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
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...
“and Elinor?”: when winning a Nobel Prize isn’t enough…
This is a guest post from Leslie Johns, an Assistant Professor of political science at UCLA. The Public Choice Society---an academic organization of scholars who study the interaction of politics...
Neoliberalizing the academy
Josh’s post on his experience with course evaluations has gotten me thinking about the practice of using course evaluations. Because my personal circumstances differ from Josh’s (e.g. I do not have...
More academia Posts
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...
What I Did Not Know About the Prof Business
In the recent conversations about Policy PhDs and such, one of the frequent assertions was that people going into PhD programs had no idea what they were getting into. Why do we assert such things? All I can say is that I had no clue not just about what was involved in a PhD program, but also what was involved in being a prof. Let me review some of my beliefs and the realities I have experienced over the past two decades.* * I will leave aside the job market stuff (like not controlling where I would live). Despite warnings from my adviser at Oberlin, I thought profs spent much of their...
Should College Costs Reflect Benefits to Society?
Florida Governor Rick Scott is considering changing the cost of different college majors at Florida's public colleges to influence students' choices. The reasoning is standard rightist dirigisme: STEM degrees would cost less, and artsy ones would cost more, because STEM = jerbs and, presumably, English = liberals. Debate over the proposal has broken down along the usual lines. Unsurprisingly, Marginal Revolution co-blogger Alex Tabarrok offers two cheers in favor of the scheme, dissenting only on the implementation (that instead of targeting STEM in particular the subsidies for selected...
When is it rational to leave graduate school?
Among the many interesting things about graduate school is its propensity to spark greater drinking than I ever thought possible. After preparing (most of) a three-hour talk on using R, I definitely found that celebrating America's greatest brewer-turned-patriot was useful. (For the benefit of readers who are serious snobs, my favorite beers are much more hoppy and more indie than anything brewed by such a large producer.) I'm more interested, though, in the thoughts of those who have problems that can't be solved by the sweet release of Mr. Adams's brewery. In particular, Dan and I would...
Bad Metaphors: Journals, Articles, and Pages
As a graduate student at an urban university, I envy this RA's large office. New technologies adapt terms from older tools, even when they're curiously inappropriate. Consider "dashboard," which we use now to refer to an easy display of critical information (as in Google Dashboard) or the control panel of an automobile. Originally, however, a dashboard was (per Wikipedia) "a barrier of wood or leather fixed at the front of a horse-drawn carriage or sleigh to protect the driver from mud or other debris "dashed" (thrown) up by the wheels and horses' hooves." Clearly, that term outlasted its...
Wednesday Morning Linkage
Dan Nexon is not responsible fortoday's links.Dan is traveling today, so it's the Duck of Minerva's version of Assistant Editor's Month (or, perhaps, assistant to the editor's month):Dani Rodrik becomes the Clippy of forensic investigators, as he relates how the Turkish government may have faked evidence against 300 officers on coup-plotting charges: "It looks like you're trying to frame someone for treason. Would you like help with that?" (Dani Rodrik's Weblog)Jay Ulfelder shows off a political science version of the Netflix Prize, in which a bunch of quantoids tried to systematically...
Unionizing Adjuncts at Georgetown (Updated, and Again)
UPDATE: the author of the Chronicle article, Peter Schmidt, discussed the issue on the Kojo Namdi show yesterday.The SEIU wants to unionize adjunct professors at Georgetown University. As their card makes clear, this is part of a broader effort to unionize contingent labor at colleges and universities. George Washington's adjuncts unionized in 2006, and won a significant pay raise this August. American University's and Montgomery County's adjuncts are also unionized.From today's Chronicle of Higher Education article: SEIU Local 500 began a campaign to organize an adjunct union at Georgetown...
Data is not the problem. Data is not the solution.
Data is not good government. Even when it wears a green eyeshade.The Wonkblog view of the world presumes that social problems should be met with policy solutions, and that the best way to analyze policies is to have better data. To an extent, I agree. All else being true, better data does make for better policy.But that is a trivial conclusion. Politics is not policy. Indeed, data isn't politics either. And what Wonkblog provides is frequently an inaccurate guide to all three.The biggest problem with the Wonkblog attitude is its unthinkingly technocratic approach to everything. This...