A NEW FORM OF TENURE QUOTA? Invisible Adjunct and King at SCSU Scholars use this report on four of six professors at Wisconsin's Carroll College who were recommended by their departments and the college promotion committee for tenure but denied by the college president. Invisible Adjunct and King Banaian both draw parallels between the president's action and administrative tyranny elsewhere, and in particular with whether Carroll's administration might be behaving badly by attempting to replace tenure-track faculty with temporary faculty, as an economy measure.

The Chronicle article, however, is misleading in part: "Every year professors at colleges around the country come up for tenure -- and, inevitably, some of them miss the mark. But what has made the decisions here so unsettling and unusual, some people say, is that by all accounts each of the four professors excelled in teaching, research, and service -- the traditional standards by which tenure candidates are judged. Nonetheless, Carroll's president and trustees simply decided that it didn't make good business sense to keep them.

"Financial issues typically don't figure into tenure cases unless a college is facing financial collapse, or enrollment is declining and a college wants to close a program. Neither is the case at Carroll."

Actually, financial issues do matter, and they have mattered for a long time. Some university administrators keep track of something they call tenure "depth," referring to the proportion of a department currently tenured, and I have an old set of suggestions for students on the job market that includes looking at the dean's strategic plan, if you have an interview with the dean as part of your visit. The author of these suggestions noticed that one such dean had characterized the economics department as tenured up, and presumably took a job elsewhere. Moreover, during my time at Wayne State, we were able to hire a very good demographer and economic historian who became available to us because a dean at Cornell decided that department already had one of those specialists with tenure. Nearly 30 years ago, The Progressive did an article on the phenomenon of universities discovering that it was cheaper to do searches at seven-year intervals rather than grant tenure. The Carroll College case might be unusual, but not astonishing.

TESTING THE PERMANENT INCOME HYPOTHESIS? Insta Pundit links to a Cointelpro post that suggests Scrapple Face (first pedantic note: a professor might move from UCLA (motto: On! Wisconsin!) via Boston University via Fisk to MTSU, but not via Columbia) and Counterspin Central are praising, the first for fun, the second for profit, Democratic fiscal policy going back to the first Clinton-Gore administration. It's worth thinking about the tax rate cuts, the tax rebate checks, the deficit, and the third quarter growth rate figures in perspective. President Bush's original 2001 proposal included cuts in marginal tax rates, which were to be phased in over ten years and then abolished. (At a discount rate of eight percent, which is my best guess as the right risk adjustment for Congressional action in eight ((2011-2001)-(2003-2001)) years, the effect of that abolition, or not, on my perceived permanent income is neglgible.) The compromise that went into effect that year included some immediate tax rebate checks (anybody else remember the assurances that the last batch WOULD be mailed out after September 11, assurances that did stand up?) which contributed immediately to larger deficits and which provided transitory income to consumers. The compromise this year involved more rapid decreases on marginal tax rates and some supplementals to the earned income tax credit, which, again, provided transitory income to some people and immediate enlargement of the deficit. The lower marginal tax rates, provided they stay in effect for the next eight or ten years, imply changes in peoples' permanent income. Should be plenty of dissertation topics in the next few years to tease out the effects of the permanent (within meaningful discounting) and transitory tax changes.

Daniel Drezner has some additional coverage, including some good news about inventories being drawn down. (The existence of inventories to draw down is one source of a "jobless" recovery: reported sales and thus national income increase, but inventories represent past jobs that might not have to be filled immediately.) He's also linked to Outside the Beltway, with more cross-references and a reminder that Presidents take too much blame for recessions and claim too much credit for expansions.

One further phenomenon that bears watching is the possible shortening of the business cycle. I was at a steel industry technical session in beautiful Merrillville, Indiana, last night at which I learned that where steel used to enjoy two good years in seven (this would be from the mid-1970s on) it's now more like enjoying two good months in a year. Going to have to dig out the Metal Statistics and take a closer look.

STAY THE COURSE. Ralph Peters takes stock of the Iraqi resistance and evaluates criteria for success in the Global War on Terrorism. We are unlikely to live long enough to see a dispassionate analysis of the war, which would require an assessment of how many attacks were disrupted prior to September 11, 2001; how many have been disrupted since; have the plots subsequent to September 11 been more frequent and more clever, more frequent and less clever, less frequent and more clever, or less frequent and less clever. (No doubt the historians will come up with more precise categorizations. A 2x2 classification works for many economics problems, which no doubt influences my classification scheme.)

POSSIBLE SOURCE OF COMPANY MAIL. Steven D. Krause's Official Blog compares and contrasts life in the academy with life in industry. Well worth a look, not just for the MAC connections. (Via Invisible Adjunct.)

TODAY'S AMNESTY PUZZLE: William Raspberry, looking at differing willingness among states to offer in-state tuition to children of illegal immigrants: "The guy who illegally makes himself at home in my shed may turn out to be a pretty good deal for me. Maybe he keeps the grass cut and the snow shoveled and the porch painted -- all for less than I could manage on the "legal" market.

"But it doesn't follow that I have to put him in my will or otherwise give him the status of family. Isn't the in-state tuition rate for family?

"And even that misses the point, which is: If the federal government fails at its job of keeping the illegals out of the country, why should it fall to the states to pay the costs produced by that failure?

"The problem, at bottom, is the inability of the federal government to enforce existing immigration policy and its refusal to reform it. The states are simply stuck with the unhappy result."

All of the foregoing presupposes that the policy is a failure. The facts recited above are consistent with a coherent policy. There is room for further research, to investigate the hypothesis that states are using the in-state-tuition as an instrument to further fine tune the mix of illegal, but productive, immigrants within their borders.

(Thanks to Milt's File for finding the column.)

NOTICE OF LINE RELOCATION. The Knowledge Problem has moved to a new site, with a new design. (I can't offer any suggestions on the Internet Explorer glitch noted here.) The posts appear without any truncation problems if I use the horizontal scrolling arrows to read the posts. (That cuts out the extensive link list. Scroll to the left and look around.)

MARKING OFF. Expect light or sporadic posting the next few days. Business and other pleasures will come first.

THOSE PURITAN ROOTS ARE SHOWING:

(Via Betsy's Page.)

WELCOME DISSECTING LEFTISM READERS. The post Professor Ray found worthy of linking is here. There is a cross-reference to it at this Invisible Adjunct Gender Poll (and if you're reading the university weblogs and haven't discovered Invisible Adjunct, have a look.) There are at least three interpretations of my post that people are discovering. First, it is making fun of academics, because they deserve it. Second, it is laying down a marker in the culture wars, which is what I suspect Dissecting Leftism is reading, and at least one commenter on the poll concurs. Third, it is being excessively pedantic, which drives another commenter slightly around the bend.

(But "conversation ender?" (toggle irony)What a limp-wristed, quiche-eating perspective to take.(/toggle irony) There has been a shift in usage, and it has coincided, whether causally or accidentally, with the emergence of Race-Class-Gender theory ... all three of these terms being used to indicate dimensions of a person's identity that are objectively defined by attitudes beyond that person's control. Years ago, when I was helping construct Divisia indices of labor quality for two-digit industries, the index had a five-way classification: Sex, Age, Education, Experience, Occupation. Employment and enrollment applications had a space to indicate "Sex." The substitution of "gender" on applications and as the name of the regressor formerly identified as "sex" has been within the past fifteen or twenty years. And in that time some academics who misname themselves as "theorists" have proposed additional "genders." Trans-sexuals appear on campus only in screenings of Rocky Horror Picture Show)

Back to the Dissecting Leftism cross-reference. There's another post, here. Suggestions for a more accurate three-word summary of this are welcome. (I have not been able to rule out a logician sympathetic to Leftist arguments defending tu quoque fallacy as the summary. Fire away!)

CARNIVAL OF THE VANITIES visits Who Censored Blogger Rabbit? (not Who Framed Blogger Rabbit, as erroneously noted in the vanity post.) The Superintendent at Blogger Rabbit advises me that the movie, "Who Framed ..." is loosely based on a book titled Who Censored Roger Rabbit (details or compare prices.) The things you learn participating in this new medium. Welcome, Carnival readers, and thanks to Who Censored Blogger Rabbit for hosting it.

Carnival 59 will call at Wizbang, which means I have to have something extra special to tease Tim Hall.

RECOMMENDED RECREATIONAL READING. National Public Radio war correspondent Anne Garrels has written Naked in Baghdad (you'll have to read the book, the usual details or price comparisons for your use.) Well written and a quick read. My copy has some unusual annotations in it as I was reading it on Train 1243, the 3.58 semi-fast to Aurora, which got into an interesting drag race with a late-running Southwest Chief that featured two trains running flat-out, nose-and-nose, from Berwyn to Clarendon Hills.

TONIGHT'S WICKED THOUGHT. I received a form from Staff Benefits that had a few fields blank, including one marked "Gender." I crossed out the word "Gender" and enterered "Sex: Male." I resisted the temptation to send a memorandum back reading as follows:

I was brought up to understand that "sex" was a biological term and "gender," a grammatical term. I understand that some people use the term "gender" as a way of making the point that the actions people take, including acting on their sex, have elements that have evolved over time, something loosely described as "socially constructed." My sense is that your office is using the term "gender" to determine my biological makeup, which is "male." You probably are not interested in my gender, which is "Non-Quiche Eating Real Guy," a category probably deserving of protected status as under-represented around the University.

SECOND SECTION: The Gender Genie (correct use of the terminology, as it is looking at evolved patterns of writing) strongly agrees:
Words: 143
(NOTE: The genie works best on texts of more than 500 words.)

Female Score: 39
Male Score: 437

The Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is: male!

In this longer post, it's another boot to the head for the quiche-eaters:
Words: 684
(NOTE: The genie works best on texts of more than 500 words.)
Female Score: 679
Male Score: 1349
The Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is: male!

IDEAS MATTER MOST. Porphyrogenitus has been writing and generating commentary on the continued conversation over the role of the Trivium and Quadrivium, particularly in light of the conversation over Certification U or preferred alternatives thereto. Porphyrogenitus proposes another (ranting screed?) shortly. It is not to that post that I wish to speak tonight. Rather, it is to his contrasting of cyclical and linear time, particularly as viewed by the academic Left. I'm not sure there's that much of a contrast, particularly if one uses the Fourth Turning (details or compare prices.) The notion of cyclical history bothers me for the same reason that cobweb cycles bother me: the existence of a cycle implies the existence of an arbitrage opportunity, which has the effect of dampening the cycle. There is, however, a dialectic present in the cyclical view of history: the thesis, antithesis, contradiction, and synthesis appear in recursive, rather than convergent, ways.

THE BATTLE OF THE SEXES. Apt. 11-D, Invisible Adjunct, and Sara at Crescat Sententia weigh in on the tensions between moms caring for their kids full time, women caring for their kids and doing paid work, and women without kids doing paid work. (I hope that distinction is consistent with 11-D's and Invisible's observation that raising kids is work and not really equivalent to a hobby.)

But there is a deeper theme running through several of the paid media posts inspiring the commentaries linked above. In Ellen Ostrow it's this: "The problem, it seems to me, is that issues of equity have been framed in the context of balancing work and family life. Understandably, this renders the concerns of people without children or other family obligations as irrelevant." Cady Wells puts it this way: "As a childless faculty member I wonder why the ability for me to have evenings and weekends is not as important. I'm sympathetic to the difficulties of the faculty parent, but it's not necessarily easier being childless. The pressures are just different." And Lisa Belkin goes beyond the Battle of the Sexes: "Women started this conversation about life and work -- a conversation that is slowly coming to include men. Sanity, balance and a new definition of success, it seems, just might be contagious. And instead of women being forced to act like men, men are being freed to act like women. Because women are willing to leave, men are more willing to leave, too -- the number of married men who are full-time caregivers to their children has increased 18 percent. Because women are willing to leave, 46 percent of the employees taking parental leave at Ernst & Young last year were men."

But methinks Belkin doth claim too much, and Ostrow and Wells doth protest too much. We are all ... whether raising children or not, whether working late with the help of artificial light or not, whether tenured or not, whether taking derivatives or playing on the Internet ... seriously underemployed compared to our ancestors of 100 or 150 years ago. Consider, for example, the time squeeze that comes from making time to work out, or to run, or to get the kids to a sporting event. Fast-rewind to a time when we got PAID to work out, shoveling coal into a locomotive, or walking behind a plow, or doing the laundry on a washboard, or chopping wood for the cookstove, or gathering water. Whether I'm keying into Maple or checking the math with paper and pencil, I'm not burning anywhere near the calories I would on any of those other jobs.

And, as I have argued before, we are likely to have a de facto 35 hour work week in the United States, and without the French to legislate it. On the other hand, as I have also noted before, some high-achievers are going to self-identify by working harder than others and that phenomenon is likely to be more visible at universities than in private-sector businesses, because the transaction costs involved in setting up a high achiever university from scratch are likely to be more daunting than the costs involved in similarly setting up a high achiever business.

TAKING ADVANTAGE OF OTHERS' SUBSIDIES? Spoons Experience notes that prescription drugs are often expensive in the United States and cheap in other countries because the single-payer health care providers in other countries use a form of monopsony power (sell to us at the price we offer, or sell nothing at all) with the effect that U.S. consumers bear most of the burden of research and development (if the single-payer's price exceeds the avoidable cost of producing the drugs, taxpayers in other countries are kicking something in toward research and development.) Such price policies set up a short-term arbitrage opportunity (this Chicago Tribune editorial recognizes the point) to buy abroad at the controlled price and consume here, which has the effect of exacerbating the shortage of drugs abroad (it is no accident, comrades, that "socialism" comes just after "shortage" and just before "sophomoric" in the dictionary) albeit by reducing the revenues the drug producer expects to earn from the open-market (is it really an open market price with a constraint on overseas prices?) price. Insults Unpunished has been following the price-control and reimportation debate for some time, and the posts cited therein are worth a look.

In other health economics commentaries, Shark Blog notes, yet again, the deleterious effect of third-party payments on the incentive to shop for the best price, a phenomenon also present with guaranteed student loans.

REDISCOVERING APPRENTICESHIPS? Joanne Jacobs notes that trade schools, many of which are private and for-profit stand to benefit as rising populations and tight budgets lead to stiffer admission standards in Arizona (motto: we don't match outside offers to potential Nobel laureates,) a development which is likely to please Highered Intelligence, and perhaps will get the institutions of lower and higher learning to rethink what the highest result of their efforts might be.

IRRATIONAL EXUBERANCE? Would you pay $1000 for a railway-station poster that produced $10 per year in profits?

CRAYON DIVERSITY AWARD. Shark Blog also has a wicked thought. (Hat tip: Joanne Jacobs.) The crayon-box metaphor is popular with many in the ed biz, as it permits all sorts of statements about different colors coexisting in the same box. That crayons come in a box and have pointy heads doesn't seem to occur to such people.

FORCING A NASH EQUILIBRIUM IN PURE STRATEGIES. There is no fortress that Bolsheviks cannot storm. (Hat tip: Volokh Conspiracy.)

BOOKS FOR TROOPS. Will the following address become the next address to be overloaded by civilians?

CPT David Spencer
Task Force 1-63 Armor
c/o 173rd Airborne Brigade
APO AE 09347

Hat tip: The Command Post, who suggests including a brief "thank you" with the book(s) you send.

WALKING THE GREAT HALLS OF OUR YOUTH. Michael Jennings pays tribute to London's St. Pancras, soon to be home to the Channel Tunnel Rail Link, and the adjacent King's Cross, starting point for the steam-powered non-stoppers to Edinburgh (and, in fiction, for a mis-directed GWR Hall that somehow sneaked under the main trainshed.) London has done better than most North American cities at retaining its classic terminal stations. Although there are still three major stations in Chicago, all three and the Metra Electric are best described as annexes to office towers, although the main waiting room at Union Station honors the classic forms.

SELECTIVE INDIGNATION. Fraters Libertas is unimpressed with the American Library Association's resistance to some provisions of the Patriot Act.

WINNER TAKES ALL. Betsy's Page notes that the New York Yankees scored more runs than the Florida Marlins, but lost the World Series anyway. (And no Florida Supreme Court attempted to rewrite the ground rules after game 2.) She links to a colleague who is attempting, perhaps too earnestly, to draw parallels between the Bowl Championship Series and the primaries. Perhaps the method will work to determine which of the candidates gets the most buzz based on the outcome of the previous week's primaries. There is a parallel between the views of pundits, and the logic of a rating system in which a team with a win over the current #10 and the current #12 and a near-tie with the current #6 fails to crack the top 15 while the #12 it defeats falls to about #25. (Time does not permit an analysis of the weighting of the computer power indicators that figure in calculating the rankings, although there is an interesting mathematics problem in there.)

VISUALIZE GLOBAL POVERTY. Ira Chernus has, although he doesn't recognize it. (Hint: it's not the rich countries that practice import substitution and autarky.)

SECOND BEST? Deionychus antirhopus takes issue with an Economist editorial looking at future substitutes for fossil fuels. He hits on a problem that frequently perplexes students, the effect of a monopoly price on the production of a good that has a negative nonpecuniary externality.

I was reading the editorial in question this morning, and had a wicked thought: wouldn't successful hydrogen fuel cell technology for automobiles lead to even bigger land yachts?

SECOND SECTION: Day By Day has a somewhat different wicked thought.

CUE ZARATHRUSTRA. Details at Newmark's Door.

OVER-RIDE. Marginal Revolution discovers that the traffic-light override transmitter intended for emergency vehicles is available commercially.

NOSTALGIA TRIP. Econo Pundit pays tribute to John McCutcheon's "Injun Summer." I still have a yellowed copy clipped out of the Chicago Tribune Magazine, possibly the last time it ran.

DICTATORSHIP OF THE NOBEL LAUREATE. Excellent precis of many of Joseph Stiglitz's writings, at Econ Log.

OSAMA'S BEST FRIEND. Via Milt's File, more on a possible Saddam-Osama connection, and some new information about Fall Porsche.

SEPARATING EQUILIBRIUM? Invisible Adjunct comments on the potential instability of the academic caste system (particularly in the humanities, but it's a cautionary tale for other disciplines) and on the bidding war for academic superstars, linking a David L. Kirp editorial column that King at SCSU Scholars evaluates somewhat differently.

To repeat: (Put in professor-speak: even the brightest among you could benefit from a modicum of repetition. In Road Foreman-speak, it's more like "No matter how #@*& many times I say this, one of you %@+$ is going to *@%= it up!) The academic job market does not exist in isolation of the rest of the world. Good researchers can command high salaries for doing research on problems others find interesting, and if they're devoted enough, they can make time to publish some of it. Academic research is not so devoid of value added that universities can tell good researchers to teach more classes and forget about their researches, without at least some of them leaving. And as King notes, some people might want to stay in the university for the teaching opportunities, and a few might express relief at being exempt from doing further research. In the absence of more precise instruments, it makes sense to see salaries and job descriptions being tweaked in such a way as to attract people to jobs. Those tweaks might even match the right people with the right jobs.

SWIM SAID THE MAMMA FISHY, SWIM IF YOU CAN. Via Invisible Adjunct, additional coverage of Stanley Fish's career development.

PRINCIPAL-AGENT PROBLEM? The Calico Cat takes a look at the possibly perverse effects of government-guaranteed student loans. Salient points:

"The article fails to ask the basic question of why the federal government is involved in this business at all. If the colleges the students were attending really offered such a valuable proposition to the students, then I'm certain that the colleges themselves would be able to arrange loan based financing."

Or, the students could borrow against their future earning power. Problem: jobs offer differing combinations of pecuniary and non-pecuniary benefits. Lenders expect to be repaid out of the pecuniary benefits. (None of what I'm noting here is original with me. I choose to borrowing freely from Free to Choose (details or compare prices.) Students who borrow against future earnings have incentives to seek remunerative careers, which furthers the transformation of an institution of higher learning into Certification University, to the exclusion of those nonpecuniary externalities and the love of learning. Put another way, that might mean the end of theologians, social workers, poets, and musicians.

"The article mentioned how the cost of college education has been increasing faster than the rate of inflation, but the issue of why was never addressed. I believe student loans are part of the reason. By making more money available to students, this just gives the colleges the leeway to raise tuition even more."

Ayup. Here's the principal-agent problem in a nutshell. The taxpayer has given the student a put option on the education received, and attenuated his incentive to conserve resources. That's a separate issue from optimally financing the production of the next generation of preachers and composers.

Here, however, the Calico Cat's argument begins to break down:

"I know it's very anti-mainstream to question the value of a college education, but I'm going to go ahead and question it anyway. My experience is that the majority of college students are just in it for the piece of paper they get at the end which they think will be a ticket to a 'good job.' Yet we have so many college students graduating with no job awaiting them at all. And then to add insult to injury, they are burdened with student loan payments of hundreds of dollars per month. This is debt that can never even be discharged in bankruptcy.

"How are we benefiting society if we make kids get themselves deeply into debt so they can obtain the same jobs that people obtained a generation ago with no college degree at all? Student loan proponents will say that without student loans, people will be denied the opportunity to advance themselves. I say that without federally guaranteed student loans, the bright students who would be able to benefit from a college education will still be able to obtain funding. The marginal students, who don't belong in college anyway, will also be better off because they will be able to get the same job they would have gotten anyway, except they won't be burdened with having to pay back student loans
."

If I grant the first and second sentences, I see no reason not to grant borrowing against future earnings (or, for that matter, charging tuitions for high schools.) The third to the fifth sentences conflate a number of things: students picking the wrong major, students opting into more enjoyable but less rewarding careers, and students exercising the put options. And the transition to the second paragraph doesn't work. What Calico Cat has really recognized is the breakdown of the existing elementary and secondary education, such that the university degree often certifies an entry level file clerk who in years past would have been so-equipped by the tenth grade, with six to ten years of additional on-the-job career development available to him that Self Esteem High and Beer and Circus U have taken for the non-productive reasons the Calico Cat has noted. (And it is also worth noting that the return to experience on the job might be greater than the marginal return to years of schooling, although evaluating these returns on a ceteris paribus) basis is difficult.

CIRCUMSTANCES ALTER CASES. Dissecting Leftism rediscovers this ancient maxim. (Hat tip: Common Sense and Wonder.)

DO SEATBELTS KILL? De Longs, father and son revisit the research.

MORE ACREAGE THAN PESHTIGO, MORE PEOPLE THAN CHICAGO. Citizen Smash has continuing coverage of the California wildfires, with the right answers to some uninformed questions. And so soon after Fire Prevention Week.

59 MINUTES. OK, I'm prepared. Arnold Kling's nonlinear thinking problem is a variant on the lily-pad problem: you see a lily pad on your pond. The next day you see two, and the day after that you see four. It takes a week to schedule the pond service. If you make the appointment when the pond is 1/4 covered, will you save your pond? But there's more to modelling than getting the functional forms right. As the essay goes on to note, you have to think about the omitted variables as well.

SIMPLIFYING. Apt. 11-D notes women and men opting off the treadmill. Number 2 Pencil commends voluntary simplicit. A caution: if you go to the link, you will be offered numerous books. There's something about doing all that reading up that strikes me as anything but "simplicity."

SECOND SECTION: Via Milt's File, some coverage of the 25 percent of adults living alone, and the growing recognition that employers cannot treat the singles as a reserve army to cover for the family men and women leaving work early.

LOSS LEADER? Transport Blog is looking for the value to an airline in flying a supersonic aircraft that loses the airline money. Ah, the economics of common and joint costs. There is a market test, but reality doesn't permit sufficient impoundment in ceteris paribus. Specifically, does the airline lose business on conventional aircraft once it discontinues the supersonic aircraft? This is a non-trivial problem with real penalties for getting it wrong. Case in point: the Milwaukee Road becoming the operator of the Union Pacific City trains from 1955 to 1971 in the hopes that doing so would attract more freight shippers. That strategy failed, miserably.

YOU HEARD IT HERE FIRST. World Series television ratings second-or-third lowest. Advantage: Cold Spring Shops.

In other entertainment news, Britney proposes to clean up her act.

CHARITY BEGINS AT HOME?. Marginal Revolution compares remittances by immigrant workers, usually to family members, with foreign aid, extracted from taxpayers and transferred to government officials, in ways not favorable to the foreign aid or to the donor nations. The numbers suggest that additional work on the economics of illegal immigration, in light of remittances and the recent raids at Wal-Mart.

SECOND SECTION: Truck and Barter has coverage of these topics, with some impressions about how well-paid (compared to some pretty crummy options) some illegal migrants are.

CARNIVAL OF THE CAPITALISTS calls at The Noble Pundit. Carnival founder Jay Solo solicits comments on the suggestion that the term "Carnival of ..." is becoming overused as indicating a compendium of submitted weblog posts. I maintain that such a signal has value provided the object of the preposition is well-defined. "The Capitalists" doesn't quite do it for posts involving both business, where it fits, and economics, where it doesn't, but it's close enough. On the other hand, the editors of this Carnival have been identifying interesting non-submitted posts, suggesting something more akin to a proceedings volume.

A DILBERT MOMENT. From the latest announcement of faculty "development" workshops (most of the "development" is training in the use of various electronic gadgets including online gradebooks, Blackboard, and Power Point) is this:

Faculty Diversity Workshop for Department Chairs

"The purpose of this workshop is to discuss the definition, the context, and the significatnce of diversity, share experiences in the recruitment of diverse faculty, and engage in a dialog on addressing faculty diversity. The workshop will include a panel presentation by several department chairs, and small group and large group discussions. The workshop will be an opportunity to engage in a meaningful and constructive dialog on these diversity issues with your colleagues and share ideas and success stories that could benefit your department and college. This workshop is for academic department chairs. Advanced registration is required."

I wonder if "meaningful and constructive" includes incorporating viewpoint diversity in the definition or significance of diversity, or if it's simply a way of reducing confusion.

NO GOOD DEED GOES UNPUNISHED. Critical Mass discovers whistleblowers and cowardly administrators. You'd think that information about unscrupulous competitors would be something a university administration would welcome being circulated, but remember as you read the article, and the extensive cross-references, that you're dealing with the University of Illinois.

NOT PHOTOSHOPPED

There is nothing wrong with this picture.

Details, and more pictures here.

FARMING OUT THE KIDS. In this post I noted that a Mother Jones quote would likely turn up after I had logged off. It proved to be somewhat longer after than I had anticipated, but it turned up. Or did it? The only Google reference I found to it was this Bill Kauffman essay, part of this The American Enterprise issue, without further footnoting. Note also the context: Mother Jones was in particular displeased with the upper-class practice of contracting out child rearing to poorer people, generally poorer women.

CORPORATE WELFARE WINS THE SERIES. There is more to my complaint about the Florida Marlins than the symbolism of edgy mixing with phony artiness in their black-and-teal uniforms. Reason's Matt Welch has done some research, commending in particular some research by economist Andrew Zimbalist.

THOSE MISSING RED CARS. With the next Carnival of the Vanities to call at Who Framed Blogger Rabbit, it's fitting to visit, once again, the sub-plot in Who Framed Roger Rabbit? about the disappearance of the Red Cars. (Only a temporary disappearance, they've returned to San Pedro and there's more background here.) Anyway, here's a summary of research on the disappearing Red Cars, and this site might be of interest.

SECOND SECTION: The electric cars are making a comeback elsewhere, and yes, the author is that Paul Weyrich.

NEITHER LIBERTY NOR SECURITY. Opinion Journal proposes another look at U. S. immigration policy. Note in particular the discussion of immigrant enrollment in Ph.D. programs. There are at least two hypotheses that come to mind for those programs not attracting domestic students. One, the return to a professional degree such as law, medicine, or accounting, is greater than the return to a research degree, employment opportunities in high-tech notwithstanding. Two, the secondary and undergraduate education has become sufficiently watered down that domestic students simply cannot cut it in the graduate programs.

SECOND SECTION: Although not specifically about immigration, Academic Game's thoughts on funding graduate programs based on Ph.D. placement are worth a look.

BOGGED DOWN?

(Via Insta Pundit. News story here, and Hit and Run comments on the geopolitical implications. More here.)

AFTER FURTHER REVIEW. Instant replay preserves a Bear victory, when the Detroit player who caught an on-side kick attempt is discovered to have caught the ball before it had bounced 10 yards.

CALLING SENATOR PROXMIRE, who used to issue something called the "Golden Fleece Award." Taxpayers for Common Sense have taken up the cause, at Senator Proxmire's urging, and the linked site provides a great deal of history of the awards, which often made the academy angry (and which inspired parallels here.) Over the summer, I learned of a project that is almost certainly worthy of a Golden Fleece Award. I received a lengthy survey from something called the Human Dimensions in Natural Resources Unit at Colorado State Unit seeking my comments on the aesthetic effects of allowing elk to browse in Rocky Mountain National Park. The last time I visited that park was nearly 40 years ago, and at the time bears would roam the camp grounds. The survey did not include "reintroducing wolves" or "extending elk season" as options. Your tax dollars are at work measuring Public Preferences for Elk and Vegetation Management in Rocky Mountain National Park. (Are there any gold-bearing streams in the area? One could skin a mountain goat, leave it in the stream for a while, and get some real golden fleece to present to Colorado State.)

TRULY GOOFY PASTIMES. From Where Worlds Collide comes news of the ten dorkiest hobbies (as viewed from a San Francisco perspective.) Model railroading is not on the list, but one wonders about the accuracy of the rest of the list. Consider the description of scrapbooking. If memory serves, just about everybody who gets married puts together a scrapbook or six, and as far as I know, the scrapbookers as described in the final paragraph have not discovered spontaneous generation.

GROWING MARIGOLDS IN NOVEMBER? A Small Victory compares and contrasts the current antiwar protests with those of 1968. And Leon Trotsky has to be shaking the very foundations of hell upon learning about this.

DIRIGISME KEEPS THE FRENCH POOR. Marginal Revolution surveys some research on the effects of lower marginal tax rates on economic welfare in France.

MEAN REVERSION? Econo Pundit offers a lengthy evaluation of the consequences of the unwinding of a bubble economy on economic growth and the employment rate.

CHUNKING, AND HIGH-SCHOOL ENVY? Academic Game objects to the tyranny of the fifty minute MWF class.

LIBERTARIANISM, DEPENDENCE, CHARITY, AND EQUALITY. Chris at Crooked Timber has some thoughts here and here.

THUD. The celebrating in the State Line area is by Northwestern fans, after their team outthought Wisconsin, including a couple of trick plays on fourth down in the red zone. (What's that old line about "fool me once ...") Bowling Green, a team that came within an end-zone interception of forcing overtime with Ohio State, ended the Northern Illinois run, which figures, given the recognition the team has begun to attract, including an evidently successful fundraising campaign for the indoor practice field.

STANDING DOWN. The University of Illinois at Chicago announces that Dean Stanley Fish will not be seeking reappointment. Too soon to interpret what that means. Perhaps Illinois-Chicago will appoint a dean who recognizes that with academic freedom comes academic responsibility, both of which Dean Fish has been complicit in degrading during his career, and neither of which he grasps.

FRAMING BIASES? Avrum Lank sees some pitfalls with proposals to make consumer economics classes mandatory in high school, and with some of the test questions.

THE DOWN SIDE OF TENURE. Joanne Jacobs links to a Bob Herbert column identifying uncaring (and difficult to fire?) teachers as one source of misbehaving students. Jacobs focuses on one encouraging trend: opinion leaders in minority communities losing patience with the popular notion that behaving badly is a manifestation of authentic behavior. (One of the more discouraging things I discovered in Detroit many years ago was the equation of doing well in school with "acting white." That is not exactly what my parents and their peers envisioned in seeking an end to separate-but-equal.)

Herbert's column does not mention teacher tenure, but the hypothesis that teachers more difficult to fire for cause are more likely to look the other way at students opting out merits further investigation.

THE OPTIMALITY OF LESSER-EVIL POLITICS? Lexington Green at Chicago Boyz elaborates a corollary to the median voter theorem, which, to the extent that it is correct, illustrates the unintended consequences of supporting third party efforts in national elections.

ICH NAJPIEKNA GODZINA. Wednesday evening's Extension 720 featured Lynne Olson and Stanley Cloud providing some information about their new book, A Question of Honor: The Forgotten Polish Heroes of World War II. The heroes in question are aviators of the Kosciuszko Squadron, who were instrumental in winning the Battle of Britain.

There is currently no Kosciuszko Squadron in the Polish Air Force. Perhaps with their purchase of some F-16s, it is time to start a new one. The Polish Embassy website provides a link for letters (sending thanks for their help in Iraq is also a good idea) and Poland has lots of potential as a tourist destination. (For something really different, check out the Wolsztyn Experience (it's the only place in the world where a visitor can run big steam on the mainline under the supervision of a pilot engineer.))

(A note on pronunciations: it's kosh-CHOO-sko, and more's the pity that baseball announcers couldn't handle Aloysius Szymanski.)

FINDING THOSE MARKET TESTS. Invisible Adjunct has weighed in on Stanley Fish's response to Congressional criticism, first noted on these pages here, where I focused on the role external labor markets play in disciplining the university. Invisible Adjunct puts rather precisely a different, yet related point: "The one point that I would query: as I read it, it's not so much that Fish's elitism undermines his argument as that his argument is underpinned by an elitism that will no longer fly with the public." That, dear readers, is where the market test still comes in, protestations contrary to "And on the matter of accountability, I think Fish does a bit of pandering of his own, invoking the spectre of college curricula determined by popular plebiscite in order to highlight the dangers of running the college as a business that responds to consumer demand" notwithstanding. Let's walk the cat backwards. In the absence of some kind of demand (from my earlier post, "we have not yet disposed of the hypothesis that creature comforts are cheaper than a prestige faculty as means to encouraging enrollments" still remains an open question) there is no university. The reason I focus on the failures of the universities is that those failures drive recruiters away from the job fairs, those graduates who get hired as symbolic analysts will lose their audiences (classes, congregations, readers, viewers, clients, you name it) and the students will find other ways to demonstrate their capabilities. (If you really want to worry, imagine internships without sophomore or junior standing. We used to call such things apprenticeships, and they ran for seven years.) Although the academy operates in part apart from the market, it cannot operate in complete isolation from it. I think Invisible Adjunct gets that. Problem: the following paragraph presupposes that there are some nonpecuniary positive externalities to a university degree: "Ultimately accountable in the sense that public institutions must serve, and must be seen to serve, some public mission and/or some idea of the public good. This is tricky to argue, the more so as some members of the broader public would use 'accountability' to undermine the very principles on which higher education in a liberal democracy must rest." Absent a sound core curriculum, there might be no such spillovers. (That was one of my observations here.)

IF YOU'RE SO SMART, WHY AREN'T YOU RICH? A Fisking (complete with grammar checking) of some wishful thinking. Frederic Bastiat, call your office.

RED LIGHT DISTRICTS. The plague of badly-timed traffic lights spreads to Des Moines, Iowa. (Hat tip: Cornfield Commentary.)

PONDEROUSLY BAD WRITING. Photon Courier found a Chronicle of Higher Education colloquy using a Richard Wolin commentary (not quite a review) of Ted Honderich's After the Terror (details, including some provocative consumer reviews, or compare prices.) It is difficult to take seriously any writing that perpetuates, however innocently, the distinction between revolutionary and reactionary violence, in particular when it involves a stretch such as linking the nostalgia for the Caliphate with the class struggle because 3,000 people died in the World Trade Center. To his credit, Wolin doesn't buy it either. The moderated comments are worth a look (this one suggests the academy might ask of the populace, "does this conversation induce them to hate us?) and Academic Game both participates and provides a roundup.

LOWER YOUR VOICES. EconoPundit asks the court intellectuals among the economists to keep their disagreements civil. While you're visiting his site, look at this. There are other kinds of rollbacks at Wal-Mart.

MORE ON THE ACADEMIC RHUBARB. Number 2 Pencil, Twilight of the Idols, and Number 2 Pencil yet again have some more commentary and information about the grade-change lawsuit at Northwestern. Commentary is still conjectural; nothing to change my previous assessment of a test of power gone wrong.

BUILD SERIOUS TRAINS. Chris at Crooked Timber points to a Guardian article about the latest thoughts about dealing with leaves on the rails. Key sentence: "The real problems began with the advent of the lighter diesel and electric trains, particularly the fleet of 158 diesels introduced in 1992-93." I think what the reporter is referring to is the Class 158 DMU, otherwise known as the Sprinter units. They are lightweight trains without much by way of sand boxes.

RECOMMENDED RAILWAY REFERENCES. Where Worlds Collide introduces each edition of Carnival of the Vanities with a diesel-themed pun. For North American readers, here is a little background. British Rail adopted a numbering system wherein each type of locomotive has a two-digit class number, roughly suggestive of its power (thus a Class 66 is more powerful than a Class 57 and a Class 57 is more powerful than a Class 20) and a three-digit unit identifying number, which sometimes communicates via the third digit additional information about the type of service intended for that unit. Such a numbering scheme, while sensible, would not be practical in the United States, where a computer program for keeping track of locomotives allows a maximum of four digits in the locomotive number. (As Dave Barry would put it, I am not making this up. I forget whose computer program this is and what its purpose is, but recall that it is very useful to the railroads. Union Pacific registered a new reporting mark, UPY, so as to keep track of more than 10,000 locomotives without requiring a rewrite of this program.)

The latest Carnival invokes the Class 57, an upgrade using the bodies and trucks of the Class 47, an alternator from retired class 56 units (the link points to what looks like a train simulator,) and a new diesel engine from Electro-Motive Division. That makes the Class 57 something with no direct analogue to North America. The 2500 hp SD-35 of some 40 years ago had the 567-series (cubic inches per cylinder) diesel whilst the Class 57 gets a 2500 hp 645-series diesel not applied to anything currently running on rails.

The link to Carnival 55 underplays the significance of the Deltic Class passenger diesels, so-named for the triangular shape of the three banks of opposed pistons that made up the engine. The result is a compact and powerful prime mover. At the time of construction, these were the most powerful twin-engined diesel locomotives in the world, but the statement that they were also the "fastest at the time of construction" is accurate only because Electro-Motive Divisions E7 passenger diesels (2X1000 hp engines) with a design speed of 117 mph were already out of production for 10 years.

The opposed-piston design concept made for powerful prime movers. The most notable was the 1954 Fairbanks-Morse Train Master, with one 2400 hp engine. The idea was probably 10 years ahead of its time, and if you could fit two such engines onto one frame, you'd exceed the power of the Deltics. The problem with the Fairbanks-Morse opposed piston design was with the lower crankshaft, which was not easy to maintain. Moreover, the engine was very tall.

Where Worlds Collide also kindly provided a link to this picture. North American readers, what you are looking at is a European double-ended Electro Motive F7. (Wouldn't the Belgian paint scheme have looked good on a New Haven EP-5?) British Railways might have spared themselves a lot of trouble had they figured out a way to further shrink the European double-ender to fit the loading gauge, rather than fool with all sorts of experimental units, and German hydraulic transmissions, and other such follies.

Where Worlds Collide also finds a description of an advanced-technology steam locomotive good for 125 mph, proposed to be built new. A shame that the UK loading gauge does not permit any of these (particularly the Milwaukee 4-6-4.)

TRIBUTE TO A DISTINCTIVE AIRCRAFT. Transport Biog notes the end of the production line for the Boeing 757. It is a distinctive plane, unlikely to be mistaken by an observer for anything else, although perhaps not as distinctive as the Stratocruiser or the Constellation.

NO VANGUARD HERE. Go your own way and leave a trail. Truck and Barter's mom did.

CONJURING TRICK. If you're a university administrator, the word "access" has for a long time meant "enrolling unprepared students." The conjuring trick the PC crowd has pulled off is to make denial of that reality into a virtue. Namely, anyone crass enough to point out that "protected status" means "admitted with less preparation" is guilty of incorrect thinking for daring to point that out. Joanne Jacobs discovers a recent example of the conjuring trick at work.

In a related post, Milt's File finds a guide to a few other verbal conjuring tricks.

SECOND SECTION: The University of California at Los Angeles (motto: On! Wisconsin!) apparently also provides such access.

UTILITARIANISM. Invisible Adjunct questions the University of Nebraska at Lincoln declaring a financial emergency and laying off tenured faculty members whilst diverting more resources to the football program. To answer one of her questions with a question: what do we know about the accounting procedures at Nebraska? The football program might generate a surplus on a cash flow basis, but if it pays no rent (explicit or implicit) on the stadium, practice field, alumni house, golf course, (you get the picture) or if, as is the case at Northern Illinois University, student fees go to pay the mortgage interest on such things, then on an opportunity cost basis it loses money. I recall reading a book a few years ago, one of the late-1980s criticisms of intercollegiate sports, that asserted no program made money once such transfers and subsidies were taken into account. The effects of on-field success on alumni giving, or on enrollments were also mixed.

PRESERVATION. Common Sense and Wonder discovers industrial policy, California style. I wonder if among the favored industries are the rice growers. That was the source of a trade flap some 20 years ago when Japanese Customs blocked the entry of a display that included some U.S. grown rice. (That's still a rather tender subject.) Some Midwestern industrial policy types were quick to complain about Japan exporting cars and protecting their rice farmers. The growing of rice in Northern California, however, using subsidized water from flood-control projects, is hard to distinguish from dumping.

POSITIONAL ARMS RACES. Apartment 11-D has about the right reaction to the status anxieties of some of her neighbors (she has not yet mentioned the expensive Brio trains that may be mandatory for high-achieving kids) and some experience navigating school choice in New York City.

WHY I'M PROUD TO BE AN ECONOMIST. Newmark's Door finds an economics department that has about the right attitude toward administrative assessment of the obvious.

57 VARIETIES. Carnival of the Vanities makes a surprise stop this week. Next week's stop is at Who Censored Blogger Rabbit (are we going to revisit the National City Lines case again?) who promises not to be surprised by submissions. (Hat tip: the ever-hit-welcoming Jay Solo's Verbosity.) Go bump his daily counter!

INCOMPLETE COVERAGE? (No, this is not an editorial on the Packer secondary.) Of what value is a report on college tuitions and fees that gives only the industry's story and laments the passing of the old social compact as if the universities are blameless in breaking it.

DON'T SURF IN THE SUBWAY. There are no handholds on the roof, and clearances are restricted. Once again we see a rule underlined in blood.

THE STATE STREET SUBWAY L. Moving commuters for sixty years. Most exotic train movements in the subway? Has to be the two Electroliner detours.

LEFT, RIGHT, LIBERTARIAN? Nolan Finley sees the concentration of state power for conservative purposes, correctly notes, "Conservatives shrug off these erosions of their principles because the people who control the White House and Congress have R's after their names.

"But they should remember the inevitability of political cycles. Someday, the more powerful federal government they've crafted will be run by Democrats. What will they say when the National Education Association is writing local school policy?

"How loudly will they whelp when those new powers to poke and pry into private lives are in the hands of President Hillary?"

DERIVED DEMAND. Let's see, if you attempt to protect the incomes (or pension funds, or maybe it's the blast furnaces) of steel producers, you make life more difficult for fabricators of steel products including all sorts of automotive stampings. (Hat tip: Liberty and Power, who commends this source.)

CORNER SOLUTION. Truck and Barter has other commitments. Atlantic Blog has other commitments. Make that three. Postings will continue to be light the next few days. Thanks for your interest.

BEER AND CIRCUSES. Invisible Adjunct proposes a closer look at the disconnect between college sports and higher education. It's worth taking that look. The Northern Huskies got some ink from Sports Illustrated for inter alia recruiting local players and making do with a locker room smaller than one of Saddam's palaces. That doesn't stop some people from dreaming. The latest plans are for a new indoor practice facility on the former outdoor track and field site (there is a new track squad, Title IX and all that, thanks, Hillary, and presumably there will have to be a new track and field site) and for a new alumni house. The latter has prompted some resentment, as there was money from somewhere to hire a plane towing a banner plugging the alumni house, but there is not at present money for paper to duplicate assignments.

FUTURE GARY BECKER? The economics of student dating. (Via Newmark's Door.) Looks like evidence of successful teaching. At the end of last semester one student, a secondary education major seeking a social studies certificate, noted that she could no longer make a decision without thinking about the opportunity cost. The cited column is evidence of a little bit of learning going on.

IN PRAISE OF HOME SCHOOLING. What he said. (Via Highered Intelligence.)

PEOPLE RESPOND TO INCENTIVES. Students at Northern Illinois University pay an activity fee to underwrite the operating deficits of the Athletic Department and to pay the mortgage interest for the arena. In exchange, students in good standing may view athletic events on the strength of a current ID card. The system told us something about the scarcity of an unpriced resource, or about sunk costs, in that an ID card holder would be able to get a pretty good seat right up to game time. Until this fall, that is. The Athletic Department has set aside 6000 football tickets to be claimed by students, initially at the arena, more recently (after complaints about how out of the way the arena was) at the student center. Those tickets have become the hottest football tickets in the State Line area of late. What happens when the Athletic Department sets up an arbitrage opportunity? Yup. Is the phenomenon at all well understood by editorial writers? Nope.

KEEPING THE POOR POOR? Common Sense and Wonder discovers a new twist on that theme.

HIT AFTER HIT AFTER HIT. Joanne Jacobs was kind enough to link to this article (October 9 postings, in case the permalinks are not working properly.) If you've arrived here looking around for more on the misplaced priorities of the recreational university, look here (October 14 postings) for some followup. More on that topic on deck for tonight's launches. Derivative taking first.

CARNIVAL OF THE CAPITALISTS calls at Jay Solo's Verbosity.

RANDOM ACTS OF KINDNESS. Chicago's Metra commuter railroad charges passengers a $2 surcharge for purchasing tickets on the train, if the passenger boards at a station with an open ticket office. (A lot of occasional passengers boarding at Chicago get caught at this. The stories they give about the ticket windows being closed are sometimes amusing.) Today, a passenger on a train (I will not disclose what train or what destination) offered a cash fare on a train leaving Chicago. The collector determined that the passenger would pay less for the $5 weekend pass than for the one-way cash fare, and sold the passenger the weekend pass with no surcharge.

THUD. There's a potentially interesting research paper, provided the information is available, on the pricing of commercial rights to the World Series broadcast. A week ago, those advertising rights might have had great value, with the possibility still alive of a Series featuring the country's two sentimental favorites. The actual Series features a metaphor for everything that was wrong with the 1990s playing the Yankees. What value are commercial rights to that?

7-0. That's both the record and the margin after two plays for the Northern Illinois Huskies. No need for come-from-behind heroics on Homecoming Day. North of the Cheddar Curtain, Homecoming did not turn out so well for the Badgers.

Whether or not there is a Sports Illustrated jinx, the print edition of Sports Illustrated that featured Northern Illinois at 5-0 put the Cubs and the Red Sox on the cover of the issue.

NO RELOCATION TO A PAID HOST. Check out this opportunity cost. (The big radiators aft are there because the builder adapted a submarine cooling system to a locomotive.)

TRANSPARENCY? Is a stealth pay raise for high university officials less bad if some of the participants in the meeting exoress qualms?

NO DROPPED SIGNAL. The reporter, clearly, has little experience with railroads. It's yellow. YELLOW. The rubberheads refer to amber lights. The only reference I've ever seen to amber lights in a railroading context is with respect to the bulbs in the Pennsylvania Railroad position light signals. The Rock Island Line did not use those. (I know of an obscure installation on one of the other Chicago suburban lines, now removed. Any guesses?)

THE TWO INCOME TRAP, CLIFF-NOTES-VERSION: The authors of The Two-Income Trap (book details and initial statement of their logical error here, followup here,) are no better with the short form (registration required) of their argument, couched in the form of an open letter to Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan. Key point: "Mr. Greenspan, you are widely credited with a long-running economic boom and a soft recession. But what has happened to middle-class families during your reign? A generation ago, the average American family lived on one income, put away 11 percent of its take-home pay in savings and carried a consumer debt load of less than 4 percent. Today, for a typical two-income family, inflation adjusted income has risen 75 percent, but by the time they pay the mortgage, health insurance, car payments, taxes and day-care bills, they have less to spend on everything else, from food and clothes to life insurance and vacations. And they put away a scant 1 percent in savings, while shouldering a whopping 12 percent in consumer debt load--triple the load their parents carried."

Yeah, we were a lot richer when all the women were at home barefoot and pregnant and mindin' the youngins. Curiously, a lot of those women, and not a few of the men who appreciated them, thought differently. There are laws of conservation in economics, of which the Say Aggregation Principle is an important one. There's more to the middle-class squeeze than monetary policy. There are also coping strategies available to families. Don't buy the McMansion in the first place. Ditto the SUV that looks like a Kenworth bobtail. Homeschool. Ditch the organized sports and let the kids organize their own recreation. Encourage the kids to work their way through college. Cut up the credit cards. Start a victory garden.

NOTICE OF LINE RELOCATION

Operation Give
7155 Columbia Gateway Drive
Columbia, MD 21046

(Hat tip: Citizen Smash.)

WHAT'S WITH THESE KIDS? Football and hazing isn't just for Pennsylvanians anymore. Some students in the Rockford, Illinois area misbehaved in a locker room. The attitude of some parents: no big deal. OK, is it no big deal when, after seven years at Beer and Circus U., they become boomerang kids? In Port Washington, Wisconsin, a cheerleading coach saw something happening and didn't get involved for fear of being hazed herself? What's up with a school district paying a 20-year old $2800 to be a cheerleading coach?

CASSUS BELLI? Q and O evaluates nineteen justifications for ousting Saddam's government. Round III of the moderated debate on the rhetoric is up at Daniel Drezner.

BENEFIT PRINCIPLE? Chicago contemplates a variety of fees rather than higher property taxes. A. C. Pigou, call your office. Meanwhile, the Tribune auto section reviews the latest tax magnet. Something there is about the Cadillac truck line that leaves me cold. I have visions of some now naturally-bald Thirteener, with saggy tattoos and a gray dirty-face goatee, driving one of these things with the bass cannons booming.

COMPENSATING DIFFERENTIALS? So much work left to do ... here is a letter lamenting the outcome of the new trash-haulers' contract:

"Most people in the helping professions, such as teachers and social workers, don't earn as much as garbage collectors.

"While watching the news, I heard that the drivers make as much as $60,000 per year.

"There are professionals who have master's degrees who don't make that amount."

OK, you get up at 3.30 on summer mornings, in order to have your run done by 2 pm so that the stuff you're collecting hasn't festered in the heat all day. Or contemplate setting your rump against a UPS triple ... that's another kind of truck, and it goes to nicer neighborhoods than your truck does, and it hauls nicer-smelling cargo. Maybe the opportunity to sit in an office and do corporal acts of mercy, or compel others to do the acts of mercy for you, is worth a few dollars off your pay. Or maybe, just maybe, those Master's degrees are devalued credentials.

DROPPING A SIGNAL? The latest news (requires registration) about the weekend Metra derailment gets curiouser and curiouser. The engineer continues to claim he saw signals indicating a clear route. The dispatcher did set up the route after the train had left the station. A safety inspector makes a strange comment about "only one warning." That would be true of a signal system without an advance approach aspect. The previous stories suggest the Rock Island line uses an advance approach aspect. But then the engineer ought to get two warnings: the approach aspect on the distant signal and the medium clear on the home signal. Once the train has passed the distant signal, the circuitry ought to lock up, indicating that the train has accepted the signal. The dispatcher can reset the route, but a timer prevents him from changing the positions of any switches. The home signal immediately goes to red, and the engineer has a very nervous time of it. The purpose of the timer is to prevent the dispatcher from throwing any switches under the train or in advance of a train travelling too fast to safely negotiate a reversed switch.

There are some interesting simulations of signals and of trains should you want to try any of this at home. I recommend the products of Signal Computer Consultants. The dispatcher simulator includes the run-time feature if you change your mind, and you'll discover with some of the track territories why you can't set the entire route for a train before it leaves its first station. This train simulator is not as well known as Microsoft's, but in some ways it is better. For instance, if you want to put a diesel on its side, just run the Virginia Rail Express train northbound and disregard the first open crossover you'll encounter, near Fredericksburg. Rather spectacular graphics.

HOLD-UP PROBLEM? City claims the trains are blocking the road crossings unreasonably. Railroad says there are too many crossings. Throw in a whistle-blowing law (registration required) and an experimental noise-abatement project, and things get ugly.

OUR NEIGHBORS AT WAR. Northern Illinois University volleyball player Brooke Dodson has a brother billeted in one of Saddam's houses, probably the poshest rat-infested parts of Baghdad. (The family group picture in the article shows the Hudson River Valley near West Point. Pretty country.)

MINIMUM DIFFERENTIATION. Truck and Barter takes up the perpetual discount problem and the minimum differentiation principle by identifying minimal clustering of rug merchants in his neighborhood. The general topic might reward further study; in fact there might be a dissertation or so lurking in it. Readers might want to look at Jean-Claude Thill, "A Note on Multipurpose and Multistop Shopping, Sales, and Market Areas of Firms," an extensively documented positive theory of shopping behavior in the November 1986 Journal of Regional Science, and at Charles ReVelle, "The Maximum Capture or 'Sphere of Influence' Location Problem: Hotelling Revisited on a Network," which is an attempt to cope with the analytically intractible multi-firm, two-dimension location problem, in the May 1986 issue of the same Journal. Atsuyuki Okabe et. al. offer "A Statistical Analysis of the Spatial Association of Convenience-Goods Stores by use of a Random Clumping Model," in the February 1985 issue, and that paper cites some previous efforts to determine why some types of stores cluster and others scatter.

SCHADENFREUDE. There is joy in Chicago this morning, for White Sox fans. (Requires registration.) Regular readers will recall that these pages took some joy in the end of the season for the team formerly known as the Milwaukee Braves. (And if you go here and advance to picture 5, you just know he's thinking, "I shouldn't have whacked that sausage.")

Some biographical information about the fan who got his hand on a pop foul in the sixth game are germane to the more serious topics featured on these pages. We have a twenty-five year old boomerang kid with a degree from Notre Dame working as one of thousands of benefits specialists at an outsourcing and consulting firm. A college degree to answer phones? Do I hear an echo? On the other hand, he took the job in order to be able to schedule travel time to coach some high-achieving Little Leaguers. That sounds like an alternative to the 24/7 treadmill. And Chicago Tribune columnist John Kass correctly notes, the Cubs folded on their own. The weakness noted here manifested itself again.

PADDING? Airlines don't do it, notes USA Today's Ben Mutzabaugh. Perhaps not as notoriously as Amtrak, where the Hiawatha Service trains and the westbound Empire Builder routinely do Chicago-Glenview in about twenty minutes, while the eastbound Empire Builder has close to an hour. But an observation by Scott McCartney, "The reality is that padding the schedule is an extremely expensive, potentially disastrous thing to do." from a Wall Street Journal paid article, misses the point. The problem with lengthening the schedule and the turn-around times is that the airline will have to have more airplanes (railroads have a similar problem) on hand to fulfill all the schedules. But if planes get behind schedule, whether account weather or traffic control problems, or bad gate management, or slow-loading passenger, planes will in time be unable to fulfill the next leg of their scheduled trip. (If you want to complicate things further, make sure that each plane gets to the right maintenance base in time for its next required inspection.)

One reason you'll sometimes read a gripe on these pages about how slow Amtrak's schedules are is that the carrier would likely be able to provide a bit more space on the more popular trains at peak times if the cars moved about the country more rapidly. There is a standard consist for many of Amtrak's long distance trains, such that a train might run New Orleans to Chicago and after cleaning become a Chicago to Seattle train. Similarly, a train from California might be cleaned and dispatched to Washington, D.C. Many of these cars spend a day sitting in Chicago because the slow schedules (and late running anyway) mean the cars arrive Chicago with insufficient time to properly clean and restock them to go back out later that day.

ROUND AND ROUND ON HOMEWORK. Joanne Jacobs suggests that it isn't homework that contributes to the time squeeze confronting 'tweens, teens, and their parents. Shot in the Dark sees some value in some of those other activities. (There's something to be said for more un-structured play time for kids.) Last week, a letter in the print edition of USA Today (a quick perusal of the site at the time did not reveal any electronic letters column) offered yet another perspective.

Leave work at school

"Why do we require kids to study more than two hours a night? My teen has many interests, not all of them involving school and not all about television,

"I don't give my employers more time than the hours I am scheduled to work.

"Why do we ask children to give up their family time for work that should be done at school?

"Most of the people I know like to leave work at work. My child has spent most of her childhood in a school, and she doesn't have the inclination to study for two hours more each day.

"Homework stinks. It always has and should be outlawed."

(Name has been withheld out of charity.) Anybody catch that "my employers?" Is the poster somebody who is working two jobs "to make ends meet" whilst showing no ability for greater responsibility, with a social circle similarly disinclined? Although these pages have frequently suggested inefficiencies in the 24/7 treadmill, the Superintendent also sees merit in rewarding initiative and separating the performers from the slackers. Homework whether from school or from shop or office is one way of achieving such a separation.

MOORE BLAMES IRAQ. Andrew Sullivan reads Michael Moore on Crossfire, discovers "I'd like to ask the question whether September 11 was a terrorist attack, or was it a military attack? We call it a terrorist attack. We keep calling it a terrorist attack.
But it sure has the markings of a military attack. And I'd like to know whose military was involved in this precision, perfectly planned operation," asks, "What on earth is he getting at?"

Somewhere in my September 11 files are some articles I clipped or downloaded, from sources potentially opposed to the Afghanistan campaign, who made similar suggestions, and on occasion alleged Iraqi involvement. I don't recall any of these people being Bush Administration officials. Time permitting, I'm going to those files and reporting what I find.

THE NEW ENGINEER'S NIGHTMARE. (Chicago Tribune links in the following might require registration.) On Sunday, a Metra Rock Island commuter train derailed at the 47th Street crossover, with six people injured, a new diesel locomotive damaged and an older one possibly beyond economical repair. Repairs have been disrupting regular service.

The engineer had only recently marked up. Sometimes the press gets the details of a train derailment right. "At the third signal, at 47th Street, where the track switch had already been set, the signal was red over green. That indicates a 10 m.p.h. restriction traveling on the crossover, followed by an all-clear to resume speeds of up to 70 m.p.h. on the main track, sources said." More precisely, the signal at 47th Street is displaying a "medium clear" (possibly "diverging clear") aspect, requiring medium speed through the interlocking limits, with at least two clear signal blocks in advance of the train on the other track. The operating timetable and special instructions spell out what the maximum safe speed is on the diverging route. These vary from interlocking to interlocking. (A number of Burlington line commuter trains cross over at the west end of Lisle, although there are other crossovers closer to the train's next stop, because the maximum safe speed is higher at that set of switches.) The story suggests the dispatcher might have made a snap decision to cross the train over: "The first signal warned to slow down near Pershing Road, about a mile from the crossing where the accident occurred, National Transportation Safety Board investigators have said. Sources said the green signal turned to amber, meaning reduce speed, about the same time the train passed the signal." "First signal" refers to the signal that first gives advance warning of a line obstruction or an open switch. Depending on the railroad, that might be a yellow over green or a yellow over yellow, an approach aspect. The second signal would then be yellow over red, an approach medium, and the third signal would be the red over green. (Danish signal engineer Carsten Lundsten has a very useful guide to North American signalling practice.) Although it is possible to check a Metra train fairly severely (ask regular riders) less than a mile's notice of a 10 mph crossover would be dangerous, if what the dispatcher did was "drop a signal" in front of an approaching train. The usual westbound track was out of service for repairs (engineering possession, for those of you in the UK) but as the railroad operates as two main tracks, with signalling protecting movements in either direction at track speeds. I am not familiar enough with the Rock Island Line to surmise whether there was a preferred crossover further west that the engineer might have been expecting. The investigation proceeds.

Tuesday's coverage suggests some of the facts that have to be established. The print version included some diagrams that illustrate why rail enthusiasts distrust press coverage. These diagrams, not available online, showed a switch in the normal position, lined for the straight route, and a switch in the reversed position, lined for the diverging route. The captioning on these diagrams described the switch positions respectively as "off" and "on."

ACADEMIC RHUBARB. Flunked Student Sues NU Professor is the headline (may require registration.) The story strikes me as a test of power gone wrong. Student attempts to make a case for a better grade, professor stands his ground, student persists. The story does not provide sufficient information on how that conversation, which is common enough around the university, turned into a change of grade. The lawsuit alleges non-use of Northwestern's internal procedures for dealing with academic misconduct. Those procedures are there to protect the faculty as well as the students.

THE CURSE OF THE BILLY GOAT WILL BE LIFTED SLOWLY, IF AT ALL. (All links in this post might require registration.) Late in the game, Cubs leading, catchable foul fly, possible fan interference, a walk on a wild pitch, an error on a potential double-play ball, a seventh game tonight.

CARNIVAL OF THE VANITIES calls at Priorities and Frivolities. Thanks!

RULES WRITTEN IN BLOOD. In September of 2002, a Norfolk Southern (NS) train derailed near Knoxville, Tennessee. There was a hazardous material spill and an evacuation that didn't quite chase Insta Pundit. The November issue of CTC Board reports the main points of the National Transportation Safety Board investigation, which is available as a .pdf file here. (The mother lode of train wreck reports is here.) Why the derailment? Earlier in the day, an eastbound train crew discovered a problem with a track switch. As the switch was a spring switch, and the train was making a trailing point move, the dispatcher allowed the train to proceed. The train pushed the switch out of the way in such a way that it appeared normal to a cursory inspection. A maintainer made such a cursory inspection, oiled the switch points, then stuck around for the next westbound train, which pushed the switch points out of alignment. Result: derailment. NTSB finding: "The signal maintainer’s initial visual examination did not reveal a problem, but he did not operate the switch before train 15T passed over it. NS operating rules did not specify that an inspection of a possibly defective switch should be completed before trains are allowed to operate through the area. NS procedures also did not address the reduction of train speeds after receiving a trouble call about the condition of a switch."

NO DISAGREEMENT. Highered Intelligence correctly surmises "I admire excellence in philosophy and plumbing. If by 'such attitudes' Stephen was obliquely referring to the attitude that I was mocking in my post, then so be it. I have no quarrel." I was. In this post, the "such attitudes" might have more than one antecedent: I did intend to refer to the parents and students of Certification University.

The fun stuff is in an earlier paragraph. "He's got a point. In the long run, the cost might be nontrivial, although I seriously doubt that there's any substantial causative link between outsourcing and college certifications. That seems to be more a simple question of wages -- although the economic inefficiency of having to go to college could be exerting some sort of upward pressure on wages. I'm not an economist, so I'll leave that to the King if he wants to tackle it."

I know just enough about labor economics to be dangerous so here goes: if any of the economists among the sources of Company Mail call me out on it I'll advise the readers. There's one central idea in labor economics that will get you a long way: Low Wages = Low Productivity. (That's why you don't see a lot of outsourcing to Alabama or Mississippi or Bangladesh. Plenty of cheap labor, but not a whole lot by way of human capital investment or complementary infrastructure.) Now consider someplace like China or India where there has been a lot of recent investment in human capital and in complementary infrastructure. With satellite telephones and portable computers it's a whole lot easier for an employer to find a competent file clerk who does not expect the salary of a vice president. (There is a rather wicked Federal Express commercial that might be a harbinger of things to come. Upwardly mobile suit-type is in shipping department. Middle aged shipping supervisor wants him to help get the packages out. Suit type finally says, "I don't do shipping. I have an M.B.A." Supervisor thinks about it, says, "Ohhh, you have an M.B.A. I'll show you." If that's at all representative of employer views of recent college graduates expect a lot more outsourcing.)

If you've been following this conversation about the changing role of the university, do head over to Porphyrogenitus (who recommended Stanley Kurtz with some thinking on related lines) and to Disenchanted (via Insta Pundit) whose observations on the blurring of the university distinctions are worth a look.

ECLIPSE CONDITIONS? Andrew Sullivan has a few questions about National Command Authority's planning for the reconstruction of Iraq. Good questions, not easily dismissed. Sometimes, even the predictable contingencies don't work out exactly as anticipated. Case in point: Allied troops held as war prisoners by Nazi Germany. The Protecting Power had a pretty good idea how many were there, and where they were, until the Germans started marching them around just before the end. Then it got messy. Just how messy is spelled out in The Last Escape (details or compare prices.) That's the latest piece of recreational reading, although it's sometimes grim going. (The reader will learn how close the Oflag at Colditz came to being busted up, how effective the U.S. artillery was at busting up castles by 1945, and that there was a Stalag XIII near Hammelburg.)

POSSIBLE SOURCE OF COMPANY MAIL? Check out Academic Game. Just keep scrolling.

QUOTE OF THE DAY: "There are places on Earth where "police" can arbitrarily arrest and torture whom they like, and ask for bribes not to do so. And some people in the United States, sheltered from such things, will tell you that American soldiers are no different from such fighters.

"It is their right to think so. But the children know. The children of those tortured lands laugh and play with American soldiers, wave to them, speak a few American phrases, ask for candy and treats or simply give a shy smile. They crowd around us when we walk the streets, cluster around our bases and safe houses, run out into the streets to wave to passing convoys. They thank us.

"They do not do the same for the other soldiers. They vanish when they see them about their business, hide when they sense the trouble coming, run before they can get chased away. They understand the difference, even if our pacifists do not."

Reminds me of a passage toward the end of Citizen Soldiers (details or compare prices) contrasting the reaction of civilians to a squad of G.I.s with their reaction to a squad of soldiers wearing any other uniform. The quote is from a letter by Sgt. N. J. Todd, USAR and is worth reading in its entirety. (Hat tip: Photon Courier.)

MIND YOUR MANNERS. Going Underground finds a prohibited transit practice that the Chicago Transit Authority has not yet seen fit to ban.

REPRISING THE THIRTIES? Arnold Kling has some bad news and some good news. The good news: he retracted some dire prognostications.

DOMESTIC DIVIDES? "Added together, the differences suggest people who live in different worlds that are on a collision course." Dennis Prager spells out those differences. (Via Betsy's Page.)

THE NEXT FRONTIER FOR MULTI-CULTIS? Buzz Machine discovers a new category of offensive mascots.

FAMILY AND MEDICAL SHIRKING ACT? Apt. 11d passes along two tales, one of a colleague with no children who resents picking up the slack for colleagues who plead sporting events and the like as a way of leaving the office early, another with children who regularly takes work home. (The tales are incomplete, as the resentful colleague has not introduced evidence that the early-leavers aren't taking stuff home to work on after the kids are in bed, and the overstressed colleague has not explained why she doesn't mention her responsibilities at work.)

I have to wonder what my ancestors would have made of the pressures of the modern economy. There was no artificial lighting to prolong the working day. There wasn't much distinction between paid work and home work for many of them, particularly the dairy farmers. Equally clearly, I have to wonder how much longer the One Path to Promotion model is going to go without competing career paths. Too much stress, too much resentment, too much discontent. It has to contribute to turnover problems for employers as well.

UNDECIDABILITY THEOREMS? "One nation under God, indivisible." Bad mathematics, notes Scrapple Face.

OFFICIAL RESULTS OF THE AVIATION POLL. The Shops did its own assessment of the ten most notable aviation innovations. Reader David Karlson discovers the official poll results, identifying the jet engine as the peoples' choice. The poll is part of the Centennial of Flight countdown.

NO WAY TO RUN A RAILROAD. The weather was favorable for a road trip, to the Civil War re-enactment at Princeton, Illinois. The battle ended (a Confederate retreat, described as a draw, did you know that very few battles ended with the winner holding onto the ground for some time after?) with time to get an early supper and check out the local railroads. Amtrak's westbound California Zephyr went through a little after 4 pm, close to schedule. The Southwest Chief was due at 5 pm. It had not yet appeared at 5.30 pm.

IS HUMAN LIFE THE REVENGE OF THE NERDS? An Extension 720 show last week builds from the centennial of anthropologist Louis Leakey's birth, which was being celebrated at a conference hosted by Chicago's Field Museum. One of the factoids that came out on the radio show was the emergence of a pre-human with smaller teeth. I did not listen to the call-ins and missed whether anyone asked the question that later occurred to me: did the use of stone tools in that species precede the emergence of smaller teeth? In the absence of tools, a primate species that has small teeth will be at a disadvantage in a fight. A primate that figures out how to augment his power with a stick or a stone might be able to overcome some of that disadvantage. Is the fossil record showing the selection for survival of tool-using pre-humans (sorry if that's not a proper term of art) with shorter teeth?

A FISKING. Number 2 Pencil is unimpressed with a proposal to race-norm scores on standard tests as the latest correction for cultural biases. A further note: the kind of golf handicapping being discussed in the proposal and the rebuttal is in use only in recreational play. It is not in use in professional tournaments. (At least nobody is seriously proposing a handicapping system of the form in use in keelboat racing. The system, which is supposed to enable similar boats to compete on something resembling an even basis, sometimes leads to boats withdrawing from races because for the wind speed and course configuration set, those boats will have their time adjusted in such a way that with best sailing they have no chance of winning.)

QUESTION OF THE DAY: "Most of the schools mentioned in the article are state universites, meaning that the construction is taxpayer-subsidised; is this good value for public money? Also, if these schools took their teaching mission seriously, is a student who weights his decision heavily on the standard of the saunas worth having?" India West weighs in on Jacuzzis rather than faculty as student-recruiting strategies.

THE FRUITS OF VANGUARDISM. Daniel Drezner looks at Democratic efforts to come up with some bumper-sticker issues of their own, as a counterpoint to Republican themes that can be put rather simply, such as "Cut Taxes." "Deregulate." "Beat the Commies." (Oh, that last one has been accomplished.) Such efforts would be welcome. The usual "our positions are more principled and nuanced" stuff is unlikely to work very well. As Andrew Sullivan notes, such posturing is likely to antagonize potential voters, a point Linda McQuaig misses. Best of the Web finds much to criticize in the mindset. Newmark's Door notes the likely outcome of vanguardism. (I hesitate to comment further on the scrap between the Angry Left and the Triumphant Right over who is more stupid. If that's what you're after go here or here or here or here.)

It is not to the name-calling that I wish to speak. I suspect there are as many deep thinkers on the Right side of issues (or pick any other stratification you want) as there are on the Left. Accordingly, a debate on the meaning and effectiveness of the bumper sticker slogans (let's call them Big Ideas) is likely to be more useful than any number of snarks about the moral consistency or intelligence of advocates of particular positions. One good place to start is with this essay about the effectiveness of tax rate cuts. Key paragraph: "Democrats have lost faith in Keynesian-type fiscal stimulus, and are instead worried about the effects of deficits and a growing debt on future spending programs. Republicans, on the other hand, appear to be favoring a fiscal stimulus, but they are mainly trying to limit future spending on entitlement and other programs favored by Democrats." Plenty of room for serious debate about serious economics right there. As I noted here, both major parties (not to mention the minor parties) have erred on the side of hype and spin in selling their messages. I'd like to see better.

OVERWHELMING THE LOGISTICS. Public response to Chief Wiggles's toy drive has been so strong that the military cannot accept any more shipments at this time. (There still are minor combat operations in progress, with the bad guys still killing and wounding our neighbors, and the munitions and water rations must go through.) Operation Give will be providing information about new shipping channels. The first toys have arrived. Snapshots and slideshow herer.

THE END OF AN ERA? The south side of Milwaukee, and the nearby industrial suburbs, used to feature lots of neighborhood taverns. A bar with a few stools, a couple of tables, possibly a fish fry on Friday, certainly a color television turned to a sporting event and a trophy case for the bowling or softball trophies. All changing. Perhaps one of these days, people who make development policy will figure out that creeping yuppification does not equate to progress.

CARNIVAL OF THE CAPITALISTS makes its first stop, at Business Pundit.

RECOMMENDED ECONOMICS READING. Newmark's Door finds some thoughts on the evolution of the Wal-Mart economy.

QUOTE OF THE DAY. "Pricey rite of passage." Welcome, Joanne Jacobs readers.

SELECTIVE RECOGNITION. What makes a state chapter of a national organization a recognized faculty organization? At the University of Alabama, the Alabama Scholars Association (affiliated with the National Association of Scholars) is encountering resistance the AAUP chapter did not. Is the football-challenged University of Alabama administration attempting to stifle criticism from within?

BOWL ELIGIBLE. Wisconsin matches its Big Ten win total from a year ago, and ends Ohio State's win streak in a most dramatic fashion. Wisconsin's starting quarterback left the game after being tackled in a fashion that might have involved a chokehold. The broadcasters viewed the entry of a reserve quarterback as a major setback, with Wisconsin limited to running the ball. After one series that went that way, followed by an Ohio State drive to tie the score, the spin from the broadcast booth was, "Ohio State wants another three-and-out, then they'll drive and kick a field goal and go back to Columbus." Nope.

Earlier in the day, Central Michigan had the effrontery to score the first seventeen points of the game. Northern Illinois's sole first-half score came on a field goal at the end of the half. That's why there's a second half. The rest of the way it was Northern Illinois 37, Central Michigan 7.

RUNNING EXTRA: Ohio State fans are not impressed with the chokehold tackle, reports The American Mind.

THE VILLAGE IT TAKES. Joanne Jacobs links to recent research identifying the importance of "authoritative communities" in bringing the kids up right. She concludes, "nothing substitutes for a good family." Probably not. Wouldn't good families back up the schools and the police, such that a miscreant at school would be in for more trouble at home?

RUSH TO REHAB. Talk-show host Rush Limbaugh admitted to a pain-killer addiction and informed listeners he would be entering rehabilitation.

DISPLAY SIGNALS AND RUN AS SECOND EIGHT. There are a number of updates to yesterday's posts. Why is this one identified differently?

WE KICK 'EM OUT. The SCSU Scholars note preparations for future outbreaks of Gopher Envy at homecoming. We had a little trouble with that a few years ago. Students decided that tearing down the goal posts was a suitable way to celebrate the end of a long losing streak. (The coach at the time is the same coach that is now enjoying a nice run at the BCS.) OK. The next home game was a victory, with the goalposts suffering the same fate. The Judicial Officer has since issued stern statements about goal-post-pulling on Saturday, back to Mom and Dad on Monday. No more goal post pulling. It helps to have a Judicial Officer who doesn't mess around. Students who are caught cheating and offered a failing grade on the exam or assignment by the professor make a mistake requesting a hearing.

INSUFFICIENT ALTERNATIVES? Wednesday evening's Nightline featured the money crunch in education, with the travails of the good folk of Arlington, Massachusetts, who rejected a millage increase yet held a bake sale for their stressed schools. Also appearing was the Chicago superintendent, coping with the shell game mandated by the No Child Left Behind (but No Child Gets a Voucher) Act, in which a school "fails" if any of the pre-determined subsets of its population is not making progress. Students have the option of transferring to a non-failing school elsewhere in the system, which probably has the effect of moving the failures around. A concluding segment looked at the troubles at the University of Texas, taking the opportunity to list a few tuition increases without looking at the effects. The anchor -- not Ted Koppel -- left the viewers with an attempt to be witty: was it the politicians fault for promising school improvements and tax cuts, or the voters for believing it? No consideration of whether the State of Texas ought to be admitting as many students as it is, at the tuitions it charges. No effort to go to Milwaukee (an easy Amtrak ride from Chicago) to ask about the choice programs there. Jonathan Kozol got plenty of air time, but no reporter could be seconded from recall coverage in San Francisco to interview Eric Hanushek. The news clip that served as prime-time tease, and the Arlington coverage, focused on cuts in music and other basics. Must not have been enough time to look at invented math, invented spelling, environmentalist propaganda, and selective advocacy for justice crowding out the basics. (A reminder to parents: you can get your children reading and ciphering on their own. Simply provide the materials and the opportunities and turn 'em loose.)

ORDERLY MARKETS IN WHAT? Marginal Revolution looks at the costs of organ [donation] socialism.

IF YOU'RE SO SMART, WHY AREN'T YOU RICH? Irwin Stelzer suggests you might not be so smart. (Hat tip: Andrew Sullivan.)

QUOTE OF THE DAY. "Increasing academic standards is obviously not an option unless you're a scholar-oriented institution, which most state universities (I'm generalizing) are not, at least on the undergraduate level. If what you want to do is give out certificates of suitability for middle class life, then your audience is not going to be drawn in by something that purports to make life more difficult for them. So instead, you turn your University into Disneyland." That's Highered Intelligence. Why not outrage at this misappropriation of state property, or a Carthaginian Peace for the universities? In Highered Intelligence's view, because the outcome is the desired outcome.

"So do parents and students really balk at the increased cost?

"No. They are getting exactly what they paid for: a diploma with a minimally intrusive course schedule and all the amenities money can buy. Parents will do it because to not is to risk that your child will become... gods above... a PLUMBER."

(Via Betsy's Page, some commentary on the pacifying effects of third-party payments, and the continued neglect of breach of the social contract by the universities.) Moreover, plumbers might have a brighter financial future to look forward to. Mr Lopez is right in part and wrong in part with his inferences:

"The truly tragic thing about the transformation of the American University from an elite (if exclusionary) institution to a populist system of social certification is that none of the parties involved really lose out on an individual level. Professors still get paid, students get their diplomas and get decent jobs. Parents get saddled with debt, but they got what they paid for. No one has an incentive to say, "Wait a sec... I just graduated with a degree in English and I never had to read King Lear!" Because the point of studying English or History is just to have a major so that you can get a job.

"Ultimately, the cost is invisible. We -- the country and Western Culture in general -- will not know what we do not know. The cost is not in economics: people will still train for jobs and perform them well. America does not need philosophers in its factories, in its offices, in its public works. This is not about national survival, it is about something more subtle."

Working backwards, the cost IS in economics. First, using the university to certify entry-level file clerks because the high schools failed to do so doesn't come cheaply. Second, why do you suppose employers are taking advantage of improved communications to outsource jobs, including increasing numbers of computer programming and engineering jobs? Professors' working conditions worsen, and parents have to deal with boomerang kids. (Is it really worth sending them off to Beer and Circus U to hang out with other Party Animals for five or six years only to get 'em back later?)

A long time ago, John W. Gardner saw the consequences of such attitudes toward philosophy and toward plumbing.

EXPECT LIGHT POSTING. Stack of bluebooks on hand. Drop deadline next week Friday. Procrastination time likely to be spent outside. Thanks for visiting.

MORE ON WORKPLACE DISCRIMINATION. Disturbing, if true. The researcher in question appears to have dispatched applicants, rather than sent application letters with different sorts of names.

CHUTZPAH? "UW regents apologize for pay raises. While method was flawed, increases are justified, legislators told." Read all about it. Time permitting, comments tomorrow.

SECOND SECTION: Here are the key paragraphs from the article:

"However, no reporters were informed of the unusual meeting and no press releases were sent, normal steps when regents meet outside their usual schedule.

"[Regent vice-president] Walsh and Board of Regents members Nino Amato, Peggy Rosenzweig and Fred Mohs said the teleconference was pushed by Regents President Toby Marcovich and UW President Katharine Lyall in an effort to boost pay ranges for the vacant chancellor positions at UW-Milwaukee and UW-Stevens Point so search committees could attract top candidates.

"Walsh said regents have not delivered half of a 4.2% salary increase for executives that had been approved by the Legislature's Joint Economic Committee in 2001.

"Walsh and Mohs said the motivation - to allocate much of the leftover raise money to the vacant chancellor positions - was worthy. Walsh and Mohs did not take part in the conference call.

"State law requires the board to approve competitive pay ranges for executives, they said. And chancellors in the UW System make significantly less than counterparts in neighboring states, they said."

A little bit of invoking-the-market, a little bit of "we're just doing what we were asked to," a little bit of horizontal equity. But no coherence. And no understanding, either: "Walsh said it would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars for all departmental committees and subcommittees to advertise meetings in the newspaper and that the media would be swamped with notifications. It would also be inefficient for the board to do every vote by roll call and the Legislature should not micromanage the more than $1 million in salary adjustments the board approves annually, he said."

On the other hand, the Legislature has a responsibility as principal to ensure that its agents live up to expectations.

THE SOURCE OF OUTSOURCING? This Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel story presents a few superficial reasons for learning algebra. (Everybody uses the term "mathematics" to refer to "algebra." Computations are part of mathematics, but one can be a competent skilled worker with no head for the higher mathematics such as calculus and analysis). Here are a few more practical reasons, inspired by something I saw recently, about a student who failed a test for putting a decimal out of place. (I forget where, it will probably turn up later tonight, in which case expect a Second Section.) Anyway, student was in engineering, set the problem up right, made the right substitutions, screwed up on the decimal point, probably a minor error in algebra but the bridge fell down! The student had no estimating skills. Henry Petroski has written about that (no cite, I have one chance in three of guessing which book without my library at hand) as a criticism of the teaching of calculation with the aid of machines. Students get no sense of magnitude. You want to have a sense of magnitude to keep the bridge from falling down, or the drawbar from snapping. Hypothesis: lots of outsourcing of technical jobs to places with more development of estimation skills for lack of calculators and computers. Iraq, anyone?

FOURTH TURNING ALERT. The Superintendent has been unable to determine whether the impending secular crisis will be primarily international or primarily domestic. (That does not rule out some combination of the two.) Porphyrogenitus has a long post, suggesting the opening conflict will be primarily domestic. Roger Simon sees a domestic angle as well, namely the end of the two major parties as we currently know them. Glenn Reynolds is thinking about some of the same themes, but seeing more rather than less peaceful means of transformation at work. On his other site, he recommends a map that shows regional cleavages in Californian voting patterns. (You had to expect this reaction to the map, nicht wahr?) Will the future hold further polarization and further anger? Developing ...

SELLING EFFICIENCY ISN'T EASY. Fiscal policy problems confront both major parties. Crooked Timber's Ted Barlow sees a problem for President Bush: " But right now, it seems that two of the most significant parts of Bush’s legacy, the war on Iraq and the tax cuts, are not just controversial but actually unpopular. In a significant way, Bush won’t be able to run on his record." Something similar appears to have happened in California. Here's The American Prospect's Harold Meyerson, only two years ago: "California is more than just the Democrats' electoral anchor, however. Increasingly, a number of its cities are coming to look like Justice Louis Brandeis's 'laboratories of democracy'--enacting minimum wage, health care, and worker-rights ordinances that would normally be the responsibility of the federal government (if only the feds could be interested in the conditions of working-class life). In city after city, a civic left has emerged in California, with the state's new-model labor movement--the most dynamic in the country--at its core."

Opinion Journal got in a bit of pre-recall snarking, with "What Californians have witnessed is what the modern liberal coalition looks like in power: a gerrymandered majority dominated by the "progressive" special-interest trinity of trial lawyers, unions (especially of public employees) and environmentalists.

"Their priorities are the transfer of wealth from working people to an ever-expanding public sector; more mandates and rules on business that enhance union power but reduce the ability to invest at a profit and create new jobs; and of course legal standards and workers' compensation loopholes that create more openings for trial-lawyer assaults," and the best Tapped's Matthew Yglesias could do by way of a counter-snark was a bit of tu quoque.

We deserve better. Democratic politicians have historically paid a little more attention to the Welfare Economics Paradigm than Republicans, but their attempts to sell corrective taxes (consider the carbon tax on fossil fuels) or approximately corrective taxes (licensing fees based on the weight of the car) have generally flopped. The Republicans, on the other hand, have been more prone to criticize tax-and-tax, spend-and-spend than to propose equivalent measures (tradeable permits, congestion fees on roads.) Their failings have been as bad when it comes to in-kind employee benefits. Governor Schwarzenegger is going to face that squarely when he attempts to square his plan to bring businesses back to California, which might involve ending the mandate that all but the businesses with very small work forces pay for health benefits with the efficiency gains in pooling risks implicit in insurance programs, meanwhile balancing the incentive employer-paid benefits provide to rely more on overtime and expand workforces slowly against the moral hazard that accompanies workers choosing larger pay packets without insurance. Whew. I get a headache just arranging all the ideas. Perhaps it is a bit much to ask for a political party to present a coherent, efficient, taxing and spending policy that appeals to allocative efficiency.

DAY-LONG MARATHONS of bad pizza, bad flourescent lighting, and bad pontificating. That's Dan Drezner's characterization of faculty retreats. Irascible Professor suggests that retreats, in light of the increasing speciation of university administrators, "are intended to cushion the blow. We are told, but we are told in a way intended to make us think that we are part of the process, rather than just cogs in the machinery." This Scott Smallwood article suggests that such telling, rather than the give-and-take of the existing retreats, may become more common, if faculties become trade unionists. Here's an interesting development: "Changes were also made in the faculty's role on search committees for provost, deans, and department chairs. Under the previous rules, chairs had to be recommended by two-thirds of the faculty members in the department, and professors had a system for reviewing their chairs' performance. Neither rule is in force anymore." No big surprise. Under a union contract, the provost, dean, and chairman are part of management and (at least under the union contract I'm familiar with, from Wayne State in Michigan) have responsibilities and prerogatives spelled out in the contract, with no union representation in case other members of management take a dislike to them. Because the contract spells out the responsibilities and prerogatives, it's less likely that a chairman or a dean will be able to give a little bit on some minor yet common-sense point, lest that give be written into the contract as a right enjoyed by all bargaining unit employees.

STOCKS AND FLOWS. The American Mind is less than impressed with the inference that "half of all marriages end in divorce." He correctly notes that if you talk about the incidence of marriages or divorces per 1000 people, "All that tells us is that in sheer numbers there were about twice as many marriages in 2001 than divorces.." (The figures are relatively low, 8.4 per thousand or 4.0 per thousand, because in a random sample of 1,000 people you will likely find a lot of people who were married last year and remained so this year, a lot of people who were not married last year and did not get married this year, and some people who got divorced last year and presumably did not have to repeat the exercise this year.) The most instructive statistic, provided one could calculate it, would be actuarial in nature, looking at the end cause of a marriage (death or divorce) which would give a better picture of the incidence of divorce within the stock of marriages than the flow of additions to and subtractions from a stock that is also changing as deaths occur.

SECOND SECTION. The American Mind finds Thomas Sowell's statement about stocks and flows, which is an early and spot-on smackdown of the "half of" miscalculation.

CAN'T BLAME IT ON "OUTSIDE AGITATORS". Students at Mankato State get case of Gopher Envy. Legislators propose withholding financial aid or otherwise sanctioning students convicted of drunk and disorderly, subject to horizontal equity considerations. This SCSU Scholars post proposes an economics question, and provides the Recommended Opening for any answer. In other news from James J. Hill country, the faculty senate rejects a Marcusian civility code.

Historical note: the large tuition discount offered to state residents enrolling at state-located universities, for which the official rationale relies on who pays the taxes, grew during the years of frequent campus protest, particularly if legislators could point to arrest records with lots of home addresses in other states. Northern Illinois University has on occasion waived the out-of-state premium for extension courses, for reasons that might not be limited to Wisconsin or Indiana residents working in Greater DeKalb.

SEEKING ELDER BREWSTER? Milt's File links to a New York Times article suggesting a developing schism in the Anglican Communion. Midwest Conservative Journal notes that the congregants are singing hymns long un-sung in the more fashionable churches.

AVOIDING THE SECOND DATE FROM HELL. A recognition chart for men. (Via Common Sense and Wonder.) The Superintendent will entertain serious suggestions for a similar recognition chart for women.

AND WITH THE CUBS DOING SO WELL. Knowledge Problem's Lynne Kiesling will be working with Vernon Smith on experimental simulations of energy markets. Good on ya!

YOU DON'T HAVE TO BE A ROCKET SCIENTIST to have opportunities to use optimal control. Spacecraft offers some notes for beginners, promises more. In economics, it's sometimes possible to work it out backwards (What happens if I cash it in now? Suppose I hold it and cash it in tomorrow? Under what circumstances would I be willing to give up the choice.)

COVERING THOSE OPPORTUNITY COSTS. Two seemingly unrelated posts from academic webloggers provide opportunities to revisit some basic economic principles. Apartment 11d responds to a Stanley Fish article continuing his defense of the academy (and in the process making a spot-on observation about bullet points.) The criticism from the fourth floor includes this: "Perhaps there has to be a different mission in public and private universities. Private universities can set tuition rates as they please, have a serious research agenda, and provide jacuzzis for the students. But public universities have to be responsible to others. If the public doesn't want the faculty to take year long sabbaticals or teach classes of five students, then so be it." The Superintendent's minor nitpick is with the second sentence: it is or, not and, as we have not yet disposed of the hypothesis that creature comforts are cheaper than a prestige faculty as means to encouraging enrollments; whether those are the kinds of enrollments to encourage is another matter. That leads to the major nitpick: the public has not told its representatives it does not want its university faculty to stop doing the kinds of work the private research universities do, and it probably hasn't hurt Northern Illinois University to have graduated the Speaker of the House (don't get me going on what I discovered at West Virginia.) Faculty are mobile. During the early 1980s, an era of tight state budgets and falling enrollments, a number of good economists at the University of Wisconsin were able to obtain more attractive offers elsewhere. Although the public does have a right to know where its money is going, it has to understand the rest of the story. Dean Fish is unlikely to be able to keep his best scholars at Circle (I know, it's Illinois-Chicago) if he's unable to match the terms of employment, which means research opportunities, participation in doctoral programs, and tech support as well as salaries and surroundings. That brings me to the apparently unrelated second post. Invisible Adjunct suspects this professor is crying with his mouth full. (He also doesn't know the territory: "OK, we're not in Boston, or the San Francisco Bay area, or Puget Sound, or Raleigh-Durham. The nearest beach is about 300 miles away. The local culture is conservative, with more churches than bookstores. We are south of the Mason-Dixon line, but we have indoor plumbing and a National Public Radio station on the campus.

"There is a major metropolitan area only an hour away. The weather is good, housing is affordable, the crime rate is low, and so are taxes. Schools are good, even if there is no Advanced Placement French or Urdu offered in the second grade." Sounds like some pretty good selling points to me: are there sailable lakes or dealers in O Scale near to hand? The article, however, neglects to mention salaries. Killer job description. Not your basic coastal College Town. Classic compensating differential problem. If the pay packet is also stingy, nobody will come.

WRITE THAT ESTABLISHMENT CLAUSE INTO THAT CONSTITUTION. Joanne Jacobs recommends a Christian Science Monitor story about the evolution of the Hilla School of Religion. "Founded six months ago by a Shiite scholar, the institution bills itself as the Arab world's only school of theology, teaching Muslim, Christian, and Judaic texts. In a town full of deep-seated sorrow, the statue may best embody the school's credo of breaking down barriers and asking dangerous questions." The "statue" is a recent monument to people murdered by the Hussein dictatorship and buried nearby. The school makes use of the recently-completed Saddam Hussein mosque. The dean of the school seeks knowledge: " The school's 180 or so full-time students and 50 or so part timers now study the teachings of the Bible and the Torah; they may learn a few things about religions like Hinduism and Buddhism as well. All the while, they are sent searching for religious insights into everything from medicine to astronomy. Computers are taught as a religious tool; philosophy becomes a theological discipline." As Joanne Jacobs notes, "If your heart needs warming, read the whole thing."

WELCOME CARNIVAL OBSERVERS. Go to a faculty meeting, encounter lots of visits from Carnival No. 55. I trust the archives and permalinks are functioning properly. If not, and you were patient enough to open the main page, scroll down to the entries headed 6.10.03 for the entry titled LAYING DOWN HIS MARKER.

WHAT CAME FIRST? Suppose you regressed all past values of chicken production on egg production, and all past values of egg production on chicken production. Could you answer the question? All of that by way of introducing this year's Nobel laureates in Economics, econometricians Clive Granger and Robert Engle. The Superintendent thanks Marginal Revolution for providing the information, Atlantic Blog for the news and pre-announcement commentary, and Truck and Barter for linking to the announcement and Big Media coverage.

RUNNING EXTRA: Newmark's Door suggests it's a humorous lead-in, cites serious research that a colleague had mentioned to me long ago, way before it got into print.

DOUBLE NICKEL. Carnival of the Vanities No. 55 calls at Dancing with Dogs. Great effort, as ever. Thanks!

WELCOME EXTENSION 720 FANS. Thanks, Milt's File, for the endorsement. (Cub fans, there's some coverage of your team here. Both of the sentimental favorites are still playing in October.)

QUOTE OF THE DAY. Next up on the recreational reading list is Losing Bin Laden (details or compare prices.) Commentary later. For now, look at this, from page 12. "Finally, there is no evidence that the CIA ever paid bin Laden. No canceled checks. No contemporary news accounts published in English in any newspaper in the world. Indeed, the earliest article to mention bin Laden (or any variant spelling of his names) appears in a February 1992 edition of The Guardian -- and it does not mention CIA funding. Subsequent congressional and media investigations have turned up nothing. The charges of CIA funding came later -- and with no evidence attached.

"The claim that the CIA somehow supported bin Laden is mostly made by those who opposed President Reagan's support of guerrilla movements to roll back Soviet communism. They had warned that Reagan's strategy would inevitably cause 'blowback,' which they now claim is embodied by bin Laden. Perhaps they hope to use bin Laden to win an argument they lost long ago."

GET A GOOD START AND SAIL ON THE LIFTED TACK. What's better than a novel set in the Age of Sail? The reality. Let me recommend Flying Cloud (details or compare prices.) Great page-turner, even with an annoying cold making me tired. Flying Cloud set a speed record, New York to San Francisco around the Horn in less than 90 days, in 1851. The hook for the story is the partnership between Captain Josiah Perkins Creesy and his wife Eleanor Creesy, the navigator. (Something tells me I would probably learn a few things racing Lasers or M Scows against her.) The story also provides some insights into why Olympic and Titanic went to sail with only perfunctory sea trials. Flying Cloud's sea trial was her delivery passage from Boston via the Outer Route (east of Cape Cod and Long Island) and on her record-breaking passage her main and mizzen topgallant pole masts carried away in one blow, and her fore topgallant pole mast carried away in another. The crew was able to take the pieces on deck, effect repairs, continue the trip, and replace the spars without loss of any hands. The story also provides some insight into why the clipper ships carried a lot of extra sails for running, rather than using the light-air racing tactic of sailing wider angles to get your apparent wind forward. The act of gybing a ship requires all hands, and to carry out such maneuvers frequently might leave the skipper with a severely tired crew in the case of an emergency.

The reader will also learn a few of the work songs used to get the crew heaving in unison, there's no hand-over-hand or a Harken winch to singlehandedly hoist or trim a sail here. This site is a comprehensive collection of chanteys, and you'll find some of the more popular ones, with program notes, here.

DEFIES PARODY. The word "hate" is a proscribed word. I am not making this up. Number 2 Pencil has the details.

FATAL CONCEITS. Jonathan Rauch comments on the fallacies of hindsight biases. (Hat tip: Dynamist.)

MOTIVE QUESTIONING? Compare and contrast motive-questioning and consequence-evaluation as debating techniques. In your answer, does the nature of the debate, i.e. to get elected, or to have your paper published, influence your technique. Read and understand Arnold Kling before preparing your answer.

TRADEOFFS. Rather than run a Second Section to Monday's mini-dissertation, I'll quote this (register using your Chicago Tribune codes), which Joanne Jacobs found. "Overall, the document finds, the admissions process at UC Berkeley 'might not be compatible with [the school's] goal of maintaining academic excellence.'" There's more to this sort of remediation than the tradeoff between access and standards, something which might lead universities to build waterparks as a cheaper alternative to building academic departments. Consider a mathematician, working on convergence of approximation algorithms in large-dimensional spaces. (That problem interests me. I don't know whether it interests mathematicians. If it's a bad guess, forgive me, but stay with me.) Suppose that mathematician's published and in progress research looks good to a serious mathematics department, such as Berkeley's. Now tell that mathematician that his duties include teaching entering students the algebra that they paid no attention to, or their middle-school teacher failed to teach them. Is that a career-enhancing development? The generalization of this problem to other disciplines and to other universities is left to the reader as an exercise.

WOODSTOCK NATION ALERT? Andrew Sullivan gets why the Schwarzenegger campaign frightens the traditionalists of the Left and the Right.

THE EASIEST DEGREE? Professor Blog has the details.

SPELLING OUT HIS LOSS FUNCTION. My nephew's father emails a further stipulation. "[H]is dad would not like to see him shipped off to fix a problem that was ignored 12 years earlier because our elected employees failed to do their job." Big Up to that.

FIRE PREVENTION WEEK. Congratulations to those visitors who did some research on the Peshtigo Fire (more here.) It occurred the same day as the more famous Great Chicago Fire, leading to the proclamation of the first week of October as Fire Prevention Week (more here -- the theme for this year is particularly on point, as many people have died returning to a burning building to retrive something -- and some classroom materials here.)

WHEN IT'S A TIE AT THE GRADE CROSSING, YOU LOSE.

Cold Spring Shops supports Operation Lifesaver.

It's no easier on the train crew if the fatality might not be accidental. We lose too many people attempting to beat the trains around here.

IMPOSSIBLE TO PROPITIATE THE RAIN GODS? Insufficient fossil fuels to provide sufficient greenhouse gases?

PANGLOSSIANS? Marginal Revolution contemplates differences in the conservative and liberal temperaments. Earlier musings here.

A CHINESE SOUSAPHONE? Truck and Barter evaluates asymmetries in the evaluation of employment of foreign nationals in Indiana or overseas.

LAYING DOWN HIS MARKER. The editorial writers at The Northern Star are unimpressed with President John Peters's State of the University address. The kids have a point, or several: "During his speech, Peters barely mentioned, and failed to give solutions to, several problems the university is facing.

"In the wake of one of the most serious budget crises in university history, as we often are reminded, Peters failed to mention the current state of the university.

"Doesn’t he realize that faculty in some departments are unable to give handouts because they are trying to save money by not using paper?

"How about other professors who are only able to use their phones in emergencies or when students call?

"Peters also didn’t talk about faculty layoffs, which has been mentioned as a way to combat the budget problems. Job security is one of the main concerns faculty have, and many of them could have been looking to the president’s speech for answers.

"The opening of the Convocation Center and Barsema Hall were two major highlights for the university last year, but failed to get a mention this year. Does the university think their first year was successful? Did they make money or improve education like they expected?"

Spot on. Perhaps President Peters is laying down a marker for a future run at a flagship state university or research university presidency. The speech addresses the scope and nature of the comprehensive university, and what better time to make it than during a time when the football program is generating some buzz, the region remains vibrant and sufficiently leavened by red-state virtues to not emulate the coastal circus, and the faculty's efforts to suck it up and keep going have borne some fruits? Why not take advantage of the correlation of forces to make a statement that establishes you as a forward-thinkiing leader within the conclave of university presidents?

Alas, the speech fails to convince in a number of ways. Consider first President Peters's characterization of the changing social contract.

"What I see, and what I want to talk with you about today, is a fundamental change in the social contract that created and continues to shape public universities. This fundamental change goes far beyond our current state-funding crisis, though clearly they are related."

His speech focuses on the changing nature and perceived value of a university education, a point to which I intend to return. But first, don't we have to look at whether or not the universities are themselves in breach of the social contract. Long ago, I wrote an op-ed article for a now-cancelled Faculty Bulletin that began with the sentence, "Universities are failing at their mission." It did not make me terribly popular around campus at the time I wrote it. However, developments in the past dozen years or so have not led me to rethink, let alone recant, a word of what I wrote. And, as I mentioned Sunday, with a Monday second section, the use of funds from any source to provide water parks and other creature comforts is unlikely to impress many people. The American Council of Trustees and Alumni (disclosure: the Superintendent belongs) pulls no punches: "Many colleges and universities no longer provide every student with a strong education. Indiana University English professor Murray Sperber has written that many universities today keep their undergraduates content with a “beer and circus” atmosphere to cover for the fact that they are not receiving much of an education. Huge lecture sections in some courses and a plethora of academically dubious offerings as electives have turned what was once the nourishing, home-cooked meal of a college education into a cafeteria of snacks and desserts." The consequences: "America's colleges and universities educate almost two-thirds of our citizens, including all of our school teachers, lawyers, doctors, journalists, and public leaders. They set the admissions and curricular requirements that signal to students, teachers, parents, and the public what every educated citizen in a democracy must know. If colleges and universities no longer require comprehensive curriculums that introduce students to the major areas of study, we are all in danger of losing a common frame of reference that has sustained our free society for generations.

"Students who have reached the end of their college years without knowing basic landmarks of history and culture are unlikely to have reflected or to be able to reflect on their meaning. They are less likely to be prepared than they should be to make the complex choices that today's life demands. They fail to recognize the unique nature of our society, and the importance of preserving it."

No mention of that breach in the speech. By the way, the students are right to ask questions about the arena, er, convocation center. Their student fees provide the revenue for the bonds that financed it. No state deficit financing, my eye. But it is not to that dimension of public finance that I wish to speak. Rather, back to President Peters:

"Historically, public higher education has been thought of as a “public good.” It was an institution whose purpose was largely unassailable, and its support by the broader society underscored that belief."

Bad economics. A public good has two properties, nonexclusive use and nonrivalrous consumption. President Peters's own arguments will contradict both of those properties. A more accurate argument might be that there are unpriced spillover benefits, or non-pecuniary externalities, to a university degree. That's for another day: are the marginal social benefits of a state-aided university worth the costs, or has Robert Fulghum (details or compare prices) correctly identified the sole source of a positive benefit-cost ratio?

President Peters again: "Our current environment makes it difficult to imagine a public leap of faith like the Morrill Act of 1862, which created the great land-grant universities, 'in order to promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes.' Contrast that vote of confidence with the current debate in Congress, where renewal of our most basic charter, the federal Higher Education Act, is surrounded by criticism and threats of conditional funding!"

We find ourselves in a different kind of a civil war, where the siting of a Pacific Railroad or the creation of engineering colleges is not required to keep the Plains States in the Union. We find ourselves in a situation where universities are failing at their mission, and the People's representatives are questioning our efforts. It would take real courage for a university president to admit that the People's representatives have a point. Instead,

"Recent shifts in public policy seem to hint at a changing view: Instead of a 'public good,' some leaders seem to think a college education is a private benefit that should be paid for by the user. We see this most clearly in the reductions in student financial aid, and the increasing debt burden on students who finance their education through loans."

Be careful what you ask for, you just might get it. From earlier in the speech, "Generally speaking, Americans today take a much more utilitarian view of higher education, and that is clearly reflected in public policy.

"In many respects, we’re a victim of our own success: We’ve done such a good job of educating the citizenry and emphasizing the financial value attached to a college education that it has become, in some respects, a commodity. No longer the sole province of the privileged, a college degree is now considered the standard – the base on which one begins to build a successful life and career."

Anybody remember the Advertising Council's public service adverts: to get a good job, get a good education. How well has that worked? The University of Michigan's James Duderstat notes, "The pay gap between high school and college graduates continues to widen, doubling from a 50% premium in 1980 to 111% today." Looks like a lot of private benefits and pecuniary externalities in there. President Peters offered an ad-lib not in the released text about the difficulty he has speaking with those parents and students who do reach him to complain about the burdens of tuition. Tuition is a bargain, given the private return on a degree. Why not invoke the Benefit Principle and harvest some of those private gains for the provision of the services?

Here's President Peters preferences: "In the past, higher education’s response to major societal concerns has been met with an outpouring of public funds to support those efforts. Think of the G.I. Bill, the space race, or the establishment of Pell Grants. Each evolutionary wave in public higher education has been aimed at educating a broader segment of society -- the establishment of the land-grants, the normal schools, community colleges, and even today’s online universities."

Several responses come to mind. First, is another subsidy to the middle class efficient, or fair? Second, what have the normal schools been doing? The SCSU Scholars have been all over recent education-policy course proposals and The Blob's reaction to some serious content standards (just go to both of the cites linked supra and keep scrolling.) More evidence that Charlie Sykes (details or compare prices) had a point when he alleged that the university was the home office of educational decline in the common schools. Third, the space race well might have set space exploration back, by crowding out work other than on the moon shots, an impractical space shuttle, and a space station whose purpose was to keep the shuttle flying. Fourth, the expansion of financial aid simply provided liquidity for stereo systems and spring break trips. So what expansion of public support is President Peters seeking?

"Another area in which NIU leadership has not only emerged but blossomed is the very compelling need for greater coordination between all levels of the public education system. At NIU, we call it the “preschool through graduate school,” or “P-20” initiative.

"Led by five of our deans, NIU’s P-20 effort is bringing together education leaders throughout the state in an effort to create a seamless web of services for learners of all ages."

And what, is the purpose of P-20? (This is the University language, not quoting President Peters.) "An integrated educational continuum ensures strength at all levels: universal access to quality pre-schools, mastery of reading skills by third grade and algebra by eighth, assurance that all educators are competent and current in their fields."

Forgive me the impertinence, but apart from the pre-school component, the effectiveness of which is not yet settled, isn't this what the common schools used to do? And wouldn't that involve a sea change in the coreless curriculum of the universities, and an end to the remedial and therapeutic regime that consumes mass quantities of university resources. Go here and here and here and here and here and here to get a sense of how many resources could be released for college-level instruction; go here for a dissenting view on the consequences, here for a defense of offering such courses in college, here for the opportunity costs, and here for a position paper by and for university administrators.

I suspect our legislative paymasters will be unlikely to come up with additional resources in the absence of evidence that the third graders (why not second graders?) are reading well, and the eighth graders are doing algebra well, and that the universities are using mathematics PhDs to teach more calculus and less middle-school algebra, and returning administrators to courses in the disciplines where they earned Ph.D.s. Perhaps such a stiffening of standards in the common schools will reduce the propensity of employers to expect a university degree of an entry-level file clerk, and equip the youngsters who have a vocation for the crafts and the trades to be able to master the tools and the tricks of the trade. (The Superintendent reminds all readers that there are plenty of good colleagues at Northern Illinois University that he wouldn't trust near his power tools. Trade school ought not to be viewed as a non-academic track.)

The coming crunch also presents an opportunity to provide some small nonpecuniary externalities that President Peters notes: "I have come to understand, over the course of my three years here, that Northern Illinois University is deeply committed to providing opportunity for all students, from all backgrounds, who want to learn. That belief is woven into the fabric of the institution. As a result, we have programs and practices in place to support students from all educational backgrounds." President Peters goes on to mention the opportunities to serve various ethnic, emigrant, and first-generation populations that the neighborhood presents the university. If anything, the heterogeneous neighborhood we serve presents an opportunity to play it straight: rigorous standards from first grade onward, and rigorous courses at university.

"Because when it comes right down to it, NIU is today what all universities must strive to become: a center of opportunity, founded on and driven by a very public purpose.

"Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for making it so."

Thank you. Consider whether doing some things differently might not enhance those opportunities, foster those public purposes, and capture some of the private benefits created at the same time.

NO COMEBACKS. Deutschland 3, USA 0 in the other kind of footballl tournament.

BREAKING THE SOCIAL CONTRACT? A New Can of Worms comments on the upcoming Chicago schoolteacher contract negotiations: "Teachers have a hard job, but anymore they are pretty much well paid...and in later years they are very well paid. Yet, their results are totally lacking. They'd be wise not to push their luck." (Hat tip: Econo Pundit, coping with the Chicago area trash-haulers' strike.)

CAN YOU ANSWER THIS? Late in the 19th Century, a tragic fire occurred in Peshtigo, Wisconsin, in which more than 1,500 lives were lost. Yet this event was journalistically overshadowed by a simultaneous tragedy in which only 300 lives were lost. Where did this latter tragedy occur, and why is this question on the website today?

BLOCK PARTY. Knowledge Problem is enjoying the end of the season for the Team Formerly Known as the Milwaukee Braves.

NO HOMECOMING. Packers 35, Seahawks 13. Former Packer coaches Mike Holmgren and Ray Rhodes, and reserve quarterback Matt Hasselbeck, no longer undefeated. Badger Band providing the Fifth Quarter! Life is good.

GAINS FROM TRADE. Facts on the ground consistent with this theory of immigration amnesties: "Yet despite the new era of the Patriot Act and its threats of deportation, real and perceived, most illegal immigrants remain convinced that the chance for a better life here is worth the risk. What gives them hope in part is the proliferation of small gestures on local and state levels that are making big differences in their lives.

"These gestures are tacit recognition of the presence of illegal immigrants and their needs and contributions to society. They appeal to a community's sense of justice, and, little by little, they nudge along a federal system playing catch-up with the rest of the nation," writes Marcela Sanchez (registration required. Hat tip: Milt's File.) The policy puzzle: how best to manage migration, such that future contributors to society get in, while future criminals stay out, without devoting inefficiently many resources to border enforcement?

PLEADING POVERTY, BUILDING JACUZZIS? (A down payment on the commentary on the State of the University?). Northern Illinois University President John Peters told us, referring to the expected bulge in applicants (which is easy enough to observe, just ask the middle schools,) "Demand has outstripped supply." If that's the case, why are college recruiters competing to build health spas? (Registration required, and thanks to Newmark's Door for pointing to the article.) Remind me not to play poker with any university administrators. It takes incredible self-discipline to go to the legislature and, with a straight face, ask for more subsidies to the middle class and to rich people, when taxpayers, including people poorer or less book-smart than university students and faculty, are being asked to dig down for water parks, indoor recreation centers, masseurs, and orgy-sized Jacuzzis.

President Peters laments a change in the social contract between the state universities and their state governments. I have more, much more, to comment on, and intend to do so once this cold passes. For now, I suggest that the state universities are not blameless in this change, and contend that the first failure is a failure of giving too much (not just recreation centers, consider as well coreless curricula and lax admission standards (but see Number 2 Pencil for some encouraging developments)) and asking too little (for now, I'll mention on asking professors to cover more classes, adding more students to classes, and calling for more information about how students are performing.)

SECOND SECTION: Invisible Adjunct is not pleased with these developments. "Do these examples represent isolated instances? Or do they rather illustrate a new trend? In either case, I think it's time we asked some tough questions about educational priorities and the allocation of scarce resources." She points to The Salt Box, who sees the consequences of the wrong business model: "The 'arms race' in student services (the metaphor is from the article) arises predictably from the fallacy of thinking about students as consumers." The confusion in collegiate thinking has been a long time in coming. The research universities might have the strongest claims to inheriting the monastic tradition. Once you introduce the "agricultural and practical arts" of the land grant colleges, the teacher preparation of the normal schools, and the vocational and technical components of the community colleges, you have a mixing of traditions. And when normal schools and land grant colleges begin thinking of themselves as comprehensive universities, with no regard to whether that is the right environment for all students, and when the mid-1990s mentality of preserving enrollments at all costs hasn't evaporated, particularly to provide fee money for expense-preference behaviors in the upper administration, stuff like the water parks happens.

DISSIPATED IN RENT SEEKING? Faint praise for further federally-funded research on extending Metra service Kenosha to Milwaukee.

COULD HAVE BEEN WORSE. "After beating three teams from BCS conferences to open the season, Northern Illinois coach Joe Novak was worried about a letdown in the conference opener against the Bobcats, whose only win was a 17-3 victory over Division I-AA Southeast Missouri State.

"It looked as if that would happen until Fleck came through at the end." Northern Illinois 30, Ohio 23, in overtime. At the not-so-Happy Valley, the Joe Paterno Retirement Watch returns, the offensive line continues its stop us if you can ways, and the Badgers match last year's Big Ten victory production.

RAILWAY ARCHAEOLOGY. Milwaukee streetcars weren't just for schlepping groceries home. The car department at the East Troy Railroad has been working on the Milwaukee streetcar that illustrates these pages, and they discovered these (you might have to register with Yahoo Groups to view them.) It transpires that sometimes people schlepped pork chops home (this looks good, here's Kassler Rippchen, and more prosaic uses are possible) and sometimes people ate them on the car, and didn't clean up after themselves.

SPELLING OUT MY LOSS FUNCTION. Posting has been light or nonexistent the past couple of days owing to a cold that is slow to go away, and a bit of boredom with the big stories of the day, and a few fun things going on elsewhere. Plame? Precursor chemicals? Limbaugh? The Common Carriers are all over it. Go there. They don't hang valve gear or take derivatives. I do. California recall? Big Up to this. Does an absence of post on such things mean I don't care? Hardly. But there's no point linking the Common Carriers who are doing such a good job linking and commenting on each other. Where do I stand? Let's say that I don't want to explain to my nephew why he now has to pray with his nose pointed in the general direction of Cudahy, and his butt in the air, and his aunt has to cover her face, just because some people wanted evidence far beyond a reasonable doubt of some bad guys' capabilities. Raising Sand offers a somewhat more global perspective. (Last via Jay Solo's Verbosity.)

SECOND SECTION: One of the mad Ba'athist paymasters may be off the street.

THIRD SECTION: Shot in the Dark is thinking along similar lines, complete with an on-point from Day By Day.

NO NEED TO PROPITIATE THE RAIN GODS? Skepticism of man-made climate change, from unusual quarters. More here. (Hat tip: Insta Pundit.)

MISAPPROPRIATING RESOURCES. Photon Courier is unimpressed with Stanley Fish's pleas of poverty in the state universities. Go there. It'll hold you over until I get the time to respond to the State of the University here.

OPERATION GIVE. Photon Courier discovers that A Small Victory's Michele has set up a web site for Chief Wiggles's toy drive.

It's worth checking the Chief's site for updates on the toy drive (including school supplies, toothbrushes and toothpaste) and the campaign to free the generals. The first platoons of the new Iraqi Army are completing basic training (or is it retraining into the ways of civil society?) One thing my parents' generation learned in World War II is that the help of Germans, including influential Germans, who weren't mad Nazis was helpful in getting Germany up and running again. Isn't the same thing true for influential Iraqis who weren't mad Ba'athists?

SECOND SECTION: Be sure to read and understand the Service Bulletins at Dean's World. Coverage of both the toy drive and the Generals.

THIRD SECTION. More on both stories at Winds of Change.

THE REAL REALLY USEFUL ENGINES. All the toddler-related posts invoking Thomas the Tank Engine and friends inspire the following links. Here is the Awdry Family web site (the stories originated as Awdry bedtime stories) and here the real lives of Thomas and most of the other engines.

How big is Thomas to the railroad preservation effort? A "Day Out with Thomas" brings as many visitors to the Illinois Railway Museum in two weekends as visit some museums all year.

BREACH OF FAITH? The State of the University speech by Northern Illinois University President John Peters ventures into the broader topics of The University and The Public. Not enough time to react to it at the moment, but perhaps over the weekend...

FOURTH TURNING ALERT? A call for libertarians to migrate to New Hampshire.

LOTS OF GREEN BAY FUND RAISERS? Check out the "updated" tags here.

GENERAL EQUILIBRIUM. Let's see, if China exports goods to the United States, doesn't somebody have to handle the sales efforts?

NOTICE OF DISRUPTION OF SERVICE. Invisible Adjunct is busy with a book project. Good on ya.

SAUCE FOR THE GOOSE? Lookee what's the news from Europe and the implications thereof.

CALL FOR PAPERS. The latest Carnival is Carnival of the Capitalists. Unclear whether this is a touring carnival or a fixed site. More information at Jay Solo's Verbosity.

CAR 54 WHERE ARE YOU? Carnival of the Vanities calls at Dodgeblogium. (Just the facts, ma'am.)

FOURTH TURNING ALERT. Not good times ahead for free spirits, suggests Reason's Julian Sanchez, who links to this article (English language in a Swedish Journal) that inter alia provides an explanation for acceptance of the homeland security measures. Although many high schools in tough neighborhoods have been run much like prisons for a long time, since the Columbine shootings, which prior to 9/11 were much on the minds of entering classes, that has been true of high schools in more prosperous parts as well. And the level of security, and the acceptance thereof, might increase further, if this story (at Number 2 Pencil, celebrating a birthday) ceases to be newsworthy simply because it is common.

GREAT PAGE-TURNER. One reason for the somewhat light posting of the past few days is the arrival of Frederick Forsyth's Avenger (details or compare prices.) Great read, and no sign of the recycling of content that has been plaguing Tom Clancy (or shall we say the school of Tom Clancy lately.) Vietnam, Yugoslavia, Osama, the usual Forsyth coincidences, and some political philosophy: "The hatred of your country is not because it attacks theirs; it is because it keeps theirs safe. Never seek popularity. You can have supremacy or be loved but never both. What is felt toward you is ten percent genuine disagreement and ninety percent envy."

Probably the Literary Establishment (motto: we don't want you to understand it) will sniff at Forsyth, if they have time to sniff while shuttling from Community College A to Vocational School B, if what Joanne Jacobs has found is true. (Pretty ineffective full employment scheme, if you ask me.)

SOUND AND FURY? "And the idea that Bush is a liar must seem counterintuitive to ordinary, nonpartisan Americans. After all, he is a pol who generally does what he says he's going to do: He said he'd cut taxes, and he did; he said he'd liberate Afghanistan and Iraq, and they're liberated. On the really important matters, Bush has to be reckoned one of today's more honest politicians." That's Best of the Web, seeking and claiming to find anger on the Angry Left.

MAKING FUN OF ACADEMICS FOR A YEAR. Go visit Tightly Wound. (All of the recent references around the Interchange Track to Thomas the Tank Engine suggest that it's time to put up some information about the real Thomas and his friends.)

BEER AND CIRCUSES. The cover of the fall Directory of Classes at Northern Illinois University featured pictures from on and around the football field. The football team has been playing well thus far. Alas, some of the fans have been behaving like, well, Illinois sports fans. [Associate Athletic Director Robert] "Collins went on to say NIU has received complaints about its fans dating back to the Toledo and Bowling Green football games last year, and more recently this year with the Maryland and Iowa State games."

BACK TO POLITICS. Fox News reporting that Rush Limbaugh has resigned his football post at ESPN, presumably to restrict his opinions of affirmative action to his call-in show.

VANGUARDISM, AND TRADEOFFS. Atlantic Blog notes the difficulty of an advocate presuming to speak for all members of the class the advocate presumes to speak for, and notes the tradeoffs open trade brings. The opportunity for a seller to sell at a higher world price, absent tariff barriers implies the obligation for a buyer to buy at the higher world price, which means a loss to a buyer. The general equilibrium effect is frequently, however, the opportunity for the buyer to buy something else from somewhere else at a lower world price, suggesting a benefit to consumers from trade liberalization, but a benefit different from the one claimed here.

QUOTE OF THE DAY. "What you get here -- as with any blog -- is my idiosyncratic selection of things that interest me, as I have time to note them, with my own idiosyncratic comments." That's Insta Pundit. Those are House Rules here, too.

FIGURE AND GROUND. The latest from the SCSU Scholars suggests a very differing view of university administrators from the view upon which I base this post and my preceding posts linked therein. Evidently there is more of the evolution of the normal schools to research universities than meets the eye. A dean with no home department? That's a new one to me ... Northern Illinois University deans have home departments, and external hires come with presumptive tenure in those departments. A "professional administrator" with no collegiate experience? Involved with curriculum? Rare around here. Sounds like there would be fewer administrators at St. Cloud to send back to the classroom in lieu of hiring more adjuncts from Minnetonka or to efficiently term-limit them.

WAYNE'S WORLD ON THE UPPER MISSISSIPPI. No, not a new joint venture of Paramount with Cedar Fair. Rather, it's a Fisking of the latest course proposals from the Blob. I trust that someone on the university curriculum committee is checking that "pro-active strategies for change" includes teaching the times tables and notes that any formulation including the words "x + issues" signals a content-free zone. (It's probably expecting too much now for anybody to point out that "masculinity" evolved over five thousand years of trial and error, and to "redefine" it in light of the past twenty or thirty years of fashionable thinking is presumptuous.)