Anne Harrington and Jacqueline (Jill) Hazelton take center stage in the inaugural G&T episode.
Duck Podcast G&T series episode 1: Power, realism, and the politics of IR Academia
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academia
Normative dilemma of writing policy?
This week, courtesy of my colleague Adam Stulberg and the Center for International Strategy, Technology, and Policy, our department hosted Matthew Kroenig. When I first learned of Kroenig’s visit,...
Under Review: Cite This!
The boon and bane of our academic enterprise is that we get feedback all the time on our work. Our work is better for it--that the hack-iest stuff I read is always stuff that is not submitted to...
A Strategy of Appeasement: Winning the Revise and Resubmit
You hear the “ping” of an incoming email and quickly check the subject – oh, crap, it’s from a journal![1] This could make or break your day. You open the email and quickly scan for the word...
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A Different Take on the URI Statement 2.0
Kindred Winecoff disagrees that this was a modest victory: I must completely disagree with his ("modest") level of satisfaction. This represents no victory at all because this new statement from URI officials, like the first one, completely misses the point. This is not about First Amendment rights. Nobody was saying that Loomis should be thrown into the deepest darkest dungeon never to be heard from again. They were saying that he should be fired or otherwise professionally damaged for an emotional -- and politically motivated -- response to a mass killing. The relevant standard here is...
A Modest Victory in the Struggle Against Academic Fecklessness
The URI administration has issued a new statement: What to make of this? On the one hand, I don't think anybody will buy the claim that (1) Erik is at fault for "not making clear that he was speaking solely as an individual" and (2) that this failure provided the "rationale for our original statement." The URI administration doesn't go far enough in terms of redressing the most offensive part of the earlier, rushed response: its implicit characterization of Erik's comments as "acts or threats of violence." On the other hand... I'll just outsource the "other hand" to Corey Robin: The...
The Academic-Policy Nexus (Or Lack Thereof)
In my first post after signing on with "Team Duck" I thought, before jumping into a series of weighty topics--rise of the east, end of the west, cratering of the middle east--it might be worth reflecting a little on my sojourn as a policymaker after beginning my career as a Political Scientist. As an IR scholar I started out specializing in the politics of international economics before gradually shifting over to the security studies side of this Poli Sci subfield. After an initial brush with death by acronymia when I joined the State Department, I was surprised at how well my training as a...
Crooked Timber Petition
As I sorta implied below, you don't need to agree with Erik's political views or his manner of expressing them to recognize that the President of the University of Rhode Island's statement is all kinds of appalling. The good folks at Crooked Timber have put together a petition to that effect. Go sign, if you'd be so kind. Meanwhile, Glen Reynolds explains the underlying dynamic of this kind of attack. Except he's one of the enablers of the cyber-assault on Loomis. As Paul Campos notes, irony is dead.
Academic Administrative Fecklessness
I wasn't going to post anything about the cyber-intimidation campaign being directed at Erik Loomis, as that seemed like a job for Big Important Liberal Blogs and not for the Duck of Minerva. But now the issue has strayed directly into our territory. In brief, Erik Loomis is a history professor at the University of Rhode Island and a long-time blogger. His highest-profile gig is at Lawyers, Guns & Money. In the immediate aftermath of the Newtown massacre, Erik tweeted that he "wanted to see Wayne LaPierre’s head on a stick." The usual suspects in the conservative blogsphere soon...
The Role of Assumptions
Earlier today, Brian Rathbun criticized "rationalists" for making assumptions.* I have some thoughts on the matter, and I expressed many of them on Twitter. And in the language of Twitter -- snark. That was not the best response, and I regret the tone of my reaction, if not the substance thereof. I'd like to try now for a more constructive dialogue. Let's start where we agree. Brian writes It seems for rationalists that assumptions are statements that one makes to make the building of theoretical models easier. It does not matter if they are true, only if they are useful. Assumptions...
Silicon wafers: Why we need to move religion online
As one of the two great still-extant medieval institutions, the church confronts the digital age with a mixture of trepidation and hope. Hope, because congregations and ministers with online presence can build up new types of community and remain in contact through a variety of media; trepidation, because the church, like any incumbent industry, looks with fear at the fate of travel agents, small retailers, and print newspapers. Having seen each industry fall to the likes of Expedia, Amazon, and the Huffington Post, the leaders of churches throughout the United States and beyond worry that...
Status, Cliques, and the Political-Science Job Market
There are many things I find unsurprising about Robert Orisko's claims in the Georgetown Public Policy Review about hiring patterns in academic political science. Among those are the disparate reactions produced by its summary in Inside Higher Education. In brief, Orisko argues that academic political-science hiring displays dynamics more associated with status-conserving cliques than an efficient market. This tracks with (more sophisticated) comparative studies of hiring patterns which suggest variation across different disciplines. As Kieran Healy discussed of the earlier study back in...