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
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...
The Good Old Days
When people lament about how broken academia is now (for example Higgs of Higgs-Boson), I am so tempted to generalize about the olden days: Many, if not most, jobs were not advertised publicly and...
Academia, Drug Cartels, and Inappropriate Analogies
Given the intricacies of our job and the cushy lifestyle most academics live in, it disconcerting when academics use improper and incorrect analogies to describe the intricacies of their job. The...
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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.
SSRN Bound Editions
The question before us: does SSRN now include a Vanity Press option, or it the new AllAcademic?In the email box:SSRN recently released our Purchase Bound Hard Copy Service. Authors and readers can now order printed copies of select papers in the SSRN eLibrary, which provides another format for users to access research papers. The Free One-Click Download option is not affected by this new service.For $9.99 plus shipping, the reader will receive a black and white printed and "perfect bound" copy of the PDF document with a glossy color cover. The cover includes the title of the paper, and the...
On Paradigms, Policy Revelance and Other IR Myths
I had every intention this evening of writing a cynical commentary on all the hoopla surrounding Open Government, Open Data and the Great Transparency Revolution. But truth be told, I am brain-dead at the moment. Why? Because I spent the last two days down in Williambsurg, VA arbitrating codes for a Teaching, Research and International Politics (TRIP) project (co-led by myself and Jason Sharman) which analyzes what the field of IR looks like from the perspective of books. It is all meant as a complement to the innovative and hard work of Michael Tierney, Sue Peterson and the TRIP founders...
Beware the Blog?
Being new to the blogging world, I have been thinking a lot about the utility and influence of blogs. Blogs seem appealing in so many ways. They appear to be an effective means of disseminating facts and views quickly to a wide audience, facilitating timely responses to emerging policy issues (and other fun pop politics). At the same time, blogging is a way of discussing real intellectual ideas free of many of the pitfalls of peer review and academic publishing (see last week's Duck entry by Brian Rathbun). More importantly, blogging is concise, pithy and entertaining and can potentially...
The Rhino in the Room
Somehow I managed to delete my mediocre post on peer review. The gist: peer review is arbitrary and capricious; summary rejections offer a cosmetic fix; we need to reduce our reliance on counting peer-review journal articles as a basis for evaluating scholarly worth.Jarrod Hayes commented: I am struck by the arbitrariness of peer-review. I have at least once asked to come in as a reviewer when two reviews reached polar opposite conclusions about a manuscript. Both reviews were careful and conscientious, and I found merit in both when I saw them in the decision letter to the author. How could...
Office Hours…..
Stacie Goddard and Tom Burke from Wellesley created this "typical meeting between a student and faculty member at the Political Science Department of Wellesley College" for their annual Political Science majors' dinner. Well done.
Tenure for Teachers
The official justification for tenure is that it allows scholars to "speak truth to power" without fear of losing their jobs. There's obviously something to that, but I've always looked upon tenure as a form of non-salary compensation. Most college professors make less than they would in other sectors. Tenure compensates us with much greater job security. I'd never thought about it in these terms, but the same reasoning might also apply to teachers in primary and secondar education. It turns out that while direct evidence for schoolteachers proves difficult to come by, data on New Jersey...
Who’s Your Grand-Advisor? Crowdsourcing an IR lineage map
There are a series of jokes floating around academia about "academic relatives," most recently this little bit of brilliant whimsy from Jorge Cham's Piled Higher and Deeper entitled "Your Academic Genealogy." Funny, yes, but there's also something potentially important here about the lineages of academic thought, so I did a little digging and thus far have been completely unable to locate something that I would have thought that someone would have already assembled: an online searchable database that mapped adviser-advisee relationships in IR. So far as I know, there is no such thing. Not...