This is a guest post by Idean Salehyan. Associate Professor of Political Science, University of Texas at Dallas “Why did you become an academic?” is a question that I’m frequently asked. For me, my path into this profession is pretty clear. I was about fourteen and...
This is a guest post from Rob Blair and Jeff Colgan of Brown University. Since Donald Trump was elected last November, there has been no shortage of commentary warning that he represents a unique...
This is the third in a series of posts about bridging the gap between policy and academia. The first focused on principles for engagement. The second on short-form writing, including blogging. ...
This is part II of a series on bridging the gap between policy and academia. In my last post, I laid out some principles for thinking policy engagement as an academic. In this post, I'll talk about...
Many of us are Baltimore bound for ISA, and other than the Duckies this Thursday night, what are you looking forward to? What panels, receptions, events, new books have caught your attention? Mike Horowitz winning the Karl Deutsch prize? PRIO folks, Ida Rudolfsen and runner-up Jonas Nordkvell, winning the Jacek Kugler paper award on demography and geography for work on food price shocks and unrest and rainfall and conflict? Exciting stuff. (I mostly want to use this post to test our new Facebook auto-post image, but serious responses, including self-nominations most welcome). I've got an...
This is a guest post by Paul Beaumont, PhD Candidate at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences (NMBU). Previously, he worked as an academic writing advisor at NMBU and as a Junior Research Fellow at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs (NUPI). Some time ago, back when Duckpods still happened, Nicholas Onuf talked to Dan Nexon about the impact of World of Our Making (WOOM). Onuf’s masterpiece is rightly credited with founding Constructivism in International Relations. Yet as the two reflected upon the course 1990s constructivism embarked upon, Onuf acknowledged that his...
What's wrong with the current use of metrics in academia? This is the best summary that I've ever seen. Here's the horrifying key table from the paper Siddhartha Roy co-authored on perverse incentives in academia. #AAASmtg pic.twitter.com/sdrUlPmXs7 — Mike 48% Tⓐylor (@MikeTaylor) February 18, 2017 I will be discussing the publishing part of the equation on my Saturday panel at ISA.
The FAKE NEWS media (failing @nytimes, @NBCNews, @ABC, @CBS, @CNN) is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American People! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 17, 2017 President Trump tweeted this on Friday. Even before he issued this egregious tweet, I had prepared a thread on Twitter of my observations from a recent trip to DC. This builds on my post from earlier in the week on how to defend democracy from the perch of the Ivory Tower. After my trip to DC, it occurred to me that academics, particularly tenured ones, have the freedom to resist this administration and speak out in...
Abe Newman and I have a piece in Vox on Trump's attempt to pressure allies into spending more on defense. You should ignore the title. The gist of the argument is that, first, there are upsides to having wealthy and technologically advanced allies dependent on the US for their security needs; second, while it would be great to get NATO allies to spend more on defense, this is a very dangerous way to go about doing it; and, third, the benefits of burden-sharing are likely overblown. Since it went live, I've had a few interesting exchanges. One of the claims that we make is that Trump's calls...
Ah, the spring semester: When the thoughts of many turn to the promise of summer, while the thoughts of panicked ABDs turn to the question of what they’re going to be doing beyond the end of this academic year. Right on schedule, the jobs boards are filling up with this year’s crop of “visiting” professor positions--inviting young (and not-so-young) ABDs and early-career faculty to gamble on a choice that will uproot their lives without any promise of permanent or even long-term employment. Having spent my early career off the tenure track, I wanted to take this opportunity to make a...
This is a guest post by Zachary C. Shirkey, an Associate Professor of Political Science, Hunter College, CUNY. Attempts by observers to give Trump’s foreign policy some coherence by finding an underlying ideology that motivates it have largely focused on Jacksonianism. Certainly, aspects of Trump’s outlook and those of a number of his advisers fit the description of Jacksonianism. Jacksonians see US interests in white ethno-nationalist terms and they emphasize strength, unilateralism, self-reliance, and coercion. Jacksonians also seize upon simple solutions for complex problems. Early Trump...
Today’s revelation that Mike Flynn resigned from his post as National Security Advisor is another strong sign that the struggle between Truth and Politics is not a foregone conclusion. Indeed, we ought to actually celebrate the fact that when Flynn lied about speaking with the Russian ambassador, and the lie was made public, he was forced to resign. This victory notwithstanding, we still must be extremely vigilant against the Trump administration’s attack on Truth. For the administration apparently knew that he lied some time ago, and it was only with increased public scrutiny that Flynn...