I have to say my favorite part of waking up every day is the opportunity to read headlines like “As schools court professors, Duke strives to retain them” in the Duke Chronicle.

On the bright side, at least I have on-campus job interviews… which is more than I could have said this time last year.

The key advantages to not having a girlfriend at Valentine’s Day: it’s quite a bit cheaper, and nobody can complain that you’re spending the evening working on job applications and finishing the Veronica Mars Season 1 DVD set.

The key disadvantage: you can’t email any female colleagues (particularly ones from the vaguely-recalled distant past) to ask for favors relating to said job applications because they might think you might be hitting on them on Valentine’s Day.

Teaching four days a week this semester makes it a real pain to schedule on-campus job interviews without stomping all over my classes…

My email today included something that seems dangerously close to a teaching award:

Recently you should have received an invitation to the first HOPE Banquet sponsored by Residence Life and Housing Services. The celebration will be held on [redacted].

HOPE stands for Honoring Our Professors’ Excellence, which is the entire purpose of the evening. Each of our Resident Assistant and Graduate Assistant student staff members were offered the opportunity to nominate one Duke faculty member to be invited to this event. The students were asked to select a faculty member who has made a tremendous impact upon them, either inside or outside of the classroom. You were nominated as one of those faculty.

Between this and going to the Teaching and Learning Conference, I may be drummed out of political science (or at least the methods section) in short order…

A former student at Millsaps asked me to help her out with avoiding retaking basic stats in her master’s program today, so I had to go hunting for all the information, including the catalog description. Weirdly enough, not only is my course website still lurking around at Millsaps, but I am still listed in the 2005–06 catalog as a professor in the department (see page 25 of the PDF). If Google (which is probably sentient at this point) thinks I still work there, does that mean I actually do and just don’t know it?

In other academic news, I just landed an interview at a liberal arts college in the Midwest for a one-year position in American politics and political behavior. Jobs, as they say, are good, and jobs higher up in the USN&WR rankings from Millsaps are priceless—even if there should be giant confidence error bounds on the rankings.

While doing some work on a small project for the Director of Undergraduate Studies of our department, I stumbled across this course in the undergraduate bulletin and my first thought was “this would be a really cool class to teach.”

It looks like I soon will be able to move to South Dakota and become an affirmative action hire. I can hardly wait…

þ: InstaPundit, who doesn’t even find this heh-worthy.

Leopold Stotch has some thoughts on meritocracy in academe. At my end of the food chain, my perception is that I’ve more often lost out on positions because search committees (or deans), for whatever reason, want people from “name schools.” The only time I’ve heard gender or race discussed on the job trail is in reference to other positions that I didn’t apply for. However, I have had my graduate program insulted to my face through backhanded compliments of my other achievements in interviews (“well, normally, we wouldn’t hire someone from Mississippi, but since you have that ICPSR thing…”).

Leopold Stotch duplicates it for the masses who aren’t APSA members.

The piece that Dirk and I wrote for The Political Methodologist on Quantian is now out in the Fall 2005 issue, along with a mostly-glowing review of Stata 9 by Neal Beck that no doubt will annoy the R purists, as he suggests he will be ditching R in favor of Stata in his graduate methods courses; a review of a new book on event-history analysis by Kwang Teo, whose apartment floor I once slept on in Nashville; and an interesting piece on doing 3-D graphics in R.

In other methods news, I had the privilege (along with a packed house) of hearing Andrew Gelman of Columbia speak this afternoon on his joint research on the relationship between vote choice and income in the states, which uses some fancy multi-level modeling stuff that I have yet to play much with.

Incidentally, it was fun to see someone else who uses latex-beamer for their presentations; I could tell the typeface was the standard TeX sf (sans-serif) face, but I wasn’t sure which beamer theme Andrew was using off-hand.

What possible value could a search committee for a non-tenure-track teaching position find in a sample of my research? I’ll concede that recommendations are valuable (if something of a chore to orchestrate), but I simply fail to see how a writing sample could be of any use whatsoever.

It seems I spoke too soon; the financial powers that be apparently are unconvinced that keeping around a visitor to do something (teach sections of undergraduate methods) that perhaps a dozen or more of the department’s tenured or tenure-track faculty members are nominally qualified to do needs a bit more justification, particularly in the midst of a “budget crunch,” at least by “university that has more money than the Queen of England” standards. Nothing definite, but playing the odds in the presence of asymmetrical payoffs for misprediction seems like a bad idea at this point—potentially wasting hours of my life on applications beats potentially having to beg for a job at Best Buy or Red Hat, any day.

On the upside, a whole new vista of postdocs and one-years have been opened to me. Happy happy, joy joy.

Incidentally, I’m reminded of one of my favorite NewsRadio quotes: “You can’t take something off the Internet. It’s like taking pee out of a swimming pool.”

Modern computer processors have this feature called “speculative execution,” in which they try to guess which code path is more likely to be executed, and actually go ahead and execute that code before seeing which path is taken. This is a perfectly sensible strategy; however, if the prediction is wrong, the computer has to “undo” all that work and take the other branch.

Today I engaged in a little speculative execution of my own by putting in the paperwork to teach my (hypothetical) research methods class in the fall in an Interactive Computer Classroom. It’s not a huge investment by any stretch of the imagination, but every little commitment edges me down the path of spending another year in Durham. And given the state of the job market these days (and perhaps my generally picky nature), the chance of a branch misprediction seems rather low at this point.

Econ prof James D. Miller think colleges need to “fight” RateMyProfessors.com. I don’t know if it needs fighting, per se, but I’d say it’s only marginally valuable. For example, here at Duke I’m allegedly easy but at Millsaps I was easier yet was considered tough (and had the grade distribution to prove it—my classes were consistently below the college’s mean GPA).

That said, I don’t mind student-centered evaluations and have even lauded one effort to compile such things here at Duke, where the “official” evals for last semester are apparently so shrouded in secrecy that I still haven’t seen them 6 weeks after turning in grades. And I don’t even mind student evals in general, although they almost certainly were a factor in my failing upward in the academic universe.

Though, as a political scientist looking for a job, the mentality noted by this commenter (allegedly a faculty member in my field) is somewhat disturbing:

I have been to two academic conferences within the year (academic year 2005–06) where colleagues were running tenure-track job searches (political science) and when I made recommendations regarding two individuals who I thought might be a good fit for both jobs, I received subsequent emails that,“after having checked RMP” (talk about unprofessional behavior!!!) there were “concerns” whether either of the recommended colleagues could teach in liberal arts enviornment. Clearly RMP is being looked at by folks on search committees. Don’t believe for a minute that after having looked at RMP folks are not influenced by what they read. And don’t believe that search committee members are not going directly to RMP to, as I was told, “a snapshot” of job candidates. AAUP and the national associations for the various disciplines ought to step in on this debate and come down clearly on RMP and its use in job searches etc.

The IR Rumor Mill site has an interesting discussion thread talking about the job market that seems to apply (and range) more broadly than IR.

Apropos the previous post, I give you the American and Comparative Jobs rumor mill (courtesy of first-time commenter Wesley). It’s not quite as organized as the IR version, but it will do in a pinch.

I just found the IR Rumor Mill on Nick’s blogroll. Would that we Americanists had the same thing; at the very least, it would help me figure out whether or not one of the ads that came out today was a new listing or just a readvertisement of a job that first came out in August.

An academic rumor mill, incidentally, is probably one of the few applications of anonymous blogging that I could see myself being involved in. (The idea of anonymity to hide my political views, or lack thereof, from search committees or students or Horowitz’s nitwits seems rather unworthwhile; my Internet paper trail is over a decade old, even without the blog.) Although, since I’ve now mentioned that I might be willing to do such a thing, I’m pretty much precluded from doing so. The net result: less work for me—since, without announcing this prediliction, I’d feel some sort of obligation start one myself. I suppose that should make me happy.

Incidentally, on the (more) complete information front, I got a call today that I’m among the top 5 candidates for a position in the great state of Texas, as well as a solicitation from an ex-colleague to apply for a soon-to-be-advertised position at a Research One, er, Doctoral/Research-Extensive in the Midwest. The latter is not exactly where I thought I wanted to take my career, mind you, but maybe a couple of years on a tenure-track line and a few pubs at such a place—or at least a couple of years of the effects of the natural aging process on my appearance—would make folks on this list take me a little more seriously.

The anonymous community college dean proposes no longer requesting recommendation letters in job searches.

All of his points in opposition to letters strike me as valid, but nonetheless I remain unconvinced. Information, no matter the quality, seems mighty scarce in the academic employment process, and at the very least the identities of the letter writers in question might say something about the candidate, even if the letters themselves are rather content-free; even the diligence (or lack thereof) of recommenders in providing letters might be a signal to search committees.

I’m not going to waste a lot of space talking about the academic bias debate, but I did want to point vaguely in the direction of this post in which Quaker at Crescat Sententia discusses Steven Bainbridge’s post on disparate impact analysis as applied to ideology, and this one here (via Matthew Shugart), although I might be tempted to mock the latter (which, of course, is a parody) by analogy to the protestations of many an employer hauled into court for racial or gender discrimination on the basis of mere statistics, rather than any demonstration of the employer’s involvement in the causal process that led to the hiring differential.

I’d be curious what rival explanations my methods classes might come up with for this graph beyond “the obvious.” At least one structural feature of Congress leaps out at me as a possible explanation… can anyone identify it?

It’d be nice if the trained primates who manage the APSA eJobs service were actually mentally capable of distinguishing between visiting and tenure-track positions when they classify them in the listings.

(For those with eJobs access, I specifically refer to posting 9773, a position at a leading liberal arts college, which quite clearly states it is a “one-year replacement position” yet is classified by these dopes as “Assistant Professor” rather than “Visiting Professor.”)

From an email I received today in response to an application:

Thank you for your letter indicating your interest in the political science position at [Redacted Institution]. The search committee appreciates your willingness to be considered as a candidate and, as our work proceeds, we will keep you informed about the status of the search. [emphasis added]

I didn’t realize I was doing them some sort of favor by applying.

Incidentally, the effect was somewhat spoiled by two identical versions of the form letter being pasted into the email, but what can you do? It could be worse: a couple of weeks ago, I got a rejection letter with someone else’s name on it…

The Mungowitz provides a potentially reliable and valid one-question quiz that classifies professors on the basis of ideology.

I actively encourage a Duke clone of these dweebs to waste a hundred bucks getting evidence of my (alleged) promulgation of radical left-wing views in class. Frankly, I’m sure some of my students would be happy to have the beer/pr0n money.

þ: Michelle Dion.

This may become an ongoing series…

• Doing the same lecture two days in a row is a bit (ok, highly) disconcerting the first time you’ve ever done it.
• Seminars are much less painful when you don’t do all of the talking.
• It will be hard for Duke University Transit to find a blue canvas bag you think you left on one of their busses when it has been sitting in your living room the whole day.