Daily Chronicle Editorial Board Karen Pletsch, Inger Koch, Eric Olson, Brett Rowland
OPINIONS TUESDAY
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SKETCH VIEW
June 2, 2015 Daily Chronicle Section A • Page 7
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OUR VIEW
District’s plan for concessions a sensible move
Universities bloated and dysfunctional American colleges and universities, long thought to be the glory of the nation, are in more than a little trouble. I’ve written before of their shameful practices – the racial quotas and preferences at selective schools (Harvard is being sued by Asian American organizations), the kangaroo courts that try students accused of rape and sexual assault without legal representation or presumption of innocence, and speech codes that make campuses the least rather than the most free venues in American society. In following these policies, the burgeoning phalanxes of university and college administrators must systematically lie, insisting against all the evidence that they are racially nondiscriminatory, devoted to due process and upholders of free speech. The resulting intellectual corruption would have been understood by George Orwell. Sometimes, you can get too much of a good thing. American colleges, dating back to Harvard’s founding in 1636, have been modeled on the residential colleges of Oxford and Cambridge. The idea is that students live on or near campuses where they can learn from and interact with inspired teachers. American graduate universities, dating back to Johns Hopkins’ founding in 1876, have been built on the German professional model. Students are taught by scholars whose doctoral theses represent original scholarship, expanding the frontiers of knowledge and learning. That model still works very well in math and the hard sciences. But not so much in some of the mushier social sciences and humanities. Consider the Oxford/Cambridge residential college model. Up through the 1960s, college administrators acted in loco paren-
VIEWS Michael Barone tis, with responsibilities similar to those of parents. Men’s and women’s dorms were separate and mostly off-limits to the other sex; drinking and drug use were limited; cars often were banned. The assumption is that 18- to 21-yearold students were, in important respects, still children. The 1960s changed all that. Students were regarded as entitled to adult freedoms: unisex dorms and bathrooms, binge drinking, a hookup culture. But now the assumption is that adultaged students must be coddled like children. They are provided with cadres of counselors, so-called “trigger warnings” against supposedly disturbing course material and kangaroo courts to minutely regulate their sexual behavior. Most colleges and universities abroad and many in this country (notably for-profit and online) don’t use the residential model. Students live with parents or double up in cheap apartments and – horrors! – commute, like most employed adults. The residential college model, with its bloated ranks of coddler/administrators, has become hugely expensive and increasingly dysfunctional. It’s overdue for significant downsizing. The doctoral university model also is metastasizing. A plethora of humanities and social science doctoral theses are produced every year, many if not most written in unreadable academic jargon and devoid of scholarly worth. Most will probably be read only by a handful of people, with no loss to society. But some worthy
scholarship will be overlooked and go unappreciated. A glut of Ph.D.s and an ever-increasing army of administrators have produced downward pressure on faculty pay. Universities increasingly hire Ph.D.s as underpaid adjuncts, with low wages and no job security. The last half-century has seen a huge increase in the percentage of Americans who go to college and a huge increase in government aid to them. The assumption was that if college is good for some, it’s good for everyone. But not everyone is suited for college: witness the increasing ranks of debt-laden non-graduates. And the huge tranches of government money have been largely mopped up by the ever-increasing cadres of administrators. Do students get their money’s worth from the masses of counselors, facilitators, liaisons and coordinators their student loans pay for? Or would they be better off paying for such services only as needed, as most other adults do? As Glenn Reynolds of instapundit.com has written convincingly, the higher education bubble now is bursting. Colleges are closing; college applications and graduate program enrollments are declining; universities are facing lawsuits challenging the verdicts of their kangaroo courts. Naturally, administrators seek more money. But the money pumped into these institutions is more the problem than the solution.
• Michael Barone, senior political analyst at the Washington Examiner, is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a Fox News Channel contributor and a co-author of The Almanac of American Politics.
VIEW
Graham tries his luck with presidential run By JONATHAN BERNSTEIN Bloomberg View It’s a bit of puzzle why Sen. Lindsey Graham is jumping into the presidential pool. After all, neither social nor economic conservatives have much use for the South Carolina Republican. Most of the major party players in his home state appear to have signed up with another candidate. What Graham is up to, it seems, is running John McCain’s third presidential campaign. To see how, go back to McCain I and II. McCain in 2000 accidentally wound up finishing second. He was too moderate for the Republican Party, but his biggest hurdle was his push for campaign finance reform, which turned Republican-aligned groups who felt targeted by it, against him. Instead of waging a conventional campaign – spending a year glad-handing Iowans and big-shot national Republicans – McCain instead hung out in New Hampshire with political reporters. Normally, that would have produced a few nice
feature stories and nothing more. But in 2000, George W. Bush quickly dispatched his serious Republican rivals before or in the Iowa caucuses. New Hampshire voters (who famously love upsetting the Iowa winner, from Walter Mondale in 1984 through Barack Obama in 2008) punished Bush for wrapping up the nomination early by voting for McCain, thereby making him the last man standing against W. McCain’s 2008 adventure was, if anything, more unlikely. McCain spent the beginning of Bush’s first term in open revolt against his former rival before returning to the ranks of loyal Republicans just in time for the 2004 election – and the beginning of the 2008 nomination fight. McCain then put together a typical Republican front-runner campaign, heavy on corporate-style bureaucracy, only to have the whole thing collapse halfway through the cycle. But once again, McCain was lucky. No candidate emerged who combined normal qualifications for the presidency, positions well within the mainstream of the party and the ability to build a competent
presidential campaign. McCain came close enough on each of those scores to wind up as the nominee. It isn’t going to work this time. To begin with, Lindsey Graham simply isn’t John McCain, charismatic war hero. Perhaps more important, Republicans in 2016 have at least half a dozen people with conventional credentials who are stronger candidates for the nomination than anyone McCain faced in 2008. Luck isn’t much of a campaign strategy. So it’s unlikely Graham will even have sufficiently good poll numbers to qualify for Republican debates. It’s unlikely he’ll finish among the top half-dozen candidates in Iowa or New Hampshire. And if he’s still running by the time the race moves to his home state, he’ll likely get embarrassed in South Carolina. And even if he manages to win there, it’s not going to impress anyone or turn him into a serious contender for the nomination.
• Jonathan Bernstein is a Bloomberg View columnist covering U.S. politics.
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The recent decision by the DeKalb Park District’s board to allow Feed’em Soup to handle concessions at park facilities looks like a good way of solving a problem and helping a local nonprofit. We expect parks and recreation professionals to be experts in areas such as athletic field maintenance, aquatics, grant writing and other popular recreation activities. We don’t necessarily expect them to be experts in food service and turning a profit through sales of food and beverages. DeKalb Park District ofFor the record ficials say concessions sales were a money-loser for them Feed’em Soup will last year. So this year, the pay the park district 5 district will ensure it turns percent of its gross sales a profit by turning over in exchange for the rights the concessions sales on its to sell concessions on park property – with the excepproperty. tion of its two golf courses – to Feed’em Soup, a local nonprofit that provides community meals regardless of people’s ability to pay. Under an agreement approved recently by the park board, Feed’em Soup will pay the park district 5 percent of its gross sales in exchange for the rights to sell concessions on park property. Although the deal isn’t expected to net the district big money, it will eliminate the risk of losing money as well as provide an opportunity for Feed’em Soup, which was one of a handful of organizations to apply for the concessions business. Jason Mangum, the executive director of the park district, said selling concessions just wasn’t something the park district was good at. Outsourcing the operation seems a better solution than committing time and resources to trying to improve on an operation that is outside the park district’s core function. Giving up control of the concessions business means park officials will not control pricing, and prices could go up. But the business hasn’t been sold to some far-off concern with no connection to the community, and no food vendor can raise prices higher than the market will bear and expect to turn a profit. We hope the new arrangement between the DeKalb Park District and Feed’em Soup turns out to be mutually beneficial, and maybe raises awareness about the good work that Feed’em Soup tries to do in the community.
ANOTHER VIEW
Obama’s good-enough global warming plan President Barack Obama’s global warming strategy will cut the country’s climate change-inducing greenhouse emissions significantly – but at some cost. That’s the upshot of a new Energy Information Administration analysis of the Environmental Protection Agency’s landmark Clean Power Plan that, once finalized, will be at the core of the president’s strategy to reduce U.S. carbon-dioxide output. The report underscores a fundamental truth about the U.S. stance on global warming: The nation’s plan has merit, but it is a second-best policy the country is stuck with because Congress is too cowardly or unwise to endorse a better one. The Clean Power Plan will set emissions targets for every state’s power sector, and the EIA reckons they will be effective. The sector’s carbon dioxide emissions will drop to 34 percent below 2005 levels by 2030. The country will see a broad move away from coal, the biggest environmental villain in the electricity industry. Utilities will replace coal with cleaner burning natural gas, especially in early years, and carbon-free renewables, which will become increasingly prominent in later years. This shift won’t be easy. The EIA projects that electricity prices will increase between 3 percent and 7 percent in early years as utilities invest in new, cleaner technology. As time goes on, average prices will return to around the levels they would have been without the plan, although the effect will not be even across regions: A band of states in the South will see a more persistent increase in electricity prices. These figures don’t necessarily translate into higher energy bills. States will invest in efficiency programs that reduce energy use, and people will waste less electricity, too. The bottom line, the EIA finds, is that electricity bills will be slightly lower by 2040 than they would have been otherwise. There will be economic costs over the next several decades, but they won’t be prohibitive. This picture is more negative than the one the EPA painted when it proposed the Clean Power Plan. The agency projected energy costs would be lower, and it calculated substantial public health benefits that offset the economic costs, which the latest analysis doesn’t attempt to quantify. By either calculation, however, the policy appears to be an acceptable path to significant emissions reductions. Acceptable, but not ideal. Any economist will tell you the most efficient way to reduce emissions is to put a price on them, allowing consumers and businesses to wring carbon out of the economy without central planning or favor to preferred interests. Congress would have to OK such a plan, and lawmakers have dodged the climate issue for decades. Until that changes, the Obama administration’s approach is the only option. The Washington Post
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