If you've written a guest post for the Duck of Minerva recently, or published a piece at International Studies Quarterly while I was editor, you know that I really hate "heavy noun phrases." Scholars seem to really like using them. I don't know why. Perhaps they think...
The way that APSA leaders handled the Claremont Institute situation was troubling… will APSA, as an organization, be committed to some broadly liberal democratic values?
So the New York Times reported on Beverly Gage, a history professor at Yale University, resigning from her post as head of the Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy because of donor pressure....
Academic freedom is a very important value. Professional integrity is another. Both values admit complexity, and are the subject of reasonable disagreement among colleagues and leaders of academic...
Academic freedom is a very important value. Professional integrity is another. Both values admit complexity, and are the subject of reasonable disagreement among colleagues and leaders of academic institutions. At the same time, the modern academy would not be what it is, or at least aspires to...
The academic job market is terrible. It’s worse for international students.
While political comedy thrives, IR comedy, whatever that phrase might mean, is virtually non-existent. omedy gap’? Is it a figment of my imagination or a real problem?
The twentieth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks has come and gone. We've reflected on what led to the attacks, its human toll, how well America handled it, and what impacts the US response has had on the world. I thought it was also worth asking what effects these attacks had on the sub-field of...
Taking my children to their dance class yesterday morning in Quincy, MA I found, as the traffic ground to a halt, the town center draped in red, white, and blue bunting. A giant flag hung suspended from two cranes. A parade, I was told, was in the offing. To anyone not looking at a calendar the...
Many of academia’s core institutions are ‘held together by masking tape and pixie dust.’ But do they also rely on fantastical notions of academic karma?
Paul Musgrave concludes the “Lab Leaks” symposium by engaging with his interlocutors and reflecting on the challenges faced by political science in an era of public-facing scholarship.
Musgrave’s identification of dangerous ideas is correct, but his metaphor risks entrenching the fundamental problem: the (inevitable) weaponization of “scientific objectivity.”
Perhaps the problem isn’t that theories leak from the lab, but efforts to seal the lab in the first place. If political scientists spent more time observing the policy world, me might get both better and more careful theories in the first place.
Political Science isn’t sterile laboratory. The discipline is riddled with politics and deeply influenced by policy concerns.
Some political-science lab leaks are more difficult to control than others.
Paul Musgrave has written an important piece discussing how ideas developed within academia can have profoundly negative effects when they escape into the wild of the policymaking world. For someone like me who has been involved for many years in the Bridging the Gap project, whose...