A key part of the tenure process is for outside experts to evaluate the candidate's research (hard to evaluate their teaching and service from outside). These letters can be quite handy for getting a less biased perspective that a department might have (in either direction). It is especially useful for providing insights in cases where the candidate's subfield is under or unrepresented among the senior faculty evaluating tenure (a...
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Embargo My Eggo!
Today, I learned that I am out of touch. Ok, that is old news. I got into a twitter conversation about embargoed dissertations. A friend was trying to access and then cite a dissertation that has been out for a few years, and she could not because the dissertation was embargoed. I then raised this on twitter, and got a whole lot of push back. So, let's take a look at this. My basic take is that a dissertation is a contribution to knowledge, and...
Forget the 800-pound gorilla: the United States is the 300,000-pound blue whale of IR scholarship
This is a guest post from Cullen Hendrix, Director of the Sié Chéou-Kang Center for International Security and Diplomacy and Professor at the Korbel School of International Studies, University of Denver. International relations and international security scholarship have a U.S. bias problem—or so we are told. Ido Oren has argued the modern discipline of political science generally—and international relations specifically—was shaped by U.S....
A War On … Something?
This is a guest post by Linda Monsees who works as a Post-Doctoral Researcher at Goethe University Frankfurt and is the author of Crypto-Politics. After wars on drugs, Christmas and everything in between, it seems that we people tend to call everything a war – everything despite a real war. But really, we are now in a ‘war on truth’? Politicians, companies, and countries start disinformation campaigns and lots of stories are shared that do not...
Protecting Civilians Through Responsible Scholarly Engagement (Vacation Planning Edition)
Recently I highlighted Korbel's new Responsible Engagement Institute, an important innovation in our profession. I shouted this out in the context of my own concerns with survey experiments that (perhaps irresponsibly) inflate the appearance of American support for targeting civilians abroad. However make no mistake: just as humane treatment involves more than providing toothbrushes and soap, protecting civilians involves much more than...
Seeing Israel and Palestine Up Close
I just came back from eight days in Israel and Palestine, as I participated in a program, Academic Exchange, that has already taken something like 600 scholars (mostly IR but also other political scientists, lawyers [including my brother-in-law], and some economists) to learn more about the place, the conflict and the politics. The experience was pretty intense, so I blogged my daily experiences at saideman.blogspot.com starting with this one...
Will Republican voters punish Trump for a trade war with China? It depends.
This is a guest post from Shana Gadarian and Dan McDowell, both Associate Professors at the Maxwell School at Syracuse University. Earlier this month, after Chinese authorities reportedly backtracked on a set of economic reform promises as part of ongoing trade discussions, President Trump announced that existing tariffs on $200 billion of Chinese goods would increase from 10% to 25%. China responded with new tariff hikes of its own on American...
On Responsible Scholarly Engagement
Rob Farley has posted a Lawyers, Guns and Money podcast discussing my new research with Alex Montgomery on why reports of Americans' willingness to target civilians have been greatly exaggerated. One theme we discussed that bears emphasizing are questions of why we do the survey research we do, and how we decide what findings to publicize, where, how and for whom. Do we truly need poll data on the precise conditions under which Americans would...
Why Do Opinion Leaders Misjudge Public Attitudes?
Last week, Dina Smeltz, Jordan Tama, and I had a piece in the Monkey Cage on the results of our 2018 survey of 588 foreign policy opinion leaders. We found that these opinion leaders misestimated public attitudes on (1) US engagement in the world, (2) support for trade, (3) support for military intervention, and (4) support for immigration. I did a thread on the results, which I'll summarize below, but I wanted to follow up with some thoughts...
So Call Me Maybe
A recent IR Twitter flare-up occurred on a seemingly innocuous topic illustrated by the flow-chart above: what should I call my professor? A PSA from Prof. Megan L. Cook recommended students to address their professors as Professors or Dr., avoiding references to their marital status or first names. Prof. Raul Pacheco-Vega tweeted the following: I also delete every email that first-persons me on a first email. Them’s the rules. You can decide...
The ULTIMATE Academic Job Market Guide
The following is a guest post by K. Anne Watson, a PhD candidate in Political Science and International Affairs at the University of Georgia's School of Public and International Affairs. The academic job market is incredibly stressful. This is at least partly because so much of the process tends to be opaque. (The rest, of course, is because you will be asked to handle all of it while juggling your day-to-day life and feeling a vague—or...
Are Generic Drugs Safe? Big Claims in a New Book
I was in the car when the Dallas radio station KERA came on with an interview with the journalist Katherine Eban, author of the new book Bottle of Lies, in which she claims that the generic pharmaceutical industry faces widespread problems of quality. A high percentage of generic drugs come from India and most of the chemical ingredients or raw materials come from China. Generic drugs constitute according to Eban about 90% of the...