Screen your potential job applications against the list of ICPSR member institutions. Data: don’t take a job without it.

0-for-5 and counting…

The good news is that the state of Arkansas won’t have Chris Lawrence to kick around any more. Or at all, for that matter. At least I got enough credits out of that interview from Southwest to put me over the top for a free ticket.

The tote board now stands at 0-for-3 for Fall ’07.

Update: If the wiki is to be believed, make that 0-for-4.

Another update: The title of this post is a semi-paraphrase of the third quote down.

The Free Exchange blog at The Economist considers the conditions under which unions might increase productivity. Given the conditions identified, this is not the article you want to take to your dean to defend your efforts to start a faculty union (or, even worse, a grad student union).

There’s something vaguely Soviet about trying to come up with a written plan of what one hopes to achieve over the next n years as an academic. Particularly when said plan is contingent on a hypothetical (like, say, being hired) that, while not of negligible likelihood, is certainly not a Sure Thing™.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m certain there is value to the exercise, if only because it’s useful to be able to rattle something off in response to a question on an interview.

Last night in a hotel room in an undisclosed location, I was lying in bed and my inner ear was telling me I was still on an airplane.

In related news, I’ve got two more invitations for interviews, just in case my equilibrium wasn’t shot to hell already. Already, I think I’ve taught more sessions of other professors’ classes than some of my own this semester.

I should be in bed since I have an 8:45 flight tomorrow to Charlotte for the APSA Teaching and Learning Conference. In addition to seeing Michelle and a fellow Ole Miss grad at the conference, I’m being put up (with?) by Frequent Commenter Scott and his family during my stay, so I’m only out my airfare, the absurd $190 conference registration fee, and my rental car.

I’m particularly looking forward to hobnobbing with all the people who got the jobs I wanted this year. That’s going to be great fun.

Rick Hasen and Jonathan Adler note the passing of prominent American politics scholar Nelson W. Polsby, probably best known for his study of American political institutions such as Congress and the presidency.

I’m moderately in favor of the idea of the residential college model and having faculty advisors have apartments in student housing—but some of the drawbacks are mighty big whoppers.

þ: Steven Taylor who, like me, probably won’t be signing up for such a job anytime soon.

I need to complete the following tasks today (now that I’ve recovered from my early morning Monday):

1. Apply for four new jobs that just appeared on various and sundry job sites.
2. Prepare for my Congress class Wednesday morning. (I can prepare for intro before class in the morning and methods between classes, since those are classes I taught last semester and not a lot has changed in either, but I haven’t taught Congress since July 2005, when I was using different books, so it’s essentially a new prep.)
3. Prepare for a teaching demonstration in a methods course Friday at a university in Texas. (I have something canned for this, so it won’t be too much additional work.)
4. Finish revisions to the strategic voting paper so I can send it out.

Now, if you had to guess, which one of those do you think won’t get done today?

Frequent Commenter Scott made me aware of this $2000 scholarship contest available to political bloggers of any stripe who are currently attending any postsecondary institution of higher learning. All you need is a political blog and the ability to write 300 words to have a shot.

Jacob Levy senses a disturbing trend in the job market force for political theorists, based on the APSA’s (in my opinion, decidedly rose-colored) statistics on political science hiring in recent years. I can’t say I’m very surprised by those findings. My sense from four years on the market is that new hiring, particularly outside the research universities, is trending in a very pragmatic direction, with more emphasis on applied and borderline vocational subfields such as policy and public administration (and, to a lesser extent, quantitative political analysis as applied to those fields) and rather less on the theoretical study of politics, normative or otherwise.

On the other hand, I’m not sure many R1s are planning to follow the lead(?) of my graduate alma mater and Florida State by completely eliminating the subfield… which means that the supply of theory PhDs will probably decline slower than collegiate demand for such jobs. Good news for penny-pinching chairs and deans, perhaps, but alas not-so-good news for good folks like Nick.

Update: Mr. Troester posts his thoughts on the matter.

Another day, another two interviews scheduled, leading to a neat bracketing of the Super Bowl. The big downside is that the interviews mean five more classes down the drain. It’s not a huge problem yet, since my schedules generally plenty of slack time in them, but I’d better get a job soon or some students may start demanding tuition refunds—and, to be honest, I really wouldn’t blame them.

Tomorrow will be my first full day of the semester after having to miss two days (including the first two days of my Monday-Wednesday methods class). For reasons I don’t quite understand, even though my teaching schedule has a lot more cancelled days on it this semester than last (due not just to the interviews I knew about when I was making the syllabus, but also to Midwest and APSA T&LC), I don’t actually seem to be losing any class days in methods compared to last semester. I suppose those rumors about spring terms being longer than fall ones are actually true…

Jacob T. Levy advises academic job applicants thusly:

Under no circumstances is “Microsoft Word” a skill worth listing on your C.V. Neither is Power Point or Excel.

Unless you’re a certified sys admin, under no circumstances is any version of Windows or a Mac operating system a skill worth listing on your C.V.; it means “I know how to turn my computer on.”

And—really, truly—under no circumstances is your ability to e-mail or to operate a web browser a skill worth listing on your C.V.

These things aren’t just weighted at zero. They make you look ridiculous.

Tyler Cowen links a blog whose mission I can wholeheartedly support… and not just because my experience with the Duke IRB made me decide to kill off the experiential learning part of my methods course.

I have slept for all of four hours in the last two or three days. That was far more fun to do when I was an undergrad, let me tell you.

The interview at [location redacted] by and large went well, but I think I need to go back to doing my old job talk. I think even the “big picture” version of the sophistication measurement talk is just too abstract for most audiences; it’d work at an PhD-granting department, but since I’m not interviewing at those sorts of places, and not all that terribly interested in making my career at an R1, it just doesn’t work as well.

So mostly sleep and class prep tomorrow, then teach Friday, then get ready for another interview Sunday and Monday at [location also redacted] which isn’t that far away from [location redacted]. I’m also trying to figure out scheduling for an interview at [yet another location] that doesn’t necessitate me returning from T&LC in Charlotte and hopping immediately on a plane to [airport near yet another location]. Life could be worse—I guess I could not have these sorts of problems in my life.

After being about the only American today to successfully reach his destination on time by commercial aircraft, I am now in [location redacted] for a job interview. Since they didn’t put me up in a barely-renovated former hospital, they’ve already won some mild positive cred from me.

Jacob Levy takes note of some new rankings of PhD-granting departments in political science published in The Chronicle of Higher Ed, using a methodology that does not incorporate institutional reputation. I’m not going to say that they’re implausible, but the fact that there’s one UC school ranked in the top ten and it’s not located in Berkeley or San Diego makes me a mite skeptical.

Update: Jacob has updated his post with some details about the methodology behind the rankings; as he notes, it probably gives too much credit to books for article-driven subfields like American and methods, and to a lesser extent IR.

I’d also comment that reputation, which most political science ranking systems to date have been largely based on, is by and large a lagging indicator; perhaps these rankings represent a useful leading indicator, particularly in book-driven fields like theory, but I wouldn’t find them of much use on their own.

I am finally on the return leg of the grand roadtrip—I have one more day in Memphis before I finally get back home to butt-numbingly cold St. Louis. I enjoyed my visit to New Orleans. Both of my SPSA panels went well, although they were, alas, lightly attended; I am certainly more confident about the publication prospects for the paper, although now it needs a blog nickname—perhaps “the damn measurement paper” will suffice.

I also enjoyed catching up with Steven, Dieter (the rock upon whom ICPSR is built), Andrew (all too briefly), and Kelly.

Steven Taylor and I had lunch today at Mother’s Restaurant, self-declared home of the “world’s best baked ham.” I have to say that the ham and cheese po-boy was excellent, if on the pricey side ($9!).

In other SPSA conference news, my morning panel at the Hotel Intercontinental was relegated to a tiny conference room with a hand-printed sign adjacent to a service elevator. You’d think the public opinion section would get more respect from the conference powers that be…

The panel I am allegedly the discussant on is exactly four days away, and I have received all of one paper thus far. I suppose that makes the job a tad easier than usual…

In other news, I booked my flight for the APSA Teaching and Learning Conference and my shared hotel room for Midwest at the Palmer House, so I guess I’m going to have a busy spring between three conferences and the two branches of the job hunt—both academic and non-academic.

Relatedly, my public new years’ resolutions:

1. Lose weight (ok, this is a perpetual and perpetually-broken one).
2. Get two more articles accepted by September, even if they end up in the crappiest peer-reviewed journals on the planet.
3. Get a tenure-track job, a job guaranteeing at least two years, or (failing those) find something better to do with my life.

The SPSA paper is here for the morbidly or otherwise curious.

I think it’s time for a new New Year’s Resolution. Instead of my annual resolution to lose weight—which feels like tilting at windmills these days—I hereby resolve to stop being as much of a perfectionist, particularly when it comes to my research. I will now make things good enough, send them out, and hope for the best, rather than trying to anticipate and address every last objection some anal reviewer might have to the piece.

The moral of this resolution, of course, is that I should have sent out the strategic voting paper months ago, rather than continuing to fiddle with every last detail. So I shall end my fiddling, stick the latest results in the current draft, and send the damn thing out before Christmas.

(This is easier said than done, I suspect, although I’m told committing to these things is an important step in ensuring they get done.)

I find that it takes about 17 more steps to accomplish anything in WebCT than in Blackboard. Mind you, I’m still not entirely sold on either as a content management system, but at least Blackboard worked without requiring me to do stupid things like “Update student view” on a regular basis. Not to mention that its grading system worked about 70% right, as opposed to WebCT's which manages about 40% on my scale. (I still had to calculate final grades using a spreadsheet formula with Blackboard because of my bizarre insistence on weighing exam grades based on student performance, but at least it could do a quiz average trivially... instead of making me produce a formula for that too, which appears to be WebCT’s approach.)

If it weren’t for the hassle and the FERPA issues, I’d just run Moodle on my Mac mini and be done with it.