Climate Change: How Do We Know and Why Do We Care

Occasionally on social media when someone posts in opposition to the notion of human caused climate change I respond. No one's mind is ever changed. I contend that, at this point, if you doubt human caused climate change you are either woefully ignorant or have a world view that simply cannot admit the possibility. You will not change your mind because you cannot change your mind.

When I was a kid I read Isaac Asimov's "The Universe" and it fascinated me because he not only gave information about what scientists think about the structure of the universe, but also gave some notion of the evidence that led us to believe these things. I'm no Asimov, but I thought I might go through some of the ways that scientists have used to peer into the climate past and to project the future. Many of the papers that discuss these things are behind paywalls, so I'm going to rely on more public links. Click on the links only if you want more information. The sources I have used tend to provide references that you can explore for even more information.

In all of this: observations are limited, observations often include only a few locations on a very large planet, there are uncertainties in measurements, over long time spans continents drift ... Despite this, there are enough measurements using a variety of techniques and theoretical underpinnings so that the general picture is quite clear and compelling.

First there are the "How do we know" questions. The "how" of what we know of climate depends on the time frame.

Recent Times (hundreds of years)

For recent times we have direct measurements of weather. This includes temperature (air and sea) and precipitation. There are also direct measurements of longer term indicators like sea level (though sea level is an inference based on statistical averages of a large number of measurements). Vegetation records and blooming information also give information. We also have counts of the number of hurricanes...

Even simple measurements like temperature have complexities. Each temperature record is taken at a single time and place using a particular technique. Over time the surroundings change as do the methods of recording the change. A measurement may have been  taken in an open field in 1903 using a mercury thermometer. The same location today may be in the middle of an urban area with the temperature taken by a thermocouple.

The longest temperature record goes back to 1659 in Central England. It shows temperature for only about 400 years and only in a single area. Sea surface temperatures have been taken since the time of the US revolutionary war. Early ocean temperatures were measured by putting a thermometer in a bucket of water drawn from the ocean. Starting in the 1960s, temperatures were automatically recorded at the intake ports of large ships. More recently, buoys have been deployed to measure temperatures, but they differ in design and sensing methods.

The scarcity of data and differing techniques mean that adjustments and inferences have to be made to convert these individual observations into a coherent and meaningful world wide data set. For example, canvas buckets cool ocean water, insulated buckets less so. Measurements near a ship engine room tend to have warmer results. Luckily, when people publish data sets, they also publish the adjustments so that other people can check the assumptions, apply different adjustments, and check to see what the results are.

Individual observations indicate "weather" (more immediate) at a single location, but we are interested in climate (longer term) over the planet. To bridge the gap, scientists have created models and simulations. Modeling complex phenomena is difficult and tricky, but models can be checked against current and know past conditions to see how well they do. To cut to the chase, the models have gotten pretty good at simulation and predictions over time spans of decades. There are many large scale computer models for the climate (in the 10s, not the 100s or 1000s). This computer modeling work has been an ongoing effort for at least four decades. During this time period several things have occurred to increase the accuracy of the modeling. First, the computers of today are literally one million times faster and can handle a million times more data. That means simulations that used to take 11 days to run can now be run in one second. A year's simulation in the 1970s can be run in half an hour. Second, techniques of modeling have improved (smaller voxels at temperature boundaries, incorporation of aerosols from volcanos into the models, better ocean heat modeling...). Third, we are measuring a lot more by deploying more weather stations, ocean buoys, weather balloons....

http://www.ocean-sci.net/12/925/2016/
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/543546/why-climate-models-arent-better/
https://phys.org/news/2017-07-framework-accounts-conflicting-global-temperature.html

By comparing different indicators over time we can see if the measurement records tell a coherent story. If they don't, it indicates something wrong with the measurements or our understanding of the climate. Over the years, we have been able to create a theoretical understanding that pretty well corresponds to the observed record.

Over the near term, the last century or so, virtually all the data points in a single direction. The earth is warming pretty quickly. We can see this in measurements of air and ocean temperature, total volume of ice, earlier spring blooming, movement of habitats and migrations of animals ... The "hockey stick" graph of temperatures is real and correct.

https://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nclimate3325.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hockey_stick_graph
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_large-scale_temperature_reconstructions_of_the_last_2,000_years

Thousands of Years

Each year a tree forms a new ring. The size of the ring provides an indication of temperature and moisture at the location where the tree grew. In locations where dead tree trunks are available, living trees form the initial line in a chain of trees. Patterns of thin and thick at the outer edges of a dead tree may match the inner patterns on a living tree so the tree ring timeline can be extended. There are places where we have a tree ring record up to 4000 years.

If the recent pattern of rings on a particular species of tree can be matched to the weather patterns in the local historical record, we can use this correlation to start constructing plausible past weather patterns. This gives a climate measure for the location.

https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/data-access/paleoclimatology-data/datasets/tree-ring

Coral has some of the same attributes as tree rings. Regular patterns of growth can be detected. Oxygen isotopes in coral layers can also be used as climate indicators. Uranium/Thorium ratios can be used to date the coral samples.

http://lup.lub.lu.se/luur/download?func=downloadFile&recordOId=4467119&fileOId=4467197

We can also look at changes in the landscape to see patterns of deposition that indicate climate. This includes evidence of glaciation, ancient sea levels, pollen in sediment...

Thousands to Millions of Years

All climate measurements must rely on something that is different between warm climates and cool climates. One thing we have gotten good at in the past century is measuring the relative quantities of different isotopes of elements. The chemical properties of an element largely depend on the number of protons in the atom (its atomic number), but the weight of the atom also depends on the number of neutrons. In some circumstances the weight makes a difference. Isotopes are elements with the same atomic number but different atomic weights.

One important link between temperature and isotopes comes from the water evaporation cycle. Most oxygen is O16, but some is O18, which contains two extra neutrons. Both O16 and O18 are stable. O18 requires slightly more energy to evaporate and also tends to rain out slightly sooner than O16. These processes occur today and can be measured. As the earth cools, more water is stored in glaciers and ice caps. This water evaporated then snowed onto the land. The O18 tends to rain out earlier (at lower latitudes) so the snow tends to be depleted in O18. As O16 enriched snow enters the ice caps, it leaves the ocean. That means the oceans tend to have slightly higher O18 levels when the earth is cooler. The same process is true for deuterium, a heavier isotope of hydrogen.

http://www.iceandclimate.nbi.ku.dk/research/strat_dating/annual_layer_count/ice_core_dating/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxygen_isotope_ratio_cycle

This gives us two complimentary ways to measure ancient temperatures. We can look at the O18/O16 ratios in ice cap cores. We can also measure ocean O18/O16 ratios in the ocean using sediments high in calcite (CaCO3). because the calcite was formed by microorganisms that got one of the calcite oxygen atoms from the sea water in which they lived, the sediment reflects the O18/O16 ratios when the organism lived.

The ice core data goes back at least 740,000 years. Sediment data can be used for a much longer time span (at least hundreds of millions of years).

Note that we have current confirmation of the theory and two different sources of data: ice and sediment. This gives the data some real credibility, particularly since the very recent data is confirmed by other means.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxygen_isotope_ratio_cycle

http://cdiac.esd.ornl.gov/trends/temp/domec/domec.html

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Hugh_Jenkyns/publication/252408787_New_oxygen_isotope_evidence_for_long-term_Cretaceous_climate_change_in_the_Southern_Hemisphere/links/571b621008ae6eb94d0d6405.pdf

Why does climate change?

Looking at the deduced climate over the past millions of years we can say pretty definitely that climate has changed drastically over time. The question of why is frightfully difficult. Moreover, small changes in one thing or another can, over time, create big changes in climate. The basic principle is that the temperature of the planet depends on its internal heat, the amount of energy entering the system (mostly from the sun) and the amount of heat leaving the planet (mostly reflected light). The earth's atmosphere acts as a blanket, keeping the earth warmer than it would be without the atmosphere.

The sun has day to day differences in output, 11 year cycles of sunspots and a long term trend (hundreds of millions of years) of increasing energy output. The earth's orbit changes as does its axis of tilt. Volcanos put large amounts of reflective particles into the atmosphere, reflecting more of the sun's energy into space. Snow and clouds reflect more light than land or ocean. Clouds block heat. In fact, water vapor and clouds are the most powerful heat trapping substances for the earth, accounting for about three quarters of all heat trapping.

https://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/briefs/schmidt_05/

The oceans have a huge thermal mass and there is large scale heat transport through the oceans and between the ocean and the air. Ocean currents carry much of this heat and transport depends on the positions of the landmass. Over eons continental drift can affect climate. The ocean circulation also depends on salt concentrations and large amounts of fresh water melting may interrupt planet wide ocean circulation. If planet wide ocean heat circulation is interrupted, there may be larger temperature differences between lower and higher latitudes. This may cause more snow to persist at higher latitudes and increase the reflectivity of the planet as a whole.

Scientists have been trying to tease the affects apart. The further back in time you go, the more difficult it becomes and the more speculative the conclusions.

Carbon Dioxide

This is the measure that has become controversial for political and monetary reasons. Despite the perceived controversy, we know a lot about the basic heat processes of the earth and there is no real controversy among the scientists who actually study climate. The physical response of CO2 to light is well known and can be easily measured. The effect of CO2 is to take infrared heading out of the planet and reflect some portion of it back in. This is not a huge effect, but part of it takes affect above the level of water vapor and provides another insulating layer for the planet.

The most immediate indicator of CO2 as a possible cause of temperature rises comes from a simple correlation over the past century.  Of course simple correlation means little to nothing, and over extremely long periods of time (hundreds of millions of years) the relationship between CO2 levels and temperature are tenuous at best. That said, in an extremely complex system it is difficult to find causes and effects. Our best hope is to look at recent conditions where we have more measurements and the ability to test hypotheses directly. For the recent past, CO2 as a driver is quite well established.

The affects of CO2 have been directly measured. On the land, direct measurements of the wavelengths captured by CO2 have been measured and found to be increasing in conjunction with the increasing concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere. The corresponding measurements from space show the opposite affect. As CO2 increases, the amount of light radiated by the planet in the range that CO2 absorbs goes down. That is, we have directly measured the greenhouse imbalance caused by increasing CO2.

https://www.skepticalscience.com/co2-temperature-correlation-intermediate.htm

http://newscenter.lbl.gov/2015/02/25/co2-greenhouse-effect-increase/

https://www.eumetsat.int/cs/idcplg?IdcService=GET_FILE&dDocName=pdf_conf_p50_s9_01_harries_v&allowInterrupt=1&noSaveAs=1&RevisionSelectionMethod=LatestReleasedhttp://science.sciencemag.org/content/289/5477/270

https://ams.confex.com/ams/pdfpapers/100737.pdf

https://www.nature.com/articles/srep21691

Theoretical attempts to assign quantitative amounts to different drivers of temperature are rapidly maturing. These point to the same conclusion, in the current situation CO2 is the main driver of increasing global temperature.

https://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/spmsspm-human-and.html

Why do We Care?

This section is a little different. Even if the climate is changing, why should we care? After all, climate has changed drastically in the past and life on earth has survived. Even faced with mass extinctions, life has recovered. Devastating changes in climate have set the stage for new types of life to thrive and become dominant.

The earth and life on earth will survive climate change. Technological human society may not. In any number of areas, we are currently engaged in unsustainable practices. As Herbert Stein pointed out "If something cannot go on forever, it will stop." Our human life spans are relatively short and it is easy perceive the world we live in now as not much different than the world we were born in. Over spans of centuries it is easy to see the drastic changes.

Because the world is large and has been around a long time, we can unsustainably use some resources for a very long time. We probably have centuries of fossil fuels left. A few centuries is a very short time when we consider the millions of years it took to accumulate these reserves, but for humans it means we don't have to worry about having enough fossil fuels for many generations of human life.

When agriculture emerged there were probably fewer than twenty million people on earth. We hit the one billion mark around 1800. It took 123 years to get to two billion. Currently we are adding a billion each couple decades. This population increase requires a concomitant increase in resource use. When the European settlers first reached North America cod were so numerous that it was joked you could walk across the ocean on the backs of cod. In 1992 the cod fishery collapsed and it was estimated that it's biomass was one percent of its earlier levels.

When European settlers got to the U.S. Pacific Northwest the size and expanse of the forests were breathtaking. It seemed a resource that could not be exhausted. The forest is still vast, but satellite images show the incredible level of human exploitation.

There is good reason to say that we have entered a new geologic era, the anthropocene, where the dominant force shaping the planet is humans. Humans now move more earth than natural geologic processes. All of the worlds great aquifers are being emptied for agriculture. Many of them will cease to be productive within a couple of generations. Biologists tell us we are on the brink of a sixth great extinction of species. That is, an event on the scale of the extinction of the dinosaurs. This time it is being caused by human intervention in the environment.

Humans are an extremely adaptable species, but we rely on the web of life around us as well as incredibly complex and fragile systems of technology and trade. Rapid changes in either ecology or collapse of technological webs may exceed our ability to respond while maintaining our technological society. We are already seeing large scale human misery, but many people refuse to acknowledge there is even a problem. We are headed toward a world wide failure of systems that is unprecedented in human existence.

For me, the terrible part is that, collectively, we understand what is happening and if we take action we can enter a golden age of human existence and restored ecological health. We know many of the problems and we know some of the solutions. For example, E.O. Wilson has made the excellent suggestion that we set aside roughly half the earth as a preserve outside of human intervention. The preserve must be connected and contain many of the most biologically productive areas. This seems like a large and undoable task but, surprisingly, his analysis shows that it is not. The simple act of making contraception readily available to everyone (with no coercion) is probably sufficient to keep human population in check. Movement away from burning carbon is not only do-able it is probably inevitable for cost reasons, yet the fossil fuel industries fight tooth and nail to keep the burning going. World wide, democracy and concern for the average citizen is diminishing while power is being concentrated in the hands of people and institutions whose main concern is preserving and expanding their wealth and control.


https://www.amazon.com/Half-Earth-Our-Planets-Fight-Life/dp/1631492527/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1499277232&sr=8-1&keywords=half+earth+e.o.+wilson

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/07/climate-change-earth-too-hot-for-humans.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kxryv2XrnqM

https://qz.com/871907/2016-was-the-year-solar-panels-finally-became-cheaper-than-fossil-fuels-just-wait-for-2017/

http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/07/05/535596277/all-new-volvo-models-will-be-electric-or-hybrid-starting-in-2019

https://www.equalitytrust.org.uk/about-inequality/impacts

Colorado State University and its On Campus Stadium

A few disclaimers and clarifications before I begin. I have been watching the CSU on-campus stadium saga for some time and I am currently a member of the joint CSU/Fort Collins Stadium Advisory Group formed to mitigate any untoward effects of the new stadium on its neighbors.

This essay is NOT connected to the advisory group in any way and reflects, in its rambling way, my own opinions about the stadium process and university funding. All of my analysis and speculations are strictly that, analysis and speculations. They are based on the best information I have and I try to be factually correct, but I have no special knowledge.

Finally, I have found that all the people associated with CSU and the City of Fort Collins appear to be acting in ways they feel will genuinely improve, in the medium term, the university and the city.

LARGE SCALE FORCES ON CSU

Universities in general are in trouble. The reason, as is often the case, is money. State funding of the higher education system is drying up. There are four main sources of money for higher education:
 - Student Tuition and Fees
 - Faculty Research Grants
 - State Government Funding
 - Alumni and Large Donor Giving/Endowments

A couple of major forces related to funding of the university system are at work. The first is consolidation of wealth and power.

Astoundingly, wealth distribution in societies throughout the world and throughout time has followed a single pattern, a Pareto distribution. http://colin-quodlibet.blogspot.com/2010/09/wealth-distribution-and-work-week.html.  The Pareto distribution is a self-similar curve where quantities are concentrated. For example, the top 10% of the population might control 70% of the wealth. If you take all of the wealth of that top 10%, the top 10% of those richer folks will have 70% of the wealth of the rich folks. Throughout the world, this basic curve can be used to describe wealth distributions. The differences are in the constants. In a highly egalitarian society, the top 10% may have 50% of the wealth. In a kleptocracy, the top 10% may have 95% of the wealth. For the past couple generation's wealth in the US has become increasingly concentrated in fewer hands. In 2012 the top 10% in the US had about 76% of all wealth.

The same concentration of wealth applies to institutions. There are an increasing number of college students. Before World War II, the entire university system was smaller relative to the population and fewer people received higher education. The system expanded after WWII to include a much larger percentage of the population. This was extremely successful economically. We met the need for additional seats by making existing institutions larger rather than increasing the number of institutions. In the 1970's the average size of a state university was probably about 20,000 students. In the past decade or so we have seen this increase to 30,000 or 35,000 students. Hand in hand with this increase in institution size there has been a growing concentration of alumni giving. The lion's share of giving is going to a smaller and smaller set of universities. In 2015 about 30% of the all donations went to just 20 schools. The more successful graduates you have, the more likely your university will move up on the alumni giving list. Within each school there is a smaller and smaller set of donors who give the lion's share of all donations, and hence have a larger and larger voice in the direction of the institution.

A second force is cultural. In the U.S. we tend to view all aspects of culture through the lens of commerce. This has become even more pronounced over the last 30 years. The primacy of commerce extends to all aspects of culture. Even religion has corners, like the "prosperity gospel" based on prayer as commerce. Government is seen as inherently inefficient (bad) because it does not operate in a marketplace.  This has become accepted to such an extent that we have starved every civic institution that is not directly involved in commerce. Prestige and power are associated with wealth. In effect, we are creating a new feudal society where wealthy merchants have become the noble class.

Universities are not exempt from this cultural lens. Every few years a drumbeat starts announcing that college graduates are not ready for the workplace. That is, a university education is viewed as job training. This push to commercialize everything has also hit university administration. Universities are increasingly run as a business. This seems to be inevitable. Basic management training in the US is based on the business model. There are specializations for non-profit organizations, but the models of organization, motivation, and feedback are based on the current business model fads. Along with this comes a top-down approach to management with power and money concentrated in as few hands as possible. The university president acts as a CEO. As such, he or she is charged the operation of the institution and all true decision making is made at the top. An effective CEO will listen to advisors, but this is more to counteract opposition and build consensus than to alter direction.

As a business, the university must do what it can to satisfy its customers. It competes against other, similar institutions. To be financially sound, each university must turn a profit so it can support current operations and expand in the future. In this view, the funding sources can be viewed as customers and, like a successful business, the institution should be customer focused.

Taking each customer in turn:

Students are ostensibly the raison d'être of the university but not all students are alike. Because they pay higher tuition, out of state students are more desirable, and CSU is competing against universities in the student's home state. For marketing reasons, higher achieving students are also more valuable. The product that CSU is marketing to students is the experience on campus. To satisfy these students, the experience should be comfortable and stimulating. That is one of the reasons so much money has been spent on improving dorms, the recreation center, and the student union.


Faculty research grants serve several functions. They fund labs, faculty, and graduate students. Grants serve a marketing function by increasing the international visibility and prestige of the organization. Grants follow grants. The more grants a university has, the more likely other grants will follow. There is an easy way to incentivize faculty to bring in more grants. You simply measure the size of the grants and reward the faculty who bring in the most. In terms of grants, each department is either a profit center or a loss. Sometimes unprofitable departments simply have to be funded (English, Art...) but they can be put under pressure in the normal ways to be more efficient. For example: increasing the number of adjunct faculty, automating instruction, increasing class size ...

While still a comparatively small portion of research grants, corporate funding of research is becoming more important. This leaves the university exposed to pressure to support the funding corporations. See the recent scandal at Brown University. https://www.aaup.org/article/academic-freedom-and-corporate-university#.V6sczJMrKgQ

When you hear that CSU is a research institution, be aware that this a sales pitch to both students (we are on the cutting edge) and to grant organizations (we can effectively use your money). The goal may be research, but only in so far as that research provides funding either by attracting more grants or attracting more students. Research tends to be concentrated in areas that might be commercially viable in a decade or so. Too long for strictly commercial enterprises, but not pure research untied to commerce.

Because it is a funding source for the school, state government can be considered a customer of the university. In this sense, lobbying is "marketing" to the government. State government is in a rather unique position because it owns the institution even if it doesn't provide much support. In Colorado, the state government has a number of constraints that limit the amount of money it can spend on higher education. State government is thus the worst kind of customer: cheap, demanding, impossible to dump.

Finally, there is alumni and large donor giving. Donor funding is discretionary and based on whim. First you have to find the wealthy, then you have to persuade them that your institution is worth funding. If wealthy alumni feel the institution has helped them in their life or helped a community they care about, it will be worth funding. If a donor has a particular interest that can be furthered by funding, they will give. As an example, the equine department(s) at CSU have greatly benefitted from donor funding.

ON CAMPUS STADIUM

As far as I can discern there is very little overt corruption in Fort Collins. I find city employees well educated and thoughtful. They value information and when making decisions they look for other comparable situations and try to find best practices. The city as a whole is conservative in the sense that it likes the comfortable and conventional. We try to do the same as everybody else, just do it a little better.

Under Tony Frank, CSU is following a similar strategy. I think the CSU administration is well aware of the forces shaping the university system and is doing its conventional best to make sure that CSU ends up large enough and well enough endowed to survive the coming storms in higher education.

Tony Frank was made president of CSU in 2008. He has spearheaded the largest CSU expansion in decades, perhaps ever. The last major expansion was part of the post WWII restructuring of higher education. This is a perfect time for expansion largely because interest rates are at historic lows. The Board of Regents has viewed Tony Frank’s tenure positively and in 2015 he was made chancellor of the CSU system, which includes multiple campuses throughout the state.

During his tenure Frank devoted attention to all CSUs customers. Increasing enrollment brings in increasing tuition and fees. Much of the capital improvement money has been spent on the student tuition leg of the funding sources, improving and updating dorms, the rec center and the student union. Dorms have been improved. Faculty is aligned to the goal of bringing in more research grants. In the past few years a concerted campaign has aimed, successfully, at bringing in more donor money. Let's not talk about state government.

Sometime around 2011 Tony Frank made a marketing decision that both out of state student enrollment and large donor giving would be improved with a more visible and successful athletic program including an on-campus football stadium. Let me make this clear. I think the on campus stadium was a marketing decision made around 2011 before any public deliberation. Tony Frank as university president chose to build an on campus stadium. The only question afterwards was how to best implement that decision.

In December 2011 Jack Graham was hired as Athletic Director to implement this marketing plan. Within two months a "feasibility study" was started for a new stadium. The study was duly produced and in late 2012 Tony Frank recommended a new stadium to the CSU Board. This was followed by two years of PR bungling.

The stadium was popular with rich CSU donors and the athletics department. It was popular with no one else. The faculty members I have spoken with think the stadium is idiotic. The student body is divided, but largely opposed. Within the city a group, "Save our Stadium" formed to oppose the new stadium.

CSU and the city created a committee to look at stadium impacts. I had the bad fortune to watch one of these meetings on cable television. Representatives from CSU and the architecture/construction firms simply refused to answer any questions. My recollection of one exchange is: "How tall will the stadium be?" "We don't have an exact answer for that. We'll try to find out some information and get it to you later."

There is a real science to getting buy in for an existing decision. The stadium outreach violated many of the rules and it failed. One basic rule is to never give opponents the notion that the basic decision can be changed. Rather than creating support, the outreach created resentment and opposition. Fund raising proceeded but slower than hoped.

In a bold move, on August 8 of 2014 Frank simply fired his athletic director, Jack Graham. Within four months a new decision making process looking at alternatives was created and completed. The committee was given four alternatives and chose two of those as most viable. In the end, Tony Frank modified the options and chose to go with his original 2011 decision. A new stadium owned and operated by CSU would be built on campus.

Ground was broken and, in agreement with the city, a new Stadium Advisory Committee was created. This committee has the limited scope of trying to improve the operation of the already approved stadium. CSU has bent over backwards to be transparent, listen to the neighbors and not make the same mistakes twice. The stadium will be quieter and less bright than it might have been because CSU listened and spent money to satisfy its neighbors.

ANY COMPLAINTS?

If my analysis is correct, all of this seems rational and perhaps even inevitable given the cultural environment. There is only one real casualty, the university itself.

There are probably as many opinions on the nature and purpose of a university as there are people. I am giving my point of view as someone who spent a lot of time as a student, both undergraduate and graduate. I am a parent of four children who graduated from college. I am currently owner of a business that caters to the university crowd. When my children started college I thought a lot about what I hoped for them to learn in their higher education http://colin-quodlibet.blogspot.com/2008/05/what-to-learn-in-college.html.

Historically, universities have been self-perpetuating institutions based on both educating societal elites and allowing intellectuals the freedom to advance human knowledge. I contend that the institutions have been successful in inverse proportion to their integration into the commercial structure of the society. There are exceptions. Land grant colleges in the United States have focused on practical farm research and, along with farm extension programs, have revolutionized agriculture in the U.S. multiple times. On the whole though, the most successful research programs have been those where the goal is pure knowledge. The application of that knowledge has not been the concern of the school or the professors.

It is on the science side where commercial results are most immediately apparent, but the academic developers of calculus, differential geometry, physics (classical, relativistic, and quantum), chemistry, evolution, and genetics have been concerned with basic understanding the world. All of these areas, which underlie so much of our commerce, were created without any possible awareness of commercial applications. Academic competition, jealousy, and infighting is as old as the institutions. Holding research private and patenting academic discoveries is relatively new. These developments potentially make some needed money for the institutions, but hinder long-term human advancement. Einstein once said, "I refuse to make money out of my science. My laurel is not for sale like so many bales of cotton."

On the education side, particular skills have always been less important than the ability to understand and adapt to the world. It is important to have a deep understanding or skill in something or other, but the importance comes from the fact that once you have one deep skill, it is easier to acquire a second or third. When the WWII veterans came out of college, they created a vital society
There were many factors involved: monetary policy, size of cohort, delay in starting families... Higher education helped the veterans by giving them particular knowledge and skills, but also because they understood more broadly and could see further than the less educated.

The emphasis on running the university as a business enhances funding and fosters efficiency. It also ties research to commercial results and chokes off longer-term thinking. It reduces the quality of education by increasing class sizes and putting more responsibility for basic education onto the least experienced members of the faculty community. If you read the Feynman lectures on physics one of the most illuminating aspects is the sheer clarity of mind and broadness of vision that is apparent from simply being in the presence of well educated genius. Fewer undergraduates experience this as we put more graduate students, adjunct faculty, and junior faculty members in charge of teaching.

Big college athletics serves no research or educational purpose. Very few students participate in the marquee sports and those students are largely segregated from the rest of the campus. Every dispassionate study of finances shows that the programs never pay for themselves. Many people get rich off college athletics, but the only function of big athletics within the university is marketing to two audiences: modern day barons who can contribute to endowments and potential out of state students who bring more revenue when they enroll.

The direct appeal to the barons is obvious in the design of the CSU stadium. Roughly one quarter of the facility is set aside for luxury accommodations some served by a separate elevator to keep the moneyed from the hoi polloi. The more you pay the university, the better your experience will be: better seats, more amenities and better parking. Students sit in the cheap seats across from their betters. In addition to watching, cheering, and identifying with the university, they can stare and wish for riches that will enable them to join the barons. Those with money can use a display of wealth as a way to court influence within their circles. This is a standard feature of modern spectator sports. In the Stadium Advisory Group some members have suggested that the prices are too low and that raising prices to the maximum level possible will make the most desirable spots a better way to display wealth and influence. It will also help pay for the stadium.

The choice of football as the main sport to market is obvious, trite, and tragic. It is obvious because of the popularity of the sport. It is trite, because every institution trying to make it to the top tier is doing exactly the same thing. It is tragic for a number of reasons. The first is consolidation of sports money is already occurring. Fewer institutions are getting larger and larger shares of the pie. That means that many second tier schools, perhaps CSU, will fail in their attempts to cover stadium costs by using sports to lure out of state students and donor money.

The choice of football is also tragic because it plays to the worst part of human nature and actually hinders the education of students. Football is a purely spectator sport. People feel kinship based on team affiliation, but they do not do anything to actually improve themselves or the team (except spending money). In football, the identification comes at the expense of the athletes themselves. The vast majority of athletes, even at the top ranks of university athletics, do not make a career of their sports. CSU makes a genuine attempt through its academic programs to support these young people who are trying to get an education at the same time as having a physically demanding, unpaid, full time athletic job. Time after time we have seen in college athletics that as the money pressures rise, so does the temptation to cut corners and win at the expense of the athletes. With what we have discovered about Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, the current form of the game cannot continue for more than a generation or so. The fans are rabid, the money is great, but more and more parents will stop allowing their children to risk brain injury to play. This will dry the pool of available talent.

Learning how to take care of ourselves and others is an important part of becoming an educated functioning adult. If you look at people in their forties, fifties, and beyond you will find healthy adults who run, swim, bike, play tennis, golf, baseball, basketball, racquetball, ski, and snowboard. You do not find football players. The activity is simply not consonant with maintaining health. The notion of spectator sports instead of participatory sports is at antithetical to the core of the university missions.

PEOPLE MONEY AND SKILLS

One of my rules of thumb is: If you want a great organization, don't put the money men/women in charge. In any organization, the money must work out. If you put the money men/women in charge, only the money works out. Everything else, including the reasons the organization exists, suffers.

As a software professional, my career has centered on new product development. Often this is as a consultant to large organizations that wish to update their technology. The obvious reason to bring in outsiders is to get specialized expertise, but there is a cultural reason as well. People who are charged with maintaining and incrementally improving existing systems develop a conservative mindset. Many people charged with operational systems cannot cope with the uncertainty of new development. Conversely, many people in new development cannot cope with being confined to meticulously tracking potential problems.

The same kind of cultural dynamic probably occurs within the university. The skills necessary for the maintenance and gradual change of a university are different from the skills needed for major expansions. Major expansions require expensive and risky decisions that are made quickly. It is inherently a gamble on the future. The decision makers have to create a political environment where people feel involved but the pace of change is not slowed or halted.

In big college athletics the game is to quickly build a team and win more than you lose. As a coach, you either win or you are fired. If you win, you can leave and move up the coaching ladder to a bigger program with more resources. If you get fired, you move down the ladder.

In new software product development, once the job is done, the excitement subsides and the developers most instrumental in getting things done quickly move on. They are invested in the problem solving and the building, not the end result or the institution. The same is probably true for people involved in university expansion. The thrill is building the physical assets, creating the winning team. When that is completed, the tendency is to move on to the next place that needs this type of expansion.

The average tenure of a university president is about 8.5 years. Athletic directors last about 5 years. Football coaches, 4 years. For all these positions, the professional track usually moves the person from institution to institution. It is rare that these professionals "grew up" in the institution where he or she is president/athletic director/coach. Because their job tenure is much shorter than a career, people in these professions have to be more concerned with the job and their personal progress rather than the institution. Contrast this with faculty who tend to marry their institution and may very well stay with the same school for their entire professional life.

The highest paid people at CSU are associated with big budget sports (men's football and basketball coaches) and university administrators. These areas take increasing amounts of the overall labor budget. That is, we are paying the most for the people whose ties to the institution are weakest.

Following conventional wisdom gives a conventional strategy. Everyone following the same strategy competes for talent, driving up prices. When institutional loyalty is low, a larger paycheck and personal advancement are even greater lures. In addition, people naturally value their own work and value those who are like them. Administrators are likely to pay administrators more.

The end result of the current strategy is to invest large amounts of money into activities (athletics, creature comforts, administration) that are, at best, peripheral to the core of the university mission. The focus on money and business related metrics undermine faculty morale and lose the long-term research focus of the institution. The course may be inevitable in a culture based on business that does not value learning or education except as it helps commerce. The course may be inevitable, but it is also regrettable.

A Comparison of Sweden and the US

The other day someone pointed out that if Sweden were a U.S. state it would not rank very high on per capita GDP. This was a Facebook conversation and the tone of the post was "see you socialist left wing fanatics, even in the best case your socialist state is worse off than almost all of the U.S.". This, of course, created a small firestorm of posts, which I think was the object of the provocation. The comparison is interesting though.
There are cases where the differences in governance, national attitude and results are stark. For example, Haiti and the Dominican republic share an island, but the contrast between the two is stark. The same can be said of Costa Rica and Nicaragua. Sweden is not, of course, a socialist state. The U.S. and Sweden are both industrialized nations with relatively educated populations. The U.S. has a leg up because of its vast natural resources.
Given the general similarity of status of Sweden and the U.S. as industrialized nations, a comparison of social policy and the results for the average citizen is worthwhile. I think the differences between Sweden and the U.S. are largely a reflection of basic philosophical differences in national attitude. As a nation the U.S. attitude is: social darwinist, each man for himself, pull yourself up by your bootstraps, if you cannot make it here don't blame anyone but yourself, government always does a worse job than the private sector. I have never been to Sweden so I cannot report firsthand on conditions there. From the outside its social policy seems more: we are all in this together, each does better when all do better, we are all people and things happen so let us support each other, government programs work well at providing the basis for us to build strong lives.
The Swedish GDP for 2010 is about 458,000 (millions). With a 2011 estimated population of 9,415,300 the per capita GDP is about $48,640. This is roughly the same as North Dakota at 47,714 which ranks as the 20th highest state GDP per capita. There is some disagreement about these numbers. For example the wikipedia article on the Swedish economy gives a per capita GDP of about $37,775, which would make it closer to Michigan, the 42nd poorest state. Sweden cannot prop up its social welfare system with natural resources like North Sea oil (Norway, Britain). It must pay through basic productivity.
In the World Economic Forum (the Davos folks) Global Competitiveness Report, Sweden ranks above the US (because of the recession)
Sweden is not going bankrupt. Its overall national debt is 40% of GDP compared to 60% - 90% for the United States (depending on whose number you use). Sweden went through a real estate and financial crisis in the early 1990s and had to re-adjust its social spending to accomodate lower GDP. Sweden is now used as a model for how a nation should handle financial crises. Sweden can afford its social programs. Because it is somewhat poorer pre capita than United States, we could afford similar programs if our national philosophy allowed it. The difference is choice, not money.
Sweden ranks high in taxation about 48% of GDP (2007). In the developed world, Sweden is on the high end of taxation exceeded only by Denmark. In the U.S. taxes are about 27% of GDP (2006). The U.S. tax rate is one of the lowest in the developed world. Only Mexico, Turkey, Korea, and Japan have lower taxes as a percent of GDP.
So, which resident gets the better deal: someone living in Sweden with its not-outstanding per capita GDP and high taxes or a resident of Michigan/North Dakota.
Health care in Sweden requires patients to pay a fee per visit/prescription, but total costs to the patient is limited to about $360 per year. In comparison to the US Sweden has more doctors and nurses per capita. Life expectancy is higher, and infant mortality is lower. Over 80% of all medical costs are paid by the government (vs. 45% in the US) but the total cost spent on health care is so much lower that the US government pays more as a percentage of revenue than Sweden does. So, in Sweden everyone is guaranteed health care, the cost is lower both to the individual and the government than in the U.S.. The outcomes of health care are generally better, and citizens do not need to fear medical bankruptcy.
In education, Sweden works hard to make sure that opportunity is equalized for children. Grants from the national government take into account the economic conditions of the particular region. Poorer regions are subsidized and richer regions bear an extra cost. Rural regions are compensated for transportation costs and smaller class sizes. There are independent schools, roughly equivalent to charter schools in the U.S. Parents may have to pay a fee for preschool and childcare, but there is a ceiling to those costs which takes household income into account. Higher education is essentially free to the students. Students must pay for text books, and equipment needed for personal use. This means that students enter the workforce essentially debt free.
This contrasts with the United States which has limited pre-school support and where higher education is increasingly unaffordable. Two thirds of students leave higher education with an average debt of $23,000 dollars. We have created a generation of young adults who, instead of leaving college and becoming entrepreneurs, are forced by debt to ender the labor force as employees. In the United States, public dollars going to higher education have decreased and tuition costs have increased. The United States of America is the only OECD country where 25-34 year-olds are not better educated than 55-64 year-olds. This may be in part because other countries had more room to improve over the past 25 years.
In Sweden, taxpayers spend about 6.6% of GDP on education. In the U.S. about 5.5% of GDP is spent by the government on education.
We all know how skewed incomes are in the United States where the top 400 wealthiest people have more than the bottom 150 million.
About 80% of the Swedish workforce is unionized. As might be expected in a place where people tend to feel part of a single society and look after each other, the unions make the society more equal, but do not eliminate inequality or reward laziness. In hard times, looking after each other may mean unions accepting pay cuts to save jobs. The Swedish unemployment system looks much like the US unemployment system.
If we honestly compare industrialized societies, the US doesn't look so good. We have a national mythology that we are a nation of rugged individualists in a country that provides the opportunity for everyone with drive and determination to make whatever they want of their lives. While we do pretty well on the individualist side, shunning all non-business forms of collective action. We do less well on the opportunity side. American families are less socially mobile than families in other countries.
Much of the U.S. national catechism is simply incorrect.
People do not do best as rugged individuals working for their own benefit. We are social creatures who do best as collections of individuals working together and helping each other.
People are not naturally dishonest or working to game the system. There is a persistent, endemic problem of dishonesty, but this is the exception not the rule. Most people getting unemployment benefits, welfare, food stamps, WIC payments, social security, medicaid ... are ordinary hard-working folks just like you and me who have hit hard times. Most of them will be back on their feet in a little while, they just need some help to see them through.
Work and money are not the center of most people's lives. Most people work for money to earn enough to live, but are not particularly interested in accumulating large amounts of wealth. Everyone would love to be wealthy, but if you talk to people about what they would do once they got that big pile of cash, very few of them talk about accumulating more. Most people would simply do more of what they currently enjoy the most. We should not be educating our children to be effective workers, we should be educating them to understand themselves and the world around them.
Government can be effective. Government is comparable to other large organizations in efficiency and effectiveness. I have worked as a consultant to both government and private entities. The problems are somewhat different, but both government and private entities tend to have about the same level of bone headedness. If we look around the world, we can see examples of more effective governance. Sweden seems to be one of those places.
The United States has low taxation, both at the individual and the corporate level. The question in most of the developed world is not "how much am I taxed", but "what do I get for my tax dollars". As an example, the citizens of every country with universal health care are basically pleased with their system do not want a privatized system.

What to Learn in College

My cousin Tommy has been involved with education for a very long time and recently wrote a book collecting some of his speeches to students. Many of them deal with liberal arts education.

I too think an undergraduate education should not be vocational. When my children went off to college, I spent some time thinking about what I wished them to learn in their first higher education adventure. I came up with three broad areas.

First is something that teaches them how to think logically. I mean that literally. It is important to be able to form a syllogism. I want them to understand that "if [x] then [y]" also means "if not [y] then not [x]". It is important for everyone to be able to form a chain of inferences that either prove or disprove a proposition. This is rigorously taught in mathematics, philosophy, and perhaps even physics classes.

Second, is something that teaches how vast and complex the world is. Because of this size and complexity, it is difficult to make simple statements truthfully explain real events. Even the simplest situations tend to be more complex than we initially expect. On the african savannah, elephants and other grazing animals eat acacia. To protect the trees, fences were put up. That harmed the trees. The trees live symbiotically with ants. The trees provide nectar, the ants discourage grazing. Without the grazing, the trees produced less nectar. With less nectar, different ants moved in. The new species of ant didn't protect the trees against beetles. We can learn about complexity from biology and history classes (among others).

Third is something that teaches about beauty. In my own life the study of aesthetics has been personally important and meaningful, so I feel this is an important area of knowledge. Art, music, dance, literature ... all provide roads to understanding of beauty. I have a personal preference for the non-verbal arts.

To these three, I think I would now add a fourth. I think the study of human motivation and behavior is becoming increasingly important. I also think that this study has to be based on the other three pillars. To understand human behavior you must be able to think clearly, understand complexity, and show compassion. I cannot verbalize, but I think that art is one path to compassion.