Grad students who weren’t schooled at elite universities face real challenges in a squeezed academic job market. But many talented grad students do reach tenure when they receive the same support and guidance offered in elite universities.
This is a guest post by Idean Salehyan. Associate Professor of Political Science, University of Texas at Dallas “Why did you become an academic?” is a question that I’m frequently asked. For me, my...
What's wrong with the current use of metrics in academia? This is the best summary that I've ever seen. Here's the horrifying key table from the paper Siddhartha Roy co-authored on perverse...
It's time. I'm signing off as permanent member of the Duck of Minerva after seven (7!?!) years of blogging. The experience has helped shape me as a professional, writer, and member of the IR and...
Another day, another piece chronicling problems with the metrics scholars use to assess quality. Colin Wight sends George Lozano's "The Demise of the Impact Factor": Using a huge dataset of over 29 million papers and 800 million citations, we showed that from 1902 to 1990 the relationship between IF and paper citations had been getting stronger, but as predicted, since 1991 the opposite is true: the variance of papers’ citation rates around their respective journals’ IF [impact factor] has been steadily increasing. Currently, the strength of the relationship between IF and paper citation...
I keep seeing this article pop around websites this morning: "Rule No. 1 for Female Academics: Don’t Have a Baby." I'm happy to see all the family friendly policies mentioned concerning assistant professors. But, as the article points out, the "baby penalty" is also a concern for graduate students who are parents. My question: do you know of any family friendly policies for grad students?
I'll admit that this is a rather anodyne title, but the alternatives involved language not suited for above-the-fold content. The tenure process involves power asymmetries that make life very unpleasant for assistant professors. They have to worry about alienating their colleagues and their administration. They interact daily with people -- who are too often petty, fickle, or, at least, mysterious -- who hold tremendous power over their careers. Then there's the whole publish-or-perish thing. Now, many of these indignities don't even rise to the level of first-world problems. Compared to the...
I understand that there's been some recent blog-chatter on one of my favorite hobbyhorses, peer review in Political Science and International Relations. John Sides gets all 'ruh roh' because of an decades-old old, but scary, experiment that shows pretty much what every other study of peer-review shows: Then, perhaps coincidentally, Steve Walt writes a longish post on "academic rigor" and peer review. Walt's sorta right and sorta wrong, so I must write something of my own,* despite the guarantee of repetition. What does Walt get right? Third, peer review is probably overvalued because...
Hopefully, another semester has come to a close for you and you’re catching up on some much needed research/sleep. After I’ve doled out grades for my students, I usually get a nice big stack of evaluations of my teaching abilities, filled out by those very same students who squeaked by with a “C-“in my class. At my previous university, it was the ONLY way my teaching was evaluated; for better or worse, no senior faculty or peers ever evaluated my teaching content, style, or skills in the classroom. A whopping 40% of my annual evaluation came from what my students recorded on bubble-sheets...
Via a Facebook friend, an analysis of the sound and fury surrounding MOOCs by Aaron Bady: Where this urgency comes from, however, might be less important than what it does to our sense of temporality, how experience and talk about the way we we are, right now, in “the MOOC moment.” In the MOOC moment, it seems to me, it’s already too late, always already too late. The world not only will change, but it has changed. In this sense, it’s isn’t simply that “MOOCs are the future,” or online education ischanging how we teach,” in the present tense. Those kinds of platitudes are chokingly [sic]...
Ari Kohen on the value of "edutainment": Finally, and most importantly, is the central claim that the test of education is whether or not it’s entertaining. Wales asks, “why wouldn’t you have the most entertaining professor, the one with the proven track record of getting knowledge into people’s heads?” Is there evidence that the most entertaining lecture is the one that gets “knowledge into people’s heads”? Again, I’m not suggesting that a boring lecture is going to do the trick, but I’m arguing that entertaining students doesn’t necessarily equate with teaching them something. When I...
It is that time of year when people are getting the official letter informing them that their tenure/promotion has cleared the final hurdles--the President, the Board of Regents/Governors/Trustees/Assorted Rich People. So, congratulations to those that have made it past all of the various hurdles along the way.