Academics depend on slow processes subject to unfortunate slowdowns. And, unfortunately, academic timelines can make or break careers.
Playing the Waiting Game: The Harsh Truth of Academic Timelines
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academia
Writing Wednesday: embracing criticism for book revisions
Many a postdoc are likely in my position this year, dissertation defense safely in the review mirror and settling into the groove of their research. Those who, like me, are fortunately enough to...
Syllabus Musing—can we teach foreign policy without paradigms?
As a new postdoc to the Kinder Insitute, I have the good fortune not to be teaching this semester. In addition to working on my book manuscript—more on that later—I have been spending a good deal of...
What Makes a Good Book Review: Some Editorial Advice
The following is a guest post by Andrew Owsiak, Associate Professor at the University of Georgia and Book Editor for International Studies Review. The race to push scholarly research into the world...
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The Holiday Boost: Why You Should Submit a Manuscript before Winter Break
What does any faculty member REALLY want for the holidays? It’s not a Lexus, it’s not jewelry, it’s a brand new revise-and-resubmit (R&R) manuscript. It’s really all that is on my list every year. That and, of course, world peace. How can one get an R&R manuscript? So far, I think R&R decisions are the result of the following four conditions: (a) Good work without any serious theoretical or empirical flaws (b) An introduction that doesn’t make the reviewers/editor think the piece is crap from the get-go (c) All reviewers are pretty positive about the manuscript (d) ...
Mixing Scholarly with Blogging Identities
[Note: This is a guest post from Mira Sucharov and Brent E. Sasley. Mira Sucharov is Associate Professor of Political Science at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. She blogs at Haaretz.com and at Open Zion. Follow her on Twitter. Brent Sasley is Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Texas at Arlington. He blogs at Mideast Matrix. Follow him on Twitter.] Changes to our technology and to our scholarly norms present new challenges to scholars who engage in the public sphere. More and more academics in Political Science, and especially...
The Token Woman on Hiring Committees: time for a change
Policies and practices set up to avoid discrimination in the past have a tendency to expire. Remember, 'Don't Ask Don't Tell' was originally set up to protect gay service-members within the US forces. Similarly, the often unofficial rule of having one woman on hiring committees has reached its expiry date. Primarily as a result of effective equality and diversity campaigns in the 1980s and early 1990s, many departments instituted either an explicit or informal policy to include 'at least' one woman on each hiring committee- usually after finding that most hiring committees included no women,...
Why I Didn’t Quit Academia
There have been a spate of posts about why folks have quit academia.... so much so that Dan Drezner issued this challenge: Has anyone written a "Why I Haven't Quit the Academy" post yet? — Daniel Drezner (@dandrezner) October 27, 2013 So, I decided to figure out why I did not quit. Sure, looking backwards from where things stand now, it would have been a mistake to quit. Things have worked out really well for me, but that was hardly foreseeable and there were a couple of points along the way where quitting might have made sense: It took me three years to land a tenure track position,...
The power of mentorship: a reflection
In the Monkey Cage’s recent symposium on gender and political science, David Lake writes how important it is that our scholarly networks become less gendered, how male scholars must make an effort to mentor women in the field. In my view, the importance of mentorship cannot be understated. Without the support of several scholars in security studies, not all but many of them men, I may have indeed decided that this field was not for someone like me. In my first year of graduate school, I was beginning to see myself as more of an “IR theory” than a “security studies” student (yes, whatever...
Citation Counts are Like Democracy
There is much gnashing about citations of late. This tweet inspired the ensuing spew below: Formula predicts research papers' future citations https://t.co/4Hy8j3Glqj. I am afraid the citation game is getting out of hand. — John Panaretos (@J_Panaretos) October 5, 2013 But also this series of posts at the Monkey Cage last week on gender bias in citations (the link points to the final piece in the series, so it has links to the rest of the posts) raises questions about using citations as a metric of success. If the numbers are problematic, what should we do? Let's move back a step. ...
Gender and Inclusion in the Profession
The Monkey Cage has launched a symposium on the gender gap in academia. Jane Mansbridge, Barbara Walter, Sara Mitchell, Lisa Martin, Ryan Powers, Daniel Maliniak, Rick Wilson, Ashley Leeds, Beth Simmons, and David Lake will explore a range of issues over the course of this week. I know that this symposium will lead to a productive discussion that will move us forward. My political psychologist side would like to see this as well as other conversations about diversity and equality also touch upon perceptions of inclusion. Social and organizational psychologists have long highlighted the...
PhD or Not a PhD
It was perhaps appropriate that yesterday's tale of a young pundit's career unraveling due to falsely claimed PhD coincided with the first meeting of the Doctoral Research Seminar I am teaching. Elizabeth O'Bagy had given the impression that she had finished her dissertation, but apparently not so much. After tweeting about it, I got some push back--how big of a sin is this? Do academics have a role in gate-keeping/outing those who lie about their credentials? My answers: big in academia and hell, yeah. To clarify this, let's focus on what a PhD is. It is not a certificate that says you...