The following is a guest post by K. Anne Watson, a PhD candidate in Political Science and International Affairs at the University of Georgia's School of Public and International Affairs. The academic job market is incredibly stressful. This is at least partly because...
There is much gnashing about citations of late. This tweet inspired the ensuing spew below: Formula predicts research papers' future citations https://t.co/4Hy8j3Glqj. I am afraid the citation game...
The Monkey Cage has launched a symposium on the gender gap in academia. Jane Mansbridge, Barbara Walter, Sara Mitchell, Lisa Martin, Ryan Powers, Daniel Maliniak, Rick Wilson, Ashley Leeds, Beth...
It was perhaps appropriate that yesterday's tale of a young pundit's career unraveling due to falsely claimed PhD coincided with the first meeting of the Doctoral Research Seminar I am teaching....
Via Drew Conway, a great quote this morning from Stephen Curry, a professor at Imperial College London:Students should think more broadly about what a PhD could prepare them for. We should start selling a PhD as higher level education but not one that necessarily points you down a tunnel...We should not see moving out of academia as a failure. We need to see it as a stepping stone, a way of moving forward to something else.Curry was commenting here on changing the mindset of the students, but I would argue in many disciplines the problem isn't the students, but the professors. There are...
Lots of noise of late about the "relevance" question in political science, some of it thoughtful, so of it not so much. While this is obviously an old question -- indeed, in some ways, it's the oldest question in the discipline, dating back to the original efforts to place the study of politics on some kind of scientific footing in the early part of the 20th century -- I find myself thinking about it a lot these days, both in the context of university administration (which is one-half of my day job) and as a result of the dislocatingly bizarre experience of attending the European SGIR...
I am happily in receipt of a letter from University of Massachusetts' Chancellor Holub informing me that I have been awarded tenure. Of course you know what this means: the days of keeping my outside-the-box ideas to myself are gone like the Twelve Colonies. Yep, I just cannot wait to write something controversial or unpopular using my newly acquired academic freedom.
I was alerted this morning to the death of Professor Fred Halliday. Halliday, who specialized in the Middle East and was very much a legend around the London School of Economics. I was fortunate enough to be in one of the last classes of MSc students who sat through his IR theory lectures. These classes were a very strange tour de force – mixed with anecdotes of Professor Halliday’s meeting foreign leaders, intellectuals and peppered with outbursts in Arabic, Persian and other assorted languages. Unsurprisingly, the lectures were always packed. The Guardian has a very nice obituary as does...
Blogging may be lighter than usual over the next week while I and many colleagues and co-bloggers descend upon the city of New Orleans for the International Studies Association Annual Conference – or, as I explained cheekily to my students yesterday, the “Olympic Games of IR geekdom” – a gathering where scholars from different schools of thought and methodological perspectives contend for the limelight, pitted against one another through the force of sheer intellect and passion for the study of world politics. Upon further thought however, this probably ranks among the worst metaphors I’ve...
What does a citizen need to know? What skills and knowledge should we assume in our interactions with others? What makes a person a well-rounded person? The issues go back for centuries, and every so often some suggests modifications to the list of "liberal arts." I teach at a university with a "liberal arts" requirement, and I know from experience the battles to have a class listed as required (or optional) include issues of academic politics and teaching philosophy. The outcomes of those battles can make or break particular classes, or entire programs.A group of scholars has published a...
Dan Drezner offered his picks. The crazy people on Political Science Job Rumors fought a series of flame skirmishes over it. But I can't imagine the conversation's tapped out. Let's take a look at the announcement:The International Studies Best Book of the Decade Award honors the best book published in international studies over the last decade.In order to be selected, the winning book must be a single book (edited volumes will not be considered) that has already had or shows the greatest promise of having a broad impact on the field of international studies over many years. Only books of...
I started this as a reply to Peter's post in the Comments thread, but a) it rapidly got too long and b) from analysis of the site traffic I know that many of our readers don't read comments, just top-level posts. So here is my final word on the subject for the time being -- final because it's also my final Duck post until September, since I have to get this book written this summer and so am taking a step back from blogging over here until it's done. I am under no illusions that my reply ends the conversation, of course.Peter's post is an impassioned and trenchant analysis of what Weber...