I have determined that I am not very good at algorithmically generating fake roll call data. It may be time (tomorrow) for Plan B on the methods meeting poster, which will probably involve not doing anything with fake data but instead doing stuff with ideal point estimates with higher estimated error variance than ones derived from congressional roll calls.

Jason Kuznicki ponders why historians, and by extension other academics, blog anonymously or pseudonymously:

I am driven to wonder, though, about why anonymity would be needed in the first place. The short, ugly answer is that the history profession can often afford to be a fairly exclusive clique, and any deviation from orthodoxy, whether in ideology or in one’s extracurriculars, can be grounds for exclusion. Yes, there are exceptions. The rule, though, is that if as a graduate student you stick out in any way, you aren’t likely to find a job. The massive oversupply of grad students — driven by the academy’s desire to cut costs by using cheap grad student labor — is a breeding ground for a discreet, clubby form of discrimination.

In my little corner of academe, the costs of sticking out aren’t quite so bad, in part because of supply issues (the oversupply of quantitatively-oriented Americanist political scientists is much smaller than the oversupply of historians of any stripe), and in part because there is a tad more intellectual diversity among political scientists—that said, one would sooner admit membership in the Libertarian Party than the Republican Party in most circles.

Of course, an oft-posited theory for my lack of progress in finding a tenure-track job is this blog. That theory discounts my relatively short publication record, the relative lack of placements from my program, and the choice I’ve made to focus on finding positions at schools (primarily liberal arts colleges) that are least likely to hire someone who lacks a “name” undergraduate or graduate degree to put in their catalog. It also discounts the fact that much of my social network of fellow political scientists stems from blogging for the past 4 ½ years, and that there’s no way in hell that I’d have gotten my second job without the blog (and the second had a good deal to do with me getting my third and probably my fourth too).

From an email from the methods meeting cohost to poster presenters:

Please post your paper, if there is one, to the Society’s Working Paper Archive.

Must… resist… urge… to… only… analyze… data.

Via Prof. Shugart: play the Redistricting Game. I smell an Intro to Politics assignment for the fall…

A few of my fellow EITMers and I went to see the last performance of Much Ado About Nothing in Forest Park last night. I’d never seen Shakespeare set in the Wild West before, but it worked somehow. However, my reward for seeing Shakespeare was a mosquito bite on my scalp which has been bothering me all day.

I’d plan on taking some antihistamine, but if tomorrow is like today was I’d be out like a light—it probably didn’t help that the afternoon included a 90-minute lecture that could be basically summed up in a sentence as “econometric models that are misspecified and have omitted variables are incorrect in really bad ways, so don’t do that.” Perhaps it was a useful refresher for those who have forgotten the Gauss-Markov assumptions, but it did less for me in my insufficiently-caffeinated state.

∂x/∂θ = Chris’ head exploding. I’m pretty sure the last time I did any serious calculus was about 13 years ago; today I got to reacquaint myself with the chain rule and the product rule (at least I could remember how to partially differentiate polynomials). I may have to go to Borders, pick up Calculus for Dummies, and hide it under my desk (so as not to embarrass myself in front of the young whipper-snappers in the room) if this keeps up.

Timothy Burke, in a post I’ve been meaning to link and comment on for over a week, makes an interesting point about curricula: just because something isn’t in the requirements for a degree or major doesn’t mean it won’t be de facto required because of other structural features of the curriculum. I think this is valid in relatively small departments/colleges, or where the offerings are otherwise constrained for odd reasons—both SLU and Duke offer a relative paucity of American politics courses, for vastly different reasons; the offerings in my field at SLU are probably in practice slimmer than they were at Millsaps!

That said, there are some issues to be confronted. I think much of the disappearance of required courses can be laid at the feet of faculty members; many of us—myself included—would rather not teach a gen ed or disciplinary survey like Introduction to American Politics, favoring either a “fun” course or something that coincides more closely with our research interests (or both). And I think it’s fair to say that our evaluations are better in non-mandatory classes, “fun” or not—the mean evals in my Congress course in the spring were probably a full point better than in my other two classes, despite Congress being a significantly harder course—which I think reflects student preferences for more focused and narrow classes on “sexy” topics and creates further incentives for faculty to dismiss the core. Unfortunately, the end result is that you can easily end up with seniors who are trying to wrestle with the big questions but don’t have the basics down—one infamous example was a political science major who, on a senior capstone exam, apparently had no conception of what the United Nations was.

And while I broadly agree that in a liberal arts curriculum (which is what undergraduate political science programs aspire to be part of, whether we’re at a community college, a state university, Berkeley, or Williams College) the mastery of skills is probably more important over the long run the mastery of knowledge, I think we’re shortchanging our students if they escape our curricula without understanding the basics concepts and debates in their major and minor fields.

I’ve spent more time today than I meant reading through some books I checked out at the library and fiddling with (read: completely overhauling) my Southern Politics syllabus.

The primary challenge of the exercise is keeping the readings manageable after adding two recent books (Woodard’s The New Southern Politics and Lassiter’s The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South) and adding readings from the new edition of Bullock and Rozell’s The New Politics of the Old South; I probably have 2000 pages on the syllabus, even after some chopping. I still need to add some stuff on the 1866 riot, 1874 White League coup attempt, and the 1900 Robert Charles Riots in New Orleans—and not get too bogged down in history while I’m at it.

An anonymous commenter on the rumor mills posted a link to EconJobMarket.org, which seems like a semi-promising attempt to create a service that partially bridges the gap between online job listing sites and credentials services like Interfolio.

To my mind, the ideal site would function more-or-less like Interfolio from the candidate’s point of view: you submit a virtual “packet” for each job, which can be accessed by the receiving department as a web page, an email with every item in the packet as an attachment, or (for departments in the dark ages) a paper file sent to the department.

Indeed, Interfolio functions like this now, but hardly any political science departments are registered to receive packets on there (only one job I applied for last year, at New College of Florida, accepted electronic applications via Interfolio). My expectation is that EconJobMarket.org will have similar problems achieving buy-in from departments, as would any political science equivalent not coordinated by APSA.

Meanwhile, APSA‘s eJobs system has about 80% of the needed infrastructure, but as far as I can tell the association has no interest in saving job candidates and departments time and money by finishing the job, even though I’m sure they could get people on the market to pony up $50+ a year for such a service.

I belatedly took the advice of Frequent Commenter Scott and changed the photo on my professional page while I was doing my regular updates. It’s not quite this casual, but I do have to maintain at least a modicum of dignity.

There’s nothing like the impending showing of one’s apartment to motivate some long-overdue spring cleaning.

Now if I could only figure out a way to create myself some similar incentive structures for doing research I might actually have a productive summer.

As it is commencement day at SLU, it is an appropriate time to say congratulations to all of my former students at Millsaps, Duke, and SLU who have received their degrees this month. I hope that none of my former Ole Miss students were still working on their degrees—but if so, congratulations to them too!

One unanticipated side-effect of wearing academic regalia in public (and having a relatively youthful appearance, to boot) is being congratulated for having graduated—three times, in total.

Perhaps I should have just basked in the glory rather than insisting on correcting everyone, particularly since to the layperson the distinction between a doctoral gown and the vestments of new graduates is mostly invisible (and in the case of new PhDs, nonexistent save for the hood coloring and designs, which represent SLU for the graduates but the degree-granting institutions for faculty).

Except all the dress-up bits, which are fun anyway, and packing up all the books in my office so I can ship them all using the postal service’s library rate to Tulane.

I knew Samuel Kernell had taught at Ole Miss (I had the very pleasant experience of meeting him at a poster session at APSA about seven years ago—he was one of only a handful of people to look at my poster, so we chatted for a few minutes), but I had no idea he was a Millsaps political science graduate. If I’d have known that, I’d have made my intro students there use The Logic of American Politics just on principle.

It's also amazing what completely random stuff that has nothing to do with what you were actually searching for can come up in Google.

“What most professors want is for students to validate their pathetic life experience.” — Michael C. Munger, as quoted in the film Indoctrinate U., via Margaret Soltan’s University Diaries (who is less than enthused by the film overall).

As a contingent faculty member, all I can say is that quotes featured in QotD do not necessarily represent the views of Signifying Nothing, its owners, advertisers, or the potential tenure-track faculty-member who generates all of the content. But it’s still funny…

According to the Times-Picayune, Tulane is on-track to enroll 1400 freshmen in the fall, some of whom will doubtless fall into the clutches of my nefariously evil Introduction to Political Science seminar. The course is still very much on the drawing board, although I think it’s going to include big chunks on electoral systems and democratic competence*—and maybe not much else, since it’s apparently not supposed to be a field survey but more of a “wrestle with a few big questions while you write a bunch of stuff” course.

* This class will be a nice counter-balance to Politics of the American South; I get to teach one class that says “democracy sucks, and Ken Arrow proved it” and another that says “it's really important for everyone to have the right to vote, because that's what makes democracy work.” Woe betide anyone trying to take both classes at once; the cognitive dissonance would be painful. How I manage to survive simultaneously believing both of these things is left as an exercise for the reader to figure out.

I think I’ve become lenient on grading in my young age. Maybe it’s just the non-tenure-track faculty member’s equivalent of senioritis (perhaps vistoritis?), but I’m pretty sure I’m a softer touch in the spring than in the fall. I’m just waiting on a few stragglers and my Congress class’ final exams before I can officially put a nice bow on this semester, except for the bits where I dress in fancy regalia.

Tomorrow’s project: figure out what to submit for my useR! proposal. It’s scheduled at a positively icky time for me, as I expect to be moving right around August 1st, but if I can squeeze it in it’d be both a good experience and nice CV fodder. Ideally I’d figure out a way to repurpose my methods meeting proposal, but I’m not sure it’ll work for useR! (boy that punctuation is annoying) very well, so plan B is to get my R package with epcp and friends into working order and write a paper on that.

I also owe a 900-word encyclopedia entry to Ken Warren by next Tuesday.

Frank Stephenson links a front-page WSJ article on disappearing from Google, which leads off with this tale of woe:

Before Abigail Garvey got married in 2000, anyone could easily Google her. Then she swapped her maiden name for her husband’s last name, Wilson, and dropped out of sight.

In Web-search results for her new name, links to Ms. Wilson’s epidemiology research papers became lost among all manner of other Abigail Wilsons, ranging from 1980s newspaper wedding announcements for various Abigail Wilsons to genealogy records listing Abigail Wilsons born in the 1600s and 1700s. When Ms. Wilson applied for a new job, interviewers questioned the publications she listed on her résumé because they weren’t finding the publications in online searches, Ms. Wilson says. [emphasis mine]

So when Ms. Wilson, now 32, was pregnant with her first child, she ran every baby name she and her husband, Justin, considered through Google to make sure her baby wouldn’t be born unsearchable. Her top choice: Kohler, an old family name that had the key, rare distinction of being uncommon on the Web when paired with Wilson. “Justin and I wanted our son’s name to be as special as he is,” she explains.

First, I’m not sure that naming your son after a faucet company is a good move, no matter how unique the name is. Second, I think Ms. Wilson’s travails might have easily been averted by giving full citation information for her publications on her CV, including her maiden name.

The lesson I draw from this: people (mostly, but not exclusively, women) with established publication records shouldn’t adopt married names for their professional careers. The lesson I don’t draw from this: I should name my firstborn “Moen Delta Lawrence.”

I am happy to report that I have accepted a visiting position for the 2007–08 academic year in the political science department at Tulane University in New Orleans. I’m not sure exactly what I’ll be teaching next year, but I know it involves an introduction to political science course and some additional mid-to-upper-level courses in American politics at the undergraduate level, which hopefully will include my seminar in Southern politics in the spring semester.

I’m particularly looking forward to living about nine degrees farther south. St. Louis may very well be a great place to live… but not between November and March, at least for this cold weather wimp.

The best thing about teaching research methods is that I get to talk to students about all sorts of different research questions: everything from the relative effectiveness of economic and racial integration policies in public education to the incidence of split-ticket voting.

I’m almost looking forward to a semester (maybe even a year) of not teaching methods—if nothing else, it’d be good not to be pigeon-holed as the “methods guy” for a while. But I’ll miss the methods papers nonetheless.

I’m waiting to hear back from one job interview; once that happens, I’ll either have a very tough decision to make, or a very easy one… and even though professionally a tough decision might be better for me, personally I’d rather just have it all be over with for 2007 so I can get on with doing what I need to do for 2008.

That would be Ruth Sheehan, apologizing for her inflammatory columns at the beginning of the Duke lacrosse “fake but accurate” rape scandal in the Raleigh News & Observer, rather than anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan, who as of last report is still emulating a homeless woman in Crawford, Texas.

þ: Craig Newmark.

I spent several years of my life learning to pronounce a proper name like the locals did… but for the next 24 hours, to avoid sounding like a southerner (usually not a problem for me, except for the occasional “y’all”), I have to consciously pronounce the name the way northerners pronounce it—if only so people can understand the proper name I’m using.

TigerHawk talks eminent sense about the legal drinking age:

On the drinking age, I think the right answer is now and always will be obvious. Individuals should be able to purchase alcohol on their own account starting at age 19, which would liberalize the current law considerably and still allow for the policing of unsupervised drinking among high school students. In addition, teenagers older than, say, 15 should be able to drink in the company of their parents, either in private or in restaurants. Responsible drinking has to be taught. One can’t help but believe that the current generation binges because it has had no opportunity to learn that responsibility from the people in the best position to teach it to them.

The only thing I might add is that I’d prefer some sort of policy that got colleges and universities out of policing student prohibition. Lowering the drinking age to 19 would continue the temptation for “student life” officials to (largely ineffectually) regulate all alcohol consumption by students, regardless of age. I’m not sure what the exact solution to that conundrum is, but I am certain that I’d rather have freshmen drinking openly than “out of sight” in the basement of some frat house or off-campus apartment.