industry’s retail spending improvement is rather a release of pent-up demand, referred to as “frugality fatigue”.

That's one interpretation. Another possibility is that appeasing displeased trophy wives is subject to tighter budget constraints. In 2005, the peace offering was a Lexus. By 2008, the model appeared to be repositioning its brand, and the latest offerings continue the theme of Thirteenth Generation Enters Middle Age. (It's not pretty.) The red bows are still there, but the annoying tinkly music is gone.

FIRST YOUR SOUP, THEN DESSERT. I found this advertisement for an online discount service.


You can't buy booyah in a store.

GETTING THE PROPER FOUNDATION. Yes, the trivium and quadrivium matter, but I've long maintained there's more.

I've gone on and on and on about the common schools abdicating their onetime mission of inculcating the habits of effective people, and I continue to maintain that special programs for people who have bad life-management skills that are not crash courses in developing proper life management skills will waste resources.

In Milwaukee, there's something more than a crash course in progress.

On the way to their new elective class, the seventh- and eighth-graders walked under the fluorescent cafeteria lights and past bagged lunches on tables, awaiting the first lunch shift.

What they saw on the other side of the wall at Concordia University School made many whisper and cast surprised looks at their friends: candles amid a 15-piece table setting, white tablecloth, silver platters and fine china, soup bowls and a centerpiece.

Presentation is everything in Camille Monk's etiquette class. The 29-year-old has started a business bringing classic social training to urban schools, in the hopes that teaching tolerance and respect will help the students successfully navigate future social situations. The payoff for students who complete the class: a formal five-course lunch or dinner at Bacchus restaurant downtown.

But at a time when budget cuts have eliminated long-established specials such as gym, art and music in many school buildings, financial support for manners training is a struggle, even though experts say soft skills - from properly eating at a dinner table to managing a Facebook page - are critical for today's students.

"A lot of the children I'm working with are around a lot of negative energy and negative vibes all the time," said Monk, who leads an elective course at Concordia University School and Young Leaders Academy, a charter school. "The bottom line is respecting others and being tolerant. But it's hard to retrain someone when they're planted in a negative environment."

In their first class at Concordia, 8242 N. Granville Road, the children practiced standing up and introducing each other, and adults, to their peers in front of the room. They practiced shaking hands and correctly scooping soup away from the front of the bowl. They practiced tearing off chunks of bread and buttering each one, rather than buttering the entire loaf at once.

They were attentive, thoughtful and respectful, if a little clumsy with the utensils. After class, many could be overheard in the cafeteria, excitedly sharing what they'd learned with other peers or teachers.

Adrianne Hooker, who started the Great Lakes School of Etiquette and also has worked in Milwaukee's urban schools, said manners are a lost art in many communities. Children don't always act rude because they are willfully disobeying social norms. Often, she said, nobody has ever told them that what they're doing is inconsiderate.

"The biggest problem in schools is that people don't necessarily see the value in putting lots of time and training into children's social development," she said. "Your first teachings begin at home. But we have a different generation of parents, many of them are children themselves . . .  and many have learned to accept a lesser way of living. They've become complacent about not having to put their best foot forward."

That complacency perpetuates poverty. Perhaps it's the beginning of the end of social-constructivist attitudes toward traditions.