AFTER THEY'VE TRIED EVERYTHING ELSE, WILL THEY TRY SOMETHING THAT WORKS?

Years ago, I made a simple request.  "[J]ust once I'd like the diversity advocates to spell out precisely their trade-off between quality and inclusiveness. (If there is no such trade-off, there ought be no controversy over hiring for diversity.)"  The poobahs of higher education weren't interested in responding then, nor were they nine years later.  "But when higher education is in bad odor already, can pretending there are no standards really work?"

PLEASE LOOK AFTER THIS BEAR.

There's no end of grim stuff to post on, and there's more to come next week.

We have to sign off today with something cheerful.

It's time for today's baseball game to start.

THERE'S MONEY ON THE TABLE, IF THE RAILROADS WOULD PICK IT UP.

Diesel fuel is getting dearer, and that's going to affect the delivery of everything.  "Weekly on-highway diesel prices (as reported by the U.S. Energy Information Administration, EIA) hit a national price of $5.61 per gallon [mid-May] and are more than 70% above prior-year levels. In terms of regions, the Eastern U.S. has been harder hit with prices rising approximately 84% (up more than 100% in New England), while the West Coast saw the lowest (but still high) increase at approximately 63%."

There are some frictions, but the potential for shippers to use the rails is there.

Diesel prices are passed on to the shippers (customers of the transportation companies) via fuel surcharges. These surcharges are normally linked to an index (typically the EIA’s weekly on-highway average). Truckers have a small lag (about a week), while railroads see an approximately 60-day lag in recovery based on how contracts are written. (We note that domestic intermodal is an approximately one-week lag.) In general, higher diesel prices widen the gap in total landed prices between trucking and rail moves. This is because railroads are roughly three times more fuel efficient than their trucking counterparts.

We looked at a May 16 afternoon move between Newark, N.J. and St. Louis, Mo., which is a roughly 960-mile route. A shipper would have been quoted to pay approximately $2,400 for full truckload and approximately $1,800 for intermodal (with a one-day delivery differential). That suggests that a shipper would pay 33% less in transportation costs hauling via intermodal (well above the normal pricing differential between the modes), at the expense of one extra transit day.

The railroads might be more fuel-efficient, but whether theyr'e able to pick up the new cargo in a timely manner is doubtful.

Even if a shipper can switch some of his freight to intermodal, not all freight can make the move due to delivery schedules and the ability of railroads to handle the business. The good news is the rail industry has been on a hiring bonanza with some railroads hiring more people in April than all of the first quarter. Unfortunately, it takes four to six months to get these workers trained and out in the field making a difference. We are hearing that there has been some mild sequential improvement in box turns, and we expect that to continue barring any large shocks to the system.

Note that some of my posts on the difficulties of retail railroading, particularly retail intermodal, predate both the corona shutdowns and the Jarrett regency's "transition" efforts.

A SIMPLE MATHEMATICAL ECONOMICS DEMONSTRATION.

It's on Twitchy, and the poster is better known in social media circles for his extensive knowledge of vintage automobiles.  Enjoy it all the same.  "Iowahawk has put together a handy thread on economics ‘in the interest of making this place just a weeee bit less f*cking stupid’"

Here's the setup:

Now being a filthy profit hoarding Taco baron, I wish to maximize those profits by (1) taking the 1st derivative, setting to 0, and solving for the price that will maximize profits.

1st derivative of profit = (A-BC) + 2*BP = 0

profit max price = P* = (BC-A) / 2B

I'll excuse him that "setting to zero." (It's "finding the critical value.")  But it's standard locution in mathematical economics, and for full credit he should note that the profit expression is globally concave since B < 0, but it's Twitchy, it's summer, and I'm retired.

For the values of A, B, C, and P that he eventually imposes, P* = 6.  Then comes the key takeaway.

Screw that, though! I want my customers to suffer both gastronomically AND economically, so Imma jack that taco price up to $7!

At which price I will sell 30 tacos, make $5 per taco, for a total profit of... $150. WTF?

Blimey this taco price gouging is complicated

Of course it is, which is why elected officials always get it wrong.

Are you hungry, dear reader?

GROOM THE INFIELD, NOT THE KIDS.

Years ago, the Milwaukee Brewers' ground crew took pride in expeditiously dragging the infield mid-game.  These days, do they drag the infield for a drag show?

Yo, this drag performance was originally planned to take place outdoors in a very public area where fans entering the game could see. Luckily, there was plenty of public backlash and it rained, so the Milwaukee Brewers were forced to hold whatever you'd call this (a drag show?) in a private space for people 21 and older.

Although there is nothing intrinsically homo- or trans- sexual about dressing up in drag, or other manifestations of camp -- perhaps some of the performers in Milwaukee have girlfriends into their own form of kink -- historically pride has been an omnium-gatherum of the sexual underground.

Pride parades began explicitly as a celebration of difference.  If Normals think of the sexual underground as perverse, why not make the most of it?  Thus, community standards might mean delegates of all the alphabet soup in the reviewing stands turning their backs when the pedophile delegation (it has an acronym too) marches up: evidently BDSM is acceptable, but messing about with little boys is not.  Second, making the most of it can mean turning Normals' terminology against them.  "Queer" as an affirming term is a page, hell, it affirms the title, of Dick Gregory's autobiography.

Old post alert! That "pedophile" might yet become "minor-attracted person."  Go to that post for the Culture Wars, today's post riffs on a Jim Bouton observation about organized labor and major league baseball becoming the last bastions (circa 1969) of bourgeois uptightness.

Namely, that the Gods of Baseball might be sending that message.  The night before the, um, celebration of difference, Brewer closer Josh Hader's streaks of consecutive scoreless innings and consecutive save opportunities converted both ended.  "The Brewers got off to their best start ever during the first fifty games and as of this writing are half a game ahead of the Cardinals. It's shaping up to be an interesting summer."  Both Not the Bee and a commenter at Pajamas Media noted that the Phillies won the Drag Show game, and ultimately swept the series.  And the hits keep coming -- for Brewer opponents.  "Milwaukee allowed a season-high 19 hits — including a season-high-tying four home runs — manager Craig Counsell was ejected and what had been a 4½-game lead in the Central Division on May 26 had completely disappeared as the Brewers fell into second place behind the St. Louis Cardinals."

It was the Tampa Bay Rays who swept a series with the Cardinals that kept the Brewers atop the standings that long.  Yes, those Tampa Bay Rays.

On Saturday, the Tampa Bay Rays held their annual “Pride Night” game. As part of the festivities, players wore a special rainbow patch on their uniforms to support LGBTQ (and whatever new letters they’ve added this week) pride. Well, most players did. A few players decided to take the brave step of not playing along, choosing not to wear the patch on their uniforms.

ESPN reports that “Among players who elected to remove the logos were pitchers Jason Adam, Jalen Beeks, Brooks Raley, Jeffrey Springs, and Ryan Thompson, according to the Tampa Bay Times. According to CBS News, “Adam was elected to speak for the group after the game, saying it was a ‘faith-based decision’ for many of them.”

Adam explained how the players’ Christian faith played into their decision. He told the Tampa Bay Times that “when we put it on our bodies, I think a lot of guys decided that it’s just a lifestyle that maybe — not that they look down on anybody or think differently — it’s just that maybe we don’t want to encourage it if we believe in Jesus, who’s encouraged us to live a lifestyle that would abstain from that behavior.”

Mr Adam apparently concentrated on learning his baseball, not the vocabulary of cultural studies.  Isn't the diversity lobby's use of rainbows cultural appropriation?  "The LGBTQ movement has hijacked a symbol of God’s promise, which, if it’s not blasphemy, comes very close to it."

That's too much theology for me.

Meanwhile, the Phillies have been playing good baseball since they fired their manager, and the Rays are staying ahead of them in that division.

DOWN-SWITCHING.

The phenomenon has long been with us.  I recall a jingle from the 1960s, ran something like "Pepsi-Cola's value pack/Brings the nickel serving back/Every six ounce glass you pour/Costs a nickel, not a penny more."

The nickel bottle of pop used to be bigger than six ounces, and Coca-Cola held the line on that price for a long time, in part because of non-convexities: a vending machine could run on nickels only, or at greater expense, make change for dimes or quarters, but setting it up to run on nickels and pennies and make change wouldn't pay off this side of the Big Crunch.

That is the Big Crunch at the end of the Universe, not the Big Crunch when you mis-handle a full bag of potato chips.  One way to avoid posting a higher price is to put more air and fewer chips in the same bag, and that way, particularly if the bag came imprinted with a price, you get the old bags out of inventory.  "One thing reducing the size of packages does is allow companies to avoid the one thing they don’t want to do—raise prices. Domino’s Pizza, for instance, didn’t reduce its price for chicken wings in January—it’s still $7.99—but now you get 8 pieces instead of 10."  There's been a lot of that going on.  My favorite Buffalo Wild Wings has gone from buy one, get one free on Tuesdays to buy one, get one at half price.  I switched from a dozen under the old regime to ten, with no additional purchase, under the new regime.  There are lots of ways to respond to incentives.

It appears, though, as if this summer's Norman sandwiches are going to have the aspect of Occupied France about them.  Here's one from last year.

The cold cuts project a little farther from the edges of the baguette this year.  First world problem, I know, but others confronting shrinkage of the food packages and $100 refuelings might not have the reserve margin I do, and that discontent might boil over like a red wave.

THE SOUNDS OF FREEDOM.

A Lancaster and some Spitfires and Hurricanes might be a bit much for Britain's Prince Louis.

The Platinum Jubilee coincides with the centennial of Britain's Royal Air Force.  Think about it, dear reader, that video might be showing the British Monarchy as it will serve almost to the 22nd Century.

I wonder what sort of advanced projects the Air Forces are working on that might be public knowledge when those children are the elder royals.

FRIDAY short TAKES.

Stop voting Democrat.  Youngsters might ask, "Jimmy who?"  "Joe Biden is making Jimmy Carter look like a good president."  Reality comes for the Fatal Conceit.  "Governments can't plan economies, but can disrupt them."  How fatal?  "Democracy, you see, simply means the Approved View."  Even if the Approved View comes up short: by the corona tyranny shall ye know them.  "Technocratic progressivism in fact requires the disqualification of experience and common sense as a guide to reality, and installs in their place a priestly form of authority, closer to the Enlightenment’s caricature of medieval society than to its own self-image."  But the priests are failures.  "The White House is beset by three major problems simultaneously: a president wallowing in self-pity; an in-over-its-head staff that feels the need to keep the president away from cameras; and the few experienced voices of reason, like perhaps Treasury secretary Janet Yellen, getting boxed out by the Twitter Left."  The putative leader is addled.  "President Biden is about as popular right now as a sinkhole."

Elaboration:  "Biden has unified us all on the simple notion that his presidency is a disaster, his economic policies are moronic, his border policies are apocalyptic, his mental capacity is severely incapacitated, his foreign policy is incoherent, and his ability to run the federal government competently is non-existent."  More:  "The nation is in the hands of a weak, befuddled president who is easily manipulated by the ignorant partisans around him."  By their fruits ... "Broken economy, broken health, broken military, broken law enforcement, broken culture, broken morale."

Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties.  "We cannot reason with them. Our objective should be to defeat them."  They're cooperating.  "So please, keep it up, Democrats. You keep driving more Americans to the Republicans as the only party of sanity left." Or less crazy, but within normal tolerances?

The weekly collection of pithy elaborations of traditional Cold Spring Shops themes follows.

RESTORATION IN PLACE.

In November of 1953, Trains did a feature on the then-still operating, narrow gauge, East Broad Top Railroad, including a photo of an active steam locomotive, and the railroad's map.

The article noted that the railroad was still doing well hauling coal, in part because the coal was washed and graded before transloading into standard gauge.  Three years later, they quit business, but the owners never sold the property for scrap.  A bit of a tourist railroad complex emerged, with East Broad Top running excursion trains in the direction of Mount Union, and a standard gauge electric railway museum built on that abandoned right of way running to the southeast.  The owners put the narrow gauge line up for sale in 2011, and a serious preservation effort purchased the property in 2020.

Although getting the tracks toward Mount Union operable for excursions came first, now the long-idle and more mountainous line into coal country to the northwest will be restored.  "The first goal is to reopen the 7.8-mile stretch between EBT’s headquarters at Rockhill Furnace, Pa., and Saltillo, a former junction with EBT’s Narco Branch that once boasted a station, water tank, and wye."  The local history of those town names isn't in the article, although it ought to be interesting.  The map suggests heavier going to the northwest, and that is for future development.

Long-range, EBT plans to reopen another 12 miles to the end of the line at Robertsdale and Woodvale, company towns in the mountainous mining area that once supplied the semi-bituminous loads for coal trains. This is rugged territory, with the line climbing 2.75% grades and traversing a horseshoe curve and two tunnels in need of significant work.

When the track work is done, the excursion trains will feature steam power and many of the passenger cars on their home rails.  That Trains article included, as one would expect, a roster of the steam locomotives.

The two standard gauge switchers departed long ago.  Those six narrow gauge Mikados are still on the property, and Sixteen, illustrated above, received a major overhaul just before the railroad quit for the first time.

It's probably too much to ask that Amtrak's Philadelphia to Pittsburgh day trains call at Mount Union for passenger connections, which is possible at numerous British preservation railways.

THE SUICIDE OF THE HUMANITIES.

During my time in higher education, I often groused about having to time slip the English department, often when I was offering the senior capstone paper course, and dealing with the failure of either the high schools or the composition classes to develop student writing skills.  My statement of principles is simple. "English is writing, conversation, and communication. The core curriculum is about the central ideas, and the major fields, the elaborations."

It's long been clear what the source of the rot was.

Economics is arbitrage, indifference, and exchange. Football is blocking and tackling. Essays are made up of paragraphs composed of sentences using words. And aspiring writers aren't getting enough practice using words to compose sentences that form coherent paragraphs and argue a point.

Public intellectual Freddie deBoer provides more detail on the origins of the rot.

You may find it weird that there would be writing-specific programs and departments in American colleges and universities. Isn’t that English’s job? Well, no, at least not according to a great many English professors. English profs are into the subject matter of their field, man - which is to say, Lacanian readings of the phallic imaginary, queering the Young Adult canon, and why the comma is a tool of white supremacy. Teaching college students to write papers has always been seen, by a large chunk of the world’s English professors, as a kind of academic scutwork best fobbed off on the academy’s hordes of contingent and powerless labor. In the late 20th century some tenure track professors disagreed, though. They were mostly at large state universities in the middle of the country, far from the prestige and power of elite academia. They cared about student writing, took it seriously, and wanted to receive professional credit for caring about it. But English faculty would not give it to them, fearing that rewarding writing pedagogy work would devalue their field. It was from here that rhetoric and composition was born.

The universities found themselves in that pass in part because the high schools weren't doing their job, but the pressure to get the MacArthurs or the national endowments to recognize their work contributed.

The funding of departments and programs in universities is Byzantine and varies a great deal from place to place, but certainly to survive a department needs butts in seats. Big enrollment gen ed classes serve to fund the upper-level seminars where a dozen students or less have intimate discussions with professors, and I don’t see much to object to there. (Masters students, often, exist to fund the PhD students, which is far more problematic.) And so while English professors were disdaining writing classes, those classes were keeping the lights on in their offices. Newly-formed writing programs threatened that funding, and the ongoing decline of students taking American and British lit classes (which I lament with my soul) deepens the problem. So you see why it’s touchy.

In addition, the people in rhetoric and composition departments, like those in communication studies and perhaps other disciplines that viewed themselves as English-adjacent, wanted to get in on the High (although untestable) Theory.

Back when I was grad school for rhetoric & composition, it was, like, the rhetoric of Dr. Who, endless arguments that “playing video games is a form of writing,” papers about how white cishet people take up too much space in academia and need to step back written by white cishet people, tired screeds about how comic books are just as deep and real and also less racist and more cool and smarterer than the canon, dissertation-length case studies of three Appalachian women’s journaling habits that somehow could render sweeping generalizations about literacy, treatises on business writing that curiously had nothing to say about corporate practices and everything to say about Andrew Pickering’s theory of “the mangle,” lots of disdain for the concern of teaching students how to arrange sentences into paragraphs and paragraphs into papers, relentless insistence that any attempts to correct a student’s English is the hand of imperialism, “ethnographies of place” that entailed the author spending four total hours in the library and writing about whatever they fancied there, and sundry other topics that could function as parodies of useless academic writing.

It was not going to end well, and it's not.

No one was listening. This had consequences not just for the research of grad students but for how they taught their classes. I cannot tell you how many of my peers teaching freshman writing had excised out almost all actual writing from their syllabuses, replacing it with stuff like web design and podcasts and, literally, playing board games in class. They loved that shit. And they were rewarded for it: the last thing you wanted to do was to go on a job interview with boring-ass papers on your syllabus. I had multiple conversations at conferences where fellow grad students would brag about how few pages they required in their classes, often finding every loophole in their syllabus guidelines to replace writing papers with something cooler, something that seemed more fresh to the eyes of a faculty committee looking for a hip new member of their department.

It never seemed to occur to them that abandoning the specific purview of their classes was dangerous, that antagonistic forces were always looking for excuses to slash humanities funding, and that doing podcasts and web design in your writing classes looks less like innovation to college administrators and more like redundancy.

Mr deBoer might view Hot Air's John Sexton as among those antagonistic forces, although it's easy to be antagonistic when you're agreeing with the criticism.

The humanities are obsessed with racism and language that makes their insights seem more obscure to anyone outside the field. Meanwhile, the actual teaching of writing to students is out-of-fashion with professionals in the fields of English and even Writing Studies. At some point, stressed academic budgets will force cuts and writing studies professors who don’t care about writing will probably seem like a good place to start. The wolf may be at the academic door but deBoer has made a convincing case that the wolf will be doing the taxpayers a favor.

There's a lot more in Mr deBoer's essay. I'll stop with this.  By all means, click over and read it in full.

A typical response to my fears has been to say, “I didn’t sign up to study how to teach students to write research papers.” To which I would say, that’s what the people who write your paychecks thought they were signing you up for.

As usual, my worries were not welcomed. It was stupid to voice them, of course, for purely self-interested reasons, but I never stopped hurtling off of the battlements in my graduate career. On that WPA listserv, people who had been tenured for 20 years and felt they had nothing to fear professionally sniffed condescendingly at my concerns, waving away my fears of defunding and casualization of the teaching workforce - “that would never happen here.” Like so many conversations with senior academics, their displeasure with my opinions was tinged with menace; I can’t tell you how many times I was told in my graduate education some version of, “I would never try to restrict what you have to say, but I worry for your career….” My grad school friends, almost all of whom were smart and sweet and perceptive, would mostly get quiet when I would talk about such things publicly, and I don’t blame them. One way or another it was clear that asking writing programs to care about writing was a professionally unhealthy thing to do.

The essay is not quite as long as Prof Scam, but if Charlie Sykes took a break from carrying Joe Biden's water and read it, he'd probably concur with it.

The point of the core curriculum is to help matriculants figure out what they're good at.  Develop that, and then your departments will be fine.  "In Economics, we teach Principles as a condition of being able to investigate perfect Bayesian equilibrium and other fun stuff."

BEING MOST VALUABLE OFF THE FIELD.

Green Bay Packer quarterback Aaron Rodgers sometimes gets into trouble off the field, fortunately not in the way footballers generally do.  At the same time, he's surely impressed at least one young fan.

There’s not much fun about going to the grocery store these days, but if there’s one way to take the sting out of rising food prices, it’s a surprise cart encounter with Aaron Rodgers.

Alyssa Proffitt shared photos on Twitter on Tuesday of her young daughter delighted to bump into the Green Bay Packers quarterback at Fresh Thyme Farmers Market in Ashwaubenon. Just a couple of casual weekday shoppers in their sneakers — one in shorts and one in sparkly leggings — doing a little catching up.

Sports Twitter picked it up.

Debated whether or not to post these but I just can’t get over the joy this brought to my daughter. Thank you Aaron Rodgers she will never forget this! @AaronRodgers12 pic.twitter.com/1QqIdQsbpv

— Alyssa Proffitt (@alyssamacktruck) June 7, 2022

Apparently, though, so did some killjoys.

One would like to think that aside from a few bitter members of the Future Mrs. Rodgers Society Inc. and even bitterer Chicago Bears fans, such a moment would generate nothing but warm fuzzies. Regrettably, such a notion is immediately dashed against reality’s rocks and social media’s quasi-anonymity bringing out the bitter, cynical hatred in bitter, cynical people.

Maybe the best thing for such people to do is turn off the computer or device and go for a walk.

Maybe some kudos are in order instead of sniping while hiding behind social media screen names. Like thanking a young mom who obviously loves her daughter. Like thanking Aaron Rodgers for taking a moment to be a nice guy. Let’s thank both of them for a moment of doing this being human thing right.

There is more than enough in this world to drag us down individually and collectively.

The ramp up to training camp is under way.  The kid is not quite ready for a bicycle to bring to practice.

THE ETERNALLY FASCINATING GAME OF BASEBALL.

An excellent closer has a bad night.  "Josh Hader, as dominant a closer the game has seen in recent seasons, surrendered a pair of home runs in the ninth inning and the Milwaukee Brewers dropped their fourth straight game, this one a 3-2 gut-buster to the Philadelphia Phillies at American Family Field on Tuesday night."  It's hard to break records in baseball.  "Hader entered the game having just tied Ryan Pressly for the major-league record with 40 consecutive scoreless appearances on Sunday."  Former Milwaukee closer Cory Knebel got the final Philadelphia outs.

The Brewers got off to their best start ever during the first fifty games and as of this writing are half a game ahead of the Cardinals.  It's shaping up to be an interesting summer.

THINK OF THOSE NAMELESS EXPERTS AS RIVET COUNTERS.

I've long been a fan of the old Opinion Journal "What would we ever do without experts?" entries.  Power Line's Steven Hayward is similarly skeptical.  "Whenever a news story says 'experts say,' you can stop reading, or turn to the obituaries, where some of the reported facts might be true."  The organizing principle is simple enough.  "[Experts are] People who are wrong about everything. Usually collaborators in Groupthink, and employed by government agencies or a university."

I've documented the general principle.

It's all For Your Own Good. Wise Experts know better than you, dear reader, what "disinformation" on social media is, what additives to cigarettes are dangerous, how much beer you should drink, and whether your business ought remain open during flu season or not.

Helen Roy is having none of it. "Of the countless lies the American people are meant to believe, perhaps the greatest is the myth of expertise."  Or perhaps, as Roger Koppl notes, they should speak but not rule.  "We should value expertise, but fear expert power."

PULING HYPOCRISY.

A dissertation advisor who successfully supplemented his income in the consulting and expert witness arts nevertheless kept his academic appointment as being introduced as "professor" with a university affiliation put what he described as a "Mr Chips halo" on his testimony.  That is, he could appeal to scholarly research, undertaken by people with no (easily discovered) priors to reinforce as the basis for the estimates of the benefits or losses being considered by the policy makers or the litigants.  At the margin, that halo might have offered some protection when the consultants or experts arguing to the contrary might have been more easily tied to some special interest.  (As an aside, that leads to a different sort of cottage industry in which all parties want to line up their own Mr Chips, and in which the academicians seek not to become known as a "prosecution" or "defense" witness or as "friend" or "adversary" to an industry, think, e.g., environmental regulation or the delivery of telecommunications.)

In those days, people inside the academy might have, privately, thought of people in the employ of consulting firms or policy shops or the like as "failed scholars."  These days, though, the more honest work might be done at the policy shops.  What was that Abraham Lincoln quote?  Do we now speak of advocacy taken pure, without the base alloy of (notional) academic objectivity?

Perhaps we should.  Not long ago, Georgetown Law hired Ilya Shapiro away from Cato to serve as lecturer and director of the Georgetown Center for the Constitution.  (That a Constitutional scholar from a Wisconsin or Marquette or Northern Illinois wasn't available might be salient.)  That was fine, until Mr Shapiro made a pithy but somewhat harsh social media post about a presidential appointment.

During the Democratic nomination marathon of 2020, the current president might have secured the nomination by pledging to appoint a black woman to fill a Supreme Court vacancy.  That opportunity has now presented itself, and now the promise is freeing people to weigh in, and sometimes they invoke the specter of an affirmative action asterisk.  A Georgetown Law professor called Ilya Shapiro invoked the asterisk, and now he's in the middle of an academic cancellation squabble.  Outside the Beltway's James Joyner got off what in other weeks could be a Friday short take: "Outrage over the outrage is outrageous."  The elaboration would, in a saner time, be one of those "goes without saying" commonplaces.

These are not saner times, and Georgetown, which is notionally a Jesuit institution, and thus a basketball school in the mode of Loyola-Chicago or Marquette, appears to be reverting to an older form.  Mr Shapiro was reinstated, but under something like double secret probation, or perhaps with an entry in the Index.  "Georgetown effectively told Shapiro he must either toe the company line and keep dissenting opinions to himself or face another investigation and possible sanction."

The deterioration has been long in the making.  "The point of academic research, no matter how recondite, is to be a part, no matter how small, of that continual and fearless sifting and winnowing by which alone the TRUTH can be found."  Even then, though, the rot that has now infected Georgetown Law was spreading.  "And thus does sifting and winnowing degenerate into protection of received doctrine."

If I was being hyperbolic back then, I'm in good company with the hyperbole now, namely Eugene Volokh, who has a bigger platform than I, and who comments on the ex cathedra pronouncement restoring Mr Shapiro in a manner most critical.

The policy bans expression of views in social media, op-eds, conferences, scholarship, and more. The restriction on professors' speech isn't limited to the classroom, or for that matter to the campus. It obviously extends to social media, and the same logic would apply to any other public speech that might be have "a significant negative impact" because students will hear about it and be upset by it (again, more on the specific details below).

That logic thus extends to scholarship and other professional work, as well as op-eds, radio and television appearances, and the like, and not just to quick sound bites on Twitter. And of course it extends to the viewpoint being expressed, and not just the particular words that are used to express it. Georgetown professors could thus be disciplined for "prohibit[ed]" "harass[ing]" viewpoints they express in their research, as well as of course in their public political commentary.

There's a lot more in his post, although what the Sensitivity Monitors are doing goes beyond encouraging professors to approach controversial topics in a respectful manner.

The list could go on. It doesn't matter whether you care about Ilya Shapiro's career. The important thing here, I think, is just how much speech is now in peril, going forward, for Georgetown professors generally (especially ones who lack tenure, but even the tenured ones).

Mr Shapiro will be fine. He has affiliated with another Washington policy shop, the Manhattan Institute.  Whether purging Georgetown Law, or any other college of law, or any other faculty, of the people who might otherwise investigate subjects that upset the sensibilities of the Sensitivity Monitors advances the academic mission will turn out well is another matter.  Margaret "University Diaries" Soltan, who did Abraham Lincoln one better with that "puling," observes, "G’town’s Shapiro fiasco is the beginning of a process that will eventually also gobble up Carol Christine Fair, and she knows it."  Ms Fair is another Georgetown Law professor, somewhat more in tune with the woke mob, but herself afraid of the student cancel mob baying for more faculty to be fired.  There might be a policy shop somewhere that aligns with her priors, as well as more honest than Georgetown Law, adhering to tight priors yet pretending to support scholarly inquiry.

LET'S GO FOR A TROLLEY RIDE.

The East Troy Electric Railroad commemorates fifty years of railway preservation (by several different preservation groups) in the Lake District of southeastern Wisconsin.

The rides, quite literally, come with all the requisite bells and whistles that are part-and-parcel of riding the retro-nostalgic rails.

It was in October 1971 when ambitious plans were announced for the East Troy Trolley Museum and its electric excursion railway, which opened to standing-room-only crowds the following May.

Today, a half-century later, electrified streetcars, trolleys and interurbans — a rolling stock roster now 27 cars strong — still ply the venerable 115-year-old line, gently rocking and clickety-clacking the rails between East Troy and Mukwonago, conjuring up sepia-toned memories of yesteryear while also pointing to a greener electrified retro modern future.

“This year will be special for our volunteers and a great time for people to come out to ride our trains,” said Ryan Jonas, president of the East Troy Railway Museum. “When you take a ride on our trains, you’ll hear about the history of the electric railroad line, which has been in continuous use since 1907. This year you’ll also hear about the hundreds of volunteers and what they have done to maintain the railroad and restore its trolleys, streetcars and interurban cars for 50 years. It really is an amazing story.”

Much of the content of the article will be familiar to regular readers of Cold Spring Shops. As, perhaps, will this historical recollection.

Volunteer Evan Richards, motorman on No. 9, has fond memories of riding Milwaukee city streetcars to see the National League Milwaukee Braves play at County Stadium as a child, recalling the streetcar lines were removed after the Braves’ 1958 World Series matchup against the New York Yankees.

When the East Troy Electric Railway runs 1920s-era TMER&L double truck streetcars, Richard said he often kids passengers that “if you’re here trying to catch a ballgame, you’re 60 years too late.”

“You know how the Chicago Cubs had all the problems with The Goat? If the Brewers want to win the World Series, they better put a streetcar line back in,” Richards said.

I've apparently got a neighbor involved in the preservation effort, as well.

Find yourself a preservation railway and ride it.

THE DIVERSITY SHELTERS THE INCOMPETENCE.

I wonder, dear reader, whether the Jarrett regency put a waif like Buckwheat in charge of White House communications because she's able to make NBC's Kelly O'Donnell look like a mean girl.

She’s either out of her league, or the President makes her job of defending him completely impossible. https://t.co/niJDhOoNxb

— Frank Luntz (@FrankLuntz) June 3, 2022

Twitchy's Doug P. notices. "White House reporters might be doing a little less water-carrying for this administration as the excuses run thin."

Brutal.

In one of the most cutting exchanges of the briefing, NBC News reporter Kelly O’Donnell told Jean-Pierre: “On the issue of who briefed the president on baby formula, to say there was no specific person is not a satisfactory answer.”

"When you have senior assistants to the president, there’s a paper trail, I’m sure, about briefings to the president,” O’Donnell continued.

“What I’m trying to say is there’s so many issues that come up that is presented to the president, as you know, you’ve covered many administrations,” Jean-Pierre responded. “And there are just regular channels that that happen that go to the president.”

O’Donnell, president-elect of the White House Correspondents’ Association, interjected: “It looks like it’s evasive to not have the most senior people in the White House willing to say, ‘I had a conversation with the president about it’ or ‘I had, we talked about it in this context or in that context.'”

“We’re talking about the consumer side of it, of what you’re doing putting out and trying to get information,” O’Donnell continued. “But we’re also trying to understand the information flow in this White House. And it’s important for us to get that answer, which is why we’re going to keep asking it until we get that answer.”

I shall keep pointing out the ways in which the Jarrett regency's incompetence is its diversity.

Turf them out.

THEY'RE NOT WASTING ANY OF MY MONEY.

I generally consign fundraising requests from any institution of higher education directly to the recycle bin.  They're not going to get a mention in my will, either, particularly with results like these. UW-Madison sees no improvement in campus climate despite millions invested in DEI.

I'm not surprised, their alumni communications are similarly foolish.

The idea behind so-called inclusive education is that it's supposed to produce those intellectually curious youngsters.  The lie is that those intellectually curious youngsters exist, and somehow a more conventional education doesn't hurt them.  Think about this, dear reader.  Each month I receive glossy alumni magazines from a university you might have heard of (not always in a good way) and you might be excused for thinking they're sending out Benetton catalogs based on the covers, and the feature stories.  The stories, though, describe faculty members or graduates working on Really Useful projects, and the language and presentation is impeccable.

That post was ultimately about the failure of so-called inclusive education in the high schools and before. The messaging isn't much better at university.

There has been no improvement in the UW-Madison campus climate over the last six years despite the public university pouring millions of dollars into programs and staff positions to support diversity, equity and inclusion.

“Students of color, students with disabilities, nonbinary students, transgender students, and other LGBTQ+ students responded less positively than their counterparts” when rating whether they feel welcome, safe and respected, according to the results of a recently released campus climate survey.

“The gap in reported perceptions between these students and other students did not change between 2016 and 2021,” the survey found.

Outgoing Chancellor Rebecca Blank said the survey results were disappointing and she hopes her replacement can do a better job on diversity.

“It’s clear that there do remain gaps between more marginalized groups and their degree of satisfaction and their sense of belonging and comfort on this campus,” Blank said during her final press conference on campus May 11.

“I think we’ve done a number of things that have helped move the university forward, but as others have noted, we are a predominantly white institution in a predominantly white state and this is work that is going to be ongoing for a long time.”

Whether that's the propensity of the favored protected status students to gripe about stuff that could be done, the tendency of the diversity deanlets to emphasize what work remains to be done (the day a major campus reports success in diversity efforts, will somebody downsize Student Affairs?) or the fact that the outgoing chancellor still has to establish her woke bona fides at Northwestern, and you can never go wrong deplorable shaming white folks.

Her successor is unlikely to be better.

When asked by The College Fix via a virtual press conference Tuesday how she plans to improve diversity beyond what Blank had achieved, incoming Chancellor Jennifer Mnookin said she will spend time on campus before deciding how her approach might differ from Blank’s.

“That’s definitely [an issue] where I will need to get to campus and learn a lot more,” Mnookin said. She noted during the interview that scholarship programs to make education more accessible and affordable for all students were at the top of her list.

Look out, more Distressed Material showing up in the incoming classes.

The College Fix documents a number of other diversity, inclusion, and equity excesses so I don't have to.  "So much for me writing any more checks to any operating units of the University of Wisconsin."

ESTABLISH THAT WINNING CULTURE.

Chicago Sun-Times sports scribe Rick Morrissey sees none on the north side of Chicago.

The Cubs are playing the Cardinals at Wrigley this weekend, a timely reminder that they should want to be the Cards when they grow up but in reality don’t. The Cardinals are where they usually are in the standings, near the top of the National League Central, and the Cubs are going through their second rebuild in 10 years, which explains all the losing.

The last time the Cardinals finished under .500 was 2007 and before that 1999. Since the Ricketts family bought the franchise in 2009, the Cubs have finished under .500 six times. This season will be the seventh.

Just to be clear, Chicago is the third-largest city in the United States, and St. Louis is the 72nd, smaller than Durham, North Carolina; Lincoln, Nebraska; and Corpus Christi, Texas.

Lincoln with more people than St. Louis comes as a surprise.  But in Lincoln, or St. Louis, or Green Bay, fans know what success looks like.  Somehow, the Cardinals prosper despite continuing suckitude in Chicago, Cincinnati, and Pittsburgh.  Are the Packers paying attention?

The Cardinals know that their fans expect greatness. There’s no explanation for what the Cubs are doing other than they’ve chosen making money over winning titles. And if you follow this line of reasoning to its logical conclusion, you realize that the Cubs don’t think their fans expect greatness. If they did, they’d be pumping money into the product on the field.

The Cardinals know what their fans expect.

The Cubs think they know what their fans will swallow.

One more comparison, the only comparison that really matters, to illustrate the difference between the two franchises: The Cubs have won one World Series since 1908 (perhaps you’ve heard), and the Cardinals have won 11 in the same span. Now that’s a team culture.

The Cardinals management understand that "good enough" means capering on the field in late October.

Four years ago, I asked then-interim Cards manager Mike Shildt if he could ever envision the organization going through the painful losing of a rebuild in the hope of winning a World Series down the road, the way the Cubs had before they built up to their 2016 title.

“No,’’ he said. “That’s not what the Cardinals organization represents.’’

At the time, the Cards were two games over .500 and struggling. It was mid-July. They went on to finish 88-74 — much better but not nearly good enough by their standards. The next three years, they lost an NL Championship Series after winning the division, lost a wild-card series and lost a wild-card game. Pretty good, right? It got Shildt canned.

The most damning thing you can say about the Cubs is that they should be the Cardinals — damning because the Cards are their purported archrivals and damning because there’s no reason a major-market club should be taking the rebuild route again.

Here we are, entering the run to the All-Star break, and the Cardinals are again pressing the Brewers, another small-market team.

PAID LACKEYS WITHOUT CHARACTER OR KNOWLEDGE.

A David Acevedo essay in Minding the Campus opens with what might rate a Friday short Take.  "A Game of Leftist Whac-A-Mole: Why College Presidents Are Quitting."  Yes, that's part of the presidential retention problem.  "The undermining is being done by radical-chic, politically correct courses. That's still primarily a talking point on the right wing of the Canon Wars, but the growing reserve army of underemployed university graduates cannot help the defenders of business as usual."

But only part.

College presidents are charged with an amazing range of responsibilities. There’s nothing wrong with this in and of itself. Indeed, the president of any organization or company ought to be busy with wide-ranging duties, higher education being no exception. But what exactly should a college president be busy doing? In short, he should devote himself to protecting and promoting the core mission of the university. And what is that mission? This will make clear what a college president’s job should be, and what it should not be.

For the past twenty or thirty years, though, those presidents have been presiding over various failures at that mission.  By their fruits shall ye know them.

Vocation, culture, truth, and character. That’s a lot for a college president to keep track of, especially when he must not only be concerned with academic matters, but also with ensuring that the institution holds together administratively and remains afloat financially.

But today’s college presidents are asked to promote a quite different set of values, in many cases the exact opposite of those listed above. After all, if this holy quaternity is actually the unholy vestige of white supremacy, as many claim, then we ought to invert it entirely. Barbarous activism supplants vocation; culture (at least Western culture) is to be “deconstructed,” not promoted; objective truth-seeking is discarded in favor of postmodern subjectivism; and demographic identity replaces character. This great inversion has had disastrous consequences for academia and has fundamentally transformed higher education as we know it, and thereby the college presidency itself. College presidents have sowed the seeds of this transformation for decades—out of ignorance, cowardice, or malice—and are now reaping the bitter, perhaps unforeseen, consequences. The college presidency has lost its way and, in the process, has lost its luster.

There might be a simpler explanation, something along the lines of sex for the students, football championships for the alumni, and parking for the faculty, but it ought be possible to make good on those things while not losing culture, truth, or character.  But paid lackeys have to establish an Institutional Position, whether it's in their purview or not.

One such consequence is that college presidents are now expected to embrace the new and all-consuming role of “Activist-in-Chief.” After every domestic or international tragedy (limited to leftist-approved tragedies, of course), faculty, staff, students, and alumni wait with bated breath for the Office of the President to issue a statement condemning the bad guys and praising the good guys.

Where is there an academic president or provost with the self-confidence to say "We prepared our graduates to weigh the evidence and reach their own conclusions, and our weighing in on today's event would be evidence of our failure."  Here's how Mr Acevedo puts it.

College presidents ought not comment on current affairs that do not directly affect their school, and they ought not make such rash statements before anyone knows the facts on the ground.

These statements are not merely instances of irresponsible leadership. They also create a de facto institutional stance on these issues which may not be violated without serious consequences.

In so doing, they sow the seeds of their own undoing.

It’s simply impossible to pay equal attention to all of the Left’s favored causes—climate change and fossil fuel divestment, racial “justice,” graduate student compensation, sexual harrassment, “gender-inclusive” facilities, COVID-19 mandates, etc.—so when college presidents focus on whacking one mole, a few more pop up in its place. No matter how hard they try, they can never keep up. I imagine that all of this mole-whacking is exhausting, even if a president’s statements are primarily ghostwritten.

More than that, I doubt that most college presidents sought out their role in order to become Activist-in-Chief. It’s a thankless job—at best, you save your own skin for a few weeks; at worst, you feel the wrath of a thousand leftists because you didn’t issue the statement fast enough, you didn’t issue enough statements, or you phrased the statement insensitively. Perhaps some incoming presidents look forward to wearing this hat, but that bright-eyed naivety is sure to wear off before long. Only after getting battered a few times do they realize that by making such pronouncements, they have made themselves the plaything of the activists. They are no longer in charge, and they must constantly look over their shoulders to see if their new masters approve of their behavior.

All of this to say, the modern college presidency is unbearable. Our institutions, including the presidents themselves, have made it unbearable. Any college president with at least a few brain cells remaining will see where this is going and hightail it out of there. Given the state of affairs, their decision makes perfect sense. But it will leave a dangerous power vacuum in American higher education. College presidents who actually seek to lead their institution rather than follow the whims of enraged activists will either resign or be forced out. Those who take their place—those who see the state of the college presidency and actually want the job—will be far worse than their predecessors.

We've long understood "his successor will be worse" as the reality in higher education.  Perhaps, though, there are people, silently suffering the foolishness of their decanal order, who might come to the conclusion that they might not be able to do a better job, but they surely could not do any worse, and work their way up.

PUSHING (WHAT REMAINS OF?) UKRAINE INTO THE WESTERN ALLIANCE.

A Trains report on developments with Ukraine's war-disrupted railroads includes the possibility of a significant restructuring of the railroad network.

Ukraine, like all countries in the former Soviet Union, uses 5-foot gauge broad gauge for its track, while neighboring European Union-member countries use standard gauge. In late May, Ukrainian Prime Minister Mr Denys Shmyhal announced plans to rebuild the rail network with standard gauge track and European PTC systems to replace legacy ex-Soviet Railways systems. Small sections of standard and 5-foot dual-gauge lines already exist, largely adjacent to the Hungarian border in regions that between 1918 and 1945 were part of Czechoslovakia.

This would have a substantial cost, and it remains to be seen whether Ukraine, and most likely international donors, will prioritize rail-gauge conversion alongside the massive rebuilding that will be necessary once the war is over. Ukraine’s Infrastructure Minister, Oleksandr Kubrakov, told local media that damage caused by the Russian invasion to the country’s transport, energy, and telecoms infrastructure totalled over $100 billion by April alone.

Experience in Spain, the only European country to begin adding a standard gauge network to an existing broad gauge one, shows the process is both very time consuming and expensive.

The principal challenge in regauging a railroad is in rebuilding all the switches and crossings.  It's easier to regauge by moving a rail in than moving it out.  Such rebuilding might be necessary if the Russian revised plan, which might still be progressing, even if slowly, of connecting Russia to the Crimean peninsula and possibly securing Odessa landlocks Ukraine.  The parts of Ukraine being occupied (and annexed to?) Russia might be devoid of much commercial value.

Head of the Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) Denis Pushilin stated that DNR authorities are planning to level Azovstal after completing its capture. Azovstal was a major element of Mariupol’s economy before the war because of its unique function as a full-cycle metallurgical complex, the 10,000 jobs associated with production at the plant, the billions of dollars of foreign exchange earnings and taxes it generated, and its production output of 7,000 tons of steel, 6 million tons of iron, and 4.5 million tons of rolled metal, according to the Mariupol City Council. Pushilin stated that the DNR intends to rebuild Mariupol to be a “resort city,” while admitting that 60% of the structures in Mariupol have been destroyed to the point where they cannot be rebuilt. The announced plan to turn Mariupol into a center of tourism and leisure following the complete destruction of a major center of economic activity in Mariupol, is indicative of the damage that Russian troops have inflicted on themselves through the destruction of Mariupol. Russia does not need another resort town on the Black Sea. It does need the kind of hard currency that a plant like Azovstal had generated. This announcement epitomizes the kind of Pyrrhic victories Russian forces have won in Ukraine, to the extent that they have won victories at all.

Yes, a resort on what we would understand as a Superfund site is a great tourist draw, isn't it?  But pillaging productive assets appears to be what the Russians are doing, both in the autonomous zones they've already carved out, and in the territory gained in the past hundred days.

Russian forces reportedly hit the “Azot” fertilizer production plant in Severodonetsk on May 31 and caused the dissemination of toxic nitric acid smoke. The production plant was an economically-significant resource for Severodonetsk and the Luhansk region and it would have been prudent for Russian forces to maintain and take control of the plant’s production capabilities. Russian forces similarly destroyed the Azovstal Steel Plant in Mariupol, which had considerable industrial significance for Ukraine and could have been economically exploited by Russian occupiers if they had not destroyed it. While the Azot plant in Severodonetsk was less productive on whole than Azovstal, its destruction is part of the systemic failure of Russian forces to take effective control of the economic and industrial capabilities of occupied territory. Russian forces will likely continue to destroy productive infrastructure and continually undermine the economic benefits they could have hoped to gain from occupied territories.

What sort of loyalty the Russians can expect from the supposedly Russian-aligned inhabitants remaining in the conquered territories, after their livelihoods have been undone, remains to be seen.  But what will remain of an independent Ukraine once some sort of settlement emerges is going to be more connected, whether by rail, by commercial ties, or military practice, to the Western powers.