Passover and Future Holidays

It's Passover time, which is my favorite holiday of the year. I come from a very small and very contentious family. As a kid, I remember Passover as being the one time of the year when all of the animosity seemed to disappear. For two nights in a row, people would sit at the table and not only be civil with each other, but actually let their guard down and enjoy each other's company. As a kid, seeing relatives not scream at each other and be on good behavior was a welcome relief. So I remember this holiday warmly.

Like Lent and many other religious holidays, Passover is a time when you have to change your behavior. I'm not a fan of matzoh at all, but not eating leavened food puts a modest crimp in your eating habits. And whoever created the rule of no leavened food knew what he was doing because it is a very successful means of reminding you for several days running what the holiday is about and who your ancestors are.

Once we were slaves in Egypt.

I practice - more or less - a very ancient and not very successful (on the basis of its rather small population of adherents) religion. If religion were an ecological system, Judaism would be a rare species, one that managed to barely survive the competition from other species for thousands of years.

I could never give it up. It's literally part of my DNA. And when you have many relatives murdered and buried in a mass grave outside of Minsk because of their religion you feel (or at least I feel) an obligation. You want to honor them. You want to keep up their traditions even if its only for one more generation.

Before my grandfather came to this country in 1949, he was living in Germany in a displaced persons camp with his family. He had been living there since 1945, when my mother miraculously found him in Poland and got him across the border. In 1947, he received permission for his family to immigrate to Canada. There was one condition. On the government form, he had to declare himself a Catholic. They wouldn't let him in if he was Jewish. He couldn't do it. He couldn't lie on the form. I understood. On the one hand, it was crazy not to lie. But after living through hell for being Jewish, he looked at that form and literally tore it in half.

Old religions are resistant to adding holidays to their calendar. The events we remember tend to be thousands of years old. Their age gives them gravitas. But the Holocaust doesn't need time to gain importance. It already has been given its own day, albeit a minor one, on the Jewish calendar.

One thousand years from now I imagine my obscure religion will still be practiced and still be unsuccessful relative to other religions. The past is usually a fairly good guide to the future. Other holidays may well appear on the Jewish calendar. And the minor holiday of Holocaust remembrance, Yom Hashoah, will likely be transformed into a major one. Like Yom Kippur and Passover, we will likely be required to change our daily behavior for this holiday. It may be that all that is required is a fast. But somehow I think that there should be more.

And with that, I'm off for a few days. Happy Passover.

Adventures in Cause and Effect, Part II

Whenever the public sees a change they are concerned about, they ask why. They want to know the cause. For example, an observation is made that the amount of ozone in the atmosphere near Antarctica is decreasing. At face value, this doesn’t sound alarming, but then someone does some calculations that indicate that decreases in ozone have also been observed in New Zealand and Australia, which means a greater potential for skin cancer for humans who live there. Now the public is concerned. What’s the cause?

The problem with identifying causes in environmental issues like this is that we usually don’t have comprehensive data and the environment is, like the stock market example mentioned in part I, a very complex beast. It may be that there is no identifiable cause either because the observation simply reflects natural variability or because our data are insufficient to determine a cause. Unfortunately, the “no identification” answer is not an acceptable one to society. We have to identify a cause even if there isn’t one that we can find.

I’ll get back to the “ozone problem” in part III because it’s an interesting one that illustrates what is probably the best we can do with not particularly good data. But first, I’d like to point out some examples where identifying cause and effect in environmental problems is a slam dunk and where it isn’t so easy.

The first example I’d like to point out is one that I worked on for a few strange years, sinking islands in the California Delta. It’s a case where cause and effect identification is a slam dunk.

The Delta is a key area for water transfer from northern to southern California. If the Delta water would ever turn brackish, southern California's water supply would be in deep trouble. What keeps the Delta water fresh are a series of islands that essentially keep San Francisco Bay water from migrating inland.

Unfortunately, those islands have been sinking for decades. Some are now as much as 20 feet below sea level. The only reason they haven’t flooded already is that dams surround their peripheries. The Delta is a mess.

Maintaining those dams costs money. And the federal and state governments, until recently, weren’t keen on providing that money (since Hurricae Katrina, they’ve decided that dam maintenance in the Delta is a good idea). If you’re a private landowner you might want to try to find someone with deep pockets to pay for dam maintenance. You have sinking land. Maybe you can find someone to sue for causing that land to sink.

What is the cause of the sinking land? At face value, the cause is a simple one. The islands have soil that is very rich in carbon. About a century ago, the islands were drained for agriculture, which exposed the carbon rich soils to the atmosphere for the first time. When you do that the solid carbon oxidizes away to form CO2, gas. The islands are sinking literally because the soil is turning into gas.

If that’s the case, the landowners are responsible for their own problem. They drained the land. They made the islands sink. But they wanted to blame someone else. So they drummed up another potential cause: oil companies.

The lands of the Delta contain one of the richest natural gas fields in California. These fields started to be pumped many decades ago. When you pump out gas, you lower the pressure of the gas in the subsurface. It’s like letting air out of a balloon. And land sinks as a result. It can sink a tremendous amount. In some areas in the country, land has sunk as much as 20 feet due to pumping of oil and gas.

Now you can see where this is going. The landowners have dollar signs in their eyes. They might be able to sue the oil companies for causing their land to sink. Maybe they’re responsible for most of their land sinking. Maybe they can get them to pay for dam maintenance.

I was asked to determine if it was possible that natural gas pumping was a significant cause for the islands sinking. I looked at the declines in pressure in the natural gas fields. I used some basic theory and made some back of the envelope calculations. The simple answer was no way. It wasn’t possible that natural gas pumping was a cause for much of the sinking. I handed in my report.

It turned out that my report wasn’t enough to satisfy the State of California. I thought it was a slam dunk, but they didn’t think so. Maybe my theory was wrong. I told them that the theory I used had been accepted by the scientific community for decades. It didn’t matter. It was theory. They wanted absolute proof.

This is not a typical state of affairs in the cause and effect game. Usually an expert comes up with a best guess based on his knowledge base, and government accepts that expert judgment. I had to scratch my head more to come up with better proof.

So I did scratch my head. And I came up with an idea to measure how much natural gas had caused land to sink. I told the State of California my measurements – which I thought were a waste of time – would cost about $150K to make. They said fine. I was surprised as hell that they wanted to throw this much money away. But I did the work.

I made my measurements. They showed that natural gas pumping had caused the land to sink by at most four inches. That was it. Four inches out of 20 feet of sinking might have been caused by natural gas. The State was happy. The landowners weren’t.

In this case, I had theory and measurement to show that the islands were sinking due to causes other than natural gas pumping. Later on, I was able to show that the amount of sinking was completely consistent with the amount of carbon in the soil and the rate at which carbon can oxidize into CO2 gas. I had proved that the landowners were responsible for their own mess. No one disputed the results.

Most environmental problems aren’t this easy. The data are vague. The systems are much more complex. The theory isn’t particularly well established. And that’s when both scientists and society can get into trouble. I’ll talk about that more next time.

Adventures in Cause and Effect, Part I

A little while back a posted an essay, False Precision, about how we the public ask scientists to make predictions with a level of accuracy that just isn’t possible. In essence, we always want to know more than we can. And in response, scientists accede and dress up their approximate predictions with false precision. In essence, the public demands that experts abandon scientific principles to produce numbers; and they do. It’s a strange dynamic at work.

I’d like to look at another strange aspect of the interaction between society and experts that is also produced by our need to know more than we possibly can. And it doesn’t just involve scientists. It involves “experts” of all kinds, both real and self appointed. The typical scenario is this. We see some sort of change. Society demands that we know the reason behind that change. Sometimes the correct answer is “no reason.” Sometimes we can’t identify the reason(s) well. It doesn’t matter. We assign a simple cause to the change we see. There’s some aspect of human nature that drives us to identify cause and effect even when none exists or when causes are hard or impossible to identify.

For example, today stocks opened higher on Wall Street. The stock market is one complicated beast and its rises and falls on any given day are often random. It’s just natural variability folks. But every day, the press assigns a “reason” to that random behavior. It finds some experts to state a cause even when none exists. Today, the assigned cause for the rise in stock prices is: “Wall Street advanced Thursday after a government report showed the economy grew in the fourth quarter at a faster clip than had been estimated.” (AP). Maybe that’s true. Probably not.

To truly assess whether a “government report” was the cause for today’s rise in stock prices, you’d have to run an experiment. You’d have the stock market open a dozen or so times without the report and all other news being the same. Then you’d have the stock market open a dozen or so times with the report and all other news being the same. Then you’d compare the difference between the openings.

Obviously, this isn’t possible. But you can do something else. You can look at every time in the past the government issued a quarterly report like this one and see how the stock market responded. Look at stock market response to a couple hundred quarterly reports and you probably could gain a decent inference whether this report had any real influence at all on a consistent basis.

Such a detailed analysis is entirely possible. I can guarantee you that none of the experts who have ascribed today’s high openings to a government report have done this. What they are doing is in modern parlance known as “bullshitting.” They don’t know. They just guess. The press reports these guesses as the real thing. People want to know the reason for a change. Experts give them a reason. The experts don't really know. They are just bullshitting. People are satisfied simply to have an explanation. It comforts them.

We can scale up greatly from the stock market to our very existence, a huge leap I know. We are born. Why? There must be a reason. Now obviously, we are in a realm of discussion well beyond my area of expertise. I am in no way shape or form a philosopher. But the possibility exists that there is no reason at all for our existence. It’s just a random thing. Your birth, my birth, the existence of the human species could simply all be a random blip. And we’ll never know, at least while we’re on this planet, whether there is an inherent reason for our being.

But assigning randomness to our existence is just not acceptable to most anyone on this planet. It’s not an acceptable answer. So we invent one or more precisely, we find experts to invent one. They create a G-d or G-ds. They create an afterlife. They assign a special character to human life above and beyond all other life. There are a number of different inventions like this that are popular. They draw billions of supporters. For some reason, the invention I subscribe to, Judaism, is not particularly popular. Without about 20 million followers worldwide it’s hardly a blip. But there are others that are.

It may be that, given that all of these inventions have common traits, they may be facsimiles of a real truth. More than likely, they just represent a psychological need. We want a reason for creation. Experts provide us with that reason.

I note that despite these words I've just written, I need that psychological comfort just like billions of others. Every morning I recite a prayer thanking G-d from bringing my soul back from sleep. I’ve been reciting the same prayer in Hebrew every day ever since I was eight years old. And I pray in my own way for a few minutes every day. I find it comforting. It makes me feel better. It gives me strength. Is there a higher reason for me being here? Who knows? Probably not. Regardless, I look up to the heavens for a few seconds every day and then commence to pray. We are very complicated beings.

OK, that’s as far as I ever care to write about faith and philosophy. I felt unmoored writing the above words. Talk about being out of your depth. Whew! Next up, back to the concrete world that I know: the perils of identifying cause and effect in science.

I’d Rather Not Know

Health issues concerning two public figures have come to the fore as of late, President Bush’s Press Secretary Tony Snow and John Edward’s wife Elizabeth. My prayers are with them. But if truth be told, I’d rather not know that they are ill. For me, illness is a private thing. Yes, these are public figures. But we do not need to know every detail about their lives. They should be allowed the dignity of dealing with their illnesses in a private manner. For me, that right to privacy should extend all the way up the ladder to the president.

The public has long had a concern for the health of its presidents. It goes all the way back to Washington. And I understand why. But as for me, I’d rather not know. We elect a president for four years. It’s unlikely that even if he or she is seriously ill, he or she will step down. They are entitled to some degree of privacy. I’d rather their health problems – at least the specifics – remain something between themselves and their family.

When I was a kid, LBJ created a stir when he bared his belly at a hospital to show his recent scar from gallbladder surgery. The idea was to show the world that he was doing just fine and dandy. But no one really wanted to see that scar. And it didn’t prove anything anyway. It turned out that in addition to his gallbladder problems, LBJ had other health concerns that were being concealed.

When I hear the public never knew that JFK took painkillers for his back and couldn’t even lift up his kid, I think its a good thing such information was concealed. If he would have gone up for re-election, those would have been serious issues to discuss. But when he was running the show, what would have been the point? FDR was critically ill during a critical time for the US. His illness may have been the reason the US negotiated so poorly with Stalin at the end of WWII. That’s unfortunate. But knowledge of his illness would not have helped the US public. In hindsight, it seems possible that Reagan was suffering from the early onset of Alzheimer’s disease toward the end of his presidency. Had it been actually detected, I don’t think the public needed to know.

We live in an era where we are flooded with personal information about leaders. I think it’s useful for there to be a filter of decorum. The bodies and personal habits of our leaders are as far as I’m concerned off limits. If a president is ill, all I need to know is that he or she is ill. If a leader has a fatal disease, we should be so informed and leave it at that. If a president is screwing somebody on the side, I don’t want to know that either as long as he or she isn’t engaging in criminal activity by doing so.

Sure, there is a gray zone of interpretation as to when to splash information across the media and when to hold back. Right now we don’t hold back at all. The rationale I guess is that the public has a right to know and can decide for itself what is important and isn’t. That’s a valid view. I just disagree with it. Mostly what I see is that the information is simply used to fuel people’s need for juicy gossip.

The media holds back information about important matters routinely. I had a discussion with a Gannett executive about how its newspapers downplayed information about anti-war protests before the Iraq War because it wanted to support the president. It applied a filter. Why can't we apply filters out of respect to families dealing with illness?

The illnesses of Tony Snow and Elizabeth Edwards have little or no implications for our current and potential future leaders. I wish that the press would allow these people the choice of keeping their private affairs just that. Private. There’s a school of thought out there that says that the genie is out of the bottle. All information about our national figures is open for display. We’ll never let public people hold onto a private part of themselves again. I don’t agree. It’s just fashion and culture. We live in a crude time right now. I’m sure there have been equally crude times in the past. Someday decorum will become fashionable again. I’m looking forward to it.

Against the Grain

I’ve been writing about what a lousy job we do with college education for about eight years now. I couldn’t have predicted that this would have happened. It was never a goal of mine to become a college professor much less write about higher education. It's ironic that I had any kind of academic career. As a graduate student, I saw what professors were like first hand. I didn’t like what I saw at all. They tended to be spoiled and snooty.

My goal was to work at a government research lab. I worked at one for a couple of years. Then its budget was strangled. I could have stayed but decided to try academia.

I was lucky. I landed at a pretty damn good place. But we did a lousy job with undergraduate education.

I’ve written a book, some newspaper articles, put together a couple of popular web sites, and have created this blog. Most of the time, I kvetch about what a bad job we do. I don’t offer solutions. I lay down a lot of numbers that show we are failing our population of 18-22 year olds and just throw up my hands in disgust.

But today, I’m not going to do that. I’m going to scoop USA Today a bit, which will be running an article on grade inflation in a day or so. I don’t think they’ll mind. It’s not like this blog is a competitor. I’m going to talk about a success story in higher education. It’s about one person in a leadership position doing something right: Nancy Malkiel, Dean of the College at Princeton University.

Princeton has had a longstanding problem with grade inflation. From 1971 to 2001, average GPAs at Princeton rose from 2.99 to 3.40. In the years 2002-2004, A grades accounted for 56 percent of all grades given in the humanities and 47 percent of all grades across the college. When grades are that high, many students lack any motivation to study. Excellence and mediocrity are rewarded with the same grade.

Princeton’s high grades are mimicked elsewhere in the academy. There are exceptions like Reed College in Oregon. But at just about every significant college and university, students are being rewarded with high grades with little effort. And at those colleges, no one is doing a thing about it. Except for Princeton.

Getting faculty to grade honestly is difficult. There is no reward for doing so. Students resent honest grading. And they pay back by giving negative teacher evaluations. They avoid classes where grading isn’t fluffy. The end result is that unless someone from leadership steps forward and actually leads, faculty will continue to reward mediocrity.

At Princeton, the leadership was there to change grading practices. Dean Malkiel worked for years to enact a change. She was unusual. As she noted:

“We believe there should be some correlation between intellectual performance and reward. We want grading to help students evaluate what they have learned, how well they have learned it and where they need to invest additional effort.... We need to be more discriminating than we have been in the grades we reward."

I can’t think of another person in the academy in a position of leadership who would say such a thing publicly. Privately, they’ve said it. They’ve even said it to me. But when I ask them to go public, they get cold feet.

Dean Malkiel is unusual in many ways. She has integrity, a concern for the big picture with regard to higher education, the trust of the faculty, and persistence.* These types of people in leadership positions are very, very rare in the academy. Because she has been at Princeton a long time, she had enough “goodwill capital” on campus to pick one big fight and win. She succeeded.

In 2004, Princeton enacted a soft cap on A grades. The plan was modest. The idea was to bring grades in engineering, the humanities, and the social sciences down to the range of the natural sciences. A grades would still be plentiful, but they wouldn’t be given out like candy at Halloween.

As of 2006, it looked as if the plan had partially worked. A grades declined to 41 percent of all grades given across all undergraduate classes. In the humanities, A grades dropped down to 46 percent of all grades given. These aren’t dramatic changes, but they show that grade inflation can be halted with proper leadership.

In response to these changes, undergraduates are not happy. The undergraduate student government at Princeton continues to fight this policy change. Fine. That’s their right. But college policy shouldn’t be tailored for the happiness of students. Rather it should be guided by an overarching effort to teach students well. In that policy, there should be a means to single out students who are truly doing outstanding work. Princeton is moving in that direction.

What about colleges following Princeton’s lead? Dean Malkiel states:

"We hope they will. We know that it's now more difficult for our peer institutions to argue that you can't do anything about grade inflation."

I hope so too.

*In case you're curious, I've never met Dean Malkiel. I've never even been to the Princeton campus. I was accepted into a Ph.D. program there, but declined. It might be true that my book on higher education sold more copies at Princeton than anywhere else aside from Duke. I'm told that it was displayed prominently in their bookstore for a long time. I do not know why.

CCI on NPR

Yesterday, I heard a segment on Duke’s Campus Culture Initiative on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered. I didn’t understand why this was national news. I went online last night and found out that this isn’t the first time NPR covered the CCI. A NPR talk show segment from a while back had a Duke student, Duke administrator and Rolling Stone reporter discussing the issue. By the way, the talk show almost got interesting in a lurid way; the Rolling Stone reporter and the sorority girl student (who sounded like an absolute bitch from hell) started going at it with claws extended right at the end, but alas, they were cut off by time limitations. It was starting to sound like Jerry Springer.

Why the CCI, a document that deals with the anti-intellectual nature of one college campus, is national news beats me. Duke isn’t at all unusual in its party hardy atmosphere. What makes it news? The closest I can come to explaining it is that this is Lacrosse affair carryover. But there is also a little of something else. Duke is accessible. Its image isn’t one of aloof, imposing, brainy people in an Ivory Tower. Rather, its most visible face is its basketball team. Its most visible personality is Coach K, who talks and looks like a regular guy on the street. Unlike Harvard et al., the man on the street doesn’t feel intimidated when he thinks of Duke. He thinks of its team. Does he like the coach? Does he like the team? How well did they do in the tournament?

I know from experience that the biggest conversational killer that I can have at a bar at a business hotel is to tell someone I’m a professor. They just tighten up immediately. Maybe they’re worried I might think that what they are saying is stupid. Who knows? All I know is that they feel intimidated. Duke is the opposite of that.

Duke’s accessibility is also the reason why I think that right-wing lunatics with zero connections past or present to Duke have invaded the Duke student newspaper's message board to spew venom about “radical professors” at Duke and elsewhere, reverse discrimination, etc. I doubt they are invading Harvard et al.’s student newspaper message boards. Why should they care about what happens at one university? Duke becomes an accessible symbol of all that’s wrong in the academy and the world. Without the national visibility of its basketball team, I doubt that this would happen.

Listening to the NPR report last night on the CCI reminded me that when you really know about a topic, you know that reporters tend to be lazy s.o.b.s. The NPR segment pasted a few random facts together to paint a story that was predictable and shallow: Duke is a party school, administrators would like to change that, and students aren’t so sure that it should be changed. Maybe that’s all that needs to be said. Maybe I’m just being too critical. But even in a three-minute segment there is room for some nuance and subtlety. There are a lot of shades of gray in this story from all stakeholders; that grayness wasn't explored at all.

What is interesting to me concerning the CCI report is that one thing never gets discussed in the news or by Duke. The CCI report notes that students don’t work very hard in comparison to their peer institutions. And they don’t. A Duke publication from last year indicated that freshmen and sophomores at Duke spend a mere 11 hours a week studying. That’s it folks, an hour and a half a day. Students at Duke are studying much less than they did in high school. They are also attending fewer classes than in high school. Yet, the sound bite is always “work hard, play hard.” A recent Rolling Stone article on Duke’s Greek culture – which to my reading was fairly accurate in terms of documenting the lurid and brain dead nature of a small but significant aspect of Duke student life – stated wrongly that Duke students study four hours a day. There probably isn’t a college campus in America where students study that much. Typical numbers are around 13 hours a week.

And that’s the rub at Duke and elsewhere. When you’re spending about 25 hours a week total attending class and hitting the books, you’re not working very hard at all. Unless you have a job to make ends meet, there are way too many free hours in the day for you to screw off. It’s one reason why college life at Duke and elsewhere is so intellectually bankrupt. You can’t expect a student to be serious about college when you expect so little.

It's a curious thing that the public and the press cling to the notion that college students work hard. Some do. Most don't. I'm going to guess that we happily ignore all data that show they don't because we don't really want to know. Myths provide us with comfort. It's often true that cold hard facts can't pierce our myths.

Strange Soup

Several years ago, I was asked to give some Spanish high school students a tour of Duke University. I thought they’d find the athletics programs interesting and exciting. After all, what high school student doesn’t like sports? As part of their tour, I arranged to have them talk to some scholarship athletes and an athletics department administrator. The athletics department did a great job putting things together.

But the students looked bored. They didn’t care about the athletes. And when I talked to them after I found out why. They assumed that since these kids were in college, they must not be good enough for the pros. Otherwise they’d either be in the pros already or in a developmental league. They thought they were talking to scrubs. Who wants to talk to scrubs?

I explained to them that no, these kids could be pro prospects. In the US, we use college as a developmental league. They couldn’t believe that. College was college. Sports were sports. Why would anyone mix the two?

I told them it was just the American way of doing things.

It’s a very strange soup. We’ve tried to justify it in a lot of crazy ways. Somehow having a student spend a few hours every day practicing and working out (instead of studying), travel around the country during the school year, and live in a cliquish environment is good for them. It builds character. It builds discipline.

For some, I’m sure it does. It’s like having a full-time job to pay your way through college. You can spin that in a postive way as well. But for most, it isn't positive in the balance. It diminishes their college experience. They learn less. They are less engaged with other students across the broad spectrum of the student body. It’s the equivalent of hiking with a 50-pound bag of flour on your back. For some that builds character. For many, it’s just a 50-pound burden. The NCAA is selling the public a bill of goods.

But college sports aren’t going away. They are part of the fabric of American colleges and universities. And while at face value, it doesn't make sense to throw such a non-intellectual activity into what is ostensibly a place for the "life of the mind" it fits well with the ethos of this country. American culture has many positive values. We tend to work like hell. We tend to be very optimistic. We tend to always look forward. And for better or worse, we tend to be anti-intellectual.

The anti-intellectual nature of this country would seem antithetical to our economic strength. But it isn’t. We are a country of doers not thinkers. We get things done. And when we need brains for technological/scientific progress, we import it. Our graduate schools are full of brainy Indians, Pakistanis, Turks, etc. who often end up staying in this country to provide us with our famed “Yankee ingenuity.”

While this country has an anti-intellectual bent, it paradoxically requires adults to graduate from college in order to have reasonable financial success in life. A college diploma is a union card for middle management and above. About two-thirds of all high school graduates attend college at least for a little while. With percentages that high and with a country that isn’t gung ho about intellectual achievement, you have to transform college into something that isn’t focused on a “life of the mind.” It wouldn’t work. There are simply too many students present who either lack the skill or desire to immerse themselves in intellectual thought for four years.

Instead, you have to create a hybrid. You create a four-year “college experience,” a time when people not quite ready and mature enough for the workforce can gain a mix of intellectual and social skills. The intellectual demands tend to be light in this hybrid, but a student who burns with intellectual passion is free to explore on his or her own. There are state of the art health clubs on campus. There are fraternities and sororities for socializing. There are athletics teams to participate in. And there are sports like football and basketball so that students and alumni can be entertained and feel emotionally bonded to their school.

Somehow it all works out in the end. Students don’t learn very much, but they seem to be ready for the workforce. They love their college sports teams. And they tend to love their college experiences. The type of higher education we’ve created in this country reflects our national culture. It isn’t intellectual, but it is exceedingly pragmatic.

I would argue that given how little learning takes place in college, it is unnecessary for those who simply want to get on in life. We ought to let those 18-years olds go into the workplace if that's what they want to do. They shouldn’t have to go to what amounts to a four-year summer camp to have a shot at a decent wage. But that would certainly be a minority view.

What Happened to Cinderella?

I don’t know college basketball from beans. But like any opinionated male, I pretend I do. I barely watch the game. I’m just too jaded. When you see these guys on a college campus, you know that many of them are there for one reason and one reason only: to play basketball. They should simply pay them a salary and make school an optional part of their duties.

But then there is tournament time!

And I don’t care if college basketball is a whorehouse. It can be fun to spend a little time in front of the tube to see a buzzer beater. It’s a cheap thrill, sure. I’m not immune to cheap thrills.

It’s “the dance” as Al McGuire coined it back when I was a kid and we were both in Milwaukee. That’s when I was a big time fan of college basketball and I’d watch the Marquette games. I can still remember the 1977 finals when Al McGuire – burned out from coaching at the tender age of 48 - summoned every last ounce of whatever love of the game he had in him to outcoach Dean Smith and win the tournament.

When Al McGuire retired as a coach, I retired as a fan. Since then, I’ve only watched at tournament time. This year, I’ve watched parts of a few tournament games. The games have been big on defense and low on scoring. That’s OK with me. But what happened to Cinderella?

I wish there would have been some Cinderella teams this year. I would have stood a chance in my NCAA pool. Without Cinderella, I was doomed. By end of the second round, I simply threw the hard copy of my brackets into the recycling bin. There was no reason to be reminded just how bad my predictions were.

I’ve won one NCAA tournament pool in my life. I don’t claim any expertise. I don’t know about any of the teams beyond what I read in box scores on the sports page. The one time I won, I simply picked on the basis of geography: whichever school was located closest to the basketball arena where the game was played would win. That dumb formula has gotten me close other years too.

But this year, I went with a different kind of geography. If I lived near or spent time at a school, they would do well. Wisconsin. Marquette. Stanford. Duke. Illinois. Those teams needed to go deep in the tournament for me to take home the bacon. Now you know why I threw away my bracket sheet.

For me, the tournament isn’t just about Cinderella teams and buzzer beaters. It’s also about the Bracketville Cinderella, the person who has barely watched the game and doesn’t know the rules picking unheralded teams and beating the basketball junkies in the office pool. The time I won, I remember the trash talk I received from those junkies. They not only knew the player's names; they knew the ref's names! It felt good to be the dummy who beat the die hards. This year, not only are there no Cinderellas on the court, but Bracketville won’t have them either. Wait ‘til next year!

False Precision

The other day I posted a piece on human response to saturated markets. Essentially, when given many outstandingly qualified candidates in a pool of applicants, we fool ourselves into thinking that we can truly identify some as being better on paper. We go to great lengths to “identify” differences that simply aren’t there. I don’t know why we do this. It must fulfill some psychological need. It’s part of being human.

Scientists are frequently asked to do something similar for the public. They are asked to make predictions to levels of accuracy that simply aren’t possible. In response, many scientists fool themselves into thinking they can make these predictions. It makes the public feel better to have this false precision. It makes the scientists feel better that they can make such predictions. Both are fooling themselves. In both cases it must fulfill some psychological need.

I ran into this false precision problem twice in my scientific career. I used to do a lot of research along fault zones. A good deal of my research was designed to try to develop a means to make short-term predictions of earthquakes. Back when I started, there was some optimism that such prediction was possible. Nowadays, the conventional wisdom is that such prediction is a fool’s errand.

But the public wants to know when large earthquakes occur. They aren’t satisfied with the answer no, we can’t predict. In response, scientists – who have given up on short-term prediction – started to make long-range forecasts of large earthquakes. They started to spout forth numbers about a decade ago. An oft-cited number for the Bay Area is that there is a 62% chance of an earthquake of magnitude 6.7 or greater for the region in the next 30 years. Really now. 62 percent. 6.7 or greater. Um. No. There is no valid statistical or scientific basis to this prediction. There are no data that suggest that earthquakes occur with any sort of regular frequency. Historical or prehistoric data on large earthquakes are lacking to make any useful prediction to this level of precision.

What scientists probably should do is simply say that given that there have been no major earthquakes in the Bay Area since 1906 and since stress continues to accumulate along major faults in the region, sometime in the next couple of centuries another major earthquake is likely and leave it at that. But doing so would leave the public unsatisfied. So scientists make an educated guess. And they dress up that educated guess with false precision. It makes the public happy to have a number. It makes the scientists happy that they are doing something “useful” for the public. It isn’t rational that any of this happens. But it is an essential part of being human to want and provide such numbers.

I saw the same thing in another field of study: prediction of contamination of groundwater. Here’s the problem at hand: someone spills some nasty chemical that seeps into the ground. It contaminates a groundwater supply. How fast will that contamination move underground? That sounds like a simple math problem I’m sure. But it turns out that because the character of the subsurface is not known well, there are never enough data to make such a prediction. Yet scientists are asked to make these predictions routinely. And they do so without much hesitation even there is no scientific basis to making such predictions to any useful level of accuracy. I actually wrote a paper with a student published in the highly respected journal Environmental Science and Technology as to why such predictions aren’t possible. The results of that paper have been blithely ignored. The public wants numbers. Scientists deliver them.

I’ll end with a final example of predictions we use every day: prediction of precipitation. The weather service happily provides predictions to 10 percent “accuracy.” This would imply that meteorologists have a scientific basis for quantifying weather behavior to one significant digit. They don’t. They simply provide an educated guess. In a rational world, they would provide predictions with a level of precision equal to their knowledge base, something along the lines of three possible predictions: we think it's going to rain, we can't say, and we think it's not going to rain. Instead they employ false precision to appease the public. Below you will find the frequency that each “percent chance of rain” is used by forecasters.*



It’s interesting to me that meteorologists tend to use the numbers 10-30 percent most frequently. They are always hedging their bets and they do so on the low end. That makes sense. In an average US town, there is precipitation about 1/3 of all days of the year. So "no rain" forecasts should be more common than rain forecasts. Any they are. But if my data are right, "no rain" forecasts are significantly less common than they should be. About 60 percent of the time meteorologists are predicting no rain (0-40 percent chance of rain). It should be higher than this. But the penalty of a bad forecast of no prediction of rain is larger in the public’s mind than the penalty of a bad forecast of a prediction rain. No one wants to get caught without an umbrella. Meteorologists respond to this feedback of the public by predicting rain more often than they should. It isn’t science driving these predictions. It’s public need. Of course, in making such statements - given the quality my data - I could be guilty of false precision as well. So it goes.

*The data here are admittedly very approximate. This is a blog not a science paper, you know. I simply Googled the following phrase “x percent chance showers weather” and noted how many hits each x percent received.

Adventures in Fortran Geekdom

John Backus, head of the team the created the first easy to use industrial strength computer programming language, Fortran, died this week. Hearing of his death brought back memories. I’m a former geek and Fortran was my geek mother tongue.

Probably somewhere in my garage is a 1000 piece card deck of Fortran code that was the basis my master's thesis back in…well way back. I go back to the days when you had to type individual punch cards (and remove the hanging chads) to write programs. Make a typo and there was no “chad out.” You had to type the card over again. Every line of code was a new card. If you weren’t a decent typist, you were doomed. By the time of my master’s thesis, I was off cards and was using a DecWriter, a “revolutionary device," kind of like a keyboard with a paper monitor. No more cards! I was in heaven. I still made myself a card deck (with a nifty automatic card printer!) so I could easily transport my code to any large computer (floppy disks were a bit of a novelty back then).

Programming requires a laser-like focus. It’s definitely not a 9-5 thing. To program well requires you to be obsessive. When you write a code a thousand or so lines long (or longer), it’s going to have numerous bugs. You have to find every one of those suckers and to find them means late nights, copious amounts of caffeine, and junk food. There’s no other way to do it, folks. Those are all requirements. Geek culture is what it is not because of choice. To program like a geek (and to program well) means you have to be the geek. There’s no shortcut. Show me a calm, socially adept guy who dresses well and can speak in complete sentences, and you’ve shown me someone who doesn’t stand a snowballs chance in hell of passing a junior level EE class.

We’re not just talking late nights, folks. Every hour of the day or night that you work on your code means progress. And you don’t have to even be conscious. I can remember waking up in the middle of the night and almost screaming out loud, “That’s it!” I’d fixed a major code bug in a dream. I have my doubts that I would have fixed it any other way.

Needless to say, such obsessive devotion to your programming makes you into a lousy boyfriend/girlfriend/husband/wife. No, your partner doesn’t want to know about your troubles with a If Then statement. Your clever little subroutine fix doesn’t interest them. It doesn’t interest your dog Barney either. It’s a lonely obsession that makes you the death of any party. Do this long enough and your partner, if he or she is sane and not over-the-top in love with that little glimmer of humanity that still resides in you, will be smart and walk. Mr. Fortran, John Backus, was married twice. For a geek, that’s relationship stability heaven.

In a lot of ways, geek life is surprisingly like rock and roll life. There are late nights. There’s obsession with your craft/art. There are broken relationships. The difference is that at the end of the geek life there is no good tell all book to write chock full of drugs and sex.

And there is an end. Just like rock and roll, geek life is for the young. Oh, you see a gray haired geek every now and then plowing through code. But it’s a rarity. And it’s definitely not advisable. It’s the equivalent of seeing Mick Jagger parade himself on stage singing Satisfaction at 60 plus years of age. Both are very creepy things to witness in their own way.

Sometime around 30 you start to lose your focus. That laser-like ability to hone in on a few lines of code starts to disappear. And once you lose it, it doesn’t come back. It’s time to move off that keyboard and find some young blood to take over. You’ve lost your geekness. Sure, you could pretend. Your shirttail could still be hanging half in and half out. Your shoelaces on your Nike’s could still be undone. But it would be an act.

Then comes the difficult part. Like athletes and rock and rollers who time has passed by, you are – while worthless as a programmer – still quite young. What do you do next?

Now you have no excuse to make the effort to turn into a real honest-to-god human being. You’ll have to develop the skill to talk face to face with someone. You’ll actually have to learn how to listen and empathize. You have to find your heart. It’s a scary thing I know. I’ve been there. It’s a long slow transition. I’m, um, still working on it.

Saturated Markets

There was an interesting and provocative editorial the other day in the LA Times by Barry Schwartz, a psychology professor, concerning college admissions. He argued that given that there are far more highly qualified applicants at Harvard, Swarthmore, et al. than there are slots available, all qualified applicants should simply be put in a lottery.

It makes sense to me. I used to argue the same point when it came to applicants for academic jobs. We’d get 80-150 applicants for one professorial position. At least twenty of them would have sterling records with glowing recommendations that said the applicant could walk on water. We’d pore over every line in those applicant files, trying to discern which of those 20 or so was better. It was a silly exercise. There was no way on the basis of paper you could make that distinction. I used to argue that we should simply throw the 20 files down the staircase and see which three landed the furthest downhill. Those three would be our interview candidates. Needless to say, my recommendation was never implemented. But I was perfectly serious.

Similarly, admission deans try to select their “best” candidates on the basis of paper files that can only tell you so much. It’s a silly exercise. They should simply figure out which candidates are “good enough” and randomize after that. But they don’t. They are just like academic search committees. Chalk it up to "human nature." It makes us feel important and essential if we fool ourselves into thinking we can truly select the best of the best. It’s an ego thing.

Academic job searches and elite college admissions are examples of saturated markets. And saturated markets are inherently twisted affairs. The decision makers have too many good choices. And typically they go nuts trying to discern differences when there are none. It’s like a basic science problem where you measure two items that both weigh 3.98 grams to three significant digits. They are the same. Perhaps if you had another significant digit, you would be able to tell the difference. In a science problem, you don’t and you leave it at that. But in making comparative choices in the real world you beat your head against the wall until you convince yourself that one of those items is indeed heavier. It’s silly, but perhaps emotionally necessary to delude yourself.

On the other end of a saturated market is, as Professor Schwartz notes, the person trying to “get in.” They are beating themselves against the wall doing silly things to stuff their resumes and college files so that they look better on paper than the other person. So there is madness on both ends. Both the decision makers and applicants are doing ridiculous things to make distinctions that just aren’t possible.

As far as I can tell, this situation is happening with grades in colleges as well. I’ve noticed that college students are more neurotic about grades than they ever have been. Yet high grades are easier to get than ever before. As the market for high grades gets saturated at the top, students go nuts about trying to distinguish themselves. They worry about whether they have a 3.54 or 3.52 GPA. Making grades higher has had the counterintuitive effect that students obsess more over grades. I couldn’t have predicted that at all.

In my business, I see the effect of saturated markets all of the time. There are so many great songs out there, but there is only room on a CD for a handful. And out of that handful, only one will be the first “radio single.” Radio singles are amazingly important in music publishing. It isn’t CD sales that make a songwriter or publisher real money. It’s radio play.

Picking a radio single for a new or relatively new artist makes or breaks a career. You need a hit, an absolute smash. The stakes are huge. The amount of money it takes to launch a new artist with a new CD is on the order of low seven figures. It’s a million dollar plus investment. Without a radio smash, that money goes poof in a matter of a month.

Record companies go through thousands of songs to find that one radio smash. They twist themselves into pretzels trying to find “the one.” It’s a silly exercise. As Ray Charles once said, “Ain’t a man born can pick a hit for sure.” And it’s funny to watch. Because about three weeks before a CD is about to be pressed, records companies tend to go into an absolute panic about whether they have a radio hit. They start to call around like crazy trying to find a new song that might be “the one.”

Record companies could save themselves a lot of trouble. They should simply pick a couple hundred out of the thousands of songs that they listen to that are “good enough.” Then they should randomize to figure out which go on the CD and which one will be the first radio single. They would do no worse than they are doing right now. And they’d save themselves the emotional wear and tear.

The Joys of Self-Parody

There is a thin line between pompousness and self-parody. Actually, there's probably no line at all. That's certainly true when it comes to US News. Recently, the US News annual ranking of colleges was criticized in a Washington Post editorial authored by Sarah Lawrence's president Michele Myers:

“U.S. News benefits from our appetite for shortcuts, sound bites and top-10 lists. The magazine has parlayed the appearance of unbiased measurements into a profitable bottom line. The problem is that the U.S. News college rankings are far from reliable. Turns out that some of their numbers are made up. I know that firsthand.”

It’s not the first time that US News has been outed for fraud concerning their college rankings. I’ve done it in print in the San Francisco Chronicle. The New York Times has done it. The past-president of Stanford has done it. The list of people who have gone on record to point out the hucksterism behind the US News rankings is long.

In response to Michele Myers' op-ed, the US News printed the following on their web page last week:

“Our rankings are painstakingly tabulated, using the best data available. U.S. News data researchers regularly participate in briefings and conferences where the most complicated nuances of the process are discussed with the ranked institutions. We regularly adjust to changes in the educational environment, and we plan to address this circumstance in a similar manner.”

The language looked somewhat familiar to me. And then I remembered. I wrote much the same thing six years ago! I have a parody web site of US News college rankings, rankyourcollege.com. On rankyourcollege.com I wrote on the home page and methodology page:

“We take our rankings seriously. Each college is painstakingly analyzed, as if under a microscope, for its flaws and degree of polish. The college ranking service employs immensely complicated algorithms in its effort to separate the wheat from the chaff in the academy.”

In an attempt to defend itself, US News has essentially parroted the language contained in a parody. I think I should sue US News for plagiarism. Not only have they essentially copied my writing; their sullied reputation as rankers of colleges is having a negative impact on my own ranking service. The nerve!

The Value of Narrative

The music industry is in a tailspin that’s been going on for several years. There’s more music than ever before - 70,000 new CD titles are being created every year in the US with bar codes making them ready for retail - but total sales continue to spiral downward. Legal downloads aren’t making up for the loss in CD sales. What has happened in less than a decade is the value that consumers place on a single song or an album has plummeted. Essentially, if it isn’t available for free, many consumers just aren’t interested.

There are many reasons for this change that people have cited. The demographics of music buyers are young, and the young don’t feel any remorse or concern when they download “illegally” (I put quotation marks around “illegally” because when something is so common as free downloading, it’s for all and intents and purposes, a legal act). It’s easy and quick to download or rip a CD. The iPod has made music portable and hard/flash drive based, so CD packaging is obsolete.

People’s iPods are filled with thousands of songs. They have all the music they need at their fingertips. Do they really need to buy something new? Selling music right now is like selling oranges when everyone has an orange tree in their own back yard.

What’s interesting to me is that equivalent media have not suffered the rampant downloading present with music. Book sales are not robust but they aren't in a downward spiral. It would take little effort to scan any book and make it available for downloading. The bandwidth necessary would be about 1/5 smaller than for a song. In five to ten seconds, you could download an entire book. That isn’t happening. I don’t think it ever will.

Movie revenue from box office sales rose last year despite active downloading of movies. Yes, if bandwidth increases, if the ease of using illegal movie downloads increases, movie revenue will suffer. But I’m going to make a prediction. Movies will continue to have an increasing audience in terms of legal sales from DVDs, on demand downloads and broadcasts, and movie theaters. The movie industry won’t befall the same fate as the music industry.

About the only media industry that has encountered the same hard times as music as a result of the internet is newsprint. Newspaper sales are also dying. People are getting their information online for free. Why bother to buy a newspaper? There is the exact equivalent online and reading news online is certainly not “illegal,” not in this country at any rate.

Books and movies seem to be somewhat refractory to the presence of the internet. Some of that is due to the “poor translation” of the media in a digital form. Reading a book on a computer is painful and cumbersome. The print resolution of a screen is much less than that of that of paper. And printing out a book and carrying around loose-leaf pages is far from ideal. The printed and bound book format isn’t going obsolete perhaps because it is an ideal way to transmit lengthy amounts of text.

Similarly, watching movies on a computer screen isn’t anything you would want to do with your friends and lovers. Movies tend to be a communal experience. Of course, all you have to do is burn a DVD and you can watch an illegal download on your TV with all of your friends. My feeling is that while this will happen increasingly (or perhaps you’ll simply send your movie over a WiFi signal to your TV), such behavior is not going to gut the movie industry.

The reason I’m fairly sanguine about the future of books and movies (at least relative to music, which I consider to be, in terms of sales at any rate, a dying industry), is that ultimately what they are providing is something quite different and more valued than what the music industry provides. Music is trying to sell catchy little three-minute sex teasers. The singers come and go in the marketplace over a period of months. Ultimately, music is a quick little high.

Books and movies in contrast are selling a narrative. Even some stupid, lurid bodice-ripper of a book is designed to hold your emotions for a few hours. It isn’t just the format of a book or movie that is keeping legal sales vital. It’s what they are selling. The public inherently values narrative. It goes back to the time of Homer, people sitting around the hearth listening to one person tell their story. Narratives sustain us. We value our storytellers. I expect we’ll always be willing to pay for a select few of them to tell their tales. I expect any type of entertainment that focuses on narrative will always have a potential paying audience.

There are exceptions to the death of music sales by the way. I note that the most narrative based musician of the last 50 years continues to sell one million CDs a year from his back catalog. His name is Bob Dylan. He’s been doing it since the 1960s. Forty years from now where will Justin Timberlake, Gwen Stefani and all the rest of those thin voiced, sexually charged Twinkies be on the radar screen?

When It Isn’t National News

De Anza College is about 10 miles from my home. It isn’t an elite school. It has no national visibility. Like many, if not all, community colleges in California it does have sports teams. And when it comes to baseball, those teams can be very good, good enough that players from places like De Anza get drafted as major league prospects.

This month an alleged rape occurred in the city of San Jose that possibly involved baseball players from De Anza College. Eight players were suspended. DNA samples were taken. The baseball team cancelled three games. A couple of nights ago, they played their first game without those eight players.

The rape is not major news in the Bay Area. It certainly is not national news. No parking lot full of news media trucks has descended on De Anza College. Its president isn’t being besieged by the likes of CNN, CBS, et al.

Is there a racial angle? Nothing has been stated in the news. The alleged victim could be white, black, Asian, Hispanic, who knows? The same could be said for the players. No charges have been filed yet.

Without the glare of national media and only minor attention by local media a college and its baseball team can make reasonable decisions. A tragedy may have occurred involving some students, but life can indeed go on.

What makes headline news and what doesn’t is an interesting thing to me. Why the death of Anna Nicole-Smith, a very minor celebrity who married a billionaire, captures the attention of the press for a few weeks when a war in Iraq with world-wide political ramifications and where tens of thousands have died often gets buried on page ten is an amazing thing. Ultimately, the news business is about selling newspapers and advertising time. The media do inform, but what they choose to emphasize is usually designed to titillate and fulminate. They want to appeal to emotions. Emotions sell newspapers and they make people sit in front of the TV a while longer.

About a year ago, I read about an alleged rape at Duke University in the New York Times. My first reaction was, why on earth is an alleged rape in North Carolina being covered extensively in New York? Don’t they have rapes in New York City?

I couldn’t believe it was national news. But like Anna Nicole-Smith it was a story that could be used to arouse emotions. It could be used to sell a few newspapers. It was a gossipy thing with no real national implications. The national news media embarrassed themselves by covering a story that I’m sure they knew was just lurid news candy. They do it all of the time.

I read the New York Times every weekday. For me, it’s the best out there. The quality of the writing is wonderful. Every reporter knows how to write an interesting sentence. That said, like all news media, it is more than willing to sink very low to sell newspapers. They certainly did so with regard to the Duke lacrosse affair. But I don’t want to focus on that.

Instead, I’d like to mention something else. Several years ago, a lurid murder took place in New York City and the victim was a relative of a friend. There was a racial angle. The victim was white. The murderers were black. There was a society angle. The father of the victim was a very prominent national figure. As can be expected, the media descended on the family. No, the story didn’t have any real implications for New York or the nation. But it was a juicy gossipy thing. My friend said that out of all the media, the news service that was the absolute worst in terms of invading family privacy was the New York Times. At a horrible time of personal tragedy in their lives, the Times was relentless. They wanted their story humanity be damned.

It’s very worthwhile for this country to have an informed public. It would be ideal if the information pushed by the media was of value for the public to make informed decisions as citizens. That indeed happens, but not as often as it should.

Water Is A Thief

It’s been another horrible week for the Republicans and the Bush administration. If this keeps up they are going to make me feel sorry for them. Not. One funny thing is that for a couple of years, I was on a friends of Bush mailing list. I even received a wonderful 8x10 glossy of George and Laura wishing me a happy holiday season. Laura looked great in a lime green suit if you like that sort of thing. I’m sure she’s a wonderful person even if she can’t dress. There are worse sins. And people routinely fall in love for the dumbest of reasons. As I looked at that picture, I thought of writing back to Laura, “Thanks for the photo. You look great, but you need to ditch that dope you’re standing next to.” But I didn’t.

I think I was on that mailing list because Bruce Bartlett, a Reagan administration economist, liked a piece I wrote on grade inflation. But Bruce Bartlett then turned colors. He wrote a book about Bush called Imposter. That’s not a very loyal thing to do. He’s definitely off Bush’s Christmas list. And so, apparently, am I.

All week long Alberto Gonzales, Bush uber-loyalist, was twisting in the wind for abusing his position as Attorney General. It’s like Rumsfeld all over again. Except this time it’s not about an arrogant, smart s.o.b, who is so cocksure he is right that he happily ignores the data that tell him he’s wrong. No this time it’s about a dim-witted political hack who just did as he was told.

First it was Harriet Mier’s fault that the Attorney General did what he did. How convenient. We’ll use someone who’s not in the White House anymore as the fall girl. But then it wasn’t her fault. Whose was it then? No one knows. Memories are hazy it seems. Maybe they should ask Scooter Libby to recollect how it all happened. Then again, he says he has memory problems too.

When will all the bad news end? Who knows? All I know is that the Bush administration is a classic lesson in how not to run a presidency. And there is one unlikely lesson that anyone who is seeking to be president needs to learn. Running a tight ship is at face value good. But running it too tight and being too anal ultimately will kill you.

For years, the press was in awe of the Bush administration’s ability to keep everyone on message. His team was loyal, disciplined and always had a smile on its face when it went before the press and the public. All that nasty stuff, the backbiting and infighting that take place in every organization, was hidden from view. All the lies and all the deceit that are part of the animal called politics never leaked out. The Bush administration was the political equivalent of Las Vegas. What happened in the White House, stayed in the White House.

But too much of anything is hardly ever good. Putting a happy face on your politics 24/7 is actually a lousy idea. It just allows all the bad news to build and build. When nothing leaks, all the bad information builds up. Eventually when it does get out it tends to explode. Explosions are never a good thing.

It would seem counterintuitive, but it’s probably true that leaks are good for a presidential administration. When the leaks are steady, the public just might get used to them. They start to get hardened to the minor misdeeds that happen in any organization. When you run a too tight ship, the absence of juicy gossip makes the press and the public hunger. And when the bad news eventually leaks out, as it did during the second term of the Bush administration, the press and public go into a feeding frenzy.

There is an obscure saying in Yiddish, water is like a thief. It means that no matter what you do, water will find a way eventually to leak through your roof. Information is like a thief as well. Eventually it finds a way to the public. The goal is to make sure that it does so in a manner that has the least negative impact. What happens in the White House shouldn’t be visible for all to see. But some of it needs to leak out, even the bad news. The alternative is what we’re seeing now with the Bush administration, a total collapse of a house of cards.

Crime Solved. Time To Pack Up

I finally figured out who was responsible for: 1) stealing my suitcase from my Israeli cousin’s – former bodyguard to Golda Meier – apartment; 2) stealing my computer science homework at the University of Colorado which I had conscienciously placed in a box outside my professor’s office three days before the due date; 3) making a bird shit on my head while I was having an outdoor interview with a prospective boss. It was all done by the same guy: Khalid Shaikh Mohammed.

Mr. Mohammed, a high up in al Qaeda imprisoned at Guantanamo, confessed to being responsible for thirty-one terrorist attacks or attempts the other day. When you have a rap sheet of serious transgressions that long, your memory as to your more minor efforts, I’m sure, fades. That’s why his three terrorist attacks against me were left off the list no doubt. And come to think of it, I’m certain the Mr. Mohammed was responsible for Billy Buckner letting that ground ball roll through his legs in the 1986 World Series.

Mr. Mohammed has compared himself to George Washington. Perhaps as a child he confessed, “I cannot tell a lie. I chopped down the apricot tree.” Who knows?

Seriously now, there is no way Mr. Mohammed – can they, will they please find a better picture of him to put in the newspapers; the one they use makes him look like a NYC apartment super who has been sucking on some Drano – committed or attempted 31 attacks of terror. There are only so many hours in the day, folks. And either because he is delusional or wants to make a farce out of his interrogation or both, he has confessed to just about every terrorist attack on the United States since 1992.

It is likely true that Mr. Mohammed is partly responsible for a few of these attacks. It is likely true that Mr. Mohammed is bloodthirsty, although he maintains, “I don’t like to kill children.” And since we probably have no direct evidence of Mr. Mohammed’s involvement in these attacks, this confession is probably as close as we’re going to get to proof “beyond the shadow of a doubt” that he is indeed a murderer. What this country should do in response to a farcical confession, I do not know.

I do know that there are about 500 other prisoners at Guantanamo. The Bush administration has made the unconscionable decision that the Geneva Convention rules do not apply to many if not all of them because they are not prisoners of war but terrorists. They are being mistreated. Only ten have formal charges against them.

The UN, Amnesty International, and the EU have all called for the prison at Guantanamo to be closed down and with good reason. It is a visible sign of an America that is ignoring the noble principles upon which it was founded. The United States' actions at Guantanamo have been disgraceful.

We have a confession from one deranged - Are there any other kind? - and likely guilty terrorist, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. There are perhaps another ten out of 500 prisoners guilty of criminal acts. We need to close up Guantanamo and let the others go home.

The Ratings Game

Last I checked, I was the owner and creator of the number four college ranking service in the world, rankyourcollege.com. We’re number 4! Not bad for a parody site. There’s US News, Princeton Review, Washington Monthly, and then us. Well actually me. There is no us. And of those four, I provide the only honest ranking site in the bunch. And of those four, I’m the only one that hasn’t made a dime at college rankings. OK, that's enough of me displaying unbridled egotism for at least a brief while. I’m jealous.

US News makes millions at college rankings. In the early 1980s, they were floundering as a news weekly. By luck, they stumbled upon ranking colleges once a year. And they found out that their ranking service fulfilled a need. Early on, the rankings of US News were formulated largely on the basis of an opinion survey given to people in academia. I actually filled out one of those surveys for their graduate program rankings a long time ago. The only problem with this is that opinions hardly ever change. If US News relied on opinions alone, the rankings would be the same every year. And they would sell no magazines.

So the US News decided they would throw integrity out the window to make some money. Every year they would add different criteria to their rankings. And every year they would change the formula to determine their rankings. And lo and behold, the rankings changed every year! And lo and behold, people wanted to buy the new issue on college rankings every year!

US News rankings have always been and continue to be a complete fraud. They should be laughed out of existence. Even one of their former employees, a statistician, has stated flatly that the rankings have no statistically valid basis. Their rankings have no more believability and value than a daily horoscope. Then again, people follow horoscopes too. As PT Barnum famously said, no one ever lost money underestimating the taste/intelligence of the American public.

This week the president of Sarah Lawrence wrote a whiny op-ed in the Washington Post about her problems with US News rankings. Sarah Lawrence, a liberal arts college, does not use SAT scores in their admissions criteria. The US News on the other hand does use SAT scores in their rankings. This creates a problem for both Sarah Lawrence and US News. Sarah Lawrence wants a high ranking, but they don’t have the SAT data to give US News to achieve that high ranking.

Apparently the president of Sarah Lawrence received a communication from US News that in the absence of SAT data, US News will simply assume a number for SAT scores of Sarah Lawrence students. That number will be low. And as a result, Sarah Lawrence will undoubtedly drop in the rankings. The president of Sarah Lawrence is upset that her school is being penalized.

But I’m upset at the president of Sarah Lawrence. Why is she helping US News engage in fraud to sell magazines in the first place? Why does she give them any data at all?

Doesn’t she have a backbone?

Apparently not. Apparently neither do over 90 percent of all university and college presidents. They all dutifully submit data to US News to be ranked.

As the president of Sarah Lawrence notes, at least one highly regarded college, Reed, does not provide US News with data. And US News, in order to rank Reed, makes a bunch of numbers up. Those numbers are on the low side and (ignoring the interesting fact that US News makes up numbers to create rankings) Reed College misses out on the potential for a top 10 ranking as a result. But Reed isn’t complaining. Every year, it gets far more quality applicants than it can accept. What exactly is the “penalty” for having a backbone and saying no to US News? It doesn’t seem like much to me.

So instead of whining about how a fraudulent news magazine is treating her college, the president of Sarah Lawrence should simply tell US News no. We won’t give you data. And since to rank us, you’d have to make up data, we’ll sue you for fraud if you do try and rank us. The thousands of others of college presidents out there should do the same.

Such an action would have two advantages. A fraudulent college ranking service would get run out of business. It would get its just desserts. And the other advantage would be personal. I’d move up and have the number three college ranking service in the world! Whoopee! Now if only I could figure out how to make some money from rankyourcollege.com.

The Ping of the Bat

Baseball is the only sport I watch. I played it as a catcher, but wasn’t good enough to pursue it in college and certainly not professionally. I like to get up close and watch the catcher call the game. For an inning or two I’ll often try to get in close to home plate just to watch the cat and mouse between the pitcher and catcher and between the pitcher and batter. For me, that’s a lot of what baseball is about, the head game taking place between all three. It’s my version of a ménage a trois.

I remember going to a playoff game a couple of years ago, turning my head for a second, and just hearing the crack of the bat contacting the ball on a pitch. Just by the sound, I knew that ball was gone. Who needed to look? The sound told me that the batter had great bat speed and hit the ball right on the sweet spot of the bat. And when I looked up I saw the center fielder didn’t even move toward the wall. Why bother? The ball traveled some 435 feet to dead away center.

The major and minor leagues are the only places where you can hear the crack of the bat anymore. Everywhere else, the sound is a ping. The reason for this is twofold. First there is the money factor. Wooden bats break easily. Metal bats last a long time. They save money. The other factor is that metal bats allow players to look better than they should. Metal bats provide more power and a bigger sweet spot.

The fact that metal bats can be engineered to have more power is troubling. More power means more speed. A pitcher now has to dodge even faster bullets coming off a bat aimed straight for his head. The bigger sweet spot means that pitchers lose the advantage of using the inside of the plate. I’ve seen many balls in college games hit for home runs on great inside pitches that would have resulted in routine fly balls in the major leagues.

This week, the city of New York is considering a bill to ban metal bats in high school games. While I don’t like the sound of ball pinging off the bat in the least, I think that they are overreacting. Metal bats save money and I don’t want some high school having to deal with burning a hole in their budget because they have to buy wooden bats.

Instead, little league, high schools, and colleges have to simply tell the bat companies what they want. If they want a bat that behaves almost identically to wood, they can get it. It’s all a matter of engineering. No it won’t be exactly the same. But it’s not rocket science to make a durable bat that acts more or less like wood. It’s just basic mechanical engineering mixed with a little material science, folks. It isn’t that hard.

To a large extent this is already done. It’s why the scores in college games have dropped considerably over the last few years. It can be done even more. The size of the sweet spot of the bat can be further reduced. The spring off the sweet spot can be further reduced. Just tell the bat companies what you want. They can deliver.

Of course, games being what they are, there will always be someone trying to get away with using a high-powered illegal metal bat. This already happens with wood bats as well. It’s a game. In all games, people try to cheat. That’s why there are umpires.

Twisted in Translation

Recently, I read an article that used the Yiddish word shiksa. Someone got all in a lather about the use of this term. They said it was a slur, akin to calling a woman a slut. Um. No.

Shiksa is not a derogatory term in Yiddish. It simply means gentile female. That’s it. It is not an insult to call someone a shiksa. If a female is considered to be loose or immoral, the Yiddish words used to describe her could be sroyreh (loose thread, a mild denunciation) or chooneh (whore, a more emphatic denunciation). By the way, I tried to look up both of these words in my Yiddish dictionary and could not find them. But my mother, father and friends used them in conversation not infrequently.

It is true that in English, the word shiksa has been transformed into a derogatory term. Strange things happen to Yiddish words when they are used by non-Yiddish speaking Americans. For example, I’ve heard the word putz used far more in everyday English conversation than I ever did growing up in a Yiddish-speaking house. Putz is an extremely vulgar term in Yiddish, something never used in mixed company. In New York, people who don’t know a word of Yiddish throw it around like water and not just as an insult. Somehow the word putz has also been turned into meaning to be idle. So every once in a while I’ll hear someone tell me, “I was just putzing around.” I wince.

I don’t know how this happened. I’m going to guess that it’s a twisting of the Yiddish word poost, which means idle or empty. My parents used to use the verb “purtz” as well to mean wandering around without purpose. Maybe it comes from twisting that word. I don’t know. Alas I can’t find the word purtz in my Yiddish dictionary either. Yiddish dictionaries tend to be lousy. At least mine is.

Translation is always a tricky business. At the University of Pennsylvania about a decade ago, a national scandal erupted when an Orthodox Jewish student used phrase “water buffaloes” to describe some noisy black sorority girls engaged in pledging while he was trying to study. It’s a strange invective to shout in English. For some reason, the powers that be (one of whom is a former yeshiva boy who should have known better) at the University of Pennsylvania didn’t understand that the Orthodox student was translating on the fly. In Yiddish/Hebrew, the word behaymeh, which means water buffalo, is a mild insult. It’s the kind of word an Orthodox Hebrew school student would hear thrown at him by a rabbi when he screwed up a passage from the Biblical scholar Rashi. I should know. It happened to me more than once.

Getting back to the word shiksa, when my father first saw my wife to be, he said to me in Yiddish, “She looks like a shiksa.” It wasn’t an insult. He liked my wife to be. All he was saying is that her skin was light, her hair was light, and her eyes weren’t brown or green. He was making a neutral observation about her appearance.

So how does shiksa, a neutral word in Yiddish, become a slur in English? It may be that just the use of a foreign word in a conversation starts to sound like an insult even when it isn’t. For example, a Jewish mother could say to her son, “Are you going out with that shiksa again?” Obviously, in that context she’s not happy her son is dating someone outside the faith. And to those who don’t know a word of Yiddish and overhear that conversation it might sound like shiksa means slut. But they would be wrong.

Messing With Your Head

Today I woke up an hour earlier just like most Americans. And I feel groggy and a bit out of sorts. I lost an hour due to Daylight Savings Time (DST). I’ll get it back sometime in the fall. Ostensibly, the purpose for DST is to save energy. But there is no evidence it actually does so. The real reason for DST is that people stay out later in the evenings, which means that they buy more stuff. The driver for this law is the retail industry.

This year, DST comes one month earlier, and again the ostensible reason is to save energy. And I imagine that retail stores are happy about this change. They probably lobbied for it. If that’s the reason we’ve made this change, then I don’t have a problem. Big business creates a lot of dumb laws in this country through their lobbying efforts. I wish they didn’t, but they do. It’s just politics as usual.

But there is the remote chance that a dumb law like this isn’t about lobbyists. It just might be about a congressman who is using his power to mess with my head. It makes him feel good to know that because he’s elected he can mandate when people wake up in the morning. I doubt that the politics of power was the primary driver for one congressman to put forth this dumb law, but it might have been 10 percent of the reason. After all, doesn’t Congress have better things to do than push DST up by one month?

This country has a strong anti-government sentiment. And as a result, government rarely intrudes into our lives. At least that’s my take on it. There are few “messing with your head” kind of laws that I encounter. We enact a lot of legislation to prescribe a moral path to our citizens that I don’t quite understand. Much of it has to do with alcohol and sex. And if I were an alcoholic, I might get upset that bars close when they do, I can’t buy liquor in many states before noon on a Sunday, etc.

Sometimes our laws can get very strange. For example, in Tennessee you can only buy wine in liquor stores, but you can’t buy a corkscrew in one. So if you’re an out of towner like me who forgets to pack his corkscrew, you have to go to a grocery store to buy a corkscrew (but no wine), and then go to the liquor store to buy the wine. It’s why I frequently buy wine with screw tops when I go to Nashville.

But that hardly counts as a messing with your head kind of law, the kind of thing that you know was created as a show of power. And when people in this country complain about intrusive government laws, I don’t get it. They have no idea how bad government can be.

In totalitarian states, laws can control lives in ridiculous and detailed ways. For example, orchestras tune to the note of A, which is produced by an acoustic wave at a frequency of 440 cycles per second. In Nazi Germany, Hitler mandated that all orchestras tune to 444 cycles per second. He liked the sound. If you have perfect pitch, which most orchestra musicians do, it’s unnerving and irritating to play sharp like that. Hitler was messing with their head is all. With every note they played, they knew who was in charge.

When our government starts to enact laws like this, then I know we’re in trouble. So far, the length government travels to control my life is by screwing around with my clock twice a year to make retailers happy. I can live with that.

Looking Good

It’s unbelievable. The presidential election of 2008 is already front-page news. If people weren’t so sick of Bush, it probably wouldn’t be. But everybody but his dog Barney is eager to see him leave the White House. And it’s only natural to be curious about who’s going to come next.

First off, I wish that all of the potential presidents were actually doing the job they were elected to do instead of running around the country campaigning 20 months before an election. It’s a shame that those who voted for these senators and governors aren’t getting much work out of them.

That said, everything is being pushed up early including key primaries. The money necessary to win votes is going to easily top 200 million dollars. I’ve already received two solicitations for money from Obama (and said no, it’s way too early for me). It looks like the presidential candidate from each party will be unofficially picked many months before the conventions.

As a Democrat, this is the first time in a dozen years that I feel good about a presidential election. Elections are won on the basis of personality and back history. Whoever is the most likable, charismatic, strong figure without too many skeletons in his or her closet wins. And on those criteria, the Republicans have nothing. They don’t have a single candidate out there who looks like a winner.

Job number one is to simply look better than the other guy or gal. Job number two is to make your base-support enthusiastic about your candidacy. That’s what Bush did in 2000 (with the aid of a corrupt Supreme Court) and 2004. Look at the line up of Republicans out there. They look more like Gore and Kerry than they do Bush. Either they have big-time skeletons in their closet or they have nothing their party can get excited about. If I were a Republican right now, I’d start looking ahead to 2012. Because in 2008, they don’t have squat.

Let’s look at the line-up of Republican losers in waiting.

Rudy Giuliani. Let’s see now. How many times has this guy been married? How many affairs has he had? And what is his stance on abortion? And where is this guy from? There is no way on Earth the Republican Party is going to garner any enthusiasm from its Moral Majority Evangelical core for Mr. Giuliani. Strike one.

John McCain. At one time, I thought Senator McCain had a chance. No, I didn’t like him as a candidate. I just thought he could connect with the American people. Now I view his candidacy as a zero. He has tried mightily to attract the Moral Majority core of the Republican Party. They aren’t buying. And in doing so, he disaffected those that liked him for his apparent candor. He has the albatross of Iraq around his neck. Strike two.

Mitt Romney. He’s a Mormon. He’s not dead set against abortion. He has no name recognition. He has no money. Strike three.

Oh I forgot, there’s Mr. Philanderer himself, Newt Gingrich, waiting in the wings to fill the power vacuum. You’ve got to be kidding.

It’s no wonder, given that the Republicans have a loser line up of candidates, that the press keeps putting Hillary and Obama on the front page. They know what sells newspapers. And none of the Republican candidates are going to make you put 50 cents in the newspaper vending machine.

In the meantime, the Republicans are scurrying like mad to find some good dirt on Obama. They haven’t found anything yet. With regard to Hillary, they already threw so much mud at her during her husband’s presidency that she’s virtually dirt proof now.

2008 is looking good.

Why Republicans Can’t Govern

It’s been a bad couple of weeks for Republicans. The list of transgressions is so long that I need to resort to a bullet list (and I swore I’d never use a bullet list on this blog!):

*Scooter Libby was convicted, the worst criminal conviction of a political appointee since the Reagan Iran-Contra scandal. W. said he wanted to be like Reagan didn’t he? Well I don’t think he meant it in this way.

*The Army’s Walter Reed Hospital – which was a good place to get well in the Clinton years – has been transformed into a mold-infested haunted house.

*The Justice Department policy of pressuring US Attorneys to serve as shills for the Republican Party and firing them if they don’t was exposed for all to see.

*The FBI abused its post-9/11 powers to obtain personal data and telephone records.

*Cheney went abroad – why oh why did he come back? – and managed to so frighten two foreign leaders that they now refuse to share human intelligence with the US and one, suspicious of Cheney’s mental health after a conversation, followed up to ask if Cheney “was OK.” (This comes from an unnamed source by the way.)

Can it get any worse? We have 22 months to go in the worst presidency I’ve ever witnessed. As they say in my home state, you betcha.

Bush can’t govern. He simply can’t. When he ran for office, I was worried. It wasn’t because he was a Republican. I don’t expect or even want Democrats to win all of the time (80 percent of the time would be nice, though). It’s good to have change every once in a while. It keeps things fresh. W.’s father wasn’t bad. I didn’t like the Reagan years, but I actually admired the man in some ways. W. worried the hell out of me.

The reason was simple. W. was so obviously stupid and ignorant that he couldn’t possibly be a decent president. I talked to Republicans about this. Not one of them disagreed with me that W. lacked something upstairs. But they assured me that W. would appoint some smart people under him and those people would know how to run things. Man oh man were they wrong.

I agree that the people under W. are smart. But they are also incompetent. And I’m going to throw out a reason why I think smart Republicans are so incapable of running our government. I’m throwing this out just as a flyer. This is a blog after all, not some piece of scholarship. It goes back to a famous quote from Bush’s hero Ronald Reagan:

"Government is not a solution to our problem, government is the problem."

Now I honestly don’t think that Ronald Reagan believed that. If you look at his policies and his budgets, he believed in government as an agent for positive change. It was just cute rhetoric on his part, a catchy sound bite. But nowadays this stupid sound bite is being taken as gospel by Republicans. You have influential Republican ideologues like Grover Norquist who want to shrink government “down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub." This is madness.

If you don’t believe in government, how can you possibly run it well? Your heart just isn’t in it. And maybe subconsciously you’re driven to screw up. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Thirty years ago, the Republicans weren’t this crazy. They were normal people who believed in government and wanted to use it to support big business. I always have thought that big business can do just fine without the weight of the feds helping it along, but at least Democrats and Republicans were on the same page that a working, competent federal government was something possible and desirable.

I’m an optimistic guy in some ways. Sooner or later the Republicans will recover their sanity. Until then, however, they shouldn’t be in charge. You can’t run something well that you hate. You’ll end up running it into the ground. And that is exactly what the Bush team is doing right now.

Changing Campus Culture Is a Very Hard Thing To Do

Recently, my old employer Duke released its long awaited Campus Culture Initiative (CCI) report. It’s nothing to get excited about. The CCI was never designed for anything but political cover. Duke’s President Brodhead, who has emerged as one of the most cynical and Orwellian campus leaders I’ve ever observed, created the CCI to buy some time during the height of the Duke Lacrosse affair.

In what can only be called cynical and calculating, he appointed the faculty noisiest during the Lacrosse affair to put together the report. The political right – which has used Duke as a symbol of all things wrong with academe for almost a year now – had a field day with these appointments.

I never understood why. The CCI was a ceremonial thing. It was never intended as a tool to make substantive changes at Duke. Brodhead in appointing people to this committee was simply doing the standard political ploy of co-opting your potential enemies by making them feel important. And if in the end, those people get p.o.’d that all of their work is being ignored, so much the better. Maybe they’ll get so angry for being used as political pawns that they will leave.

That all said, the CCI report is a kind of interesting document in a social anthropology kind of way. It posits that there are significant problems with Duke undergraduate culture. Then it proposes some solutions. Its statements about the culture of Duke are to my mind fairly accurate. Its solutions to the problems are to my mind mostly well meaning, but naïve.

The CCI report notes that Duke has a drink heavy/work light culture with little interaction across race/cultural lines in comparison to peer institutions. What’s interesting is that a lot of this information was made available last year in a report entitled the Campus Life and Learning Project (CLLP).

The data from the CLLP should have set off an alarm that Duke lacks any intellectual core. It painted a picture of wealthy kids (average family income of $200,000 a year, 24% of whom own a second family home), who spend far more time in recreation during the week (28 hours) than they do studying (11 hours), yet earn high grades for their modest effort. Students reported that they spent three to five more hours a week studying in high school than they did in college. The numbers indicated that Duke has an elite summer camp kind of atmosphere, a respite from the pressure cooker that defines many high schools of the wealthy. When the CLLP came out it was essentially ignored.

Is Duke really that different than other elite research universities in terms of student economic class and behavior? In terms of being a home for the children of the wealthy, the answer is no. Other peer institutions draw from a similar base of wealthy white, black and Asian families. As I noted in an earlier posting, private elite universities and colleges emphasize racial diversity and largely ignore economic diversity in their recruitment efforts.

But there are differences in social behavior. According to a COFHE (a consortium of elite private schools including Duke) report, Duke students study about four hours a week less than their peer institutions yet their grades are on a par with Harvard et al. They work less for the same reward. And as the CCI report notes, Duke students party harder.

The emphasis of the CCI report is on racial diversity and interaction across racial lines. That’s not one of my major concerns on a college campus. If students choose to congregate strictly with those of the same color – which is the dominant tendency at Duke – I’m not all that worried. They have ample opportunity to do otherwise, and I don’t see why Duke should mandate social interaction.

My concern is that students take their studies seriously. If they are going to pay all that money to go to school for four years, they should get something more out of their experience than a good four-year party. As the CCI notes, Duke comes up short academically in comparison to peer institutions. And those peer institutions aren’t any great shakes either. Harvard, Princeton, Yale et al. aren’t exactly pressure cookers. They are “college-lite” for the smart and wealthy. Unfortunately, Duke is even lighter. Its motto could be “more beer, less work.”

Suppose you wanted to change that culture for the better and make it more serious and conducive to learning. The CCI report has a number of recommendations. They include eliminating selective housing on campus, clamping down on alcohol use, and raising the bar on entrance requirements on the low end for athletes, legacies, and children of the wealthy. These are interesting ideas. But even if they were implemented, I don’t think they would do much.

Other schools have fraternities and selective housing and manage to have a more serious academic environment. Stanford manages to have Division I scholarship athletics and a more serious academic environment than Duke (nothing to brag about, but definitely more serious).

From my standpoint, the reason Duke comes up short academically is not due to selective housing or the fact that it lets in 100-200 students with SATs in the range of 850-1150 and high school GPAs in the range of 2.3-3.3 every year. It’s what’s happening with admissions with students who look great on paper. They may have great SAT scores and wonderful GPAs. But their heart isn’t in the classroom. Duke gets more than its fare share of that kind of student in its applicant pool. And on paper, it’s impossible to tell the difference between those that are applying and have intellectual drive and those that don’t.*

In an earlier posting, I talked about pre-filtering of students. I argued that the reason liberal arts colleges tend to have more of a serious academic feel in comparison to their research university counterparts is that the type of kid who goes to them is more intellectually inclined. They don’t care if the school has a nationally ranked sports team. They don’t care if the school is located in the middle of cornfields that suffer bone-chilling temperatures in the winter. They want to learn. That’s why they come.

With regard to Duke, there is a fair amount of pre-filtering going on. Many students are preferentially applying for a number of reasons that have little to do with academics. They come for the basketball. They come for the warm weather. They come because Duke ranks highly in the US News annual rankings of colleges. They come because Duke is known as a place that attracts “well-rounded” students, students who aren’t going to hit the books every day of the week.

From my view, it’s that pre-filtering that makes Duke the kind of “education-lite” place that it is. Changing selective housing, alcohol policies and entrance requirements will not solve this problem. To some extent, Duke actively courts not-very-serious students by emphasizing the “well-rounded” and “balanced” nature of the Duke campus in its literature. If they want a more serious academic environment, they need to try to “sell” Duke differently.

But beyond selling the university differently, I honestly don’t know what Duke could do to attract a different kind of student. It could demand faculty demand more of students in the classroom, but I doubt this would be effective. You can’t move Duke to Minnesota. You can’t fire Coach K and close down a nationally visible basketball program.

Having a campus with a significant number of students who look good on paper but don’t have their heart in academics does have significant repercussions. It makes Duke a less attractive place to teach. I know a number of faculty members who have gone elsewhere – not necessarily to peer institutions – partly because they found teaching at Duke to be unpleasant. And when I’ve talked to them after they’ve moved they are happier.

It also creates a campus where the students who are the most serious can be frustrated by their inability to find a nucleus of like-minded academically inclined peers. I talked to a number of students who expressed such frustrations to me.

That all said, pre-filtering does have the advantage that Duke tends to attract the kind of students who would be happiest in its education-light culture. They are getting the experience they want out of college. And it’s also true that if you want a serious education, you can get a damn good one at Duke. You just have to buck the trends and go out and seek it on your own. I talked to a number of students who did just that. I admired the hell out of them.

*Just to bring this point home, Duke is required to have a certain percentage of kids from the Carolina states. Those kids on average have lower SATs and high school GPAs than the other students. On paper they are weaker. But in my experience, they were more serious and brought a lot more to the classroom. A high school transcript and SAT score can't tell you what's in a kid's heart.