According to two researchers, if you want your kid to go to an elite school, grab their hands and take them to an art museum.

Of activities that take place out of school, the researchers found that participation in music or dance classes made it more likely that a student would enroll in a four-year college program, but had no correlation to whether students would end up at elite colleges. The only out-of-school activity that increased the likelihood of a student ending up enrolled at an elite college was parental visits to art museums.

Art classes and visits to public libraries (by parents or children) had no correlation to students matriculating either to colleges generally or to elite institutions.

Several activities that take place in school increased the likelihood that students would enroll at a four-year college, although not an elite college. These activities included school music groups, interscholastic team sports, and student government. Two types of participation made it more likely students would end up at elite colleges: yearbook or school newspapers and “hobby clubs.” (The authors regretted that there was no breakdown on the impact of various hobbies, so it is unclear if photography clubs do better or worse than chess or other topics.)

Numerous activities had no apparent impact on whether or not students will end up in college — elite or otherwise. School plays, interscholastic individual sports, intramurals, cheerleading, academic honor societies, public service clubs — no impact is clear from any of them.

Of course, and as the authors of the study point out, the connection is the cultural capital of the parents. Elite schools become elite by setting up screens to find other members of the elite.

...to the extent that parents who visit art museums (even without their children) are likely to talk about high art and culture, their children (if they pay even a little attention) will pick up cultural knowledge that their peers lack. And if those parents teach their children to name drop, there could be an impact, especially if it allows students to shine in interviews.

“A chance mention of the new Bertolucci film or the Ruscha show at the Whitney may tip an applicant from one pile to another,” the authors write.

I'd call it signaling of a social network. Contra George Leef, it may be a waste to send junior to a dorm room for most classes, but getting the stamp of membership to the elite is not even if junior learns nothing.

I've had some nice discussion of immigration with some readers through comments. Gary Gross at Let Freedom Ring has posted a couple of complimentary posts, which are of course very nice. But I like the tug of good debate, and Nathan Bissonette of St. Paul, who has joined the upper echelons of MOB readership and commentship (?) has been giving good comments on the viability of fences. We had a debate in comments here and then went to email to hash some things out. The question is whether there are comparable fences we can look at to see whether fences are efficacious. (I know, I know, "It's obvious that ..." There's something in that sentence opener that raises my antennae. Call me pedantic if you wish.) Thus I argued against using the Israeli security barrier as a comparable to the fence that would be erected by the Senate or House bills. Here's the end of the exchange between us, which I think states well the point I'm trying to make about these bills (Nathan in italics):

But the San Diego fence doesn't share the Israeli fence's problems. It's designed to keep out Mexicans. It's enforced American style - no shooting. It's worked to cut border crossing in San Diego because illegals simply walk around the end of the fence. So it works where it's built. So why not extend the fence all the way to Texas?

Why isn't the experience of the San Diego fence instructive as to the effectiveness of an Arizona fence?

I have two issues. First, I am unsure how much effect it had on national statistics. How many people went around the fence and how many were sufficiently discouraged not to try at all? I don't think the numbers in the LAT piece said anything about that, just the SD immigrant flow? How would we know? I'm sure it had some effect, but we're looking quantitatively for its marginal effect. And we don't know that yet.

Second, we can't easily extrapolate from a 13 mile fence to a 1300 mile fence. Are there economies of scale or diseconomies? Again, it's not to say it absolutely will not work. I don't know that. Neither do its supporters. I'm just cautioning people not to oversell the fence and to be sure they understand the need for employer sanctions as a necessary bulwark for the fence. THAT was why we needed the House bill to get to conference, to get those sanctions put in. I still think some way to get illegals into the system by offering to use monetary punishments rather than incarceration for violations of immigration laws only (any other law they break, they pay the full price including potentially jail) will bring more out of the shadows and allow for better enforcement, but just like in the case of the fence we don't know that yet. I think it would, but if a bill came out of conference that had real employer sanctions and either length of fence and nothing else, it would be much, much better than either house's bill in itself.

I agree with Gary's report of Matthew Dowd's commentary, and say let's chill out and make the two bills come together into something that deals with employers who hire illegals. I haven't any idea if the biometric card proposed works or not; that's an engineering problem that others will solve. But there has to be priority given to solving it somehow, now, or else this thing goes the same way as Simpson-Mazzoli did, which also had plenty of support. It just didn't have enforcement.

The Minnesota Annual Conference of the United Methodist Church has for years used SCSU as the site of its convention, including many rooms in my building. (I once had to assert my right to finish lecturing my summer class before they took possession of my classroom.) I think we've been pretty good hosts. But some of the conferees have decided to bite the hand that hosts them by offering a vote on resolution item #513:

Action: The Minnesota Annual Conference of The United Methodist Church be in conversation with St. Cloud State University about the actions it is taking to combat racism, anti-Semitism and other hate crimes on the campus.
If the Sessions Action Team members are not satisfied with their findings, they will consider other options including finding another location for the future gatherings of the Minnesota annual conference of The United Methodist Church.

If you people would only read our Insights, you'd see we've done so much. [/sarc>

If anyone wants to know how I went from being Methodist to Lutheran, you could start with this. Here are people who don't even stop to realize the fact that they are renting space from the epicenter of political correctness, and they believe their rent gives them the right to demand a conversation with the landlord about its actions to combat social ills. I'd suggest that the Administration simply mail them a letter with their "strategic plan", "accomplishments", which they are so willing to trumpet any place else, and include a 50% rent increase for 2007. We could use the money much more than another bunch of busybodies.

(h/t: reader Richard Vatsaas)

Snow vs. Thomas, UFC-style.

I'd watch C-SPAN again.

John Snow seemed to hang on as Treasury Secretary about as long as Generalissimo Francisco Franco stayed dead. But he's done now, replaced by Hank Paulson, CEO of Goldman Sachs. The hold-up over replacing Snow, it says in the article, was that nobody would take the job. Think anyone will give Bush and Josh Bolten -- another Goldman hand now Bush's chief of staff in charge of reinvigorating the executive branch -- any credit for boating a big bass? Don't hold your breath. I cannot wait for the "he's no Bob Rubin" chorus that accompanied Snow's appointment.

So who will set the tone for economic policy in DC now? Ed Lazear currently heads the Council of Economic Advisors, and he's well known among economists but probably not on Wall Street. The other two members? Well, if you knew both their names before exploring that CEA link, you're a bigger wonk than me, and that takes a little doing.

In Rubin's day, he would travel to visit Greenspan fairly regularly. It would be wise for Paulson to get to know Ben Bernanke more regularly, since Bernanke is the guy who Lazear replaced. At any rate, it seems likely that Paulson will get to be more than just a voicebox for the Bush White House. He has experiences nobody around there has, particularly with Bolten off from OMB to the White House staff.

Well well. It must be that the U has many really bright students, becauseforty percent of them are getting As.

"The concern is that if we have a lot of classes where there is no competition for a grade, that dilutes the evaluation of students overall, which is not good for our jobs and unfair for our students," said neuroscience professor Dale Branton.

U officials say there is no widespread problem, but they don't know exactly why some classes have so many A's.

The U last year asked deans and faculty to look at classes with high numbers of A's.

"The question was what, if anything, we could do about it," said Branton, "and I think that's where the discussion got a little more lively than usual."

Nobody ever comes into your office to complain about an A (though increasingly we see some arguing for it over even an A- or B+, something I would never have dreamed of doing short of some error in grade calculation.)

Interestingly, the list of courses that give out many A's included most introductory courses (Introduction to Sociology was called "a joke" by "most students", as was art history.) Also, "Cultural studies focused on race and gender also showed up regularly on the A list." No surprise there. Our HURL department's A+, A, and A- as a share of all grades last fall was 64.2%. (Go ahead and research for yourself here.) My department had 18.2% in the same area.

At SCSU, where the average GPA was 2.82 last fall (spring grades not yet posted), there was once a list of what they called "high difficulty" courses (failure rates three times the university average.) These were available to anyone. Now the list is protect to only administrators. Most faculty view these lists as being of poor data quality, perhaps choosing to keep their heads in the sand. Students would have loved that list so as to avoid those courses.

PowerLine is running a poll for greatest American novels, and had this to say about Atlas Shrugged.

I want to say this gently, because I know I'm addressing some of our staunchest allies and most loyal readers. And I'm sure that the dozen or more emails we've already gotten are only the tip of the Ayn Rand-sized iceberg. But, to put it gently--Atlas Shrugged may or may not be great political philosophy, but it isn't great literature. It just isn't. Sorry!

This is a bad decision for the same reason removing Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath is a bad decision. Politics are only part of this. The decision of what went on John's list seems to be "no message novels", but in their own ways Huckleberry Finn and Invisible Man are message novels. I go back and forth on whether Atlas Shrugged or The Fountainhead is my favorite, but that means nothing in terms of the rankings. It's hard to figure which Rabbit you include, or which Bellow (I'd've chosen Herzog or Mr. Sammler's Planet instead, but I can live with Augie March.) All of which argues more for including Rand on the list. The case for Atlas Shrugged is quite simple -- name another novel that has launched as much discussion about things as fundamental as how the world works. I don't know how Joshua thinks it's not literature -- by what definition? Because English professors don't assign it? Why do you suppose that is?

Mrs. S expresses shock and dismay that Main Street would not make this list. I would have said the same for Slaughterhouse Five. They are fine books, but something has to be 22 and 23, and I suspect they go there.

But frankly even Rand isn't the most egregious of all. How does Red Badge of Courage miss this list? I think most of Crane's work was great, and in describing America the Bowery needs some mention too, but the greatest novel set in the Civil War is missed? And while I'm not as big a fan of the book as many, The Scarlet Letter should at least be explained for why it is not chosen. (Corrected: It wasn't on the RSS feed I read, but it was the first listed on the article. Sorry about that, and thanks to Bob Arthur for the correction. Damned pain pills!)

This must be some rightwing drivel, eh?

Were Professor Churchill a scientist, rather than a researcher engaged in social science research in ethnic studies, the equivalent would be (1) the misstatement of some underlying data…and (2) the total fabrication of other data to support his hypothesis.

If only. It's actually in the Investigating Committee's report to CU on Churchill. And, as Charles Mitchell points out, only one of five members of the committee thought this behavior warranted firing Churchill (I like Diana Hsieh's wording of the other four's behavior: "although they formed the proper moral judgment, they failed to act upon that knowledge.") Mitchell has a list of other references to Churchill's work in the report that are equally damning.

The left has a natural antipathy to free market economics and its practitioners, so even when they find common ground the leftist cannot resist a cheap smack. So Matthew Yglesias challenges those who signed the economists' letter on immigration to ask for no limits to H1-B visas for economics professors and open those spots up to competition (particularly set off by this follow up editorial by Alex Tabarrok). Ilya Somin, and Jonathan Adler accept Yglesias' offer. Those folks work at more competitive institutions than SCSU, but the result is the same. Our department has hired seven faculty in five years, and none were excluded due to visas. We hire them first and then, because there's about a 4-6 month gap between the agreement to hire and the first day of work, we can work out the visa then. So I have no problem arguing to remove the H1-B visa limit, but I'm not sacrificing anything by doing so.

My emergency mentioned on NARN, for those interested, is a 3 mm kidney stone, an attack of pain from which put me in the emergency room Saturday morning for some fairly strong painkillers. They say this is the male equivalent of childbirth. I've apologized to Mrs. S profusely. I'm hopeful this will all clear up by Thursday's convention coverage.

Dear Sir, I got last night in the mail your letter that was sent to delegates and alternates seeking the endorsement. A full page of the two-pager is devoted to your accomplishments. Fine, sir, but it's not like I've been asleep the last four years. I know what you've done, and I know you've done some things I like, some things I really like, and some things I really don't like. And I'm willing to accept that you haven't had the political backing to do all the things you promised to do, that Dean Johnson and Larry Pogemiller and their sycophantic supporters at the STrib have kept you from moving the ball as far down the field as we would have liked. Maybe things could have been done better, maybe you could have gotten more in the compromises of the last two years. But heck, what do I know? You're the governor, I just run some academic department out here in airport tour-land.

What I want to know is what you'll do in the next four years. What will you stand for. Here's what you told me in your letter:

If the Minnesota we all believe is possible is to ever become a reality, we must persist.

We have to put a stop to taxpayer-funded abortions and pass a constitutional amendment to protect marriage.

We must continue to reform education by paying teachers for performance, not just seniority and by making sure the hard-earned money we send to schools actually makes its way to classrooms.

We need to get serious about dealing with illegal immigration and facilitate the legal immigration our economy needs.

We have to continue to address the evolving challenges of methamphetamines and sex offenders. They're threats to our communities and our families and we need to deal with them head on.

Excuse me, Governor, but I was looking for something more. Not that any of those items on your list are unimportant. But what unifies this? What are your core beliefs? What is the one principle you will not sacrifice no matter what? (I hate to ask that, sir, but after the last two years the question crosses my mind more than once.)

Not only was I looking for more, I thought I'd see something about the crushing burden of government. As Doug Williams pointed out a few days ago, the recent Economic Freedom Index from the Pacific Research Institute -- some fine conservative and libertarians work there; I have published with them myself -- ranks Minnesota 44th of the fifty states in economic freedom, down one from 2003. Yet nary a word about that in your goals except to declare you are "holding government accountable to the taxpayers of Minnesota." Someone who provides me an itemized bill for $120 for dinner for two without a second bottle of wine has been "accountable". He's also asking me to pay a helluva lot for a meal.

Do you have any plans to address this?

I got this second letter in the very same mail, from some woman who says if she was elected governor she would "Remove MN from the list of the top ten highest taxed states in the nation." She also supports TABOR. Now you can try to convince me that TABOR isn't the best way to go on this, but it makes a statement. I know what that woman stands for. What I am reading from you is a passel of things you want to do, a task list.

I don't want a task list. I want a vision. If you finish the task list by 2008, what will be the vision that guides the rest of your term as governor? That's important. Without it people can get talked into all kinds of stuff.

Like stadiums.

I'm very much looking forward to hearing your vision, sir. See you next weekend.

Yours,
King Banaian, SD 15 (alternate)

P.S. If you need help on getting that vision down to sound bite size, you could just buy Hugh's shirt. And remember, state officeholders don't have primary responsibility for three of those five. Focus on the other two.

As mentioned, I'm working on a paper on Congressional voting for immigration reform, and I'm in the middle of data collection. I thought while I was at it I would code the votes from the Senate debate over the last two weeks. I know where to get the data, but I want opinions from my readers: Which votes on the amendments to S. 2611 do you think were critical or important votes? There were 24 such roll call votes, and coding them all looks wasteful to me. Your suggestions in the comments will be greatly appreciated.

The answer is Ronald Reagan, Second Presidential Debate, 1984. One more point to make about Gary's post is his correct analysis of the role of the biometric ID card. One of the items watered down in the Simpson-Mazzoli bill -- which was long on employer sanctions in its intent at least -- was that the I-9 form employers had to file permitted a broad variety of possible identification (see page 3 of the form). It is correct for critics of the Bush proposal to insist on a very narrow definition of the documentation needed to establish residency. If you snuck in and don't have it, I'm inclined to say 'tough luck'. For the same reason, we can't continue to allow fuzzy documentation of I-9s.

What do the Chinese treatment of dissenters to the Communist regime and diversity training have in common? David Beito says 'plenty'. He carries a story of Glenn Singleton (previously mentioned on this blog here) using numbers from a scoring system in a training exercise to hang around the necks of the participants. The numbers represent one's ranking in support of affirmative action and racial awareness. Singleton then has them stand by rank.

The worst part of it, however, is the groveling readiness of so many faculty to subject themselves to public degradation under the abusive eyes of Singleton's associates. Meanwhile, the same government schools and colleges which are wasting funds and time on this nonsense continue to dumb down standards and preside over the tyranny of low expectations for all students, black and white.

Along with Mitch, Captain Ed, PowerLine and the Fraters, we extend our condolences to the family of Smokin' Joe Hanson, first producer of NARN, who passed away earlier this week at the age of 50. A unique voice -- I loved calling in when I was traveling to hear his take on how the show was going, and as I was usually first to the station before we went to the four-hour two-volume format, I had many chances to sit with Joe in the control booth. It looked so easy and he could carry on a full conversation with you, the caller, and work the board while still listening to the show. As Mitch points out, he belonged to another time in radio. Now he belongs to the One who is fully God, and Joe will need nothing more.

I was Googling around for something after reading Gary's description of the interview of Tony Snow on Rush Limbaugh's show today, and I found this.

But it is true our borders are out of control, it is also true that this has been a situation on our borders back through a number of Administrations. And I supported this bill, I believe in the idea of amnesty for those who have put down roots and who have lived here, even though some time back they may have entered illegally. With regard to the employer sanctions, we must have that - not only to ensure that we can identify the illegal aliens but also, while some keep protesting about what it would do to employers, there is another employer that we shouldn't be so concerned about, and these are employers down through the years who have encouraged the illegal entry into this country because they then hire these individuals and hire them at starvation wages and with none of the benefits that we think are normal and natural for workers in our country. And the individuals can't complain because of their illegal status.

I'm not going to give you the link until tomorrow. Guess who said it?!

Karen Murdock informs me you can hear her side of the Century College/Mohammed cartoons story twice this coming weekend.

On Sunday night I will be on the program "Belahdan" ("With open arms") on Channel 17 at 10:30 pm. This is a 10-minute interview, which I taped last month out in Eden Prairie. Belahdan is a program aimed at Arab viewers.

On Monday (Memorial Day), KFAI ("Fresh air radio") will run a debate of approximately 45 minutes on the Danish cartoons. Participants are me, Farheen Hakeem (a Green party activist and would-be elected official who has called for a Muslim boycott of Century College), and Nick Sikon of the Minnesota ACLU. This debate will air at 6 pm on KFAI.

You will recall Ms. Hakeem from this post, to which Murdock responded. I absolutely want to hear that show Monday; KFAI streams if you do not live close enough to the stations.

Sean at The American Mind is a fellow reader of economics though it's not his profession. He sent me a link to a story that wonders why Milwaukee's employment falls while the rest of the state rises? It turns out true for us in St. Cloud as well -- the labor force is lower now than in 2004. Did they all move to the suburbs and out of the market area? I think that's partly true -- one of those little details in the local data is that St. Cloud's Metropolitan Statistical Area or MSA, for which we typically report labor statistics, does not include Sherburne County. (St. Cloud sits at the crux of three counties -- Benton, Sherburne and Stearns.) Sherburne is part of Minneapolis/St. Paul's MSA. Could our decline be due to more people leaving St. Cloud's other two counties to live in Sherburne, which has ready access from Highway 10 to the northern suburbs of Minneapolis? I'm planning a study of that in the near future.

It should come as no surprise that Milwaukee is seeing flight from the central city to its suburbs. The map I just linked shows the MSA. If there are that many people moving to the edges of the MSA by 2000, it stands to reason that more people are moving (just) outside the MSA now. People are willing to make longer trips now (between the 1990 and 2000 Censuses, average commute times rose 3.1 minutes to 25.5 minutes each way.) I suspect Milwaukee is just seeing people move out. But along with that follows services like retail. If the population is moving out of the metro Milwaukee area, so too do the service jobs. It's worth noting that goods-sector employment has risen by almost 1000 over the last 12 months there.

It's also worth remembering in this story that the unemployment data reported at the end of the article come from a different survey than the payroll data from employers that most of the story reports. The end of this story is making the rest of the story more confusing (if I was his editor, I'd've deleted it; it adds nothing to the story.)

PirateBallerina points out the poor reporting of Ward Churchill's response to the findings of the University of Colorado investigation committee.

Note to the AP: allegations were what the committee was investigating. The committee's report is of its findings. Don't they have dictionaries over at the Associated Press?

Hey Jim? There are these guys at PowerLine? They feel your pain.

Jim has a detailed set of notes linking what Churchill writes to what the committee said. Cf. Campus Magazine.

So says Vincent Cannato, in a review of Harry Lewis' new book on higher education, "Excellence Without a Soul":

So how does Harvard define an educated person? A Harvard education, the university states, "must provide a broad introduction to the knowledge needed in an increasingly global and connected, yet simultaneously diverse and fragmented world." Mr. Lewis, rightfully dismissive, notes that the school never actually says what kind of knowledge is "needed." The words are meaningless blather, he says, proving that "Harvard no longer knows what a good education is."

Boy does THAT sound familiar? Let's have a look at

SCSU's mission statement:St. Cloud State University is committed to excellence in teaching, learning, and service, fostering scholarship and enhancing collaborative relationships in a global community.

So what will be taught and learned? What is the value of "enhancing collaborative relationships"? And notice the presence of the word "global". Global is the word used by the diversity worshippers when they know the word "diversity" might put off the paying customers. As Lewis points out about Harvard is also true of SCSU: Most American universities do not think of themselves as American. The Sorbonne and Oxford do not suffer from these deficiencies.

The vision statement isn't much more help in deciding what it is they want our students to know:

St. Cloud State University will be a leader in scholarship and education for excellence and opportunity in a global community.

Scholarship for excellence? What is that? Cannato exposes the missing mundane things a university needs to create a real vision of what a good education includes:

There is too little accountability at most schools, Mr. Lewis observes. Trustees often abdicate their responsibilities, while college presidents have become glorified fund-raisers. Most professors are "narrowly educated experts" with little experience outside academia. They are "poorly equipped to help college students sort out" their lives. Meanwhile, professors teach what they want to teach based on their own interests, not on the needs of their students. At too many schools, Mr. Lewis argues, students pursue an "à la carte" course schedule that lacks coherence and can leave large gaps in knowledge.

And without a meaningful mission, nobody can tell what's missing.

Maybe I just live in places where they're more common, but I'm pretty confused by this:

Police weren't laughing Monday over a supposed "senior prank" by a Peoria High School student they accused of showing up on campus wearing a ski mask.

Police were called and the school, 11200 N. 83rd Ave., was placed in lockdown for nearly 2 ½ hours as more than two dozen officers searched for intruder, fearing that the masked man possibly was armed.

The student, Zubair Hussaini, 18, was arrested in a nearby neighborhood after the masked man fled from the campus, said Mike Tellef, a Peoria police spokesman.

There's nothing to indicate he did more than a) wear a ski mask and b) was Arab. I don't think either of those things is a crime. Did he say something? Did someone else say they saw him with a gun? If they did and he didn't have one and didn't ask someone to say so to create the prank, they've arrested the wrong guy.) Or was he arrested for wearing a ski mask while Arab? I have to guess there's something to this story not reported.

(Link via Edspresso, those people who buy the ad to your right, which I would greatly appreciate you visiting. It's a great site, and not just because they pay for ads here!)

Jeb Bush for NFL commissioner!

Bob Kerrey's take on the New School commencment can be summed up with two points: 1) "hey, it could have been worse"; and 2) "the students were within their rights." To which I say 1) that's not much of a defense -- this is akin to my son scratching the family sedan on a lightpost and saying at least he didn't knock it down onto the hood; and 2) it's not about their rights. Nobody wants students arrested or even have their degrees confiscated. We are concerned about boorishness, though ... as are those students' future employers, if they find any.

When the governing elite want something, it might be delayed by unified opposition, but grass-roots movements are always burdened by divided energies. Opposing the resources of the Minnesota Twins, Hennepin County commissioners and state legislators with legacies on the line are individuals who also have day jobs and nightly worries other than turf versus sod.

The stadium war was not won on the battlefield of ideas and policy; it was a successful siege. Government always wins in a war of attrition. It is inevitable.

Craig has now officially joined the dismal scientists. The late Mancur Olson would have nodded his head at this application of the logic of collective action. Simple application: Just because you have more voices and more votes doesn't mean you get your preferred outcome.

Please stop by Coldheartedtruth and offer condolences to Scott, whose father has lost his battle with cancer.

Chinese students at New Zealand’s Massey University staged a heated protest last week after the campus’s student newspaper used an image of Mao Zedong’s head—set atop the body of a curvaceous woman wearing a decidedly bourgeois décolletage—to satirize Cosmopolitan magazine. The lampooned title: Commupolitan. ...[T]he Chinese students said the satire in Chaff, the student paper, was as offensive to them as cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad were to Muslims worldwide earlier this year. The protesters said making fun of Mao, the founder of China’s Communist state, was akin to lampooning Jesus, George Washington, or President Bush. They also said they deserved better treatment as foreign students who pay full fees at the university.

Source: The Chronicle: Daily News Blog. I had not realized Mao had ascended into deity. Could be worse. They could have stuck that cartoon on a bulletin board.

(Source for photo.)

Both new stadia have spurred increased ticket sales:

The Gophers reported selling 102 football season tickets for next season on Monday as fans began to position themselves for seats in the on-campus stadium set to open in 2009. Athletic director Joel Maturi called it the first sign that things are going to be different when it comes to attending a Gophers football game.

"The reality is we're going from a 64,000 seat stadium to a 50,000 seat stadium," Maturi said. "There is some excitement being generated. So it could come to the point that come 2009, and you're not a season-ticket holder, you might not be getting in."

...The Twins reported significant activity in their ticket office, as well. Ticket manager Scott O'Connell said approximately 20 season tickets for the remainder of this season were sold before noon, with more expected before the end of the business day.

"People are trying to establish a priority at the new ballpark," O'Connell said. "We'll have some kind of program down the road that will be a deposit situation, where people can establish a pecking order for the new ballpark. People who already have season tickets or are buying them now will walk into a priority situation."

By the way, did you hear about this little bit of pork tossed into the Gopher bill?

A provision in the University of Minnesota's stadium bill that passed in the waning hours of the Legislative session commits about $80,000 in taconite taxes annually to keep the U.S. Hockey Hall of Fame in Eveleth, Minn.

Citing sagging attendance, hall officials earlier this month said they wanted to close the museum's doors and look for a new home. St. Paul officials, including City Council Member Dan Bostrom, suggested the capital city would welcome a new Hall of Fame, particularly on the East Side.

I reported the HHOF closing at The Sports Economist earlier this month. Rep. Tom Rukavina (DFL-Virginia) got the bribe annual contribution into the bill. He's hoping to get matching funds from private donors.

Regional retail gasoline prices, down to the lowest level in a month. Last week's This Week In Petroleum points out that for a 500-mile trip, a 75 cent-per-gallon difference in the price of gas if you drive a car getting 20 mpg is $18.75. So, how many people do you think are changing their minds on where to go on vacation?

And which way might oil prices go next? James Hamilton thinks natural gas prices might give us a hint.

And unsurprisingly, it's again from Russ Roberts:

Jeff Jacoby at the Boston Globe has a lot of interesting things to say about immigration. And as always, he says them very well. The most interesting point and unfortunately he doesn't have room to explore it fully, is that assimilation and the melting pot aren't what they used to be. He's right. Legislation of various kinds has made it easier to stay unassimilated and encourages people to identify either culturally or politically with their own ethnic groups.

I think there's another point to be made as well about assimilation. Some argue that we need public schools so that all of us can have a common vision for America and to aid the process of assimilation. But the public schools common vision for America is that there is no common vision. Everything is sacrificed to the god of tolerance. The common education children receive in public schools is that there should be no common vision of America. Everyone is entitled to a unique vision and no one's vision is better or worse than anyone else's.

I have noted the possibility that the contributions of current immigrants -- legal and illegal -- to society are less than in the past because of the lack of a common culture or language. See George Borjas on this point. But this point is vital: The inability of schools to push English as the sole language of instruction out of concerns for "cultural imperialism" is harming this very same group.

Haven't you ever wanted to tell your kid she or he is selfish? Haven't you always hoped for the day when your teen would grow up and start to show concern for others? If you do, you better hope they don't wake up to it during their valedictory speech.

Ben Kessler was chosen Tommie of the Year at the University of St. Thomas, and he decided to give .something other than milquetoast congratulations.

Ben Kessler, an academic All-America football player who plans to become a priest, chastised students for using birth control, criticized them for a recent food fight and upheld the St. Paul university's controversial policy against allowing unmarried faculty and staff members in romantic relationships to room together on school trips that involve students.

"Then he got into other failures of society, and one of my classmates next to me stood up and left," said Daphne Ho, a graduating senior whose family traveled from Hong Kong for the celebration.

..."He started out pretty well and then, out of nowhere, comes these bombshells about things he'd seen that irritated him," said Chris Kearney, a graduating senior from Hibbing, Minn.

"The heart of the speech was about making selfish decisions, so when I went up to get my diploma afterwards, I told him he made some good points about being selfish -- and he's the man that was selfish enough to ruin hundreds of people's graduations," Kearney said.

Several students were seen crying, while others hollered to get Kessler off the stage. Brandon Mileski, a 2002 St. Thomas graduate, was in the crowd to watch his girlfriend receive her diploma.

"Dozens of students literally started walking out when he brought up birth control issues and, at one point, I thought a riot would break out," Mileski said. "I give him credit because he kept on going when everyone started booing and heckling.

"At one point he was talking about the meaning of true happiness and someone stood up and screamed: 'I'll be happy when your speech in done!' "

Well, I've wanted to say that last line at a lot of graduations!

I'll give Chris Kearney credit for taking his message privately to Kessler, though I may disagree with Kessler. But to the booing of him -- like those boos at Boston College or the New School -- I say it is as much if not more disgraceful to disrupt graduation as anything Kessler said. He is voted an award for his four years of schooling, but only if he says the right things on stage.

Unsurprisingly, St. Thomas president Rev. Dennis Dease took time off from his unwavering Castrophilia to call Kessler's remarks "not appropriate" and to accept an apology from Kessler.

At the same time, the president said, it was also important "to treat one another with respect as we speak and as we listen, regardless of how controversial an issue may be."

You had four years to get your school to teach that, Reverend. You might want to review the curriculum.

UPDATE: Dease's statement is here, and the PioneerPress report includes this lovely sentiment.

Aus and other students were upset that St. Thomas officials didn't stop the speech.

"If someone were to start talking about their beliefs on gay rights, I guarantee you someone from the administration would have put an end to it right away," Aus said.

After Kessler's speech, Thomas Rochon, the university's chief academic officer, told the crowd it takes courage to express one's convictions. Aus and others saw it as Rochon validating the remarks.

I know Tom Rochon -- we have common Claremont Graduate University roots -- and I suspect what he meant was to protect academic free speech. Who knew it didn't carry from the classroom to the graduation stand?

No wonder Paul Krugman still has a column, when his boss is Arthur Sulzberger. Pretending that his entire generation had committed to preventing , he now says he's sorry:

...."It wasn't supposed to be this way," Sulzberger said. "You weren't supposed to be graduating in an America fighting a misbegotten war in a foreign land. You weren't supposed to be graduating into a world where we are still fighting for fundamental human rights, be it the rights of immigrants to start a new life, the right of gays to marry or the rights of women to choose."

Sulzberger added the graduates weren't supposed to be let into a world "where oil still drives policy and environmentalists have to relentlessly fight for every gain.

"You weren't. But you are and I am sorry for that," Sulzberger said.

No problem except that your job is to report out the facts, something which the Times hasn't done well of late. These students would have been better off doing what Sulzberger did instead of attending his graduation at Tufts -- ride a bike.

Scholar's Notebook reports on the results of surveys of graduates of Wayzata High School, which uses integrated math exclusively (except for AP and an off-campus UMTYMP program). Of the 54% of the students who went to college and took a math placement test, 24% had to take remedial math. 20% got to take an advcanded math class. Is that success?

(Meanwhile, Littlest won her school division of a national year-long mathematics meet.)

I'll have a longer note on the Twins deal when the smoke clears later today, but I did want to make note of Eva's point on Sen. Tarryl "Blue Dress" Clark's vote on the stadium and removing the ability of Hennepin County voters to decide if they wanted to pay for it. I had a chance private conversation with her on this in February, and at that time she said she did not see herself voting to deny the vote to Hennepinians. I heard Marty and Tony say on their show Sunday that when they inquired of her vote, her office said she would not decide until it was time to vote. Well, now we know.

Now she ends up on the side of the DFL contribution to a bipartisan deal to pass the deal and stick Hennepin with the bill. It is interesting that it is newer representatives and senators (like Clark, Larry Haws, Larry Hosch, and Dan Severson) who have been sent to vote for the bill.

We interrupt the newly-reinstituted dogblogging this week to commemorate our cat Gladys, who died on Tuesday. It took us a few days to find any pictures of her from her younger years. Partly this is because she aged over a long time (she was a stray, and our best guess is that she was 18 this year, but perhaps older), and partly because I tend to be the cat guy, Mrs. S and Littlest prefer dogs and they control the cameras. I'll have this post up top for the weekend in memory.

It's also odd that I took this so much better. Sunday she came upstairs to the kitchen and groaned as she laid down, and there she stayed for her last 36 hours. You knew it was the end. Breathing was slow, she couldn't eat, and we knew there was nothing to be done. Sure, take her to the vet and put her on kitty-IV, I guess, but that cure would only last awhile.We didn't want to see last days that were as bad as our dog Betty's were, so if it was possible for her to spend her last days at home, we figured, so be it.

This was a cat that played all the time, but liked to observe only from a distance. She was not a snuggly cat. The little black spot on the edge of her nose -- a little crooked and offset from center -- gave her a whimsical look. Her favorite games when younger were with a ball like Betty did, but later she learned to stick her head between the stairwell posts leading down to the basement. This she would do when your head was at the level of the upstairs floor, and if you walked along that side of the stairs she would butt her head against yours. Then she'd duck back from between those two posts and step down to another slot and do it again. Like I say, whimsical.

As I say, I'm the cat person of the house. When I write in my home office there almost always is a cat or two. We still have Pepper, an all-black stray that adopted our porch three years ago and wormed his way in. Pep is a much more clingy, affectionate cat than Gladys, hopping into my lap when attention is needed. Gladys was never that way. She would sit in a box near you like the picture at the top, or on this bed in my office -- when I am in writing tunnels I prefer not to disturb the family and fall asleep down here. She would never jump in bed like the dogs or Pepper do, unless food was needed.

It took us almost two days to drop her for disposal at the vet this week. She was never the same after Betty died and if cats and dogs go to Heaven, they're fighting over a ball just about now.

See you, girl.

UPDATE: Margaret recites a very nice poem.

That's how I spent most of the day, and now I don't have much more to add to the blog. Just updated http://del.icio.us/kbanaian. If you're interested in sports econ, you can look at the syllabus, and be sure to read at The Sports Economist. I may be more active over there the next few weeks. I'm amazed how many more blogs and resources for sports economics there are out there. I'm also amazed how good Darren Rovell is, but a blog just about GatorAde?

Still think I'm all wet on immigration? Be sure to call in tomorrow at NARN. I doubt we'll talk about too much else.

I decided to try to read more of what the "state of the profession" was on illegal immigration from Mexico after this post Tuesday provoked some negative reaction. I have done research on remittances but not Mexican remittances from the US, so while I know the general literature on immigration and think Alex Tabarrok's letter is in general correct, I have to agree with the commenters who note that the letter did not sufficiently distinguish between legal and illegal immigration. And as I said, the literature on immigration generally is divided on the effect of immigrants on U.S. wages.

One expert in the field, Prof. Gordon Hanson of UC San Diego has an upcoming article in the Journal of Economic Literature. (For non-economists: the JEL is published by the American Economics Association, the national professional organization. Its most frequent use is as an index of scholarlship in the profession, but it also runs articles that often are considered to be statements of where the literature is in a certain field, or to run in depth book reviews of important works. So a publication there carries somewhat of an imprimatur of "received wisdom" and has undergone substantial peer review.) It took me the better part of an evening to read, and all I've done here is pull out some interesting paragraphs, followed with interpretation and commentary from me. If you want to cut to the chase, there are three summary points at the bottom.

On the nature of illegal immigrants:

Immigrants from Mexico, whether legal or illegal, are drawn disproportionately from the middle of the country’s schooling distribution. Over time, illegal migrants appear to have become more likely to be female, to work outside of agriculture, and to settle in the United States on a long-term basis. Largely absent in the literature is analysis of the life-cycle behavior of migrants. Many individuals from Mexico first enter the United States as illegal immigrants and over time gain a legal permanent residence visa through sponsorship by a U.S. family member. One would expect that how a prospective migrant responds to changes in U.S. or Mexico economic conditions, or the extent to which a migrant already in the United States assimilates into U.S. society, would depend on whether the individual expects to obtain a U.S. green card in the future. Family sponsorship in the granting of entry visas may thus create a direct link between receiving-country policies on legal immigration and the incentive for illegal immigration.

Thus the ability of an illegal immigrant to woo a US family into sponsorship is a lure for Mexicans to come to the US. The fellow you hired off a street corner to move your furniture becomes your friend, and asks one day ... You have to wonder then why we have policies that allow a single family's offer of sponsorship to be determinative of whether an immigrant should be granted admission to the US.

On what motivates them to come to the States.

...Attempted illegal immigration appears to be particularly responsive to shocks to the Mexican economy, with surges in apprehensions at the U.S.-Mexico border coming shortly after downturns in Mexico. Yet, given the large magnitude of U.S.-Mexico wage differences and the small apparent cost of crossing the border illegally, the volume of migration flows from Mexico to the United States is surprisingly low. Also, given the high relative return to education in Mexico, it is puzzling that Mexican immigrants exhibit intermediate selection in terms of their observable skills. One would expect less-skilled Mexican immigrants to have the strongest incentive to migrate abroad....

This may be the most surprising part of the study for me, that it is somewhat better educated (not college graduates, but with a fair amount of HS) females that come to the US and work in rather than poorly educated males to work in the fields. There is now data from Mexican sources that give us a better indication of who is coming, though, and it appears that the demographics of illegal immigrants is indeed changing. This makes sense to me, though: If the return to education in America is rising, then those drawn to the US from abroad will increasingly have more education. Though, it should be pointed out, the ratio of earnings of poorly-educated native workers to immigrant workers is higher for lower education levels.

Thoughts on the amnesty/normalization process.

Over the last two decades, the United States has greatly increased the resources it devotes to controlling illegal immigration. The government has, in particular, beefed up enforcement at specific U.S. border cities. While the United States has criminalized the hiring of illegal immigrants, the government devotes few resources to monitoring U.S. worksites for the employment of unauthorized workers. The net effect of changes in enforcement policy (coupled with changes in U.S. and Mexico economic conditions) has been increasing levels of illegal immigration. There is no formal political economy theory of immigration control that would explain why the United States chooses border over interior enforcement. The United States appears to be on the verge of granting an amnesty to at least some of the illegal immigrants residing in the country, which would come two decades after an earlier legalization under the Immigration Reform and Control Act [a/k/a Simpson-Mazzoli --kb]. There is also no formal theory that would explain why a country would choose to enact imperfect and costly enforcement against illegal immigration today and later grant an amnesty to those that entered illegally.

In other words, we have created a system that in essence rewards those who can evade relatively expensive border security measures. Between 1994 and 2001 we increased the number of hours of Border Patrol officers on the line watching for illegal immigrants by a factor of four. Have we reached the point of diminishing returns on border enforcement? Maybe...

The price a migrant pays to a smuggler is higher in years when border enforcement is higher. But the elasticity of coyote prices with respect to enforcement is small, in the range of 0.2 to 0.5. During the sample period, a one-standard-deviation increase in enforcement would have lead to an increase in coyote prices of less than $40; in the mid 1990s average coyote prices were $410. The estimated demand for smuggler services and the individual probability of choosing to migrate to the United States are both quite responsive to changes in coyote prices. However, given the small enforcement elasticity of coyote prices, the observed increase in border enforcement over 1986 to 1998 appeared to reduce the average migration probability among MMP (survey of Mexicans in the border area) respondents by only 10%.

That's a little too economics-ese for some readers, so let me explain by analogy. If you try to stop drug smuggling into the US and pinch a large shipment of, say, cocaine, the price of cocaine should rise. But the size of the rise in cocaine prices depends on the quantity of the other shipments and on the responsiveness of cocaine users to increased prices. If border security was greatly increasing over the period after Simpson-Mazzoli and all we got was a 10% decrease in the flow of illegal immigrants (which would be a reduction of about 20-30k per year), then how much more will the fence do for us? The way to see that is to see whether the price of coyotes rises dramatically after the fences are built. So far, there's not much evidence that other enforcement measures have had much effect. And again, we haven't spent nearly so much on internal enforcement, probably because politically it's unpalatable. Gordon explains further,

The United States has undertaken a massive increase in the resources that it devotes to border enforcement. Yet, the apparent impact of this increase has been modest. While expanded border enforcement has reduced attempted illegal entry at what used to be major crossing points in California and Texas border cities, it appears to have had a small effect on deterring illegal immigration overall (measured either in terms of changes in smuggler prices or the average probability a Mexican national migrates to the United States). One possibility is that there are important non-convexities in enforcement such that it only becomes an effective deterrent to illegal entry at high levels of resource commitment. This is perhaps the implicit argument of those calling for further expansion of U.S. enforcement efforts. Another possibility is that U.S. enforcement strategies are ineffective by design, due to the political economy of immigration control.

For instance, in 2005 the Western Growers Association, a business lobby representing farmers in the western United States, issued a statement complaining that excessive enforcement was preventing farmers in Arizona from hiring sufficient immigrant labor to harvest their winter lettuce crop. In 1998, INS raids of onion fields at harvest time in the state of Georgia prompted the U.S. Attorney General, both Georgia U.S. senators, and three Georgia congressional representatives to criticize the INS for injuring Georgia farmers.

Links infra are mine. One of the reasons the House has an easier time passing immigration control laws is that the areas most affected are either border districts or districts with a high concentration of industries that use immigrant labor (like textiles or farming.) Senators, however, can be lobbied by those groups to the detriment of the rest of their states, since there is the Olsonian problem of having intense benefits to lax internal enforcement and diffuse costs. (Two colleagues and I are presenting a study on this at the Western Economics Association meetings in July in San Diego that gets at some of these questions.) This is one explanation for why the Senate is generating a softer-line immigration bill than the House.

What should we learn from all this? I'd make three points

1. Contrary to some analyses, we have spent a great deal on increasing border security in the last few years; it has had at best modest effects on inflows of illegal immigrants. This would argue that the increase of personnel through the call-up of National Guard probably will have little effect. And how can we be so sure that a fence will have greater effects? We don't know.
2. The character of the illegal immigrant has changed over the last forty years to be better educated and more female. These illegal immigrants are able to use the existing program of sponsorship to convert their status from illegal to legal already.
3. We continue to see little done to deal with internal enforcement, and we therefore may end up with an increasingly disproportionate share of our immigration control resources at the border. This mixture is probably suboptimal. Indeed, there appears to be a case to use the fence as a substitute for border patrol personnel and use it to free those officers up to raid firms and industries that make use of illegal immigrant labor. A combination of business pressure and the diversity/racial warfare crowd prevents this from happening, and there's no sign of a change in thought in Congress on this issue.

I've been fairly silent on the stadium bills over the last month as the usual legislative shenanigans have caused the three stadium proposals to merge and diverge more than once. It now looks like the Vikes get kicked to the curb for a year, while the original Twins proposal is heading for approval.

The Vikings, who two days earlier said they would not request state aid or a retractable roof for their proposed stadium in Blaine, ran a reverse Wednesday night, saying they needed $115 million from the state in the form of tax exemptions and proceeds from the sale of the Metrodome to pay for the roof. But the revised plan, which was greeted less than enthusiastically by a House-Senate conference committee, raised new concerns.

The Vikes have sucked the air out of discussions almost all week so far. I could rant for weeks about this thing -- I have a sports econ course the next three weeks in which I am going to bring out my artillery -- but let me call your attention to one particularly egregious piece of crap that Minnesota Momentum, the movement to build the Vikes stadium that has been sticking ads in and on anything that moves, has been saying. This is from their print ad insert in the StarTribune from May 10:

No existing state general fund money will be used to fund this project. Only new state tax revenue that wouldn't exist "but for" this project will pay for the state's portion.

What dollars would exist with Northern Lights that didn't exist before? This is the same multiplier scam that other teams have tried in other cities. As my friends Dennis Coats and Brad Humphreys point out, this methodology is flawed because the money spent at the stadium is being diverted from other sources in the same region. The net effect is much smaller than the investment projects in the other 14 Minnesota communities using the sales tax to fund economic development.

The Gopher stadium, I predict, will finish the session passed in about this current form. Taxing sports memorabilia to fund the stadium might not, but the rest of it most likely will.

I never thought I'd find myself agreeing with Greens on anything, but I'd hold one of these signs in front of Steve Kelley's place too.

Meanwhile, Larry Schumacher is following the Legislature and is unpleased with what he sees. Because the Mayor has asked a moratorium, I will not refer to the meat of tubular shape for the making of metaphors. My take is that this is like watching those dot races on the scoreboard at the Metrodome between innings.

You're a law student, and you take a course in negotiations. Negotiations being something adversarial, you might think you'd hear some people use rough language; language matters in negotiation. The DesMoines Register reports that at the University of Iowa's law school, students of color are complaining that a professor's readings which included a racial slur were creating a hostile environment.

The university's Black Law Students Association, a group of 27 students, said in a letter to law faculty, U of I administration and the Iowa Board of Regents executive director that a March 29 incident was "indicative of a much larger problem at the College of Law."

The readings were read aloud in class.

The readings, one from Robert Caro's Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of former President Lyndon Johnson and another a 1964 speech by a black sharecropper named Fannie Lou Hamer, were in context with the course, Jones said, but students may not have been sufficiently prepared to hear the racial slurs.

[Professor Gerald] Wetlaufer apologized to students for not adequately warning them about the readings but said he believes they were relevant to the course, which focuses on the power of language.

"These were not words I used to oppress anyone in the class or promote anyone else's agenda," he said. "This word appears 49 times in 'To Kill a Mockingbird.' I don't think I have crossed some line here."

...Tori Bobryk, a third-year law student who is white, walked out of the class because she was offended by Wetlaufer reading the slur without warning, she said.

"I wish there had been a preface or a disclaimer or a discussion afterward," she said.

The readings are linked to the article. I also find this paragraph in the article.

In another case, a student brought up the idea of reinstating slavery, and the professor, whom Nelson would not name, did not contradict the notion, he said.

If it was my classroom, I would not have said anything and tried to get other students to fill the silence. Remember, this is not a classroom with 18-year-olds from Ottumwa. These are future law practitioners. If you can't stand up in a classroom to someone who suggests something as stupid as reinstating slavery, how do you expect to defend me from criminal prosecution?

A few days ago I said I was in the 5.25% Fed funds rate camp.

As I said last week, I'm still inclined to think we are going to 5.25%. David Altig reads the futures market as saying no, but I'm going out on a limb to say they'll reverse that judgment very soon.

Barry Ritholz commented he was too. Well Barry's crowing now with the new inflation data and everyone seemingly rushing to our bandwagon. Nattering Naybob deserves honorable mention too. Altig reviews the reviews and says wait for the PCE report next Friday.

I won't crow quite so much, because my read on the economy isn't so much a galloping inflation as a galloping real economy. But nevertheless, look for that rate move in June, and then great GDP numbers at the end of July. Let's see if I ever link to this post again.

From an NBER study of data on border patrol hours invested and sectoral wages in border areas:

...for the United States, only the lumber industry in California and Texas is affected positively, and only slightly, by border enforcement. When enforcement is high, wages rise slightly. For all other industries they examine, there is no impact on the wages of poorly educated males in U.S. border regions.

In Mexican border regions, though, wages fall for poorly educated males in Tijuana when U.S. border enforcement is high. Tijuana is where a large number of immigrants attempted to enter the United States illegally over the authors' sample period.

Using monthly and quarterly data on wages, person-hours logged by the U.S. Border Patrol, and the number of apprehensions made, the authors conclude that stricter enforcement does deter illegal immigration. But illegal immigration has only a minimal effect on labor markets in U.S. border regions, probably for two reasons. First, given continuing illegal immigration, U.S. natives may leave border regions or be deterred from moving to those regions. Second, the economies of border regions may gradually shift to industries that make intensive use of immigrants' skills. The authors thus conclude that the perceived impact of illegal immigration on wages has been exaggerated.

The paper has been published (84 RevEconStat 73-92 (2002)).

There's a letter at Marginal Revolution, sponsored by the Independent Institute, that makes the economic case for immigration. Alex Tabarrok, pushing the letter, says

The goal of the letter is not to cover all the issues but rather to say, 'here is the hard-won consensus that economists have come to on these major issues. By all means let us have a debate but let it be an informed debate.'

That's important because if you just read the letter itself, I'm not sure you'd come away thinking anything more than "they want open borders", with arguments that immigrants "do not take American jobs" and "[o]verall, immigration has been a net gain for existing American citizens." As I was scrambling for yesterday's interview I kept flipping around the internet to a variety of articles on economic effects of immigration, and the conclusion I came to and expressed to Lee and Jeff was that it's not clear-cut. Tyler Cowen and Daniel Rothschild do a fair job summarizing the competing evidence, though they would come down on the same side as Tabarrok. Reading summaries of the work of George Borjas and David Card, as Cowen and Rothschild do, would greatly benefit people who are currently entrenched on one side or the other of the issue. An open debate of the Borjasistas and the Cardians would highlight some very bad thinking on both sides of the debate that I've heard thus far.

Maybe politically, "build the damn fence now" is a winning strategy (though I find this note from Deacon at PowerLine quite interesting in arguing the converse). Maybe. But many bad policies are the product of hasty, politically-motivated stategery. I am more convinced, the more I read, that the Bush speech is good policy, even if it doesn't end up painting the map red.

From the Mises mail list, a definition on the Seattle Public Schools website.

Cultural Racism:
Those aspects of society that overtly and covertly attribute value and normality to white people and Whiteness, and devalue, stereotype, and label people of color as “other”, different, less than, or render them invisible. Examples of these norms include defining white skin tones as nude or flesh colored, having a future time orientation, emphasizing individualism as opposed to a more collective ideology, defining one form of English as standard, and identifying only Whites as great writers or composers.

If you ever wondered why I say political correctness is just socialism dressed up with minorities substituted for the proliterian class, you need look no further. Thrift and individualism are now defined as racist.

It's just "alternative historical perspective."

I have received the report of the Investigative Committee of the University of Colorado and consider it a travesty. This "investigation" has all along been a pretext to punish me for engaging constitutionally-protected speech and, more generally, to discredit the sorts of alternative historical perspective I represent.

Eugene Volokh dispenses with this nonsense even before Churchill's raving.

This isn't a criminal prosecution, but the university's decision whether to keep someone on its faculty; it need not keep a dishonest scholar on board, even if the complaints about the scholar were motivated partly by the complainers' hostility to the scholar's viewpoints. And as best I can tell, there's little reason to think that the University wouldn't have investigated Churchill had he been accused of the same misconduct but had expressed diferrent views. These are serious charges, and my guess is that most universities would indeed look into alleged multiple falsification of evidence and plagiarism by their faculty members.

David French agrees. It was noted in the report (as reported in Inside Higher Ed) that the report's authors thought the timing might have been motivated by Churchill's statements after 9/11. Still, that hardly matters. A single mistake of plagiarism is bad enough; this report found several. The only way Churchill can win his threatened lawsuit at this point would be to expose several other cases of plagiarism on campus that the University knowingly ignored. Good luck with that.

For those of you with a fascination about this guy, Pirate Ballerina -- whose blog has been steadily about "The Imam of Indigenism" -- has a link to video of Churchill discussing the report. I admit to spilling a little coffee this morning laughing at it.

It is worth pointing out that the report includes some not-so-oblique criticism of the university for hiring the guy and bringing this thing on themselves, and directs attention at the media (and I suppose bloggers -- perhaps I give us too much credit) for shining light on this whole affair. Some selective quoting:

Thus the decision to hire, and especially to confer continuous tenure on, a faculty member is a deeply consequential one for the University, for by making this decision the University commits itself to the defense of the individual’s work, so long as he or she lives up to the University’s expectations. We believe that the University of Colorado may have made the extraordinary decision to hire Professor Churchill, a charismatic public intellectual with no doctorate and no history of regular faculty membership at a university, to a tenured position without any probationary period in part because at that moment in the institution’s history, it desired the favorable attention his notoriety and following were expected to bring. This notoriety was achieved to some extent by the publication of some of the very essays that have now come under scrutiny because of their scholarly shortcomings. The hiring was, in short, largely the consequence of Professor Churchill’s effectiveness as a polemicist.

In light of the explicit requirements of the Regents’ Laws requiring the university to resist outside interference and pressures, it is at least ironic that the Interim Chancellor of the University has now become the formal complainant in this much-publicized proceeding. The University has perhaps gotten more than it bargained for when it made its high-risk decisions about Professor Churchill in the early 1990s, but there is very little about the present situation that is not foreshadowed by developments across the last fifteen years. For us, the indignation now exhibited by some University actors about Professor Churchill’s work appears disingenuous, as they and their predecessors are the ones who decided to hire him.

...The role of the public and press in attacking Professor Churchill is part of a more general opening up of the academic world to wider participation over the past 20 years. Debates that would previously have been conducted within the academic world itself by scholars who worked in a given field are now matters of public knowledge and sometimes of considerable public interest. Everyone is able to express opinions about academic issues by contacting the media, posting ideas on the web or internet, or sending e-mails directly to the scholars involved. While this expansion of discussion has many positive features, it contains some worrying characteristics too. Members of the press have acquired considerable power to advance or harm scholarly reputations, especially for people who frequently appear in public venues and who advocate controversial positions about contemporary issues. Circulation figures rise if news media prepare accounts that grab public attention, sometimes irrespective of complete accuracy. Short news segments do not lend themselves to balanced reports of complex arguments. The ease of posting or sending anonymous statements on the web or e-mail has weakened previous expectations for accuracy and civility in debate over public issues. ...

These changes in communication can have particular impact when an accusation of academic wrongdoing becomes a matter of public interest. People without formal training in a particular field of scholarship are able to assert just as forcefully as specialists that someone has falsified or misused evidence or has offered unwarranted interpretations. In this case, both the University administration and Professor Churchill relied at times on assertions made by “researchers” with no formal qualifications, background, or training about the topics under consideration. ...If any evidence of misconduct is found, scholars who critique accepted views are far more likely to be fired from their jobs—not just reprimanded—than are academics who support familiar interpretations.

The considerations we mention have been very much on our minds as we have considered a recommendation concerning the appropriate sanction for Professor Churchill’s misconduct.

One is left to wonder whether this can explain the lenient recommendations for sactioncs from some of the committee members.

Similar thoughts and more context at ACTA Online.

In a first for me, I'll be on KKMS Live with Jeff & Lee around 3:30p CT. It sounds like a half hour version of News in Review. I'd better go study.

All 125 pages of it are here. Unfortunately, while all five members found serious research misconduct, only one member of the committee thought it met the requirements for Churchill's dismissal from the university. Two others thought "Professor Churchill’s research misconduct is so serious that it satisfies the criteria for revocation of tenure and dismissal specified in section 5.C.1 of the Laws of the Regents, and hence that revocation of tenure and dismissal, after completion of all normal procedures, is not an improper sanction," but they thought it wasn't the most appropriate sanction, deciding to split the difference and suspend him for five years. The remaining two thought a two-year suspension would be sufficient. I'll have to read the rest later, as I'm getting ready to do an interview shortly.

Thanks to Linda Seebach for posting a comment with a heads-up.