It’s no surprise that current events regularly lead us to update our syllabi. That doesn’t mean we can’t make “surprise” an important feature of our courses.
Our syllabi should be full of surprises
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Academia
U.S. Political Scientists Must Work To Support Free and Fair Democratic Elections
This is a guest post by Jeffrey C. Isaac, James H. Rudy Professor of Political Science at Indiana University, Bloomington. You can follow him at his blog at Democracy in Dark Times. Democracy is a...
The Interviews for Teaching World Politics Project
In less than a month, I'll be teaching "Introduction to International Relations" for the first time in over ten years. As luck (for certain values of "luck") would have it, this means I'm building a...
The networks and hidden procedures that keep discrimination alive in academia
This is the third post in our series on Race&IR.This is a guest post from Carla Norrlöf and Cheng Xu. Carla Norrlöf is an associate professor at the University of Toronto. Her research is in...
More Academia Posts
Beyond “Rejection”
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 rejected.” “I am sorry to inform you that your paper has been rejected for publication.” Social practices are constituted in large part by the words we regularly use and the meanings these words typically convey. Political science is a social practice. And variations of the sentences above are commonly employed by political...
Rejection Is The Name of the Game
Much discussion lately about how much rejection is in this academic game. I had a conversation yesterday with a pal who was finding it much harder, it seemed, to get work published after tenure than before. "I thought I knew how to do this." Folks have been calling for the true CVs of people--where rejections would be listed. Not sure that is going to happen. However, in this week where I received news of receiving a fellowship to supplement my sabbatical, I thought I would list many of the rejections of my work along the way (my spreadsheet for tracking my work is pretty good but...
Put a DA-RT in it
If you have been living under a rock as I apparently have, then like me you may be unaware of the DA-RT controversy that is brewing in the American Political Science Association.* Turns out that some of our colleagues have been pushing for some time to write a new set of rules for qualitative scholarship that, among other things will require “cited data [be] available at the time of publication through a trusted digital repository” [This is from the Journal Editor's Transparency Statement, which is what is being implemented Jan. 15]. The goal I gather is to enhance transparency and...
The Mindful Academic
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 when we know the semester is going to become a runaway train, a downward spiral that ends in stacks of blue books, wine, and crying about your failure as a teacher. It’s that point in the semester when the blank page seems to stare back at you, when the spark of creativity has dimmed and you have serious doubts about the usefulness of anything you “study.” But it doesn’t have to be this way!...
Zen of teaching
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 opportunity to watch students grow through discovery and skill building. Professors and students through the practice of teaching build a shared connection of knowledge and inquiry. For many faculty and (hopefully) students, teaching raises new perspectives and forces reconsideration of established ideas. Teaching has economic benefits for students, notwithstanding recent debates. All of this and more is...
Gearing Up for the Academic Job Market: Getting THE CALL
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 meaningless, however, to a special group of individuals: those on the academic job market that are worried about employment in the next academic year. For this group, mid-October is typically the beginning of the horrible downward spiral of (a) hitting refresh on your inbox[1], (b) double checking that your phone is on and charged, (c) trying to have the willpower to avoid checking job rumor websites,...
“There was something missing from scholars’ models of political and economic life: ideas”
The Chronicle of Higher Education has a longish write-up on Pinar Dogan and Dani Rodrik’s efforts to exonerate Dogan’s father after he had been caught up in then Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s efforts to push Turkey’s generals out of the political arena. At the heart of this effort was the publication in 2010 of documents detailing an alleged plot—Operation Sledgehammer—by Turkish military leaders in 2003 to overthrow the government by undertaking a massive campaign of state terrorism. Dogan’s father was a general in 2003 and was, according to the documents, the leader of the...
APSA Statement on Campus Carry
In response to demand for a statement on recent gun shootings on college campuses, prompted in small part on the Duck by Maryam Deloffre, APSA has issued a short statement on campus carry, the new Texas law that will potentially allow students to bring concealed weapons in to classrooms: The American Political Science Association is deeply concerned about the impact of Texas’s new Campus Carry law on freedom of expression in Texas universities. The law, which was passed earlier this year and takes effect in 2016, allows licensed handgun carriers to bring concealed handguns into buildings on...