Posts by Andrew Grossman
Something to think about while you wait for your latte
By Andrew Grossman, written on Nov. 12, 2007
Slate’s Tim Harford reports on a new study that suggests women get served slower than men at coffee shops.
Harford speculates on the reasons for the slow joe service:
Perhaps, says the skeptic, this is because women order froufrou drinks? Up to a point. The researchers found that men are more likely to order simpler drinks. Yet comparing fancy-drink-ordering men with fancy-drink-ordering women, the longer wait for women remained.
It is also hard to attribute the following finding to a female preference for wet-skinny-soy-macchiato with low-carb marshmallows: The delays facing women were larger when the coffee shop staff was all-male and almost vanished when the servers were all-female.
Does such discrimination exist in Ann Arbor? It might be tough in some places, like the State Street coffee corridor between North University Avenue and Washington Street.
Economists Sandra Black and Elizabeth Brainerd found that the surge in international trade, which has increased competitive pressures in many markets, has reduced the ability of firms to discriminate against women.
But what Becker cannot say is how reliable the competition mechanism is at crushing discrimination, nor how quick. (In fairness to him, economics in general has a real blind spot when it comes to the question “when?”) The research on coffee shops is an interesting curiosity: Coffee retailing seems to be fiercely competitive. How can discrimination continue?
One answer, perhaps, is that a rival coffee shop would have to be very close indeed to justify a trip aimed at avoiding a 20-second wait. Even coffee retailing isn’t that competitive.
In some places in Ann Arbor, it is.
Courant events
By Andrew Grossman, written on Nov. 5, 2007
Earring-wearing, motorcycle-riding former University Provost and current University Librarian Paul Courant has launched his own blog. He starts it off with a strong (but long-winded) defense of the University of Michigan-Google agreement that provides for the digitization of the University libraries’ collections. It’s a serious policy argument, but it might be best summed up by this parenthetical:
“It seems to me that being in bed with Google is way better than sleeping alone.”
But there are some universities who are getting in bed with each other instead of Google.
Mayor and student? It’s happening in Hillsdale.
By Andrew Grossman, written on Oct. 15, 2007
Hillsdale, Mich. Mayor Michael Sessions is a sophomore at Hillsdale College. He recovered from testicular cancer this summer. He fought off a recall effort. And he’s hired a fourth firefighter for that town of 8,000 people.
Students at the University of Michigan have no such prominent representative in Ann Arbor city government. The closest a University student has been to a seat on the Ann Arbor City Council was then-LSA senior Eugene Kang, who ran for the city’s second ward seat in 2005. He lost to Stephen Rapundalo in the Democratic primary, but won 45 percent of the vote.
Notes from the Ron Paul rally
By Andrew Grossman, written on Oct. 10, 2007
Selections from the pre-speech soundtrack:
“Times Like These” — Foo Fighters
“I Won’t Back Down” — Tom Petty
“Best of You” — Foo Fighters
“Revolution” — The Beatles
“Fix You” — Cold Play
And a song that featured a chorus of “Ron Paul’s here”
…
Overheard on the steps of the Hatcher Graduate Library during the rally:
“Doesn’t he know [he should stop talking]? I cut my speech short as hell!” — one Ron Paul campaign staffer who spoke before Paul, referring to Rob Johnson, the co-chair of Students for Ron Paul, who was introducing Paul. Throughout Johnson’s speech, some students chanted “We want Ron!”
“I slowly have gained an appreciation for the Beatles. When I first got into ’60s music, they were too pop for me. But they’re pretty awesome.” — some student to another student, waiting on the top steps of the Grad for Ron Paul.
“He’s the Paul Revere of our era!” — Paul supporter in an introduction.
— Kimberly Chou
Council wants stem cell research ban lifted
By Andrew Grossman, written on Sep. 4, 2007
The City Council passed a resolution Tuesday night supporting the repeal of the state’s ban on embryonic stem cell research.
City council member Leigh Greden (D–Ward 3) said after the meeting that the ban hinders Ann Arbor and Michigan’s economic growth by outlawing jobs.
He said that even if scientists aren’t interested in embryonic stem cell research, a ban criminalizing potentially life-saving research like that makes a broad statement to the scientific community.
“We’re losing critical economic growth opportunities by keeping the ban in place,” he said. “It’s well known we are losing some key talent because of the ban.”
—Daniel Strauss
How not to get into college
By Andrew Grossman, written on Jul. 22, 2007
A sloppy, misspelled and “rather strange”-looking college application might do more than hurt your chances at admission.
It could result in a call to the local bomb squad.
The Oxford Difference?
By Andrew Grossman, written on Apr. 16, 2007
Check out this story from the Times yesterday.
It appears that British universities, long heavily reliant on government funding, are being forced to wade into the uniquely American tradition of hounding alumni for money the minute they graduate. Problem is, there are “cultural hurdles” to asking alums for cash. The solution? Hire an American who isn’t quite so polite.
Ms. Rawlinson, the campaign’s director, is American, and her foreignness is a plus, Mr. Thomas said, because she lacks the social antennae that can turn a Briton-to-Briton fund-raising appeal into a pas de deux of mortified evasion.
“Americans are coming from left field completely,” Mr. Thomas said. “Because those nuances don’t come into play with her, she’s able to ask in a clearer way.”
It also seems that some Brits would be shocked by some of the traditions at the University of Michigan.
Not so in Britain, where superiority is supposed to speak for itself and displaying unironic school pride is an embarrassing gaffe, akin to boasting about your I.Q. or your salary (the exception is the annual Oxford-Cambridge boat race, where emotional displays are acceptable, particularly if alcohol is involved).
Indeed, the joke at Oxford is that the only students who wear school sweatshirts are the Rhodes scholars.
Nor do British universities subscribe to the nostalgic “best years of our lives” mentality, encouraged in America through football games and lavish reunions in which alumni are wined and wooed.
Where would the University of Michigan’s development office be without all that?
Getting into college is hard work
By Andrew Grossman, written on Apr. 12, 2007
With decision letters from many colleges arriving April 1, there’s a lot in the news this week about how hard it is to get into top universities. It’s enough to kill any nostalgia you might have had for senior year of high school.
It was a record year for applications to the University of Michigan.
There was this piece in The New York Times where we learn about young Max Rothstein. Max, a senior at a Chicago private school, had an “exemplary record” but only got into Wesleyan, NYU and the University of Michigan. Poor Max.
And today, this story in The Boston Globe about how competitive schools in Massachusetts have become. Even UMass-Amherst, it appears, is getting harder to get into.
Amherst, the flagship campus of the UMass system, is trying to bolster its national reputation to compete against other big state universities, such as Michigan and Texas.
“We are in the position . . . of making really tough decisions, either denying or wait-listing kids that three years ago we would have welcomed into the system,” said Kevin Kelly, director of admissions at UMass. “As the appeal and reputation of UMass has spread, we’ve been able to attract more qualified kids and enroll the very best kids we can.”
Now if only they could do something about those riots.
(Fun fact: the rioting occurred after the Minutemen lost a football game to Appalachian State–Michigan’s much-maligned Division 1-AA opponent for the 2008 season opener.)
Bored at the Ugli?
By Andrew Grossman, written on Mar. 20, 2007
Flipping through an old New Yorker earlier today, I came across this Talk of the Town piece on the “boredat…” series of websites. The site’s creator explains:
Its creator, Jonathan Pappas, was in Butler the other night, explaining the source of his inspiration. “Basically, I was sitting in that room”—he pointed to Room 209, an undergraduate study area—“and I was thinking, I want to create something to beat my boredom,” he said. Using his laptop and the school’s wireless connection, he bought the domain name boredatbutler.com, for nine dollars, and built a simple Web page consisting of a post box—where visitors can write public messages—and a note of introduction: “Post your thoughts … but keep it anonymous!”
That night, Pappas put up a few flyers. By morning, the site had accumulated more than two thousand messages. (One of the first: “I’m a big chubby boy looking for a big chubby zebra.”) Pappas has since graduated and relocated to Silicon Valley, and he has expanded the “bored at” empire to include eleven schools.
I’m having trouble understanding the appeal of these sites, for the same reason I never got why people write on bathroom walls (the title of the New Yorker piece reflects this).
Still, it’s interesting to see what people will say when they are completely anonymous. It’s like the Ivy League’s collective id is now on display.
A University of Michigan version of this site can’t be far off. The only question now is will it reflect the bathroom walls at Ashley’s or Scorekeepers?
Where’s our naked ambition?
By Andrew Grossman, written on Mar. 5, 2007
A piece in Sunday’s New York Times Magazine on the rise of the campus sex magazine got me wondering. Magazines like Boink and H-Bomb have popped up at Vassar, Harvard, Boston University, Yale, Columbia and the University of Chicago. But not here.
These days, when anyone can run a virtual media empire out of a dorm room, student-generated sex magazines, some with the imprimatur of university financing and faculty advisers, are becoming a fact of campus life. Their subjects and contributors are the gals — and guys — down the hall; their target audience is male, female, straight, gay and everything in between.
Don’t call it porn, though.
These publications vary in tone and content, but while all strive to be provocative after a fashion, they generally eschew the term “pornographic,” hurling it as an insult with the good-natured mutual contempt of varsity football teams. “Outlet … is not intended to be porn,” sniffs a December letter from Traube to readers, saucily addressed “Dear Hotbottoms.” “They do a very good job of that over at Harvard.” On their Web site, Harvard staff members retort: “If you aren’t mature enough to tell the difference between playful nudity and pornography you probably shouldn’t be reading H Bomb.”
The exception is Boink, which Oleyourryk calls “user-friendly porn”: an unblushing assortment of bared private parts, lewd prose and graphic caricatures. With its panoply of contributors — about 50 percent of whom are enrolled at B.U., most of the rest at other colleges — Boink is the most independent and commercially ambitious of the pack, and at first glance the least interested in critical thought.
So, what gives? Are the University’s Midwestern sensibilities getting in the way? Is this giant state institution stifling our creativity — if that’s the right word? Either way, if you want to keep wearing those silly “Harvard: The Michigan of the East” t-shirts, someone has to step up, start a magazine and put us back among the country’s top universities.