There's a Slate article titled "The End of the College Essay" circulating in various Facebook and Twitter circles critical of assigning long essays to undergraduates. The gist of the complaint mirrors the complaints I've heard over the years from students and...
Two steps forward, two steps back. Just as three women completed training in the Marines for the first time- and as the US Military works to integrate women in to the combat arms, a top female US...
Last week, I finally had the opportunity to read Lisa Martin’s recent piece on compliance entitled Against Compliance. Prof. Martin meticulously evaluates the literature on compliance and concludes...
It is time for an academic Thanksgiving (at least it is for me, flew home early because it was Reading Week in the UK), that time of year when we give thanks for when our ancestral academic Deans...
[Note: This is a guest post by James M. McCormick of Iowa State University and is the third post on the Duck Forum on Teaching US Foreign Policy] "Teaching American Foreign Policy in the 21st Century" by James M. McCormick, Iowa State University In teaching the American foreign policy making course over the past several decades, I have always had three major goals. First, I want students to become familiar with the values and beliefs that have influenced and shaped American foreign policy from its beginning to the present, albeit with a particular emphasis since World War II. Second, I...
Via Bad Lip Reading. Outtakes here.
I attended a celebration of the life of Kenneth Waltz held at Columbia University last weekend. The service was organized and hosted by Robert Jervis, Robert Art, and Richard Betts and included sixteen speakers -- family members, scholars, and former students who gave wonderful tributes based on their own personal reflections on his life, research, and teaching. It was clear that Waltz was gifted intellectually. His book Man, the State, and War was written in just over a year in 1959 and transformed the field. But this was only the start, he made major intellectual contributions in each of...
(Note: This post is cross-posted at The Research Centre in International Relations at King's College, London's Blog) Feminist theorists have long made and substantiated the argument that gender "matters" in International Relations (IR) theory and practice, and that it matters in complicated and hybrid ways. Gender analysis has been used (in my view effectively) across a wide spectrum of theoretical approaches, issue areas, and contemporary political events. I thought about this as I was reading news stories and opinion pieces expressing disappointment that Malala Yousafzai did not win the...
How do we communicate ideas to our audience? What steps can we take to introduce advanced concepts to our students or the general public? Scholars work for decades on the content of their arguments but spend very little time thinking about how to translate their ideas for specific consumers of information. In Phil Arena’s review of Braumoeller’s new excellent book, he makes a baseball reference, later noting that he does not even like sports. This is a typical tactic in Political Science, if not all of academia. We often make sports metaphors and analogies in order to push our point...
[Note: This is a guest post by Steven W. Hook from Kent State University and is the second post on the Duck Forum on Teaching US Foreign Policy] “Teaching U.S. Foreign Policy in an Age of Uncertainty,” by Steven W. Hook (Kent State University) Students of U.S. foreign policy face a unique intellectual challenge: to understand state policy making at the intersection of domestic and global governance. Their instructors, who face the same task, need to integrate the two domains in their lectures and assignments. Along the way, they confront the added burdens of making some sense of the...
Yay, pointless self-inflicted global catastrophe avoided. In between all the gnashing of teeth about whether the United States Congress would act to forestall a default on the country's national debt and actually reopen the government, some other things were happening around the world. I've been meaning to write about the energy and environment front for weeks, but my attention has been captured by the awful spectacle that was the U.S. Congress, namely the machinations of the radical Tea Party right. Before I delve into links about energy and environment, let me give conservative New York...
(Note: This post is cross-posted at the Columbia University Press Authors' Blog) Over the last couple of years, the US military has begun to employ FETs (Female Engagement Teams) in Afghanistan, characterizing their purpose as "to engage the female populace" of the country. The mission of these groups of female soldiers seems to be divided between victim services, trust building, influence seeking, and intelligence gathering. Many feminist scholars (e.g., Keally McBride and Annick T. R. Wibben) have expressed their deep concerns about both the effectiveness of FETs and the ideas about sex,...