This piece kicks off a short forum on mentoring in academic careers in international affairs, written to honor Kathleen R. McNamara.
Mentoring Is What You Make Of It
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academia
Ranking IR Journals
Editor's note: this is a guest post by Brian J. Phillips, of the Center for Research and Teaching in Economics. What are the best International Relations journals? How do we know if one journal is...
Shouldn’t we call it the “having-a-husband” penalty?
As Jennifer Grose at Slate reported this morning, a paper by Wendy Stock and John Siegfried at the most recent AEA meetings, had some very disturbing - but not surprising - findings in regarding...
Dear Kansas Board of Regents
Dear Kansas Board of Regents, Greetings. You probably don’t know me but I’ve been a long-time user of your services. I started my college career taking dual-credit courses at Pratt Community...
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Friday “I Really Am Just a Nerd” Blogging
I was shocked, shocked to read Brian Rathbun's characterization of me in a recent Canard as a "robot" who has only been posing as a Battlestar Galactica addict as part of my cover (!):The academic and foreign policy worlds were rocked today by the news that Charli Carpenter -- prolific academic, policy wonk, and mom -- is in fact a robot. An anonymous source told this paper: "There were the academic writings, then all the policy work, the grant writing and management. She never missed her son's soccer games though... it was just too much. Her makers made a mistake by not giving her any...
What I Learned Teaching IR in Asia (1): Learning to Love US Hegemony
<img alt="" galleryimg="no" onload="var downlevelDiv = document.getElementById('e6403e01-e0de-49ce-a231-02a0ef2f117a'); downlevelDiv.innerHTML = "";" src="https://lh5.ggpht.com/--9rqXXXWaCY/TxzqyXkDwmI/AAAAAAAAACw/Nly5J93m9N8/videob4f2a8e66e2f%25255B2%25255D.jpg?imgmax=800" />If you haven’t seen this yet, it’s pretty hystericalI’d like to thank Duck contributors/editor, especially Vikash, for soliciting my contribution. The Duck is a great site, one I link to a lot on my own blog, so I am happy to come aboard. Thank you.I have been teaching IR in...
Visas and scholarship
Sarah Duff (who has contributed to this blog before) had a very interesting piece in the UK Guardian this week on the hurdles scholars in developing countries have to face in order to engage with scholars in the developed world. Rather than focusing on whether or not the visa system is fair, she describes exactly what she must do in order to present a paper in “the West” how this impacts on the development of her research:I describe the expensive, time-consuming, and often quite invasive procedure of applying for a visa to explain why they influence my work. Because my American visa is valid...
The DC Government’s Priorities
Last year I mentioned an editorial in the Washington Post decrying the District's decision--prodded by a small number of wealthy Georgetown residents--to force the University to meet unrealistic targets. A refresher:A recommendation by the city’s office of planning would require the university to provide housing for 100 percent of its undergraduate students by 2016; failure to do so would force cuts in enrollment starting in 2015. Georgetown houses a higher percentage (84 percent) of undergraduates on its campus than most of the other universities in the city. Not only is it unfair to hold...
Graduation Rates
Are student-athletes better prepared to complete a college degree in a reasonable amount of time than the general student body? Given the stereotypes many people share about "jocks," this may seem like a startling question. Yet, the NCAA released evidence this week that claims to demonstrate that student-athletes graduate at a very high rate, often at much higher rates than other students at the same institutions. My local newspaper, the Louisville Courier Journal revealed this news today on the second page of the sports section. The front page of the same section featured local athletes...
Mortenson declines Education Grawemeyer
In addition to filling an open faculty line in international relations (IR), I was hired in 1991 by the University of Louisville with the idea that I would eventually direct the Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order. The World Order award was then one of four Grawemeyer Awards and at the time I was hired, I knew virtually nothing about any of them. The prize was worth $150,000, making it the largest award in Political Science. Nonetheless, it was not especially well-known even within the discipline, nor much publicized outside of it, though the earliest prizes were awarded to...
Life Imitiating Political Science and Vice Versa
I had a nice life imitating art (or science) today. I was lecturing about identity and the stuff we political scientists have borrowed from social psychology to explain ethnic conflict today. The idea is to get my IR of Ethnic Conflict class exposed to the basics before we move on to the international relations issues that are the heart of this course.So, today, I am quite aware of my identity and how my self-esteem depends on how I see my group and how others see my group. Then I notice a blog about Teaching Political Science which links to an article that focuses almost entirely on...
State of the Field
In the nearly three years since the worst global economic crisis in the post-war era, how many articles have appeared in International Relations "flagship" journal, International Organization, with direct relevance to the pressing IPE questions of our time? And no, a review essay on how the financial crisis suggests different directions in the study of financial regulations doesn't count.