The Sneaker Comes of Age

When Christopher Tennant, the editor of the magazine Man of the World, met up with his future in-laws a few months ago at JoJo, an Upper East Side restaurant, he wore a navy blazer from Barneys New York, olive slacks and — what else? — a pair of sneakers by Common Projects.

“I always wear sneakers,” he said.

When Jian DeLeon, the deputy style editor at Complex magazine, went to the ballet last month, he paired a plaid suit with white sneakers by the Amsterdam brand ETQ, which he said feel “just as luxe as a pair of oxfords, and are 10 times more comfortable.”

And when Tyler Thoreson, the head of men’s editorial for Gilt Groupe, appeared recently on NBC’s “Today” to talk fashion, he wore a custom blue suit, a white dress shirt and navy blue sneakers, also by Common Projects. His wardrobe has become so sneaker-centric, he said, that “when I put a suit on, I have to think twice: ‘Oh, maybe I’ll mix it up and throw on my wingtips today.’

The once ungentlemanly sneaker, it seems, has undergone a fashion baptism. The distinction between dress and athletic shoes is on the verge of collapse for fashion-forward men, as the humble gym shoe has outgrown its youth-culture/streetwear origins to become a fashion accessory, as well as a staple on runways, red carpets and in the workplace, where it is no longer considered the height of quirk to wear them with a suit.

The boundaries of acceptability in casual footwear are shifting so quickly that Cary Grant himself, if he were to rise from the dead, would hardly look out of place with a pair of Adidas Stan Smiths poking from the cuffs of his glen-check Kilgour suit.

“At some point in the last two years, all the guys being photographed by The Sartorialist and Tommy Ton went from wearing Alden boots and double monk-strap shoes to Nike Roshes and retro New Balances,” said Brad Bennett, who runs the men’s style blog Well Spent. “It was almost as though some decree had been handed down by New York City’s fashion elite.”

by Alex Williams, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Tony Cenicola

Vinyl Re-enchantment

The Economist‘s website has an article about Record Store Day, a marketing stunt during which a bunch of vinyl-only releases and reissues are choreographed in hopes of driving music buyers to support some brick-and-mortar businesses. Every label wants to piggy-back on the hype of every other release, leading to an overwhelming hodge-podge of material record stores are supposed to carry to be full participants in the event. This creates problems for the stores that the event is supposed to help, saddling them with stock whose appeal to non-hardcore record collectors may already be questionable.

I have never understood the point of Record Store Day, in part because I have not traditionally been sentimental about record stores. I tend to associate them with judgmental clerks and aggressive taste peacocking and stereos playing the most confrontational music the workers could get away with to keep the store clear of unwanted browsers. Independent record stores often seemed more like clubhouses, and I was never confident enough in my tastes to believe I could truly belong. The record store was a place where “nerds” could be vengeful bullies; now that we have a whole culture that is like that, record stores feel a bit redundant in that respect.

But the more salient reason Record Store Day repels me is that it runs counter to what I do find appealing about shopping in small record stores, the fact that I can’t predict what they will actually have in stock. Record Store Day supplies you with a prefab shopping list and an easy way to cross off every item on it — just come early (or have a friend who works at the store; it’s still a private club, a market in which it matters who you know). If I wanted to shop in a market that I knew in advance would have what I want, I would go on to Amazon, or to Spotify. But I started to buy vinyl again not for the records so much as for the intermittent rewards. Going to a used record store not knowing what I will find allows me to go in not knowing for sure even what I want — and this expands my capacity for desiring things. It re-enchants consumption for me, for better or worse. I have a list in my head of records I hope to come across some day, but since I can download all this music to actually listen to it, I am more invested in the quest itself than its completion. It keeps me flipping through crates, looking for a lottery-like payout.

Record stores are a bit like thrift stores in that they produce a sense of rarity and serendipity, a shopping experience that can trump whatever it is one ends up buying. When I go to record stores, I want to enter into a fantasy of one-of-a-kind finds, of consumption sweetened by its contrived precariousness. I want to pretend I’m in a world where you have to earn your consumer pleasures, and where the bond between pleasure and ownership is still tight. (This is a depressing realization.) It’s not uncommon for me to be so excited about coming across a record I love that I’ll buy it again, “forgetting” that I already have a vinyl copy. (...)

My craving for these purely idiosyncratic consumption experiences has something to do with wanting to enjoy something unsharable, something that can’t go viral, as though that might authenticate it in the solipsistic counter-reality I try to create for myself. The curator of the Oakland exhibition remarks that albums, as material objects, places the emphasis on music appreciation’s “social aspect,” but I think that’s backward. I want to use records to prove that I am “better” than those social pleasures of validation that are now so readily sought for online. I want records so I can try to remind myself that I can get autonomous joy from a private world of things.

by Rob Horning, Marginal Utility |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Mario Sorrenti for Harper’s Bazaar, February 1997.
via:

Philip Seymour Hoffman,  Almost Famous

[ed. My default condition...]

College Radio is Dying

WRAS 88.5 FM in Atlanta was the first radio station to play Outkast. It was one of the first few stations in the country to play R.E.M., Deerhunter and the Indigo Girls. It’s been a crucial, student-run force in independent music both locally and nationally for decades. But later this month, a backdoor deal will replace all of its daytime programming with “Fresh Air” simulcasts and “Car Talk” reruns.

This is a huge blow for the students who run WRAS, for Atlanta’s art and music communities and for the entire independent music industry. WRAS is one of the most powerful college radio stations in the nation. Its signal is as strong as the law will allow; those 100,000 watts cover all of Atlanta’s sprawling metropolitan area. And the closure of WRAS is just the latest in a long string of colleges failing to preserve their cultural institutions and selling their radio signals off to outside interests. It happened at Rice in 2011, at Vanderbilt between 2011 and 2014, and now it’s happening at Georgia State University, home of one of the most important college radio stations in the nation.

In early May, GSU announced an agreement to hand over WRAS’s signal to Georgia Public Broadcasting for 14 hours a day, from 5 a.m. to 7 p.m. The student-produced programming that WRAS has broadcast during those hours since 1971 will now be confined to an Internet stream. The students who run the station weren’t included in negotiations, which stretch back to 2012. The station’s student management only learned about the deal shortly before the public did. The larger GSU student body didn’t get to vote on the deal or have any input in the agreement. It feels similar to another recent ugly scene in Atlanta, as the neighboring Cobb County resorted to banana republic tactics to squelch public debate on its plan to give the Atlanta Braves hundreds of millions of dollars for a new stadium.

Since 1971, WRAS has played a mix of new independent rock, hip-hop, experimental noise and electronic music that’s played by no other radio station in Atlanta. WRAS is programmed and hosted by students who otherwise wouldn’t have any opportunity to DJ on FM radio, and it aids local arts and music communities by promoting upcoming events and giving away tickets. (...)

Although GPB has touted new educational possibilities for GSU students as part of the agreement, along with an expanded NPR presence in the city, it’s hard to see how this deal is good for either the students or Atlanta. The students are losing 98 hours of terrestrial radio a week, including the hours that draw the largest audiences. 88.5 might attract more listeners with NPR stalwarts than obscure indie rock or specialty shows devoted to reggae or hardcore, but non-commercial radio stations traditionally aren’t concerned with ratings, and the listener base for student programming will immediately plummet when it’s walled away online.

The demise of WRAS is bigger than Georgia State or even Atlanta. Today college radio is threatened by the same forces that undermine the commercial radio industry. The Internet has upended the entire notion of radio, as listeners can find almost anything they want at any moment. Satellite radio has eaten into the audience for local stations during drive-time hours. Younger listeners don’t grow up with a love for college radio, and thus don’t go out of their way to volunteer at a station when they’re in school, which leads to the increasingly common sound of older voices on the college frequency as community members fill in the gaps on the schedule.

Before the Internet conquered the world, college radio was the most reliable way to hear new underground music. Seventies punk grew into ’80s college rock and ’90s indie rock in seclusion at the left end of the FM dial, while the commercial radio stations and mainstream music industry that so smugly dismissed them chased trends and cycled through formats. College radio filled a vital gap, and although it has diminished in the face of 21st century technology, college radio stations are still as valuable as ever.

by Garrett Martin, Salon |  Read more:

Image: Rough Trade/Tom Sheehan/Elektra Entertainment

Dixie Zen: On the Laid-back Art of Tubing

People often compare the summer heat of Louisiana to being locked in a sauna for three months. The image is close, but a bit weak: It’s important to add that, in the sauna, you’re forced to wear a body stocking made of warm, honey-soaked cotton balls—and that, sometime around the beginning of July, you’re thrown into a clothes dryer (still within the sauna), in which you tumble around on high heat with a load of wet towels. Occasionally someone tosses in a smoldering coal, and one of the towels flares up and emits a damp smoke.

The point is that Louisiana’s heat is inescapable and aggressive. It dominates life to such an extent that you start to think consciously about things that are, in friendlier climates, unremarkable: breathing, for instance, and blood circulation. You start to strategize about walking, replacing it whenever possible with sprints from one air-conditioned building to the next. Life—restricted to the biosphere of your house and the local supermarket—begins to seem like an endurance experiment engineered by NASA.

This means that, from June to September, Louisiana’s outdoors are off-limits. Activities that would have been pleasant diversions to the tropical fall or the temperate winter—hiking, biking, tracking weird birds with binoculars—become exercises in instant dehydration. Fortunately, however, the state comes with its own cooling system: It is one of the wettest in the nation, soaked by patchy marshes and Rorschach lakes, which are in turn drained and filled by an extensive network of mostly hospitable rivers. In all, Louisiana is more than twenty percent water, and through several millennia of absurdly hot summers residents have found ways to squeeze into the state’s aquatic fifth by boating, skiing, swimming, fishing, and sportively dodging things with sharp teeth. In my experience, the most effective antidote to the heat is what I like to consider the unofficial summer sport of the South: tubing. Other parts of the country tube too, of course, but they may as well be knitting. In Oregon or Nebraska, tubing is just an incidentally wet version of a stroll in the woods, the spiritual equivalent of a hundred other outdoor leisure activities. In the South, it represents one of the only possible escapes from a greenhouse climate threatening to replace human life with ferns. Southerners are forced to tube.

by Sam Anderson, Oxford American |  Read more:

Image: Debbie Fleming Caffery, courtesy of the Octavia Gallery

Judge Strikes Down California Tenure

[ed. See also: The Issue of Tenure for Teachers]

A judge struck down tenure and other job protections for California's public school teachers as unconstitutional Tuesday, saying such laws harm students - especially poor and minority ones - by saddling them with bad teachers who are almost impossible to fire.

In a landmark decision that could influence the gathering debate over tenure across the country, Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Rolf Treu cited the historic case of Brown v. Board of Education in ruling that students have a fundamental right to equal education.

Siding with the nine students who brought the lawsuit, he ruled that California's laws on hiring and firing in schools have resulted in "a significant number of grossly ineffective teachers currently active in California classrooms."

He agreed, too, that a disproportionate number of these teachers are in schools that have mostly minority and low-income students.

The judge stayed the ruling pending appeals. The case involves 6 million students from kindergarten through 12th grade.

The California Attorney General's office said it is considering its legal options, while the California Teachers Association, the state's biggest teachers union with 325,000 members, vowed an appeal.

"Circumventing the legislative process to strip teachers of their professional rights hurts our students and our schools," the union said.

Teachers have long argued that tenure prevents administrators from firing teachers on a whim. They contend also that the system preserves academic freedom and helps attract talented teachers to a profession that doesn't pay well.

Other states have been paying close attention to how the case plays out in the nation's most populous state.

"It's powerful," said Theodore Boutrous Jr., the students' attorney. "It's a landmark decision that can change the face of education in California and nationally."

He added: "This is going to be a huge template for what's wrong with education."

The lawsuit was backed by wealthy Silicon Valley entrepreneur David Welch's nonprofit group Students Matter, which assembled a high-profile legal team including Boutrous, who successfully fought to overturn California's gay-marriage ban.

In an interview following the decision, Welch tried to open a door to working with teachers' unions, but the enmity of the two sides intensified.

"Inherently it is not a battle with the teachers union. It's a battle with the education system," Welch said. "Unfortunately, the teachers union has decided that the rights of children are not their priority."

He said he hoped union leaders can eventually work with his group to put in place a system that ensures children get a better education.

But the unions were having none of it.

Dennis Van Roekel, president of the National Education Association, the nation's biggest teachers union, bitterly criticized the lawsuit as "yet another attempt by millionaires and corporate special interests to undermine the teaching profession" and privatize public education.  (...)

The trial represented the latest battle in a nationwide movement to abolish or toughen the standards for granting teachers permanent employment protection and seniority-based preferences during layoffs.

by Linda Deutsch, Yahoo News |  Read more:

Image: 

Yan Nascimbene, Septembre
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How Much Does It Hurt?

Even before a single doctor in the United States had written a prescription for Zohydro, the controversial long-acting painkiller approved by the Food and Drug Administration last October, potential users were already dreaming up possible street names. “How many times will this be said in the future,” someone posted on Opiophile, an online forum for people who like to share their drug experiences and expertise. “Got any of dem Zoh’s?” There were other possibilities: Zs, Zodros, and Zorros.

Another voiced chimed in: “I like Zorros … Yeah, has a ring to it.” This was on October 26, 2013, less than 24 hours after the FDA announced its decision. (...)

In the annals of new-drug rollouts, Zohydro seems to be in a class by itself. It has become a political nightmare for the drug’s manufacturer, Zogenix, Inc., and for the FDA—Massachusetts tried to ban it; the attorneys general of 28 states excoriated the FDA for approving the drug without “tamper-­resistant” features, a decision Senator Charles Schumer of New York has called “baffling”; and Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia has introduced legislation to roll back the approval. It has inspired apocalyptic warnings, mostly because Zohydro belongs to a class of drugs that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in 2011 has created a nationwide, doctor-­driven epidemic of addiction, death (roughly 16,000 a year), and unquantifiable familial devastation. And yet, so far, it has been nearly invisible—as of March 31, the company reported exactly 1,141 prescriptions filled nationwide.

“Watchful waiting” is a time-honored term in medicine, and it is the perfect phrase to describe the collective sense of anxiety, dread, and fatalism playing out as Zohydro slowly makes its way to pharmacies and ultimately into medicine cabinets. Zohydro is neither the first long-acting opioid painkiller nor, milligram per milligram, the most potent, so why all the fuss? Part of the concern is that because the drug is an extended-release formulation, it packs up to 50 milligrams of hydrocodone in a single capsule (Vicodin, the more familiar, instant-release version of hydrocodone, tops out at 10 milligrams per pill). And since it does not come in a tamper-resistant formulation, addicts can theoretically crush and snort or inject it to get an instant high from all 50 milligrams at once. OxyContin, the most infamous of prescription opioids and the main protagonist in the painkiller epidemic, did not come in a tamper-resistant formulation until 2010. By then, it had been implicated in thousands of overdose deaths since it hit the market in 1996.

It was precisely those fears that unnerved a panel of pain experts convened by the FDA to consider Zohydro 18 months ago. “Are we really, in the long run, helping people, or are we creating an epidemic?” asked one. As another briskly put it, “There are too many deaths already.”

by Stephen S. Hall, New York Magazine |  Read more:

Image: Bobby Doherty

Jarek Puczel
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Miley
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Killing a Patient to Save His Life

Trauma patients arriving at an emergency room here after sustaining a gunshot or knife wound may find themselves enrolled in a startling medical experiment.

Surgeons will drain their blood and replace it with freezing saltwater. Without heartbeat and brain activity, the patients will be clinically dead.

And then the surgeons will try to save their lives.

Researchers at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center have begun a clinical trial that pushes the boundaries of conventional surgery — and, some say, medical ethics.

By inducing hypothermia and slowing metabolism in dying patients, doctors hope to buy valuable time in which to mend the victims’ wounds.

But scientists have never tried anything like this in humans, and the unconscious patients will not be able to consent to the procedure. Indeed, the medical center has been providing free bracelets to be worn by skittish citizens here who do not want to participate should they somehow wind up in the E.R.

“This is ‘Star Wars’ stuff,” said Dr. Thomas M. Scalea, a trauma specialist at the University of Maryland. “If you told people we would be doing this a few years ago, they’d tell you to stop smoking whatever you’re smoking, because you’ve clearly lost your mind.” (...)

The experiment officially began in April and the surgeons predict they will see about one qualifying patient a month.

It may take a couple of years to complete the study. Citing the preliminary nature of the research, Dr. Tisherman declined to say whether he and his colleagues had already operated on a patient.

Each time they do, they will be stepping into a scientific void. Ethicists say it’s reasonable to presume most people would want to undergo the experimental procedure when the alternative is almost certain death. But no one can be sure of the outcome.

“If this works, what they’ve done is suspended people when they are dead and then brought them back to life,” said Dr. Arthur L. Caplan, a medical ethicist at New York University. “There’s a grave risk that they won’t bring the person back to cognitive life but in a vegetative state.”

But researchers at a number of institutions say they have perfected the technique, known as Emergency Preservation and Resuscitation, or E.P.R., in experimental surgeries on hundreds of dogs and pigs over the last decade.

As many as 90 percent of the animals have survived in recent studies, most without discernible cognitive impairment — after the procedure, the dogs and pigs remembered old tricks and were able to learn new ones.

“From a scientific standpoint, we now know the nuts and bolts and that it works,” said Dr. Hasan B. Alam, chief of general surgery at the University of Michigan Medical Center, who has helped perfect the technique in pigs.

“It’s a little unsettling if you think of all the what ifs, but it’s the same every time you push into new frontiers,” he added. “You have to look at risk and balance it against benefits."

by Kate Murphy, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: University of Pittsburgh Medical Center

The Militarization of America

In a pole barn in Franklin, sharing space with a motorcycle and a boat, sat an imposing military vehicle designed for battlefields in Iraq or Afghanistan, not the streets of Johnson County.

It is an MRAP — a bulletproof, 60,000-pound, six-wheeled behemoth with heavy armor, a gunner's turret and the word "SHERIFF" emblazoned on its flank — a vehicle whose acronym stands for "mine resistant, ambush protected."

"We don't have a lot of mines in Johnson County," confessed sheriff Doug Cox, who acquired the vehicle. "My job is to make sure my employees go home safe."

Johnson County is one of eight Indiana law enforcement agencies to acquire MRAPs from military surplus since 2010, according to public records obtained by The Indianapolis Star. The vehicles are among a broad array of 4,400 items — everything from coats to computers to high-powered rifles — acquired by police and sheriff departments across the state.

Law enforcement officials, especially those from agencies with small budgets, say they're turning to military surplus equipment to take advantage of bargains and protect police officers. The MRAP has an added benefit, said Pulaski County Sheriff Michael Gayer, whose department also acquired one: "It's a lot more intimidating than a Dodge."

Even in Pulaski County, population 13,124, a more military approach to law enforcement is needed these days, Gayer suggested.

"The United States of America has become a war zone," he said. "There's violence in the workplace, there's violence in schools and there's violence in the streets. You are seeing police departments going to a semi-military format because of the threats we have to counteract. If driving a military vehicle is going to protect officers, then that's what I'm going to do."

But, to some, the introduction of equipment designed for war in Fallujah, Iraq, to the streets of U.S. towns and cities raises questions about the militarization of civilian police departments. Will it make police inappropriately aggressive? Does it blur the line between civilian police and the military?

"Americans should ... be concerned unless they want their main streets patrolled in ways that mirror a war zone," wrote Rep. Hank Johnson, D-Ga., co-author of a USA Today article earlier this year. "We recognize that we're not in Kansas anymore, but are MRAPs really needed in small-town America?"

by Mark Alesia, Indy Star | Read more:
Image: Kelly Wilkinson/The Star

‘The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.’

                                                                                            - Richard Feynman

Image: Flight of the Conchords

Jennifer Coyne Qudeen
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Alexandra Thomas, Welcome
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David Byrne

The Science of the One-Inch Punch

Forget all those broken boards and crumbled concrete slabs. No feat of martial arts is more impressive than Bruce Lee’s famous strike, the one-inch punch. From a single inch away, Lee was able to muster an explosive blow that could knock opponents clean off the ground. Lee mastered it, fans worldwide adored it, and Kill Bill "borrowed" it. But if you’re like us, you want to know how it works.

While the biomechanics behind the powerful blow certainly aren’t trivial, the punch owes far more to brain structure than to raw strength.

Biomechanical Breakdown

To understand why the one-inch punch is more about mind than muscle, you first have to understand how Bruce Lee delivers the blow. Although Lee’s fist travels a tiny distance in mere milliseconds, the punch is an intricate full-body movement. According to Jessica Rose, a Stanford University biomechanical researcher, Lee’s lightning-quick jab actually starts with his legs.

"When watching the one-inch punch, you can see that his leading and trailing legs straighten with a rapid, explosive knee extension," Rose says. The sudden jerk of his legs increases the twisting speed of Lee’s hips—which, in turn, lurches the shoulder of his thrusting arm forward.

As Lee’s shoulder bolts ahead, his arm gets to work. The swift and simultaneous extension of his elbow drives his fist forward. For a final flourish, Rose says, "flicking his wrist just prior to impact may further increase the fist velocity." Once the punch lands on target, Lee pulls back almost immediately. Rose explains that this shortens the impact time of his blow, which compresses the force and makes it all the more powerful.

By the time the one-inch punch has made contact with its target, Lee has combined the power of some of the biggest muscles in his body into a tiny area of force. But while the one-inch punch is built upon the explosive power of multiple muscles, Rose insists that Bruce Lee’s muscles are actually not the most important engine behind the blow.

"Muscle fibers do not dictate coordination," Rose says, "and coordination and timing are essential factors behind movements like this one-inch punch."

Because the punch happens over such a short amount of time, Lee has to synchronize each segment of the jab—his twisting hip, extending knees, and thrusting shoulder, elbow, and wrist—with incredible accuracy. Furthermore, each joint in Lee’s body has a single moment of peak acceleration, and to get maximum juice out of the move, Lee must layer his movements so that each period of peak acceleration follows the last one instantly.

So coordination is key. And that’s where the neuroscience comes in.

by William Herkewitz, Poplular Mechanics | Read more:
Image: Washington Post

Colleges are Full of It: Behind the Three-decade Scheme to Raise Tuition, Bankrupt Generations, and Hypnotize the Media

The price of a year at college has increased by more than 1,200 percent over the last 30 years, far outpacing any other price the government tracks: food, housing, cars, gasoline, TVs, you name it. Tuition has increased at a rate double that of medical care, usually considered the most expensive of human necessities. It has outstripped any reasonable expectation people might have had for investments over the period. And, as we all know, it has crushed a generation of college grads with debt. Today, thanks to those enormous tuition prices, young Americans routinely start adult life with a burden unknown to any previous cohort and whose ruinous effects we can only guess at.

On the assumption that anyone in that generation still has a taste for irony, I offer the following quotation on the subject, drawn from one of the earliest news stories about the problem of soaring tuition. The newspaper was the Washington Post; the speaker was an assistant dean at a college that had just announced a tuition hike of 19 percent; and the question before him was how much farther tuition increases could go. “Maybe all of a sudden this bubble is going to burst,” he was quoted as saying. “How much will the public take?”

Oh, we would take quite a lot, as it happened. It was 1981 when the assistant dean worried in that manner—the very first year of what was once called the “tuition spiral,” when higher ed prices got the attention of the media by outpacing inflation by a factor of two or three. There was something shocking about this development; tuition hadn’t gone up like that during the 1970s, even though that was the heyday of ascending consumer prices.

Yet at that point, the tuition spiral had more than three decades to go—indeed, it is still twisting upward today. But the way we talk about this slow-motion disaster has changed little over the years. Ever since the spiral began, commentators have been marveling at how far it’s gone and wondering how much farther it has yet to run—“the trend can’t continue,” they say every few years. They ask when the families and politicians of America are finally going to get off their knees and do something about it.

But somehow nothing ever gets done. The trend does continue. And for 30 years the journalists who cover the subject have followed the same pointless script. They have hunted fruitlessly for the legitimate expense that they knew must be driving up the prices. They have chased repeatedly after the wrong answers, blaming everybody and everything except for the obvious culprits. They have related to us the politicians’ plans for bringing the spiral to a stop—plans that everyone can see have virtually no chance of succeeding.

And all along, the larger meaning of the spiral is almost never discussed, as though it were contrary to some unwritten rule of journalistic cognition. (...)

A low point of sorts was reached in the late 1990s, when Congress appointed a “National Commission on the Cost of Higher Education,” and filled it with university presidents and the head of one of the main higher-ed lobby groups. The report they proceeded to publish in 1998 was an entirely predictable outcome of this staffing decision, I suppose, but still the reader is struck by its resounding impotence. This panel was so pallid it didn’t even amount to a whitewash. On page one of its report, for example, the Commission declared that it wasn’t really interested in soaring tuition at all, except insofar as soaring tuitions might cause Americans to feel “ill will” toward universities. After going on to catalog the usual culprits—blame regulations, blame students—the Commission concluded that there should be—yes!—further study on the matter. (“The Commission recommends that the philanthropic community, research institutes, and agencies of state and local government adopt the topic of academic cost control as a research area worthy of major financial support.”) They also recommended that universities do a better PR job, that they organize themselves to “inform the public” about “the returns on this investment.”

But even that would probably be considered an outrage were it published today. Last year, the Obama administration announced its own “Plan to Make College More Affordable”; the centerpiece was a scheme for doing something analogous to what that Commission proposed back in 1998: building a rating system to inform the public about the returns on college investments. (There was also the obligatory olive branch to the right, in a proposal to “reduce regulatory barriers.”)

The universities responded by going absolutely apeshit. They are happy to talk about the “return on investment” when it’s a vague promise of a million bucks for anyone who pays up and goes to college; when someone actually takes them at their word and tries to measure the claim, it seems that fundamental principles are being trampled.

I hope Obama ignores the wailing of the universities and goes through with his plan, despite the obvious folly of trying to explain people’s relative prosperity by reference to the college they attended instead of their class background. If the president were to expand his approach to include data on the vast and growing size of university administrations and how many courses are taught at each college by adjuncts, his rating system might well be useful.

But there should be no illusions. More information by itself is not going to stop the tuition spiral, not after 33 years. In fact, we can predict fairly easily how this thing will backfire once the government discovers and announces the precise “return on investment” for each institution of higher learning: Like any rational, profit-maximizing entity those institutions will simply continue hiking tuitions in order to capture a larger chunk of that return for themselves.

As the reforms fail and the journalism fails maybe we will figure out that all along there has been a single bad ideological idea behind all of this failure: The notion that the market will solve the problem if we only adjust the controls a little. And as the newspapers of 2020 tell us about an angry new generation of students shouldering an unimaginable debt burden, maybe it will dawn on Barack Obama, by then retired and relaxing on the beach in Hawaii, that maybe we shouldn’t have thought of education as a market in the first place. Maybe college shouldn’t be about individuals getting rich. Maybe there is another purpose.

by Thomas Frank, Salon |  Read more:

Image: Rodney Dangerfield in "Back to School"