Ah, Saint. You think you can make an economics movie? So did the people trying to film Atlas Shrugged, and look what that got them.

For the cast, I envision Heather Graham in the lead role. She'll play the intrepid, brilliant classical economics professor (Dr. Erika Love) who finally connects the dots and begs the authorities to limit the rate of growth in government spending to that of inflation. Before it's too late! The thrilling climax of the movie occurs during her riveting testimony about the Quantity Theory in front the Senate Budget Committee.

I would prefer a hail of bullets. Too bad Equilibrium is already taken (and not a great movie.) I thought that was where Saint Paul was going until he went all Friedman on me.

I'm actually fond of good movies depicting capitalism in its appropriate light, sort of the anti-Wall Street. A few unusual suggestions that come to mind:

• Harry's War. Any movie with the line "Hit*er would have loved the I.R.S." is going to get two stars if it does nothing else. David Ogden Stiers is the IRS agent, and is hysterical.
• Dr. Syn, Alias the Scarecrow. Fans of The Prisoner get to see their hero as a country priest taking on the taxman. I think Saint Paul could pull this off, don't you? And a Disney film, fun for the whole family!
• Or SP could try to be James Garner in Cash McCall? If it's me, I use Salma Hayek (not Friedrich) to replace Natalie Wood rather than Graham, but de gustibus, dude.
• I was sent by Tyler Cowen to a site that discussed how business is portrayed in film, and later found this article on Robocop as a pro-capitalism film. I had wanted to write about this some day. I sat one weekend in Yerevan, Armenia, at a hotel while it was raining hard outside. Flipping the channels I see the satellite system is running a Robocop marathon. I can't figure out why this is on, but I had never seen them before so I sat down and opened a Kotayk. Fifteen minutes later I'm addicted. Saint Paul = Peter Weller? I've seen worse.

I have yet to ask anyone in the administration what they think of my cohosting of the NARN. I figure if I don't ask, they won't come up with a policy against it. Besides, it's not like they put it on a survey or something. The local paper has a file photo of me to use when they need "a quote from an economist" or when I have to discuss the Quarterly Business Report. But I wouldn't say they actually push me into the spotlight.

As schools vie to attract top students, top faculty, and top-dollar gifts, they count on their bookish professors to leave the library and enter the studio, where their insights on the day's news might help put their institutions on the map.

...

For schools aspiring to enhance their reputations, the task of positioning faculty for a "media hit" has become big business. To get their professors into reporters' Palm Pilots, 624 colleges and universities pay between $500 and $900 each per year to be listed with ProfNet, a private database. Some go further by paying thousands to private firms whose sole mission is to get professors quoted in the press.

Spokespeople in higher education tend to agree that the time, effort, and money they invest to get professors quoted in news stories are priceless.

But it appears they want to be sure you say the right thing.

What's more, professors who comment on controversial local issues involving their universities can find themselves at odds with the very administrations that encouraged them to do interviews. To mitigate this problem, some institutions have instructed scholars to limit their comments to their areas of expertise, but those policies are producing protest.

"As a faculty member, you're an officer of the institution. You're not just an assembly-line worker," says Jonathan Knight, director of the American Association of University Professors' program in academic freedom and tenure. "An effort to stop faculty members from commenting on issues of concern to their communities would be a direct assault on academic freedom."

Not that our gang would ever think of censoring, would they?

Reform K12 drops a dime on some NAACP recommendations and thrashes them well. Here's what is described as the "jaw-dropping one":

In the interest of public service we reprint all of the NAACP's recommendations, beginning with the most jaw-dropping one (emphasis ours):

To the parents of students who received letters informing you that you may transfer your child from one of the failing schools, do not transfer them. Leave them there and monitor your child, the teachers and the administration.

See, if parents transferred their children, the NAACP would run the risk that:
a) The children would attend better schools.
b) The chronically failing schools would close or be reconstituted.
c) The borderline schools would wake up and begin teaching again.

All of these things would reduce the supply of future victims, and they can't abide that.

RTWT. The problem is generally that nobody wants to hold the school accountable that kids can't read or write. When students fail standardized test, the focus is on adding resources to the students who've already fallen behind rather than addressing why they fell behind so that it doesn't happen again.

Someone correctly understands academic freedom, reports Erin O'Connor.

The University of Rhode Island has reached a decision regarding women's studies professor Donna Hughes' controversial web site. Readers will recall that URI administrators asked Hughes to remove two articles from her university web page after they drew threats of a libel suit from England. Readers will also recall that when, after more than six months, URI still had not decided what to do, the ACLU came to Hughes' defense. Yesterday, URI president Robert Carothers formally gave Hughes permission to re-post the articles on URI's web site.

Carothers' letter follows on Critical Mass. While it took six months and a letter from the ACLU to get Carothers to grant permission to re-post, at least he's seen the light. (See also Fenster Moop, suggests Erin.)

Several bloggers, including Precinct 333, John Ray, Peggy Kaplan and David Huber, have linked to this article by August Nimtz in the RedStarTribune, who clearly has better whiskey than me.

In 1959 the Cuban masses did something that working people have yet to do in this country: They took power out of the hands of a tiny privileged minority and began to exercise it for themselves. They became the makers of their own history. Unlike in the United States, where politics is reduced to a boring spectator sport and working people are treated as mere consumers -- thus, the high abstention rate -- Cubans vote with their feet every day in defense of their revolutionary conquests. More than 1 million took to the streets in Havana May 14 to protest the Bush administration's latest moves. The social gains that the Cuban people enjoy, as in education and health care, are possible because they possess political power -- in other words, real democracy. Precisely because U.S. workers lack such power, their social wages continue to erode.

So I thought it would be good to Google Prof. Nimtz. It turns out he's a tired old leftist who's been honking Castro's horn for years. Here's one other example of his views:

For August Nimtz, a professor of political science at the University of Minnesota and political activist who grew up under Jim Crow segregation in the south, the flag represents something entirely different than it does for Orr.

“Many people see the flag as representing imperial conquest, exploitation and oppression,” said Nimtz. “Because of our history of lynching, dispossession and repression at the hands of people waving the flag, many Black people have a healthy suspicion about flag-waving.”

“The flag doesn’t give me a warm fuzzy feeling — rather, it reminds me of Billie Holiday and the images of brutal lynching she conjures up in the song Strange Fruit,” Nimtz explained.

He is also the author of a book titled "Marx and Engels: Their Contribution to the Democratic Breakthrough." So yeah, I'd guess he likes Castro more than he likes the U.S. And if you follow his vita around the University of Minnesota, you find the usual suspects.

“Mr. Reagan will raise taxes. And so will I,” Mondale said. “He won't tell you. I just did.” (Michael Putzel, The Associated Press, 7/19/84)

"Many of you are well enough off that ... the tax cuts may have helped you," Sen. [Hillary Rodham] Clinton said. "We're saying that for America to get back on track, we're probably going to cut that short and not give it to you. We're going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good." (Hat tip: Instapundit.)

Some people learn, some people don't.

One of the things you get bombarded with as a department chair are requests for assessment of teaching. Like Eric Rasmusen, I've wondered why we spend so much time on this. The title of this post is my answer: student evaluations do not evaluate teaching; they evaluate the service professors have provided to students. Those are not the same thing.

Look at it this way: What would be the meaning of having a patient fill out an evaluation of her heart surgeon? She could comment on bedside manner or quality of the surgeon's explanations of the procedure and post-surgery recovery process. That is, she can effectively evaluate the service she received from the surgeon as counselor. But what weight would you give to her evaluation of the doctor as a surgeon? OK, so she was under anesthesia, so maybe that's a bad analogy. So try a dentist. The dentist who keeps my kid from screaming as she's brought in for a teeth cleaning isn't necessarily the best dentist, even though my son may love him for the candy he gets as he leaves the office. And you wouldn't know that until years later when the child becomes a man and needs to have dentures before age 30 because the pediatric dentist botched things.

There are some professors who make an impression on you while you're in school who you remember fondly for the rest of your life; there are others who were complete SOBs from whom you later realized you learned a great deal. There is one retired prof from my department, a harsh fellow who required a great deal of his students and was brutal on the ones who didn't read before class. Complaints galore for the old chair of the deparment. But as I talk to alumni in their 50s and 60s, I am amazed how many tell me "boy he was tough, but did I ever learn a lot from him!" I hope someone says that about me some day. (Hat tip: Stephen Karlsson, who has more humorous thoughts on his evaluations.)

When a government official keeps saying something isn't price controls, you can pretty well guess that it is. Reporting inThe Chronicle of Higher Education today (subscribers only), Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry announced that he is proposing to spend $10 billion in "fiscal relief" to states who kept public university tuition rate hikes "no greater" than the rate of inflation. Kerry has a smattering of college proposals all of which cost some money. He proposes $25 billion overall in his "State Tax Relief and Education Fund" (of which the $10 billion tie-in to controlling tuition hikes may be a part -- I cannot tell from his website -- and has already proposed a refundable College Opportunity Tax Credit of $4000 per year for tuition for four years. He says this is all fully funded, but I cannot see where the money comes from.

Since the last time someone proposed price controls for higher ed didn't go so well, the Kerry camp is being careful how this new proposal is portrayed. From the Chronicle article:

In a conference call with reporters on Monday, campaign officials said the idea behind the tuition plan was not to put price controls on colleges. Rather, the goal was to give institutions the money they needed since many states have been forced to cut spending on higher education because President Bush's tax cuts have reduced revenues for state governments.

"States were making up for the gap by raising tuition," said Gene B. Sperling, an adviser to Mr. Kerry and a former economic aide to President Bill Clinton. "Senator Kerry does not support price controls."

It doesn't matter what you call it, though. The economics are quite clear: Raise tuition above the rate of inflation, and you lose millions of dollars. Only if there were a very high number of students with highly inelastic demand could one go beyond the tuition rate listed. Just because you use a positive rather than negative incentive scheme doesn't make one price controls and the other not. Unfortunately, the Republicans Hopefully this idea dies the same death that haven't doen much better on this idea.

UPDATE: He better work harder if he wants the Hispanic vote.

I've complained about Minnesota schools, but at least they're not this bad.

In terms of numbers, charter schools are barely a blip on the Massachusetts radar screen. Of the nearly 1,900 public schools in the state, only 50 are charters. Of the 980,000 children enrolled in public education, only 19,000 - fewer than 2 percent - attend charter schools. The tiny shadow cast by these schools is actually mandated by state law: They are barred from enrolling more than 4 percent of Massachusetts students or from spending more than 9 percent of the education budget in any given school district. And just to make sure they never grow fruitful and multiply, there is a firm ceiling on the number of charter schools permitted statewide - 72 and no more.

But if Massachusetts charter schools are few and small, they are also in great demand. Each one has a waiting list. Some 14,700 students in regular public schools are hoping a spot opens up at a local charter school. Unless Beacon Hill eliminates the caps that keep the number of charter schools so low, the majority of those kids will never see the inside of a charter-school classroom.

Meanwhile, Minnesota continues to lead the nation in charter schools, sometimes with silly ideas and others that work well even when they seem leftish while educating an immigrant population.

Following up on my post about research publications, last night a colleague and I finished a paper for submission to a journal. (One of the reasons my posts have been lamer than usual.) We were told we could upload the file to The Berkeley Electronic Press. My colleague did, and within a few hours we get back a link to our paper converted to .pdf (which I can then download in that form), and a link to follow the paper's status.

Web submission seems to be the way to go. In contrast, I sent a paper to the Journal of Monetary Economics by snail mail a year ago last January, paying $150 for the privilege of having them look at it, and can't get anyone there to reply to my requests to learn its status.

(UPDATED to fix name of journal -- it's JME, not JPE.)

Another religion/education/political blog has come to my attention. Say hello to Precinct 333, whose owner already shows a keen understanding of the difference between public and private universities. As a writing sample, I like this metaphor in describing Vin Suprynowicz:

As a result you get things that are the written equivalent your best-friend's mom's meatloaf and mashed potato dinner -- stick-to your brain cells columns that are intellectually nutritious but have a little unusual flavor that your mom's cooking lacks.

Who told him about Mom?

I'm sorry I missed Wendy McElroy's editorial on the anniversary of the University of Michigan affirmative action cases.

It is time to question whether AA is a noble goal. Advocates of U-M's policies speak in collective terms about race disadvantage and gender inequities. What they don't deal with is individuals. AA admission (and other) policies do not look at the individual merits of your son or daughter at the grade average they've struggled to maintain, the volunteer organizations they've joined, the dreaming human beings they are.

Instead, AA advocates see skin color and genitalia. There is nothing noble about that vision.

As Scholar Jack often writes me, whoof.

"Instead of getting your name tattooed on your arm, write your name in history."

From the graduation of a charter school in Philadelphia. See Reform K12 for the rest of the story, as well as this one about a student's take on Pythogoras as a "dude with issues".

(Courtesy Lew Rockwell.) The New York Times reports that more research is being published via the web.

The high subscription cost of prestigious peer-reviewed journals has been a running sore point with scholars, whose tenure and prominence depend on publishing in them. But since the Public Library of Science, which was started by a group of prominent scientists, began publishing last year, this new model has been gaining attention and currency within academia.

More than money and success is at stake. Free and widespread distribution of new research has the potential to redefine the way scientific and intellectual developments are recorded, circulated and preserved for years to come.

"Society pays for science," said Dr. Nicolelis, whose article in the October issue of PLoS got worldwide attention. "We have the technology, we have the expertise. Why is it that the only thing that has remained the same for 50 years is the way we publish our results? The whole system needs overhaul."

At the big-sticker end are publications like The Journal of Comparative Neurology, for which a one-year institutional subscription has a list price of $17,995. Access to Brain Research goes for $21,269, around the price of a Toyota Camry XLE.

According to the Association of Research Libraries, journal prices went up 215 percent from 1986 to 2003, while the consumer price index rose 63 percent.

In my field of economics, there have always been options, formalized by the Social Science Research Network which makes many working paper and published paper available to researchers. This builds on the tradition in economics of getting working papers out quickly to possible reviewers and collaborators (and to stake out a claim to an idea before you have to go through the peer review process.) Open source publishing in the field is being researched by David D. Friedman at Santa Clara. Question to the readers: What benefit is gained from not letting information be free? What is the value added by having and Elsevier or Kluwer produce journals and sell them at very high prices? And why, do you suppose, do libraries continue to pay those prices?

David Wall comments in my post last week on the costs of education at SCSU that higher tuition might be driving down enrollment, if the number of eligible high schoolers are rising faster than our own enrollment. He also wonders if students are switching to public from private schools. A couple of points:

1. The rate of increase in MnSCU of about 15% exceeds the rate in private schools, at about 6%. So the relative price of private school to public has diminished, which should encourage shifting AWAY from private public schools, all other things equal. But...
2. All other things aren't equal, because as today's USA Today notes, the real price of tuition -- that which is actually paid by the student or parents -- has fallen by a third.

   What made the difference: a $22 billion annual increase in grants and tax breaks since 1998.
   
   That 80% jump in financial aid — targeting middle-class families earning $40,000 to $100,000 a year — has more than offset dramatic increases in tuition prices.
   
   "College still takes a big chunk out of most families' income. But the average student is much better off today than headlines would have you believe," says Sandy Baum, an economist who co-authors an annual report on college costs for the College Board, which oversees college entrance exams.

   Interestingly, a good bit of this money is coming from merit awards modeled on Georgia's HOPE program. As I suggested months ago, schools are getting better at the price discrimination game.

   Alexander estimates that 28% of the 10,000 students at his public university in Murray, Ky., would get more aid if it raised its official tuition price and then gave scholarships as discounts.

   And I'll bet his tuition revenue goes up, too.

UPDATE (1:30pm): Phil's right; I typed that the substitution should be to public schools when it should be to private schools. I shouldn't blog so close to class time.

A story from Wisconsin (Stephen, how did you miss this one?) discusses a high school newspaper that declined an ad (and $3000 revenue) from a military recruiter.

Bix Firer, 17, editor of the newspaper, rejected the offer, saying the U.S. military's actions run contrary to the advertising policy he drafted.

The policy rebuffs businesses and organizations "deemed destructive to the social, economic and environmental health of the earth and all of its inhabitants."

He also says he didn't want the student publication being used to advance the cause of "warmongers."

Why is it you never hear them referred to as "defensemongers" or "protectionmongers"? Just wondering.

He also says the military is "both classist and racist in its approach."

"I realize this is sort of absurd coming from a privileged, white male, but the recruitment sort of targets those with fewer opportunities," Firer says.

As Joanne Jacobs notes (from whom I found this article), the recruiter was trying to target this rich, more liberal neighborhood but was hampered by the self-imposed policies of Mr. Firer. David Foster, meanwhile, notes in a comment on Joanne's post an article by Karl Zinmeister (excerpts here), interviewed last Saturday by the Northern Alliance Radio Network. David asked a couple of months ago:

There's always been a lot to be said for hiring people with a military background, because the military often gives very young people the opportunity to exercise heavy levels of responsibility. But the nature of the current conflict is giving many people experience that will be of especially high value in business. ...

They're making tough decisions involving the balancing of multiple conflicting objectives. For example, the article tells of a lieutenant who is asked to take his platoon to a Baghdad sewer plant, where a suspected terrorist is believed to be employed. Does he charge in, seize the employment rosters, grab all the employees, and interrogate them? But the plant is--which was in a state of "advanced decay" when the Coalition arrived--is now being rebuilt, a project that is employing hundreds of workers and serving as a centerpiece of the reconstruction effort. Not a good place for a firefight, or even an angry scene. In the end, the lieutenant decides to take a more diplomatic approach, working quietly through the plant management. The right decision?..it's hard to know. But a person who makes decisions like this on a day-in/day-out basis is surely growing in executive capacity.

Read all of David's post, and then wonder whether it is better to hire one of those veterans rather than kids like Mr. Firer who might go to a liberal arts institution like his parents teach at, and maybe, just maybe, get a single course in management?

Compare The Broken Window and Today's Bleat (scroll to last story). And of course the glaziers and the stairs demolishers and landscapers all vote Democrat.

UPDATE: Another Democrat doorknocker visits the Random Penseur, who has a daughter perhaps as precocious as Gnat?

The doorbell rang and it was the local Democratic Party chief looking for the previous owners of our house. My daughter and I answered the door. I explained that the previous owners had moved and he looked at us and said to my daughter, "so, are you a democrat?" And my little 3 1/2 year old looked back at him and just said, "no". He was nonplussed and that ended the conversation.

Poliblogger is helping to round up textbooks for Iraqi schools. Please consider donating. I'm going to the office tomorrow and digging up a few myself.

You can depend on the StarTribune for a misleading headline. Here's the one used in this morning's paper:

Economy slows, thanks to ballooning trade deficit

So did the economy contract? No. The first quarter GDP figure revised by the Commerce Department came in at a growth rate of 3.9%. Mostly the change was due to more consumers buying imports than domestic goods. The P in GDP is product, and when we are buying less product from domestic producers GDP falls, even if we are buying the same amount of stuff and feeling just as good as we did otherwise. And real gross domestic purchases, which measures what people bought regardless of where it was made, accelerated slightly. (And it's not a mirage, since savings as a share of GDP also went up in the quarter.)

The numbers behind the GDP revision are still strong. Corporate profits up 32% year over year. Disposable personal income -- what people actually have to spend after the government takes its tribute -- grew strongly last quarter. Many models of economic effects on presidential elections use disposable personal income rather than GDP. Douglas Hibbs' Bread and Peace model is one poignant example. Using his model and the pre-2000 parameters, the healthy growth rate of real disposable income at 3.2% per year so far should lead to Bush receiving 56-57% of the two-party vote share, even including the deaths of American soldiers in Iraq to date.

So if the papers start discussing how the "slowing economy" is going to lead to a Kerry victory, don't bet the farm. Indeed, if you go to the Iowa Electronic Market, Bush's vote share contract is trading at around 53-54%. 'bout right.

I usually don't post on Friday nights, but I want to put up something for the NARN show tomorrow. (I won't be there, and I won't be at Paintapalooza, either. I hate parades, but I'm in one.) I want to write about the last revision to the first quarter GDP figures, which are interesting but getting largely ignored so far. But I have to decorate a float right now.
So follow the last link, you think about them and I'll tell you what you should have thought later, 'k?

The student newspaper has some interesting quotes from our enrollment management officer:

"There is no doubt tuition increases will have an impact on enrollment," Saffari said.

Although there is a correlation between enrollment and tuition, Saffari said it is hard to say just how strong it is. He said high school graduates are applying at many more colleges than they have in the past with the help of the Internet. He said many colleges are experiencing higher numbers of applications that never translate into higher enrollments. He also said applicants take a longer time to decide which college they would like to attend.

"(Tuition) has become more of a contributing and influential factor in that decision," Saffari said.

The accompanying editorial -- you had to know there'd be one -- does a little math for us.

Since 2001, tuition at SCSU has increased by a total of more than $1,000 for a full-time student. That means that a student who began their studies in 2001 would have payed a total of $9,495 in tuition through the 2004-05 academic year if there were no tuition increases.

In reality, however, the same student has payed $11,722 in tuition since 2001.

So Dr. Saffari is saying that there will be an impact, and that because students can shop more easily they are more responsive to tuition changes than before. In economics, we would say demand became more elastic. But the calculation made here is as if nobody ever changes their demand. Now it is certainly true that students already here for a couple of years have more inelastic demand, which would argue for charging them a higher price, but that's like any other subscription service ("Hey freshman! Enroll now and get this special introductory rate!")

It's just that before, it was done more via financial aid.

There's no sign that enrollments are actually falling -- enrollment projections are for an increase of 3% -- so the increases in tuition are quite rational.

Steve Gigl has moved Helloooo Chapter Two! to a new site. Change your blogrolls and see how he works Leni Riefenstahl and Lewis Black into a post on Michael Moore.

John Rosenberg and Joanne Jacobs link to a report on Lani Guinier and Herny Louis Gates saying that says affirmative action is not helping low-income American blacks.

According to Lani Guinier, a Harvard law professor, and Henry Louis Gates Jr., the chairman of Harvard's African and African-American studies department, "the majority of them — perhaps as many as two-thirds — were West Indian and African immigrants or their children, or to a lesser extent, children of biracial couples," reports the New York Times. Guinier herself is the daughter of a Jamaican father and a white mother.

If their figures are correct, affirmative action is helping students whose families didn't suffer from American slavery or segregation.

So which is it? Diversity improving the education of the majority, or quotas to undo past injustices? Gates and Guinier can't even agree:

This is about the kids of recent arrivals beating out the black indigenous middle-class kids," said Professor Gates, who plans to assemble a study group on the subject. "We need to learn what the immigrants' kids have so we can bottle it and sell it, because many members of the African-American community, particularly among the chronically poor, have lost that sense of purpose and values which produced our generation.

In Professor Guinier's view, there are plenty of other blacks who could also succeed at elite colleges, but the institutions are not doing enough to find them. She said they were overly reliant on measures like SAT scores, which correlate strongly with family wealth and parental education.

"Colleges and universities are defaulting on their obligation to train and educate a representative group of future leaders," said Professor Guinier, a Harvard graduate herself who has been studying college admissions practices for more than a decade. "And they are excluding poor and working-class whites, not just descendants of slaves."

It's worth also seeing what Rosenberg has to say on this article.

The Elder reports on a letter from the MoveOn PAC he received (see, I've always wondered about that guy!) regarding support for Patty Wetterling, the DFL candidate for the House up here (as noted here.)

Warren, a MoveOn member from St. Cloud, MN, writes: 'Patty Wetterling is a person of great integrity and compassion. Because of her work with missing and exploited children, she has already been instrumental in passing significant national legislation. She is liberal on all the issues that truly matter: ending the war and supporting those who have had to fight it, opposition to the marriage amendment, advocate for public education, strong support for progressive environmental and wilderness legislation, and advocate for working people and a living wage. Patty is smart, tough, but human.'

Emphasis mine, because I'm not sure how Warren knows this. The only piece of news I can find on her since she won the DFL endorsement was this on missing children, which is of course the cause she's best known for, from a paper in southern California. Her own website has no direct link for a statement of her views. It does contain a link to a Mesabi Daily News article which counsels her to "be who she is" and ignore other issues. A second article from Minnesota Women's Press says,

Wetterling has also been criticized as a one-issue candidate. The criticism doesn’t bother her. For her, Wetterling said, the thread that links all issues is how they affect children. “Every time a decision is made, I think, ‘how will this affect kids?’”

Since I said I would venture into more economics here, let me put out one to see who salutes...

The Commissioner Hugh Hewitt has called attention to a USAToday editorial that tells Kerry what I said months ago: his middle class misery index is a crock of la merde:

Kerry's downbeat economic talk may be inevitable for a candidate challenging an incumbent's record in the wake of a recession. But as the economy blooms, his index's credibility is wilting

...By talking down the economy, Kerry may hope to pick up votes in economically struggling states where the November election may be decided. But in doing so, he risks sounding out of touch with millions of Americans who see signs of an improving economy -- and want a president with a sunnier outlook. The recent death of former president Ronald Reagan recalls just how powerful an optimistic message can be.

That was yesterday. Today in a frontpage article, McPaper says that the economic indicators are only one of six indicators out there, and that the six are split 3-to-3. The biggest Bush positive right now is the economy, as Ray Fair notes. But look at the three they cite as favoring Kerry:

1. Bush's favorable/unfavorable rating. But that really depends on who's doing the asking. Look at Real Clear Politics' survey and tell me whether it's clear Bush is under 50%. Even USAToday has to say it's not the same as Carter or Bush 41.
2. Ohio. That's stronger; Kerry has made a number of appearances in the state and has two polls giving him leads. But the unemployment rate in Ohio is dropping, to 5.6% in May. When I did my dissertation twenty years ago on political business cycles, one of the things I showed was that it wasn't the level of inflation or unemployment that mattered as much as the rate of change. I doubt that relationship has changed. With continued growth expected, look for Ohio's job numbers to continue to improve. I think I gave Ohio to Bush in our private pick-the-states contest with Hugh last January, and I still think that will be right.
3. Kerry's taller than Bush. Seriously. In order to gin up the story to make it a 3-3 tie, they had to rely on an indicator sillier than Kerry's miserable Misery Index. Note to USA Today: If you really believe that, will you bet your rent payment on the stock market if the NFC wins the Super Bowl next year? Fuhgeddaboudit.

But to the question in the title, and to Hugh's post. A few months ago I said that for Kerry to win the election he would have to run on the economy and hope the recession continued to linger, or at least have the media trumpet bad times. That has clearly not played, despite the campaign's attempt to spin the data to its suiting. Even the USAToday has punted that one. So they are left looking for some signs. As David Wyss notes at the end of the AP article discussing the role of the economy in the campaign, challengers do not make much headway in reminding people of economic troubles two years ago:

Most of our historical work suggests that voters have very short memories and it is really the last year that dominates their thinking with employment tending to be the best variable to predict the outcome.

And when the graph looks like this...
...you aren't going to do too well. So they have to keep looking for space within which Kerry can campaign.

He isn't going to win on the economy, and he can't veer far left on the war. And height won't do. So my other prediction from this is that either Kerry has to play to his own strengths, which he tried earlier in the year and didn't gain much traction, or he has to go more negative on Bush. I'm saying he does the latter.

(Crossposted at Liberty and Power.) According to Michael Tinkler, the British marquee universities have caught on to teaching-for-profit very late in the game.

They are all busy recruiting American students for one year degrees - a Masters of Studies, at Oxford. Oxford, you see, has decided to move from its current position of approximately 75% undergraduates to parity between undergrads and grads by 2007 (no one thought they'd make it that soon, but think that by 2010 it's pretty likely). You see, graduate students pay higher fees, and if they're non-citizens they pay full tuition -- which my informants pointed out is STILL less than the Ivy League, even if you add in a single round-trip airfare.

All this is leading up to the factoid that surprised me the most. University College, Oxford, set up the first regular alumni fund-raising scheme at Oxford or Cambridge in the late 1980s.

It struck me that Oxbridge colleges are something like American state universities in this way -- very late comers to the money game. The retired Whatchamacallit Professor of Modern History told me that, indeed, they had been embarassed to ask until it was almost too late. Now they're shifting the entire balance of who and what they teach to try to regain some fiscal independence from their government funders. (Emphasis mine.)

That's probably right, but I think Tinkler has missed an additional point here. There are two money sources for a state universities aside its operating revenue from tuition and fees. It can get state subsidies or it can raise funds from alumni. Targeted marketing has become far more productive lately -- I think my colleagues here at SCSU who work on nonprofits will attest to the declining cost of fundraising. Simultaneously, the decline of liberalism in America has made political officeholders less willing to throw dollars at every school willy-nilly. If you think about the effort needed to raise another dollar through fundraising and another dollar through lobbying, the Age of Reagan and Thatcher has probably made the former less costly relative to the latter. That would induce the type of behavior Tinkler now sees.

The NARN will like this quote:

"I am convinced I never would have received my doctorate if I had taken the results of standardized tests too seriously," the late Minnesota Sen. Paul D. Wellstone (D) had written in an article published in 2000. His SAT score reportedly was below 900.

From Jay Matthews, reporting on success stories of people who scored poorly on the SAT or ACT. Apparently to Mr. Matthews, like most sociologists, the plural of anecdote is data.

No word on how Wellstone did in music-writing.

That's the title I give to a course we teach in introductory economics that is designed for non-majors (and non-business students.) I love teaching it because you get students who are creative and simply have never thought about the world the way economists do. A perfect place for The Armchair Economist, The Economic Way of Thinking or Basic Economics. If nothing else, injecting a consideration of the mundane into the lives of students thinking mostly about arts and humanities strikes me as a useful exercise.

Schools nowadays are now finding that their liberal arts students need help finding their way into the job market, so they are now offering "Job Markets for Poets". The article clearly indicates that there is an increased demand for students to get vocational training, but they are struggling with the idea of how to fit it into the curriculum.

Faculty at SCSU continue to work without a contract as we approach one year past the last contract's expiration. Some have started wearing buttons saying "MnSCU -- we just don't fit in" or “Support Higher Education: Outsource MnSCU”. I wonder what they're wearing on the SUNY campuses after they've been told to start testing their students for writing, critical-thinking, and quantitative skills? (Subscribers only.) Well, probably not much.

Officials on each campus will be allowed to select the tests they use, although their choices will be reviewed by a systemwide group of faculty members to make sure that the tests meet certain standards. SUNY administrators and other advocates of the plan said the flexibility would allow campuses to tailor the assessments they use to their curricula. The plan also would allow the campuses that already use tests to keep some of them.

These in other words are non-standardized tests, given every three years, to only 20% of the students.

The tests would not be used to establish requirements for students to graduate or to enter specific university programs, officials added. Nor, they said, are the tests being created for use in any kind of performance-based budgeting process.

No, I don't think we'll see any buttons on the SUNY faculty. At least one trustee has sniffed through the smoke and found that there's no fire in SUNY's belly.

Candace de Russy, a SUNY trustee, cast the sole vote against the testing program. She favors requiring all campuses to administer the same test, arguing that such an approach is the only way to ensure proper measurement of educational quality across the system. By allowing each campus to choose its own test, she said, the plan creates "illusions of assured quality verified and verifiable by no one."

"Instead of ensuring SUNY hallmarks of quality," Ms. de Russy said at Tuesday's board meeting, "the assessment plan before us will guarantee that the state university remains just a loose federation of independent campuses, ultimately responsible to no one but themselves."

What happens when the Right decides to fight Lefty signage (or t-shirts) with some of their own in a high school? Bryan Henderson at Princeton High in West Virginia does so and teaches a number of people a lesson in free speech rights.

At the end of the day, my fellow PW chapter members and I felt it was time to fight back and strike at the public education indoctrination machine that seemed to be running out of control. Our school desperately needed some ideological balance, so we decided that the next day we would up the ante and place 500 signs in the halls of the school.

I got to a quick start the next morning ...and just when we posted about 200 of our 500 signs, we heard a rustling around the corner. Upon investigating the noise, we found a fellow student tearing the signs from the wall and ripping them into shreds. We made no attempt to stop her, but she quickly abandoned her pursuit when I removed my camera from my backpack. Apparently, her being conscious of her own hypocrisy was not enough to prevent her from forcibly suppressing our dissenting point-of-view. But facing the prospect that others might be made aware of her hypocrisy, and it's cut-and-run.

That's just a teaser; the remainder is a sad commentary on how many administrators who knew what the right thing was, didn't do it out of fear of safety (or job security), of teachers who abused their power and the students they had indoctrinated, and one very troubling parent. His description of his conversation with his principal is a model of decorum and intelletual debate.

The next day I sat across the table from the principal. Our scheduled meeting had begun. He had reviewed the documentation I had provided to him from the ACLU website, but he still wasn't sure if my rights extended to posters. We talked about it for about half an hour and he really seemed to be coming around.

He stated that signs unaffiliated with the school would not be allowed to be posted. Anticipating this line of reasoning, I produced for him pictures I had taken the day before of many signs not affiliated with the school posted all over the walls. Included among them a picture of a movie poster for "Alamo", with which I asked him if the school was affiliated with Touchstone Pictures?

We talked it over for a little while longer until he agreed with my interpretation of Tinker vs. Des Moines. He said that if he decided not to let me tack posters to the wall I would definitely be allowed to hand them out as leaflets.

I think we should have a new motto for kids speaking out like this: Give a Tinker's dam to liberals!

I think Mr. Henderson will be a good local leader for Students for Academic Freedom when he arrives at college next year. At minimum, he should receive some of their "red books" along with a couple hundred of Cato's pocket Constitutions. (Mine is on my Palm.)

(Hat tip: Captain Ed.)

Our articles on commencement speaker bias (like here and here) are just the tip of the iceberg, says the Young America's Foundation.

Commenting on the annual study, Young America’s Foundation President Ron Robinson explained, “For eleven years, we’ve shown that college administrators are using commencement ceremonies to send their students off with one more predictable leftist lecture. This year, the most prestigious schools exclude scholars like Milton Friedman, Thomas Sowell, Antonin Scalia, and Clarence Thomas for the likes of Kofi Annan, Madeleine Albright, Gloria Steinem, and Ralph Nader.”

Their page contains a list of the 100 top universities and 100 top colleges in U.S. News and World Report, with the name of their commencement speaker.

The one exception was, as it was last year, Hillsdale College.(Hat tip: Art Carden.)

As the first state to have charter schools, many other education writers look at Minnesota for the latest on the charter school movement. The Christian Science Monitor does so today, telling the story of how the movement is forcing the big-city schools to improve.

While many urban districts struggle to retain white, middle-class families, Minneapolis is also losing low-income, minority ones, primarily to charter schools. It's led to an enrollment crisis for the district, which loses state money with each departing student, and now has 800 surplus classrooms. But many observers point out that this is exactly how choice is supposed to work: better options for individual students, and a competitive educational landscape that may, in the end, force all the schools to improve.

This paragraph will not make Nick Coleman happy.

But the Monitor misunderstands the school district's response to this competitive landscape.

The district has delayed the school closings and mergers its interim superintendent proposed this year, and is instead planning a series of community conversations to engage parents in the restructuring decisions. In an effort to get a jump-start on the tough achievement-gap issue - as well as bring families into the public schools early on - the district hopes to expand its pre-K and all-day kindergarten options. It's also exploring specialized programs: gender- and culture-specific schools, performing arts specialities, and dual-immersion language programs.

As Mitch pointed out in February (my link here) the reason for these closing was a funding deficit combined with a desire to embarrass Republicans in the Minnesota Legislature for budget cuts. See this MPR report on how well it worked. I don't think they were ever really serious about closing these schools -- there was no additional money sent to stop the closings -- and so the liberals have resorted to the Washington Monument strategy. (For those not familiar with the strategy.) Nor has it stopped the carping against the Republicans.

All this should be a challenge for the new superintendent, who seems willing to continue the confrontations with the state.

More hilarity from our local newspaper, today's edition, page 6A, top left corner.

Weekly Gas Price Watch

Prices as of Monday

National Average Price: $1.937

Local Average Price: $1.77*

Local High: $1.86 on June 15

...

*Based on price observed at one Division Street station.

Compiled by Times staff

Wow, that's some serious statistics there. Perhaps Rand Simburg had it right, that we need a No Reporters Left Behind Act. "Compiled by Times staff"??? This is our new joke: "How many reporters does it take to observe a price?"

And it turns out this isn't a one-time phenomenon. Notice how the local high is different? Did they change gas stations?

No word yet on what the median was.

I'm old enough to have learned my public finance from Musgrave and Musgrave's classic textbook, when there were few good alternatives (Buchanan and Flowers was the other one I read for my qualifying exams.) One of the things you learned from the text was tax equity principles; one of the principles, called the "benefits-received" principle, says that taxes should be paid according to the benefits received. I haven't taught public finance since the 1980s, so I don't know how much people lecture that any more.

I was reminded of this by a story Stephen links to about gifted students losing their special programs in Wisconsin. It's a trend (which of course is blamed on No Child Left Behind, which is also the leading cause of cancer), as 17 states do not provide money for gifted programs and 8 do not even have a state coordinator for gifted programming. And advocates are worried:

These programs provide the motivation and challenges that bright students need to do well in school, Robinson says.

Without them, gifted students will simply turn off from school, underperform and may even drop out. Research shows that up to one-quarter of the country's high school dropouts are gifted students, Robinson adds.

"Part of the problem is that people are going back to the comfortable myth that gifted kids are OK on their own," said Robin Schlei, the gifted and talented coordinator for the Mequon-Thiensville School District. "These kids are different from the norm, and they need help and support."

Pamela Clinkenbeard, a University of Wisconsin-Whitewater professor and expert in gifted education, says gifted students are among the most at-risk for failing.

As a graduate student at Purdue University, she said, she worked with a seventh-grader who was years ahead of her classmates in math. School officials did not want to accelerate the girl, and she started skipping school and becoming depressed. At the urging of Purdue professors, she enrolled in a college calculus class and earned an A.

...

According to Clinkenbeard, Wisconsin was recognized as a national leader in gifted education in the 1970s. Its reputation started to decline as teachers retired and weren't replaced, she said.

"It's hard to measure what you lose by not challenging them," said Clinkenbeard, who calls investing in gifted education good for the economy, because it can slow down Wisconsin's much-publicized brain drain.

To an economist, two questions arise. First, is there a greater return on putting educational resources into gifted students? We have some evidence that it helps to track students (and doesn't harm disadvantaged learners), but that's not the real question. We want to know if "preventing brain drain" is helped by giving gifted students better education. After all, they can move.

Second, if not, would it make sense to start charging parents of gifted students more for the specialized education? If they are to receive greater benefit, the Musgrave tax equity story says make them pay more. But then you could argue the same for special ed students, too, right? And nobody wants to go down that road, methinks.

I was at a Public Choice meeting a few years ago when a young economist gave a paper on the virtual economy created in an online role-playing game (RPG, for those of you unfamiliar with the language of video games.) Edward Castronova has gone on to make a nice name for himself as an expert on virtual economies. And this research has blossomed dramatically among other economists as well, and has developed even a blog that delves in these issues (Castronova is a moderator of that blog).

So I suppose it had to spread to other disciplines, even English, and lead to its own conference.

Editors Sidney I. Dobrin, Cathlena Martin, and Laurie Taylor seek proposals for a new collection of original articles that address the use and place of space and ecology in video games. This collection will examine video games in terms of the spaces they create and use, the metaphors of space on which they rely, and the ecologies that they create within those spaces. This collection will address the significant intersections in terms of how and why video games construct space and ecology as they do, and in terms of how those constructions shape conceptions of both space and ecology.

The editors seek proposals for innovative papers that explore the intersections between ecocriticism, theories of spatiality, and video games. Ecocriticism of video games straddles studying ecology as the Earth (or alternate world setting), nature, and land, while adding physical representation and experimentation through video game spaces and other technological spaces. These video games spaces create their own spatial practice through their representation and through the players' lived interaction with the gaming environments as constructed worlds. Video game spatial analysis comprises the created representation of space in the games, the players' experiences with those spaces, and the nuances by which those spaces are constructed and conveyed, including their portrayal of cultural norms for space and spatiality. In addition, the editors are looking for several papers that specifically address children's culture and education in terms of video games, space, and ecology.

As someone who hung around the computer center at St. Anselm and Claremont looking for spare 110 baud modems to play D&D, this simply doesn't strike me as weird as it does Erin.

Look, if you want "quirky", try listening to the new Sonic Youth CD, which I'm doing right now.

James is NOT quirky.

Eloise, you're right. Gotta go see this picture.

UPDATE: Elder has the pic. Oh, and Elder? If you lived as close to Chino as I did, you'd give a crap, too. (I linked all three of his posts in one day. What a suck-up!)

Another story about racemonger Jane Elliott of Blue Eyed fame. She tends to show up when stories of freshman orientations are run. According to this article by Wendy McElroy, Elliott gets $6000 a day to perform trainings like this one that Linda Seebach describes.

Why am I telling you about this now? Because an extremely and righteously angry woman wrote me recently that her son, a ninth-grader at Peak to Peak Charter School in Lafayette, Colo., had been subjected to this abusive treatment in his English literature class, which was studying "Othello."

"The teacher made my son wear a blue card on a string around his neck. He was required to smile ingratiatingly, bow his head, and beg people to tie his shoes for him," she wrote. "The teacher wore a yellow card, that of the superior race, and she petted and made much of the other yellow card students."

In a particularly nasty wrinkle, the teacher told the students chosen for the subordinate group that they would all receive Fs for their work that day and that the failing grades would be on their final transcript. And she sent them home still believing that lie.

If that had been done to me in ninth grade, little Miss Perfectionist that I was, I'd have gone home and killed myself.

"Teaching children about abuse should never include abusing them," the mother wrote. "Committing a hate crime should not be the way we teach our youngsters about hate crimes."

Teaching discrimination by humiliation, at many places paid for by tax dollars. I wonder if Don Rickles is available. (Hat tip: David Beito.)

UPDATE: Joanne Jacobs picks up the same story. The comments there are worth your time.

There's a story in the Washington Post on a student who passed all his classes but didn't graduate because he didn't pass the Standards of Learning test in Virginia. (These are regrettably abbreviated as SOL.) The test doesn't appear to be unfair, since he had a 490 SAT to boot. This doesn't preclude him simply doing poorly at standardized tests, though the article shows he has a history of educational difficulties that have been diagnosed and treated. He has a 2.23 GPA in school. And despite repeated tests and remedials, the desire to pass them to play collegiate football, and seeming like a good kid, he can't pass the reading and writing test.

Did this school let him slide for too long? You decide:

Joyce O. Jones, director of guidance at Gar-Field [high school --kb], said Copeland is "one of many" students who get passing grades by working hard in class but whose academic weaknesses are pinpointed by the SOLs. She said the tests, which are given beginning in elementary school, increasingly are uncovering problems early, before they become a barrier to graduation.

Supon, the guidance counselor, said he believes that Copeland deserved to receive a diploma with his classmates but that he will need more than just reading remediation before he can tackle college level work. "He's got a good brain, but he's going to need some help with [college]. Junior college might be good, where he could get remediation courses," he said.

Eloise says I should read the StarTribune more. The Elder objects. Funny enough, today I had a case where three faculty members who received a grant were cited for their work in the local paper, but the wrong person was listed as the lead investigator and the rank of another was incorrect. And then, to make matters worse, when I send a correction to the paper, I "over-promoted" the person whose rank was slighted.

I should note the local paper usually treats me pretty well. They have a file photo, which leads to me getting calls on things I know next to nothing about, like health insurance last week. The reporter is very nice so I start chatting with her, but get all shy when I hear the keys clacking on the other end. I never get calls about central banking, which I actually know something about.

Courtesy John Ray: There are not many good studies of faculty attitudes, but this one by M. Reza Nakhaie and Robert J. Brym in 1999 does a fair job of researching the question through survey research.

American research suggests that class origin and current class position have no effect on liberalism and civil-libertarianism, but they do have an effect on attitude towards faculty unionism. Discipline and ethno-religious effects are observed in the American surveys, and ethno-religious effects are also evident in Canadian research on the relationship between higher education and political attitudes.

Trying to straighten up the findings on the American and Canadian academics, they run their own tests. They find that, unlike results from the 1970s, younger faculty now tend to be more leftist. Female faculty are more liberal than male. Like almost all the studies, they find that business and engineering faculties are more conservative than those in the humanities, arts, social sciences or education. Comments Ray,

the only subgroups that averaged below 3.5 (i.e. were slightly Rightist) were professors of accounting, finance and mechanical engineeering. Professors in all other disciplines tended Left. The most far-Left group was, of course, the sociologists -- the most meaningless of all the disciplines. I taught in a university school of sociology for 12 years so I have some cause to know the emptiness of most sociology. Leftism sure is pervasive in academe.

His essay on leftist elites merits reading.

One interesting note: This research showed that while none of the other attitudes derived from family background, there was a tendency for faculty whose fathers were from working class backgrounds to support faculty unions. Now I wonder: If family background is a predictor of success in academia, wouldn't those working-class faculty tend to be at less selective institutions like SCSU, where faculty union activism is pervasive and pernicious?

How many times do you wish you had spoken out as a public speaker, and particularly a well-known one, said something extraordinarily foolish, but passed because you were afraid to embarass your family and friends? My family knows better than to go to such events with me. Thankfully, his daughter let Alan Bromley attend her graduation from Harvard's Graduate School of Education. He should have known:

The dean of the School of Education talked about our country's isolation and "our need to learn more about" Islam and Muslims--not their need to learn about multicultural capitalism that embraces and allows so many avenues of expression and growth.
And when the rain stopped, Kofi Annan started. Distinguished and eloquent as ever, he first disparaged President Bush (to cheers), then asked: "What kind of world would it be, and who would want to live in it, if every country was allowed to use force, without collective agreement, simply because it thought there might be a threat?"

I raised my hand, and above a whisper and below a shout (so my daughter wouldn't be embarrassed), I said, "Me!"

A few people looked at me, disdainfully, and one apparent father asked me, "How could you not agree with that?"

"Simple," I replied, "the United States, while not perfect, has perhaps the world's best checks and balances of liberties and legalities in the world. And when we've gone wrong, we try to address the wrongs."

I continued: "Would you rather we hand over our autonomy to the French, Germans and Russians, all of whom promised to protect Saddam Hussein for illegal business transactions and payoffs? Or to the nations that comprise the U.N.'s Human Rights Committee--the Libyans, the Sudanese? To whom would you entrust our fate other than to your neighbors? To the Arab nations, for who Judenfrei--and Christian-frei--amounts to a national anthem?"

Without reply, they walked away from me, a leper in the colony of the pure, as I glanced towards my family, hoping they hadn't witnessed my latest provocation.

This the day after Ronald Reagan's death, which warranted no mention from the assembled.

UPDATE: Big Trunk notes that the title of the article, Silence of the Lemmings, was misleading -- there was much applause for Annanhole. Hindrocket's rejoinder:

One thing about lemmings--when they jump over the cliff, they don't try to take anyone else with them. A key distinction, I think.

Indeed.

Some fool resigned as president of William and Mary. Another re-education camp closes, and nobody notes the crime that went on there. Sic semper nine of clubs.

And now I've got a real reason, rather than just seeing six spoiled brats needing a smack upside the head. Several groups, including Foundation for Individual Rights in Education: Issues and the National Association of Scholars, have filed an amicus brief in the California Supreme Court in the case of Lyle v. Warner Brothers Television Productions et al.

The accuser in Lyle alleged that she was subjected to harassment by virtue of the frequent sexual banter of the writers—both male and female—of Friends while they discussed ideas and developed storylines and scripts for the show. Although she admits she was not the target of any of the comments, she claimed that some of the comments were derogatory towards women in general and therefore created a "hostile environment" for her work. ...

The letter argues that writers’ offices, like universities, are "communicative workplaces" that encourage and depend on free-wheeling and uninhibited dialogue and discussion. Rules that give individuals the power to punish anyone who offended them could spell the end of the open exchange of ideas. The letter lists several examples of activities that could be suppressed through restrictions, such as "a feminist studies course criticizing pornography, a medical school class on human sexuality…or a public health series on means of combating the spread of AIDS." All of these classes feature sexual themes and would be at risk if the current decision in the Lyle case goes unchallenged. Discussions involving speech that anyone might find religiously or racially offensive would also be at risk. The letter points out that Lyle, when added to other California court decisions, would create "a de facto mandatory speech code for all universities."

The Smoking Gun produces the original complaint against the writers, which suggests some rather crude behavior if true -- the language described is quite foul. But the amicus brief wonders how one could work, for example, on the Vagina Monologues if the appelate court decision in Lyle is allowed to stand?

At the university, frank sexual discussion and sexual images can serve important pedagogic purposes. Consider, for example, university courses such as a feminist studies course criticizing pornography, a medical school class on human sexuality, a seminar on the art of Michelangelo, or a public health series on means of combating the spread of AIDS. In each of these classes, sexual content is academically appropriate, and academic freedom requires that debate on these topics be robust and uninhibited. Yet under the Court of Appeal’s ruling, discussion of a sexual nature in these classes — and in the halls and on the quads of universities — can be ended simply by the objection of a university employee to the speech.

It's certainly an odd case for FIRE and NAS to take up, but it's also consistent with what they've argued elsewhere.

Oscar Chamberlain is wondering if he should watch what he says about "modern history" (and isn't that an oxymoron, anyway?)

My general approach is to let them know that when we get to my life time that I am a participant as well as a historian. I discuss some things that I did and believed, but I make that in the form of a warning, that no matter how hard I try to be objective I may slip from time to time.

Then, in practice, I make sure that I express the best arguments against those positions as well as the arguments supporting them. I think this works fairly well, as in most classes I have some students expressing contrary views.

However, I am really wondering how I'm going to deal with the attempts of this administration to legitimize torture as a proper tool for some interrogations. When it came up this Spring--mostly though not always in a course online discussion area--I attempted to be objective.

However, I was appalled at the students who do not simply support torture in a sort of "ticking bomb" hypothetical way but consider it as a logical part of the current war. One in particular expressed this with considerable eloquence and with reasons that, apart from morality, had a considered logic to them.

...

So, as it becomes more and more obvious that the Administration's views are quite similar to that student's, do I have a moral obligation to make clear how horrid that is? Or should I hold to my established way of doing things?

First things first: The fact that students are "expressing contrary views" in most of his classes suggests that Mr. Chamberlain is doing a great job teaching. The fact that he wonders about this in a blog is further evidence that Chamberlain is only interested in doing the right thing as I think we both understand it.

Second, since he's asking for opinions: Chamberlain teaches in a public university. As such, I do not think it is within his purview to make moral judgments about his students. His is a history class, not an ethics course. His school takes as its mission to prepare students for life-long learning through a two-year program. If Mr. Chamberlain would like to teach at a school where he can express moral outrage, those schools exist in the private sector and he is free to find one. But he doesn't have an obligation now because the student and the university (via the professor) did not enter into a contract for moral tutoring.

I'll blog this PM after a well-earned golf date with my father-in-law. Meanwhile, NARNer Captain Ed has a very intriguing post about a news report that Vladimir Putin told the press Russia repeatedly offered intelligence to the US post-9/11 that Saddam had plans to attack within the United States and at US interests elsewhere, including US citizens. Ed wonders it this constituted the imminent danger the Bush administration felt justified the war. The 9/11 Commission is silent on this question. Mitch says so too will be the media.

Wanna bet which story leads the NARN broadcast tomorrow?

MnSCU has approved tuition increases for state universities and technical colleges in Minnesota. Average full year tuition and fees at the four-year institutions will be $4,921, with SCSU charging $4,981. The technical and community colleges are $3,824. Systemwide, the state provides now about one-half of the system budget; at SCSU it's down to about 46%. Complaints on the news at the local newspaper suggest it's all a Republican plot, but the decline in state funding as a share of MnSCU expenditures is a long-run phenomenon.

Remember: We're running a contest at the Northern Alliance site to pick our new logo. Go here to vote. At last report, Amy Lopez' rendering was closing fast on Derek Bringham's design. Winner will get first dibs on redesigning SCSU Scholars for cash money. I'm glad others are choosing, because they're all very, very good. Voting ends Saturday morning.

For some reason, the New York Times has room to fit this news: Graduating students are bummed out they have to give up their email accounts