“[I]t’s the only major American city to have ever elected three socialist mayors.”

Via the Phillies Zone:

My prediction:  Phillies in four (losing game 2 to Sabathia), but what the heck do historians know about the future?

“A Corner in Wheat” (1909).

I just finished a book that I didn’t like for many reasons, American Lightning by Howard Blum.  It’s supposed to be about the McNamara Brothers trial for blowing up the LA Times building in 1910 but about a third of it is a totally gratuitous history of D.W. Griffith’s Biograph Studios.  At least reading it made me check for this forgotten working class classic on YouTube, and it’s there in its entirety:

Early processed foods.

I think I have a knack for bumping into food history web sites while looking for other things. My latest find is Food and Drink at the Pan-American Exposition, part of a larger site at SUNY – Buffalo devoted to the 1901 Exhibition there in general.

While the exhibit mentions many “food firsts and technological marvels,” I’ve developed a strange interest in grain milling because the substance is so undifferentiated, it practically begged for branding.

The pictures here are great for examining the origins of popular brands. As the text explains:

Ironically, as the emphasis on eating healthier food grew, so did the public’s desire for quick and easy to serve processed food products. The late 19th Century saw the development of the canned meat and fruit industries–Libby’s, Armour’s, Van Camp, Borden and Heinz were the giants of the day. During this period saccharin, synthetic vanilla, and flaked cereal also entered the market, as well as the myriad of soda pop brands, most of which are still in use today. The decade of the 1890’s was an especially lucrative one for “quick food” producers with products like minute tapioca, “instant” cereal, condensed soup, and pre-ground coffee guaranteed to ease the labor of meal preparation.

It’s only ironic in retrospect. The food safety problem had to do with unwanted additives, not the healthiness (or lack thereof) of the food itself. That’s why large manufacturers generally supported the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906. It stopped shady manufacturers from underselling them by cutting corners.

Quality, not quantity.

What does Mark Bauerlein have against research?  First, he decries the internet as a teaching tool, now he attacks the tenure review process for producing so much material:

“Publish or perish” has long been the formula of academic labor at research universities, but for many humanities professors that imperative has decayed into a simple rule of production. The publish-or-perish model assumed a peer-review process that maintained quality, but more and more it is the bare volume of printed words that counts.

While this would be terrible, I don’t believe it’s happening.  This is about all teh proof I could find in his article:

A friend who teaches at a large midwestern school says that salary increases correlate with book and article publication to the dollar, and he hopes that his next book comes out before year-end recommendations are due. “What if your book isn’t any good?” I ask with a half-smile. “Doesn’t matter,” he replies. When I returned to my own institution after two and a half years of government work and wondered how much credit I would get for pieces appearing during my time away, a dean skipped the quality question and replied, “Well, you have lots of titles, but how many pages do they amount to?”

Mark Bauerlein teaches at Emory.  I don’t believe for a minute that Emory tenures people on the basis of word count.  That’s just not credible.  Getting into the right journals matter, otherwise people wouldn’t devote so much energy trying to get into them.

However, it’s not like his solution to the problem he perceives is all that bad:

A new tenure threshold should be erected, one that insists on a lower, not a higher, level of productivity. Tell junior faculty that the department will consider only so many titles and pages for tenure review. Reduce the requirement to only two substantive, high-quality essays—and reward conscientious teaching alongside them. Young people will respond accordingly, spending years ensuring that their fifty pages meet higher standards.

But maybe – just maybe – some people write because they think they have something to say to the world rather than just for the tenure process.  It might not matter if few people read it as long as it reaches the right audience.

How should college teaching be evaluated?

I have taught college students, and read evaluations of me, but I was unprepared for the naughty thrill of reading evaluations of somebody else. Getting to read what Anna Bean’s students thought of her was like finding your neighbor’s bank statements, or maybe medical files, on the sidewalk.

I had the same feeling reading the New York Times Magazine article from which this quote comes.  Personally, my forms are not particularly interesting.  My numbers are always right around the department and the college average.  What bugs me is that I almost never get comments that I can take as well-thought compliments or bad ones that I can use constructively to improve my teaching.  I certainly don’t get the kind of comments that Anna Bean (who has taught at Williams and Wesleyan) gets:

At both schools where she taught, many students adored her. (When she was denied tenure at Williams, many alumni wrote letters in protest.) Others, of course, were indifferent or lukewarm. And a small minority couldn’t stand her. When I looked through evaluations of Bean’s class, Blackface Minstrelsy, Then and Now, I found all three groups. The great: “I found the teaching amazing. . . . I believe that the love and expertise that the professor obviously has in the subjects shines through in her teaching.” The good: “Teacher is well informed and has interesting topics.” And the very, very bad: “In general this course deteriorated and by the end of the class we weren’t even talking about minstrelsy. Tremendous amounts of time were wasted by Bean’s lateness (due to yoga class), absence or even inability to operate technology. . . . I found her completely unstimulating and unable to lead productive classes.”

If you’re her department chairman, what do you do with a comments that are that polarized?  Well, you certainly don’t blame it on race and gender like Bean did.  And you certainly don’t just take the hostile students’ word for it and fire her.  You investigate further.  Visit the class yourself.  Collect references from other colleagues who have seen her teach.

The problem with that is that it takes time.  That wouldn’t be a problem except Anna Bean wasn’t tenure track.  She was on a one-year contract and it wasn’t renewed.  Since there’s plenty of adjunct teachers out there willing to teach at Wesleyan, treating her fairly wasn’t a necessity.

So how should college teaching be evaluated?  I’m not really sure, but certainly with a lot more care than this:

Before her first year of teaching, she received a letter from Renee Romano, her department chairwoman, saying that she would be recommended for a second year if she met certain benchmarks in her students’ evaluations of her. Specifically, for the fall 2007 term her teaching and the overall quality of the course had to be “rated in the top two categories (Outstanding and Good) by at least 85 percent of the students in both your courses.” When, at the end of the semester last December, she got only 76 percent in one of her classes and 73 percent in the other, she knew her job was in jeopardy.

I don’t usually think this, but I hope she sues.  Bean might not have a case, but Wesleyan definitely deserves it.

More Glass Steagall blogging.

The hit count on this blog is going through the roof thanks to a throwaway post I wrote back in March (when Bear Stearns went down) on the 1999 repeal of the Glass Steagall Act. Thanks to Wall Street’s horrible week, it now seems like half the people on the internet want to investigate the repeal of this important, but hardly ever taught Depression Era law. 

Let’s see if I can help. I like this diary at Daily Kos because it dumps the issue in McCain’s lap. [It also points out that there are two Glass Steagall Acts. We're concerned about the second one here.] However, there’s one thing that the diarist didn’t mention:  Bill Clinton made the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (which repealed the second Glass Steagall) possible.

The place to go for the proof are a series of posts by Ralph Brauer at Progressive Historians. Start here, then read here, then here. [When I linked to Ralph before, it was only one part of this excellent three-part series.]

There’s nothing I hate more than when Democrats govern like Republicans and that’s what Bill Clinton was doing here. I remember thinking back in 1999 that this repeal was a bad idea because the only people crying out for their banker to be their broker were executives at Citibank. Isn’t it funny how things that didn’t look important at the time can seem much more so in hindsight?

You, Madam, are no Harry Truman.

I’m subscribed to Newsweek for one reason and one reason only: Northwest Airlines frequent fliers miles, which I used to pay for the subscription because I never used them otherwise anyway. My new issue came today, and I was forced to read this:

Veep nominee Sarah Palin answers concerns about her inexperience by comparing herself to Harry Truman, who became president three months into his term, when FDR died…

Why It Works
Both had non-elite upbringings and, as Palin says, “unlikely” paths to high office. In the reformer category, both were early supporters of pork projects (Truman’s early political career was backed by the Pendergast machine) who later lambasted wastefulness and fraud.

To be fair, since this is part of a lame Newsweek effort to be even-handed, there is a counter argument, but it should be much stronger:

Why It Doesn’t
Truman, a World War I vet, was selected more for his 10-year service in the Senate, where he voted on major national legislation and steered a war-preparedness committee, than his origins as a small-town Missouri haberdasher, as Palin has suggested.

That “war-preparedness committee” was the Senate Special Committee to Investigate the National defense Program. better known as the Truman Committee. Its mission was to stamp out waste, fraud, abuse and other intellectual precursors to the “Bridge to Nowhere” in the Pentagon budget. According to David McCullough [Truman, pp. 287-88]:

[O]verall the commitee’s performance was outstanding. It would be called the most successful congressional investigative effort in American history. Later estimates were that the Truman Commitee saved the country as much as $15 billion. This was almost certainly an exaggeration–no exact figure is possible–but the sum was enormous and unprecedented.

Contrary to popular belief, Harry Truman was not an unknown when FDR selected him to be his Vice President in 1944. His work on this committee had made him famous. He even criticized the Roosevelt administration for the waste that occurred during War Mobilization. Sarah Palin, on the other hand, was for the Bridge to Nowhere before she was against it. Being a creature of the Pendergast machine did not make Truman corrupt by definition.

In short, David McCullough knows Harry Truman, and you, Madam, are no Harry Truman.

“Save Waste Fats”

Boing Boing pointed me to this wonderful collection of American Legion World War I and World War II posters. The one above reminded me that I think read somewhere that fats were never used to make ammunition during World War II. The government just created the program so that housewives could feel more involved in the war effort. If anybody out there knows documentation for that point one way or another, I’d be much obliged if you share it below.

Why does John McCain hate the FDIC?

John McCain, this morning:

The “alphabet soup” of federal regulatory agencies was designed for the 1930s, he said, and must be reformed. This is something that Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson already has called for: A streamlining of banking and financial market regulation into just a few overarching agencies overseeing all.

I wonder which agencies he has in mind? The Securities and Exchange Commission? Maybe the FDIC? This is from the FDIC’s Mission, Vision and Values:

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) is an independent agency created by the Congress that maintains the stability and public confidence in the nation’s financial system by insuring deposits, examining and supervising financial institutions, and managing receiverships.

Sounds like the FDIC. But the FDIC has been working very hard lately:

Including IndyMac, there have been 11 bank failures nationwide this year, according to the FDIC. That number is up from three in 2007, and zero in both 2005 and 2006.

Federal regulations don’t need to be streamlined, they need to be tightened so that this doesn’t happen again. If deregulation is the problem then regulation is the solution. Streamlining regulations are what got us into this trouble in the first place.

Speaking of deregulation disasters….

From the Wall Street Journal:

UAL Corp.’s United Airlines is doubling the fee it now charges for passengers who check a second bag on domestic flights as major carriers look for ways to recoup some of the soaring costs hitting the airline industries.

Boosting the fee to $50 is a first for U.S. carriers and the move comes seven months after the airline was the first to enact a $25 fee on a second checked bag.

This comes less than a month after united announced that it would start charging for food on overseas flights. I have a particular interest in United because as a Coloradoan, I’m too often stuck traveling on them since there are no other flights. Nevertheless, everybody knows I could cite more examples/horror stories from nearly every US carrier.

Much the same way that Bill Clinton deregulated investment banking, it was Democrat Jimmy Carter who deregulated the airline industry. This is the introduction to the speech he gave when he signed that bill back in 1979:

It is a special pleasure for me today to sign into law the Airline Deregulation Act. This legislation will permit us to achieve two critical objectives. One is to help our fight against inflation. And the other one is to ensure American citizens of an opportunity for low-priced air transportation.

It will also mean less Government interference in regulation of an increasingly prosperous airline industry. All of us here today worked long and hard for this legislation. And the product is well worth that labor.

Inflation is increasing despite everything that’s been deregulated in the last thirty years and the total cost of airline travel in money, time and on your psychic well-being is higher than its been in years. And, of course, we all know the airline industry is anything but prosperous.

That’s why I was so glad to see the way that Barack Obama phrased his statement about the ongoing collapse of America’s investment banking system this morning:

“I certainly don’t fault Senator McCain for these problems, but I do fault the economic philosophy he subscribes to. It’s a philosophy we’ve had for the last eight years [Ed. Actually, longer.]– one that says we should give more and more to those with the most and hope that prosperity trickles down to everyone else. It’s a philosophy that says even common-sense regulations are unnecessary and unwise, and one that says we should just stick our heads in the sand and ignore economic problems until they spiral into crises.

[Emphasis added].

Re-regulate the airline industry now.