I now have a campus interview tentatively scheduled for mid-January at a southern liberal arts college. More please.

Today I consider the value of Texas’ “10-percent” admissions plan over at Outside the Beltway; read and comment over there.

As a reminder, all of my OTB posts can be found here.

I’m not sure where in my application materials someone at a teaching institution got the impression that I’d prefer a position in a research-oriented department (although I doubt it was in anything I wrote, nor in my letters of recommendation), but since potential employers are apparently hanging on every syllable that appears on the blog, let me reiterate a few points:

1. Beggars can’t be choosers, particularly in March, when I accepted my non-tenure-track positions at Duke and SLU.
2. I have never taught a graduate-level class, despite having opportunities to do so.
3. In six semesters of full-time teaching, including spring 2007, I have carried a three-course teaching load in all but one: my first semester at Duke. At Millsaps, my effective teaching load was higher (an additional directed readings course each semester, along with supervising an honors thesis).
4. If I didn’t want to teach, there are ample research opportunities in the private sector for someone with my skills and interests with far better job security and remuneration. And, by definition, I wouldn’t be applying for your job that requires a lot of teaching and advising.

I now return you to your regularly-scheduled programming.

Leopold Stotch explains how to buy student worker loyalty. I suppose that’s slightly more ethical than selling desk copies on Amazon or to the textbook buyers… and at least more altruistic.

After the misery of the last two weeks (to recap: four days without power and limbo-turned-rejection at the hands of my current colleagues) I am happy to be in the relatively temperate climes of Memphis for a few days courtesy of the good folks at Northwest Airlines, who didn’t manage to lose my bags this time, even if I remain somewhat worried that my car will be stripped to the bare frame and/or encased in a block of ice when I get back to St. Louis.

In other good news, I have another phone interview, a sit-down with a department at SPSA, and another chat with a department chair scheduled for the upcoming weeks, with hopefully more on the horizon. I guess I continue to live in interesting times.

Jeff Gill looks at the plethora of terminology surrounding multilevel models:

There is a plethora of names for multilevel models. Sociologists seem to prefer “hierarchical,” many statisticians say “mixed effects,” and there is heterogeneity about usage in economics. It seems reasonable to standardize, but this is unlikely to happen. ...

Some prefer “random intercepts” for “fixed effects” and perhaps we can consider these all to be members of a larger family where indices are turned-on turned-off systematically. On the other hand maybe it’s just terminology and not worth worrying about too much. Thoughts?

Silly me thought the plethora of terminology was a deliberate obfuscation effort by methodologists to make them look like they know more stuff than they actually do. For example, smarty-pants methodologists could say in casual conversation, “I know hierarchical models and mixed effects!” And unless you knew that they were the same thing, the smarty-pants methodologist would look like s/he was two things smarter than the non-smarty-pants methodologist who didn’t know either.

I may try this myself in interviews… “I know logistic regression and logit!” “I know dummy variables and fixed effects!” I feel smarter already…

Have I mentioned lately how much I despise phone interviews?

Margaret Soltan shares some commentary on a report in Sunday’s New York Times on an investigation into grading irregularities involving Auburn scholarship athletes. Key paragraphs of the NYT report:

An internal audit at Auburn University found that a grade for a scholarship athlete was changed without the knowledge of the professor, raising the athlete’s average in the final semester just over the 2.0 minimum for graduation.

The grade, which was changed to an A from an incomplete, was one of four A’s the athlete received in the spring semester of 2003. None of the courses required classroom attendance. ...

The grade was changed without the consent of the instructor listed for the course, the sociology professor Paul Starr. He said he did not teach the course to the athlete that semester and did not recall ever meeting the athlete.

“It was a phantom student in a phantom class,” Starr said in an interview in his office this week. “The schedule was a very strange one. You don’t cook up a schedule like that yourself. There was obviously some kind of guidance and special allowances with someone who had that kind of schedule.”

Starr said he found out about the grade change, which occurred May 12, 2003, only eight days ago, when he received an e-mail message as part of the internal audit. The information systems auditor who sent the message, Robert Gottesman, said the audit had nothing to do with the sociology department or the athletic department. It is not known whether the grade changes were widespread, but other sociology department professors received e-mail messages from the auditor this week.

The e-mail message Starr received Nov. 29 said, “As part of an ongoing audit, Auburn University Internal Audit is reviewing changes made to grades where the documentation was signed by someone other than the instructor of record.” ...

Starr said that he would like to find out who had authorized the grade change but that he had heard nothing since replying to Gottesman on Nov. 30.

“I want to know more about the circumstance,” Starr said. “If credit is assigned by my name, I should know the background to it, whether it was an error or an inappropriate act, because I’m the instructor of record.”

The same week Starr received the audit notice, other professors in his department, which includes sociology, anthropology, social work and criminology, received e-mail messages from an auditor.

This does not look good, to say the least. As Margaret puts it, in a nutshell: “Are we clear about what’s going on at Auburn? People affiliated with the sports program are getting in to the university computer, adding the names of players to professors’ class lists, and assigning them A’s from those professors.”

As a few readers are already aware, I learned (under highly suboptimal circumstances) that SLU has offered the tenure-track equivalent to the position I currently occupy to someone else, although it is unclear at this point whether or not said someone else will be accepting said position; it is also unclear whether I might possibly receive an offer should this offer be turned down.

The good news? Three phone interviews next week, and one more I’m very confident of getting in the near future. Some of them even at places that I’d rather be than SLU… admittedly a list that has expanded somewhat since Friday.

After a three-month drought, I have now three phone interviews scheduled for two days next week. I have no clue what this means, but I guess it’s good.

My student Jim Swift inadvertently demonstrates via anecdote why I tend to avoid current events and policy discussions like the plague in my classes.

So does anyone want to take up the mantle of the table guy?

Update: He/she’s back.

The power outage at least had one silver lining for me: it forced me to spend some time in my office with minimal distractions, which allowed me to wrap up most of the textual revisions of the strategic voting paper.

I also am continuing to fiddle with the data analysis; I’m still not happy about the 2000 results, and I’m not sure there’s anything to be done about that (beyond getting a time machine, increasing the NES sample size, and figuring out some way to get more people to fess up to voting for Nader), but the 1996 results turn out to be stronger with the IRT measure of sophistication than they were with the interviewer evaluation. Plus I got the multiple imputation stuff to work.

So hopefully during the black hole between now and student paper grading time I can get this thing polished and ready for submission to a decent journal… and have time to spare to hack together about 8 bits of my dissertation and my job talk into a SPSA paper.

In other “I actually get work done, believe it or not” business in recent days, I took care of a paper review for a journal… I wish I could say it was punctual, but in fairness the first time they sent me the paper for review it got bounced from my SLU account because I was either over my mail quota or the mail system was mid-meltdown. I also wrote two recommendation letters.

Leopold Stotch shares a highlight from a recent phone interview. And apparently anonymous people know more about my employment status than I do, maybe.

I now have a phone interview scheduled for a position at a midwestern state university. More please.

One of the dozens of “last forms of acceptable discrimination” will get its place in the academy if “fat studies” is added to the curriculum. Somehow I don’t see the study of William Howard Taft (or, for that matter, William Jefferson Clinton) fitting very well into this research program.

As (virtually) always, from NewsRadio:

Jimmy: The market can be a cruel mistress.
Beth: Well, so can I… but that’s not how I want to make my money any more.

For the first time in my life, the spirit moved me to create flyers for the Congress class that I am teaching next semester. I’m not entirely comfortable with advertising “no prerequisites” as a selling point, but then again there are no prerequisites—indeed, I don’t think our intro to American politics class, despite its popularity with undergrads, is actually required for anything at all in our curriculum at present.

The next step is to finalize a syllabus; I have an outline that I think will work well, but I’d like to nail down the dates for each topic and the content of the assignments.

Incidentally, I haven’t taught a MWF class since my days as a graduate instructor—if even then—and next semester I’ve lucked into two of them (Congress and intro). I am not at all a fan of the 50-minute class, and it's going to play havoc with my in-class exams in intro, but I suppose I will adapt. At least methods is only scheduled MW…

I get an inordinate number of Google hits looking for the political science job market blogs… so here are the links that I’m aware of (as of October 2009):

• Political Science Job Rumors: the discussion board that’s not really a blog.
• 2009-10 Jobs Wiki
• Public Policy/Public Administration Jobs.
• The IR Rumor Mill.
• Methods discussion blog.
• Political Theory/Public Law.
• REP (Racial/Ethnic Politics)

For the record, I have no responsibility for any of the above blogs or wikis, although I have commented on some of them on occasion. I will be happy to add any additional links that are germane to this post.

Today went better than Wednesday, largely because (a) it was shorter and (b) I didn’t spend 90% of it walking or standing. I feel reasonably good about how things went, all things considered—and certainly better than I did yesterday morning, when I was both tired and in one of those depressed moods.

I think the bar is now set pretty high, at least if the dimensions that appear to matter to this department and university are the ones on which this position will be filled. But we will see; it is early days yet.

Day one of the interview is over, and I am basically brain-dead.

There is something immensely odd about interviewing for what is essentially one’s own job: the pronouns get muddled, as do the tenses, and (putting on the shoes of the interviewers) I’m not sure there’s much comparability between what an outsider might say and what I would.

Maybe it just doesn’t feel like an interview “should” because (a) I am basically comfortable with the people I am talking to and (b) I have resigned myself to knowing my fate is essentially out of my hands; I can fiddle at the margins, but essentially whether or not I get the job is largely determined by whether or not they find someone “better” than me who also accepts this offer, neither factor being under my control.

The analogy in my mind that keeps replaying itself is something that came up during one of my feeble attempts at a relationship with another political scientist† who explained to me that for all my swell features her existing boyfriend had “incumbency advantage.”*

Well, the one time previous to this when incumbency advantage should have accrued to me on the job market it did me very little good—partially my own fault in that case, since I was still in “meek new faculty member” mode—and I am no more optimistic now than I had right to be in the past.

My review copy of Stewart’s Analyzing Congress showed up today in the mail (I actually had it suggested to me by a professor at Lawrence during my interview there last year), and I liked it so much it went in my book order and on my Congress syllabus. Maybe I’m just overcompensating for having virtually no formal theory training in grad school.

I accomplished item #1 on the list today. Here’s the result. Item #2 should be feasible tomorrow, since my Monday schedule is currently clear, particularly if I get my intro exam written tonight.

Unfortunately, I think someone set the building alarm on Fitzgerald Hall about 30 minutes ago with me still inside, so getting home tonight may be interesting.

Oddly enough, the graphics package code that I was using to add error bars to my dotcharts has mysteriously stopped working since upgrading to R 2.4.0. I can still make the dotcharts using dotchart, but the error bars don’t show up after adding them using segments. This clearly worked last month, or otherwise I wouldn’t have had a presentation to show at Mizzou.

Luckily enough I found another solution using dotplot in lattice instead in an article by Bill Jacoby in the most recent edition of The Political Methodologist… which I probably should have read before hacking together the code the first time around. So now it works… at least until R 2.5.0 comes out, at which point all bets are off.

Halfway through the weekend, I’m 0–6 on the agenda, although I did get out 11 job applications. Sunday’s plan is to go into the office to do real work, since clearly I won’t get anything done if I sit around the apartment.