The recent flap over errors in the APA Style manual has pushed me into pulling a Seinfeld and coining a new term: Cubicle Sourcing. You heard it here first, the day after Thanksgiving, 2009. Cubicle Sourcing is the opposite of Crowd Sourcing, of course.

Crowd Sourcing, Wikipedia reminds us, is “a neologism for the act of taking tasks traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing them to a group (crowd) of people or community in the form of an open call.” Cubicle Sourcing, then, is my neologism for taking a task that ought be done by a community, and assigning it to a team of isolated copywriters and editors.

APA, in other words, did everything backwards;…

The recent protests over fee increases in California’s higher education system are worth watching and worrying over for a lot of reasons, as a recent post on “Education is a Right” makes clear. “If California has taught us anything,” writers Greogory Candenna, “it is that the amount of fee hikes states and regents will impose on students to mitigate budget shortfalls is limitless.”

He’s not exaggerating. Fee increases have tripled the cost of college in California over the last decade. These are Reagan’s birds come home to roost in every sense. As Governor of California Reagan made his disdain of student protesters all too clear. The anti-war movement convinced Conservatives that too much education– like too much government– is…