The death of public universities

At the University of Virginia, state support has dwindled in two decades from 26 percent of the operating budget to 7 percent. At the University of Michigan, it has declined from 48 percent to 17 percent.

Not even the nation’s finest public university is immune. The University of California at Berkeley — birthplace of the free-speech movement, home to nine living Nobel laureates — subsists now in perpetual austerity. Star faculty take mandatory furloughs. Classes grow perceptibly larger each year. Roofs leak; e-mail crashes. One employee mows the entire campus. Wastebaskets are emptied once a week. Some professors lack telephones.

Behind these indignities lie deeper problems. The state share of Berkeley’s operating budget has slipped since 1991 from 47 percent to 11 percent. Tuition has doubled in six years, and the university is admitting more students from out of state willing to pay a premium for a Berkeley degree. This year, for the first time, the university collected more money from students than from California.

via washingtonpost.com

As an individual matter, I despair of getting my son a top-flight college education some 15 or so years from now.

As a societal matter, two points:

First, a lot of parents are going to despair of getting top-flight educations for their children. The death of public universities is going to mean the death of opportunity for a lot of smart kids—and, to some extent, the death of merit in this country. Talent will still out, on occasion, but this exacerbates income inequality by robbing young people of proving grounds where they could demonstrate their ability to climb the social ladder. If you can afford a great public university, good for you. And if not, too bad.

Second: The research done at those public universities has helped spur innovation that, in turn, has helped drive the American economy. We're robbing ourselves of our future.

Holiday homophobia

Somebody took part of their Christmas Day to post these comments to my blog, and I thought the were worth sharing with the wider community, without comment:

Dude you and your article on gay rights is a total load of crap. The backlash against Gay Filth in AMERICA is building daily, The people of Hawaii will have a Statewide Day of Shame to show their anger and disgust for allowing civil rights to be allowed by a wacko governor in direct opposition to the 70% of voters who are opposed to the encroachment of homosexual perversion.

What type of article will you write when the first homosexual military member is brought up on charges for sexually harassing a straight fellow soldier or when a straight soldier kills a homosexual that can't take no for an answer. Then we will see if you are so elated over the end of DADT

Christmas in the country has begun.

Taken at Valley Township

Don't trade away unemployment benefits, Mr. President

This inability to connect economic policy to the larger problem of joblessness is a real problem with the debate over the payroll tax cut. This disconnect explains why the unemployment insurance extension bundled with the payroll tax cut have attracted so much less attention. After all, if all that matters is the first tranche of money, the payroll tax cut will affect many more households than the UI extension. But all serious economists agree that the extension of unemployment insurance is a far more efficient fiscal support – providing about 50 to 100 percent more jobs per dollar added to the deficit.

What makes unemployment insurance so much more efficient? It is laser-targeted at families in genuine distress, meaning that the recipients will spend every marginal dollar that comes in the door. This also makes the extension better targeted at alleviating actual economic misery.

via epi.org

Read the whole thing.

2011: A great year for gay rights

The advancement of gay civil rights is the best thing that happened this year, I argue in the Scripps Howard column.

The best event of 2011? The gains made for gay civil rights.

Other good things happened -- most notably, the Iraq war came to a close for the United States, ending a disastrously dumb conflict that never should have happened. But the end of a huge negative isn't really a positive. So instead, it was in the arena of gay rights where two big events took place that could wonderfully alter the landscape for future generations.

First was repeal of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell." The law itself passed late last year as Congress was closing out its session, but the law was implemented this year. Despite the hysterical cries of opposition from anti-gay forces, the military seems to have weathered the transition pretty well.

Second was the legalization, in New York State, of gay marriage. This was important for two reasons: New York is one of the most populated states, and the law was passed by an act of the state legislature. There were no "judicial activists" imposing a "gay agenda" on the state; the representatives of the people did the people's business.

Simply put: In 2011, gay Americans took a huge step toward attaining full citizenship in this country.

There is much work to be done, and some of it may be done in 2012: There are court challenges both to the federal Defense of Marriage Act, which prevents the federal government from recognizing those legal marriages in New York, and to California's Proposition 8, which made same-sex marriage illegal there. And outside the courtroom, support for gay rights continues to spread among the citizenry.

There will always be opponents to gay equality. Time, however, is on the side of those who favor civil rights. In 2011, we found out we might not have to wait much longer.

Ben's favorite development? The emergence of Occupy Wall Street. Yes, he's being cynical.

How did the guy who was president in 1979 end up doing?

Throughout 2011, an average of 17% of Americans said they were satisfied with the way things are going in the United States. That is the second-lowest annual average in the more than 30-year history of the question, after the 15% from 2008. Satisfaction has averaged as high as 60% in 1986, 1998, and 2000.

via gallup.com

1979 was a comparable year, according to Gallup. But Jimmy Carter fared pretty well in the next year's election, right?

Is Bill Conlin innocent?

Over at The Philly Post (where I contribute weekly) Victor Fiorillo has a provocatively titled column: "Bill Conlin is innocent." Conlin, of course, is the legendary sportswriter who retired this week after 40-year-old child molestation accusations surfaced.

You’re well aware of this concept: that the accused is innocent until proven guilty, that the accused has no obligation to produce evidence, that the accused has no obligation to make an argument or say anything, for that matter, and that the government has the obligation to prove guilt—beyond a reasonable doubt—and to get 12 people to agree to it, too. You “know it” like you read about it in school. But you sure are quick to forget about it in cases like this.

Well, we probably forget about it because the presumption of innocence is only applicable in a court of law—we in the public are under no requirement to make a similar presumption. That doesn't excuse us from wisely weighing the evidence in public, though.

And the evidence is that three women and one man have told stories about being molested by Conlin in the early 1970s. What's more, there's evidence that they aired those accusations to parents and relatives at the time—thus, these aren't just stories that are being created now.

For the public to continue to offer Conlin the presumption of innocence, then, one must believe that three women, one man and their parents have all conspired to devastatingly besmirch his reputation. That's not unimaginable, but it seems unlikely. Who gains what in this scenario?

I don't favor media-driven witch-hunts. But as Fiorillo notes, Conlin will never face a criminal trial on these allegations because the statute of limitations has passed. (If Conlin is innocent, though, he might consider legal action of his own, in the form of a civil case against his accusers.) Fiorillo's suggestion seems to be that we in the public thus suspend our judgment of the case in perpetuity. That's unlikely, to say the least. All we can do is weigh the evidence before us and use our common sense.

Fiorillo is wise to warn us against a rush to judgment. Given what we've been told, though, it's difficult to see the scales tipping in Conlin's favor.