The following is a guest post by Jeffrey C. Isaac, who is James H. Rudy Professor of Political Science at Indiana University and editor in chief of Perspectives on Politics: A Political Science Public Sphere. “I reject this paper.” “I recommend that this paper be...
It is that point in the semester when the energy of summer wears off, endless grading awaits, deadlines loom, meetings drag on and everyone feels swamped, exhausted and grouchy. [1] It’s that point...
There are a lot of really great aspects of professorial teaching. It at the core of education, and thus at the core of universities as institutions of higher education. Professors have the...
Mid-October is a beautiful time of year – leaves are changing, the air is getting crisp, and there are a variety of outdoor activities to partake in. All of the wonderfulness of October is...
It’s the last weekend in August, which means at least 1 of 2 things are happening: APSA drinking ABDs hurriedly working on their job market materials. Since (a) is still a week away, I thought I’d take a second to offer some unsolicited advice on (b): job market materials. By job market materials, I’m referring to the CV, cover letter, writing sample, teaching portfolio, research statement, transcripts, and letters of recommendation that will make up the totality of what any academic hiring committee will know about you and your work. It’s basically your academic life, condensed into...
As the summer movie season ends, it makes sense to bring back Friday Nerd Blogging after spending most Fridays at the theatre. This week's invokes all kinds of IR, including resource conflicts, gender dynamics, and Tom Hardy:
The following is a guest post by Jeff Colgan, Richard Holbrooke Assistant Professor at Brown University, and is @JeffDColgan on Twitter. It’s that time of year again, when professors are designing syllabi as fast as they can with deliberation and care. Recently I analyzed IR syllabi for PhD students. The data suggest a gender bias that instructors could easily correct. The case that gender diversity is good for IR and political science has been made elsewhere, repeatedly and persuasively. According to APSA, women are 42 percent of graduate students in political science (in the US), but only...
Once again, those poli sci types on twitter (Marc Lynch, Dan Drezner, me, and the other usual suspects) will be meeting up at the APSA on Friday, August 4th from 5:30-7pm at the Parc 55 hotel bar (which I believe is on the second floor) which is across the street from the Hilton. Note that the regular Hilton is undergoing renovation so the usual bar/lobby meeting arrangements will not work this time around.
My first post on the Duck focused on the emergence of the #BringBackOurGirls hashtag and campaign, pointing also to the ease with which hashtags can get appropriated and campaigns derailed. Yesterday, #BringBackOurGirls Nigeria (@BBOG_Nigeria on twitter) started a one week campaign to mark 500 days since the abduction. Given the continuation of the campaign, in today's post I want to dig a bit deeper in examining the urge to do "something": Why do some events capture our attention while others fail to produce any kind of reaction? What kind of reactions are helpful? And - for whom? The...
So, in another installment on the job market front, I thought I'd weigh in with some thoughts on possible differences of job postings and hiring processes at policy schools. Admittedly, this is an idiosyncratic take having just worked at one of them, but I think there may be some generalizable aspects from my own experience. I have also passed through two others as a post-doc. If my institution is any indication, policy schools tend to be heterogeneous interdisciplinary places which can make faculty coordination and hiring processes even more fraught than in a disciplinary department. So,...
A long, long time ago, before I became a professor and even before I went to graduate school for my doctorate, I worked for a few years in the defense community. I was a Defense Analyst for the Strategic Assessment Center of Science Applications International Corporation (unfortunately, the SAC no longer exists), which was a small organization that dealt with issues of future war. We did much of our work for the Office of Net Assessment of the Defense Department under recently-retired Andrew Marshall. Our job, simply said, was to help DoD think about what war would look like 25 years or so...
Why Worry About Online Media and Academic Freedom? Um, because academic administrations have lousy instincts? I have gotten involved in this whole online media intersecting with academic freedom mostly by accident--the ISA mess last year. I am not an expert on academic freedom, nor am I an expert on the use of online media. So, I could imagine a university representative being upset at me as an employee trashing their academic freedom/social media politicies and it not being entirely illegitimate (however, I would still do it and expect to be tolerated...). On the other hand, observing a...