You've Gotta Be Sincere

I notice in the news that my former boss at Duke, Richard Brodhead, issued an apology to the lacrosse players and their families. Like almost everything he has done concerning the lacrosse affair, it was a calculated thing designed simply for p.r. He chose a small conference at the Law School to speak. He did not allow any questions. Duke pre-released the speech to the press so they could quickly spread the news.

In a small way, this speech of Brodhead was his version of Nixon's famous Checkers speech. Like Nixon before his Checkers speech, Brodhead's reputation has been sullied. Ever since the book Until Proven Innocent* came out in the early part of this month, Brodhead has been yet again battered in major newspapers for his fecklessness. Prominent alumni have repeatedly asked him to resign.

For over a year now, it's been clear that Duke made serious mistakes in the handling of the lacrosse affair. Regardless of the harm done and over sixteen months of bad press, the response from Duke has been, "we did nothing wrong." Through the months of financial settlements with people they have hurt through their actions, Duke continued to maintain they were not culpable.

In the past when Brodhead has been asked point blank if he had any regrets, he has said more than once that his only regret is that the lacrosse affair happened. I think what he has actually been trying to say is that he wishes that the lacrosse affair hadn't happened under his watch.

Regardless, this approach - the admit no mistakes method of p.r., a method that goes all the way back to Machiavelli - hasn't worked. The lacrosse affair keeps popping up in the news and when it does Duke and Brodhead keep getting mentioned as bad actors in the drama. In response, he and the p.r. machine at Duke, undoubtedly in consultation with the Board of Trustees, decided that an act of contrition would be a good thing. Maybe this mea culpa will work to rehabilitate the reputation of Brodhead and to finally get this affair and Duke's mishandling of the affair out of the news.

I doubt it, but hope springs eternal.

It's interesting to read the details of the apology. Brodhead apologizes for not reaching out to the lacrosse players and their families in their time of need. It's important to realize that Brodhead didn't just not reach out. He cut his ties to those players and their families as quickly as he could. He did it willfully in an effort to try to distance himself and his institution from whatever bad news those associated with lacrosse generated.

This cutting of ties to anything that potentially puts you and your institution in a sleazy spotlight is standard p.r. 101 procedure and something Brodhead had done at Yale as well. As I noted in June 2006, Brodhead made a certain calculated bet:

"I don’t think that Brodhead’s actions presumed guilt on the part of the students. He was simply trying to get the scandal off the front page; suspending the students was a way of cutting Duke’s ties from any potential negative fallout the students might generate. Essentially, he made the calculation that the reputation of the university was more important than the lives of the students.

That calculation was not the right one. And it’s costing him dearly right now."

Almost everything that Brodhead has done has been motivated by one simple objective: get the lacrosse affair off the front page. And he hasn't been able to do it. It's been a double tragedy for Brodhead. He's had to sacrifice every bit of his integrity and he still hasn't been able to accomplish his goal.

Further on in his speech Brodhead apologizes for not distancing himself and Duke from the inflammatory remarks of some of Duke's faculty during the lacrosse affair. He makes the argument - a valid one - that those remarks might have been misinterpreted as representing the views of the university. It's an odd apology, though. My view is that he regrets not being even more cold blooded than he was. Essentially, I believe he is saying that he regrets not having cut his ties with faculty as quickly as he cut his ties with those associated with lacrosse.

Brodhead is undergoing a review right now for renewal of his contract. University reviews are pro-forma things. If a person in a position of leadership is put up for review, it means that his or her contract will be renewed. It's too much of a p.r. black eye for a leader to fail a review. The standard procedure - if a contract is not going to be renewed - is to tell that person that they aren't wanted anymore. Then they are allowed the graceful exit of making a speech that they have decided to leave for "family reasons" or whatever.

Why Brodhead's contract is going to be renewed is a mystery to me. Fair or not, he has become an albatross around the neck of Duke. He will be forever known as the man who botched the lacrosse affair. The standard procedure when you have a p.r. nightmare like Richard Brodhead is to do what Brodhead did to the lacrosse players and the lacrosse coach: cut your ties as quickly as possible.

Why the Board of Trustees, composed of cold blooded captains of industry, wants to keep this liability around beats me. They went to a lot of trouble to woo and hire Brodhead. My guess is that they simply have too big of a collective ego to admit they made a mistake.

*I haven't read the book, but I will. I was supposed to have received a review copy from the publisher, but it never came. My library has a copy and I'm next on the short waiting list.

The Last Oasis, Part II

Downloading has been adversely impacting sales of pop and rock music for the last several years. Walk into an LA record label building and you'll find a ghost town of empty desks. The public hates record companies by the way. The word "greedy" seems to be attached to the phrase "record company" as often as the word "ancient" is attached to the phrase "Pyramids of Giza." For me, all businesses are greedy and it seems silly to make record companies prime examples of the nasty side of capitalism. It's redundant to call any business greedy. Record companies are just businesses plain and simple.

Anyhow back to the matter at hand. While pop and rock record labels have been hurting for several years now, country record labels were strangely immune to the ravages of downloading. The reasons for this were kind of fuzzy. All kinds of theories were out there. The most significant demographic for country music consisted of soccer moms. They liked their CDs and didn't have any inclination to download. That was one theory. Another was that the South was a little slow on the uptake concerning computers and hadn't quite got this pirating thing down yet. Another was that in the Bible Belt, stealing music was just not a socially acceptable thing to do.

Well now none of these theories matter anymore. Because as of this year, downloading has caused a serious erosion of sales in country music. CD sales are down 30 percent. They aren't coming back. The last oasis for studio musicians and songwriters is in serious peril.

I've been visiting Nashville for about three years now, making more and more contacts and plugging tunes - mine and those of others - around town. And during every visit, people seemed refreshingly upbeat. Maybe they were having problems with making payroll and feared for their jobs, but they never let on that they did. Until now.

People are crying in their beer now. Publishers. Songwriters. Musicians. Record label executives. Everybody is worried. In the past, you'd hear some whining now and then. Whining is something you hear in every business no matter how successful. Now it's different. Now I'm seeing fear. And in my view these people have every right to be fearful. Country music is now in the same boat as rock and pop. It's revenue producing future is in peril.

Of course, there will always be money to make, but there will be a lot less of it. And that means a lot less artists, labels, musicians, and songwriters. You are going to see significant contraction, just like you've already seen significant contraction in LA. The market for making a living at music in Nashville is going to become frighteningly competitive.

As with rock and pop, I hear people say the record labels have no one to blame but themselves. They've lost sales because the music is junky. They were stubborn about selling music digitally. I hear these complaints all of the time.

I don't agree with these assessments. Yes, the music major record labels produce is junk, but it's the junk people want. They aren't force feeding the public crappy music. They do their market surveys. And those market surveys tell them that the public wants trash. If they want to make money, that's what they have to deliver.

As for the "late to the party" charge about downloading, record labels could certainly have embraced the digital music age. But by doing so, they would have had to embrace a singles only market. Record labels cannot in any way make enough money to survive selling singles. Essentially, by ignoring downloading, record labels were simply delaying their inevitable demise.

I believe - and it's just me being hopeful here - that rock and pop music has a future. It's just that it's not in recorded music anymore. Rather, it's going to be all about performance. A band can work like hell and build a national following for their live shows through word of mouth buzz and small scale marketing. They'll be able to sell their recorded music, but it won't be through retailers. Rather, it will be at their shows. Recorded music - like a t-shirt - becomes a kind of souvenir for the fan. It's just another piece of merchandise.

To replicate this model for country music is going to involve a bit more work. Unlike rock and pop, country acts typically don't try to build a following on their own. They don't travel the live music circuit and make their own buzz. Rather, they hang around Nashville and do a lot of songwriting while they wait to be signed. It's strange for me to see this because it means that when an act does get signed it's often very green in terms of live performance. I've seen some dreadful performances in country music by new acts backed by major labels.

It may be that the reason country acts don't try to get roadworthy is that the music circuit doesn't exist for them to do so. Those CD buying soccer moms don't go out often. And if that's the case, the tone of country music is going to have to change and become more youth focused. You're going to have to build a market for live performance for those that have the time and money to attend concerts.

My last trip to Nashville ended with a "greedy" rental car company trying to soak me for several hundred dollars over a tiny pre-existing scratch on my car. I thought it was fitting. For three days, I'd heard people tell me their tales of woe. I listened like I was a psychotherapist just nodding my head. But at the rental car desk it was me venting big time.

The Last Oasis

The music industry has been in woeful shape for several years now due to downloading. When you add up the carnage from the retail level on up, around 140,000 people have lost their jobs. But truth be known, the music industry has been in awful shape at the base of the pyramid for a couple of decades. The solution for many musicians and songwriters who want to keep working has been simple: get a cowboy hat and boots and move to Nashville. Nashville was the last oasis.

For example, the 1970s were heaven for top-rank musicians in LA and New York with studios humming with activity. But by the 1980s, that work dried up. Consolidation of labels and the reduction in the number of musical acts being promoted caused a dramatic decrease in demand for musicians. The sound of music changed as well, relying much less on musicians and much more on synthetic beats and sounds. There was only one place left for studio musicians to have a shot at steady work: Nashville. It was there that records were still made by bands playing live and good musicianship was in demand.

Similarly, in the 1970s songwriters were in demand to provide the music for the wide range of rock and pop acts being groomed by record labels. By the 1980s, consolidation caused a significant reduction in demand for songs. Also the emergence of MTV made musical acts much more about visuals and much less about audio. The song didn't really matter. All you had to do was put out a hot looking act and give them something to sing with a loud pounding beat and voila you had a hit. Producers started to understand that they didn't need songwriters anymore. Any song would do and they could easily write the stuff they needed themselves. There was only one place left for songwriters to have a shot at an income: Nashville. It was there that the song still mattered.

In the 1980s and 1990s, musicians and songwriters of all stripes headed for Nashville for work. The result was a major change in the nature of country music. The quality of recordings dramatically improved although they sounded too slick to many ears including my own. The new breed of songwriter fueled the infusion of pop and rock melodies and chord progressions into country music. These musical changes created a much wider audience; the demographics of country music expanded well beyond the Mason-Dixon line and sales increased dramatically.

It was in some sense a wonderful synergy. Country music got a big bump in sales. Many of those Yankee musicians and songwriters* who moved to Nashville earned a good living. By the late 1990s, further consolidation in Nashville and the emergence of home recording, however, caused an end to the marriage. Studio time dried up like it had done in LA and New York decades before. Song demand dried up as well. In the period of 1997 to 2007, the number of songwriters on contract in Nashville went from 2000 to 200. The oasis that was Nashville was running dry.

Still, a good number of people were still making a living. Until now. I'll talk about that next time.

*The most influential country songwriter and producer from the 1990s was an Austrian, Shania Twain's husband Mutt Lange. I don't think you can call an Austrian a Yankee, but what the hell; this is a blog after all.

Something Old, Something New, Part II

Like Dory Previn, Joe Henry is one of those rare pop musicians that writes for adults. Given that the market for music is driven mostly by teens, few people buy his CDs and hardly anyone knows he exists. But other songwriters do. In an obscure interview from a few years ago, the writer Steve Earle was asked what other writers he was scared of. He mentioned one name, Joe Henry. When I read that I just nodded my head. There are only a few songwriters out there today that when I hear their music I think man, I wish I could do that. Joe Henry is one of them.

I ran into the music of Joe Henry by chance about a dozen years ago. He was on a small record label at the time located in Carborro, NC, about two miles from my home. Possessing a very small amount of local buzz, he would play at a local club, Cats Cradle. Back then, he was writing alternative country. No one was writing it better. His CDs from that time period have gone in and out of print, and sometimes fetch as much as seventy five dollars on Amazon.

Joe Henry really wasn't the cowboy type however, and he moved on to jazz and r&b influenced pop on subsequent CDs. Like the earlier CDs, they didn't sell. I remember one time I stayed at home with a 103 degree fever and was watching daytime television. Joe Henry popped up singing on the Rosie O'Donnell Show. I thought I was hallucinating.

Over the years, he kept on punching out wonderful album after wonderful album for his ridiculously small following. To make money, he's produced albums for others and written songs for people like Roseanne Cash. His principal claim to fame doesn't come from his music. He is one of Madonna's brother-in-laws. Madonna can't sing or write a decent song to save her soul and she makes zillions. There is of course no justice in the world.

It was with a rare sense of anticipation on my part that I waited to get a copy of Joe Henry's new CD, Civilians. It has received wonderful reviews from critics, but music critics are strange beasts. They tend to simply and naively gravitate toward anything that is depressing and uses odd instrumentation and any artist who has a troubled past of addiction or mental illness. I always ignore them.

Sad to say, I don't think Civilians is a very good CD. The songs are dreary, beat soaked things. There is an uneasy mix of country and Memphis r&b instrumentation in the arrangements. The lyrics are strangely on the sloppy side. Even the best songwriters are capable of making clunkers. I look for Joe Henry to rebound on his next CD.

Some Advantages of the New Rudeness

There was a big brou-ha-ha over Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad giving a speech at Columbia University the other day. How could a university give a promoter of terrorism who believes he can help usher in the Islamic endtime the legitimacy of a forum at a world renowned institution?

Conservative pundits beat up yet again on the political correctness and leftist bias of universities. The tie between the invitation of Ahmadinejad and political correctness seemed tenuous at best, but the right always seems to think that just about every action on campuses involves leftist bias. They did the same thing in trying to describe the motivations of Duke's President Brodhead during the lacrosse affair. Leftist faculty supposedly influenced his decision making. That claim is pure unadulterated b.s., but I digress. Back to the matter at hand.

In the old days of decorum, the visit of Iran's president to a college campus would have been accompanied by tight-lipped politeness. Prior to the speech of such a nut job president, there would have been a respectful introduction. And indeed the result of having Iran's president give a talk at Columbia would have been to give him some legitimacy.

But not anymore. We live in a time where all are happy to jeer. Our own president - Bush - is commonly characterized as a buffoon in newspapers, something unheard of when I was a kid. No one is worthy of unquestioned deference and respect in today's climate, much less a nut job president from Iran.

At Columbia, everyone got into the act. Even Columbia's President Lee Bollinger - not one of my favorite people - lobbed a few tomatoes calling Ahmadinejad a cruel tyrant in his introduction. The crowd openly laughed and booed at Ahmadinejad's answer to a question about homosexuality in Iran. The end result was to shrink Ahmadinejad down to the size of a bug.

I'm not a great fan of our culture of rudeness. But every cloud has a silver lining. And in our inability to treat people with respect comes one big benefit. Everyone is Rodney Dangerfield in this society. And of course some people deserve to be.

Something Old, Something New, But Both About the Same

On a plane yesterday, I listened to two albums, one old, Dory Previn's eponymous first album with Warner Brothers (recently released digitally for the first time), and one new, Joe Henry's Civilians.

When I was a kid, I would hear Dory Previn's very occasionally on obscure FM radio stations.* She sounded whacked out and whip smart, musing over topics like how she could handle Marlon Brando if she were his wife (she sounds like a stalker on that song by the way). Her voice was plaintive without much range, a kind of female Randy Newman. I hadn't listened to her stuff in decades. But for 30 years one song of hers has stuck in my head like crazy glue, If Jesus Had a Sister. And now thirty years later, I find that many of her other songs hold up nearly as well.

The production on the Dory Previn album, is to be honest, awful - there must not have been much of a budget to put these songs together - and the music is just so so. Dory Previn was principally a lyricist who used to leave the melody writing to her husband Andre until he left her for Mia Farrow. But the lyrics are so intelligent and conversational at the same time that they are superb, like something out of the best of Broadway musicals. A jukebox musical of Dory Previn's music would be an interesting proposition.

There's another female songwriter from this time period, Judee Sill, who is currently a critic's darling. Like Dory Previn she didn't sell at the time. She was rediscovered a few years ago. Sill was more musically adept but couldn't write a decent lyric at all. I think the critics gravitate to Judee Sill because she died of a drug overdose at a young age. Dory Previn - in contrast - "only" had a nervous breakdown in her 40s when her husband walked out. It's not quite as glamorous a tragedy in critic's eyes I guess.

Dory Previn made this eponymous album in her 40s, which was very old to be striving to become a pop singer even back then. Now it would be completely ridiculous. Joe Henry is now 46 and has been making albums for probably about 15 years, maybe more. There are a lot of similarities between Joe Henry and Dory Previn. More on him tomorrow.

*Back then, the words FM and obscure were almost redundant. No major networks bothered with FM because its signal does not generally carry more than several tens of kilometers. You could buy an FM music station in a major market for about 50K. My how times change.

How The Humanities Became So Damn Strange

I went to college in the 1970s. When I wasn't taking science classes, I was taking literature classes in a number of humanities departments. Back then - just like now - those humanities departments had a leftist bias. There is a basic reason for this: right wingers have less of an interest in art and literature as a subject of study. They'd rather get an economics degree and go on to Wall Street.

So there has been no major shift in the political persuasion of humanities departments over the last few decades that I can detect. But the humanities have in general become very, very strange. In the 1970s, the humanities professors were still writing in a way that could be understood by an educated public. That's only sometimes true now. Occasionally, their volumes would get national media attention and sell tons of copies. That doesn't happen anymore.

In the 1970s, research in literature was confined to analysis of the "greats." Now that's considered passe and boring. Literature professors will analyze anything from Shakespeare to comic books to the X-Games. It's all fair game. They've become more or less critics at large. There's a key problem with this: the only people listening are other professors. The public could care less. And increasingly, students could care less.

The humanities don't really matter anymore. They don't matter to the public. They don't matter to students (the percentage of humanities majors nationwide was less than 10 percent last I checked). The federal funding available for research in the humanities is so tiny that you probably couldn't even buy more than a few Boeing 767s with it.

I wish that the public cared. But they don't. There has been a cultural shift in this country. It used to be that people aspired to be "cultured." The middle class bought leather bound books of Shakespeare, went to the symphony, and their parents forced them to try to play Chopin on the family piano when they were kids. Now truth be known they probably never opened that Shakespeare volume, fell asleep at the symphony and the family piano was usually way out of tune. But they tried. Now they don't.

We've moved from the high culture model to the Steve McQueen model. He who dies with the most toys wins. The humanities just don't matter.

The only visibility the humanities has left is in the way campuses are portrayed on TV and in movies. For some reason, English professors - usually a guy with a bow tie and mustache who can recite all of Emily Dickinson by heart - appear regularly in Hollywood stories that feature universities and colleges. Note to Hollywood: these guys don't exist anymore (if they ever did) and no one is taking their classes if they do.

What's unusual is that despite the lack of enrollment and the lack of federal funding, humanities departments with certain exceptions - classics departments for instance have been axed across the country - continue to have fairly large faculty numbers. Essentially you have large numbers of people with not a whole lot to do. They don't have many students to teach. No one is reading their books and articles except for a handful of professors at other colleges and universities.

In the absence of any real purpose, the humanities have become very strange and insular on college campuses. They are obsessed with the politics of gender and race yet they are so far off the mainstream in their politics that their views mean nothing to the public. For example, during the recent Duke lacrosse affair the humanities faculty at Duke in their outrage went to the effort of buying a full page ad in the student newspaper suffused with bromides about racial and sexual discrimination. It was laughable. In the first place, hardly anyone reads the student newspaper the Duke Chronicle. They wasted their money. In the second place, their descriptions of racial and sexual attitudes at Duke bore little relation to reality. The ad would have been completely ignored had not the far right decided to use it for political fodder.

At least the ad was written in understandable English. Sad to say, that's not always true when it comes to the humanities. I would argue that the reason the language of humanities texts has become so laughably arcane is the result of insularity. In some sense, it's a downward spiral. Humanities departments become more and more insular. Students and the public understand them less and less. So to some extent, the humanities have themselves to blame for their lack of importance. But I think that's actually a bit harsh. Even if they were still writing understandable prose and speaking about Shakespeare very few would care.

Inevitably, culture will shift again. We'll move from the "Steve McQueen model" to something else. Who knows? Maybe kids by the bushel full will be playing Chopin with out of tune pianos a couple of decades from now. And if that's the case, the humanities will start to matter. My guess is that if they ever do start to matter again, the strangeness will disappear. It will be self-correcting.

That's it for higher education week on this blog. I was going to include a review of the Duke lacrosse book, Until Proven Innocent, but my review copy has yet to reach my mailbox and my library has only two copies with a short wait list (it isn't exactly a bestseller, but it is generating more interest than its publisher expected). I imagine I'll read it in a couple of weeks and post a review then.

The Disappearing College Education

It was a sense that I developed early on as a professor. College was getting easier and easier. Education was disappearing on college campuses. We were turning colleges into summer camps. I was becoming less of a teacher and more of a camp counselor. Was I right or was I just being cranky at a young age?

I looked at my old notes from college and tried to use them as a guide to teaching my courses. I found that the material was too dense for the college student of today. I had to simplify. I had to throw out a lot of the math. Essentially I had to teach about two thirds of what I once learned and I was teaching at an elite school. It probably was worse elsewhere.

I looked at the homeworks I was assigned once a week as a student and again tried to use them as a template. They were too difficult for today's student. And I couldn't assign them once a week otherwise students would revolt. So I went to once every other week with the option of skipping one homework during the semester.

I did all of this and found out that I was still deemed a hard instructor. I wondered just how much less other people were teaching. I looked at introductory textbooks in my field and found that the language had been dumbed down. There were less pages and lots of pictures. They looked less like text books and more like comic books. I ran into one of the textbook writers at a meeting and asked him, "What happened?" He gave me a wan smile and said they had to rewrite the text because the old one - the one I learned from - was deemed much too hard for students of today.

I reduced the number of expected hours spent studying for my classes from six per week - because students were ready to shoot me - to about two. I filled up a lot of lecture time with jokes because I couldn't teach what I once had learned.

I was teaching "college-lite." No one seemed upset by this except me and a handful of others. College goes on. And when I talked about this with other people they said that I was mistaken. Students were working as hard as they ever did. During this time, my college's president-to-be said to a reporter that students were earning higher grades than ever before because they were smarter and actually working harder than they once did.

So who is right? Am I delusional? Am I one of those cranks who remembers that I walked to school (uphill both ways) through the snow for four miles every day?

It turns out I'm right. First, I did some personal calculations. In my head I totalled up the number of hours I spent studying way back when. It came out to about 20 hours a week. I asked my sweetie to do the same not telling her what number I came up with. She did the totals. It was the same number, 20 hours a week. According to a recent study by my old employer, students are studying less than half that amount at Duke.

But a sample of two is not much in the way of data for comparison with current trends. You need much more than a sample of two.

It turns out that they are samples much higher than two. A working paper by Babcock and Marks uses sample sets of about 10,000. The figure above comes from data from that paper. Students are studying far less, about one third less than they once did. I'll be talking about the results from this paper in detail at a later date.

According to the paper, college has been transformed from a full time job of 40 hours a week to a part time job of about 25 hours a week.

Grades are up. Workloads are down. What is essentially happening is that college has transformed itself into a right of passage for attaining social standing. The educational component of college is disappearing step by step.

If you look at past trends over the last forty years and extrapolate to the future (always a dicey business), sometime toward the end of this century, the average GPA of a college student will be essentially 4.0 and the average workload will be zero hours per week. We'll have straight A students doing zero work. It's a perfection of sorts.

It's Weasels All The Way Down

A couple of days ago, Erwin Chemerinsky, law professor at Duke, was re-hired as dean of UC-Irvine's new law school. He'd also been hired about two weeks before. But before he even showed up on the job he was fired because he was deemed "too politically controversial" by Chancellor Michael Drake. We'll never get the straight story from Dr. Drake about why Chemerinsky was fired. But we know why he was hired back. Dr. Drake had a p.r. disaster on his hands when he fired Chemerinsky. Trying to create a new law school on the foundation of a p.r. nightmare is never a good idea. So Dr. Drake flew across the country, likely got on his knees, and Professor Chemerinsky said yes for the second time.

Hooray for Dr. Drake. At least he knows how to make a good recovery. But the country now knows what probably everybody already knew at UC-Irvine. Dr. Drake is a weasel.

By the way, what's lost in the news is the fact that this country doesn't need a new law school. We have more lawyers by far than any other country. As far as I can tell, we'd be better off if we closed down a good half of the law schools that already exist. Yes I'm digressing and no I won't tell any lawyer jokes.

OK, back to the weasel at hand. Dr. Drake is not the only weasel leading a university. Feckless leadership is standard business in the world of academia. My old employer hired Richard Brodhead a few years ago. This past year, because of the lacrosse affair, the whole country was witness to his spinelessness. But well before that it was clear that he was a weasel. And I don't mean to pick on him. The previous president of Duke was also of the feckless variety.

When Richard Brodhead became president of Duke, an old friend of mine said to me that she couldn't believe it. Brodhead ate at her dining club when she was an undergraduate at Yale. The guy was a milquetoast. She never understood how he became a dean much less a president of a university. He had nothing in him that would indicate leadership ability. I nodded my head listening to her. It sounded familiar. About a decade previous, I'd had the same conversation about Nan Keohane, Duke's past president, with a faculty member from Stanford, a place where Keohane once taught.

I don't mean to pick on Duke, really. Once I was giving a talk at a UC university. They put me up in a fancy small hotel the night before. It just so happened that all of the chancellors of the UC system were having a meeting at this place. I started chatting it up with one of them in the morning and he invited me to breakfast with the chancellors.

Now one might think that a room full of University of California chancellors would have a certain level of buzz and intensity. Not so. Being there and eating my yogurt, fruit and bad pastry was like being in the office cafeteria of a regional Allstate office (don't ask me why, but I used to sometimes eat at the regional office of Allstate in Menlo Park). These people were so dull and boring that I couldn't wait to get out of there. I was in a sea of milquetoast.

How does it happen that universities tend to hire people bland, weasel-types with no leadership skills for presidents and chancellors? I can only take a stab at this question. But one reason is that the process of rising through the ranks at universities requires you to take an active role in faculty governance. At most universities, faculty councils and committees are powerless things. They are empty affairs where votes either represent rubber stamps of what the powers that be wish or are ignored. If you have any pride or personality, faculty councils and committees are essentially a form of psychological torture. So you avoid them as best you can (and I certainly did).

The people who fill positions in faculty governance tend to be people without any pride or personality whatsoever. They dutifully go to meetings knowing full well that their efforts have no real meaning. They happily rubber stamp presidential wishes. And this is the pool of faculty from which universities draw their leadership. It's weasels all the way down.

Now this "weasels all the way down" observation is simply a rule of thumb. There are of course exceptions. Professor Chemerinsky - the now twice hired dean of UC-Irvine's new law school - appears to be an exception. But here's another rule of thumb: those that aren't weasels tend to fare poorly in academic leadership positions.

I've seen two non-weasels at work in leadership positions: Harvard's Larry Summers and Rice's Malcolm Gillis*. Both had huge personalities. Both wore their opinions on their sleeves. And they both were hated by their faculty.

Larry Summers famously was fired. The right wing has made claims that Summers was fired because he wasn't politically correct (that the political right has turned Summers - a left leaning economist - into a martyr is odd). That's not correct. He was fired because he was a poor fit. One thing - maybe the only thing - that academics are good at is having an eye for detail. It's why little things get so blown out of proportion in universities. All of Summer's personality quirks - well known when he was in government - became magnified in the academic spotlight.

Gillis wasn't fired, but when he left Rice's faculty was jubilant. His folksy ways and his big belly laugh were not anything Rice's faculty members wanted any part of. They thought he was a hayseed. The man taught at Harvard for over a dozen years, but in their eyes, he came straight out of the Beverly Hillbillies.

It may be that in the current state of academia, having a personality is a liability. Maybe we have milquetoast weasels leading our universities because that's precisely the personality type that's required. If that's the case, Dean Chemerinsky is in for a very rough ride.

*Gillis, by the way, wanted to be president at Duke but the Board of Trustees were scared of him. They hired mild-mannered Keohane instead. Summers was replaced by Faust, a milquetoast historian.

America's Grade Inflation Czar Speaks

One of the strangest things that has happened to me has been the media response to an article I published in the Washington Post on grade inflation in 2003. Ever since that article came out, I seem to have become America's Grade Inflation Czar. I've been on talk shows, on CNN, you name it. I've even earned some money from repeated publication of figures from the web site - gradeinflation.com - that accompanied the Washington Post article (hint, anyone can make those graphs themselves for free by using the data on the site).

I couldn't have predicted this. I chalk it up to America's obsession with numbers. I remember that while I was writing the article in a Kauai* hotel during winter break my sweetie said "Who in the world is going to be interested in this?" I said I had no idea, but I'd send it to the Post (which had published something earlier of mine) and see. The idea for the article came about when I saw a graph on the front page of my daughter's college newspaper showing grades over time at her college. "Wow, real data," I thought. "I wonder how many schools have data like this?"

I note that for a little while after the article and web site came out, someone who bought the domains gradeinflation.net and gradeinflation.org routed them to Stanford's and Harvard's main web sites. Funny. The Stanford link is gone (why I can only guess), but the Harvard link to gradeinflation.org remains. Stanford is very touchy about grade inflation. Unlike Harvard, they refused to give me any data. So much for openness in the pursuit of knowledge.

But maybe Stanford will change its tune. Because as of next month I will start to upgrade my grade inflation database. People keep asking me for new data, but I've always hesitated. First, it takes time. Second, you need enough time for elapse for any trends to show. Five years sounds like a good time increment to me. So I'll be pecking around the web looking for new data and asking Stanford and a bunch of other universities yet again for grading information. Who knows what I will find? I have no idea really. I'll post the results next spring. If anyone who reads this has access to data, kindly send me an email.

It's worth mentioning that since I published my article on grade inflation and put together my web site, little has been done in academia to change grading practices. Princeton has implemented an advisory ceiling on the percentage of As awarded in each department that appears to have had a noticeable effect on mean GPAs. I don't know of any other school that has implemented such a policy.

Since my article and web site came out there have some additional attempts to relate grade inflation to increases in student quality. As I note on gradeinflation.com, SAT scores are commonly used as a surrogate for student quality in these studies. This use of SATs is fraught with problems. Correlations between grades and SAT scores typically have horribly low statistical reliability. For example, I note that Cornell's recent rise in grades shown above has been partly attributed to SAT increases in its student body. But the r2 values for the relationship between SAT scores and GPA at Cornell according to the paper that tries to make this claim are on the order 0.05. Garbage in. Garbage out. I'll say a little more about this work below.

Another contributing problem in using SAT scores as a student quality surrogate is that some admissions officers appear to be cherry picking students with high SAT scores in an attempt to increase their US News ranking. They are gaming the rankings system. SAT scores of first year students may be increasing dramatically at a school, but overall measures of the incoming pool of students (class rank, difficulty of high school courses, recommendations) may show little change. I may talk about this more in the future.

But back to Cornell and grade inflation. First off, before the data above became available (I saw it in Atlantic Monthly in 2005) there was hearsay that Cornell was a hard school to earn an A. The data clearly show otherwise. A's comprise about 40 percent of all Cornell grades. Those prospective students who have been avoiding Cornell because it's tough can start applying without a pang of worry.

Second, a working paper by Bar et al. on grading at Cornell ascribes 60 percent of recent grade inflation to the appearance of online data on course GPAs. Sometime in the late 1990s, mean GPAs for each class at Cornell were posted and became readily available online. The thesis of Bar et al. is that students are preferentially choosing easy grading classes based on this new information.

It's an interesting thesis. But I don't think it holds water. Students had ample information on which instructors and classes had easy grades before the web-based data were available. It's called word of mouth. On college campuses, the grapevine is a very, very strong way of learning about what classes to take and avoid. Second, if this thesis is true enrollments in classes would have seen a measurable shift after the data on GPAs became available online. Easy grading classes would have seen increased enrollments that were beyond past trends. Hard grading classes would have seen decreasing enrollments. The authors present no evidence that this transpired.

Why have grades at Cornell been increasing? The most likely contributing factor is that professors across the board are being more lenient in grading.

I hope to get more data on Cornell's grading during the update of my database. My goal is to get reliable data from at least 100 schools. I do believe that it will be harder for me to get data this time than last. I'm hoping I'm wrong. But last time, I was just a geology professor interested in grade inflation. People probably thought that the data would barely see the light of day. Now it's different. We'll see.

*Whoops. It was Maui. And the fact that my sweetie puts up with me writing boring articles in tropical island hotels has been duly noted.

Sis Boom Bah

This is higher education week for this blog, a topic near and dear to my heart and one that I haven't written about in a while. And to start off higher education week, I thought it would be worthwhile to discuss the most visible aspect of higher education in America, college football.

I've been associated with three schools as a student and/or instructor, Duke, Stanford, and Wisconsin (actually four, but I was at the fourth for so little time that I tend to forget about it). Football is an important part of all three schools just like it is in every school that has Division I sports.

The chart above shows the conference winning percentages of these three football teams over the last five years. In a nutshell, Duke and Stanford have had mostly miserable non-competitive teams over their recent history while Wisconsin has had a lot of success. Forgive the color scheme in the chart. That funny red color is supposed to be the color "cardinal," the official color and "mascot" of Stanford. Having a color for a mascot is one strange thing. But I digress.

It wasn't always the case that Wisconsin was good at football and Stanford and Duke were miserable. When I was a student at Wisconsin, they were in general awful at football and had been for some time. Conversely, when I was a student at Stanford they were usually competitive as was Duke during some of the 1980s.

How did things flip around? It's simple really. In the 1980s, Donna Shalala, then president of Wisconsin decided to do what other schools successful at football did. She paid a lot of money for a coach and assistants, upgraded facilities and allowed the recruitment of a few tens of players with very limited academic skills. Voila! In a few short years Wisconsin won the conference championship and the Rose Bowl.

In the 1990s, the ante for a successful football program increased. You had to pay even more money for a football coach - much more than what a college president earns - and bring in even more marginal students who weigh 300 pounds and can run 40 yards in 4.3 seconds. Wisconsin marched in lock step with other football powers. But Duke and Stanford didn't. They decided they weren't going to pay a seven figure salary for a coach. They weren't going dip ridiculously low in the academic pool. Essentially, they walked away from the table.

In the 1990s, Stanford got lucky for a few years with a young unproven coach and even managed to get to the Rose Bowl. But eventually, the big boys came calling and hired their coach away. Stanford paid their next coach about $400,000 a year, well below what the major football schools were paying for top talent. As can be expected, they quickly fell from their perch.

Duke watched its successful coach from the 1980s move to Florida for a ridiculous salary and paid their next coach in the low six figures. Aside from one fluke year in the 1990s, they have been miserable for almost two decades now.

A few years ago, the presidents of Stanford and Duke co-penned an op-ed in the San Jose Mercury News (apparently major newspapers turned them down) that raised the white flag. College sports needed reform they said:

"Yet as we move from one athletic season to another, we are not alone among university presidents who feel increasing tension between our educational mission and the powerhouse of intercollegiate sports. We worry that the demands of major collegiate athletics loom so large for some students that they have a disproportionate, unhealthy impact on their lives."

What they were really saying was they could no longer compete in football because salaries for coaches were too high and academic standards for football were too low. Since that op-ed was written, salaries for football coaches have entered the 2 million plus range. The athletes? Please don't ask them to spell any word longer than "win."

Of course, the NCAA still promotes the myth of the student-athlete. It's a narrative that people buy because they oh so want to believe facts be damned. Graduation rates for football players in top-tier football programs are embarrassing. And the funny thing is that these graduation rates have stayed low even though the work loads of college students have decreased dramatically over the last forty years (more on that later in the week).

I'm not going to say that colleges should abandon football. It's part of the fabric of college life. People derive enjoyment from it. But what we should do is admit that football has nothing to do with academics; college football is entertainment and serves as the minor league of the NFL. Colleges should pay their players and make education optional for them. We're probably a couple of decades away from paying players. But it will happen.

It's interesting to note that both alumni and students at Duke and Stanford are well aware of the reasons why their teams have not been successful. My informal polling of these past and current students indicates that they would love to have their schools bring in even more dumb jocks and pay their coaching staffs whatever it takes. They are sick of losing. It's a matter of pride.

My guess is that a few years from now the cacophony from alumni will grow so loud that both Duke and Stanford will succumb. The presidents will hold their noses and hire some guy for a few million to recruit kids with 900 SAT scores. Graduation rates for football players will plummet, but both alumni and students will be very happy to cheer their teams on to victory. Sis boom bah.

In the meantime, I note that this past weekend something happened that hasn't happened in at least two years. Duke and Stanford won a football game on the same day. In both cases, they weren't facing conference rivals, but a victory is a victory. When they come so infrequently you can get a little overenthusiastic. Duke students became so excited that they ripped out a goalpost or two from their stadium (the team wasn't even playing at home) and carried one of them around to the campus quad. During the drunken revelry some of the students decided to prop up the goal post. But they didn't succeed for long. The goal post descended and before it reached the ground hit a student over the head, knocking her unconscious.

Thankfully, the student is fine. Not so the football program. Count on Duke and Stanford football wins to be rare for the foreseeable future.

Reb Stu Explains All

My father died on this day - the second day of the Jewish New Year - over 15 years ago. According to Jewish law, you're supposed to honor your loved one's anniversaries of passing by reciting a prayer for mourners, the Kaddish. Ten Jews need to be present. My father made things easy for me. I don't have to search around for ten Jews and a synagogue. I can find hundreds in a jiffy on this day.

When my father died, I didn't feel particularly sad. He'd been so ill for so long, both mentally and physically, that I felt I had said good-bye to the father I really knew years ago. His death was a relief more than anything else. Once a few years before he died he asked me for a pill so he could kill himself. My mother told me he asked her as well. Still a couple of weeks before his death, we all went out - all the kids and grandkids - to a breakfast buffet. It was a rare thing having all of us together. The weather was wonderful. Although my father could no longer talk and his facial expressions were frozen by advanced Parkinson's disease, I could feel something radiating from him as I pushed him along in his wheelchair away from the restaurant. It's hard to explain, but I sensed real joy from him, a kind of satisfaction from the day.

On the second day of the Jewish New Year what has to be the most emotional passage in the Old Testament is read, Genesis 22, the binding of Isaac by his father Abraham. To mourn for a father on this day is propitious because "The Binding" is in some ways as riveting a story about the complexities of father/son relationships as you will find.

When I was a teen, my view of The Binding was that it was the tale of a crazed man. Abraham hears a voice that tells him to sacrifice his son. Hearing voices that tell you to kill is never a good thing. To my mind, Abraham was the ancient equivalent of Son of Sam. The father of Judaism was simply a nut job. The creation of monotheism was the result of one crazed guy who heard voices.

Now I'm not so harsh in my interpretation although I must say that there are readings of ancient rabbis that come somewhat close to sharing my old view. They say that Abraham misinterpreted God. The whole thing was a misunderstanding. Abraham still had a lot to learn about the ways of the master of the universe. It's an interesting idea, this "God didn't mean it" interpretation. There are, of course, a lot more nterpretations out there, many by people a lot smarter and more learned than I. Still I'll put in my two cents.

For me, the story operates best as an allegory. I discount the whole idea that Abraham actually bound his only son on a hilltop and almost slaughtered him. It's just a story. Abraham would have to be crazy to actually do this and chances are he wasn't. So let's throw out the actual event and look at it as an allegory. And let's throw out the numbers given in the Old Testament, Abraham being 137 years old and Isaac being 37 at the time. Let's divide by three and the numbers work out better.

In this allegory, God tests Abraham by asking him to do the unthinkable, kill his only child. But since God is all knowing, he knows that Abraham has so much faith that he would actually do as commanded. He will do anything for God. Let's put it this way. When God asks you to do something and you're a believer, it's an offer you can't refuse. So the point of this story for me is not that Abraham passes some kind of test. It's not what God learns about Abraham. It's what Abraham learns about himself. He learns he is capable of doing anything for God. He learns that his faith is absolute. He also learns that his faith will be rewarded, that God will intercede on his behalf. In this story, God is helping to teach Abraham about the nature of his faith.

My father never tried to sacrifice me. He did have me bribe government officials, the thinking being that I was less likely to be caught. So he was more than a bit of a stinker. And he wasn't altogether sane even when he was healthy. He was what was known in the world of Yiddish as a "shtarker," a strong one. He got things done. People never messed with him. And if perhaps he did hear the voice of God telling him to kill me, my guess is that unlike Abraham, he told God to f*ck off.

Rereading

Today is the first day of the Jewish New Year. And every year in synagogue, the same two portions of the Old Testament are read on this day. The first deals with the birth of Isaac. The second deals with the birth of Samuel. I'm not a regular reader of the Old Testament, but one thing you get from an Orthodox Jewish education is the value of reading in detail and rereading. Once a year, I read these passages carefully and every time I walk away with a little better understanding. I kid you not. I've been reading these passages for decades now and they don't ever get old.

Now's time for Reb Stu's bible lesson based on decades of reading these same two passages over and over. Just like many people who read the bible, I like to make interpretations. I've been doing this for a long time. The problem is that when I did this as a kid, my interpretations would usually be met with physical violence on the part of my teachers, frustrated low rung rabbis stuck teaching wiseacre kids in the virtual Jewish desert called Milwaukee.

But now I'm far away from those guys. No one is going to slap me across the face. So here goes. Genesis 21.

Biblical scholars tend to make all kinds of excuses for bad behavior in the Old Testament. The idea I guess is that because these people are our matriarchs and patriarchs, they must be wonderful people. But they aren't. They're just people with all kinds of quirks and bad stuff mixed in with the good. And one of the absolute stinkers in terms of bad behavior is what Sarah does after her son Isaac is born. Ostensibly worried about the "bad influence" of Ishmael, she makes sure that Abraham kicks his son Ishmael and Hagar, Ishmael's mom, out into the desert.

Now that's just plain sick and twisted. Sarah is engaging in a heartless power play. Sarah knows that sending Hagar and Ishmael into the desert is a virtual death sentence. She could care less. In the Old Testament, Sarah tends to come across as a pretty woman with a mega-nasty streak. She complains about how people are going to laugh at her over nursing her son Isaac. Why should she care what other people think? She's 90 years old for gods sake. If she is so vain at 90, one can only imagine what she was like when she was young. I could never live with someone like that. The Sarah of today would be living on Park Avenue, taking weekly Botox injections, and when she died would leave twelve million dollars to her dog, Trouble.

So much for Genesis 21. On to Samuel 1. For me, this is as good and sweet as the Old Testament gets. Again we have a barren woman, this time Hannah. The poor thing has to listen to her husband's other wife ridicule her over her lack of a kid (another knock against bigamy if you ask me). She's driven to tears by this "co-wife." In desperation she goes to Shiloh to pray. And she makes some prayer. Not a word escapes her lips and she is so lost in her prayers, she's so intense, that she's accused of being drunk. She wants a child so much that she swears that if she is given a son, he will give him to god as his servant.

When she does give birth, she keeps her promise. And she creates a beautiful and stunning poem to honor God. Yesiree Bob, one of the best poems in the bible is written by a woman.*

It's a curious thing, having these two passages together, two responses to late-found fertility. One woman responds in as ugly a way you can possibly imagine. The other is so humble and thankful that you can be driven to tears of joy when reading her poetry (I cry when I read her poem; I'm a softy and can't help it.).

One funny fact is that in Eastern European shtetl life, the name Sarah was held in high regard. In contrast, according to my mom (my authority on all things shtetl), Hannah was a name given to daughters of trailer trash (OK, not trailers but straw roofed shacks), the equivalent of Tiffany today.

But for me, that hierarchy should be swapped. Give me Hannah anytime over that rich pretty bitch Sarah. OK, I'll fry in hell for this interpretation. But I'm an atheist and don't believe in that stuff. And Jews don't believe in hell anyway. That's a Christian thing, the fire and brimstone. So there.

*OK, don't take me literally. The people who wrote the Old Testament almost certainly were males. But they gave some of the best lines to a woman.

Cowgirls Need Not Apply

Lately, I've been writing a lot of country songs for women. Female country singers tend to sing about meatier subjects and they tend to have a decent range - most male country stars can only sing over about an octave and a quarter - so you can write somewhat interesting songs with real melodies. But a funny thing is happening to females in country music. They are disappearing fast. It's becoming a cowboys only thing. Cowgirls need not apply.

Last month brought news of two female acts being dropped from Capitol Records, one of them a former platinum seller. In pop, acts come and go so fast you can't keep track. But in country, it's usually different. Country fans are very loyal to acts. Once a star achieves a certain status, they tend to last for a decade or more. That's not true anymore for women. They are dropping off the country radar faster than you can say Patsy Cline. Jamie O'Neal. Julie Roberts. Jessica Andrews. Pretty women with track records of selling CDs who can sing like angels are going the way of the dodo bird.

The best song on the country charts in terms of meaningful content and melody last year, Georgia Rain, was sung by Trisha Yearwood, a long time country favorite. It barely cracked the top 20 on the country charts. Even last year's national darling, Carrie Underwood, has seen her first single from her new album - a big power ballad with a soaring chorus - not even crack the top five.

Why are women not selling? I can only guess. One is that those meaty songs with good melodies - what used to be career type songs for females - have lost their popularity. People just want something that they can dance to. They don't want to think. Another reason is that in music - country or pop - you're not really buying the song. It's more than ever true that mostly you're buying the personality.

In a personality driven marketplace, female country singers are at a big disadvantage. There are basically only two acceptable personality types in country music right now: the girl/woman next door model of Faith Hill/Martina et al. and the trailer park trash next door model of Gretchen Wilson and a couple of imitators. Country female singers can be sweet or they can be ignorant and proud about it.

Being sweet gets boring and how many girl next door acts can a market house? Being ignorant and proud gets old fast in the marketplace. And one thing it's not acceptable for a country female singer to be is sexy. No Madonnas, Britneys or Beyonces are allowed. It's a cultural taboo. Another cultural taboo - with a little more leeway - is for a girl to be funny.

In contrast, the personality types being sold on the male side are diverse. You have the obnoxious jerk who's the life of the party come July 4th, Toby Keith. You have the great guy who would always help you in a pinch, Tim McGraw. You have the sexy party animal, Kenny Chesney. You have the frat boy with a big smile, Josh Turner. And of course, you have the guy who'll make you laugh out loud, Brad Paisely.

Country girls, by contrast, are in a personality straight-jacket. Unless the actual music becomes important again or cultural taboos in the genre fade, it's going to continue to be a tough row to hoe in country music for females.

A Hand Like a Foot

I first met my sweetie to be when I was 13. It was New Years Eve. I was high on pot. Me and my friends were riding bikes from party to party. And at this particularly party there were only girls. One of them was teaching the others to play a card game called kalooki. It's an obscure rummy kind of card game played with two decks. I don't know its origins, but as far as I knew at the time it was a game only played by Orthodox Jews who came from Eastern Europe. If you knew that game and you were my age, undoubtedly your parents were immigrants and you spoke Yiddish in the home. But this girl wasn't a child of immigrants. She knew only a few Yiddish words. How did she know that game?

I don't do drugs anymore - haven't for decades - but when I get high I get incredibly sentimental and mushy. I watched this girl dealing cards from that fat deck and almost cried with tears of joy. She seemed so smart. She had a way of pronouncing her words with her lips that I found adorable. I didn't see her again until about two years later, but I never forgot her.

I rode home on my bike in the middle of the night and I was so high that I ran right through a barricade with flashing lights; my front tire ended up in a 10 foot deep hole in the road before I managed to stop. Obviously my judgment was not the best. And my judgment about girls when I get high - given how mushy I become - is also not the best. I remember once going unconscious in a closet while inhaling nitrous oxide. As I came to I thought I saw the face of an angel. It was a girl opening the closet door. I was convinced that she was the love of my life. I pursued her and wooed her blinded by love. I succeeded. In three weeks time, I was deep in a relationship from hell.

I've been playing kalooki since I was three years old. By four, I'd be sitting around the table with adults, beating them with a frequency that would make them a bit angry. Rummy is a game of simple math. I'm good at math and obsessed with numbers. At three, I would go to sleep by multiplying by two as high as I could go in my head. The biggest obstacle to playing kalooki as a little kid was the physical chore of holding so many cards, fourteen, in my small hands. People would sit around the table and say things like, "ich hub a handt vie a feece" (I have a hand like a foot). I felt so grown up.

On occasion, I'll still play kalooki with my sweetie. She's a very good player. It turns out she learned the game from her grandmother, a Jewish Russian immigrant. I still adore the way she pronounces words. Over the years, she learned enough Yiddish to understand my parents. When I think of the game of kalooki, I think of love.

It's Time to Bring Back Floozie

You can't avoid their presence, these blonde and bleach-blonde young women who grace the covers of those magazines that line grocery checkout aisles. It seems to be a requirement that they have names that sound like they come out of a fashion doll collection: Britney, Paris, Lindsay. Notice that the names consist of two syllables with the accent on the first syllable. There's another one that doesn't quite get as much press coverage, I think because the accent of her name, Nicole, is on the second syllable. Poor thing. For publicity purposes she ought to change her name to something like Amber.

The public appeal of these women is that they are young, thin, rich, promiscuous and troubled. It's not necessarily true that they are dumb although in the case of a couple of them it's obvious that they are. They aren't particularly beautiful, either. Their allure seems to be of the "I can't take my eyes off this train wreck" variety. They drink too much and drive intoxicated. They take copious amounts of drugs. They have home sex videos that rather than serve as a source of disgrace, fuel their popularity. They get pregnant and you know that the men with whom they have exchanged bodily fluids in order to procreate will not be changing any diapers and reading books to their children. They are arrested and put in jail for a few days to weeks.

We live in a very crude society that seems to celebrate these living train wrecks. It's a shame we do, but we do. And I've been wondering what, as a class of females, do you call them?

You could call them skanky. But this implies a certain dirtiness and they all seem to have decent hygiene although they apparently don't all don underwear. You could call them bimbos, but this too seems a bit off. They aren't all dumb and they aren't particularly top heavy either. Slut isn't right either. Whore, ho, and all of those words that imply that they have sex for money are far off the mark.

I say we bring back the Victorian era word floozie. It doesn't imply dirty. It doesn't imply anything about brains or the lack thereof. It simply means someone who dresses in a sexually overt way, flirts, and screws like like a bunny on the first day of spring. In essence, it's someone promiscuous with a tawdry fashion sense. Of this they are all guilty as charged. Plus, like their names, the word has two syllables with an accent on the first syllable. As a result, using the name Paris and the word floozie to describe her in the same sentence works well from a literary standpoint. As for their criminal behavior, you could add the term jailbird. Jailbird floozie has a nice ring to it don't you think?

Adventures in False Precision Part II

A while back I talked about how scientists try to make precise quantitative predictions that just aren't theoretically possible. They do it because of public need. The public needs forecasts. It doesn't really matter if they are accurate or not. It comforts the public to see those numbers there.

I noted that the National Weather Service (NWS) does this on a daily basis with their predictions of rainfall. It isn't possible to provide 10 percent accuracy on these predictions. But the NWS does it anyway. And as I noted earlier, it appears that as a sort of safety factor, they predict rain far more than they should.

We are currently in hurricane season and the NWS is hard at work making predictions of both the landfall of a hurricane and its intensity. Like predicting rain, making predictions about hurricanes is a dicey business. A hurricane in the atmosphere is akin to a cork floating in the ocean (that line by the way comes from a hurricane forecaster for the NWS who I interviewed a few years ago). It's subject to the whims of atmospheric weather patterns and those are very hard to predict.

What meteorologists do to try to predict landfall and intensity of hurricanes nowadays is use supercomputers to run atmospheric circulation models over and over again with slightly different initial numbers. They get a range of results and use that range to predict what's going to happen in an average sense. But those models have no track record of making accurate predictions. Atmospheric scientists fool themselves into thinking these predictions have validity. They taut how complicated the models and how powerful the computers are. Essentially they get lost in the coolness of the toys they use.

But the proof is in the pudding. NWS predictions of landfall and instensity are often miserable. I note that in 1996 Hurricane Fran loomed off the North Carolina coast. At about 10 PM, I went online to look at the forecast as to where Fran would make landfall that night. The predicted landfall was close to the Virginia border with a subsequent path toward Richmond, about 150 miles north of Chapel Hill, which is where I was living. I turned off my computer. I remembered that my Volvo was parked in the driveway not in the garage. I thought, "What does the NWS know about predicting landfall? Nothing." So I went outside and parked my car in the garage.

That night, Hurricane Fran rampaged through Chapel Hill, knocking over a half-dozen huge trees on my lot. One of them landed on the driveway right where my Volvo had been. So much for NWS predictions of hurricanes.

The NWS makes predictions about hurricane behavior not because they have a scientific basis - they don't - but because the public demands that they do.

It isn't just the NWS that's caught in this game. In economics, government offices like the GAO make all kinds of economic forecasts about the state of the economy and our budget deficits that have no basis whatsoever. People need predictions no matter how inaccurate. They need them with ridiculous levels of accuracy in economics, weather, agriculture, you name it. These predictions allow them to make decisions about what to do next. Of course, since the predictions are lousy so are those decisions. Welcome to the real world of decision making.

We like numbers. We feel comforted by them. And the more decimal places we put behind those numbers, the more we seem to feel comforted. It's a kind of numerical voodoo. I don't quite understand it myself, but I know it's there. And it isn't just in forecasting. We like to make quantitative distinctions that just aren't possible. For example, I've made many references to US News and World Report's annual ranking of colleges in print and in this blog. Can anyone actually say with any degree of validity that Princeton is a more prestigious and better place for an undergraduate to go to college than Harvard, Yale, Caltech, MIT, or Stanford? Is Penn more prestigious and a better place to go to school than Dartmouth, Brown, Duke, Cornell and about a dozen other places? The real answer is that they are all about the same. But the public wants someone to do the impossible and split hairs deciding which of these institutions is actually better than the other.

The bottom line is that the public would rather have funny numbers than no numbers at all. I guess in a world where people still consult horoscopes, our desire to have scientists, economists and journalists provide us with shoddy predictions and distinctions isn't so strange.

One liner of the day:
On the AP wire today, "Bush tells biographer 'I do tears.'" I do too. Every time W opens his mouth I cry up a storm. badabump

Is It the Man or His Politics?

A new biography of George W. Bush came out this week, Dead Certain by Robert Draper. I won't read it. I love to read biographies of presidents. But one of my requirements is that the subject of the biography have some emotional or intellectual complexity. In Bush's case neither is true. If a definitive biography of Bush is ever written, it should be in comic book form with a picture of OZ on the cover. Title? If I Only Had a Brain.

Oh I know that I'm being mean-spirited by saying that. I should have more respect for the man who is after all our nation's reader. But honestly, have we had a dumber or more incompetent president in the last 50 years?

I'm a lefty who votes for people who have a chance of winning so I vote for and support Democrats even though they aren't liberals much less on the left. The country has moved to the center over the last 30 years. Democrats tend to be moderate centrists. Republicans tend to be right wing lunatics. The left has been essentially gone in mainstream politics for decades.

I note that until Fred Thompson entered the election yesterday, all major presidential candidates, Democratic and Republican, had some intellect. I doubt that Fred Thompson will succeed. So regardless of who wins it is likely that we will have someone with a brain in the White House for the first time in eight years. We have no place to go but up.

The question I have never quite settled in my mind with regard to Bush is the following. Is conservative ideology - something Bush holds dearly - at fault for the disaster of his presidency or is it just him as a practitioner of that ideology? Like most questions like this, the answer is probably that it's a little of both.

The last conservative president we had, Reagan, was smarter than Bush until he seemed to deteriorate mentally toward the last year and a half. He was an autodidact who hammered out his own political philosophy. If ever there was a test case as to whether a conservative president is good for this country Reagan was it. That test case was very mixed in its end result.

Reagan pumped up our military. One of the unintended outcomes of wasting so much money on military expenditures is that the Soviets felt compelled to do the same. It was a game of economic chicken. Reagan drove our economy into recession in the process. The Soviets completely collapsed. We unintentionally buried our enemy by outspending it.

But economically, Reagan was a disaster. He spent money like a madman and cut taxes for the wealthy. But there was no "trickle down." The rich got richer. The poor suffered. Social services were stretched so thin that they actually broke. The era of Reagan initiated the era of "Reagan's children" the homeless people - often mentally disturbed - that populate the streets of the nation's urban centers.

Reagan was fond of saber rattling and getting us involved in battles we had no business getting involved in. In Granada it worked. But in Nicaragua and Lebanon it didn't.

From my perspective, the principle benefit of the Reagan years was - aside from the very real collapse of the Soviet Union - emotional. For white Christians in middle America he was a charismatic figure. He gave them hope and quelled their fears - momentarily at any rate - that the country was being taken over by unwashed masses of blacks and other people of color. Reagan was a cowboy with an easy smile who, while not being particularly religious himself, happily embraced the religious right to obtain power.

Bush has said that he didn't want to be like his dad as president. He wanted to be like Reagan. And he has been. Bush has given us a renewal of the Reagan presidency. He is Reagan II except that he is rather dumb. The guiding principle behind the Bush presidency has been WWRD, What Would Ronnie Do? And it hasn't worked in the least.

Unlike Reagan, Bush's presidency has not had any significant high points. Mostly it's been one failure after another. And I think that the reason for this is two-fold. One is that he isn't as smart and flexible as Reagan. The second is that the country has changed in the intervening 20 years and the Reagan approach is obsolete.

"What Would Ronnie Do" with regard to Iraq? In the first place, my guess - and it's a very big guess - is that Reagan would have created a war in Iraq after 9/11 just like Bush did. He was a saber rattler. He loved to create and use military toys. And like Bush, he would have underestimated the nature of the conflict. But it's also my guess - and it's an even bigger guess this time - that we'd already be out of Iraq by now. For example, Reagan readily accepted defeat in Lebanon. He knew that this was a conflict with no possible upside for the US. He pulled out after the death of several hundred US troops incredibly quickly and left Lebanon to stew in its own mess.

My guess is that Reagan would have walked away from Iraq without any remorse. He would have said something along the lines that we tried to help Iraq, but they didn't know what to do with our help. Bush just doesn't have that level of flexibility. And it's costing this country dearly.

But even if Bush were Reagan in every way shape and form, it's doubtful to me that the act would work. The country is different today than it was back in the 1980s. The "moral majority" of white Christian America is increasingly being marginalized. The great fear of the "moral majority" - that they would no longer be a majority - has come true.

We are more than ever a nation of many colors. And Reagan never appealed to much of anyone who wasn't white and Christian. If Reagan were around today, I believe he would be mostly a polarizing figure on the political landscape. And that's what Bush has become. He is a divider not a uniter. He speaks to a narrow-minded constituency. If conservative philosophy is going to be successful politically today, it's going to have to learn how to reach beyond white Christian America.

Public Servants

A few days ago, Nuclear Regulatory Commisioner Ed McGaffigan, Jr. died from skin cancer. I didn't know him. I vaguely remember that he was present at a presentation I once made to the NRC about the feasibility of storing high level nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain, Nevada. He was a fierce defender of the job that the NRC did in safeguarding our nuclear stockpile and a supporter of the use of nuclear power.

The press and the public tend to dwell on the incompetence of government and its employees. To their credit, the Washington Post and NY Times gave Ed McGaffigan kudos for his work in their obits. And well they should. He was a public servant in the best sense of the word. He was well qualified for his job. He worked hard at it. I didn't always agree with his views. For example, recently he came out against Yucca Mountain because it had been mismanaged for so long. I agree that it has been mismanaged. But I don't agree we should give up on it. That said, I respected his views. And I respected his honesty.

We need government, Grover Norquist and the right wing lunatics in DC be damned. And we need highly qualified, hard working government employees. We need to pay them a decent salary so they continue to work for government. In essence, we need many Ed McGaffigans, brainy people earning on the order of 130K a year with advanced degrees (in his case he had an M.S. in physics from Caltech and a degree in public policy from Harvard) who do their job well.

The fact is that we have them. I've seen them at work. They work in crumby little offices in places like the National Institutes of Health and in obscure agencies like my old place of work, the US Geological Survey. They often work long hours for no extra pay. They are highly intelligent and dedicated to their jobs.

The vision that Republicans often portray of the lazy government worker is one that I haven't seen that often. I see public servants like Ed McGaffigan frequently. They like what they do and are good at what they do.

The public often buys into this narrative of sloth and incompetence in government agencies. It's a convenient narrative and it's part of the ethos of this country to hate government. But this narrative is to my mind fiction. I note that about a decade ago, Newt Gingrich tried to test the validity of this narrative. He ran the experiment of shutting down government in the hopes that it would show the public that so much of it wasn't essential. The public found it in a hurry that he was wrong.

We need government and thankfully, government needs and has many public servants like Ed McGaffigan, Jr. They almost always work far from the limelight. I wish there was a way of showing the public just how many talented and essential people are working for them every day.

My Vote for Novel of the Year

I just finished what undoubtedly will be the best novel I will read this year, maybe the best one I will read in the next two to three: The Ministry of Special Cases by Nathan Englander. It's a wholly original piece of work about a family of outcasts set in a time and place that I would think no American-born author would even try to touch for fear of hitting too many false notes: Argentina's Dirty War of the 1970s.

Imagine Bernard Malamud writing with a touch more felicity in style, nuance in emotions and a better understanding of religious Jewish culture and you'd get something like this. Imagine the talent of Doctorow with a little more heart. I've never read anything by Nathan Englander before. But it's clear that Mr. Englander is a world class writer.

Everyone has their own way of judging the quality of a book. For me, it comes down to what I call its entropy. I'm borrowing from the communication theory of Claude Shannon in using this term. I'm not trying to be obtuse on purpose. This is how I think, honest.

Anyhow, a big question for me when I read a book is can I guess the next sentence or the next line of dialogue? If so, then the information content of that book is meager. It has high entropy. If I can't, then the content is dense. Dense is always good when I read, even on the beach. The brain is one of those things that gets better the more you work it. Give me a low entropy book every time.

With The Ministry of Special Cases, I'd read a new passage - in particular, a line of dialogue - and be surprised if not astonished every time. This is about as dense a book of fiction as you will find. It leads you down paths you'd never thought you'd go. And there is a level of wisdom about how humans behave in this book that I can't believe some pisher* under forty could ever grasp.

It won't be a popular book. It's too serious. It's humor is too black. It's too dense. It is too damn good to be popular. Who cares? If you like serious fiction it's a must read.

*Pisher, Yiddish, literally meaning someone who pisses, usually used to denote a young wayward male, the assumption almost always being that all young males are wayward and pissing their life away.

An Evolution of Sorts

One of the stranger things I do is write mainstream, radio friendly country songs.

While at face value, it seems very odd for a retired professor whose first language was Yiddish to be writing country songs, it turns out that it has more or less happened before. Shel Silverstein, a family friend and fellow Yiddish speaker, wrote many country songs; one was a hit for Johnny Cash. I just talked to a woman last week who gave up a tenured position in English at a New York university to move to Nashville to write. I've met one hit songwriter with a Ph.D. in English and another one who left medical school to pursue country songwriting.

So I'm not the only one.

I do it for a number of reasons. First, there is a market, small but real, for these songs. Second, the songs are lyric-driven and I'm principally a lyricist. But third, they tend to be wholesome. They are about being in love. They are about doing the right thing. They aren't, by and large, crude and rude. I'm an old fashioned guy. I don't like crudity. I don't want to promote bad, childish and self-destructive behavior in my songs. I don't want to promote misogyny. I'm happy to write country music.

But crudity is creeping into country music. Over the last few years, there have been a whole slew of hit country songs that promote pride in being ignorant that I find just as offensive as any contemporary r&b song that denigrates women. And then there are the kiss-off songs where all sense of class and decorum seem to disappear. For example, here's a lyric of a recent song that thankfully didn't do well on the charts, The One in the Middle:

I would've given you the finger on my left hand
The one that you use for a wedding band
(But) (And) now I'm givin' you
The one in the middle
The one that's a little bit longer
And I got another one
On my other hand
So I can say it even stronger
If you're askin' if I'm done
Well, I'm sure not sayin' you're number one
(No, now I'm givin' you)
(The one in the middle)
(The one that says we're through)

Now isn't that clever. I note that 20 years ago, a huge smash song with a similar gimmick (but oh so much sweeter) was sung by Randy Travis (who has one sweet country voice), On the Other Hand:

On one hand I count the reasons I could stay with you
And hold you close to me, all night long.
So many lover's games I could play with you
And on that hand I see no reason why it's wrong
But on the other hand, There's a golden band
To remind of someone who would not understand
On one hand I could stay and be your loving man
But the reason I must go is on the other hand

Give me Randy Travis any time. In 20 years country music has gone from songs that say no to infidelity to songs about giving some guy the finger. It's an evolution of sorts I guess.