Brian Weatherson of Crooked Timber links to a new group blog, called Left2Right, which allegedly is designed for “blue state” professors to understand “Red America” (excuse me while I projectile-vomit). According to Weatherson:

The contributors so far include Elizabeth Anderson, Kwame Appiah, Josh Cohen, Stephen Darwall, Gerald Dworkin, David Estlund, Don Herzog, Jeff McMahan, Seana Shiffrin, and David Velleman. Wowsa. And many other names you may have heard of, from Peter Railton to Richard Rorty, are listed as being part of the team. This should be worth following.

Do I have to turn in my cap and gown if I declare that I haven’t actually heard of any of these people? (þ: Orin Kerr)

I somehow managed to purchase two frozen pizzas (“Dano’s Gourmet”—I always trust pizza from a company named after a character on Hawaii Five-O) at Winn-Dixie last week, and, upon cooking the first, I discovered to my horror that in lieu of actual mozzarella cheese, one of the toppings on the pizza is called “mozzarella cheese substitute blend.”

My question: should I be annoyed at the regulatory state for its failure to ban fake cheese from the frozen pizza market (i.e. its failure to act in the Carolene Products vein), or should I be annoyed at the regulatory state for its lulling me into a false sense of security—a belief that I wouldn’t be sold a pizza with fake cheese on it—which led me not to check the ingredients until I got home?

Or, should I be annoyed at Winn-Dixie for stocking this crap and take my grocery business to Kroger or Brookshire’s or McDade’s or Super Wal-Mart? (I’d add New Deal to this list, but I’m leery of any supermarket whose primary selling point in its weekly ads is that ”$19.99 feeds your family meat for a week.” Plus, I generally make it a matter of principle to avoid stores named after government programs…)

Greg Ransom and Glenn Reynolds are among those linking to Jeff Jacoby’s Boston Globe column on a survey conducted on behalf of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni that indicates that students perceive bias in the classroom environment at elite liberal arts colleges and universities; a similar perspective appears today at OpinionJournal.com.

Is political bias a problem in American college classrooms? If so, am I part of the problem?

Among the findings of the ACTA survey:

* 48% report campus presentations on political issues that “seem totally one-sided.”
* 46% say professors “use the classroom to present their personal political views.”
* 42% of students fault reading assignments for presenting only one side of a controversial issue.

The survey also indicates that political comments are consistently partisan. The survey, which was conducted just before and after the American presidential election, found that 68% of the students reported negative remarks in class about Pres. George Bush while 62% said professors praised Sen. John Kerry. ...

74% of students said professors made positive remarks about liberals while 47% reported negative comments about conservatives.

One wonders, somewhat, about issues of question wording (for example, if we invite a third-party presidential candidate to speak on campus, does that constitute a “totally one-sided” presentation?) and selection (what percentage of students said professors made negative remarks about Kerry or praise of Bush?). The lack of a straightforward report on the survey on the website is troublesome, to say the least, and I’m not sure you can infer much based on an average of 12 or 13 interviews per college, particularly without knowing the mode of interview or how interviewees were selected.

Nonetheless, there are a few noteworthy issues here worth discussing; first, course readers like the one I use for my introductory American government class rarely include articles supporting both sides of a particular issue, and I can’t assign a “conservative” reading on campaign finance reform if the only one in the book is from The Nation. Nor, for that matter, can I assign a “liberal” reading on homeland security, since the ones in the book are both from The Economist. Should I include a reading from David Duke to offset the pro-civil rights articles? At some point, balance becomes silly.

Second, the perception that the “job” of the liberal arts college professor is to indoctrinate students in political liberalism, rather than guiding students to knowledge through justified true belief and promoting the ability to think critically about conflicting ideas and values, is distressingly common on college and university campuses. A friend (and fellow Ph.D. student) and I once talked about the problem inherent when people who teach political science don’t even consider the political views of one of the two major parties to be legitimate.

All that said, I’m damned if I know what the solution is. Replacing liberal ideologues who can’t keep their lectures and their leftism separate with right-wingers with similar faults is no solution. Nor is a witch hunt against professors who, after all, are human and—over the course of 100+ hours of lecturing a semester—are probably going to say at least a couple of things that reflect something other than the objective material of the class. I like to think I do a good job balancing these things (one of the best compliments I’ve ever received teaching was from a bright student who “couldn’t figure out” what I was), but I also know I don’t always succeed.

Mark the Pundit advances a theory about David Cutcliffe’s hiring-and-firing that has at least a minor whiff of plausibility (þ James Joyner):

I wonder if Ole Miss hired Cutcliffe for the sole reason that they knew that it was a good chance he could land Eli Manning? After all, Cutcliffe recruited and coached brother Peyton at Tennessee, and Peyton does think highly of Cutcliffe. Now, when Peyton was recruited he signaled he would not sign with Ole Miss since his father Archie played there and Peyton did not want the extra pressure of playing where Pop did. However, if Eli had any such reservations, I did not hear about them. In fact, I think Eli was probably more reluctant to follow Peyton’s footsteps at Tennessee. So what does Ole Miss do? They lure away Cutcliffe from Tennessee as a way to show Eli that Ole Miss’s program was going to take a direction that could land him in the pros just like his brother. Ole Miss needed a coach at the time, so why not hire a man who could land one of the most sought after recruits in the country? Apparently it worked. Eli has a God-like stature at Ole Miss, and he is now a multimillionaire playing for the New York Giants. Coach Cutcliffe delivered the goods, but in the eyes of Ole Miss he outlived his usefullness.

I certainly think the Eli situation was a factor that helped Cutcliffe win the job, but I’m not sure it explains the firing so much as Pete Boone’s apparent antipathy toward Cutcliffe and his desire to get his “own guy” in the job. Plus, anyone who’s followed the last six years of Ole Miss football has to wonder about the annual November slump and inexplicable losses to middling teams over the past few years, like unidimensional Texas Tech, limited-talent Memphis, and whatever the hell happened to the team at Wyoming, not to mention the Music City Bowl fiasco against West Virginia. Inexplicably, my dubbing of Cutcliffe as the “master of the prevent offense” never seemed to catch on, but it certainly characterized much of the play under every QB.

(All that said, I still am not at all convinced the firing made a lot of sense, unless there’s stuff we don’t know coming down the pike, as Kornheiser mentioned yesterday as a possible caveat before he and Wilbon went on a tear insulting the decision by Boone and Robert Khayat.)

Mark also reminds me why I wasn’t all that broken up when the whole Petrino thing was going down at Auburn. Couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy… (The annoying part is that I think the AP will give Tubby half the national title just because the sportswriters like complaining about the BCS—and what better way to show it’s broken than to put their thumb on the scale a bit?)

U.S. Sen. Robert Byrd (D-WV) apparently added a rider ($) to the FY2005 appropriations bill requiring any educational institution receiving federal aid to have some sort of “instructional program on the U.S. Constitution” every September 17, according to today’s Chronicle of Higher Education daily update. (Here’s a link for people not blowing $85/year on the Chronicle.)

Perhaps we political scientists (who, doubtless, will be the individuals subject to this unfunded mandate) should also devote another day—say, December 3—to teaching about the practice of including non-germane provisions in conference reports, thus circumventing the committee system and the rest of the ordinary legislative process. I feel the need for a “teach-in” already.

The Clarion-Ledger and Commercial Appeal both report that Ole Miss AD Pete Boone is looking at ousted Florida coach Ron Zook and ex-Notre Dame coach Ty Willingham as candidates to replace fired head coach David Cutcliffe, while speculation north of the state line also has current Memphis coach Tommy West on the short list, the Biloxi Sun-Herald adds Darrell Dickey of North Texas and Butch Davis to the mix, and the Gainesville Sun has Bobby Petrino and Rick Neuheisel as candidates for the Ole Miss job. (In other words, most everyone is just blindly speculating who Boone is after at this point.)

In other Rebel football news, Boone had a rather heated meeting with about sixty players on the Ole Miss football team that sort of captures the whole week in a nutshell. And who says the Rebels don’t turn out smart kids?

“People are mad,” [junior defensive tackle McKinley] Boykin said. “For a coach to have a good year and be the coach of the year, and have a bad year and then fire him, that's pretty messed up. Whatever coach comes in, I hope he knows what he's getting into.”

I have no doubt about that, at least…

In what has to be about the most unsurprising other-shoe-drop since the Michael Jackson child abuse allegations, the San Francisco Chronicle reports (via ESPN.com) that San Francisco Giants slugger Barry Bonds (unknowingly, he alleges) used performance-enhancing drugs supplied to him by his trainer, according to sealed grand jury testimony leaked by prosecutors obtained by the newspaper. Coupled with Jason and Jeremy Giambi’s admissions that they used steroids supplied by Bonds’ trainer, things aren’t looking good for baseball’s image.

A larger issue here, pointed out by David Pinto, is that these leaks are likely to undermine the grand jury system—not just in this case, but in a lot of other cases too. Given that the Justice Department is not only responsible for prosecuting this case, but investigating grand jury leaks (which, pretty much by definition, can only come from prosecutors, as no other parties have unrestricted access to the transcripts), the “fox guarding the henhouse” aspect of these leak investigations does not fill one with much confidence about the integrity of the grand jury system.

Update: Steven Taylor questions the sanity of Bonds’ reported decision to use unknown substances (steroids or not) obtained from a guy who lived in his car. No kidding. David Pinto recommends reading the whole thing for a glimpse into Bonds’ mindset, and asks the $64,000 question—what does Bud Selig do about these revelations?

God willing, I will be out from under my house in Oxford (and its absurd $44.40/month water bill—thanks Bell Utilities of Mississippi!) by Christmas. Woo-hoo!

BigJim passes on word that David Cutcliffe has been fired as coach at Ole Miss after his first losing season in 6 years with the Rebels. I’m not at all convinced it was the right decision, and the statements from AD Pete Boone and Chancellor Robert Khayat don’t make a lot of sense, in particular this bit from Khayat:

I’ll give you an example. When we hired a new Dean of the School of Education, the provost and I talked about expectations. It’s up to the Dean of School of Education to figure out how to meet those expectations. For me to say who they should hire and what kinds of programs they should implement is wrong. What I can say to him, is “there is a teacher shortage in Mississippi and there is a shortage of well-trained administrators. We need to meet the needs of this state. As Dean of the School of Education, Dean Burrow, we are expecting you to develop a way to do that and we want to see how you are going to do that. It’s not that different than athletics. Organizational rules are transferable from teams to corporations to families. What Pete was asking for was entirely reasonable. David’s response felt right to him and we respect that.

Nor, mind you, does this account square well with accounts I’ve heard of Khayat’s leadership style in other arenas.

BigJim suggests that the Rebels should go for Ty Willingham or Mike Price, both of whom would be great choices. In particular, my inner feelings of karmic justice would be fulfilled by having 2/3 of the black coaches in Division I-A at schools in Mississippi, a point in favor of Willingham. (I’ve also mentioned Memphis coach Tommy West as a strong candidate for the job.)

More at the SEC Fanblog and from Ron Higgins in the CA.

Well, that was a fun semester. Let’s just hope that I get to do a few more of these before I have to move elsewhere.

Mike Wilbon will be insufferable today… Notre Dame fired Ty Willingham (þ: Wizbang). I think most observers expected the Irish to retain Willingham through the duration of his contract, as was the case with previous hot-seat occupant Bob Davie.

The departure of Tom Ridge as Secretary of Homeland Security is imminent, according to various wire reports. At this rate, there may soon be nobody left in the administration for Democrats (or, for that matter, me) to complain about… (þ: OTB)

Update: It’s now official, according to the WaPo.

Clarion-Ledger columnist Rick Cleveland argues that people attempting to get Ole Miss Coach David Cutcliffe fired are detached from reality. No word yet if Cleveland will be joining ShrillBlog as a contributor.

Update: Daily Mississippian columnist Steven Godfrey has more on this theme, as does ESPN.com columnist Pat Forde (who forgets that Ole Miss tied for the SEC West title last year, although LSU represented the division in the SEC championship game due to the divisional tiebreaker).

I’ve come to the conclusion I really don’t enjoy writing up cross-tabs, even when it’s research I conducted myself. I’d kill to be writing for an audience that could deal with logistic regression results…

Nonetheless, despite distractions (MNF on TiVo and the need for sleep chief among them) I will press on. Maybe I’ll have a paper full of exit poll results to share soon…

Will Baude notes a lot of pessimism around the court-watching sphere regarding Ashcroft v. Raich—mind you, much of it seems to be coming from quarters that are skeptical of the whole Lopez line of jurisprudence, without which I suspect this case would have simply received the standard 9–0 Ninth Circuit Smackdown (for some of this, er, conflicted viewpoint, see today's NYT editorial). He does make a semi-interesting statement worth exploring further:

[T]he somewhat confused coverage of the case does not look good for any hope of establishing a political vindication instead of a judicial one.

It seems to me that relatively few people in the public—or, for that matter, within political elites—actually conceive of Congress as lacking the plenary power to legislate as it sees fit in any sphere of activity (economic or otherwise), subject only to the limitations of the Bill of Rights and subsequent amendments. The Lopez line is such a dramatic break from over fifty years of federal jurisprudence that I doubt many people can imagine that America got along, more-or-less fine (at least in the economic/police powers realm; I can’t say the same for the lack of enforcement of the 14th Amendment in terms of political rights), for 150 years without such a plenary congressional power, under the understanding that primary authority for such regulation rested in the states.

There are more thoughts on this topic from Brock, below, and James Joyner.

I just got back from Oxford after the 20–3 rout by the Rebels of Mississippi State in the Egg Bowl. It was cold and dreary for almost the entire game, although thankfully the rain was never heavy. Freshman QB Robert Lane saw most of the action under center for the Rebels, and racked up over 200 yards of combined offense, leading the team in both rushing (97) and passing (108) yardage; Ethan Flatt saw limited action after throwing a pick on the first play from scrimmage, Micheal Spurlock didn’t see the any game time, and scout team QB Johnny Wickham came on for mop-up duty with less than two minutes left with a lot of the other seniors. If Lane can improve his passing, and if the coaching staff can give him some different option plays (like some double and triple options), I think he will be an effective starter for the next three years.

On the other side of the ball, a combination of somewhat-improved defense and Bulldog offensive ineptitude led to an embarrassing Mississippi State performance. Star RB Jerious Norwood was contained to 11 rushes for 24 yards, State passed for zero yards in the first half (and only made one first down before the halftime break), and QB Omarr Conner seemed to spend more time on the turf than in the pocket.

Speculation now abounds over the future of the coaching staff; a housecleaning at the coordinator positions seems almost certain, and it’s still possible Cutcliffe will get the axe, particularly if Pete Boone thinks he can upgrade to someone like UTEP’s Mike Price or Memphis’ Tommy West. Allegedly such things are to be discussed at a meeting between Boone and Cutcliffe on Monday.

Tim Sandefur has a reader who doubts the continuing existence of the Federated group of department stores. They seem to be very much alive and are apparently consolidating most of their brands, such as the Memphis-based Goldsmith’s chain, under the more famous Macy’s banner.

Today’s Clarion-Ledger possibly engages in a bit of agenda setting by suggesting the state flag issue will return from the dead during the 2005 regular session. While I have to say I’m not particularly enamored of the existing state flag, and was one of those who voted to change it back in 2001 (even though the alternative wasn’t exactly the best state flag ever designed either), if anyone seriously thinks a change will stick they’re going to have to make a lot more of an effort than they did during the previous referendum campaign, which was generally spearheaded by a group of has-beens and never-wases.

I’m afraid I don’t have any great expertise to offer in the realm of Ukranian politics, so I’ve not really had anything to say about the ongoing crisis there. That said, I tend to agree with Dan Drezner that the internal dynamics of Ukranian politics suggest that the opposition candidate, Viktor Yushchenko, is unlikely to succeed in his effort to get the (apparently fraudulent) poll results overturned.

I do note, however, that the world press seems to be taking concerns about this election much more seriously than concerns about the Hugo Chávez recall referendum—where similarly large gaps between exit poll results and the actual tallies appeared. I also regret that the combination of occasionally-incompetent election officials, opaque electronic voting equipment, and conspiracy-mongering by people who should know better have coincided to leave the U.S. in a weaker position to contest suspect elections elsewhere in the world.

I’m now most of the way through (with some help from a few students) entering the data from our exit poll three weeks ago. Based on 632 respondents, there are a few things that jump out at me:

• Never ask people if they consider themselves born-again Christians, because apparently they don’t understand that question. Ditto asking them to figure out if they are “Protestant.”
• People who don’t have friends or family members who are gay were 2.5 times (!) more likely to vote for the same-sex marriage ban than those who do have gay friends or family members. This suggests that a compelling political strategy for gay people who support same-sex marriage is to come out.
• Younger people were significantly less likely to support the amendment than other people. This suggests that (combined with the strategy above) all people who support same-sex marriage should wait for a lot of old people to die off.
• Black voters are much more likely than white voters to believe Clarence Thomas is the chief justice of the United States.

There’s other fun stuff in the poll that I’ll get to once our last precinct is entered and the data is properly cleaned up.

By the way, if you need to enter a lot of data, I cannot say enough good things about EpiData. It’s very slick and the price is right.

An interesting development in college football today as Fox Sports has won the bidding for the next BCS contract for 2007–10, including three of the four “plus one” title games. ABC retains its contract through 2014 for the Rose Bowl games, including the national title game in 2010 (to be played in Pasadena).

Is this a sign that Fox is planning to get serious about college football more generally? To date, Fox’s involvement in the sport has been limited to a schedule of second-tier Big XII and Pac-10 matchups on its cable outlets (along with some Division I-AA matchups) and broadcast rights to the Cotton Bowl. It’s likely that at least one major conference, like the Pac-10, would be interested in a national Saturday afternoon slot to compete with the SEC-CBS contract—thus avoiding the limited 3:30 coverage associated with ABC’s programming. Plus, Fox would be hard-pressed to come up with an exclusive announce team that works four days a year, suggesting that regular season college football on Fox is coming sooner rather than later.

Is amending the constitution to permit naturalized citizens to run for president gathering momentum? Both Kriston of Begging to Differ and Robert Tagorda take note of the group Amend for Arnold and Jen (referring to the governors of California and Michigan, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jennifer Granholm, respectively), spotlighted in today’s New York Times by William Safire.

Interestingly, three proposed constitutional amendments have been introduced during the 108th Congress to do just that:

• U.S. Rep. Vic Snyder of Arizona Arkansas (and 6 co-sponsors) introduced H.J.Res 59, which would provide that “[a] person who has been a citizen of the United States for at least 35 years and who has been a resident within the United States for at least 14 years shall be eligible to hold the office of President or Vice President.”
• U.S. Rep. Dana Rohrabacher of California introduced H.J.Res 104, which would provide that “[a] person who is a citizen of the United States, who has been a citizen of the United States for at least 20 years, and who is otherwise eligible to hold the Office of the President, is not ineligible to hold that Office by reason of not being a native born citizen of the United States.”
• U.S. Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah introduced S.J. Res 15, which would provide that “[a] person who is a citizen of the United States, who has been for 20 years a citizen of the United States, and who is otherwise eligible to the Office of President, is not ineligible to that Office by reason of not being a native born citizen of the United States” and include a seven-year limit on the ratification period. The Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing on the proposed amendment last month.

As a matter of general principle (leaving aside the merits of Schwarzenegger and/or Granholm candidacies, which seem to me to be rather tangential) I think any of these proposed amendments would be sound, and I hope Congress will seriously consider passing such an amendment in the coming months.

The more I read about the state legislature’s shenanigans, the more I am compelled to conclude that referring to extraordinary sessions of that body as “special” seems oddly appropriate.

Ole Miss AD Pete Boone isn’t even bothering with the fake “we’re 100% behind Coach Cutcliffe” spiel, according to Sunday’s Clarion-Ledger:

“Obviously, this season has been disappointing, but the important thing is for Coach Cutcliffe and I to get together soon after the final game and… not only to look at the season but also the program,” Boone said prior to Saturday’s Ole Miss-LSU game. “And then make whatever adjustments need to be made, whether it’s policy issues or procedure issues or human resource (staffing) issues.”

Mind you, I continue to believe, absent a large suitcase full of unmarked bills being delivered to Steve Spurrier from Dickie Scruggs, that Cutcliffe’s job is safe through next fall, simply because there’s nobody obviously better on the market who the Rebs have a shot at—while it’d be entertaining to see Mike Price get the job after his comeback at UTEP, the Rebel alumni are even less likely to be forgiving of Price’s alleged indiscretions than Bama’s were. Expect nothing more than some house-cleaning at the offensive and defensive coordinator slots and an “Independence Bowl or else” edict from Boone’s office.

I’m pleased to announce that Robert Prather, formerly blogging at Insults Unpunished, has agreed to join Signifying Nothing as a co-blogger; I’ll leave any further introductions to him. Robert’s posts will be this color. Welcome aboard!