Tales From The Old Country and Beyond, Part 40

The Modified Golden Rule

The community of Holocaust survivors in Milwaukee consisted of maybe 300 families in the 1960s and 1970s. I didn't know them all, but I probably knew or heard stories about most of them. Most did modestly well in this country, working in factories, running bakeries and the like. By and large, I always felt that with some exceptions, my parents being one of the exceptions, they were beaten down people as were their children, with very modest expectations of what America or their future offered. They followed the rules laid down by God and society, lived in modest homes or flats, and their children never even thought of leaving town when they grew up. I'd go to cheder with these kids and you could just sense the limitations that had been passed on to them. It was a bleak world. Few Jews survived the war. Fewer still seemed to find the energy to live with any sense of vibrancy after.

But there were true exceptions, very colorful characters with big dreams. Some like my parents had the work ethic and discipline that matched their aspirations. Others, though, were simply wild dreamers and schemers. Just like any community, the survivors had their ne-er do wells, drunks, and womanizers, people with bill collectors, ex-wives, and loan sharks chasing after them on a daily basis. My mother had a certain affection for these men. It's not that she wanted to spend any time with them. But she would watch them from afar in the hopes that one day they would straighten out.

There was one guy named Johnny in English, Yankel in Yiddish, who my mother knew from Munich. He kind of looked like a warmed over version of Peter Lorre. He had a broad pale Hungarian kind of face, thinning brown hair swept back, and yellow teeth with lots of gold crowns. Among Jewish women in Europe, Hungarian Jewish men had the reputation for being unfaithful. They were the charming heartbreakers, the bad boys of Jewish culture. Yankel fit the stereotype. I don't know how many times he got married. The last time was when he was in his early sixties. He married a Christian woman, moved to the Jewless South Side, and was completely forgotten by all of the other greener. You could rob, steal and do a lot of things, but marrying outside the faith was simply not a forgivable offense.

Like his past relationships, he and his new wife constantly fought. He moved out after a few years, and then promptly died, leaving nothing but an insurance policy of about ten thousand dollars.

His estranged wife got the money eventually. Based on those future funds, she was given credit for the funeral expenses including the tombstone. She buried Yankel, according to his wishes, in the Orthodox Jewish cemetery. It's the same one where all of my family is buried today, right next to an old-style strip club. Hardly anyone came to the funeral. Both my mother and father did. Yankel, ganovniker and shikorniker that he was, was still one of them.

The wife - I never learned her name - ended up flaking on the funeral bills. The tombstone was never placed. Yankel lay in an unmarked grave. News of his no-good Christian wife's horrible misdeed - and positive proof that marrying a goy was looking for trouble - travelled around fast by phone. Few of the greener may have been at the funeral, but they all knew what happened concerning the tombstone.

My mother was not big on gossip. She was too busy trying to move forward with her own life. She was a problem solver, not a reveler in other people's problems. When she heard the news about Yankel's wife, she was viscerally taken back. I remember the look on her face. She was literally ashen. "It's a shame for us," she said to me. "I don't care who he was and what he did, he's one of us."

She called the tombstone maker - there was only one in town who carved Hebrew letters - to find out how much it would cost to buy the stone. Then she started calling all of the other greener to make a collection. No one was biting, though. I could hear the desperation and sadness in her voice as she talked on the phone to these people and her disappointment at their coldness in return. The stone to my knowledge was never placed on the gravesite. She never gave up mentioning this shande, and would usually bring it up after funerals of other greeners. It would be just a one sentence reminder to the others with a voice filled with sadness and shame.

My father was very sympathetic and solicitous to my mother about this issue although he was not at all surprised by the lack of response by his fellow greener. "No one should be treated like this," my mother said time and time again. My father agreed.

In essence, my parents lived by the golden rule. But frequently there was a fundamental modification that twisted that precept on its head. Their modified Golden Rule was "Do unto others as you think they will do unto you." If you knew or thought someone was vole, honest and forthright, then you behaved with complete integrity. But, on the other hand, if you knew or thought someone was a crook, you'd try to pick his pocket before he picked yours. How they made this judgment on which way they'd go was a mystery - I think they just went by their gut - but I'd see that righteous/sleazy switch go up and down many times in a day. How common this "Modified Golden Rule" was in the community of survivors I don't know. All I know is that both my parents practiced it with skill.

But think of being in Europe during the war. If you trusted no one, it was too harsh and bleak a world to live in, and besides that meant you were on your own. The chance of surviving by your own wits was probably zero. I'm guessing that trusting a few - which is what this Modified Golden Rule was all about - and being a snake to the rest is an excellent survival strategy.*

My parents were not saints nor did they aspire to be. They were basically good, decent people, but they had their quirks. Who doesn't? They were extremely responsible parents. They were devoted to each other completely and honestly. But they had no wish or desire to be known as beacons of justice and righteousness in their community. They gave lightly to charities, almost all Jewish in nature. When I left home, they quickly left the synagogue I had grown up in and switched over to the "synagogue of shnorers," a synagogue well known to have by far the lowest annual dues. The shul was dilapidated and its members were all penny pinchers. I thought it was a depressing, lifeless place, but my parents didn't care. "A shul is a shul," my mother said. "Why should a pay a thousand dollars when I can pay five hundred?"

Given that the business of construction is inherently corrupt, my parents could trust few in the workplace. One thing they did do was place trust over money when it came to hiring electricians, plumbers and the like. They'd pay a few extra dollars to someone they could count on to work on time and not short change them when it came to the quality of work or try to steal lumber on the job. Generally, the people they hired stayed the same from construction site to construction site. They made the extra effort to work with the straighter types in the business mostly I think because it meant less emotional wear and tear in the long run.

I'll end this discussion of ethics with an event that I didn't understand at the time, but now doesn't bother me so much. In about 1972, a lumberyard that my father used for years burned down. It was family owned. My father used to hang out with the son-in-law who married into the family business - a Mexican, something very unusual in those days - and offer him advice on real estate purchases. They were both ambitious greenhorns and saw eye to eye on many things.

Not only did the lumber in the yard go up in flames, but the entire place turned to ashes, including the financial records of the business. My father had outstanding bills of several thousand dollars, which was a lot of money back then. When he heard the whole place burned down, he was upset at first for his friend. He called him up and talked to him on the phone. They went out for lunch. Back then, a Hispanic in Milwaukee I'm sure would have had few who treated him well or with any kind of respect. I was always proud of my father for not caring where this man, Manuel, was from.

But a week later, he started beaming at the dinner table. He stated talking about the fire and said, "You know, I don't have to pay them a thing. The files are all gone. They have no record of anything."

"But dad," I said. "Manuel is your friend."

"Manuel doesn't own the business. His father-in-law does."

"Yeah, but."

"He won't be there for long anyway. You don't think that they've cheated me out of thousands of dollars of lumber along the way? It's my time to get it back."

Six months later when my father received a request for payment, a long letter from the owner - not Manuel - asking my father to go into his own records and figure out how much he owed, he tore it up. I remember being in the office as he literally tore the letter in two.

My father was right about Manuel. About a year later, his wife found out he had been cheating on him and he was forced out of the family business. Like my father, though, he had ambition and brains. He started all over, having given up just about everything to his wife, invested in real estate under my father's guidance, and eventually formed his own bank, certainly the first majority owned Hispanic bank in Milwaukee.

Now when I think about this incident, I just chalk it up to the Modified Golden Rule. I don't think my father was rationalizing his theft. He probably had a good sense of how many dollars he had lost along the way. And it was indeed his time to get it back. I'm aware that I could be rationalizing myself right now. That's how it is with children and parents. When you're young, your parents can do no wrong. When you're a young adult, every flaw is magnified and they can do no right. When you're older and they're gone, you don't worry about any of that and simply miss them. And I do.

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*As an aside, I found myself using the Modified Golden Rule in academia - which isn't a deadly environment certainly, but consists of an odd assortment of nasty and dishonest people who possess the added burden of having limited social skills - although I wasn't as skillful and seamless in my transitions as my parents. My heart wasn't in it. I'd think, oh my I'm acting just like my mom and dad did in business, and for what?

Uncle Stuey's American Top 40, January 28th

Here's what about 50 AAA and Jazz stations were playing this week. Usually if there is anything interesting at all, it shows up toward the bottom of the list. Those CDs, by the way, get about 50 spins a week nationwide. That's it. In contrast, the Kanye West/Taylor Swift/Beyonce/Britney Spears stuff gets tens of thousands of spins nationwide a week. Actually, it's best not to know these things or even dwell on them if you do know.

This week is unusual. Anat Cohen's fine CD shows up in the Top 10 as does Andrew Bird's new CD. There's also a bunch of new things showing up on the chart that I'll try to check out this week.

1 The Blue Note 7 Mosaic: A Celebration Of Blue Note Records The Blue Note Label 2009
2 Benny Golson New Time, New 'Tet Concord 2009
3 Anat Cohen Notes From The Village Anzic 2008
4 Steve Herberman Ideals Reach 2008
5 The Derek Trucks Band Already Free Sony / Victor 2009
5 Andrew Bird Noble Beast Fat Possum 2009
7 Gary Smulyan High Noon Reservoir 2008
8 James Moody & Hank Jones Our Delight IPO 2008
8 Hendrik Meurkens Samba To Go! Zoho 2009
10 David Byrne & Brian Eno Everything That Happens Will Happen Today Todomundo 2008
10 Eliane Elias Bossa Nova Stories Somethin' Else / Blue Note 2009
12 The Clayton Brothers Brother To Brother ArtistShare 2008
13 Natalie Cole Still Unforgettable DMI / Atco 2008
14 Bruce Springsteen Working On A Dream Columbia 2009
15 The Miami Saxophone Quartet Fourtified Fourtitude 2008
15 Bill Henderson Beautiful Memory: Bill Henderson Live At The Vic Ahuh 2009
17 Ann Hampton Callaway At Last Telarc Jazz 2009
17 Claudio Roditi Brazilliance x4 Resonance 2008
17 A.C. Newman Get Guilty Matador 2009
20 Jane Monheit The Lovers, The Dreamers And Me Concord 2009
21 Jenny Lewis Acid Tongue Warner Bros. 2008
21 Oren Lavie The Opposite Side Of The Sea Quarter Past Wonderful / Adrenaline 2008
23 M. Ward Hold Time Merge 2009
23 Susan Tedeschi Back To The River VMG 2008
25 Alice Russell Pot Of Gold Six Degrees 2008
25 The BPA I Think We're Gonna Need A Bigger Boat Southern Fried 2009
25 The Pretenders Break Up The Concrete Shangri-La 2008
25 Colleen McNabb Don't Go To Strangers Zucca 2009
29 Ray LaMontagne Gossip In The Grain RCA 2008
30 Todd Coolman Perfect Strangers Artist Share 2009
30 Lucinda Williams Little Honey Lost Highway 2008
32 The Bad Plus For All I Care Do The Math / Heads Up 2008
32 Roger Kellaway Live At The Jazz Standard IPO 2008
32 Generations Tough Guys Center For The Arts 2008
32 My Morning Jacket Evil Urges ATO 2008
36 Gene Bertoncini & Roni Ben-Hur Smile Motema 2008
36 John Stetch Tv Trio Brux 2008
36 Various Artists Progressions: 100 Years Of Jazz Guitar Columbia / Legacy / Sony BMG 2005
39 Joe Locke Force Of Four Origin 2008
39 Sonny Rollins Road Shows, Vol. 1 Doxy / Emarcy 2008
39 Taj Mahal Maestro Kan-Du / Heads Up 2008
39 The Wayne Wallace Latin Jazz Quintet 1.7977E+308 Patois 2008
39 Tony DeSare Radio Show Telarc Jazz 2009
39 Joshua Redman Compass Nonesuch 2009
39 Neko Case Middle Cyclone Anti / Epitaph 2009

On The Press And Grade Inflation

Someone sent me an article from a few days ago about grade inflation at UNC-Chapel Hill. There's a follow up blog post by the author of the article here. It looked more or less fine, but I do have some problems with it. Let me explain myself when I say I have problems. Journalists are always trying to show balance in their stories. That works with political issues. But data are data. And when data show something concrete, journalists still seem to try to find "the other side."

I've seen journalists do this with two issues where I have some interest: global warming and nuclear waste storage at Yucca Mountain, NV. In both cases, the preponderance of data and scientists say one thing. But you can always find one or two people with odd data who say something else entirely. The tendency for journalists is to find those outliers to achieve "balance" and then end up creating the illusion of controversy. The end result is really a false story. In my opinion, journalists in their search for "balance" set back political efforts to reverse global warming by ten years. With regard to nuclear waste storage, the effort at balance has set back policy at least 30 years if not longer.

The controversy in global warming is not whether it exists. No, the question worth debating is whether we should do something about it. The controversy at Yucca Mountain is not whether it's a good site for nuclear waste storage. The question is whether "good" is good enough given mismanagement of the issue by DOE and overwhelming political objections by Nevada residents and politicians.

Grade inflation is much the same as those two issues. Grades are rising almost everywhere across the country. The data are undeniable. But journalists if they want can probably find someone who will deny that this rise exists (just like they can find one or two credentialed scientists who will say global warming doesn't exist). Alfie Kohn and Clifford Adelman in the past have tried to make claims that grades have not been rising. Those claims ignore data and are without merit.*

Journalists can also find professors - typically in the humanities where data and numbers seem to be obtuse things - to make the claim that students are better or are working harder. There is no evidence that students are better across the country. Data indicate that literacy for college graduates has declined and that college students are studying about 10 hours a week less than they did in the 1960s. These claims of better students nationally are without basis.

Like those who try to refute global warming with isolated exceptions, you can of course, find isolated institutions where student quality has improved and make the false claim that this refutes all of grade inflation. It goes something like this. A. Grades are rising nationwide. B. Students are getting smarter in the Ivy League (or at my college). Because of A and B, it must be true that grades are rising nationwide simply because students are getting smarter nationwide. Um. No. It isn't even true that because of A and B (and B is a debatable point), that grades are rising in the Ivy League simply because students are getting smarter.

Harry Brighouse has tried to play the devil's advocate on this issue of student quality; he admits to being skeptical and grumpy. That's fine; he just shouldn't ignore data. Professor Brighouse feels that grades have limited utility. The value of grades is a debatable issue, I'll agree. At least Brighouse isn't trying to deny that grades are rising.** If somehow someone can show me that students: 1) were static in quality from the 1930s to the 1960s; 2) suddenly got better during the Vietnam era; 3) then plateaued in quality from the 1970s to the mid-1980s; and 4) in a grande finale display of intelligence and aptitude, got better and better from the 1980s to the present while studying less, suffering from declining literacy and producing at best static SAT scores, I'll gladly accept the thesis that grade inflation isn't real. The odds of that happening are even less than the odds of me writing a sentence in the next month that is as long as the one I just wrote. Whew.

Less often stated in the press is the "professors are better than ever theory" for rising grades. The argument here goes something like this. Getting a professorship is harder than ever. Therefore professors must be better teachers than those in the past. This argument assumes that universities select professors on the basis of their teaching ability. They don't.

A journalist could also quote parents who make the claim that their children deserve As because they're so good. I'm sure those parents would also say that their children are beautiful in addition to being brilliant. Parents are not impartial judges. Just start to ask me about my beautiful, brilliant kid! A journalist, on the basis of parental interviews, could write the article "Students Are Getting Smarter and Better Looking Every Year." OK, I'm digressing here.

But you get my point. Grade inflation is a cut and dried issue. Grade are going up. Workloads are going down. At some schools, a part of grade inflation is indeed due to better students, but like global warming, the rise in grades is so large that its main cause is due to something other than "natural factors" like better students. Professors are giving As instead of Bs, and have largely given up on Cs, Ds, and Fs altogether. Many professors won't admit that they have lowered their standards, but the data show otherwise. No one likes to admit that they are doing something bad by the way. It's novel when they do make such an admission. Some professors will at least admit they are grading easier, but are loathe to admit that they have dumbed-down material or reduced workloads. This is the "I shot the sheriff, but I did not shoot the deputy" defense.

Even those willing to admit that students don't work as hard as they once did like Orlando Patterson from Harvard can, if you want to put a positive spin on it, try and find a silver lining. "They go out of here and they do pretty well. The society and economy can hardly complain that it's being ill-served by the students we're producing." I probably shouldn't make too much of this quote, but to me it sounds like apathy mixed with an implicit discounting of the value of higher education. It comes from 1998 when, like where I taught, Harvard was sending herds of its wanly educated to Wall Street to make millions. They were never asked to think hard. They had developed few analytical skills. I used to wonder how on Earth such undisciplined and unthinking people (who we had essentially infantilized over four years) could do a reasonable job at being financial titans. Fast forward to 2008 and the implications of creating a poorly educated Wall Street work force became widely apparent. We put garbage in. It was only a matter of time before garbage came out.

The controversy is not whether grade inflation exists. The controversy is whether or not, like global warming, we should do something about it. If you're a parent, you'd likely say, like someone in Wyoming wishing for global warming, I want more of it. If you are a professor or higher education policy person who doesn't like grades in the first place, you want more grade inflation as well. But if you are a professor or university leader who believes grades have value, then you want to reverse it. That's the balance in this story: whether we should do something about grade inflation or not. That's actually an interesting debate and I'd be happy to debate someone on that issue.

But the answer to the question does grade inflation exist is about as murky as whether the earth is flat or round. I'm sure a journalist can find some flat earth people to quote as well. But they wouldn't be credible would they?

I'm not trying to pick on the North Carolina reporter who wrote this recent article by the way. I thought it was actually pretty good. In contrast, The New York Times ran a "find the balance" and "show a controversy" article on grade inflation a few years ago that was downright silly.

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*I should note that before I started looking at grade inflation data, I read an article about Clifford Adelman's work showing no grade inflation. I'm prone to liking counterintuitive results and I thought, "This is pretty neat." It's only after I started looking at the data myself that it became clear that his results were not counterintuitive, but just plain wrong. Adelman says that my data consist of "self-selected fragments," the implication being that I ignore schools and fragments that don't show any indication of a grade rise. Nothing could be further from the truth. I simply look and ask for data. If they show no grade rise or a grade drop, so be it. Nothing is being hidden.

Adelman claims that "less than thirty" of the institutions represented in my database (as of July 2005) contain information from an "unassailable source." This is simply not true. If I use the criteria of yearly data 10 years or longer in length that either come from university publications (not student newspapers), university offices, faculty, or data from student newspapers that has been confirmed by university offices (Pomona and Kenyon), the following institutions were represented in the database as of 2003: Alabama, Auburn, UC-Irvine, CSU-East Bay, CSU-Sacramento, CSU-San Bernadino, Carleton, Dixie State, Duke, Florida, Georgia Tech, Hampden Sydney, Harvard, Harvey Mudd, Kent State, Kenyon, LSU, Minnesota, Montana State, University of Nebraska - Kearney, North Carolina-Chapel Hill, Northern Iowa, Northern Michigan, Pomona, Princeton, Purdue, Southern Illinois, Stanford, Texas, Utah, University of Wisconsin-Lacrosse, University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh, Washington, Western Washington, Wheaton, Williams, and Winthrop.

If I include more widely spaced data from university offices and university sanctioned publications (again not student newspapers), I can add Colby, Miami, University of North Carolina - Greensboro, Northwestern, and Rice. Adelman criticizes the inclusion of University of Chicago information because it comes from the University of Miami or as he puts it, "a report from school A that tattles on school B." This is beyond silly in terms of criticism.

Adelman may not like my data because they refute his work, but the data are real and they are extensive. I now have more data, which I will add to gradeinflation.com by the end of February. Adelman not only has to ignore my dataset, but data collected by others who have examined national grading trends in American colleges and universities. He also has to refute an official publication of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In terms of data analysis on national trends in college grading, Clifford Adelman stands all by himself.

This has been going on for years now. No one can reproduce Adelman's work. To try to justify his idiosyncratic results, Adelman has to make claims that he is the only one who possesses valid data worthy of analysis. The act has gotten old, so old that it simply isn't believable. Rather than continuing to point fingers, Adelman has to face the likely reality that there are serious errors in either his data or his analysis.

**Brighouse invokes the legacy admission of George W. Bush in his skepticism about grade inflation being real. According to Brighouse, rising grades may simply reflect increasing student talent and it would be "hard to imagine" legacy students as weak as George W. Bush being admitted today in elite colleges. The impact of legacies on overall university GPAs is tiny, but not only can I imagine weak legacies, I advised them. I occasionally advised legacy/wealthy family students with high school GPAs of 3.2 and SAT scores of 1100, SAT numbers well below those of Bush. Bush isn't stupid; he's just not intellectually curious.

Bush-like legacies are still present at elite colleges; for what it's worth, my less than illustrious advisees had GPAs in the 3.1 to 3.2 range as first year and second year students, which means they would likely graduate with 3.2 to 3.3 GPAs. Bush's gentleman's C is now a gentleman's (and gentle lady's) B+. Please don't tell me that they are smarter than George W. Bush. As bad a president as Bush was (the worst in my lifetime), I can assure you that should any of these advisees of my past occupy the White House, the world as we know it will end. OK, that was a joke. Kind of.

Brighouse does admit that, like me, he has graded more generously over time and says, "In an environment where you believe students are awarded higher grades than they should be, it can be morally appropriate to do the same onself...." I agree, but it is strange that a skeptic of grade inflation admits to inflating his grades.

The Brighouse quotes as do the Adelman quotes come from a book edited by Lester Hunt, "Grade Inflation: Academic Standards in Higher Education." The book is based on a conference that I did not attend; I was invited to that conference one week before it began by a dean at the school where it was hosted. The dean is an old and dear friend. He apologized about the shortness of notice. By the way, this post is already too long by a factor of two. That's what happens when I start to talk about academe. Good night.

Tales From The Old Country and Beyond, Part 39

The Wanderers

I spent most of my childhood living in a little box of a brick house on a little rectangle of a lot located on the near West Side of Milwaukee. Three of the homes on that block, all in a row, were built by my father. We lived in the middle house. My parents used to say with pride, "This is the best block on the whole West Side." Where they got their data to make this statement I don't know. I think it was like saying, "My heart surgery was done by the best doctor in the business." Right. Some guy in Milwaukee is the best heart surgeon in the world. There are I'm sure wonderful surgeons in Milwaukee, though. And our neighborhood was indeed wonderful.

I don't want to go on about my childhood there. This story is about my parents not me. I'm just the kid keeping quiet and watching these people, taking mental notes. Why was I doing this? It's in my nature. Watch and learn. Look at the good stuff people do and emulate it. Look at the bad mistakes people make and try to avoid those. Watch and learn.

Now we come to a mistake. It would be a mistake that my parents would make time and time again. They couldn't stay in one place too long. They simply were itchy people. I think it went back to their days as refugees, wandering from place to place during the war. It was in their blood this wandering. After ten years of living on the "best block on the whole West Side" they were getting very itchy. They decided that they needed to move to the suburbs. They started making excuses. The neighbors were too nosey and a pain in the ass, it was only a matter of time before the blacks started to move in, yada, yada.

Part of this desire to move came from the need to affirm that they were doing well in America. The northern suburbs of Milwaukee were where affluent Jews lived and they wanted to show that they were just as well off as the doctors and lawyers who lived there. Except they weren't, not yet anyway. Finally, they convinced themselves that they were really moving for the kids and for their education. This rationale was dubious. The Milwaukee public schools at the time were quite good and I ended up sitting on my hands when we finally moved, waiting for my suburban grade school class to catch up with me. But I digress.

My father found a bargain lot in the suburb of Bayside, the last lot that wasn't right next to the railroad track in a subdivision a block north of the suburb my parents really wanted to live in, Fox Point. For my parents, this was close enough. My father, however, didn't look at the deed until he had purchased the lot and somehow a pie-like wedge 10 feet at its widest and about 200 feet long wasn't included in the purchase. The creators of that subdivision were a couple of Jewish brothers who my father had known for years - they had grown up in Sheboygan and my father even knew their parents - and he should have known better than to not look at the fine print. These guys never took a straight path to anything.

There was screaming, threats, and all kinds of nastiness related to this little piece of land. Finally, a compromise was reached where both my parents and those brothers made a donation of about 500 bucks to an Israeli charity and my father got the disputed land added to his deed. It was a true land for peace deal. Solving the Middle East conflict should be so easy.

The new home would cost about 55K to build. We didn't have anywhere near 55K. My father's credit was stretched at the time. He was building duplex after duplex on the West Side. He probably could have gotten a mortgage, but this was his own house and he had this idea that while credit was great to have for business, you should own your home free and clear.

Now we come to mistake number one. My parents decide that they need to sell our existing house to free up cash to build the new one. This will still leave them about 20K short, but they'll somehow make that money quickly. We sell our house in the winter, shlep our stuff to a triplex that my parents own and can't sell about 20 blocks from our old house. Unlike our old neighborhood, this is far from the best block on the West Side. We live there for a year in a state of purgatory until my parents have managed to free up more cash and build the new place.

Then in the dead of winter on the day of an ice storm we move to the suburbs. The plumbing is finished literally the day before we move in. We have no money for carpeting or drapes. The house is twice the size of the old one and we don't have a dime for furniture either. The place stays like this - plywood floors, sheets on the windows, empty unpainted rooms - for a full year before we have enough cash to not live like refugees in a house that's too big for us anyway. Me and my new friends use the living room with its plywood floor as a hockey rink using a shuffle board puck in the meantime.

OK, back to past tense. My parents were unlike me completely nonplussed by all of this. They were so damn happy in that shell of a home. I didn't understand it at the time. We were living in snobville. They had no friends out there and never would. No doctors or lawyers were going to cozy up to people who reminded them of their modest past and their own immigrant parents (although our psychologist next door neighbor was always very nice to us). The whole year of living in that triplex and then living in a shell of a home for a year after that was chaos.

But when, like my parents, you spend your childhood and young adulthood as a refugee, this all seems minor. I think they would say, "If this is what it takes to move to the suburbs, it's worth it." My father loved this home he built. In order to save some money, he cut some corners, but overall he was pleased with the effort. He nailed down the upstairs porch railing himself, putting in a cute little geometric design in the finish work. When he was done, he called me outside. "What do you think?" He was smiling, looking at it from a distance. He was the kind of man who could always find fault in a piece of work - just had an innate critical sense - but that day he was proud of what he had done.

"It looks good, dad," I said. Like him, I'm usually not one to give compliments, but I had to give credit where credit was due.

"I know. Yeah, it looks good." This picture above shows a different railing, just some plain cedar stuff. To keep my father's work weatherproof and decent, you would have had to paint it regularly. My guess is that it rotted away due to negligence. It's been forty years, after all. And the house looks like crap in this picture, just a dated, tired tri-level. But in its day, it was quite the house although I never personally liked it.

This would not be their only chaotic move. But I screamed about this move and how stupid it was so much for a couple of years that they waited until I finished high school before they succumbed to this itch of theirs. Whenever they would mention about moving now and then, I'd just give them this look that said, don't even think about it. I would say, "I'm not moving. You can move if you want. I'll get a gun and hold the fort." I was just joking. Kind of.

When I left high school, I knew they would pack up and go. Just like the first time, they started to make excuses. "I didn't put a basement under the family room, just a crawl," my father said. "It's gonna rot."

"The water is bad," my mother said (and it was; that bad water from the community well was probably the reason why I got interested in hyrology). "The railroad is noisy. The place is changing."

"This place reminds me too much of the kids," my dad said. "It makes me feel lonely for them."

Six months after I more or less graduated from high school and started traveling around the world they were ready to build again, but it got put off by a breast cancer scare. They would then move six times in five years. They'd build a house, settle in for a few months and then move out again. It was like they were making up for the lost time of me making them stay in one place. It got to be so ridiculous that I couldn't remember their addresses anymore and I asked that they get a post office box so I knew where to mail stuff. Eventually they did just that.

Uncle Stuey's American Top 40, January 21st

Here's the list of what about 50 AAA and Jazz radio stations were spinning this week. Note that a lot of stations were spinning Sam Cooke's A Change Is Gonna Come. And it has, thank God. Tuesday was a wonderful day in every way.

I recommend the Sonny Rollins CD if you don't already have an iPod full of Rollins. Andrew Bird is always worth a listen and I just downloaded his latest CD. Alejandro Escavedo is a better version of Steve Earle if you like that raw stuff; if he was white and had the "bonafides" of being an ex-con and drug addict, he'd be just as well known if not more so. Escavedo did get a twisted career boost from having and almost dying from Hepatitis C, which means he was doing something illegal way back when. Do something bad or almost die and the public pays attention; such is the strange world of show biz. I don't recommend getting to be a star by being a train wreck, though. Just look at Amy Winehouse. Yuck.

Dianne Reeves is the best jazz singer in the business right now. I once told a grocery store clerk that she looked like Dianne Reeves and not only did she know who Reeves was, but was so flattered that she almost kissed me. "Everybody always says I look like Della Reese," she said, looking sorrowful. "But Dianne Reeves, I wish I was her." You and a lot of people.

1 James Moody & Hank Jones Our Delight IPO 2008
2 Benny Golson New Time, New 'Tet Concord 2009
3 The Blue Note 7 Mosaic: A Celebration Of Blue Note Records The Blue Note Label 2009
4 The Clayton Brothers Brother To Brother ArtistShare 2008
4 Gary Smulyan High Noon Reservoir 2008
6 Sam Cooke Ain't That Good News RCA Victor 1964
7 The Six Parts Seven Casually Smashed To Pieces Suicide Squeeze 2007
8 Eliane Elias Bossa Nova Stories Somethin' Else / Blue Note 2009
9 Todd Coolman Perfect Strangers Artist Share 2009
10 Bill Henderson Beautiful Memory: Bill Henderson Live At The Vic Ahuh 2009
11 The Pretenders Break Up The Concrete Shangri-La 2008
11 The Wayne Wallace Latin Jazz Quintet 1.7977E+308 Patois 2008
11 Animal Collective Merriweather Post Pavilion Domino 2009
14 The Derek Trucks Band Already Free Sony / Victor 2009
15 Danny Green With You In Mind Alante / Pacific Coast Jazz 2008
15 Lucinda Williams Little Honey Lost Highway 2008
15 Ray LaMontagne Gossip In The Grain RCA 2008
18 Sonny Rollins Road Shows, Vol. 1 Doxy / Emarcy 2008
18 Dave Holland Pass It On Dare2 / EmArcy 2008
18 Natalie Cole Still Unforgettable DMI / Atco 2008
21 Andrew Bird Noble Beast Fat Possum 2009
21 Bill Cunliffe The Blues And The Abstract Truth Resonance 2008
23 Robert Walter Cure All Palmetto 2008
23 David Byrne & Brian Eno Everything That Happens Will Happen Today Todomundo 2008
23 Joey DeFrancesco Joey D! HighNote 2008
23 Jenny Lewis Acid Tongue Warner Bros. 2008
23 TV On The Radio Dear Science Touch And Go / Interscope 2008
28 Steve Herberman Ideals Reach 2008
28 Roger Kellaway Live At The Jazz Standard IPO 2008
30 Various Artists Our New Orleans 2005: A Benefit Album Nonesuch 2005
31 Ray Charles America The Beautiful/Sunshine [Single] Crossover 1976
31 Miles Davis The Legendary Prestige Quintet Sessions [Box Set] Prestige 2006
31 Calexico Carried To Dust Quarterstick 2008
34 Dianne Reeves A Little Moonlight Blue Note 2003
34 The Fireman Electric Arguments ATO 2008
34 Alejandro Escovedo Real Animal Back Porch / Manhattan 2008
34 Javon Jackson Once Upon A Melody Palmetto 2008
38 Cocoa Tea Barack Obama [Single] Roaring Lion / VP 2008
38 Bruce Springsteen The Rising Sony 2002
38 Steve Earle Washington Square Serenade New West 2007
38 Bruce Springsteen Working On A Dream Columbia 2009
38 The Blind Boys Of Alabama Higher Ground Real World 2002
38 Swing Masters Vol. 1 Happy Birthday...Lionel! Dare 2008
38 Bob Mintzer Big Band Swing Out MCG Jazz 2008

Grade Inflation Update Part 5: Preliminary Composite Analysis

I'm about halfway done with analyzing bulk data on grades. So far, I've collected historical and current data from the following schools: Alabama, Alfred, Auburn, Boston University, Brown, Carleton, Central Michigan, Clarion, Colorado, Colorado State, Cornell, CSU-SB, CSU-Sacramento, Dartmouth, Florida, George Washington, Georgetown, Georgia Tech, Grinnell, Hampden-Sydney, Harvard, Harvey Mudd, Illinois, Iowa State, Kenyon, Lehigh, Middlebury, Ohio State, Oregon, Penn State, Pomona, Princeton, South Florida, Southeastern LA, Texas, UC-Berkeley, UC-Santa Barbara, UNC-Chapel Hill, UNC-Greensboro, UNC-Wilmington, University of Houston, Utah, Western Washington, Wheaton (IL), William and Mary, Winthrop, Wisconsin-Madison, Wisconsin-LaCrosse, and Wyoming. I haven't looked at all the data that I've collected, have more promised and am finding more data on the web every day. The data go back to the 1920s. It's actually a much better data set than I had during my first go round six years ago (it has surprised the hell out of me that it is better), good enough that I'm going to try to publish this as a research paper once I'm done.

Six years ago, I noted that grades had been rising for fifteen to twenty years. The first graph (for greater detail just click on the graph) consists of recent data for schools where I have good quality recent data (the preponderance of schools noted above). The student as consumer age is still with us. Grades continue to rise nationwide (with some exceptions). The average grade at private schools for which I have data is now a B+. The average grade for public schools is now a B.


The averages mask a lot of interesting information at the individual level. The next figure probably looks like spaghetti to a lot of you, but to me it shows some patterns worth noting. Virtually everyone's grades are rising over the fifteen year interval shown, but there seem to be subcultures that have established themselves. At the upper end there is the Brown and Pomona (and some other private schools no doubt that I might talk about later) subculture where grades have crossed into the A- range. Harvard would likely be in this subculture had not its previous president made an issue of grade inflation; grades dropped temporarily as a result. Below this group are grades more typical of private schools, in the B+ range. Then there are public schools in the 3.1 to 3.2 GPA range followed by public schools in the 2.9 to 3.0 range. Finally there are schools in the South that seem to ignore the rest of academe in terms of grading.

These subcultures more or less stayed in tact over the fifteen year interval shown, rising in parallel. The average GPA change from 1991-2006 was about 0.20, essentially the same as the long term trend I noted six years ago. There are exceptions to this trend. Florida and Texas had such rapid increases in GPA that they crossed from one subculture into another over the time interval shown. Princeton, with its well documented efforts at capping A grades, moved from the private school subculture into the upper public school subculture in terms of grading. Smaller drops in GPAs over the last few years have been seen at Wheaton, CSU-San Bernadino, Central Michigan, and Colorado. At the latter two schools, grades have dropped in response to jawboning of faculty on the part of leadership.

A composite can be made of all of the data that's analogous to a consumer price index. This graph will likely change a bit as I add more data (both from schools from which I already have data and schools with data to come), but the overall trend will almost certainly stay the same.

The composite curve (which is longer in length on both ends than the original of six years ago), shows that grades were steady until the Vietnam era when they steeply rose; they then were steady for about ten years before taking off again. The C+ of yesteryear is turning into a B+, but we aren't quite there yet. There are some who maintain that this upward national trend represents better students nationwide. You have got to be kidding. SAT scores show no indication that students are better. Reading comprehension tests indicate that students are getting worse. In my own field, textbooks continue to get easier with simpler language and less information. Students are studying about 10 hours a week less than they did in the 1960s. One of the reasons I left academe was that I could not teach at the same level that I was taught as an undergraduate. It's worth noting that I was teaching at one of the best schools in the country; as bad as it was, I knew it would be worse most everywhere else. The "students are smarter" theory is one that has no basis in fact.

Optimists might zero in on the flattening of the composite curve in 2004 and 2005 as well as the slight lessening of the rate of increase over the last five years shown in the first figure and proclaim that GPAs will steady soon. I am all for optimism - for instance, I'm optimistic about our new president - but I will not make such a prediction. Both of the features noted could well be noise or temporary. I have personally witnessed time and time again the amazing inability of academe - both its professors and college presidents - to behave anywhere close to responsibly.* So I will instead focus on the long term trend in grading over the last twenty years and the long term trend in required work load over the last forty.

What is essentially happening every year is that on average in every college class of 100 in America, one to two students who used to get a B get an A and three to four minutes of outside work associated with the class are being shaved off. In an average class today of 100, about 35 students are getting As and about 50 are getting Bs. Students are studying about 14 hours a week total if they are taking a full time load. If current trends continue, in 40 years the average student in an American college or university will have a solid A- GPA. If he or she attends a private school, he or she will have a solid A GPA. That student in public or private school will be studying about four hours a week outside of class. We will have completely trivialized college education for everyone. It is my opinion that we already have trivialized college education for the majority of enrolled students today.

*Perhaps when the boomers retire from academe we can - like we are witnessing with our new non-boomer president - have adults in charge again. Here's to hoping at any rate.

Tales From The Old Country and Beyond, Part 38

Learning How To Drive

My parents were both drivers from hell. They never drove a thing in Europe. In their towns growing up, transportation was still dominated by the horse and wagon. The word for car in Yiddish is mashineh, literally "the machine." It's more or less the same in Italian too from what I remember, but in Yiddish the connotation is different. Mashineh connotes something so powerful and complicated that it's intimidating. My parents were both intimidated.

My father needed a car for work to carry his tools from job to job when he came to this country. He bribed the DMV official to get a license because there was no way he was going to pass the test. Accidents were frequent with my father. Dents were a given. In 1962, he flipped his car completely over when he somehow drove it into a ditch on a summer day. He was lucky to have incurred only minor injuries.

My mother wasn't driving then, but she soon would be. It all was the result of my father's building his first multifamily apartments. His original intention was to immediately sell them for a profit. My mother, though, had other ideas. She looked at the rents people were charging in the area, looked at the mortgage payments they would make, and saw the potential for a decent annual income if they held onto the properties.

My father thought my mother was nuts for considering this. Basically, he had little patience for anyone who wasn't as sharp and aggressive as him. He was a shtarker as they say in Yiddish, a man of strength and drive. He liked to be with other shtarkers, with the caveat that he was prone to petty jealousy. The idea of renting out apartments to him meant shmoozing with a bunch of losers. He simply could not suffer fools even if money was on the line.

But he liked my mother's math concerning renting these apartments and he knew that she could do what he couldn't: talk to people, make them feel comfortable, and massage them. His two kids to his mind (and my mother's as well) were virtually all grown - I was already nine, which meant as far as both my mom and dad were concerned I was ready to leave my toys behind and be groomed for adulthood and business - and my mother had both the time and the inclination to work.

But she needed a car.

I think there was also another reason for my mom wanting to be a landlord that was purely selfish. Wauwatosa, which was where these apartments were being built, was halfway to my grandparent's house in Waukesha. She and my grandfather were always very close. Dealing with these apartments meant that she could visit her father more often.

It was no wonder, then, that my grandfather, upon hearing that my mother needed wheels and my parents were short of cash, pulled a running car out his junk yard and gave it to my mom. It was a 1956 Dodge something or other, a Coronet I think. It was a true heap with holes in the floorboards (I used to drop pebbles through the holes as we drove) and a push button transmission. My father, out of pride, insisted he pay for the car, fifty dollars that he couldn't afford.

My mother, like my father, couldn't pass the driving test either. But again, arrangements were made with the license tester. Thank god Milwaukee was an inherently corrupt town otherwise my parents could never have had a business. My mother now had a license and wheels. And she had a job; she was a landlord. I'll talk more about her work in another post.

My mother loved the freedom of driving. She was, as I've noted, horrible at it, but for different reasons than my father. She was ridiculously cautious, could never parallel park, and would literally freeze in fear if she entered a parking garage with a steep enclosed ramp. She would hand over the keys to the parking lot attendant to finish the job. Her first car lasted nine months before it conked out and she literally abandoned it on the side of the road.

My parents definitely could not afford a decent car. All their money was being poured into more building. Plus there was the usual 1960s husband and wife tussle over my mother's new found freedom. My mother was visiting her parents often. My father was irritated by these frequent visits. In essence, my father was always jealous that my mother had a family. He was alone save for her and a couple of friends. He had lost everything in the war. Why had she been so lucky to have her parents and brother and all her aunts and uncles in Israel? It irked him. It was perhaps the only major point of conflict between them, the fact she had what he had lost.

He was happy in some sense that my mother's car conked out. But the fact was that my mother needed some transportation if she was going to be able to manage the apartments. My grandfather again stepped in. He had been embarrassed that his precious daughter drove that heap he gave her. She deserved better. If her husband couldn't afford a decent car, he could.

He bought her a new 1967 Chevy Impala (shown above). The car was huge, which was all the rage in those days. Gas cost 20 cents a gallon and the car got about 12 mpg. I remember picking it up at the dealership with my parents six weeks after it had been ordered. My grandfather was grinning from ear to ear. My father was pissed that he couldn't afford this thing and that my grandfather was so proud of what he bought his little girl. He was fuming inside I could tell. I thought he might erupt, but he held back.

I knew what he was thinking in that showroom. One day I'll show them. One day I'll buy my wife a car even better than this one, a dream car with every little feature known to man. You'll see. It'll happen. I won't need some f*cking father-in-law's help anymore. I'll be the provider for everything in our lives.

It happened six years later. My mother walked into a Buick showroom and literally fell in love with a car. She was a very demonstrative person. When I say she fell in love, I mean she literally draped her body over the hood of the car in the showroom, her face glowing in rapture, and shouted out, "I love this car!" The car in question was a 1973 Buick Riviera. It was even bigger than the Impala. It got about 7 MPG. This was right before the Arab oil embargo. Gas was about 30 cents a gallon. The engine roared. The passenger room to body size of this whale probably was as low as any car ever built.

There was something about the shape that she truly loved. Then there was that copper color. She would talk about that color for years after. The salesman, seeing her ardor, pretended there was no discount on such a beautiful beast. My mother stopped smiling instantly. "I'm not a fool," she said. We then spent over four hours in that showroom while my parents negotiated a price. There was shouting and screaming going on for much of that time. When it was over, the salesman looked completely glum and worn out.

My father on the other hand was calmly satisfied. I looked at his face and I knew that this was the moment he had been waiting for and dreaming of. It didn't just go back to that day in 1967 when my mother got that Chevy as a present from her father. It meant more. He had made it in this country. He could buy a car with stereo this and that, electric windows, a top of the line automobile. He could give his wife everything she dreamed of. He was fifty two years old at the time, in full health, still strong and capable of knocking someone out with one punch. But he wasn't slugging people anymore, hadn't done so in years.

Oh there were moments when his rage was present. I remember that same year, my father and I were walking in the Jewish Center parking lot and he spotted a Mercedes. "Somovabitch," he shouted out. He brought out his fists and started pounding the car door. The idea that a Jew would own a German car like this was unacceptable to him.

As bad luck would have it, the owner of the car started walking up as my father was furiously trying to dent the door. The funny thing, though, was that the car was so well made that, strong though my father was, he couldn't damage the metal. I tapped my father on the shoulder to stop him when the guy was about 20 yards away.

"Is anything wrong?" The owner asked, walking up with a buddy.

"No," my dad said. "You know that car of yours is made very well," and he grinned and walked away.

Five years before that he wouldn't have been grinning. He would have been screaming at the owner telling him he was a "somovabitch" for buying a car made by the children of Nazis. He might have even slugged him.

My father was mellowing. There was a calmness in him in his fifties that I had only seen previously when when he was on a boat fishing. These were his happiest years. Perhaps that day buying that car was the happiest day of his life.

Uncle Stuey's American Top 40, January 14th

Here's what about 50 AAA and Jazz stations were spinning this week. Not much interesting is showing up. My view is that if you're going to listen to jazz standards, you should just listen to the old stuff. No one needs to hear a new version of Girl from Ipanema, Speak Low, etc. And if you do want to hear the old stuff, there is some fine music from Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong and Sonny Rollins on the chart (and there is no one on this planet today who sings standards better than Ella Fitzgerald or who plays standards on sax better than Sonny Rollins).

Then there are the new versions of older artists. Just like Tom Hanks is the new version of Jimmy Stewart, pop music is now old enough to recycle personalities. Ray Lamontagne is the new version of Van Morrison. Fleet Foxes is the new version of The Incredible String Band. Derek Trucks is, duh, The Allman Brothers. My Morning Jacket is the new version of Buffalo Springfield. She and Him are the new Sonny and Cher (for both, star power trumps the requirement for musical talent). Jenny Lewis is more or less the new version of Rita Coolidge (there weren't that many female acts in the world of thoughtful pop back then). If you're young, you may like these remakes better than the originals. I rarely listen to 60s and 70s pop so both the new and old stuff leave me cold, but that's just me.

1 The Blue Note 7 Mosaic: A Celebration Of Blue Note Records The Blue Note Label 2009
2 The Clayton Brothers Brother To Brother ArtistShare 2008
3 The Derek Trucks Band Already Free Sony / Victor 2009
4 Eliane Elias Bossa Nova Stories Somethin' Else / Blue Note 2009
5 Various Artists Vicky Cristina Barcelona [Original Soundtrack] Telarc 2008
6 Flight Of The Conchords Flight Of The Conchords Sub Pop 2008
7 Mickey Hart & Zakir Hussain Global Drum Project Shout! Factory 2007
7 Bill Cunliffe The Blues And The Abstract Truth Resonance 2008
9 James Moody & Hank Jones Our Delight IPO 2008
10 Roger Kellaway Live At The Jazz Standard IPO 2008
11 Death Cab For Cutie Narrow Stairs Atlantic 2008
12 Benny Golson New Time, New 'Tet Concord 2009
13 Todd Coolman Perfect Strangers Artist Share 2009
14 David Byrne & Brian Eno Everything That Happens Will Happen Today Todomundo 2008
15 Garage A Trois Outre Mer [Original Soundtrack] Spire Artists Media / Telarc 2005
15 Bombay Dub Orchestra 3 Cities Six Degrees 2008
17 Kings Of Leon Only By The Night RCA 2008
17 Ryan Adams & The Cardinals Cardinology Lost Highway 2008
17 Brett Dennen Hope For The Hopeless Dualtone / Downtown 2008
20 Jenny Lewis Acid Tongue Warner Bros. 2008
21 Beck Modern Guilt Interscope 2008
21 Santogold Santogold Downtown 2008
21 Zen Zadravec Coming Of Age Self-Released 2008
24 Joe Strummer & The Mescaleros Global A Go-Go Epitaph 2001
24 Ray LaMontagne Gossip In The Grain RCA 2008
24 Mike LeDonne FiveLive Savant 2008
24 Javon Jackson Once Upon A Melody Palmetto 2008
28 My Morning Jacket Evil Urges ATO 2008
28 Will Bernard Blue Plate Special Palmetto 2008
28 Vampire Weekend Vampire Weekend XL / Beggars Group 2008
31 The Wayne Wallace Latin Jazz Quintet 1.7977E+308 Patois 2008
31 Lucinda Williams Little Honey Lost Highway 2008
31 Fleet Foxes Fleet Foxes Sub Pop 2008
31 The Pretenders Break Up The Concrete Shangri-La 2008
31 She & Him Volume One Merge 2008
36 Sonny Rollins Road Shows, Vol. 1 Doxy / Emarcy 2008
36 The Guggenheim Grotto Happy The Man UFO 2009
36 Frightened Rabbit The Midnight Organ Fight Fat Cat 2008
39 Ella Fitzgerald & Louis Armstrong The Complete Ella Fitzgerald & Louis Armstrong On Verve Verve 1997
39 Joe Locke Force Of Four Origin 2008
39 B.B. King One Kind Favor Geffen 2008

Grade Inflation Update Part 4: Moving in Lock Step

If someone with a lot of money wanted to go to college today and asked for my advice, I'd tell them to go to a small private school. The class sizes are smaller. Spectator sports don't dominate campus life. They tend to get students who are more interested in education and less interested in reputation. They tend to have professors that are actually interested in teaching. On the whole, it's certainly a better deal than a private research university.

If you aren't rich, small private schools may even be a better deal than public schools financially. Some of these schools have endowments in excess of one billion dollars (at least before the recent market crash) and can offer steeply discounted tuition packages for those from homes of modest income.

That said, the educational quality of small private colleges likely has been compromised by grade inflation. Not every student in a class is self motivated. It's hard to motivate those that aren't self-starters when they know that they will likely get a B+ for just showing up and going through the motions. If ten percent of a class consists of students with attitudes like that, you can still teach the rest well. But when the percentage creeps up to thirty percent, the entire educational process drags and becomes uninspiring. That's what I believe is happening at most small colleges today.

As the graph above shows, the average grade for the small colleges for which I have data is a B+ or better. I should note that the GPA data from Pomona represent average course grades for the year, but do not include non-Pomona students in Pomona classes (of which there are quite a few, on the order of 10-20 percent). I have also left off early Harvey Mudd data; it's very noisy (due to small class size I'm told), but shows a decline in the mid-1970s to 1980s.*

Grades continue to rise (for a large view of the graph, just click on it) in lock step at all of these colleges. It's amazing to me that so many institutions could independently do the same thing. But maybe it's not so strange; the professorate is a guild system and people are pretty much trained the same way across the country. They tend to think and act alike.

Why are grades rising? At many of these institutions, the quality of students has increased over the last couple of decades and it's tempting to say that rising grades are simply due to better students. But that's just not so.

Here's an example of a "the students are better" assessment. It comes from Middlebury. Below is the average course grade versus the average SAT score of incoming students and the percentage of students who come from the upper 10 percent of their high school class:


Now if you run a simple regression on the data, you find that about 80 percent of the rise in GPA can be ascribed to "better students." That's what a committee of professors at Middlebury did. But that's a naive analysis. Look at the data. It tells quite a different story.

The "quality" of students changed markedly by measures of SAT and high school rank in the late-1990s. But before that time, grades had already gone from 3.02 (3.10 if you start at the 1990-1991 academic year, which is when the auxiliary data begin to be available) to 3.18. And after that time, grades continued to rise from 3.29 to 3.34. So when "student quality" was "flat" grades rose by somewhere between 0.13 and 0.21.

What happened in the late-1990s? Did students actually get dramatically better when grades rose from 3.18 to 3.29? Maybe. It's also possible that in order to look better on paper and compete for a higher ranking in US News, admissions officers started to cherry pick students with higher SAT scores and higher high school rankings over other criteria.

Undoubtedly, student quality has improved at Middlebury over the years, but the chance that it all happened over a short interval in the late -1990s is unlikely. Even assuming that the improvement could be simply quantitatively measured on the basis of SAT scores and class rank, at least half to two thirds of the GPA rise at Middlebury looks to be due to something else. On the basis of SAT scores alone, at most about 2/5 of the rise in GPA over the time period 1990-2005 is due to student quality increases and that assumes no cherry picking on the part of Middlebury admissions.

What are the chances that Middlebury professors are grading easier than ever before? Quite high. Is it possible that mediocre work is being given B+, A- and maybe even A grades at Middlebury? Since the schools above seem to be moving in lock step, is it possible that mediocre work is being given high grades at many of the nation's best liberal arts colleges? Those last two questions are rhetorical.

I have similar data from another place where student quality has increased over time. I can't show that data because it was a condition of my obtaining it that I not make the data public. Similar to Middlebury, at most about half the GPA rise at that selective school is due to better students.

Grade inflation is real. It's real in private schools. It's real in public schools. And it's present virtually everywhere.

*I thank the people at Wheaton, Kenyon, Carleton, Pomona and Harvey Mudd for taking the time to send me this data. I also appreciate those that have made their data publicly available on the web. Note that there was a strange glitch in my spreadsheet that caused a slight error on one of the curves in the included figure the first day I posted this. I corrected the figure the next day. My apologies.

Tales From The Old Country and Beyond, Part 37

The American Dream

It's a cliche that America is the only place where any man can make something of himself if he works hard. It's also a canard. Other countries appear to have greater upward mobility than us. Plus not everybody can make something out of nothing through hard work. You have to add luck to that sweat. That all said, when you look at someone like Barack Obama, someone of color with a very odd name, even I - cold, calculating me - am compelled to think, "Where else but America?"

When I think of my parents, I think the same thing. Their knowledge and understanding of American culture was minimal. Their English was poor. What they possessed were brains, ambition and an incredible work ethic. Add some luck, and you have a success story, the kind of thing that perpetuates the image that America is the land of hopes and dreams.

In 1964, my father was in the prime of his life, overflowing with energy and drive. His business was a disappointment to him, consisting of scraping by building one single family home after another to people of modest means. He needed to scale up and build something bigger if he was going to have any chance at being truly successful. That meant he needed to get loans. Since his knowledge of English was awful and his public presence came with an intensity that sometimes bordered on menacing through the eyes of a typical American, my father was in no position to do the shmoozing required to go to banks and ask for money.

My mother, on the other hand, was a natural at this. My father had scoured the city looking for some lots to build a few four-family apartments. He found and bought some land with cash in Wauwatosa, the first time he ever intended to build out of the city proper. It fit my father's requirements to a T. The land was flat, you could cram five four-family apartments on the space (two are shown above), it was surrounded by existing four families (proof that the project contained little risk) and because it backed onto a railroad track was a bit of a bargain.

My mother travelled around town looking for a loan. At the time she didn't drive and we definitely could not afford a second car. My father drove her around from savings and loan to savings and loan. He'd stay in the background while my mother shmoozed.

They were looking for a lot of money, $250,000, actually far more than it would take to build the units. My father had a plan. He'd build these apartments and then take the extra cash and start building some duplexes elsewhere. The idea was that he would save the extra expense of getting a separate loan for the duplexes. My father had suddenly gone from being loan adverse to a lover of credit. What made him make this transformation? I'm guessing that it was drive and desperation. He had had no luck with the old way of building with his own money. If he was going to start borrowing, he was going in head first.

The question was who would lend two greenhorns with only several years of building experience and little in the way of credit history a quarter of a million dollars? The answer was almost no one. The big banks certainly weren't going to do it. If my parents were going to have any luck at all it was going to be with the locally owned mom and pop savings and loans that dotted the Milwaukee landscape at the time, the kind of businesses that were like the one Jimmy Stewart ran in the movie It's a Wonderful Life.

They finally found a willing savings and loan on the South Side of Milwaukee owned by a German family. Several years later I would go to school with the son of that family who nowadays runs a software company and plays bass in a blues band. It was an odd fit for my parents. They didn't understand just why this savings and loan owned by a family who they were convinced was anti-Semitic (which really wasn't true) would loan them this money and why they hadn't been chiseled down to a loan commensurate with the cost of construction. It all seemed surreal. Still, they were happy to receive the loan.

Milwaukee, like probably like all cities of a certain size, had a tabloid of business news that was published every day or so, the Business Journal of Milwaukee. My father would read that tabloid religiously to see who was buying what and who was building what. The paper always had a listing of loans of a significant size or bigger, which back then meant loans in excess of $200,000.

When my father's loan for these four family apartments was listed, he cut out the listing. He was beaming for days about it. He put the newsprint listing in his wallet where it lived for at least six months. Sometimes, he would pull it out at random, look at it and smile. It was a recognition that he was now a somebody in this town. He was right up there with anyone else in the Milwaukee business community; his transactions were listed in the Business Journal. In his mind, he'd finally made it. Even though he hadn't made a dime from this money yet and was still struggling, he knew that this loan would propel him. He was right.

Uncle Stuey's American Top 40, January 7th

Here's what was playing on about 50 AAA and Jazz stations this week. James Moody and Hank Jones don't break new ground, but their CD is well done. There is some new stuff high on the chart, Thievery Corporation, Bombay Dub Orchestra, Wayne Wallace and Todd Coolman that I haven't listened to, but I will. Brett Dennen has been on and off this chart since its inception. I saw him perform once in front of only six people a few years ago when he was just starting out. Four of those people were women. All of those women were in love with him within five minutes. You can teach someone how to play guitar. You can help someone sing better and write better songs. But you can't teach pheromones.

1 James Moody & Hank Jones Our Delight IPO 2008
2 The Pretenders Break Up The Concrete Shangri-La 2008
3 Bill Cunliffe The Blues And The Abstract Truth Resonance 2008
4 David Byrne & Brian Eno Everything That Happens Will Happen Today Todomundo 2008
5 Steve Turre Rainbow People Highnote 2008
5 Javon Jackson Once Upon A Melody Palmetto 2008
7 Thievery Corporation Radio Retaliation ESL 2008
7 Bombay Dub Orchestra 3 Cities Six Degrees 2008
9 The Wayne Wallace Latin Jazz Quintet 1.7977E+308 Patois 2008
10 Ryan Adams & The Cardinals Cardinology Lost Highway 2008
11 Various Artists Calypsoul 70: Caribbean Soul & Calypso Crossover 1969-1979 Strut 2008
11 Todd Coolman Perfect Strangers Bottom Line 2009
13 Natalie Cole Still Unforgettable DMI / Atco 2008
13 Bruce Springsteen Working On A Dream Columbia 2009
13 Lucinda Williams Little Honey Lost Highway 2008
13 Joey DeFrancesco Joey D! HighNote 2008
17 Will Bernard Blue Plate Special Palmetto 2008
18 Iggy & The Stooges Raw Power Columbia 1973
18 Calexico Carried To Dust Quarterstick 2008
18 Dave Holland Pass It On Dare2 / EmArcy 2008
21 TV On The Radio Dear Science Touch And Go / Interscope 2008
21 Jenny Lewis Acid Tongue Warner Bros. 2008
23 Generations Tough Guys Center For The Arts 2008
23 Roger Kellaway Live At The Jazz Standard IPO 2008
23 Christian Jacob Live In Japan Wilder Jazz 2008
23 Santogold Santogold Downtown 2008
27 Roy Hargrove Earfood Groovin' High / Emarcy 2008
27 Taj Mahal Maestro Kan-Du / Heads Up 2008
27 Kings Of Leon Only By The Night RCA 2008
27 Ray LaMontagne Gossip In The Grain RCA 2008
31 Jonatha Brooke The Works Bad Dog 2008
32 The Stryker/Slagle Band The Scene Zoho 2008
32 Bob Dylan Tell Tale Signs: The Bootleg Series Vol. 8 Columbia / Legacy 2008
32 Brett Dennen Hope For The Hopeless Dualtone / Downtown 2008
35 The Decemberists Always The Bridesmaid: Vol. I Capitol 2008
35 Bob Mintzer Big Band Swing Out MCG Jazz 2008
35 Sonny Rollins Road Shows, Vol. 1 Doxy / Emarcy 2008
35 Nikka Costa Pebble To A Pearl Go Funk Yourself / Stax 2008
39 Houston Person The Art & Soul Of Houston Person HighNote 2008
39 Irma Thomas Simply Grand Rounder 2008
39 Kenny Barron The Traveler Sunnyside 2008
39 Randy Brecker Randy In Brasil MAMA 2008
39 Raphael Saadiq The Way I See It Columbia 2008
39 Bill Heid Asian Persuasion Doodlin' 2008
39 Fleet Foxes Fleet Foxes Sub Pop 2008

Grade Inflation Update Part 3: The South Rises Again, Sometimes

One of the trends that I noticed in my earlier work was that schools in the South tended to grade tougher than those in the blue states. They usually had grade inflation, but often the starting GPA during the onset of grade inflation was lower, or they started later, or the rate of increase was slower. That holds for the five Southern schools shown here, Winthrop, SE Louisiana and Alabama, UNC-Wilmington, and Hampden-Sydney.

Winthrop started its grade inflation binge in the late 1980s, but since the late 1990s rates of inflation have been negligible. SE Louisiana has seen a 0.07 increase in GPA in 11 years, which is about 1/2 that of the national average. University of Alabama didn't have significant inflation until 2000, a year that coincided with the elimination of D and F grades in their beginning English and math classes. Grades dropped significantly in 2005 which, according to one Alabama professor, may have been due to a group of professors making public a study about grade inflation problems at Alabama.

Hampden-Sydney has one of the lowest GPAs I've seen. While their grades are creeping up at a rate of 0.1 GPA per decade, their starting point is so low that they have a a long way to go before they start to grade like everybody else.

Why does grading tend to be tougher in the South, especially the Deep South? I have no idea. I'll throw out the vague idea that the culture in the South is more socially and politically conservative and that somehow translates into less As. The schools above are about 30 years behind the times in comparison to many blue state schools. They seem to have a difficult time, so far, crashing through the 3.0 GPA barrier.

That said, the "South doesn't have much grade inflation" rule has quite a few exceptions. Texas is definitely a red state. Florida is probably a purple one. Regardless they both have blue state style grade inflation. The rates of grade inflation are very high (about 0.3 change in GPA per decade, about double the national average) and show no signs of abating. If current trends continue, average GPAs will exceed 3.5 at both schools within 10-15 years. Another 20 years of grade inflation at Texas and Florida will render grades meaningless at both institutions.

While William and Mary does not have quite the same rate of inflation as Florida or Texas, it is increasing its GPA at a rapid clip. Given that its current mean GPA is higher than that at the University of Texas, it also has about twenty years to go before its grades become meaningless. UNC has grade inflation rates more typical of the nation as a whole and won't reach a mean GPA of 3.6 until about 2040.

Georgia Tech's alumni, based on my interactions with them, believe that their institution does not have any grade inflation. In fact, it does. Its grading is about 15-20 years behind that of UNC. Tick, tick, tick.

Grade Inflation Update Part 2: Same Patterns

This week there will be two updates, one today and one tomorrow.

When I originally did my work on grade inflation there were some patterns that consistently showed up. Women did better than men in school (that's not surprising) to the tune of about 0.1-0.2 in GPA. Humanities courses graded easiest, followed by the social sciences followed by the sciences, but all showed increases in GPA over time. Grade inflation started during the Vietnam era, abated in the 1970s, and started up again in the 1980s. Private schools graded easiest, but public schools also showed inflation.

The essence of some of those patterns can be found in the chart shown above. For better detail, just click on the graph. The Georgetown dataset was supposed to be confidential, but somehow was leaked onto the Georgetown website (I don't know the details). The UW-Madison dataset is public, is actually much more comprehensive than I've shown on the graph and is the best historical data set I've found. You can see the Vietnam rise clearly, followed by the 70s wane, followed by the 1980s rise that defines the rate of grade inflation today.

I won't say anything about George Washington (I only have two data points at this point in time), except that it appears to be in between Georgetown and Wisconsin in terms of mean GPA.

UW-Madison is consistently about 20 years behind Georgetown in grading and that's typical of the differential between private and public schools across the country. If current trends continue, Georgetown will be where Brown is right now - a mean GPA of 3.6 with grades essentially meaningless - in less than 20 years. Wisconsin has about 40 years to go. Earlier this decade, faculty at Wisconsin decided that grade inflation wasn't a problem and didn't merit study. I doubt that they looked at this data. Then again, if you're an optimistic sort, you can focus on the slight change in the slope of the rise in GPA beginning in the mid-1990s and convince yourself that grades at UW-Madison will approach an asymptote in the next couple of decades. I'm not that optimistic.

The Wisconsin data also suggest that grading differences between the sciences and humanities are long standing. Here are mean GPAs on a 4.0 scale for undergraduate men in 1938 and 1948 with engineering standing in as a surrogate for the sciences:

Year 1938 1948
Music 2.61 2.82
Art Education 2.57 2.76
Electrical Eng 2.48 2.55
Mechanical Eng 2.34 2.51

It's often mentioned that today's students avoid the sciences and engineering because of harsher grading. If the UW-Madison data are representative, yesterday's students probably did the same thing.

Grades keep rising, although there are certain exceptions that I'll talk about in another Wednesday grade inflation post. There are quite a few academics who maintain that this rise simply represents better mastery on the part of students. Students are better prepared, supposedly. They are smarter, supposedly. Believing that this is so across the country is silly. SAT scores have not increased. Tests of reading comprehension show no improvement and at the college level nationwide show dramatic decreases over time.

There are of course colleges and universities that are indeed getting better students than they once did. But it's difficult to ascribe all of the rise in grades to increased student quality locally and impossible to do this nationally. There are other contributing factors. For example, the use of the computer has likely improved student efficiency and made for at least better looking assignments with fewer typos (hopefully). Female enrollments have increased faster than male enrollments and women on average perform better than men. But the main reason grades are rising across the country is a simple one: we grade easier.

Some say that students are working harder than ever. This is simply not true. Students are actually working about half as many hours as they did in the 1960s, somewhere around 8-14 hours a week total. As Georgetown's Report on Intellectual Life (2007) notes, "The most parsimonious interpretation of the observation that few students study more than 1 hour per week per credit is that the faculty are failing to challenge sufficiently the students to learn at a level that matches their ability."

Yet those in charge of colleges and universities seem to want to deny facts. Here's the Clintonesque response of one college president about data showing decreased studying (I'm leaving off his name because he seems like a nice, well-meaning guy and I don't want to embarrass him publicly): "I wonder how much studies of college workloads reflect the changes in the way students learn these days. For example, science students these days do a tremendous amount of student research, not just for a senior thesis. They will spend hours in the lab evenings and weekends. Does this count as weekly 'study' hours or not? I am not convinced that students these days work a lot less than they used to. No, they may not be sitting at their desks in their dorm rooms, but they may be preparing joint presentations with other students. So I wonder whether there is real hard data on this question, and what definitions are being used."

It gets worse. Here's what another college president, my old boss Richard Brodhead, apparently said to the Yale Daily Herald about his time at Yale compared to today in an effort to explain away grade inflation. "But when I was a student here, the number of students who took their work seriously was very small." Please tell me this is a misquote. Dumping on over 100,000 living alumni of Yale is not a good idea when you're a Yale dean (which Brodhead was at the time he said this). I mentioned this quote to a Yale graduate from way back when. Calm and collected most always, her face turned red, her lips tightened, and she said, "Well maybe Brodhead didn't work hard, but I sure did and so did my friends!" Then came some not very kind reminiscences about my former boss that for the purposes of this discussion are beside the point.

Denying that colleges are demanding less and grading easier is a denial of reality. Most of the deniers I've met either are concerned about public relations or would like grades eliminated. You can make valid arguments for the removal of grades altogether, and perhaps that's what colleges and universities that have made As the most popular grade and cannot manage to give Cs, Ds, and Fs should do. Denying grade inflation, though, is as valid as denying that the earth is round.

My Top 10 for 2008

I'm a picky obnoxious pain in the butt (although some people find me lovable, thank god). That means that when someone asks me to tell them my top ten books or movies or music in a given year, I look at them funny. There are undoubtedly many more than ten wonderful books or CDs put out in any given year. But I only really like about 10 percent of what I read or listen to so the chances that I'll find ten books or CDs that I really like are remote. Plus I'm damn certain that there are far fewer than 10 nationally released movies a year worth raving about. With that in mind, I won't stick to any one thing, but simply list 10 things that I liked this year in no particular order.

1. Book of Edgar Sawtelle. This was my summer beach read and I wasn't expecting much. It's a bestseller and I normally think those are at best airplane kind of reads that you forget about the second you leave the plane. But this book oddly was exactly the opposite. I didn't enjoy reading it very much at the time. The quality of the writing is excellent and that helped me get through the rambling portions. A couple of days after I finished, though, I noticed that this book was still in my head. Basically, it's a very inventive and unique modernizing of a Shakespeare tragedy. Then there's the Wisconsin angle. I'd say if you love dogs (not me), love Wisconsin (me), love Shakespeare (me), love good writing (me), and aren't too concerned about rambling narrative and plot endings (mostly me), this book is well worth a careful reading.

2. John Ellis and Double Wide, Dance Like There is No Tomorrow. Definitely not a bestseller CD, but it's damn fun and well executed. Like John Ellis, I love the New Orleans sound, but Ellis has also lived it. Take that New Orleans baseline of rhythm and chord progressions, add a lot of playfulness and about 30 IQ points and you get this. This CD is a joy. I guarantee it will put a smile on your face. But don't ask for your money back, please, if it doesn't.

3. Man on Wire. An artfully made documentary about obsession, beauty, and the search for glory. How a group of French men and a couple of dope smoking American slackers managed to get through security, set up a wire across the top of the Twin Towers, and then have their engaging lunatic ringmaster walk that wire in daylight is a fascinating story plain and simple.

4. Joe Lovano, Village Rhythm. I wasn't listening to this kind of stuff 20 years ago. I should have been. This is fine edgy bop and the cast of musicians including Paul Motian playing out of his mind is in wonderful form throughout. If I heard something like this in a club today, I'd be smiling about it for weeks.

5. Mozart: Piano Concertos 9 And 14 by Alfred Brendel. Brendel retired this past year and there won't be any comeback tour I'm sure. No one played Mozart better, absolutely no one. And it may be true that Mozart never wrote anything better than his 9th Piano Concerto. At any rate, combine the two and you have a must have CD. Forget about what Bo Derek said way back when in the movie "10" about Bolero. This is the ticket.

6. Booker Ervin, That's It. This one is finally available on digital download. For the last 20 years, it's been one of the few reasons I've kept pulling out my turntable. This album is perfect. I mean it. Perfect. Every song. Every way one song leads to another. Booker Ervin died ages ago known only to hard core jazz fans and people like me who randomly found his albums in the cutout section of their local record stores. It sounds pretty good digitally, too, although I'll probably keep listening to it on vinyl.

7. Passing Strange, Stew and Heidi Rodewald. This rock memoir about the LA guitarist/singer Stew with catchy tunes and pretty funny lyrics was probably the best musical of 2007 and this Broadway Cast album is infectious fun. I was disappointed with only one thing. I missed seeing this musical live by exactly one week (it wasn't on Broadway long). I'll never see it live more than likely, but the quality of the recording is solid and you can feel the energy of the performers.

8. My Dearest Friend: Letters of Abigail and John Adams by Abigail Adams. Books of letters are a format that I've always liked and this one has the star character of Abigail Adams. She is sharp as anything, witty, understands the human heart more than a dozen normal people put together, and the love she shows for her husband is the stuff of any great novel. Except this isn't a novel. It's real life. John Adams comes across as dour, dyspeptic, but also thoroughly captivated and devoted to his sweetie. Sounds like someone I know pretty well.

9. Bel Canto, Ann Patchett. My sweetie has been trying to get me to read this book for years, and I kept thinking oh no, chick lit. But it isn't chick lit at all. It's just a damn good novel, one of the best I've read in the last few years. The idea behind this novel is so brilliant that even a mediocre writer could have created something interesting and worth reading out of it. But Ann Patchett is a talented writer and the result is a colorful, well imagined novel with a wonderful plot.

10. The Best of the ArtsCenter's American Roots Series 2004-2007. I'll end with a plug for a CD that I got as a present. The ArtsCenter in Carborro, NC is a fine non-profit venue and there are a lot of solid to wonderful cuts on this CD of mostly live recordings from Rickie Lee Jones, Mavis Staples, Bettye Lavette (who put out a nice CD last year as well), Richard Thompson and others. You won't find this thing in stores and can't find a lot of these cuts from these great performers anywhere else. It's a sweet little secret CD. You can buy it by contacting the ArtsCenter via email: concerts@artscenterlive.org.

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Tales From The Old Country and Beyond, Part 36

Simchas

At the age of 68, my mother was still incredibly energetic and vibrant. She said to me more than once, "I don't know what people complain about with old age. I still feel like I'm 40." I was surprised she said such a thing . As the old saying that is embedded in Jewish culture goes, "Don't give yourself too many compliments." But with time, she became more Americanized and less superstitious. When I was a kid, she would pretend to spit in the ground three times if she possessed the temerity to give herself a kenahora like this. By the time she was 68, the pretend spitting was gone. She had strength and was proud of her strength.

That year, she came down to North Carolina for my daughter's bat mitzvah. She was beaming the entire weekend. I knew that she would would beaming. That's why we had the bat mitzvah in the first place. My daughter wasn't keen on the idea. My sweetie thought I was crazy for pushing our daughter. I reminded my sweetie that when we were preparing for our wedding, her mom basically took over the event. When my sweetie had protested, her mom had said, "You don't understand. Weddings aren't for the bride and groom. They're for the parents." At the time, I thought this was truly a ridiculous thing to say. Call me twisted, but as the years went on, I kind of bought into the concept in hindsight.

"It's just like that," I said. "This bat mitzvah isn't for us. It isn't for our daughter. It's for my mom." My sweetie was dubious, but she warmed up to the idea by the time the event actually took place. As for me, watching my mom beam I never felt better. In hindsight, I still feel good about it.

Still, my mom knew she wouldn't be on this planet forever and during the bat mitzvah party she pulled me aside. "You know what? I want to be at her wedding. I want to see her have her first kid. Then god can do whatever he wants with me."

It wasn't meant to be. Two years later she would be dead from cancer. But the way she expressed her desire for her future was completely understandable to me. Both my parents lived for simchas. A wedding. A bris. A bar mitzvah. There was nothing better as far as they were concerned. Daily life was hard work. It was necessary to pay the bills. You could enjoy the fact that you were good at what you did and were successful at it. But a simcha, you dropped everything for that. You put on your best clothes and enjoyed yourself.

It wasn't just weddings, brises, and bnai mitvot that gave my parents joy. While they weren't particularly religious, the high holidays, simchas torah, purim and passover were all special times filled with baking, eating, and drinking a little too much wine. But the events that celebrated family demarcations were especially sweet for both of my parents. They'd dance. They'd eat. It was at these events where both my mother and father glowed.

We would go to these events - mostly for greenhorn families like ourselves - in Milwaukee, Sheboygan and Chicago. And you could always sense that this is how things were in the shtetls these people all came from as well. Your life might be dreary, but a simcha was a time to forget all that and enjoy yourself. That's exactly what my parents did.

In America, there was an added joy. It was left unsaid, but it was always in the background. The only time I heard it expressed was at my Ph.D. graduation. My mother went up to the chair of my department and said, "It's wonderful that out of the ashes of Europe, this could happen." The chair was from Vietnam. He didn't have a clue what my mother was talking about. But immediately I remembered the simchas I went to as a child when she said this. They were about something good coming out of the ashes.

There was also a feeling of triumph. There was a look in people's eyes that said, "You wanted to annihilate us? Well look. Our children are growing up. They are having bnai mitzvot. They are getting married. They are having children of their own. We are here. We will always be here. We will grow and grow again. Nothing can stop us." Every simcha wasn't simply a celebration. It was an emphatic assertion of existence.