I just found out that my good friend Kelly from Millsaps (who I haven’t seen in months; I think she’s hiding from me) has a cool website with pictures of her various and sundry artistic projects. And if you’re in the Chicago area, I’m told that she has a gallery show coming soon.

Just don’t let her paint your house… I think she’ll turn it orange.

Courtesy of another “let’s take shots at each other anonymously” blog is this gem:

People who can teach methods are all nearly unmoveable. If they were moveable they’d have been snatched in the seller’s market in the last few years.

I am truly speechless.

I sent out five job applications Monday, out of 13 listed in the current iteration of the Spreadsheet of Death™. All five to liberal arts colleges, many of which probably aren’t even competing for the “early offers” candidates on the market, the folks who really, really want a job at a PhD-granting institution but would “settle” for a 2–2 at a liberal arts college if the money and geography were right. Alas, the job with the description that fits me to a “T” (seeking an Americanist mass political behavior scholar with demonstrated successful experience teaching undergrad methods from a rigorously quantitative approach) is probably the one most disinclined to hire someone with a PhD from a state more associated in the popular (or at least liberal professoriate) imagination with cross-burning than ivy; such is life.

Mind you, I haven’t even started my next job yet. I don’t even have to do anything with my new job for six weeks—that is, except for some syllabus prep that I could have done in six weeks, but needed to do now so I could include my fall syllabi in my application packets.

In any event… back to letters, boxes, research, being on hold with Laclede Gas, and sleep.

As a partially-interested observer (and occasional commenter, both anonymous and named), I have to say the life-cycle of the American and Comparative Jobs blog has been of moderate interest; in the job season, it was a source of moderately helpful information, but the summer months have devolved into a rather nasty spree of backbiting and rather un-PC grievance-airing, leading the anonymous blogmistress to resort to comment moderation. We shall see if this is, as one commenter speculates, the “death” of the blog, or merely a speed bump. My sense is the latter, as the need for information (and strategic departmental leaks) will ultimately outweigh the loss of immediacy.

At the very least, now that I know (through a combination of the blog and disciplinary scuttlebutt) that one of the jobs I applied for last year had an invisible “white males need not apply” sign attached to it, I won’t be making the mistake of applying for any position ever advertised by that college again.

In terms of wider disciplinary conversations in the blogosphere, I think the truth of the matter is that there are some serious grievances about the discipline among political scientists that simply will not be aired in non-anonymous public fora. That inevitably means there is going to be some nastiness, as those with private agendas use anonymity to attack others. I am unsure what the proper balance is, but I do know that the same themes raised at the American/Comparative jobs blog are the subject of whispers in the hallways of conferences and other gatherings.

The bottom line, I think is that if we are going to have more “openness” and “reform” in political science, we are going to need some brutal honesty about issues beyond methodological pluralism in the APSR—things like overproduction of PhDs, hiring practices (including the fundamentally broken hiring process), the dominance of doctoral-granting departments on the boards of the APSA, journals, and regional associations, differing standards for what is considered “quality” scholarship among subfields, and more. And I think that brutal honesty is going to need people who are willing to speak up about these issues non-anonymously without the protection (not from outside interference as originally intended, but from our own colleagues) of tenure. Personally, I don’t see that happening any time soon, but I would love to see someone prove me wrong.

Tyler Cowen has the evidence.

Perhaps those of my former colleagues at Millsaps who mocked the administration’s investment in our on-campus football field will think again; a growing trend, particularly at Division III schools, is to recruit male students by starting, reactivating, or reinvigorating varsity football teams.

While I am mildly sympathetic with the argument that there are times when scholar-athletes spend too much time emphasizing the latter half of the hyphenate, I have to say that I’ve never had a problem with the athletes in my classes either at Division I-A schools like Duke and Ole Miss or at D-3 Millsaps. That said, the merits of achieving a 50–50 gender balance on campus are debatable at best, even at places where the admissions game is a bit less zero-sum than at the elite colleges and universities.