This is my 20th year at the University of Texas. Although my dad was a university professor, I’m something of an accidental academic. I sought to get my PhD with the hopes of doing something more in terms of public service. I started off my PhD at Georgetown inauspiciously. In the first week of school, I sat down with the legendary comparativist Sam Barnes who asked me what my plans were. I said I wanted to run for Congress and if that didn’t work out, I’d teach. Talk about clueless! I’m surprised he didn’t kick me out of his office then and there.

To be fair, I didn’t really understand what a PhD was really for, in those days, which was mostly to train replacements for existing faculty. There was more of a stigma then of people getting PhDs and then going in to policy or other lines of work. I also entered graduate school at a time and circumstance when the internet was just taking off.

Weeks before starting my PhD in 1999, I had been in Ecuador completing my service in the Peace Corps. I had applied to graduate schools from there without regular access to the internet. There was one phone in my town, and I had to drive an hour in the back of a truck to get to a town where I could hook up my computer and modem to a phone line to check the internet.

I was so clueless about graduate schools that I applied to the PhD program at the LBJ School where I now teach. That program requires a prior master’s which I did not have. Needless to say, I didn’t get in, which is probably fortunate in some sense.

The point of this post is not simply memory lane but to talk about how academia has changed as I see it over the last 20 years, which is somewhat idiosyncratic to my own experience. While I’ve only been at one institution, I had postdocs at Princeton and Harvard before coming here, and I follow academic trends more broadly. I do teach at an inter-disciplinary school almost exclusively to graduate students so some of my observations may be specific to that experience.

So, here are some observations.

Pressures to Publish

The pressure to publish is super high, starting even in graduate school. We have hired people out of graduate school with close to tenurable records. So, if you are a graduate student, particularly at a non-elite school and you have aspirations to be on the tenure track, you should start an active research and publishing effort during graduate school.

There are Too Many Candidates

We receive hundreds of applications for jobs, and it’s very difficult to sort through them. Some of the triage that happens is based on fit, with candidates who apply for jobs randomly weeded out right away. Some of the other ways review committees triage is by unconsciously privileging elite programs or places where they know people.

If you get 100+ applications for a single job, it’s challenging to go through all of the files carefully. Some satisficing heuristics that I’m sure people use are elite schools, letter writers they know, and volume and placement of publications. That kind of stuff happens before people have read much more in the file. It’s probably rare before people are invited out that there is deep engagement in the writing samples. There simply isn’t the time to delve into 100’s of files at that level of detail. Increasingly, we’ve moved to a long short list and do some Zoom interviews even before flying people out.

You can’t do anything about that market signal if you didn’t go to an elite school. That’s where publishing your a– off could be a point in your favor, but you can also pursue postdocs at higher ranked institutions to your own.

The other thing to do is seek people out on your committee who are well connected in the discipline whose name is known broadly because it helps in the clutter of 100s of applicants if the letter writers are known quantities and can reach out to faculty at the school where you want a job.

Postdocs May Be Necessary

These are hard to get in any case, but it’s also that case that graduate students may be competing with junior associates. If you are determined to get an academic position, a lot of the junior positions may end up going to people who are looking to change institutions, rather than newly minted PhDs. That makes it harder to get a job, so graduate students should be prepared to do postdocs. I ultimately did three before I landed my position at UT, the third being a postdoc at LBJ which turned into a tenure track offer after I got here.

The Belfer, CISAC, Niehaus, Mershon, Clements and other postdocs are super competitive, as are all the other one-off or periodic postdocs that come up. I’m not sure what the most efficient way to find out about these programs these days, but it would be foolhardy for people to put all their eggs in TT jobs.

Be Prepared for Non-Academic Jobs

It’s always been true that there are too many candidates for not enough jobs, but the shift to more adjunct labor, the underfunding of higher education, and attacks on social science funding means that the surplus of PhDs in international relations/political science is even higher than it was in the past. The crash in government jobs makes the situation worse.

We’re seeing some departments around the country limit, pause, or eliminate their PhD programs as a consequence. This is coming at a time when baby boomers may be finally retiring. There are situations like our university where hiring is still happening, perhaps buoyed by some donor funding and some of the renewed interest in classical education of these “civic education” programs.

If there is a prolonged recession, the job market for academic jobs may get worse. So, it has been increasingly true that PhDs in international relations probably should be prepared to work outside academia – for think tanks, government, IOs, NGOs and the private sector. The more skills you have the better. That includes both language and data skills.

Increasing Metrification in Academia

Let’s say you do get a TT job and are on your way to tenure. Well, it’s kind of sad, but there are heuristics that departments and universities are using to chart your progress relative to peers. It’s partially about your h-index, publications numbers per year while in rank and since your defense, placement of publications, and student evaluation scores, relative to the department and university means and trends over time, and, to a lesser extent, grant dollars brought in.

These can become shorthand crutches and heuristics of quality. Your university will be figuring whether to tenure people in lots of different disciplines so the people at the central leadership don’t have easy means of judging quality across disciplines, other than relying on the reports from outside reviewers. But, they can look at volume of publications and placement in prestige presses and journals. They can look at student evaluations and trends over time, as problematic as they may be.

These aren’t great developments, but it’s a tide that’s hard to resist so if you’re going to play the game, you have to play it as well as you can. There are well-known biases in student evaluations, and students themselves may be changing in key ways, so you may have to adjust accordingly. You can supplement teaching evaluations with peer assessments, but this is an area that is fraught but one that you’ll probably find frustrating.

I did a course more than a decade ago where despite really working hard, the evaluations were poor and it became a factor in a promotion decision in ways that were problematic. I don’t know how much you can or should try to game evals, but ignore their importance to administrators at your peril.

Students May Not Read as Much

Students often have part-time or even full-time jobs so assigning a 150 plus pages a week might mean your students do little of it, because they are overwhelmed. Students post-COVID and having grown up on YouTube and Instragram may have limited attention spans to read long texts.

I’m increasingly assigning multi-media accompaniments not to replace but to supplement texts. You may need to meet students where they are. I have not cracked the code on this, but I think you need to be prepared for students with different expectations than yours about what is the right level of effort for your classes.

Faddishness in Methods

When I was coming out, game theory was a pretty popular approach, making in-roads in the field. We have always been a more applied program so it’s not always been as obvious that game theory approaches on their own would be policy relevant. Still, I get the sense that methodologically the field has moved away from that as a method of choice in the toolkit, though it’s one many respect scholars employ.

There was also a period where experimental work became more popular as well as both randomized controlled trials (RCTs) and field experiments. More lately, we’ve seen increased popularization of models derived from economics like difference in differences, amid the wider turn to causal identification. For both RCTs and diff-in-diff, there has been some pushback based on questions about the appropriateness of the methods and core findings. I think you’ve also seen that in experimental work, where findings are difficult to replicate. More lately, a lot of candidates we are seeing are doing work with big data using AI and machine learning.

My general concern is that a lot of this is faddishness that could go away in time, but having skills with data in R to analyze data, make maps, alongside some substantive knowledge about topics or deep language knowledge, will be a mixed approach that will allow you to stay relevant.

I would go to as many different kinds of methods and substantive programs as you can to be skilled in mixed methods, but it’s more important to ask important questions in my mind than it is to chase the latest trendy method.

Academic Freedom?

If you are a faculty member in America, particularly in the South, you are probably worried that legislators will take a fine-tooth comb to your syllabi to weed out DEI content like they are doing at Texas A&M. That’s a real fear. It hasn’t come to all classes yet, and I hope it won’t, but academic freedom is under strain.

Outside the classroom, we increasingly see faculty members get in trouble for speech, as we saw in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination. While faculty should be free to express their First Amendment rights, they should also be aware of the potential audience for remarks on social media that might be construed as condoning violence.

That’s likely to put faculty at risk of losing their jobs, so faculty should be intentional about steering clear from such sentiments. Some of the topics that people study like race and gender are also directly in the crosshairs of some politicians, which is unfortunate. I hope the fever breaks so that people can study important topics how they see fit. In the meantime, it’s true that academic freedom feels more parlous than before. At the same time, self-censorship in advance is hugely problematic.

None of these observations may be surprising for folks inside the academy, but I hope readers find them useful. These are somewhat navigable pressures in academia for the moment, but are worrisome and profound. I’ll likely be retired long before the next 20 years, but I’ll check back in a few years, if blogs are still around, to reflect again on what happens next.