I’m now 2/3 of the way throgh my first day of classes; I have my American politics class in about 40 minutes. Except for overpaying for lunch, missing my Metrolink train by two minutes (which wouldn’t really be much of a problem, except for trying to catch SLU‘s infrequent twice-hourly shuttle along Grand), and ending up with a Cherry Coke at a vending machine, it’s been a pretty good day thus far.

Plus I get a real paycheck tomorrow for the first time in three months, which is a nice bonus.

For the morbidly curious, here’s my pathetic collection of Metrolink photos thus far. No jumpers, tunnel collapses, or broken train windows yet.

Two posts from a couple of my favorite academic bloggers crossed the wires today, on two different aspects of what Stephen Karlson calls the “positional arms race” in higher education. Margaret Soltan excerpts a Newsweek piece looking at the argument that more prestigious undergraduate institutions do a better job of educating the masses than the “mid-majors”:

Underlying the hysteria [of parents wanting their children to attend “elite” institutions] is the belief that scarce elite degrees must be highly valuable. Their graduates must enjoy more success because they get a better education and develop better contacts. All that’s plausible—and mostly wrong. “We haven’t found any convincing evidence that selectivity or prestige matters,” says Ernest T. Pascarella of the University of Iowa, co- author of “How College Affects Students,” an 827-page evaluation of hundreds of studies of the college experience. Selective schools don’t systematically employ better instructional approaches than less-selective schools, according to a study by Pascarella and George Kuh of Indiana University. Some do; some don’t. On two measures—professors’ feedback and the number of essay exams—selective schools do slightly worse. ...

Kids count more than their colleges. Getting into Yale may signify intelligence, talent and ambition. But it’s not the only indicator and, paradoxically, its significance is declining. The reason: so many similar people go elsewhere. Getting into college isn’t life’s only competition. In the next competition—the job market, graduate school—the results may change.

At another end of the spectrum, Prof. Karlson takes note of Richard Vedder’s report that his colleagues at Ohio University have voted themselves a reduced teaching load without a lot of public accountability; quoth Vedder:

In 1960, the teaching load in the OU economics department was 12 hours a week When I started work in the mid 1960’s, it was already reduced to 9 hours. In 1967, in moving to the quarter system, we reduced it to eight hours. Now, it is the equivalent of 6.7 hours, a 44 percent reduction in roughly 44 years. That is not at all atypical. Quality liberal arts colleges these days very often have a 6 hour load—two three hour courses per semester. Top research universities have still lower loads.

When my department voted to go from six courses a year (two per quarter) to five, it essentially eliminated at least 10 classes a year from being taught. To make up for that, my department could have hired two professors, at a cost of perhaps $200,000 a year (counting fringe benefits). Or, it could turn away more kids from classes needed to graduate, increasing the length of their education and thus the cost of it. Or, it could increase average class size. In fact, it is probably doing a combination of all three of these, for example, adding one professor at a total cost of perhaps $100,000.

Why are they doing this? Supposedly, to increase the research output of the faculty. My prediction is the departmental output of articles may rise from 15 to 16 or 17 a year – roughly 10 percent. Is it worth $100,000, bigger classes, and more closing out of students in classes to publish perhaps two more papers per year, each one of which will probably be read by a best a few dozen readers? Is anyone doing a cost-benefit analysis of the advantages of this move? The answer, of course, is no. Universities simply do what they want, namely the things they like (writing papers which help get faculty promoted and tenured), rather than the things the public that is paying the bills thinks is most important, teaching students. No one is accountable, the decisions are hidden from the public, and the returns on many of those decisions are very low in relation to the costs.

Karlson concurs in part and dissents in part:

Is it the number of articles, or the quality of the articles? Will the Economics faculty use the reassigned time to polish their work so as to make it more attractive to Journal of Political Economy or Economic Inquiry or Economics Letters, or will they simply be ensuring that Rivista Internazionale Numere Due di Bovini will be able to meet its production schedules? If the latter, perhaps the decision will inefficiently allocate resources. But what’s special about the former journals? Publish in the former journals and your department moves up in the disciplinary league tables. Why does that matter? Because the league tables color the impression observers have of the prestige of a university. So what? People engage in positional arms races to get into universities with a lot of prestige.

Ultimately, then, the responsibility is on the public to quit spending money on getting their kids into “prestige” universities with brilliant research faculties that spend no time with undergraduates, particularly not with freshmen, and on the public to quit recruiting their entry-level employees from those universities. But until there are changes in those behaviors, it is not an error on the part of the Ohio faculty of Economics to offer working conditions more like those prevailing at the “prestige” campuses. Ohio might secure a recruiting advantage thereby, and some Ohio faculty might publish work that attracts the attention of a department higher up the academic food chain.

Note that “people” in the arms race are not just students but also faculty; the preordained superstars (and occasionally those who manage to publish their way out of the ghetto) go where the teaching load is lowest—and, since they’re the superstars, their pay is the highest. This is rational behavior for a department seeking to attract bright young faculty to a place more known for its reputation as a party school than its research output, and (indirectly) to create upward pressure on salaries for the department’s faculty—after all, if OU needs to attract bright young faculty, they’ll have to pay market rates for that labor, and concerns about salary compression and fairness to the longtimers will ensure everyone else gets paid too.

Everyone wins—well, except the public, who will be, over the long term, paying more money for less work, and the students, who will see the shortfall in offerings filled by adjunctification or auditoriumization of classes, or an extended undergraduate career spent chasing classroom space in the major and gen-ed distribution requirements while padding the required courseload in the meantime with filler.

Classes commence on Monday, and I’d say I’m around 85% organized—the only things I really need to take care of are fixing the room assignment for my research methods course and setting up my class stuff in WebCT.

On the job application front, I sent out six more Thursday, and have a stack of about twenty more to work on, about half of which I hope to take care of this weekend. No news yet on the 15 or so applications I’ve already sent, but I suppose that’s hardly a surprise…

Every time I feel like I’m making progress in turning “the damn strategic voting chapter” into a final paper worthy of submission, I stumble across a new bug in Zelig. I’d theorize that Gary King doesn’t want me to publish anything, but I’m afraid I’m far too insignificant a microbe in the whole political science universe to be squashed so deliberately.

If I were better organized, I’d spend the time I’m waiting for the bugs to be fixed writing up the changes I’ve made already—most notably, tossing the interviewer measure of sophistication in favor of an item-response theory model. That would probably cover the real reason I don’t seem to be able to publish anything—well, besides my lack of a research budget, RAs, and course releases for research, and a computer on my desk at work that probably was the cheapest thing Dell marketed to its education customers three years ago.

SLU has moved up a few spots in the latest U.S. News rankings of the best national universities to 77th, in a four-way tie with Virginia Tech, UC-Boulder, and Stevens Institute of Technology.

In a completely unrelated development, the Spreadsheet of Death™ 2007 edition is up to around 30 entries already.

Reminder to self: specify that I want a Mac Pro on my desk when negotiating my tenure-track contract this fall (with whomever that might be).

In part 3 of her ongoing series, Michelle Dion tackles the question of choosing a PhD program to attend. All excellent points I wish I’d been aware of when thinking of grad school 8–9 years ago.

Jason Kuznicki has what might be fairly pitched as the counterpoint to Michelle Dion’s posts with advice to prospective graduate students—that is, if somehow you came away with the impression that Michelle’s advice was rosy (which, um, it wasn’t):

Should I go to graduate school for history?

My short answer: No.

My long answer: No, and here’s why…

While things are not quite as bleak as Jason describes in political science land (for starters, I have—at least, as of August 15—a full-time job in academia that pays a living wage, with a non-negligible chance of continued employment beyond the coming academic year, which decidedly would not be the case had I gotten a PhD in history from Ole Miss), this paragraph is not far off the mark regardless:

This is the real reason why you should not go to graduate school in history: Your twenties are the most important decade of your life when it comes to defining your career. No matter how long you live, people will always ask about these formative years. Replying that you spent them getting a PhD in history marks you as uniquely unqualified for anything in particular. You will forever be more “interesting” than you are “employable.”

Glenn Reynolds, in responding to the Kevin Barrett kerfuffle, writes in part:

More importantly, they need to realize that people pay good money to send students to Wisconsin because it’s “branded” as a place that provides quality education from quality professors. When you respond to criticism by basically disclaiming any responsibility for what’s taught in classrooms, you also destroy the brand. Why send students to Wisconsin if that’s the case? Where’s the quality control? What does it mean to be an elite institution if you let any bozo teach whatever he/she wants in any course?

Without some reason to think that Wisconsin is better than other schools why go there?

The broader question left unasked is why any student paying to attend an “elite” institution should be taught by an adjunct in the first place. It’s not that big a leap, after all, from “why is this course being taught by a kook?” to “why is this course being taught by someone whose pay is less than my tuition bill?”

Quality control is always an issue (particularly in the academy, which is generally much more risk-averse in both hiring and firing than private industry), but at adjunct salaries the mentally stable underemployed PhD may be more likely to take the alternative job at the drive-through at Mickey D’s than the slightly-kooky adherent to nutbar conspiracy theories who needs an audience for his sermons.

Greg Weeks considers the problem of matching your research up with a journal for publication. Alas, the lawprof approach of shotgunning the paper to 17 journals and taking the best acceptance (if any) is precluded by journal submission rules in most other fields—not that there aren’t a few people who try (and usually fail) to get away with sending stuff to more than one journal at the same time.

The Mississippi state college board put 37 degree programs at state universities on probation last Wednesday, including all three master’s programs in political science in the state and the sole PhD program:

“We’re giving them three years to get back on track,” said Bill Smith, the state’s acting commissioner of academic and student affairs. “We’re not out to just shut them down.”

The state College Board on Wednesday placed 37 programs on probation, and eliminated two, that were not graduating enough students.

Every university in the state except Mississippi University for Women had programs on the list.

Smith said the board adopted standards several years ago mandating a certain number of graduates over six years: 30 for bachelor’s, 18 for master’s and nine for doctoral programs. ...

Smith said elimination is not automatic for programs that do not up their number of graduates.

Some, he said, such as Delta State’s political science program, are key to undergraduate programs and cannot be eliminated.

Others, he said, are vital to Mississippi, no matter how few graduates they produce.

The graduate counts they present might even be a little on the generous side (my count is 5 or 6 PhDs, although I may be missing an IR person or two), but I’ll trust IHL‘s accounting over my vague recollections in this instance.

Michelle Dion shares some of the advice she gives students who come into her office who want to go to grad school, advice I am generally concur with. Would that anyone gave me similar advice when I was in college—not that I asked many people for it, which may have been part of the problem…

Update: See also Part II of the same.

One more before I head to naptime: Steven Taylor links a post from his Troy colleague Scott Nokes on the Auburn athletics sham course scandal. I found this passage amusing:

The reason the practical limit (on the number of directed readings) is low is that professors generally do not like doing directed readings, since it requires a high commitment of time for no extra pay, and for a single student. It also can mess up a department’s curriculum, but how that works is a little complex, and unimportant for understanding this story. The main point here is that most professors will avoid doing any directed reading if they can.

Spoken like a man who’s never taught in at a college where such extra work was a completely unadvertised expectation of the position. Every semester.

Mind you, I didn’t mind teaching directed readings courses, but I certainly would have preferred doing so under at least the pretense that it was voluntary on my part. To paraphrase a famous phrase, “being an internal candidate means never having to say ‘no’.”

In completely unrelated news, I have received two emails in the last 24 hours containing the phrase “I received an email saying that you are now my advisor.” It would have been nice to get an email saying that I had advisees. It would have been even nicer for my paycheck to start before I started having to do work for my new job.

In this post, I think I hit on the major theme of my dissertation and distill the last 50 years of research on political expertise into a nice little soundbite, even though the post is obstensibly about the Arizona voter lottery ballot proposition. (I, as always, have no problem with parties and candidates outright bribing people to vote, so a government-run voter lottery is hardly objectionable to me—indeed, it’s less objectionable than the government-run lottery that you have to pay to enter, aka the Tax on Stupid People.)

Granted, it’s still too academic and wordy, and it doesn’t cite sources—the highlights would be, in addition to Downs, The American Voter, a crapload of other Converse stuff, Zaller, Delli Carpini and Keeter, Lupia, Redlawsk and Lau, Bartels, Alvarez and Brehm, Ansolobehere, and my illustrious dissertation, in no particular order except placing myself dead last.

EDSBS links a New York Times piece from yesterday detailing some rather creative use of independent study classes by a professor in the Auburn sociology department who was apparently in cahoots with an athletic tutor to give Tiger jocks cheap A’s. The money quote in my book:

[Carnell “Cadillac”] Williams said one of the two directed-reading courses he took with Professor [Thomas] Petee during the spring of 2005 was a statistics class.

Asked if that course, considered the most difficult in the sociology major, was available to regular students as a directed reading, Professor Petee said, “No, not usually.”

Mr. Williams described the class this way: “You’re just studying different kinds of math. It’s one of those things where you write a report about the different theories and things like that.”

The NCAA is, as they say, investigating, although I ultimately expect little more than a wrist-slap for Tommy Tuberville’s rogue program down on the Plains, in large part because this (and similar) petty corruption is widespread in college football. One example: I have it on good authority that at least one NFL star who was an Ole Miss criminal justice major was as dumb as a post yet somehow managed to maintain his eligibility through softball-lobbing instructors and professors, with generous assists from the athletic tutors. Most people who’ve spent any time around Division I schools can probably tell similar stories—particularly if they’ve been in or near what Prof. Karlson artfully refers to as the Division of Cooling Out the Mark.

That said, directed readings courses may be the soft underbelly of grade inflation more generally for athlete and non-athlete alike; certainly it’s hard to give out many C’s and D’s when you really have no other students to compare a directed readings student to, although in theory professors shouldn’t be letting bad students in independent study courses in the first place (so there may be a selection bias issue here).

I’ve decided to list my return address on job applications as “St. Louis” rather than “Clayton,” since the USPS says either is acceptable, and the six people who know the difference might think I was some sort of rich snob otherwise.

I freely admit to snobbery (I do put "Dr." on my frequent flyer accounts and hotel reservations, after all), but I’m afraid I’m not rich—else I’d be living in the Central West End or the Washington Avenue loft district.

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.

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.

I’m not sure whether compiling a master list of libertarian professors is a good or bad thing, but my gut feeling is bad. Particularly if/when my name shows up on it.

þ: Division of Labour.

Tomorrow morning I head to Fort Collins (via DFW and Denver) to spend a week grading exams. Hopefully that’s not quite as bad as it sounds like it could be.

Actually, I’m dreading the ten hours on airplanes more than the seven days of grading. You’d think someone would have a non-stop flight from Raleigh to Denver, but no such luck.

Well, after doing all the recoding I needed to produce binary “correct/incorrect” scores for all the respondents, I ran the IRT model on the 1992 NES, and my computer at work (not exactly shabby – a 1.15 GHz AMD Athlon XP with 1 GB of RAM) ran out of memory when it tried to save the respondent abilities after about 30 minutes of pegging the CPU and eating up my memory and swap. I guess I had more respondents this time than when I did the Dutch model for my dissertation.

The moral of this story: rerun the model with a bit more thinning on my faster AMD64 box at home.

Update: It works much faster (and without killing my computer) when the data matrix is actually set up correctly. Go figure.

Margaret Soltan ponders student evaluations; I generally agree with her view that they largely should be taken with a grain of salt—in large part because you’re simply never going to please everyone. Now that I’m a bit more comfortable in my professorial skin, I don’t worry quite so much about them, but it’s not like I can stop thinking about them any time soon.

Speaking of evaluations, how do folks handle written evaluations in job applications? I’ve only ever included my numeric summaries of evaluations, since I couldn’t figure out any sensible way to include the written evals I have, at least, not in any way that would make it obvious that they were student evaluations instead of figments of my own imagination.

The political science job market is pathologically insane; already, ads for two jobs I’m interested in starting in August/September 2007 have hit eJobs, and it’s barely June.

Hopefully I can stay sane the next six months or so by repeatedly reminding myself of my firm pledge not to go to APSA in Philadelphia this year.