INADVERTENTLY ORGANIZING A COMMUNITY?  Freedom Works have put together what Hot Air's Ed Morrissey describes as a mashup of clips from the recently released Atlas Shrugged movie with soundbites from Our President and assorted other politicians.

The video has already been Instalanched. It responds to a request Mr Morrissey made in his review of the movie.

Politicians and lobbyists scream about fairness and the need to force the wealthy to pay their share in order to show compassion.  In fact, the producers could have placed large blocs of Barack Obama’s entitlement-reform speech from last Wednesday into the film, and it would have fit neatly into the narrative.

The review also suggests that ferroequinologists will never lack for work.

When the novel was first published in 1957, the rail industry was still a central key to the American economy.  The film takes place in the near future, starting in 2016, and cleverly uses a global energy crisis to return rail to a central position in American industry. 

Rail has been returning to a central position in American industry, commencing, oh, about 1986, as the major carriers adapted to the Staggers Act, a policy development that doesn't fit the Randians' narrative.  What intrigues, though, is the profligate use of energy in the casting of tube rounds -- not the billets you'd expect as the starting castings for rails -- of Rearden Metal and the development of Acela-styled power cars for diesel freight trains in the movie excerpts.

BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR.  Run away to Illinois State University for the circus, read about their capital budgeting.

Since its inception in 1961, Hancock Stadium has served as the Illinois State football team’s home landscape.


The venue’s chain linked fences and metal bleachers have also been identified as one of the first welcome gateways to campus with the stadium serving as a visual point at the busiest intersection on campus.


“I hope we can see renovations soon. I’ve seen high school stadiums bigger than Hancock,” Pat Potter, a member of Red Alert and the Big Red Marching Machine band, said—painting a transparent picture for the shape of the university’s 15,000-seat stadium.

It's not a lament about how the misplaced priorities at high schools are straining State's mathematics and writing programs with remedial students. It's not even about the band director having problems recruiting performers.

Daily Vidette photograph by Nathan Kelly.

Looks like a smaller version of Huskie Stadium as it appeared when I first hired out here.  But Northern Illinois has visions of being the next Boise State that have nothing to do with invidious comparisons of economics departments, and Illinois State hopes to be the next Northern Illinois.  But first they hope to beat Southern Illinois into Division I.

Crowds of less than 6,000 filed into Hancock this past season. Attendance could be boosted with renovations. Southern Illinois recently built a state-of-the-art Saluki Stadium, which replaced the worn down McAndrew Stadium. The team’s first game in 2010 was a sellout and the program saw substantial increase in attendance.


Renovating Hancock Stadium is a necessary step in the long-term goal of turning the Redbirds from a Division I-AA FCS football program and into a Division I-A FBS (Bowl Series) program.


“I think Illinois State has a lot of potential in football that has been untapped. When it comes time to move up to [the Bowl series level], it will happen, I truly believe that with my heart. First, though, we have to build a football program to a stature where it’s consistently successful on a yearly basis. Coach Spack has exceeded that in his two years and I believe he’ll continue to grow the program to where it’s nationally recognized and as that happens, with stadium enhancements, then we could be in that position,” [Illinois State president Al] Bowman said.

Southern's football team continues to play in I-AA.  Their use of student fees to subsidize otherwise uninteresting sports teams, particularly basketball, continues to be unproductive.

CREDENTIALS FOR THEIR OWN SAKE.  The Popular Perspective holds that expanded production of college degrees expands opportunity, and the middle class.  See, e.g., the G. I. Bill.

Oops.

Call-center company 24/7 Customer Pvt. Ltd. is desperate to find new recruits who can answer questions by phone and email. It wants to hire 3,000 people this year. Yet in this country of 1.2 billion people, that is beginning to look like an impossible goal.


So few of the high school and college graduates who come through the door can communicate effectively in English, and so many lack a grasp of educational basics such as reading comprehension, that the company can hire just three out of every 100 applicants.

It's not a dystopian novel, and it's not the fruits of bilingual non-education gone sour, or multiculturalism substituting grievance for learning.

India projects an image of a nation churning out hundreds of thousands of students every year who are well educated, a looming threat to the better-paid middle-class workers of the West. Their abilities in math have been cited by President Barack Obama as a reason why the U.S. is facing competitive challenges. 

Yet 24/7 Customer's experience tells a very different story. Its increasing difficulty finding competent employees in India has forced the company to expand its search to the Philippines and Nicaragua. Most of its 8,000 employees are now based outside of India. 

In the nation that made offshoring a household word, 24/7 finds itself so short of talent that it is having to offshore. 

"With India's population size, it should be so much easier to find employees," says S. Nagarajan, founder of the company. "Instead, we're scouring every nook and cranny."

Mercantilists in the United States would be doing themselves no favours by introducing rubrics, self-esteem, assessment, and inclusive learning. Administrative tradition in India, coupled with a belief in the credentials rather than in education, is drag enough.

Business executives say schools are hampered by overbearing bureaucracy and a focus on rote learning rather than critical thinking and comprehension. Government keeps tuition low, which makes schools accessible to more students, but also keeps teacher salaries and budgets low. What's more, say educators and business leaders, the curriculum in most places is outdated and disconnected from the real world. 

"If you pay peanuts, you get monkeys," says Vijay Thadani, chief executive of New Delhi-based NIIT Ltd. India, a recruitment firm that also runs job-training programs for college graduates lacking the skills to land good jobs.

Next, the education lobby and Our President will suggest we can do India one better by ensuring that all baccalaureates have a master's as an entitlement.  On the other hand, perhaps someone in India will borrow a page from Cold Spring Shops and make the high schools reimburse the colleges for the do-overs.

Another survey, conducted annually by Pratham, a nongovernmental organization that aims to improve education for the poor, looked at grade-school performance at 13,000 schools across India. It found that about half of the country's fifth graders can't read at a second-grade level.


At stake is India's ability to sustain growth—its economy is projected to expand 9% this year—while maintaining its advantages as a low-cost place to do business.

Or perhaps somebody will invoke the not-invented here argument.  (Via Phi Beta Cons.)

The critical point to keep in mind is that low wages are a signal of low productivity.  There comes a level of economic activity at which continued economic growth includes competition for workers.

But before you get too cocky, consider the facts on the ground here.

At the margin, the incremental resources (students) produced from higher education investments are adding less and less output (manifested in employment income) to the economy, as more of them are forced to take relatively low paying jobs. The number of new college graduates exceeds the numbers of new jobs that truly require higher level education skills—mostly positions in management, technical areas, or the professions. Moreover, more and more of the incremental enrollment resulting from higher government subsidies in modern times consists of students lacking the cognitive skills, discipline, prior educational training, etc., necessary for mastering higher order intellectual material.

And yet higher education's special pleaders will persist in scouring the country for those not-yet-discovered high achievers who are somehow still being denied their shot at a degree.

A CIRCUS DAY AT COLLEGE.

Illinois State University is home to the Gamma Phi Circus, a program in the College of Applied Science and Technology.

Lyric Hoop.

Saturday was also World Circus Day.

Look closely at the picture, you might see the light sabers being wielded by children.  The median age of the audience is about ten, high for a circus, but a collegiate circus will bring in parents and friends of the performers.  The spotters are performers in other routines, there's no doubling in brass but a lot of filling in as prop roustabouts by the cast.  Clowns, juggling, various acrobatic performances, aerial acts, good show.

PLUGGING AWAY AT THE READING.  There's been little time to post lately, and griping about the workload doesn't make for interesting posting.  Work does progress on the Fifty Book Challenge, with the first quarter report ready for filing.  The links go to the review at the Challenge.  Some books are particularly good (+); others particularly bad (-)

1. How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation, 11 January 2011 (-).
2. Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free, 13 January 2011 (-).
3. Boomer Destiny: Leading the U.S. through the Worst Crisis Since the Great Depression, 16 January 2011 (-).
4. A Liberal Tool Kit: Progressive Responses to Conservative Arguments, 17 January 2011.
5. Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men: Understanding the Critical Years Between 16 and 26, 21 January 2011 (-).
6. Punching Out:  One Year in a Closing Auto Plant, 30 January 2011.
7. Super Sad True Love Story. 27 March 2011.

There are some books stacked and ready for review, and the bookworm will sprout more segments during the summer.

Oooooooo

(Cross-posted to European Tribune and to 50 Book Challenge)

HUMANITIES COURSES MARGINALIZE ATLAS SHRUGGED.  John Galt comes to college, all the same.

In the next two to three years, we will see a level of personnel movement in higher ed that will dwarf anything we’ve seen since the 1960’s.

I’m basing this on two observations. The first is the increasing median age of full-timers in higher ed, especially on the administrative side. The second is the extinction of pay raises.

Some commenters suggest the sluggish economic recovery gives job hoppers little hope. Perhaps so, but if the rewards to entrepreneurship, or to telecommuting from a tax haven, grow more rapidly than the rewards to teaching and scholarship, the effect will be the same.

REBELLION.

The Fort Sumter National Monument presents sesquicentennial events.

THE TRAGIC VISION.  Stephen Balch wonders whether liberty and prosperity are unsustainable for lack of appreciation of what makes it possible.

The vale of tears once taught us that it was wise to underscore the relationship between talent and reward so as to promote maximum effort. In our virtual heaven-on-earth we yearn to deem everyone a winner so as to ice prosperity with a rich coat of self-esteem. This psychological redistribution is a nice luxury, but in less favored lands there are calloused, more driven folk who have escaped its temptation.

Peter Wood, who has made the step from Cold Spring Shops's favorite academic administrator to president of the National Association of Scholars, finds much not to like in a call to religious revival in support of the ancien regime in higher education.

Of course, we can have a very good system of higher education in the United States without “substantially more public investments over current levels.”  Those current levels, driven by the delusion of mass higher education, have had the paradoxical effect of driving down academic standards and luring millions of students into unnecessary debt.  I don’t expect the federal government to extract itself from this mess anytime soon, but I do think it unlikely that Congress will substantially increase the public funds it currently squanders on higher education.

There might be a higher education bubble, and a call for additional resources in access-assessment-remediation-retention is as if a call to jump off a bridge.  And yet it is incumbent on observers of higher education's failures to draw the correct conclusions.

But [Pay Pal founder Peter] Thiel’s issues with education run even deeper. He thinks it’s fundamentally wrong for a society to pin people’s best hope for a better life on  something that is by definition exclusionary. “If Harvard were really the best education, if it makes that much of a difference, why not franchise it so more people can attend? Why not create 100 Harvard affiliates?” he says. “It’s something about the scarcity and the status. In education your value depends on other people failing. Whenever Darwinism is invoked it’s usually a justification for doing something mean. It’s a way to ignore that people are falling through the cracks, because you pretend that if they could just go to Harvard, they’d be fine. Maybe that’s not true.”

There's a reason I quip about the thirty claimants to the top ten spots in the economics league tables, and it's not just because Wisconsin is the Mother of CEOs.  We're all in the same business as Harvard, and I cannot rest until I hear a chancellor at a state flagship or a mid-major acknowledging that, and committing unapologetically to a course of upgrading his institution's academic profile.  You help the people that didn't go to Harvard (or to Yale, to remember the punchline of a song) by offering the same academic material at ZooMass or ZooConn or Northern Illinois or Anonymous Community.  (Heck, Penn State was motivated to become more like Indiana than like ZooConn upon affiliating with the Big Ten, and perhaps Nebraska's academic administration will do the same thing.  Those not skinning can hold a leg.)

YOUNGSTERS CLEAR ON THE CONCEPT.  Judging for the state Economics Concepts Poster Contest is finished, with the winning submissions available for your viewing pleasure.  The state council has posted the names of the state honorable mention submissions.

The Northern Illinois University Center for Economic Education received 300 entries from about a dozen teachers.  There will be a web page showing the regional winning and honorable mention entries.  Our web development team has been busy with other projects recently.

ECONOMICS IS NOT BUSINESS ADMINISTRATION.  Regular readers understand that some cost-cutting measures are false economies, particularly those measures that destroy institutional memory or drive business away.  That holds for higher education, in which there are market tests, even if business-faddish administrators and transgressive faculty don't want to recognize them.

A young friend of ours recently visited a public college which we at Tenured Radical have admired for years.  S/he reported conversations with undergraduates about the effects of the persistent defunding of higher ed in that state, and the ways in which defunding has diminished a quality liberal arts education that people with very little money still have access to.  A prominent problem, in the view of students there, was incessant faculty turnover due to low salaries, poorly maintained library collections and the erosion of benefits. In turn, the constant loss of faculty  made it difficult to establish mentoring relationships, get recommendations for graduate school, or do senior honors work with faculty who had helped them develop the research and had planned to advise it.

If the merit-pay policy of an organization is "we might match a better offer" the managers (or administrators or undersecretaries) have created a situation in which the organization's best people already have one foot out the door.  In higher education, where the excess demand is for credentials from serious institutions, the students recognize the consequences of the perpetual cost-cutting, and in time, cost-cutting will lead to falling enrollments leading to further cost cutting.  The sequence converges to zero.

It's useful, however, to distinguish pro-management or pro-business policies from pro-market policies.

The notion that college teachers are as interchangeable as hamburger flippers at Wendy's follows, of course, on the neoliberal notion that secondary school teachers are also interchangeable.  Furthermore, on no evidence, free marketeers have sold the notion that college professors will continue to work cheerfully, and to a high standard, for as little salary and as few benefits as colleges and universities choose to pay us.

Cheap and incompetent business gurus might be able to push the merits of speed-up to the management, but that advocacy denies the logic of a competitive market, which functions to identify and act on gains from trade. We speak of a law of supply and demand accordingly.

The only teachers you really want at your school, the logic goes, have the personalities of 18th century Franciscan missionaries in the New World, willing to sign on to thankless, ill-paid labor purely out of love for those to whom they will minister. Although this theory goes unspoken in an increasingly adjunctified world of private higher education, attacks on educational employees in New Jersey, California and Wisconsin seem to be giving new energy to strategies for disempowering and intimidating teachers at all levels.  This is particularly heartbreaking in states that seem to want to break with a long history of providing quality, public higher education to ambitious students with little money.

Never underestimate the power of a market test. In Wisconsin, there are rumblings of people turning down contracts when headquarters unilaterally changes the terms.  Eighteenth century Franciscan missionaries didn't have a Protestant Ethic or Adam Smith's society of perfect liberty as intellectual ammunition to question their lot.

One problem with free market theories for reorganizing education is that they lead to a free market in educators.  This, in turn tends not to be conducive to what administrators need to deliver a quality education to students:  faculties who commit to a particular school, and create a culture of excellence, over the long term. 

Never underestimate the power of a market test.  A free market in educators will not be conducive to administrators who dream of protecting that culture of excellence, over the long term, on the cheap.  On the other hand, those administrators who recognize that excellence over the long term cannot be obtained by a sequence of short-term downsizings and restructurings, will harvest the gains from trade that markets make possible, by offering precisely the pay packages and job descriptions that reward, rather than punish, commitment.

Policy makers who believe that free market competition creates better education for the most people have, frankly, never been in a classroom beyond their three-year hitch at Teach for America. While I don't know anyone in teaching who wouldn't consider voluntarily sacrificing money and prestige to make and keep a desired life as a college professor, I also don't know a single college professor who, on balance, believes that year to year contracts, no job security, diminishing benefits and the lowest possible pay are the basis for building a career in education.

That's called a compensating differential.  Tenure, research time during the summer, and some freedom to choose class offerings and hours the classes meet compensate for compressed salaries and short promotion ladders.  Reduce the features of the job description that compensate for, while making less attractive the features that have to be compensated for, and see how long the workforce stays.

PROGRESS. Butler's condition upgraded to serious.  Doctors aren't letting him talk yet, but he can type messages on his I-pad.  The criminal investigation continues.

ACCUMULATION OF SMALL ADVANTAGES.  In small quantities, antifreeze is relatively cheap, and at low fuel prices, the additional wind resistance offered by radiators is no big deal.  Thus, motor vehicles, until recently, did not have radiator shutters.  (Diesel locomotives, which have high-volume cooling systems for which antifreeze becomes uneconomic, have long had radiator shutters, with temperature-controlled automatic shutters being offered as early as the 1950s.)

Rising fuel prices, and competition to offer better fuel economy without turning all automobiles into golf carts, make the automatic shutter in the grille something worth developing.

[Ford vehicle engineering chief Don] Ufford said the shutters notion had been studied for years but was not practical until breakthroughs in engine computers.

Now the shutters could be opened or closed based not just on engine temperature, but outside air temperature, vehicle speed, air-conditioning demand and other factors.

Under constraints that previously didn't bind, or that didn't have a high shadow price to violate, such improvements probably weren't cost-effective.

The goal with the Cruze Eco was to create a car with the gas mileage of a gas-electric hybrid, but without the higher price tag that comes with the hybrid's expensive batteries and electric motors.

Using shutters allowed GM engineers to come up with a car that can handle the worst-case scenario for engine overheating — pulling a trailer up a Death Valley mountainside on a summer day — yet pick up the benefits of less wind drag by shutting the louvers when days or nights are mild.

Makes sense, says Robert Sawyer, a professor emeritus in engineering at the University of California-Berkeley. He says that in order to meet the tougher government gas-mileage regulations, automakers "will need everything they've got" to pick up an extra mpg or two. "Anything that is simple," is sure to be part of the formula.

Simple, however, is determined relative to a cost-benefit calculation.

ENOUGH ALREADY.  NIU football player in critical condition after shooting.

Two Northern Illinois University students have been charged in the Tuesday night shooting that left NIU football player Devon Butler in critical condition.

Wrong place, wrong time.

The DeKalb Police Department and NIU confirmed Butler, a starting linebacker, was shot late Tuesday night in an Aspen Court apartment building. Kishwaukee Community Hospital confirmed late Wednesday morning that Butler had been treated at the DeKalb-based hospital, but said he no longer was a patient there. Butler was airlifted early Wednesday morning to OSF Saint Anthony Medical Center in Rockford, where he was listed in critical condition after undergoing surgery.


DeKalb Police Chief Bill Feithen said that the shooting happened as a result of a drug deal that had gone bad earlier Tuesday. He stressed that Butler had no knowledge of or was involved or present during that drug transaction. He said Butler was at the off-campus apartment Tuesday where he was shot to meet with friends.


Feithen said that the drug deal took place at an arranged location within several hundred feet of the apartment where the shooting took place. He said the two suspects intended to sell marijuana to another person; that individual took the drugs and did not pay for them.

The larcenous customer might have been a neighbor.

The drug transaction did not happen at that apartment, Feithen said, but the suspects believed that one of the individuals involved in the earlier incident was in that residence.


One of those shots penetrated the window in apartment No. 3 and struck Butler. Feithen said that Butler was shot on the right side of his back, and that bullet fragments have been recovered from his body. Butler is out of surgery; Feithen said that he is "cautiously optimistic" that Butler will be OK.

Updates will be provided tomorrow. No more posting tonight.

A FALSE ECONOMY.  Too busy posting to turn David Letterman off; caught tonight's Top 10 List (Southwest Airlines apologies is the theme.)

#1:  Our mechanics are even more tired than our pilots.

Chortle.

THE FAILURE OF THE LAND-GRANTS AND THE MID-MAJORS.  Journalist Andrew Ferguson has a son apply to college, writes about the experience; Christina Hoff Sommers reviews the book.

Ferguson falls into "the bottom quintile of the lower upper middle class," a demographic of parents with huge ambitions for their kids but without the means to pay for elite private colleges, let alone fancy admissions counselors. So he resolves to be his son's own do-it-yourself admissions counselor. Ferguson devours insider's guides, visits Internet chat sites, swaps tips with other parents at parties, and slowly becomes an expert.

Mr Ferguson's son ultimately enrolls, the reviewer does not say reluctantly, at a large state university.  How much evidence must accumulate before the state universities recognize the excess demand for perceived quality and respond to it by, oh, strengthening the academic programs and tightening standards?

A DESTRUCTIVE POSITIONAL ARMS RACE.

Here's Carol Iannone in Phi Beta Cons.

But when you tear down all the civilizing elements that once facilitated proper relations between the sexes in the name of “equality,” you will get offensive behavior, especially from boys, and most often it will be girls who are offended, and nowadays that means a federal case. And women and girls are of course encouraged in this by feminism, which helped destroy the structures that would once have protected them.

But the situation also illustrates a larger truth. In a reign of sexual liberation, only the most beautiful can come out on the top of the pyramid. Lesser mortals will be judged wanting, even by members of the opposite sex who are scarcely Venus or Adonis themselves, because sexual attractiveness has been split off from the larger whole of the human person. People are totally objectified and therefore susceptible to being evaluated like specimens at a slave market. 

Regular readers recognize the argument.

Today the only victors in the sexual revolution are those men and women who are good-looking and clever enough to enjoy multiple partners with a minimum of emotional and financial commitment. The dowdy and the not-so-clever (or not-so-unscrupulous) are used by the well-endowed and find loneliness and frustration where, in a previous generation, they would probably have been able to start families.

That argument dates from 1987. There is great capacity, apparently, for loneliness and frustration.

THE SIGNATURE OF A POLITICALLY CORRECT UNIVERSITY.  Seven questions from Voluntary Xchange.

• Does someone monitor and/or judge what you do?
• Are you discouraged from reading criticism of your group?
• Are you limited in what you may question?
• Is humiliation or guilt used?
• Is the financial or labor commitment a problem?
• Would others consider the leadership extreme?
• Is doctrine knowable to outsiders?

Oh, you say it's to distinguish a religion from a cult? My bad.

NOW THAT THE REAL WINNER IS DETERMINED.  The Pope Center has some fun with the men's basketball tournament, first identifying the winner based on starting salaries.  Duke blows away Princeton and Vanderbilt: intriguing as all salaries are stated in current dollars with no adjustment for regional purchasing power parity.  They follow up with a bracket won by the university with the smallest outstanding student loans.  Hampton University, a sixteen seed according to the pairing committee, does better by its students than Princeton with its endowments or Brigham Young with its Mormon charitable tradition.

WHERE IS THE UNDERINVESTMENT?  Food for thought in a guest commentary by railroader Richard L. Beadles in Destination: Freedom.

Since 1980, national highway route miles have increased about 5%, lane miles a bit over 7%, and vehicle-miles-traveled, 100%. Does this sound like a healthy trend?

That might be a case for committing additional public resources to road-building, externalities and land-use considerations notwithstanding.

About 25% of the nation’s highways, which carry about 85% of all road traffic, are paid for in part by federal user-taxes, but such taxes do not yield enough revenue to support the current level of federal highway spending. Since 2008, more than $30 Billion of federal general fund revenue has been required to supplement road taxes [not to mention more than $70 billion in state and local tax revenues every year that according to AASHTO subsidizes the automobile owner – the editors]

FHWA estimates that to maintain the current level of highway utility would require a 50% increase in current funding levels, which are now in excess of revenues. Automobiles and buses account for more than 90% of all vehicle-miles-traveled, and are the major contributors to urban congestion, thus requiring costly lane-mile expansion, yet we permit anyone to drive anywhere, anytime, without regard for the demand-cost imposed upon the system. Easy solutions are still politically unpalatable.

Trucks account for the other 10% of mileage, yet they have been found to be responsible for almost all of the pavement damage. Depending upon truck weight, number of axels [c.q.], etc., FHWA and the CBO estimate that the cost of truck-related pavement damage ranges from 5 to 55 cents per mile—a huge public subsidy.

The essay is incomplete, in that the author does not make a case for cooperation between Passenger Rail authorities and the freight railroads, in which public monies might be more cost-effectively deployed to provide additional capacity for faster passenger trains (for the moment set aside fantasies of high speed rail and futuristic trains ... variable-formation diesel-hauled trains offering food service and first class accommodation and cruising at 125 mph offer almost the same advantage over air travel on trips of 300 to 500 miles) commingled with intermodal and priority freight trains.

RECANT OR BE EXCOMMUNICATED.  Tomas de Torquemada and Ignatius Loyola are no longer in charge of the Society of Jesus, but their heirs at Marquette University have summoned the heretic John McAdams before the Diet of Worms.

We just got out of a meeting with Provost John Pauly, Interim Arts & Sciences Dean Rev. Philip J. Rossi, and Political Science Department Chair Barrett L. McCormick.

Professor McAdams's sin is not that of questioning papal authority, or the selling of indulgences, or denying the King of England a divorce, or even suggesting that pictures exist of priests in the Archdiocese of Milwaukee with little boys.  He telephoned a student to obtain information about an upcoming performance of The Vagina Monologues, a play with material that might be contrary to Catholic social teaching.  (Cold Spring Shops will remain agnostic on that subject.  Eve Ensler's talkative cooch, as is often the case with characters written with a political point in mind, is not that interesting.  In this backslid Puritan's mind, the topic falls under the category of "Render unto Caesar", or perhaps "When in Sodom, do what ...")

Marquette's chain of command suggests that Professor McAdams has abused his authority as a faculty member by inquiring as a weblogger into student activities.   They may have a point, as there is plenty of play with sophomoric activities among sophomores (as well as the other classes) that ought not be interfered with by the faculty, but something of the "Who will rid me of this troublesome scholar?" comes to mind.