The New York Times informs us that the leading “private,” for-profit educational companies get the vast majority of their reported revenues from public sources:

The Career Education Corporation, a publicly traded global giant, last year reported revenue of $1.84 billion. Roughly 80 percent came from federal loans and grants, according to BMO Capital Markets, a research and trading firm. That was up from 63 percent in 2007.

The Apollo Group — which owns the for-profit University of Phoenix — derived 86 percent of its revenue from federal student aid last fiscal year, according to BMO. Two years earlier, it was 69 percent.

These numbers are far higher than most of the ones I have seen for the percentage of public funding in public university budgets, and it is notorious that the levels of government support for higher education have been dropping. What we seem to have here is a massive transfer of public funds from major educational institutions where there is some public control and scrutiny of its use, into corporate pockets where its use and outcomes become proprietary information shared only in advertising and financial reports. It turns out that the risks these brave educational entrepreneurs have run — such as loaning tens of thousands to culinary students whose  future careers as dishwashers or line cooks or sawers of novelty ice sculptures can never possibly allow them to pay back their massive student loan debts — are considerably surer things when the federal government backs the loans. Students pay, Feds pay, Career Edu Corp profits either way.

So the next time some politician or pundit tells us we should run the universities more like businesses, the answer should be, give us more taxpayer money, and maybe we will give you a few email addresses of former students to tell you how much they loved us. (As the companies did in this story.)

[Hat tip on the post title to Citizen Freneau.]

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Now playing: The Soundtrack of Our Lives – The Passover

In addition to being the birthday of Publick Occurrences 2.0’s senior proprietor, February 27 is the anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s famous Cooper Union address in 1860 (making this the sesquicentennial, come to think of it).  I was actually walking near Cooper Union this past evening, which gave me the chance to reflect on great men of American history and great American historians.  A fine way to say farewell to this short month.

"George Washington" collecting signatures for the Mount Vernon Statement

After months of non-stop, often costumed stalking by the hysterical far right,  the Founders finally caught a break this week, thanks to the  Mt. Vernon Ladies Association. It seems that the keepers of George Washington’s estate did not let the conservative promoters of the so-called “Mount Vernon Statement” hold their big media event on the premises mentioned in its title. The far right has long enjoyed projecting its obsessions on the Founders, of course, but the Tea Parties have made the phenomenon a full-on reactionary fad lately. No conservative gathering or press release seems complete unless dressed up in Ye Olde Colonial drag. The substance of the statement is only historical in the sense of being rooted in the politics of the late 20th century, rather than the 21st or the 18th. The real point of bringing poor George Washington into this vague farrago of conservative pieties would seem to be keeping longtime Beltway rightists relevant in the Tea Party era.

There have a number of enjoyable stories on the MVS debacle, but the best headlined has to be the Christian Science Monitor’s  “A fake Hitler outdid conservatives.” That’s only the middle of the headline, actually, but that phrase is what jumped out at me from Google.
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Now playing: The Young Republic – She’s Not Waiting Here This Time

There has been a crush of interesting recent articles on the contemporary tea party movement, which I thought I’d highlight.

Today’s New York Times has a very long feature that tries to tie together the tangled strands of the movement.

These people are part of a significant undercurrent within the Tea Party movement that has less in common with the Republican Party than with the Patriot movement, a brand of politics historically associated with libertarians, militia groups, anti-immigration advocates and those who argue for the abolition of the Federal Reserve.

Urged on by conservative commentators, waves of newly minted activists are turning to once-obscure books and Web sites and discovering a set of ideas long dismissed as the preserve of conspiracy theorists, interviews conducted across the country over several months show. In this view, Mr. Obama and many of his predecessors (including George W. Bush) have deliberately undermined the Constitution and free enterprise for the benefit of a shadowy international network of wealthy elites.

…

The ebbs and flows of the Tea Party ferment are hardly uniform. It is an amorphous, factionalized uprising with no clear leadership and no centralized structure. Not everyone flocking to the Tea Party movement is worried about dictatorship. Some have a basic aversion to big government, or Mr. Obama, or progressives in general. What’s more, some Tea Party groups are essentially appendages of the local Republican Party.

But most are not. They are frequently led by political neophytes who prize independence and tell strikingly similar stories of having been awakened by the recession. Their families upended by lost jobs, foreclosed homes and depleted retirement funds, they said they wanted to know why it happened and whom to blame.

That is often the point when Tea Party supporters say they began listening to Glenn Beck. With his guidance, they explored the Federalist Papers, exposés on the Federal Reserve, the work of Ayn Rand and George Orwell. Some went to constitutional seminars. Online, they discovered radical critiques of Washington on Web sites like ResistNet.com (“Home of the Patriotic Resistance”) and Infowars.com (“Because there is a war on for your mind.”).

…

The Tea Party movement defies easy definition, largely because there is no single Tea Party.

…

Local Tea Party groups are often loosely affiliated with one of several competing national Tea Party organizations. In the background, offering advice and organizational muscle, are an array of conservative lobbying groups, most notably FreedomWorks. Further complicating matters, Tea Party events have become a magnet for other groups and causes — including gun rights activists, anti-tax crusaders, libertarians, militia organizers, the “birthers” who doubt President Obama’s citizenship, Lyndon LaRouche supporters and proponents of the sovereign states movement.

It is a sprawling rebellion, but running through it is a narrative of impending tyranny.

Other articles of interest:

In the New York Review of Books, Michael Tomasky observed the protests of September 12, 2009.

Earlier this month, Ben McGrath took stock of the tea party movement in a nice piece for the New Yorker.

On the Washington Post website, David Waters was skeptical that the Christian Right would join forces with the tea party movement (H/T John Fea).

In HNN, Jim Sleeper offers a cursory comparison of the Boston Tea Party of 1773 and today’s tea party movement, and (rather too optimistically) tries to link today’s tea party movement to anti-corporate sentiment.  While there were anti-corporate elements in the original Boston Tea Party, as  Thom Hartmann points out here, I think Sleeper goes too far in hoping that Sarah Palin’s Nashville audience will take up Hartmann’s cry.

Finally, at Jeff Pasley’s request, I’m linking to the videos of two lunchtime talks I gave at the Old South Meeting House in December 2009.  John Fea kindly mentioned the videos on his own blog (which all of you should be following), but in any case here is the first talk and here is the second.  The talks are called “Teapot in a Tempest: The Boston Tea Party of 1773,” in part because that’s what I thought the title of my upcoming book would be.  The title has now changed, but I am happy to say that the manuscript is currently off to the press and due out in fall 2010.

Hey look, I am back. I could bemoan the insidious forces that have kept me from blogging, but I seem to know so many people who have been sick, injured, or lost loved ones in recent months, it really does not seem to become me to complain. And that was even without reading the paper this morning. Anyway, it’s a new year, a new semester, a new decade, so let’s get started.

Having been to more than my share of very sparsely-attended indie rock shows and history conference panels, the thought has occurred more than once that “mid-career” academic historians have much in common with a lot of the veteran indie musicians I go to see: well-known within a certain dispersed circle of cognoscenti, perhaps even established in certain way, but doing something too particular in its appeal to ever achieve more than the most modest sort of popularity.  Most historians like most bands still have to set up and load their own equipment, and while  it saddens me that we historians don’t usually get to perform in dive bars, the bathrooms in conference hotels are usually cleaner.

Then there is the economics of our respective types of publication. My reminder of the similarities here , admittedly not too recent at this writing, was this very informative post byTim Quirk of Too Much Joy, critiquing his band’s royalty statement.

From Tim Quirk, I learned a new term (new to me) major record labels used to denote those never-hit-it-big back catalog bands that they authorize themselves to ignore and abuse: “unrecouped.” This means bands whose sales, according to major label accounting, never paid back their advance and promotional costs. (According to the statement, Too Much Joy’s account with with Warner Brothers stood at $62.47 in royalties with an unrecouped balance of $395,277.18.)  Historians lucky enough to find teaching jobs and get tenure do enjoy some job security that bands who had a couple of songs on alt-rock radio in the early 90s might not, but we also live in danger of remaining “unrecouped” and thus powerless when it comes to dealing with the publishers  and their self-serving accounting practices.
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Now playing: The Low Anthem – To the Ghosts Who Write History Books

My students and I had fun discussing political geography today.  For instance, take a look at these two maps side by side.  First, we have the presidential electoral map from 1860, from the National Atlas of the United States:

Then we have this recent study, from Open Left, depicting how white men (the only ones eligible to vote in 1860) voted in 2008:

Now, obviously it would be very easy to overdraw an analysis from these two maps.  And indeed, I think Open Left is a bit too Whiggish (despite trying not to be Whiggish) about the links between the expansion of voting rights and the election of Progressive presidential candidates–after all, the expanded electorate has certainly elected its share of conservative Presidents.

But it’s still pretty interesting.

Academics cleared of wrongdoing in the balloon boy saga by country sheriff:  “He may be nutty, but he’s not a professor.” Richard Heene, the mad-scientist father in the case, turns out to be a high-school educated handy-man.

(Message: I am still here, just trying to catch up with other stuff.)

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Now playing: The Broken Family Band – Devil in the Details
via FoxyTunes

. . . about college students having sex. Got your attention? It’s not what you think. My attention was called on Facebook to a piece on the NYT site: “At Tufts, an Attempt to Prohibit Sex When a Roommate Is in the Room.” Kids having sex in public naturally did not turn the incisive historical minds on FB to our own college experiences — speaking for myself, we ate a lots of  pizza, drank a lot of beer, and studied a lot, without nearly as many opportunities to test our sexual ethics as they seem to have at Tufts these days. Instead, we early American historians thought of bundling, the scandalous youth sexual practice of colonial New England.

For civilians who happen on this post, bundling was a courtship custom where unmarried young men and women slept together, bundled up in blankets on a bed. Lest it seem too sexy,  a board was put in-between the two and the girl could be encased in a stout bag to protect her the virtue. Mom and Dad (and presumably others) often stayed in the room, just like a Tufts roommate.

From a decent-seeming scholarly article on bundling that happens to be available online:

Bundling is probably the best known courtship practice of colonial America, even though very little research on the topic has ever been published. It appears to contradict the otherwise sexually strict mores of the Puritans. It meant that a courting couple would be in bed together, but with their clothes on. With fuel at a premium, it was often difficult to keep a house warm in the evenings. Since this is when a man would be visiting his betrothed in her home, they would bundle in her bed together in order to keep warm. A board might be placed in the middle to keep them separate, or the young lady could be put in a bundling bag or duffel-like chastity bag. The best protection against sin were the parents, who were usually in the same room with them. It may not have been good enough, however, as records indicate that up to one-third of couples engaged in premarital relations in spite of the public penalties, such as being fined and whipped, that often resulted (Ingoldsby 1995).

[Read the rest here.]

Larry Cebula over at Northwest History has an interesting post with some suggestions for reforming the OAH.

Read the whole thing, but I’ll boil his suggestions down to the nuggets:

1. Make the JAH into an exclusively electronic publication
2. Shake up the conference (he prefers discussions and e-discussions to roundtables and traditional panels)
3. Establish an open, moderated blog (sort of like a Metafilter for historians)
4. Reach out to people interested in American history in various local venues
5. Provide database access to historians outside the academy
6. Take a firm hand in wrangling grants.

I agree with point 1, I’m in sympathy with point 2, I’d skeptically welcome 3, I’d be all for 4 if it could be proved feasible, and I agree with 5 and 6 in principle, at least.

I shared Professor Cebula’s post on Facebook, and got various responses.  I’ll let Jeff weigh in himself, but my favorite comment was from another senior scholar: “The rot set in when they changed the name of the journal.  What was wrong with The Mississippi Valley Historical Review?”  (Date of name change: 1964.)

I’m an OAH member, and I feel lucky every time the annual conference is held at a nearby town (I like seeing American historians outside my subfield and hearing a few interesting papers, although they always seem to schedule all the early American history panels to run concurrently), or every time the JAH has articles that interest me.

I’m not so selfish as to demand that the organization feature more early history at the expense of, say, the twentieth century (although the twentieth century would probably win a contest for Most Depressing Century Ever), but I admit that I sometimes regard the organization with something of a shrug.  As long as early American history has its own journals and conferences, I’m prone to feel a bit complacent about what the OAH puts out.  On the other hand, not everyone has the luxury of such specialization (and I myself teach at least through 1877), and it’s good to have an organization that can take a broader view.

Anyway, I’d be intrigued to see the OAH put some of Cebula’s ideas into play.

Not around here much lately, I know. The beginning of the school year, a lingering summer project, and really depressing public occurrences have all played their roles. Today, however, let me share something I found in an old newspaper — I look at those sometimes — that fits into a theme I have worked into Common-Place before:  the central and often-overlooked place of Indian affairs in the politics and policy of the Founding era.

The item comes from the New Year’s Day, 1794, issue of Greenleaf’s New York Journal, that city’s most important Democratic-Republican paper. It gives an account of the fighting strength of all the Native American peoples that the U.S. government knew anything about at the time. The tribal names do not quite match up with the ones in use today, and it would difficult to assess the accuracy of the numbers, but the proportions are fairly eye-popping. The unnamed officials thought they were facing more than 58,000 Indian warriors at a time when (according to a message from War Secretary Henry Knox), there were less than 4,000 troops in the whole U.S. army!  I guess it is no wonder a frontier military build-up (and Indian war) was the biggest project of Washington’s administration, besides the public finance system that paid for it.

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Now playing: The Whigs – Give ‘Em All A Big Fat Lip