Bryan of Arguing with Signposts today is wrestling with rejection letters. Been there, done that. Got another one of those today, in fact. I have no real advice, besides taking the same approach to the job market a prostitute takes towards her clients—no matter how good you are, in the end you’re going to get screwed.

I’ve managed to parlay my offer into exactly bupkiss thus far (beyond a few congratulatory emails), which is probably a sign I should take it. At this point, I’m about two loose ends away from doing so.

I (finally!) have another job offer. if I were a Bayesian, I’d place my prior on accepting the job at somewhere near 75% in the absence of any other information. Now to go and collect the information necessary to make a final decision…

I can no longer feel guilty about having no scholarly accomplishments over spring break, as I finally got the R&R of The Damn Impeachment Paper™ out of the way, along with my measly contribution to July’s issue of PS. Maybe tomorrow I’ll do something with either the strategic voting paper or do something with the silly economic voting idea I have floating around in my head.

In other news, I found out that I have at least a week’s worth of gainful employment for the summer. Now to see if I can con someone else into hiring me for another month or so; although I could pretend I was going to get a lot done over the summer on my scholarship, the reality is that nothing in my life ever gets done without some degree of time pressure—idle hands and all that. Employment would probably make me get something done, as opposed to sitting around the apartment watching World Cup games.

University Diaries, on the increasing interest in Loren Pope and Colleges that Change Lives, his guide to 40 of America’s great liberal arts colleges:

As more and more Americans realize how many excellent colleges there are—many of them in settings more inspiring than New Haven—the Ivies run the risk of becoming drab asylums for the status-obsessed.

Run the risk? I’d say they’re mostly post-shark already.

The failure rate on the bar exam appears to be rising, although the absolute number of individuals passing the bar seems to be nearly constant nationwide over time.

Multiple-choice question: which of the following explanations for this pattern is most plausible?

1. Although more students are graduating from law school today than a decade ago, they are nonetheless dumber, at least as measured by the bar exam.
2. Affirmative action is churning out large numbers of law school graduates who subsequently cannot pass the bar.
3. The body of knowledge necessary to practice law in America has substantially increased in the past decade, thus requiring greater knowledge by new attorneys; thus the bar exam has become harder.
4. The bar exam is designed to limit the supply of lawyers, not to test whether potential lawyers have sufficient knowledge to practice law.

Free hint: the bar exam is set by existing members of the profession who have a state-granted monopoly on the practice of law.

þ: Glenn Reynolds and Amber Taylor’s comments.

NRO has gallantly lept into the debate about the academy with a blog that, at the very least, should be as worthy of being relentlessly mocked as “The Corner.” Case in point would be this nonsensical post from Joel Malchow, who can’t even figure out what particular phenomenon (co-ed dorms? co-ed dorm rooms? co-ed bathrooms?) he is complaining about, only to make the statement that “like unisex showers, co-ed dorms are generally met with very little interest among students.” Proudly spoken like a man who’s never seen Undeclared. Or gone to college.

If that weren’t enough, the decision to grant posting privileges to the terminally vapid Kathryn Jean Lopez is surely the death knell for this project as any worthwhile contribution to debate over the current state of the academy.

þ: Orin Kerr and Stephen Karlson.

I’m afraid I’m being thoroughly useless today as I try to recover from about four weeks of sleep deprivation; all I’ve really done today is check my mail, listen to the Battlestar Galactica finale podcast from Ron Moore, and crank up iTunes in the living room.

The good news is that this coming week is spring break, so at least I should be able to get some research done, including finishing up the R&R I have from PRQ so I can get it back to the editors.

As Duke recovers from the visit of David Horowitz, freshman Oliver Sherouse writes about the best post-mortem of his visit that one could hope for, featuring among other observations this gem:

SAF wants free speech, but only if you agree with them. They want to tell us about this secret conspiracy that involves our professors shouting liberal dogma in every class, ostensibly without us noticing. They want to “educate” their professors on how to profess.

At least a portion of the Duke community acquitted themselves rather poorly at the event as well, although the promised partial nudity from members of the crowd failed to materialize (alas). It makes me almost sad that I was wedged inside a full MD-80 during the event.

I ended up having 1½ phone interviews for one-year jobs on Wednesday morning, when I was only expecting one (the ½ was about 10 minutes of Q&A on my cell phone with a department chair in a neighboring state); I think they both went well, although neither institution has as of yet committed to giving me a campus interview.

At this point, though, I suppose any news is good news; I don’t think I was a particularly good fit for the needs of the department that interviewed me in person this week—I think they are looking for more of a public law guy, and while there’d be the opportunity to teach in my research areas, it probably wouldn’t be every semester—and I have yet to hear back from the interview a couple of weeks ago after having been assured that a decision would have been made by now—which, in the academic world, usually means at the very least that you’re not the most preferred candidate, consistent with my expectations.

Via email from FCS, a story on a professor at Suffolk University who apparently can’t work Fn-F4 (the internal/external display switch) on his laptop properly:

A Suffolk University professor is under investigation by university officials following accusations of alleged pornographic misconduct.

According to Emily Macdonald, a student in the class, [the professor] allegedly watched porn on his computer, which was unknowingly connected to a monitor that was behind him.

The class ended half an hour following the display, and the students never tried to intervene.

All sorts of intriguing questions arise here: was he multitasking at the time, both lecturing and watching Hung Jury 17 simultaneously? How does one “unknowingly” hook up one’s own computer to a monitor? Perhaps most importantly, from a pedagogical standpoint, did the porn in the background hurt or help students’ comprehension of the other material presented in class that day?

Update: The boss has additional thoughts on this matter.

Update (19 July 2007): At the request of the individual involved in this unfortunate incident and after some reflection, I have removed his name from this post; his identity was really not all that important to the point of this post.

Jane Galt reponds to a post from Steven Teles on the effect of affirmative action on the academic market with an interesting observation:

[T]he academic job market, as described here, is very close to what most academics think labour markets are like outside the [academy]: a sharply binary process in which there are clearly delineated winners or losers, the outcomes are somewhat arbitrary, and a very slight run of bad luck can land you in a place from which there is literally no hope of escaping. This might go a long way towards explaining academic leftism, in two ways: first, going through the academic job market might make you more left-wing; and second of all, people who think that the entire world works this way might be more predisposed to pursue jobs in academia.

An aside: does anyone have a citation for the Rick Hess article in PS that Teles mentions? A search of JSTOR and the Cambridge Journals site has drawn a complete blank.

In the blogosphere, any old conversation can become new again; the case in point is Eszter Hargittai’s post on the various and sundry titles used to refer to her (þ: Daniel Drezner).

I’ve said my piece on this before—indeed, over time, I’ve become rather more enamored of the title “doctor,” perhaps because (a) I won’t actually lose that title in May—unlike “professor,” which will go on haitus until at least August, and perhaps permanently—and (b) I continue to spend time in the South, where people with doctorates are typically so-addressed.

It is generally a bad sign when I get home and fall asleep on the couch watching Pardon the Interruption around 6 or so, because inevitably what happens is after a 30-minute nap I’m nicely rejuvenated to the point I can’t fall asleep again until the wee hours of the morning.

I guess the upside is that at least I can sit in front of the computer and work on some job applications to kill the time I’d otherwise be spending staring at the ceiling trying to fall asleep.

Is it just me, or does the combination of an hour-long research presentation and teaching a 75-minute undergraduate class seem like a bit much for a campus interview? I guess teaching other peoples’ classes is just karmic reward for cancelling my own classes while on these junkets interviews.

In other “interview follies” news, I’m currently playing email tag to arrange another phone interview for a one-year job in the Midwest. As it turns out, today is also a crunch day in the Spreadsheet of Death, with about a half-dozen application deadlines spread around the next week or so—my part in these applications is all done, but presumably this is the point where serious application triage begins at the recipients’ ends (and, from a self-interested perspective, where competing offers might be most useful).

Finally, my name showed up in an ad in the campus newspaper today; to my disappointment, I was not identified as a member of David Horowitz’s enemies list in the SAF’s full-page ad—instead I was merely being recognized as one of the honorees at this evening’s HOPE Banquet.

Congrats to Jacob T. Levy on his new position at McGill University in Montréal.

My inner debate for the evening: spend another three or four hours grading midterms myself (I’m done with the Tuesday-Thursday section’s, but still need to do the Wednesday-Friday section’s), or live down to my newfound reputation as being “horrible at getting back assignments to students on time”?

Then again, once the methods kids see their midterm grades that reputation may be the least of my concerns…

InsideHigherEd reports that the new basic Carnegie classifications are out today, which no doubt will increase the sales of Maalox on college campuses across the country; look up the new status of your favorite institutions here.

Only one of my students was apparently aware of Paul Simon’s song “You Can Call Me Al” from Graceland; it came up when we were trying to figure out what to call Al Gore’s dad. Some didn’t actually know who Paul Simon is—the ex-senator or the singer.

Of course, I couldn’t manage to pronounce the name of Al Senior’s fellow senator Estes Kefauver, so I guess we came out even on this score.

Mr. Baude on the Federalist Society Symposium in New York:

Why do women keep dragging me towards the bar?

I’m sure they’re only interested in Will’s thoughts on sovereign immunity.

At conferences, usually it’s Dieter or Scott who ends up dragging me towards the bar (at ICPSR, it was more the lure of karaoke; I do an interesting interpretation of Foreigner’s Cold As Ice). The implications of that are rather disturbing.

There’s a point after every job interview (good or bad) when you realize that you’re probably not going to be offered the job, and you can go back and pinpoint that moment.

At Slippery Rock, I’m pretty sure it was around the 6th time that morning I’d heard a different person in the department discuss their fealty to the Unitarian Universalist Church. I’m pretty sure my body language gave my feelings about being indoctrinated into the local cult of personality away.

At Millsaps (where I did get the job, proving my spidey sense is fallible) it was during the campus tour when I made a joke (after having seen about 30 female undergrads and 2 males) inquiring whether or not the school was actually coeducational—I don’t think my guide realized I was joking and looked at me like I was an idiot.

At Lawrence, it was at dinner the second night at a Greek restaurant with the three members of the department who weren’t on leave. I am pretty sure my answer to a question about mentoring undergraduates who planned to go to graduate school went over like a lead balloon—I believe my exact thoughts were that it would be a complete waste of their time unless they went to a top-25 institution.

At the place I was ultimately offered the job last fall, I’m pretty sure it was in the car ride back to the airport when I rather stridently stated my opposition to their reopening their master’s program (dovetailing with the previous paragraph’s theme). Again, I got the offer, but I doubt this conversational gem helped.

Today, I think it was during the teaching demonstration (which, in theory, was going to be a discussion of public opinion and why it matters in democracies) during which through absolutely no fault of my own the name Noam Chomsky came up. In retrospect, that may have been the time to flee the room, because the discussion was already headed downhill and I hadn’t quite realized it yet. Everyone was very nice, but that was just a teeny bit weird. The good news is that the flight back from [Redacted Rust-Belt City] was uneventful.

The moral of this story: don’t have opinions (and certainly don’t have unapproved opinions), and don’t have a personality, and you can get a job.

The Dean Dad has stirred up some controversy at InsideHigherEd with an op-ed supporting getting rid of tenure.

I’m not entirely sold, but I do think that the institution of tenure (coupled with the norm of rarely firing professors before tenure review) does seem to encourage highly risk-adverse behavior by employers. It probably also depresses salaries substantially. On the other hand, there are serious academic freedom arguments—at least for people who have gotten tenure—that support the institution, so I am somewhat torn.

A commenter asks:

Care to share any sage advice on the dissertation process (how to get it done, considerations in selecting an outside committee member, etc)? Since you’ve already gotten the Ph.D. I thought maybe you’d have some good insights…

There have probably been dissertations written about writing dissertations; Getting What You Came For is a fairly standard reference, and one I recommend. That said, specific advice from my little corner of the universe follows:

• Getting it done: there’s an adage that once you really start working on the dissertation, it will take six months to write. I wasted most of the latter half of 2001 (from my comprehensive exams in September/October) and early 2002 putting together what may be the worst dissertation prospectus known to man. I then fiddled about with a conference paper or two that would eventually comprise the substantive dissertation chapters for about a year. Finally, in May 2003 the catalyst arrived: I went to a family reunion and decided the collective prodding of the PhDs in the extended family was enough to make me write… and so it was; I defended the first week of December 2003, and my PhD was conferred on the 13th, the day before my birthday.
  On days I decided to write or do data analysis—and this happened in fits and starts—I would go and make myself work in the library to minimize distractions, even if I was only going to play with R or Stata. Most people recommend formally setting aside time to write, and it’s something I agree with—and wish I did more of now.
  I also think you need to be in the right psychological state to write. Even if you’re not prone to psychological disorders (and a friend of mine who’s a psychologist says that really smart people are particularly prone to these problems, for reasons not fully understood), a bit of therapy during the writing process—if only so you have someone neutral to complain about your advisor to—is a good thing.
• Outside member: I lucked into a good choice by happenstance: my final semester taking classes, I had a multivariate stats class in the pharmacy administration department and met a prof over there with whom I established a good rapport. He turned out to have valuable comments on my work, even though it was pretty far afield from him substantively. Having an outside member who you can trust is a nice security blanket. Don’t do what Frequent Commenter Scott did and end up with some externally-imposed outside member who you have no prior relationship with. I don’t have any experience with having someone from the same field but a different institution on the committee (and I’ve never served on a committee in either capacity), so I can’t speak to that.

On the prospectus itself, I’d recommend having a clear idea of what you’re doing and why before writing it. In my case, I put together a half-assed cut-and-paste job from the lit reviews of some papers and it showed—the fact that nobody bothered to tell me what they wanted in the prospectus was no excuse for me not finding that out for myself. If I’d had a clearly thought-out prospectus, I’d probably have finished much earlier. Admittedly, in my case, I was still young when I got done, but it would have been nice to be younger. Oxford’s nice enough, but getting out of there a year earlier would have been helpful (for my wallet, if nothing else).

Last, but not least, expect things to change throughout the dissertation process. Originally I thought I was going to do an experiment in one chapter and focus more on heuristics throughout the dissertation; in the end, it ended up being more about information processing and cognitive sophistication and their roles in attitude formation, opinion articulation, and behavior, which turned out to be a far more interesting topic and one that seems relatively underexplored in the literature, although a lot of really smart people seem to be getting at the edges of these questions—I like a lot of Alvarez and Brehm’s work, as well as Jon Krosnick’s. (But I digress in a very political-sciencey direction.)

On the plane trip back from Washington to Durham today, I started reading Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point (in my haste to pack for the trip, I forgot to bring any reading material for the return trip, so I had to make an excursion to Barnes and Noble in Washington to pick up something to read yesterday afternoon), and about 20 pages in felt tempted to exclaim out loud that this sounded a lot like Mark Granovetter’s American Journal of Sociology article on the strength of weak ties—a theory that is surprisingly underdiscussed in the public opinion literature, at least by political scientists. I only came across it in my graduate “classic texts in American politics” seminar taught by Bob Albritton, which I affectionately refer to as the Magical Mystery Tour.

Incidentally, Friday afternoon in my southern politics seminar I brought up another Gladwell theme by talking briefly about Tom Schelling’s work on how patterns of segregation spontaneously emerge from individual actions that aren’t strongly discriminatory on their face.

Spending today listening to presentations at the Teaching and Learning Conference has reinforced my prior belief that I would be happiest teaching at a private liberal arts college—I was intrigued by the interesting (dare I say cool) things being done by professors of research methods at Birmingham-Southern and Richmond. It could just be coincidence; I don’t know. But in the absence of definite competing opportunities, I’d probably accept an offer from a different sort of institution, particularly one offering a modicum of job security.

As far as the competing offers question goes (a situation I have yet to be in), I still haven’t worked out for myself the transitive ordering between “one-year job at a liberal arts college, narrowly-defined*” and “tenure-track job somewhere else”; it’s something I’ve pondered before and not really gotten any good advice on.

At my first ever campus interview, the chair of a ninth-tier combined department once tried to sell me on the idea that any tenure-track job (versus a one-year gig) was a signal of status to other potential employers—I don’t think he was reading my mind (in which admittedly I was simultaneously plotting the quickest exit possible from the godforsaken place, trying to forestall a panic attack); he just was probably used to giving the speech—but somehow I doubt that’s really the case except when comparing among fairly similar institutions.