HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: “Teachers in many states automatically get raises if they complete a master’s degree. The trouble is that those credentials do nothing to improve teaching competence, a new report shows.” Credentialed, not educated.
Archive for 2011
April 7, 2011
APPARENTLY, Prosser won the election. More here. Wow. Stay tuned.
UPDATE: Here’s the latest from the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel.
David Prosser gained 7,582 votes in Waukesha County, after a major counting error of Brookfield results was detected, County Clerk Kathy Nickolaus announced in a stunning development this afternoon.
Nickolaus says the reason for the big change is that data transmitted from the City of Brookfield was imported but that she failed to save those results to the database. Brookfield cast 14,315 votes on April 5 — 10,859 of those votes went to Prosser and 3,456 went to JoAnne Kloppenburg.
So is this kosher? There’s no suggestion of fraud in the story. Reader Stu Wagner writes: “My suspicious, cynical side says that the Republicans delayed the full count to flush out any Democrat tricks. God bless ‘em, I hope they’re just that smart.” I’d be very surprised if they were that smart. . . .
POPULAR MECHANICS: Southwest Airlines Scare: How the 737’s Fuselage Weakness Went Undetected.
MAKING BUILDINGS with a printer. “The work is at an early stage, but the new approach to construction and design suggests many new possibilities. A load-bearing wall could be printed in elaborate patterns that correspond to the stresses it will experience from the load it supports from wind or earthquakes, for instance.”
MARY KATHARINE HAM: Hammertime: Obama Ignores Results On School Choice.
PETER SUDERMAN talks inflation and agriculture policy on Freedom Watch.
A GLOOMIER LOOK at the Fukushima reactor problems.
A controversial professor suing his university in North Carolina won a key ruling Wednesday from a federal appeals court — and the decision could eventually benefit faculty members at all public institutions.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit ruled that the 2006 Supreme Court decision in Garcetti v. Ceballos — which limited the free speech rights of some public employees — does not apply to faculty members of public colleges and universities. . . . In the ruling that Wednesday’s decision overturned, a federal judge ruled that political columns written by Mike Adams, an associate professor of criminal justice at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, had no First Amendment protection in his dispute with the university, because he submitted some of the columns with his proposal for a promotion.
The idea that a professor’s op-eds had no First Amendment protections enraged many who monitor academic freedom issues. Adams received backing from the Alliance Defense Fund, which frequently defends the rights of religious students and faculty members, and the American Association of University Professors — two groups that have differed on many other issues.
In his suit, Adams charges that he was denied promotion to full professor because of his conservative, Christian views.
Read the whole thing.
CLIVE CROOK: Don’t Take This Recovery For Granted. I’m not.
PAY NO ATTENTION to the fraud behind the curtain.
REMEMBERING Parson Brownlow. “Almost instantly he became known for his delight in insulting prominent men. He’d been an editor for only a year when he was first hanged in effigy in the region’s ‘metropolis,’ Knoxville. He noted that the gesture more than doubled his Knoxville subscribers. He seemed to relish reader reaction. Then and later, outrage was proof that readers were paying attention.” Some things never change. And I like this: “He drew ire, and sometimes gunfire. He was the intended victim of at least two assassination attempts. Shot at through a window as he sat by the hearth in his home, he returned fire.” When he became Governor, “Tennessee enjoyed—some Tennesseans more than others—an ironic status as a former slave state where black citizens had rights never known to most blacks in the free North. Under Brownlow’s administration, Tennessee became one of only six states in the entire union where blacks could vote.”
And, after the Civil War, “Adolph Ochs, the patriarch of the modern New York Times, began his career in Knoxville working for a Brownlow paper.”
RAND SIMBERG: Elon Musk’s Space Launch Industry Earthquake.
RISING VITAMIN D LEVELS correlated with lower blood pressure.
AUTOBLOG road tests the Chevy Volt.
WITH A BULLET! Our paper on McDonald v. Chicago is now Number One among top downloaded recent articles at the Social Science Research Network. Thanks to InstaPundit readers for the interest.
MICHAEL YON POSTS a new dispatch from Afghanistan.
IN THE MAIL: From Elizabeth Price Foley, The Law of Life and Death.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Colleges Spend Far Less on Educating Students Than They Claim, Report Says.
While universities routinely maintain that it costs them more to educate students than what students pay, a new report says exactly the opposite is true.
The report was released today by the Center for College Affordability and Productivity, which is directed by Richard K. Vedder, an economist who is also an adjunct scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a Chronicle blogger. It says student tuition payments actually subsidize university spending on things that are unrelated to classroom instruction, like research, and that universities unfairly inflate the stated cost of providing an education by counting unrelated spending into the mix of what it costs them to educate students.
“The authors find that many colleges and universities are paid more to provide an education than they spend providing one,” says a news release on the report, “Who Subsidizes Whom?”
The report’s authors used data from the U.S. Education Department’s Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System, or Ipeds, to conclude that more than half of students attend institutions that take in more per student in tuition payments than what it actually costs them to deliver an education.
Read the whole thing.
MORE ON Obama’s scoffing at high gas prices’ impact on Americans. “Obama fills the role of clueless aristocrat by telling a man who explains that he can’t afford to fill his gas tank at current prices that he should instead buy a new car. If the press reported it, the retort would prove rather embarrassing — which may be why the Associated Press scrubbed it from their coverage of the event. . . . Just think how Marie Antoinette would have fared with a media so devoted to spinning for her.” I saved a screenshot for the record. There’s also a link to video.
UPDATE: More on Obama and gas prices. “Obama insisted yesterday that ‘There is no magic formula to driving gas prices down.’ That is true. But there are also things the government can do that will drive the price of gas up. And the Obama administration has done many of them.”
ANOTHER UPDATE: Did the AP’s scrubbing violate their corrections policy?
MORE: Reader Jennifer Townsend writes: “One point in the video that is not being commented on is Obama seems stunned that someone might actually *need* a larger vehicle rather than using it as a status symbol. ‘You may have a big family, but it probably isn’t that big.’ When children are in car seats, you can fit two children in a sedan. You might be able to squeeze three car seats into a smaller SUV but not comfortably. More than three children and a van or large SUV are the only options. And children are being required to stay in car seats for longer and longer periods of time, upwards to age 12.”
If Obama read InstaPundit, he’d know stuff like that. More here.
MORE STILL: A reader emails: “Isn’t Obama’s comment, ‘you might want to think about a trade-in’ just one more piece of evidence that he’s innumerate? Most people who have a vehicle that gets bad mileage have considered replacing it, but a quick, back-of-the-envelope calculation shows that gas would have to go a great deal higher before it makes financial sense to replace the car.. . . Obamacare, the stimulus package, budgets (and deficits) – the examples are everywhere that neither he nor anyone around him do the math.” Hey, there’s no math section on the LSAT nowadays.
STILL MORE: Or maybe Obama really means it: “Maybe the unspoken message is: Having more kids than will fit in a small car is a decision that high gas prices effectively disincentivize.”
Plus, from the comments: “If he were a Republican, this would be his ‘Bush (41) meets a grocery scanner moment.’ But he’s not, so it is quietly buried.”
BYRON YORK: Obama Pays Tribute To Al Sharpton. “Sharpton’s organization has done more than just fight injustice and inequality. The National Action Network has also been a key part of Sharpton’s unorthodox finances after Sharpton’s image-damaging roles in the Tawana Brawley hoax, the Crown Heights riot, the Freddie’s Fashion Mart killings and other infamous episodes. The non-profit Network is reportedly part of a web of organizations that allows Sharpton to live and prosper while claiming to have virtually no assets. . . . None of that, and certainly none of Sharpton’s involvement in events like the Brawley hoax, was the subject of discussion when President Obama took the podium to sing Sharpton’s praises Wednesday. Although Obama kept some distance from Sharpton in the 2008 presidential campaign, 2012 is approaching, and, having alienated many independent voters, Obama needs a strong turnout from his base.”
UPDATE: Reader Todd Hester writes: “Glenn, if Terry Jones is directly responsible for the rioting deaths in Afghanistan, what all is Al Sharpton directly responsible for?”
Turning out black voters in 2012, I think. . . .
COMING: A big YouTube revamp: “Among the many changes, it will be developing its own content and paying for it – to the tune of $100 million!” I’m ready for my closeup.
STEPHEN BALCH: Is Our Civilization A Bubble? “For about the last two hundred years (three in a few locales), the fundamental structure of Western civilization has been anomalous in a crucial way. The anomaly consists in this: whereas in the overwhelming majority of societies the dominant route to wealth and status has been through political control, essentially the use of force or threat of force to extract value from others, in the West it has generally been through exchanges in which the parties have choices, and in which value must be returned for value received if the transaction is to consummate. We’re so conditioned to this, to the fact that our great fortunes belong to entrepreneurs, inventors, magnates, entertainers, and athletes, people who make (or do) things that others want, rather than to royalty, nobility, high priests, mandarins, court favorites and military leaders, people who take in taxes and booty things that others would prefer to keep, that we — very much including historians, journalists, and social commentators of almost every stripe — give little or no thought to it, considering it pretty much the natural order of things. But our exchange-oriented social order does not represent the natural order of things.”
UPDATE: Several readers are reminded of this from Robert Heinlein:
Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.
This is known as “bad luck.”
Fitting.
SHOCKER FROM GALLUP: Obama’s Support Slips Among Blacks And Hispanics.