Education
January 12, 2013 — Steven Hayward
I’m late in offering notice of the passing on Wednesday of James Buchanan, who won the Nobel Prize in economics for his development of public choice theory. I was fortunate to meet Buchanan on a couple of occasions (usually Mont Pelerin Society meetings overseas), and long profited from deploying public choice analysis of nanny state madness. Public choice theory can be summarized in a number of fairly simple ways, such
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January 6, 2013 — Scott Johnson
In “The bubble at the University of Minnesota” I took note of Charles Lane’s Washington Post column based on the reporting of the Wall Street Journal. The Journal reported startling data suggesting the incredible administrative bloat at the University of Minnesota. The Minneapolis Star Tribune republished Lane’s column with these choice facts and figures plucked from the Journal article: At the University of Minnesota, the number of employees with “human
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January 3, 2013 — Scott Johnson
The Minnesota media usually luxuriate in national attention directed to local institutions or figures. Not so with the December 28 Wall Street Journal article (behind the Journal subscription paywall) highlighting the University of Minnesota as Exhibit A for the administrative bloat fostered by the higher education bubble. The silence is, as they say, deafening. The Washington Post’s Charles Lane picked up on the Journal article for a column of his
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December 12, 2012 — Paul Mirengoff
If there is one fiscal cliff-related issue as to which bipartisan consensus exists, it’s that Republicans and Democrats should at least agree get the “doc fix” done by the end of the year. Actually, a consensus seems also to exist that millions of middle class taxpayers shouldn’t be forced to pay the alternative minimum tax and that the inheritance tax exemption shouldn’t drop all the way to $1 million. But
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December 6, 2012 — Paul Mirengoff
Controversy is brewing over new Common Core State Standards in English that call on public schools to emphasize the reading of “information text” instead of fictional literature. According to the Washington Post, English teachers across the country are upset by what they consider the government’s effort “to drive literature out of the classroom.” English teachers are right to be upset, but they shouldn’t take it personally. The government has nothing
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December 5, 2012 — Steven Hayward
So this week I finished up my fall semester for the Ashbrook Center at Ashland University, where I taught two sections of a course on American Political Economy—one for the undergraduates in the Ashbrook honors program, and an online master’s section for high school teachers in the MAHG (MA in History and Government) program. (There’s actually a photo of me on the website from the summer session, and boy do
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December 3, 2012 — Scott Johnson
If your parents ever admonished you not to hang around with a bad crowd, you might want to attend to the story of Columbia University’s “gang scholar,” Sudhir Venkatesh. Ariel Kaminer’s Sunday New York Times article explores Professor Venkatesh’s scholarship and publications. Professor Venkatesh’s published work seems to be headed in the general direction of Tom Wolfe, out of whose pages Venkatesh coincidentally seems to have walked: [A]t Columbia, where
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November 25, 2012 — Paul Mirengoff
With the reelection of President Obama secured, Washington Post economics reporter Zachary Goldfarb finally identifies “the bedrock belief that has driven the president for decade” (or Obama’s “driving force,” per the web edition). That bedrock belief is that the power of the federal government must be used reduce income inequality in America. According to Goldfarb, Obama formed this belief as a child and young adult living abroad, where he observed,
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October 25, 2012 — John Hinderaker
The Center of the American Experiment hosted its annual Fall Briefing tonight, with Bill Bennett as the featured speaker. My wife and I bought a row, as we always do, and because we had a few vacancies at the last minute, I offered three seats to Power Line readers last night. The Fall Briefing is usually at Orchestra Hall in Minneapolis, which is being renovated at the moment. So this
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October 25, 2012 — Steven Hayward
Are Minnesota universities trying to make complete buffoons of themselves? Last weekend in “Regulators Gone Wild” I noted the blunderbuss bureaucrats, acting as a protection racket for the state’s hidebound universities, who tried to block online college courses from being offered in Minnesota. Today comes the news from The Daily Caller of how Concordia College is threatening disciplinary action against a student for the sin of embarrassing Democratic Congressman Collin
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October 20, 2012 — Steven Hayward
I’m not always a fan of the Libertarian Party, but this poster nails it about the frivolousness of the populist, Occupy Wall Street Left: Which brings me to today’s tales of regulatory stupidity and perverse results. Liberals everywhere love regulation to protect consumers from harm, right? But slow-learning liberals (with a few notable exceptions) never seem to notice how regulations often become anti-competitive barriers to new competition, protecting lazy incumbent
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September 18, 2012 — Steven Hayward
We’ve noted the higher education bubble a few times here before, but today’s news story from FuelFix, an online publication of Statoil, is worth chortling over: South Dakota’s New Mining Grads Beat Harvard for Pay. Harvard University’s graduates are earning less than those from the South Dakota School of Mines & Technology after a decade-long commodity bull market created shortages of workers as well as minerals. Those leaving the college
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September 15, 2012 — Paul Mirengoff
Here in the Northern Virginia ad market, Team Obama continues its merciless pounding of Mitt Romney. Although Team Romney says it is blitzing the airwaves in certain key areas, most of the ads in this market still come from Obama. And, as has been the case all season, the Obama ads are troublesome for Romney. The latest I’ve seen (which apparently has been running for some time) quotes Romney to
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September 4, 2012 — Scott Johnson
David Gelernter is professor of computer science at Yale and the author, most recently, of America-Lite: How Imperial Academia Dismantled Our Culture (and Ushered in the Obamacrats), just published by Encounter Books. Earlier this month he wrote “Why do we live in America-Lite?” for us, briefly summarizing the themes of his new book. He returned to expand on the themes of his book in “What keeps this failed president above
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August 26, 2012 — Steven Hayward
It’s been a picture postcard perfect day out here on the central coast of California, with a large pod of humpback whales frolicking out in the ocean right in front of me (video coming shortly), so I’ve neglected the keyboard most of the day. California enjoys what economists call “exploitable asymmetries,” which means California’s climate and topography enable liberals to get away with more idiotic stuff than interior states, because
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August 24, 2012 — John Hinderaker
I am not a big fan of teachers’ unions. In most cities, they are the primary obstacle to controlling budgets and improving education. But sometimes they are even worse than that. Local 59 is the City of Minneapolis’s unit of the Minnesota Federation of Teachers. Minneapolis public school teachers have their work cut out for them: many of the city’s schools are poor. How much the union is to blame
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August 12, 2012 — John Hinderaker
I’ve been offline most of the weekend because I was in my home town, Watertown, South Dakota, for a unique event: an all-class reunion of the Watertown High School debate team. I am not sure there is another high school in the country that could hold an event like this. Around 200 people attended on Friday or Saturday night, or both. Attendees ranged from graduates of the 1940s and 1950s
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