Mankiw flatly declares the proposed tax "one of the most pernicious ideas I have heard of late." And were the tax to pass he urges a radical course of action for his home institution: Create a satellite campus somewhere warm -- maybe Palm Springs? -- call it Harvard South, and transfer much of the endowment to the new campus. Harvard North should then begin to sell off land in Massachusetts, eventually making Harvard South the main campus. "If Massachusetts state lawmakers remain hostile, close Harvard North down entirely," Mankiw writes.

Richard Florida, who received some recent attention in the Nota Bene column of The Chronicle Review, likes Mankiw's idea: "If states and cities are willing to pony up billions for convention centers...and hundreds of millions in industrial incentives for factories, how much do you think they [might] come up with for a Harvard, or MIT, or Stanford, or Oxford relocation? Universities are already setting up foreign campuses. Trust me, it's just a matter of time until this game gets big."

“Part of the reason nobody wants to talk about Israeli nuclear weapons is that any debate would quickly reveal American hypocrisy,” Payne writes. “How can the U.S. put pressure on Iran or North Korea about their proliferation if it turns a blind eye to Israel?”

He cites her saying: “Although they were aware of the threat, Burma’s state-run media failed to issue a timely warning to citizens in the storm’s path. The response to the cyclone is just the most recent example of the junta’s failure to meet its people’s basic needs.”

His response:

Yes, a representative of the Bush administration casting aspersions upon a government for not helping their people in a time of great crisis. You’ve got irony mixed with tragedy rolled in a staggering degree of obliviousness. We need a term ample enough to describe that. I propose “Antoinetting.” Others?

Bonus afternoon wonkery: A few addenda to today’s article about privacy, education research, and unit-record databases.

1. For more background on the evolution of those databases at the state level, see this 2007 report from the Lumina Foundation for Education.

The Lumina report—which was based on a survey conducted by the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems—said that most states are slowly but surely beefing up their data projects. But many states reported being hindered by concerns about federal privacy laws, by a lack of resources for programming and analysis, and by doubts about the quality of the data they receive from colleges.

2. Here are the Education Department’s proposed amendments to the regulations that carry out the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, familiarly known as Ferpa.

Public comments on the proposed regulations are due this Thursday, May 8. To submit a comment, go here and enter docket number ED-2008-OPEPD-0002 in the search box.

The Data Quality Campaign has posted its own reactions to the proposed regulations. The campaign praises some of the proposals, but would like to see more clarity about how and when states’ college data systems may share information with K-12 databases. (That isn’t an issue in a handful of states like Florida, where colleges and elementary and secondary schools sit under a single governance structure.)

3. Unit-record tracking has been all the rage at The Education Optimists, a newish blog by Sara Goldrick-Rab, an assistant professor of educational policy studies at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and Liam Goldrick, director of policy at the New Teacher Center.

Yesterday, Goldrick-Rab wrote about the Chicago Public Schools’ effort to track the fates of the system’s former high-school students. That effort—which has been made with the help of a research consortium based at the University of Chicago—has given the Chicago schools some painful-but-useful insights, Goldrick-Rab writes:

Some principals were stunned to learn that even at their “high-performing” high schools only thrre or four in 10 kids actually went on to attend college. Because the district also asks about what students want to do (what they aspire to), and follows up on their wages, they can respond to people who make excuses such as “Not all kids want to go to college” (not true, nearly 90 percent do), or “Some kids are better off going to work” (not so—the wages of CPS students who go straight to work are very, very low). Changes have been made, and over the last several years, while the collegegoing rates of high-school graduates nationwide have declined, they have gone up in Chicago.

Goldrick-Rab also recently touted a conference in Madison on “value-added modeling” of teachers’ effectiveness, a controversial enterprise that often involves analysis of unit-record databases.

(Vintage photo of an IBM 360 mainframe by the Flickr user cote. Used under a Creative Commons license.)

Bryan Caplan will. At EconLog, Caplan, an associate professor of economics at George Mason University, offers his “economic case for the tax cut.”

A summary of his summary: A cut would politically crowd out the notion of price controls, or worse; if, in times of crisis, tax cuts are as likely as cost controls, oil companies are “more likely to keep searching for new energy sources during crises”; and even if there’s little elasticity in world supply, tax cuts in America would still benefit consumers at least a little.

But “with arguments like these,” Caplan writes, “I doubt that I’ll be getting any phone calls from Hillary’s team. Her proposal is defensible; it’s just not defensible using arguments that the American people want to hear.”

There is nothing scientific about these “alternatives” to evolution. Encouraging attacks on evolution in high school science classes promotes academic fraud not “academic freedom.” If school boards or state legislatures want public school students to be exposed to competing theories about the origins of life — a question evolutionary theory does not address — they should do it in a world religion or social studies class and leave science alone.

“If the road to hell is paved with good intentions, Jeremiah Wright has just been awarded a construction contract,” writes Cobb. “And that’s the best case scenario — in light of his weekend blitz of media appearances there are many doubting that Wright’s intentions were benign. Assuming they were, the reverend’s appearance before the National Press Club highlighted his naive belief that he could redeem his reputation by talking to the same people responsible for distorting it.”

Last month in The Chronicle Review, Martin E. Marty offered a more sympathetic view of Wright.

Kahlenberg argues that the adoption of race-based preferences by liberals has been a disaster for liberalism. In an effort to remedy the dark history of discrimination in America, liberals succeeded in creating new divisions that continue to plague the electoral prospects of the Democratic Party. Consider that Al Gore lost the non-college-educated white vote by 17 points in 2000, as did John Kerry by 23 points in 2004. "Nothing would galvanize white working-class voters more than a rejection of the racial preferences born in Ocean Hill-Brownsville," Kahlenberg writes.

And Kahlenberg says there is reason to believe that Obama shares his opinion. In his Philadelphia speech on race, Obama observed: "Most working- and middle-class white Americans don't feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race. … As far as they're concerned, no one's handed them anything." Resentment builds, Obama said, "when they hear that an African-American is getting an advantage in landing a good job or a spot in a good college because of an injustice that they themselves never committed." He warned against seeing those resentments as "misguided or even racist" without understanding that they are "grounded in legitimate concerns."

Sleeper agrees. But the lecturer in political science at Yale wonders why Obama hasn't spoken clearly against race-based preferences. Sleeper writes that Obama is "understandably reluctant to descend to what might seem like pandering to racists, drawing the inevitable assaults from black Clinton 'race industry' loyalists and the worst of the so-called civil-rights establishment."

But Sleeper argues that it is a reasonable risk for Obama to take. "He might lose a few upscale white liberals who like to indulge racial symbolism in order to feel good about their privileged selves far more than they'd like to make the sacrifices and do the heavily lifting that equality of opportunity really requires," Sleeper writes. "But it's unlikely they'd desert [Obama] for Clinton now, and he'd gain tremendous credibility among working-class whites for being substantively trans-racial, in ways that actually benefit them, rather than symbolically trans-racial in color-coded gestures that make the pursuit of equality seem a zero-sum game."

TV reports, he writes, “have been milking the connections between biofuels, rising food prices, and imminent hunger for millions of persons for all they are worth. For some reason, Germans are being interviewed at gas stations that offer biofuels, apparently to show how good intentions can pave the autobahn to hell: the ethanol going into their tanks is pulling food out of the mouths of the poor.”

Some newspaper reports are more nuanced, he says, asking, “to what extent does increased biofuels production impact on food production and rises in global food prices? The answer seems to be: We don’t really know yet.”

Could world hunger also have “to do with existing international trade policies and the subsidized-to-the-teeth agriculture industries in America and Western Europe? Lack of commitment to (god forbid) family planning in developing countries?”

He wonders if biofuels are taking an unfair rap.

The HTS embeds social scientists with combat brigades in Afghanistan and Iraq, where they serve as cultural advisers. Griffin began his eleven months of service in Iraq with the Second Brigade of the First Infantry Division in August. In an e-mail message from Iraq, Griffin says that when he returns to the United States in July he will work at the newly-established HTS research facility in Newport News, Virginia. Griffin, who until recently maintained a blog about his activities in Iraq, was one of the few participants in the HTS who maintained a public profile.  

"I will be involved in implementing social science research from North Africa to the Middle East, to Southeast Asia and the Pacific," Griffin writes. "I feel fortunate to be in a position to both serve my country, be an advocate for often ignored peoples, and promote the humanitarian use of anthropology."

In November, Griffin wrote a short essay in The Chronicle Review in which he described his work as that of a "cultural broker" to "help Iraqis and Americans work more effectively as partners." 

The launch of the HTS in 2006 sparked a furor among anthropologists. Critics of the program argue that armed anthropologists in military uniforms cannot possibly be getting voluntary informed consent, and that the initiative is reminiscent of the imperial-flavored anthropology of the early 20th century.