Blue chip quarterback Robert Lane will move to fullback this week in addition to continuing as the backup QB, apparently solidifying Micheal Spurlock’s role as starting QB and Ethan Flatt’s role as clipboard-holder. Coach O’s other position changes seem to have worked out well thus far (most notably, moving Jamal Pittman from HB to FB, and making Mico McSwain the #1 HB), so maybe Lane as a fullback will work well too.

Lucky me: I have apparently caught a cold. At least I only have to lecture in one of my two classes tomorrow—the other class gets to take a midterm. Lucky them.

The definitive history of the investigation into Iraq’s attempts to obtain uranium from Africa—including how and why Joe Wilson found himself in Niger. þ: TigerHawk

Thus concludes my weekly lack of interest in Plamegate.

Did I mention how much I hate phone interviews?

One of the interviewers today made the mistake of asking me the question of what appealed to me about their job more than my existing one. I don’t think my answer went over big…

My new favorite song: “Baby Got Back” rearranged as a folk song. And, to increase the humor factor, iTunes just decided to play “Standing Still” by Jewel after it.

þ: Amber Taylor.

As I predicted, it was one lousy day for Chris in the college football world: Ole Miss does its impression of being a good team, but doesn’t stop the key drive at the end; Duke leads at the half against Georgia Tech, then completely implodes, and the one day of my life I root for Notre Dame fricking USC wins for the bazillionth consecutive game. At least Joe Pa’s Lazarus impersonation is coming to an end, as the Nittany Lions lose to a not-particularly-great Michigan team.

My Wallace Wade observations for today (on a great afternoon for football, at least weather-wise):

• Song college bands should not perform under any circumstances: Kelly Clarkson’s “Since You’ve Been Gone.”
• Song college bands should perform on a regular basis: Jimmy Buffett’s “Cheeseburger in Paradise.” If you can get enthusiasm out of a Duke football crowd with this song, imagine what you could do with it in a real football stadium.
• Things you should not do before a Duke football game: get fall-down drunk. Although I have to say watching inebriated sorority pledges stumble around the stadium was somewhat amusing.
• Things that need to visit a tanning bed: the Georgia Tech cheerleaders. I’m not saying they were pale, just that I’ve seen albinos with darker skin tones.

Next week: Kentucky comes to Vaught-Hemingway in an untelevised game—finally, I can pencil in an SEC win for the Rebels—while the Seminoles cruise into Wallace Wade, where the real wagering action is on whether FSU fans will outnumber Duke fans.

Bizarre parallelism thought of the day: ConfirmThem.com now has about as accurate a domain name as MoveOn.org (which hasn’t quite moved on from September 10, 2001 yet).

Thus ends the extent to which I care about the Miers nomination this week.

To my infinite shock, today’s Duke Chronicle actually has three well-written, vaguely-intelligent op-eds:

• Andrey Fradkin notes new Nobel laureate Thomas Schelling’s contribution to understanding self-segregation in society.
• Boston Cote writes on the new life of BoSox fans post-Curse.
• Sarah Ball tries to justify her dating preferences.

Ok, I did say vaguely intelligent.

An interesting piece in this quarter’s issue of PS (sadly not online), by Daniel Fuerstman and Stephan Levartu of UW-Madison, looks at the factors that departments consider when hiring new faculty. Notably, everyone seems to care about a nebulous quality called “fit,” teaching is #2 at everywhere except national universities, and nobody gives a shit about conference presentations and awards. Perhaps most interesting: letters rank highly at all types of institutions, despite the common perception that recommendation letters are inherently undifferentiated and thus information-free.

One of the more positive outcomes of the Drezner debacle has been some more serious thought about the role of blogging in the academy, exemplified by this post from Michelle Dion and this contribution from Matthew Shugart. Herewith are a few thoughts from my little corner of the academic universe.

First and foremost, I think it’s fair to say that I wouldn’t have this job if I didn’t have a blog. No blog, no Public Choice panel in New Orleans on blogging in the academy with Dan Drezner and Mike Munger, no after-panel beers with Mike (and Dan and Leslie), and no Duke job for Chris. That isn’t to say I wouldn’t have any job (in the counterfactual universe, I don’t know who would have made me offers—I just know who I had to turn down for interviews when they called me)... but I doubt it would be quite as rewarding as this one has been thus far.

Second (and following from point one), it’s fair to say I wouldn’t have the academic network I have today without the blog. Dozens of political scientists know who I am solely because of Signifying Nothing, and I hope most of them have a positive impression. If academic blogging is going to be a “virtual conference,” a big part of that has to be the informal networking that conferences are at least supposed to encourage… indeed, blogging may do a better job of fostering networking than conferences, where the temptation is to go catch up with one’s grad school cohort rather than meeting new people.

Third, I don’t think the blog has demonstrably hurt my career. I think it’s reasonably common knowledge that I wouldn’t be at Duke (or, for that matter, anywhere else) if I’d been offered the tenure-track Americanist position at Millsaps. The person they hired instead had a blog too—and I am reasonably certain that the search committee was aware of it at the time.

Fourth, I think that the message (intentional or unintentional) that the U of C has sent to denying tenure to Dan is an unhealthy one. Our discipline is—rightly—often criticized for a failure to engage the real world and real political debates. It is very tempting for an academic to avoid those debates, and to either retreat to the world of models that have no bearing on reality or the comparably disengaged world of deconstructing the arcania of political philosophy. The best academic blogs have tried to bring the real and potentially useful knowledge that we have accumulated to bear on contemporary political debates. It is one thing to sit back and opine about politics from a partisan standpoint bereft of the benefits of any particular expertise (and certainly this is a popular tactic for many academic bloggers of all partisan stripes). Dan, to his credit, has rarely—if ever—taken that approach.

Finally, on the question of the academic study of blogging (versus the merits of academics being bloggers), I think there are noteworthy parallels to the beginnings of other research programs. Decades ago, the study of particular social and ethnic groups was considered fundamentally unserious—and certainly there are plenty of observers (mostly outside the academy, but also inside the academy as well) who still see these pursuits as unserious, or at the very least as backdoor mechanisms for hiring scholars who lack intellectual rigor in the “traditional” disciplines. The fact that the people who study blogging are, themselves, bloggers is something not lost on contemporary critics of this research program, and this is likely to be a difficult reputation for people who do want to study the role of weblogs in politics and society to overcome.

Of course, my contribution to this academic study thus far (beyond doing a few favors to colleagues doing research in this area) has been confined to some off-the-cuff comments at Public Choice and my upcoming paper on my use of blogs in my American politics class for SPSA—which manages to combine blogs with another topic “real” scholars refuse to take seriously, pedagogy. Maybe I should quit while I’m still ahead.

Hopefully the final post in this series: my ex-blogger boss pops up in comments at PoliBlog, Matthew Shugart (a political scientist at UCSD and the co-author of Presidents and Assemblies, one of my absolute favorite comparative politics books) points up the positive aspects of blogging in academe, and Jim Hu has more thoughts.

The good folks at ICPSR are trying to build up the endowment for the Warren Miller Scholars Fund, which provides a small stipend and free tuition for the ICPSR Summer Program in Quantitative Methods for the Social Sciences to one or two promising grad students and junior faculty every year; thus far, there have been eight recipients of Miller scholarships, including myself in 2001. There’s more info starting on page 10 in the Fall 2005 ICPSR Bulletin; you’ll find a scintillating quote from yours truly plugging the fund.

As Steven Taylor notes, the Drezner story has made it to the New York Sun; for your own amusement, try to parse this non-denial denial from the department chair:

While refusing to go into specifics about Mr. Drezner’s tenure case, the chairman of the political science department at the University of Chicago, Dali Yang, dismissed the notion that his department considered Mr. Drezner’s blog in making its decision. “I can assure you it’s not specifically about the blog,” he said.

(There is no paragraph here. You may pass.)

I now have two phone interviews scheduled for next Monday for tenure-track jobs. That, for those keeping score at home, is two more phone interviews than I got last year.

That said, I despise phone interviews with a passion.

The University of Chicago’s decision to deny tenure to Dan Drezner has predictably led to quite a bit of discussion; the highlights (as far as I’ve seen):

• Steven Taylor expresses confidence that Dan will land on his feet and considers the question, “do we blame the blog?”
• Leopold Stotch emphatically says yes. Juan Non-Volokh is not so sure. Both (who are not tenured) will remain pseudonymous for now.
• Ann Althouse points out that ”[t]ime spent on a blog is visible in a way that time spent watching movies or talking with friends or reading mystery novels or engaging in physical exercise or playing with your kids or daydreaming is not.” (þ: PoliBlog)
• Matt Stinson reminds the gallery that Dan’s denial probably had nothing to do with his politics, as the U of C has historically been relatively friendly to conservatives and libertarians.
• Tom Smith extrapolates to the wider question of the value of tenure in the modern academy, and finds the case for tenure today to be wanting.

Stotch also raises an interesting point that is worth discussing at greater length:

Drezner made another huge mistake in trying to conflate blogging and scholarship, and I can only assume that his colleagues deemed this type of work unserious—a perspective with which I largely agree. Looking at his CV, however impressive, might have led his colleagues to believe that once granted tenure, his focus might shift away from his serious work toward more articles, books, conference papers, etc. about blogging—which I assume is hardly what they were looking for when they hired him.

I don’t necessarily believe that Dan’s primary area of expertise (international political economy) is any more “serious” than studying the role of weblogs in domestic political discourse, but it is quite definitely different, and to the extent that institutions hire people to “fill holes” (rather than based on their innate abilities or general competence) I think that could be an issue. Quite clearly, Dan was not hired by the U of C to be a political communications person. On the other hand, there’s no evidence that Dan has neglected scholarship in his primary field.

And I probably need not point out that plenty of tenured faculty take advantage of the security of tenure to spend more time with their families, stagnate scholastically, dodge professional responsibilities, and/or bed undergraduate and graduate students. Somehow the idea of Dan potentially doing research on blogs post-tenure seems like a de minimis concern compared to the other possibilities.

After picking up two USB-Ethernet adapters for the TiVos (both of which sit in the living room, since that’s the only place there’s a cable hookup in this joint), I am now enjoying the world of WPA-PSK wireless security with AES encryption.

Figuring out how to do this with my funky bridged network (using WDS) was a bit of a chore. What seems to work: put the routers (one Linksys WRT 54G, one Linksys WRT 54GS, both running DD-WRT firmware) in WDS mode, WPA-PSK Shared Key Only with AES encryption, and set them for Wireless-G only. It doesn’t seem to work in WPA2 mode, nor in Mixed B/G mode.

Dan Drezner was denied tenure on Friday. I have to say in my mind (at least, with the essential caveat that I am no expert on IR) that said decision reflects rather more poorly on the University of Chicago than it does on Dan, who I am certain will land on his feet elsewhere; my impression of the U of C is unlikely to recover so quickly.

Ole Miss (2–3) finally got off the schnide today, winning 27–7 against I-AA Citadel after a pretty lackluster first half. Mind you, the Rebels face an undefeated Alabama squad next weekend in Oxford (possibly to be televised on CBS), so I don’t expect us to have a winning record any time soon.

Ken Fisher of Ars Technica contributes further to my general level of skepticism about “intelligent design” proponents:

Intelligent Design backers spend no shortage of time trying to portray what they believe as science, but an embarrassing fact has come to light about the book that Dover would have the kids read, Of People and Pandas. As it turns out, the book was originally a work of Christian apologetics, and it explicitly promoted creationism. Indeed, the version published now is the largely the same, save one minor fact: they more or less did a search and replace, substituting Intelligent Design where Creationism once sat in the text.

More on this theme from this week’s Economist, courtesy of my ex-co-blogger Robert Prather, who’s now back and blogging up a storm at Insults Unpunished.

As anticipated, the Iraqi transitional assembly reversed its weekend rule change that critics (including yours truly) complained might rig the outcome of the vote on ratifying the Iraqi constitution next Saturday.

An Iraqi opinion poll reported by Reuters suggests that the constitution may meet with approval anyway, according to the director of the NGO that sponsored the poll:

Although support for the constitution was particularly high in the northern Kurdish areas and southern regions dominated by Shi’ites, [Mehdi] Hafedh said it topped 50 percent even in central provinces known as the heartland of Sunni unrest—a sign, he said, that the Sunni-Shi’ite split is not as wide as many fear.

“This is exaggerated by political elites who are seeking power and by Western media and analysts,” Mr. Hafedh said. “If you go down to the streets, you can’t tell who is Sunni and who is Shi’ite. We are all mixed.”

He said most opponents of the constitution cited reasons ranging from Iraq’s lack of sovereignty to poor security, while far fewer cited explicit political concerns over the document.

þ: InstaPundit for the latter article.

My big find: six packs of Goose Island Root Beer at Target for $4.49 (yes, it’s pricey, but it’s worth it). Now if you could just get Goose Island Beer around these parts…

Daniel Nexon has some interesting thoughts and advice on the whole job-seeking process, all of which would be well-taken by the novice job-seeker. I would particularly reiterate his point about not “build[ing] an imaginary life for yourself,” something that is admittedly hard to avoid when trying to tailor the cover letter to the particular institution you are applying to. Bear in mind, though, that cover letters—unlike notes on Christmas cards given to family members—are not going to be shared around among the recipients, so you don’t need to make them that original.

Dan Drezner, from whom I got the link, fairly cogently summarizes the state of the job market thusly:

The academic job market, as I’ve witnessed it, is a globally rational but locally capricious system. Some people will undoubtedly slip through the cracks—but on the whole, talent is recognized and rewarded.

Mind you, that equilibrium state takes a long while to arrive for many, and it’s one punctuated by frequent instances of blind panic as you attempt to get your various files in order.

Nice to see the Iraqis learning how to play political language games in an effort to rig the outcome of the charter referendum next Saturday. The master himself, Bill Clinton, would be proud of these linguistic gymnastics:

Maryam Reyes, a member of the Shiite alliance that controls a majority of seats in the assembly, ... said the assembly members had not changed election law, but only clarified the meaning of the word “voters” in the relevant passage. The legal passage in question states: “The general referendum will be successful and the draft constitution ratified if a majority of voters in Iraq approve and if two-thirds of voters in three or more governorates do not reject it.”

In their vote on Sunday, the Shiite and Kurdish members interpreted the law as follows: the constitution will pass if a majority of ballots are cast for it; it will fail if two-thirds of registered voters in three or more provinces vote against it. In other words, the lawmakers designated two different meanings for the word “voters” in one passage.

Neither the U.S. or the U.N. seems particularly happy with this change; both accounts suggest the decision will be “reconsidered” in the next day or two, as well it ought to be.

By popular demand: Ed Orgeron wants to sell you a Hummer, in H.264 format suitable for your iPod or Apple TV, and viewable on pretty much any modern PC or Mac.

Also available in DivX format, but you’ll need the XviD codec if you don't already have it installed.

Greetings to our visitors from EDSBS. Updated to add the H.264 version, which is smaller and the same quality as the original.

Steven Taylor notes that the disposition of the last seat in Germany’s parliamentary elections has now been resolved, giving the Christian Democrats a 226–222 edge over the Social Democrats in the new Bundestag; as a result, it appears that Gerhard Schröder is backing off his earlier insistence on remaining chancellor, although his SPD is not conceding the party’s claim to the chancellorship just yet.

On a semi-related note, today’s OpinionJournal featured article by Michael Greve argues that Germany’s election proves that proporational representation and cooperative federalism suck. I’m personally unconvinced that either is the case—indeed, the criticisms he levies against Germany’s use of transfer payments could just as easily apply to the United States. Rather, the problems Greve sees are in my mind largely the legacy of the CDU/CSU and SPD’s corporatist policies prior to reunification, which entrenched an inefficient welfare state and inflexible labor market, which have led to the need for reforms now, and effectively marginalized mass participation in politics, giving rise to both the Greens and the far right as important electoral forces.