Cold Spring Shops updates his comments on my post about the Lichter study of political attitudes of academics, questioning the direction of causality. He also points me in the direction of University Diaries (reminder to self -- read UD more often) who points out that libertarian views could get called liberal by that study.

UD skews liberal for the purposes of the study about which Kurtz is writing. “The professors and instructors surveyed are, strongly or somewhat, in favor of abortion rights [yup]; believe homosexuality is acceptable [acceptable? I think we can do better than that], and want more environmental protections ‘even if it raises prices or costs jobs.’ [UD is an enviro-freak].” But on international politics UD looks much more conservative than her colleagues, and it’s too bad that it’s pointless for her to open a conversation about this anywhere on campus.

Except with her students, of course. They’re far more conservative than any of us.

Thank God. I am no enviro-freak (I hope ANWR gets drilled as often as ARod in the ribs with fastballs) , but on the others her views are at least within a standard deviation of my own.

Phil Miller wonders where does this idea of a teach-in come from?

Did this come from the same sort of source that the term "sanitation engineer" come from - i.e. some person trying to disguise the true value of stuff. How much teaching actually goes on at these things?

Some faculty and students at Minnesota State had a teach in regarding the "Social Security Myth." Here is the opening paragraph from the local paper's story (subscription required):

It was admittedly one-sided. But for the people who put on Monday's Social Security teach-in at Minnesota State University, it was seen as a chance to have their say in a debate they think already has been a one-sided affair.

Translation: we didn't invite an opposite viewpoint because we didn't want to.

Here's what he was complaining about.

Two MSU departments and a student group will sponsor a teach-in, "Debunking the Social Security Crisis Myth," at the University all day Monday, March 28.

...It is sponsored by MSU's Sociology and Corrections Department, Gerontology Department, and Students for Social Action (The Sociology Club).MSU professors will discuss proposed Social Security privatization and non-privatization ideas and how the myth of a Social Security "crisis" came about.

Students for Social Action. There is a perfectly elastic supply of Sixties poseurs.

Deacon picks up the New York Times coverage of Columbia University's conclusion of an internal investigation of charges of faculty intimidation in Middle Eastern Studies. Their report says grievance procedures should be strengthened on campus because dealing with outside groups like Campus Watch is undesirable.

Their recommendations focus on this rather than their findings of intimidation by Professor Joseph Massad. From the Times:

The most credible, the committee found, was an incident involving Professor Joseph Massad, who was teaching a class on Palestinian and Israeli politics. According to the report, a student, Deena Shanker, recalled asking if it was true that Israel sometimes gave a warning before a bombing so that people would not be hurt. She said the professor blew up, telling her, "If you're going to deny the atrocities being committed against Palestinians, then you can get out of my classroom!"

The report said that the professor had "denied emphatically that this incident took place" and had told the committee that he would never ask a student to leave his class. And it said that others in the "particularly tense" class differed about whether the incident, which was never formally reported, had taken place.

But the committee said that in the end, it found the account "credible" and concluded that the professor's "rhetorical response to her query exceeded commonly accepted bounds by conveying that her question merited harsh public criticism."

Massad denies still the allegation. The other allegations -- one in which a student who identified himself at an off-campus event as a former Israeli soldier was asked by Massad how many Palestinians he had killed, the other a student told by another Middle Eastern studies prof that she could be a Semite because her eyes were green -- were not denied but neither rose to a level that the faculty committee thought inappropriate.

C. Across the spectrum of these concerns, we found no evidence of any statements made by the faculty that could reasonably be construed as anti-semitic. Professor Massad, for one, has been categorical in his classes concerning the unacceptability of anti-semitic views.

D. We found no evidence that students had been penalized for their views by receiving lower grades.

Oh. Thanks.

Instead the committee argues for better grievance procedures and banning "unregistered auditors" -- meaning Campus Watch or The David Project -- from the classrooms. In other words, not only do they wish to ignore the actions of these professors, they wish to seal up the classroom and keep out the eyes of the public. As I often say, cockroaches hate sunlight, and they will scream when it's applied. The students of Columbia deserve better than this report which offers them nothing more than a bigger complaint box and a promise that the box will be checked more regularly.

UPDATE: The desire for whitewash is more evident.

In an effort to manage favorable coverage of its investigation into the complaints, the university disclosed a summary of the committee's report only to the Columbia Spectator, the campus newspaper, and the New York Times. Those newspapers, sources indicated to The New York Sun last night, made an agreement with the central administration that they would not speak to the students who made the complaints against the professors.

The Sun obtained a copy of the report without the permission of the university administration. Last night, when a reporter from the Sun came to Low Library, the central administration building, for a copy of the report, a security guard threatened to arrest the reporter if she did not leave the building.

According to one student, senior Ariel Beery, one of the campus's most outspoken critics of the professors, a Columbia spokeswoman told him that students were not being shown the report yesterday "for your own good."

Beery was interviewed and says the report didn't cover many of the incidents that student brought forward during the investigation.

Nat Hentoff is right: Columbia is still unbecoming. And unforthcoming.

Source: LGF and Random Penseur.

I think this Quaker student missed religion class:

Even a pie in the face couldn't silence conservative pundit William Kristol.

Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard and former chief of staff to Vice President Dan Quayle, was splattered by a student during a speech about U.S. foreign policy at Earlham College Tuesday.

Members of the audience jeered the student, then applauded as Kristol wiped the pie from his face and said, ''Just let me finish this point,'' the Palladium-Item reported.

The student, who was not immediately identified, was suspended and could face expulsion following a disciplinary review, Earlham Provost Len Clark said Wednesday. Clark also issued a written apology complimenting Kristol for his ''graciousness.''

Earlham is a private Quaker college of 1,200 students in Richmond, about 70 miles east of Indianapolis.

Source: AP.

...it's because I'm working on three conference papers and taxes between now and April 15th. One of the papers is this weekend at Claremont, and in the process of getting ready I found a new Russ Roberts essay. It relates in a strange way to my paper, but it relates.

Here are a couple stories trying to explain (or not) income disparities. First, John Ray notes a USA Today article in which black women of equivalent education are reported to outearn white and Asian women. Why?

...the tendency of minority women, especially blacks, to more often hold more than one job or work more than 40 hours a week, and the tendency of black professional women who take time off to have a child to return to the work force sooner than others.

But black men still lag behind white and Asian men even when each has the same education, which USA Today chalks up to discrimination. John points out that if you think black women make more because they work harder, then why would you not think black men make less because they don't work as hard? John also points out the poorer work histories of black men due to higher incarceration rates, but that last point doesn't hold up for the US -- black women are seven times as likely to be incarcerated as white women.

What could be the issue here? Joanne Jacobs points to a study by a University of Florida economist (NBER abstract here; here's a free copy of what appears to be an earlier draft) who studied scores and passing rates for Florida schoolchildren and found that those with more unusual names tended to be passed more easily because less is expected from them:

I suggest that teachers may use a child's name as a signal of unobserved parental contributions to that child's education, and expect less from children with names that "sound" like they were given by uneducated parents. These names, empirically, are given most frequently by Blacks, but they are also given by White and Hispanic parents as well. I utilize a detailed dataset from a large Florida school district to directly test the hypothesis that teachers and school administrators expect less on average of children with names associated with low socio-economic status, and these diminished expectations in turn lead to reduced student cognitive performance. Comparing pairs of siblings, I find that teachers tend to treat children differently depending on their names, and that these same patterns apparently translate into large differences in test scores.

That which could explain the black-white achievement gap in schools could also explain the difference in earnings behavior. Because we expect single mothers to get off welfare and jobs after the reforms in the 1990s, they may already be responding with better work performance and greater level of effort. Without holding black men to the same expectations, we can well anticipate the results of studies like that cited by USA Today.

People Respond To Incentives.

Reader Roger Lewis sends this Jim Rome-style letter published in the Arizona Wildcat:

Dear Lute Olson and the UA basketball team,

There is no shame collapsing down the stretch to an inferior team during the playoffs in one of the absolute worst chokes in sports history.

Sincerely,

The 2004 New York Yankees

David Warsh, long-time economics reporter at the Boston Globe, ventures into a discussion of Larry Summers' leadership at Harvard. Larry's problem, in short, is that he's an MIT guy, and that the presidency at Harvard cost him his wife and family (who live in DC). Never a shrinking violet, Warsh suggests that what little modulation there was of Summers' persona has disappeared. Caroline Hoxby, a professor of economics at Harvard whom, I would think, voted no confidence in Summers, let him have it at a meeting before the vote took place.

Hoxby ventured that it sometimes seemed as though the president possessed a view of the faculty, at least some of them, "that is a caricature: self-absorbed people who care a great deal about their privileges and not much about their students and the quest for knowledge."

As a result, Summers seemed to have adopted "a management strategy in which decisions are discussed with only a small inner circle, there are forums for airing views but few mechanisms for incorporating them, and resistance is assumed to stem from obstinacy, not thought and experience.

"I do not know where you got this caricatured view of the faculty, but it is not true to my experience." In her view, she said, the faculty "is passionate about research and passionate about students and struggles every day with the tension between the two."

I'm an admirer of Hoxby's work and have used some of it on this blog, but I wonder if the caricature she finds strikes too close to home for her ... or for Summers?

(Hat tip: Grant McCracken.)

Douglas Bass of Belief Seeking Understanding is Podcasting. Today's is on academic freedom, and he adds a reading to his podcast.

His focus is on The King's College, who has lost accreditation due to one Regent, John Brademas. Stanley Kurtz picked up the story in the Corner yesterday, as well as the Naomi Riley op-ed in the NYPost that Douglas linked. The college has its own site on the issue, deciding to go at Brademas rather than pretend the accreditation issue -- which if left alone will lead to this school being shut down. These articles suggest that Brademas has bias against the religious nature of King's, and did not evaluate its educational mission and outcomes.

There is, atop the issue of Brademas' own behavior, the fact that the board of trustees voted with him and against the recommendations of its own staff. This board has had problems in the past.

...college faculty are mostly liberal. (Gasp!)

Howard Kurtz reports on a study (you can get it here with free registration) by three political scientists of responses to six ideological questions, political and religious identification by 1643 academics at 183 universities across the Carnegie classification spectrum (from top-20 doctoral programs through comprehensive schools like us to small liberal arts colleges). From the abstract to the study:

A randomly based national survey of 1643 faculty members from 183 four-year colleges and universities finds that liberals and Democrats outnumber conservatives and Republicans by large margins, and the differences are not limited to elite universities or to the social sciences and humanities. A multivariate analysis finds that, even after taking into account the effects of professional accomplishment, along with many other individual characteristics, conservatives and Republicans teach at lower quality schools than do liberals and Democrats. This suggests that complaints of ideologically-based discrimination in academic advancement deserve serious consideration and further study. The analysis finds similar effects based on gender and religiosity, i.e., women and practicing Christians teach at lower quality schools than their professional accomplishments would predict.

Commentary offered by Todd Zywicki at the Volokh Conspiracy and by David French at FIRE's Torch focus mostly on the former finding; Zywicki points out that this confirms the findings of two earlier studies by Dan Klein.

Since Zywicki and French (and nobody else I found, though this is a bullet item on Memeorandum and I didn't check them all) didn't concentrate on the information that "ideologically-based discrimination in academic advancement deserve serious consideration and further study." It's the first time, according to the authors, that someone has tried to see if professional advancement is held up through political views. Since that's a serious charge -- more serious to me than just finding out that most my colleagues vote Democrat -- we should examine what they did. All of the following come from the article.

...we examined the correlation between quality of academic affiliation (the dependent variable) and three measures of ideological orientation – left-right self-identification, political party identification, and the ideology index.

...An academic achievement index was constructed from items measuring the number of refereed journal articles, chapters in academic books, books authored or co-authored, service on editorial boards of academic journals, attendance at international meetings of one’s discipline, and proportion of time spent on research.

...There are various emblems of individual success among academics, ranging from monetary compensation to awards to chaired professorships. Perhaps the most
significant single indicator of the academic status hierarchy is the quality of the college or university with which an individual is affiliated. We can construct an institutional quality index by combining the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching classification with the well-known US News & World Report rankings of universities and colleges.

...Both the ideology index and party affiliation, when entered into multiple regression analyses, independently predict the quality of a subject's institutional affiliation. As we would expect, academic achievement matters the most in determining the quality of schools in which faculty teach. But ideology is the second most powerful predictor in Model I (beta=.09, p<.001), accounting for more than one-fifth as much variation in quality of institutional affiliation as does achievement (beta=.39, p<.001). That is, more liberal responses to the attitude questions predict a significantly higher quality of institutional affiliation, after controlling for scholarly achievement.

Second, religiosity is negatively related to quality of institutional affiliation among practicing Christians (beta=-.06, p<.05), but not among Jews. The other variable that is a statistically significant contributor to the equation is gender: Being female is a negative predictor of institutional quality (beta=-.07, p<.01). None of the other potential sources of discrimination for which we have measures is significantly related to the dependent variable. Overall, this regression model explains just under 20% of the variation in the quality of schools in which faculty teach. This analysis confirms the expected impact of achievement on professional status, but it also suggests that ideology plays an independent role. In effect, the ideological orientations of professors are about one-fifth as important as their professional achievements in determining the quality of the school that hires and retains or promotes them. In addition to conservatives, our analysis finds that women and religiously observant Christians are disadvantaged in their placement in the institutional hierarchy, after taking their professional achievements into account.

I could chip away on some items in the study: What constitutes a good institution varies some by field of study. Harvey Mudd College, for example, is a top 20 program in the sciences and engineering, but teaching social sciences there is simply service work and not a particularly desirable post. (I probably am in trouble for that line, since I'm visiting Claremont this weekend.) I'm sure liberal readers will wish to make hay with the result that females are underrepresented in academia as well, but I'm not sure if it's a demand or a supply problem. And that might be true for Republicans as well: Bright Republicans with terminal degrees may be disproportionately drawn to the private sector and away from academia.

I don't consider the results proof positive of much of anything. But as Zywicki notes,

Second, no one has provided any evidence that contradicts the central findings of these studies, whether Klein's or the apparent conclusions of the new study. I'm sure that advocates of the status quo will find something to pick at in the new study as well--but if the findings of these studies are fundamentally flawed, at some point wouldn't someone find something to the contrary? If the evidence was otherwise mixed, then nitpicking at particular studies is one thing, but when the evidence begins to accumulate, at some point it seems like nitpicking is somewhat unresponsive to the underlying issue.

If there is evidence out there that shows a libertarian/conservative takeover of academia, I haven't seen it.

Me neither. Lucky for us, Kurtz notes that the AAUP's representative says "a number of studies show the core values that students bring into the university are not very much altered by being in college." Thank God.

Big Trunk and Bogus Doug both note the STrib's editorial and supporting article arguing for a hike in the minimum wage. It's a silly idea for many reasons. Here's why:

How many people in Minnesota make the minimum wage? 32,000. Here's your data source. When the STrib editorial says it would benefit 230,000 workers it must include in the increase many workers making above the minimum wage. We know that about 57% of workers in MN are paid hourly wages (broadly, 1.5 million out of 2.8 million workers). The last distribution of MN wages number I saw is for 2002, and the lowest decile percentage comes in at $7.22. Therefore the number should be more like 130-140k, not 230, unless the STrib wishes to argue that an increase in the minimum wage will push up wages 100k workers earning more than $7/hr.

A study from a few years ago from the Heritage Foundation notes:

Nearly two-thirds of minimum wage workers move above the minimum wage within one year, and the median raise for those workers is over 10 percent. For full-time minimum wage workers, the median first-year raise is almost 14 percent. Entry-level jobs are not lifelong dead-end jobs. These jobs allow Americans to establish a track record of work that creates opportunities for better paying jobs.

...Just 1.9 percent, or 404,000, of the 20.8 million poor Americans over the age of 15 would be affected by an increase in the minimum wage ...Studies show that raising the minimum wage does not significantly reduce poverty. In fact, for some subgroups, minimum wage increases appeared to raise the level of poverty.

More than half of those who earn minimum wages are teens. Trunk does a good service bringing up Ben Zycher's rebuttal of the Card and Krueger study, but the point Tyler Cowen makes is also apt:

On this issue (and many others) I've been much influenced by my colleague Gordon Tullock. Gordon notes that the government can make an employer raise nominal money wages, but can't stop him from turning off the air conditioner. [A more optimistic scenario is that the employer invests in creating a higher-productivity job.] Surely just about every job out there can be made worse, one way or another, in a way that saves the employer money.

So the scenario is now simple. The government boosts the minimum wage. Low-wage workers earn more. Few lose their jobs. Workers sweat more too, one way or another. Few are much better off.

Cowen links to Steve Landsburg in Slate, in which Landsburg has an answer for the STrib:

Ordinarily, when we decide to transfer income to some group or another—whether it be the working poor, the unemployed, the victims of a flood, or the stockholders of American Airlines—we pay for the transfer out of general tax revenue. That has two advantages: It spreads the burden across all taxpayers, and it makes politicians accountable for their actions. It's easy to look up exactly how much the government gave American, and it's easy to look up exactly which senators voted for it.

By contrast, the minimum wage places the entire burden on one small group: the employers of low-wage workers and, to some extent, their customers. Suppose you're a small entrepreneur with, say, 10 full-time minimum-wage workers. Then a 50 cent increase in the minimum wage is going to cost you about $10,000 a year. That's no different from a $10,000 tax increase. But the politicians who imposed the burden get to claim they never raised anybody's taxes.

If you want to transfer income to the working poor, there are fairer and more honest ways to do it. The Earned Income Tax Credit, for example, accomplishes pretty much the same goals as the minimum wage but without concentrating the burden on a tiny minority. For that matter, the EITC also does a better job of helping the people you'd really want to help, as opposed to, say, middle-class teenagers working summer jobs. It's pretty hard to argue that a minimum-wage increase beats an EITC increase by any criterion.

So here's the challenge for the STrib staff. How about rather than advocate an increase in the minimum wage, you advocate a negative income tax (of which the EITC is an example) on a statewide basis to transfer income? Why should McDonalds and WalMart have to pay for our desire to give others more "economic dignity"?

You of course know the answer: To do so would mean that the costs of our "noble" desire to take money from someone to increase someone else's dignity would be exposed as a tax expenditure, and taxes on other would have to be raised, in broad daylight. It's one thing to slam Governor Pawlenty's continued commitment to no tax increases; it's quite another for the STrib and its DFL buddies to ask for a tax increase to help the poor. They know there are no votes there.

Loyal reader Pat Mattson sends me a job description for a post at the University of Washington Business School for a "Professor of Entrepreneurship with a Multicultural Emphasis".

Preferred applicants will have a combination of academic study, teaching and work related to small business and entrepreneurship that totals at least three years. The successful candidate must also have a demonstrated interest in teaching related to minority- and women-owned businesses. It is also expected that the candidate's research in marketing or management will include topics related to women and racial/ethnic minorities.

The individual selected for the position will be expected to teach one or more courses that currently comprise the academic content of the Business and Economic Development Program. This Program, now in its 10th year, provides technical assistance to businesses located in diverse communities in Seattle and other parts of Washington that are owned by individuals from a variety of racial/ethnic and national origins as well as women. The courses focus on student consulting experiences in which client projects are completed for mostly small businesses. Projects usually focus on developing marketing and business plans. Current courses enroll primarily undergraduate students and include "Multicultural Marketing and Business Development" and "Managing Change in a Multicultural Business Environment."

It would be easy, I think, to blow this off as another of those ridiculous "diversity" positions, but there's a way this can be helpful. Teaching entrepreneurship teaches one to evaluate risk and be creative. It involves accepting responsibility as an individual. I have no idea what the ideology of the people behind this position is, but it has the potential to be a great chance to show, how shall I put this, "compassionate capitalism."

Among other things I do, I also sing for our church, and with a recent retirement of a couple from our church to a new mission we are left many weeks with only me singing and Mrs. S on the piano. (She is a fantastic pianist, btw.) Holy Week includes three services and that, the play and some other engagements have frankly taken a toll on my voice.

But they were no excuse for Sunday. Our pastor gave a sermon on how often we don't recognize God's grace in our lives, and the relationship of fathers to sons, using Mary Magdalene's question of Jesus before she recognizes him -- "c'mon buddy, where is his body? Hand it over and I will take care of it" -- and ended the sermon with a video clip of Team Hoyt, a father and son the latter of whom has profound cerebral palsy but whose father runs a triathlon using a dinghy and special bicycle and wheelchair to take his son with him. The music in the background was "My Redeemer Lives" (I think it's Nicole Mullen singing.)

I sang a few months ago for my father-in-law's funeral, and that was easier than singing after watching the video, which was right afterward. I'm sure the congregation wondered what the heck was wrong with me.

At that moment, nothing at all was wrong.

If you've never seen this video or know the Hoyts' story, you can watch a video clip about them here.

Doug has moved Bogus Gold to a new site. Update your links accordingly.

Please read Saint Paul's and Captain Ed's considerable commentary on the reaction of our listeners to the NARN discussion of the Schiavo case last Saturday. They say much that doesn't bear my repeating. One comment will suffice.

What I heard in the phone calls was anger. Anger at the judiciary, anger at Governor Bush, anger at ... well, anger at anyone who was involved in the decision to starve Terri Schiavo or not intervene to reconnect her feeding tube. Mitch spent much time trying to move the anger onto something one could do within the law, which is political action.

I have no problem with righteous anger, which I can only define by reference to the Biblical example of Jesus throwing the moneychangers out of the temple (Matt 21) or when John the Baptist calls the religious leaders confronting him snakes and vipers (Matt 3). And anger as a state of mind is fine. The question is what does one do with that anger -- when does it become action, and can one act righteously on one's anger.

Thinking somehow that your actions can be righteous instead of God's actions lies at the base of all hubris.

If you are a reader and a Christian and you think Terri's death is wrong, I believe nonetheless your only action can be to pray for God to forgive Michael Schiavo. I confess to the urge to take a 2X4 to his comb-back, but I know that is wrong. So too is urging others to form a mob and seize Terri. Wouldn't it be more effective for the TV cameras to film hundreds to kneel in front of the hospice with a single sign that said, "Father, forgive Michael, for he knows not what he does"?

More than anyone else, he's the one in need of your prayers now.

UPDATE: Words in penultimate in italics were inserted to make that sentence clearer.

We were going to talk some on NARN last Saturday about the 'Tulip Revolution' in the Kyrgyz Republic, but phone calls rolling in on the Schiavo case kept us from that topic. Captain Ed has been blogging a good bit about the divided opposition who now has to create a government in place of the Akaev regime. I'd like to step back and look at this a little more broadly, as someone who's worked in the FSU -- though never Kyrgyzia. I've got two broad points to make.

One of my projects in my professional life has been to look at how political economists measure things like economic and political freedom, or the independence of central banks, or 'trust' (yes, there is one), or more generally, human development. Within that discussion has been a desire to know whether some types of freedoms are antecedents to others, whether some freedom begets more, and whether or not freedom is good for growth. Your natural instinct, which was mine too, is that of course freedom is good for growth, but it turns out not always.

It turns out not to be so. Beginning with Robert Barro's Robbins lecture, we have understood that after some point, increasing political freedom could set off distributional battles between factions. Those battles might inhibit growth. That result isn't conclusive in the economics literature by any stretch, but it makes some sense.

We see this in many places: The creation of a power vacuum by decapitation of an autocratic regime has led to troubles in places as diverse as Indonesia post-Suharto or Phillipines post-Marcos, or the 'revolutions' of Ukraine and Georgia. We are rather spoiled by past experience in the decapitation of historically planned economies to think they will be unmessy. Romania is one case where it wasn't. I don't see any reason why Romania should have been an exception. That is, there's no reason why the messiness of transfer in the KR should be considered exceptional other than the good fortune we've had in peaceful Ukraine and Georgia.

The second, and broader point is where does this end with the FSU, after corrupt regimes fall in Georgia, Ukraine and the KR? Alex Rodriguez of The Chicago Tribune reviews the remaining candidates. The difference with the KR is that it was in fact the most democratic of the Central Asian regimes, and we now have evidence that a little movement towards democratization can get one quickly to a tipping point where full-blown political freedom comes to fruition. This is likely to cause some places to clamp down. Turkmenistan is run by Niyazov, a.k.a. Turkmenbashi "(leader of the Turkmen") who allows no dissent and has created cult status; same is true with Uzbekistan except for the cult part. I don't know whether we'll see democracy movements spring up there: I rather doubt it, but then again nobody expected Lebanon to pop. Uzbekistan's poor economic performance might make it more likely the place to see something happen.

Kazakstan's economic freedom is better than the others only by the comparison. It's still a pretty bad place and economic freedom is very restricted. Kazakstan does have an active opposition movement, and it seems a likely place for contagion. Of the others outside Central Asia, I would also tab Moldova as a possible place for more democratic trends, though it already has a parliament whose election appears to have been free and fair. Sitting with EU candidates on one side and Ukraine on the other, it has strong Russian roots (as does Belarus) but without a real geopolitical significance as a buffer state like Ukraine and Belarus. Thus, if Putin is relaxing its grip, that would seem the most likely place we'd observe it.

UPDATE: Onnik notes this Agence France Presse article that thinks it could be Azerbaijan, where parliamentary elections occur in 2008. He assesses the situation:

By most if not all accounts, Azerbaijan is more autocratic than Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan were. In fact, I think it was Freedom House that recently declared that it was effectively under a dictatorship. Even so, the last Presidential Elections were particularly bloody with clashes on the streets of Baku between opposition protestors and riot police.

The situation there, however, is not exactly the same as in those republics that managed to successfully stand up against a falsified vote and not least because there is no imminent issue of succession to the Presidency.

I doubt it for approximately the same reasons. When Aliev died he had handpicked his son to succeed him in a country that is not a monarchy. So there were protests. Such will not be the case in November.

Onnik is also unhappy that the government in Armenia is not held up to the same criticism. That may be because the US has much less influence in Armenia than in these other countries; taking on Russia in Armenia would be harder because both the Armenians and the Russians see the area as vital to each's security interests.

UPDATE 2: Fistful of Euros explains how I'm probably wrong on Moldova, at least in the short run.

According to a note in todays The Chronicle of Higher Education (subscribers only), Viktor Yushchenko is calling for the resignation of university officials in Ukraine that tried to suppress students from participating in the Orange Revolution:

The president of Ukraine has told the nation's university rectors that he expects letters of resignation from those who abused their offices in the elections that brought him to power.

"This is my moral demand," Viktor A. Yushchenko said on Thursday in a speech at the Ministry of Education and Science in Kiev, the capital. "Everyone who allowed violations of the dignity of students must reflect thoroughly. Those who compromised themselves must leave the walls of the universities."

The government reportedly has investigated more than half of 186 complaints of abuses in the campaign last year between Mr. Yushchenko, who won in a runoff election, and Viktor F. Yanukovich, who initially was declared the victor in a vote widely regarded as rigged.

Some rectors allegedly forced their staff members and students to support one or the other candidate, but almost without exception the beneficiary of their alleged actions was Mr. Yanukovich. He was backed by the president at the time, Leonid Kuchma, to whose administration many rectors owe their jobs.

There were reports that students who actively supported Yushchenko were being tossed out of university housing (in the winter months) and actively discouraged from Yushchenko rallies. There will be some question whether the new government is meddling in academic freedom. I would think, though, that since university rectors are presidential appointments, they probably don't enjoy the same freedoms as the faculty.

NARN will have a fresh show today: Week in Review will definitely talk about Terri Schiavo and a new memo controversy, as well as the Red Lake tragedy. In the second hour we'll talk with state Rep. Rob Eastlund of St. Paul on his initiative to improve family law in Minnesota.

If you've been listening via the internet, time to update your link as we get away from that Abacast software.

Via Joanne Jacobs, this article from a few days before the Red Lake shootings paints a pretty grim picture of education on reservations.

One out of 6 American Indian youths has attempted suicide, according to the Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development. That group also reports that 25 percent of native Americans live below the poverty line, compared with 12 percent overall in the US. And the teen birth rate is 50 percent higher than for non-Indians.

...a 2003 study by the Manhattan Institute found that a national average of 54 percent of Indian students graduate high school (not including GED recipients). That's roughly on par with Hispanics and African-Americans, but significantly behind whites (72 percent) and Asians (79 percent).

Test scores in reading and math paint another part of the picture. The 2003 National Assessment of Educational Progress shows that Indian students' scores are considerably lower than those of their white counterparts. In fourth-grade math, for instance 20 percent of American Indians and Alaskan natives scored at or above proficiency, compared with 44 percent of whites. The gaps in reading are similar for fourth- and eighth-graders, though they tend to outpace African-American students.

The usual suspect -- inadequate funding -- is blamed, but the article also cites the limited usefulness of multilingual education when the language learned only allows students to talk to their grandparents.

This seems to fit the pattern -- low levels of achievement and high levels of frustration lead to increased school violence.

Inside Higher Ed reports that the living wage strike at Georgetown has won the day and that workers there will receive higher wages as a result. The wage increases are a compromise from early demands by the student hunger protestors, who now will get to enjoy an Easter meal. But IHE points out:

In several major ways, the policy was identical to the one the students had rejected eight days earlier.

For instance, the new policy will increase the total compensation package (which includes health care costs) for all workers to $13 an hour by this July and $14 an hour by July 2007 from the current $11.33, and adjust the pay annually based on the local cost of living. In rejecting that proposal last week, a coalition statement said that “$14 an hour is not a living wage now and it will not be a living wage in 2008.” Students had wanted Georgetown to raise the minimum wage of all workers, including those who work for its contractors, to $14.93 an hour by this July.

(Subscribers to the Chronicle of Higher Education can get a more detailed story here.)

I've argued here, strenuously, that pursuing the dismissal of Ward Churchill from CU for his 'little Eichmanns' dig was wrongheaded, and that instead we should pursue Churchill's academic record which has the accusation of fraud. It appears that the University of Colorado agrees.

Phil DiStefano, chancellor of CU's Boulder campus, said Thursday that he has determined allegations of plagiarism and fraud in Churchill's writings were serious enough to be referred to a standing university committee that investigates research misconduct. That committee also will determine if Churchill's disputed claim to be an American Indian is a violation of academic standards.

"We have concluded that the allegations of research misconduct related to plagiarism, misuse of other's work and fabrication have sufficient merit to warrant further inquiry," said DiStefano. "The standing committee also will be asked to inquire into whether Professor Churchill committed research misconduct by misrepresenting himself as an American Indian to gain credibility and authority for his work."

DiStefano said the review by the Standing Committee on Research Misconduct could take up to seven months to complete. If its findings are upheld, they would then be referred to the university's Committee on Privilege and Tenure.

...The chancellor said Churchill's comments about 9/11 were protected by the First Amendment. But he made it clear that the allegations of academic fraud could be enough to end Churchill's career at CU.

"Research misconduct is one of the most serious allegations against a faculty member," said DiStefano.

...[the report] pointed to a series of allegations against the professor:

• John LaVelle, a University of New Mexico professor, has alleged that Churchill has misrepresented an important statute in federal Indian law, the General Allotment Act of 1887. LaVelle claims Churchill intentionally distorted the act, falsely portraying it as a "formal eugenics code" that established blood standards for tribal membership. He says Churchill continued to make this a keystone of his research, even after being challenged on the facts. LaVelle also claims Churchill lifted a passage from a 1992 essay by scholar Rebecca Robbins for an essay he wrote in 1993.

• A Lamar University professor, Thomas Brown, has alleged that Churchill promulgated a false story that the Army deliberately distributed smallpox-infested blankets to Mandan Indians in 1837, causing the deaths of 100,000 people.

• Professor Fay G. Cohen, of Dalhousie University in Canada, has accused Churchill of plagiarizing her work in an essay that appeared in the book The State of Native America. Cohen also has accused Churchill of threatening her in a late-night telephone call.

The full report is here, and a copy of the letter Chancellor DiSteffano sent to concerned citizens is up at American Kestrel. (Begrudging linkage to RMA non-supporters.)

So Joshua writes to ask me what it all means. There are many possible violations here -- the report has more -- and a serious academic even accused of this stuff would be unlikely to have his or her academic career survive. The problem is that Churchill does not care and can drag this out for two more years, hoping either that the pressure will die down and the report can be buried, or that he gets a buyout.

But it will be impossible to dodge an inquiry like this, particularly if the Legislature keeps the pressure on to see it through. In the end there will be a report, and the report will show whether these claims against Churchill are valid. A single incident might go his way, but to find against all of them and completely exonerate Churchill simply seems unlikely, even to those most inclined to believe conspiracy theories. When the report is released, Churchill may still have his job, but what remains of his reputation as an academic will be destroyed.

It will release some pressure -- see Governor Owens statement in the RMN article -- though not all. But Churchill, already a martyr, now gets to become an academic eunuch. Nobody will hire him for an academic post again. He will always have a microphone somewhere, but the DiSteffano report will do for Churchill's speaking fees what a Congressional hearing did for Mark McGwire's.

UPDATE: John Hinderaker seems to have come around to the same view.

A committee of the Florida House of Representatives passed the Academic Bill of Rights on an 8-2 vote along party lines. The usual panic-stricken groups decided to take a trip down Reductio Road.

Rep. Dan Gelber, D-Miami Beach, warned of lawsuits from students enrolled in Holocaust history courses who believe the Holocaust never happened.

Similar suits could be filed by students who don’t believe astronauts landed on the moon, who believe teaching birth control is a sin or even by Shands medical students who refuse to perform blood transfusions and believe prayer is the only way to heal the body, Gelber added.

“This is a horrible step,” he said. “Universities will have to hire lawyers so our curricula can be decided by judges in courtrooms. Professors might have to pay court costs — even if they win — from their own pockets. This is not an innocent piece of legislation.”

I've made my arguments against this bill already, but this kind of argumentation doesn't help matters at all. The author of the bill has already figured out how to deal with these piddling complaints:

“Professors are accountable for what they say or do,” he said. “They’re accountable to the rest of us in society … All of a sudden the faculty think they can do what they want and shut us out. Why is it so unheard of to say the professor shouldn’t be a dictator and control that room as their totalitarian niche?”

In an interview before the meeting, Baxley said “arrogant, elitist academics are swarming” to oppose the bill, and media reports misrepresented his intentions.

“I expect to be out there on my own pretty far,” he said. “I don’t expect to be part of a team.”

I have a student who is visiting China -- and taking years to do so -- who will do an independent study with me. We want to test the ability of an entrepreneur in China to set up a retail shop in and out of the special economic zones, and both formally and informally. This is a replication, somewhat, of the experiments Hernando de Soto explored first in Peru with The Other Path then continued in the first chapter of The Mystery of Capital; indeed, de Soto is our inspiration for the independent study.

I've been reading a good bit about China, but since I'm at heart a monetary economist most of my reading has focused on the RMB/dollar exchange rate. See this from Nouriel Roubini, Brad Setser, and Stephen Roach, for example. (I don't have time to comment today, sorry, perhaps another time.) But I would like to find something more on the costs of doing business in China, particularly after NARN's interview of Ethan Gutmann last year. I have some information on doing business in China from the World Bank, which is a good example of what we're looking for.

Whereas no candidate earned even 30% of the vote;

Whereas many voted for candidates that didn't even earn 5%, and thus could never gain admission to the Hall of Fame;

Whereas I at least outdistanced Da Kommisar;

And whereas I have been endorsed by the two members of RMA;

THEREFORE, I demand that a runoff beheld between my candidacy for CU president and that of Eric Cartman.

This isn't over.

UPDATE: From Hugh: "I reject the vote counting. Many people voted whose votes were not counted. Many dead people were not allowed to vote. The machines in Ohio were delivered late. I'm still in."

UPDATE 2: Dammit!

By a vote of 6 for Hugh Hewitt, to 2 for King "Call Me Provost" Banaian, the RMA has chosen its favorite candidate to be the next President of the University of Colorado.

I can't do any better, so here's what James Taranto had to say in today's Best of the Web about this ranking by demographics of colleges and universities by Princeton Review. (Reformatted.)

Diversity University:
Lots of Race/Class Interaction
Diverse Student Population
Students Ignore God on a Regular Basis
Gay Community Accepted

Monochromatic Institute:
Little Race/Class Interaction
Homogeneous Student Population
Students Pray on a Regular Basis
Alternative Lifestyles Not An Alternative

We have no quarrel with the first, second and fourth of these criteria, but the third one is quite astonishing. If you "ignore God on a regular basis," you're "diverse," whereas if you "pray on a regular basis," you're "monochromatic"? What if you pray in a black church, or pray for a more diverse campus?

A note from Dory Beutel lets me know that there will be a new charter school in St. Cloud this fall. She writes:

My husband and I have been granted a charter by the Minnesota Department of Education, and we are scheduled to open an elementary charter school for grades K - 4 beginning in September of 2005. The school will emphasize the high content standards developed by E. D. Hirsch and others (The Schools We Need and Why We
Don't Have Them). In other words, children will study classical literature, Greek and Roman Mythology, core science, and other core principles that are often neglected (or at least not taught consistently and coherently) in our nation's public schools (depriving children of a common, core vocabulary to share with one another). In addition, teachers will be held accountable for achieving these high standards as the terms of their employment.

She also reports that she will be using Saxon math, which you know I like. It doesn't appear they will be able to take Littlest Scholar, as she is going to sixth grade next year, but it will be of use to our local readers. Go here to read more about Stride Academy.

I've also been visiting lately with LuAnn Walters, whose show Talk Education airs at the same hour NARN does over on Patriot II (AM 1570). She is now a MOBster, and you should check in on her blog. Her school, Accell Academy, is a 6-12 education designed to catch up your kid to get into the best colleges and having them ready to succeed. Sure wish she was closer to us in St. Cloud!

Meanwhile, Scholar's Notebook continues to discuss math education, and reports on the success of Wayzata High School's math team, which learned through the UMPTYMP program at the University of Minnesota. A colleague of mine has two kids in it and they are doing very well; LS will be testing for the program next month. I'm more nervous about that than any sports she's ever participated in.

Chad at Fraters thinks I will have to ditch my loyalty to the Red Sox after discovering a Red Sox cap on the head of The Font of All Fiskwas.

My boy, my boy, let me explain something.

Citizenship in Red Sox Nation requires more than donning the cap. While irrationality and feistiness certainly help -- and Coleman has those two attributes going for him -- it takes much more. David Halberstam, who wrote what I still consider to be the best baseball book ever, offers this piece of anthropology:

It is relatively easy, of course, to identify the members of the Nation. Not just the cap or the T-shirt or even the sweatshirt, though these days a great many arrive at events or games with gloves and at least partially in uniform. But there is also, I think, a certain look that gives away membership in the Nation -- it's a look of someone enthusiastic, but wary, (or wary, but enthusiastic) and there's a certain noticeable hunger to it. It's all right to believe and to care, the look seems to say, but one would do well not to invest too much emotion in the idea of actually winning. You care but you care guardedly. I would describe the principal emotion as one of deep
longing.

It's a condition, being a Red Sox fan, not a cult, nor a religious affiliation, although there are on occasion certain religious experiences. (Think Yaz in '67, and Fisk in the World Series in '75, Ortizzle and JD18 in '05 --kb.) Most Americans are relatively indifferent to the past, believing that America is so powerful that history does not matter, that our nation is so strong and energetic, that we can mold the present to our needs, despite the burdens of the past. Not Red Sox fans: They know the past matters, and they know as well that you are, more than you realize, a prisoner of it. In a country where there has been an amazing run of material affluence for almost 60 years with the expectation built into the larger culture that things are supposed to get better every year, citizens of RSN know better. They know that things do not always get better. They know that the guys in the white hats do not always win in the last five minutes of the movie. They know the guys in the black hats have plenty of last-minute tricks, and that they can pick up just the right player off the waiver list in the waning days of a season (think Johnny Mize, 1949).

Coleman is not wary and his enthusiasm seems to be for smaller things like KAR than for the Crusade Against the Unholy Steinbrenner.

My name is King, and I am a member of Red Sox Nation. From Conig and Yaz to Rice and Fisk to ManRam and Tek. From Radatz and Monboquette to El Tiante and Spaceman to Petey and Jesus Christ Schilling Superstar. Because you're only young once, but you can be immature forever.

People ask me what I do in winter when there's no baseball. I'll tell you what I do. I stare out the window and wait for spring. ~Rogers Hornsby

Hey! I have just found out what the word "Soros" means (as in Leftist billionaire George Soros). It is ancient Greek for "coffin". Rather fitting when you think of the way socialism killed millions in the 20th century.

From Dissecting Leftism. And by God, he's right.

John also notes this article from Christina Hoff Sommers describing the shrill pack of weaselettes snapping at Larry Summers' ankles, and the complicity of the MSM in choosing who wrote about it.

Division of Labour tells of a university president throwing a hissy and plays the race card. He tries to explain himself. Within the debate comes a letter that argues

As the language of that very resolution suggests, "the mere appearance of a [racial] conflict may be as serious and potentially damaging as" a conflict in fact.

The Superintendent is requested to seek placement in the sheepshead deck if all cards are not used yet.

Someone pointed out to me this AARP ad against Social Security reform. My answer was, "So I'm driving down a highway at night and see a deer standing in the road 200 yards away. When do I start steering away from the deer?"

Alex Tabarrok is more elegant.

But almost inevitably a fix to social security will involve tax increases and the longer we wait the larger the costs of those increases will be. The technical explanation is that deadweight loss increases more than proportionately with an increase in taxes. The common sense explanation is that you don't want to take all your hits at once - instead, if you must take a hit, it's best to spread it out over time. Thus, the sooner we deal with the problem the lower the total costs will be.

A simple way of explaining some hairy public finance I had to learn long ago.

Hugo Schwyzer is a union member of the faculty at Pasadena City College, and he's glad others are now being obligated to pay fair share dues.

Since 2001, California law has permitted public employee unions to collect fees from non-members. The principle is simple -- no full-time teacher ought to receive for free the benefits that his or her colleagues have paid to negotiate. Membership in the union itself, of course, is voluntary -- and those who will now have the fair share fee automatically deducted from their paychecks will not be obligated to participate in union activities.

I confess I have mixed feelings about forcing some of my virulently anti-union colleagues into paying for union activities. ... I have to confess that when union membership was voluntary, I took a small amount of pleasure in gently reminding the non-payers in the department that my voluntary dues were subsidizing their benefits! Now, I expect to hear their outrage.

Non-union faculty at SCSU also pay fair share dues of 85%. Now the question is whether 85% of union expenses are directly tied to the costs of collective bargaining, which is what the law is supposed to allow. I have periodically requested an accounting of the expenditures of the union to verify that fair share rates are being spent appropriately. The data I get back are always vague.

Our union, for example, has a lobbyist who is supposed to help us get more money from the Legislature. Yesterday's letter included a lengthy discussion of the "anti-gay marriage amendment" and a discussion of his continued opposition to the bill for alternative teacher licensure, a bill which our administration and the Minnesota Association of Colleges of Teacher Education no longer oppose (they did last year.) Whose interests does he represent? Certainly not mine.

Scholar Dave has written several fine pieces on the curse of fair-share (non)membership. I would hope, for instance, that unlike our fools at SCSU, PCC will allow its fair-share members to still participate in faculty governance. I also hopes it has a structure that doesn't prove particularly harmful for fair-share faculty who wish to become administrators and work as department chairs as the natural first step. At SCSU chairs are still considered faculty and covered under the faculty contract. As such they cannot be grieved by fellow union members. If someone wants to grieve a chair they must instead take their claim against the administration. That sounds good, but then a grievance against a chair proceeds without the chair gaining any information about what is happening. Indeed, under labor laws in Minnesota the chair cannot be told what the grievance against him or her is. It's happened here several times, and faculty willing to be chairs as a result are harder and harder to find. My view is that the best way to handle this is to make chairs administrators and take them out of the faculty contract; there could be reasons why that's a bad idea, but they'd have to be weighed versus the serious lack of due process accorded chairs under present arrangements.

(In case any one is interested, no, this isn't about my own situation. I'm blessed to have a department that could run itself without a chair and with a great deal of camraderie. Of course, we don't have merit pay, which makes us poorer financially but reduces the chances to squander our bonhomie.)

I'm glad Mr. Schwyzer thinks his dues will fall as he is able to have costs shifted back onto what he views as free-riders in his faculty. I do wonder, however, how many other costs will be shifted onto his colleagues? Before they were free riders, now indentured servants to the union's agenda?

I got this graph from Chart of the Day, showing what has happened to the fed funds rate during economic recoveries and expansions:

I've said in my forecasts heretofore that I thought the fed funds rate would top out this year at 3.5%. I'm beginning to think, looking both at this and yesterday's change in the language of the FOMC statement taking the rate to 2.75%, that I need to up that number towards 4%. The markets are already heading there.

My watch list for the economy right now has expanded then to two parts: Business confidence, which needs to stay strong for this investment-led expansion to carry through; and now mortgage rates. If 30-year rates get much north of 6%, the housing market fears many have will resurface.

I was commiserating today with a colleague with whom I had written a report during our semester 'break' period. I put 'break' in quotes because on my writing calendar that week is usually jammed, particularly spring break when it precedes a load of conferences. This week, while I am teaching, has actually been a more relaxed week because I don't have a conference for another ten days (which is a lifetime right now.)

According to Professor Blogger, I'm a missionary.

The missionaries are people who discovered somewhere along the way that they are completely incapable of living without learning more about their topic (what Quid Nomen Illius? calls "the seagulls of medievalism"). The missionaries have learned things that are important about the way that we live, and help us understand the world around us, so we research to satisfy our own curiousity, teach to share these delights with others, and serve to facilitate the research and teaching.

Like Prof. B, I've been a little light in the blogging department, and I expect to continue that way through mid-April as I work out three more papers and we complete three faculty searches. Your indulgences are greatly appreciated.

Seriously, just look at this mug shot.



Luckily, he comes with an endowment because the mother's milk of university contributions from alumni will be scared off.

In a related development, the Powerpuff Girls were given a certain address in SouthPark.



Seriouslah.

We still await the endorsement of the Rocky Mountain Alliance. Given that they've not yet been bought off by Hewitt and he's back in LA, I figure my chances are pretty good here. (I've got my eye on that Cannon guy, however.)

Matt Abe is still banging away on it, and reports on schools using Saxon math. Littlest Scholar has been instructed with Saxon and loves it; consider me a fan.

Another multiple-death murder-suicide in a Minnesota high school happened earlier this afternoon, in Red Lake, on a reservation about 200 miles north of St. Cloud. Here's the high school's website. Details are still coming in; I'll follow it on the news all evening. Of course, in central Minnesota we had a similar story less than two years ago.

UPDATE 1: A few extra details in the AP report; the suspect also is believed to have killed his grandparents first, the father a police official on the reservation. It's a fairly impoverished place as are most reservations around Minnesota, with a poverty rate over 40%. One site suggests an umemployment rate of 39% though I think that might be high; the high school graduation rate is about 60%.

UPDATE 2: Hugh Hewitt:

This has been a year of extraordinary suffering, from the human costs of the war, the tsunami, and a hundred other stories. Terri Schiavo's suffering, and the suffering of the victims in Minnesota, begin Holy Week with somber reminders on suffering's universality, and the need for salvation --the reality of Good Friday and the triumph of Easter.

UPDATE 3: Death toll up to ten now. The STrib has a background piece on Red Lake Reservation as well.

UPDATE 4: Just watched local TV news coverage. Some other depressingly familiar parallels to other school shootings: One kid said other students told him they heard the shooter say last year he would do this. Same kid said the shooter was 'goth', which challenges my perceptions of Native American students. Because Red Lake is a closed reservation, it appears to be very difficult for both reporters and state police to gain access to the area.

William Polley notes that I had a link out to Red Lake County. My bad, the link is now fixed with better demographic information. This testimony from 2003 says the unemployment rate there is 60%. Median age on the reservation is about 20.1 years old. There's little doubt from talking with people who know anything about the place that it's considered one of the most impoverished areas not only of Minnesota but of the nation.

UPDATE 5: From the tribal leadership:

I am sorry to announce that the events that took place today involving the shootings at the Red Lake High School make this one of the darkest and most painful occurrences in the history of our tribe.

Our thoughts and prayers go out to the families of the victims.

I can assure the Red Lake tribal members that the situation is under control and secure. Several organizations and agencies have offered assistance in our time of need and the Red Lake Nation has graciously accepted.

The FBI, ATF, BCA, along with the Beltrami County Sheriff’s Department, the Minnesota State Highway Patrol and the Red Cross will be providing assistance to our public safety department through out the next several days. These agencies are all here with our permission.

An information line has been set up to handle your calls and to answer any questions you may have. The number is 679-4284.This is a 24 hour emergency line.

Bumped to the top.

UPDATE 6: Mitch asks whether this will get the coverage Columbine did, since the kids there were "folks like us" and Red Lake is not. Well, there's also the issue of its remoteness and the closed nature of the reservation to consider. I keep coming across Clyde Bellecourt's comment:

Everyone in the Indian community is feeling really bad right now, whether they’re a member of the Red Lake or not, we’re all an extended family, we’re all related. Usually this happens in places like Columbine, white schools, always somewhere else. We never hear that in our community.

..."No one would ever think that that type of violence would visit itself in our communities, it's not part of our culture and our traditions, so we're kind of puzzled by it all," Vernon Bellecourt said.

"But our young people are not exempt from the same problems young people have across the country," he added, "so our communities are now being victimized by this same kind of violence."

As Mitch says, both sides of the cultural divide are going to be working this one.

Norwegianity has a roundup of coverage as well focusing on the student's interest in the neo-Nazi movement.

Rick at Stones Cry Out has taken his hand to writing a critique of a study on the exit polls that showed a victory for John Kerry, which a group of researchers argue could be evidence that something odd happened in President Bush's victory. Mystery Pollster says it's a good skeptical essay, which I think says a great deal. You're encouraged to read it.

I think a more interesting point in this case is whether blogs can be used to review papers in progress of non-peer reviewed pieces (which was one point Rick made in his posts yesterday.) I think the answer is obviously yes, but does it break new ground? I could always publish a piece that critiqued another piece. If it was in a peer-reviewed journal my best recourse was always to go to the same journal -- indeed, most journals won't take a comment or critique of another journal's article that doesn't break new ground. For non-peer-reviewed articles, the comment has more outlets.

The blog can comment on either piece. The question is whether a blog comment is a good place for an academic to comment on a peer-reviewed article. I think the answer is mixed. A comment that passes through the same screen that the original article did and is published carries a great deal of weight. As a writer, you want that. But at the same time, journal editors also are humans with egos, and pointing out that they published a flawed piece isn't always well received.

Of course the blog's readership matters a great deal. I think that's one reason why it's a good advantage for those of us who do research at more teaching-oriented institutions. Blogs don't suffer from the same snobbery as the editor who, according to economic lore, scoffed at the idea of blind reviewing of articles. "Of course I want to know who wrote it," the story goes. "How else do I know if it's any good?"

I didn't see this until John Ray had put it up over the weekend, but Jay Nordlinger's review of Davos included this snippet on lunch with Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko:

Amazingly candid, the new president of Ukraine. He says, "My country is a deeply corrupt country." He appeals to investors, and anyone else doing business in Ukraine: "Do not offer bribes to anyone." In fact, you can enter a new line, when you do your accounting: "Saved expenses on ungiven bribes to Ukrainian officials."

Although corruption in Ukraine is a "huge problem," other countries have "cured" it, and Yushchenko expects his to do the same. "And as an economist, I'm especially aware that over 50 percent of our economy is in the shadows. These people pay not a penny in taxes, and it hurts us all."

He discourses on the state of free speech in Ukraine — not good. Journalists have
been murdered "for telling the truth." The "information domain is controlled by two or three families. Our goal is an information market that is public and transparent." (There's that Davosian word again, "transparency.")

After his formal remarks, and before we begin our lunch, Yushchenko offers a toast: "I wish you prosperity in all your endeavors. I wish you physical and moral health.
[A striking phrase, that.] And may you have a white angel sitting on your left shoulder, taking care of you."There is some dispute after whether Yushchenko has said "wise angel" or "white angel," but it was one or the other.

Then he claims that the toast — the act of toasting — originated in Kiev, anciently. You see, the most popular method of eliminating one's opponents was poison. (This, of course, is all too meaningful, coming from Yushchenko.) So you clinked your glasses extra hard, so that some of his drink would spill into yours, and some of yours would spill into his.

I've said before, and ought to say again: To be in the amazingly noble and dignified presence of Victor Yushchenko is probably the highlight of the Annual Meeting.

And to think I had a year where I saw this guy weekly. I'm amazed, still. And I never met someone who gave a better toast (and not for lack of trying!)

A group of Georgetown students are holding a hunger strike for a living wage for its maintenance workers.

"These are people we see everyday, who make it possible for us to go to class," said Foglizzo, 21, who is majoring in culture and politics. "We can affect their lives directly now."

She and 24 other Georgetown students participating in the hunger strike want to boost hourly salaries and job and wage security for the university's 450 contract employees, mostly custodial, food service and security workers.

The workers receive on average $11.33 an hour, which includes wages and health benefits, a Georgetown spokeswoman said.
...

Georgetown officials said they are committed to fairly compensating the university's workers. An advisory committee is weighing a proposal by Georgetown Senior Vice President Spiros Dimolitsas to phase in wage increases to a minimum of $14 an hour by summer 2007.

After that, wages would increase annually, taking into account inflation. In all, it would cost the university nearly $550,000 over the next two years.

If $14.93 was set as the minimum hourly wage right away for all its workers, including its 4,500 direct employees, it would add $1.8 million annually to the university budget, said Julie Green Bataille, a university spokeswoman.

Student activists said money should not be an issue. The university, they noted, raised $15 million for a new boathouse on the Potomac and is seeking $120 million for a business school.

Of course, a boathouse and a business school can carry names of the donors. The university has responded several times to my requests for a lab for my students to learn statistical skills to get a donor for it. I've tried to sell donors on the idea of a splash screen that thanks the donor for three seconds every time someone logs in. No such luck. I don't think selling ad space on the side of a rolling garbage can is going to do much better.

UPDATE: Some students are smarter than others.

The finance ministers of the European Union have agreed to let France and Germany off the hook for missing its limits for budget deficits under the rules that created the euro. The rules, created back in 1990 under the Maastricht Treaty and then better codified in the Stability and Growth Pact in 1997 (SGP) which led to many divisions in Europe ever since, called for Germany and France to face sanctions for violating the 3% limit on budget deficits. Back in January, Gerhard Schroeder told the EU to butt out of its affairs:

The stability pact will work better if intervention by European institutions in the budgetary sovereignty of national parliaments is only permitted under very limited conditions.

This has been going on for awhile. The pact virtually ended last year when this communique from the EU to Germany and France was greeted with virtual hostility from Schroeder and Jacque Chirac. The EU Council, which is a political organization, would not accept the report in November 2003 from the European Commission on the violations of the SGP by Germany and France. It led to a lawsuit which the EC won in part, and subsequently a paper was written that would have allowed for some more flexibility in how the EC enforces the SGP.

The European Central Bank is now caught in a bind. While they can express concern over the busting of the deficit limits, they have little ability to do more than hope the EU leaders tomorrow night tell their finance ministers to go back and try again. That's unlikely. The finance ministers signaled by their vote a lack of political will to enforce the SGP which holds European monetary union together. The ECB is now caught with either a declining euro and rising inflation in Euroland or will react with higher interest rates to hold inflation and the euro in check. The latter would also have the effect of offsetting any expansionary effects of the tax cuts or spending hikes Germany and France wish to use to boost their lagging economies. The latter course would be suicide for the ECB: it cannot win a conflict with the EU Council. As Captain Ed notes, the bond markets are already betting on inflation and a declining euro.

The impact is also on countries in eastern and central Europe seeking accession to the EU. Oxford Analytica noted last month that it's unlikely that loosening the SGP for the big fish of Europe will help those other fish hoping to jump into the Euro pond. This is likely to be the biggest problem facing countries seeking accession, and France and Germany have bascially told the joiners that they don't have to play by the same rules. The other impact now will be the effect of any decline in the exchange rate on the costs of joining Euroland.

UPDATE: Reader Brian Ferguson notes this post from my friend John Palmer, in which Ferguson is quoted as saying:

I think this is what's known in macroeconomic theory as a time-inconsistency, precommitment problem. Which in general parlance means that a committment from a politician is not worth the paper it's written on.

Yup. And I agree with John that this could signal the bottom on dollar devaluation.

Another thing I didn't get to last week -- and man, am I glad that's over! -- was commenting on Paul Wolfowitz' nomination to head the World Bank. My first reaction was 'whoa!' You might think one needs to be an economist or a banker to run the place, but that would be mistaken. The first president of the World Bank, after all, was Eugene Meyer, who was head of the Federal Reserve Board when it made a series of bad moves in 1931 which exacerbated the Great Depression. He lasted only six months before returning to operate the Washington Post. (He was Katherine Graham's father.) The Bank has had Robert McNamara run it 1968-81 and Barber Conable 1986-91. So it's not like Bush went too far afield in nominating Wolfowitz.

The left in Europe is