At the ripe old age of 30, I’m still learning new things; to wit:

• My car will not start if I don’t have the transmission in park.
• It is embarrassing when the AAA guy makes this discovery after you’ve been sitting in a parking lot for 45 minutes.
• Parking in the Campus Drive lot is impossible at 11 a.m.
• Trying to wet erase a purple marker from a whiteboard is not a good idea if you want your hand to stay flesh-colored.

For the life of me, I can’t figure out why I agreed to do a phone interview for a job (that, to be perfectly honest, isn't exactly at the top of my rank-ordering of preferences based on admittedly incomplete information) late on a Friday afternoon after two classes.

Of course, the idea sounded like a better idea at the time I booked the interview slot (which I think was sometime in early December), when I didn’t think I needed to spend the afternoon tracking down a half-dozen books for my Southern politics seminar.

It stands to reason that the day I decide to go looking for all of my Southern politics book chapters and articles is the day I can’t find them anywhere—my office, my apartment, my car, nowhere.

This is, in one word, annoying.

Update: It turns out they were in my apartment, completely differently organized from how I remembered them being—I'd forgotten I'd separated them out by topic into separate manila folders last Spring.

It may just be the unseasonably warm weather, but the classroom I taught in today was somehow heated to around 80 degrees. That was a rather unpleasant experience, one I hope will not be repeated tomorrow.

On the other hand, there may be an upside to the heatwave.

Seeing your students covered in blue paint: meh.
Teaching late enough in the day that I don’t have to worry about students skipping: ok.
Getting a break from student emails: nice.
Dick Vitale’s microphone not working for the first few minutes: priceless.

And in a semi-major journal, no less… now I have do the actual revision and resubmission, alas.

Murphy’s Law dictates, of course, that this notice would come the day I’ve sent out four more applications with “under review at (journal X)” next to the paper on my vita.

Before my panel Saturday, I had a nice breakfast (at IHOP, no less) with personable fellow political scientist/blogger Michelle Dion, who receives only minor demerits for being a Tar Heel.

I’m safe and sound in the Hotel Intercontinental Buckhead, which may be the first conference hotel I’ve ever been at that’s actually worth what I’m paying for the room (you’re paying for the lobby at the Palmer House in Chicago; the rooms aren’t anything special).

As is the nature of the small universe that political scientists inhabit, the first person I saw in the lobby, other than the receptionist, was Bill Jacoby.

Now I’ll be incommunicado while watching the Rose Bowl. If it’s anything like the other BCS games have been, this will be a real barnburner.

Sunday’s New York Times carries this article about “merit aid” at liberal arts colleges that pretty much reflects a year’s worth of faculty meetings at Millsaps, the centerpiece of which was often discussion by the dean of problems with our 40-odd percent “discount rate,” which largely reflected our inability to squeeze all of retail out of parents who could afford Millsaps’ relatively light (by liberal arts college standards, at least) sticker price.

þ: Amber Taylor, who is miffed at the Times for its strategy in selecting which colleges to discuss.

Update: Lurker and forthcoming co-author Dirk points out this Daniel Gross post that takes note of a rather serious incongruity between the headline and the article in question.

One job application: several hours and several dollars I’ll never see again.

One phone interview: thirty minutes of my life I’ll never get back.

Seeing that position readvertised: priceless.

Barry Burden notes that party identification explains too much variance in vote choice these days:

The old Michigan triad of partisanship, issues, and candidate evaluations as an explanation for vote choices is proving less useful in recent days. The main reason is that party identification and the vote are practically one and the same. In the 2000 and 2004 NES data, better than 90% of partisans voted for the presidential candidate of their party. In 2004 only 40 respondents (7% of partisans) voted against their stated party identification.

He sets out a few intriguing directions for future research on party identification.

Scipio writes:

This is roughly… equivalent… to a job interview and the company saying, You have a great resume, you have all the qualifications we are looking for, but we’re not going to hire you. We will, however, use your resume as the basis for comparison for all other applicants. But, we’re going to hire somebody who is far less qualified and is probably an alcoholic. And if he doesn’t work out, we’ll hire somebody else, but still not you. In fact, we will never hire you. But we will call you from time to time to complain about the person that we hired.

Funnily enough, I think this actually has happened to me on both the job and romantic markets.

Good luck trying to figure this one out on your own without asking the registrar’s office: WF pattern classes in Spring 2006 first meet on Friday, January 13th, not Wednesday, January 11th.

Good thing I put a slack day in my in-progress methods syllabus.

Stephen Karlson has two posts on the academic food chain that are worth juxtaposing.

I strongly suspect that “upward mobility” as pursued by the [Southwest] Missouri States and Memphis States, er “Universities of,” of the world (not to mention the place whose offer I politiely declined) is only going to end in tears. To bring up your median ACT scores (and thus mobilize upward), you need to sell high-scoring students on coming or discourage low-scoring students from entering; the former is difficult, in these days of declining state subsidies to the mid-majors and below (reducing their cost advantage over the top-tier publics and the private alternatives), and the latter is politically infeasible in this era of “access.” So, the best they can hope for is a secular trend of improving ACT scores more generally—which hardly is going to improve their relative positioning much.

Changing the name on the letterhead is unlikely to have much effect, either; the day Mississippi Southern College became the University of Southern Mississippi was no watershed event in its academic prestige. There might be something to be said for ditching names like “the University of Western Outer Mongolia at Altay” (substituting appropriately for Altay the name of any other “alternative” campus of some “real” university) for “Altay University,” but this is not as common a case as one might expect.

Nor is it all that clear that the “upwardly mobile” have much clue what they’re striving towards. [Southwest] Missouri State’s “mission statement” expressing fealty to the concept of being “a multipurpose, metropolitan university providing diverse instructional, research, and service programs” is nice, but I’m damned if I know what a “multipurpose, metropolitan university” is supposed to be. The cynic might read “multipurpose” as “rudderless” and “metropolitan” as “unsure if it’surban, suburban, or rural.” Then again, “operating a diploma mill for kids who couldn’t get into Mizzou, and stoking the egos of those who could have gone to Columbia by giving them a free ride and straight A’s” probably doesn’t look as quite as good when going up for reaccreditation…

The average final grade in my research methods class this semester was 92.66% (an A-).

U of C theory professor Jacob Levy talks about his tenure denial, breaking a two-month blogospheric silence; from his perspective, the fact that both he and Dan Drezner were denied tenure at the departmental level has nothing to do with blogging or ideology, but instead because “both political economy and liberal political theory are outside the emerging, Perestroikan, sense of what [Chicago’s] department’s about.”

My (strictly personal) sense is that any department that aspires to either be or continue to be considered at the top of the discipline needs to attract and retain the best faculty possible across the breadth of the discipline. My sense is also that the Perestroikans and their fellow travellers have at best a minimal conception of the actual breadth of the discipline. The intersection of these two senses is most disturbing, at least for those of us who’d like to think that Chicago ought to be an important center of political science research.

Pretty much the most enjoyable thing I’ve done thus far on my birthday is spend 90 minutes reviewing for my methods exam with about a half-dozen students.

The least enjoyable thing was walking back and forth to East Campus when I realized about 30 minutes ago that I’d left the canvas bag with said exams in it on the damn C-1 bus.

Fighting with PeopleSoft to get my grades entered for the other class, watching a couple of DS9 reruns on TiVo, and breakfast at Elmo’s Diner appear somewhere in the middle of that hierarchy.

I’m unsure whether to chalk it up to extreme diligence or just paranoia on their parts, but my students here seem to be atypically obsessed with their final papers and the (open book, open notes) final in my research methods class. I had at least 20 (of 33) students in a review session Monday night, I met with about a half-dozen today, and I expect to meet with at least another half-dozen tomorrow. It’s not a bad thing, just not what I really expected.

Mungowitz may be ended in the blogosphere, but his alter ego lives on elsewhere: Robert Lawson of Division of Labour posts a link to Mike Munger’s recent talk at Capital University, entitled “Democracy is Overrated.”

Also, a Munger quote graces the front page of today’s Raleigh News & Observer in the latest article about my erstwhile colleague and administration advisor Peter Feaver—the latter link coming courtesy of the departmental mailing list, where there is some guffawing about the characterization of our department as “left-leaning” and the (apparently false) statement that mutual colleague Chris Gelpi’s door has “anti-war posters” on it.

Congratulations to David Adesnik on completing his D.Phil.; I think these words are pretty apropos of most finishers’ thoughts:

Afterward, I didn’t feel very much like celebrating. I felt like a survivor, not a winner. But when it comes to getting your doctorate, surviving is more than enough.

Couldn’t have said it any better myself.

I decided today to spend President’s Day weekend in Washington at the 3rd APSA Teaching and Learning Conference. Vita fodder, catch it!

A second colleague at Millsaps had their contract non-renewed this week. In the counterfactual universe, where I did get the tenure-track job last year, I’d probably be looking for another job starting right now.

Professor Paul Mirecki of the University of Kansas was apparently brutalized in roadside beating, allegedly in response to anti-Christian comments that came to light after he waded into the intelligent design controversy in the state by offering a course in the subject. The whole story doesn’t sound entirely plausible to me, but stranger things have happened, and there’s certainly no shortage of nutbars out there with an axe to grind…

þ: PoliBlog.

The interview with the place I thought might turn out to be Fundie U went somewhat better than expected, although I’m still not entirely sure why I got the interview in the first place—the job description listed two courses (and only two courses) that I’ve never taught before.

On the topic of the broader market, the prospects seem to have slowed to a trickle; things will probably pick up again in January, as some of the places where people have moved up in the world (usually the ones who can’t afford, logistically or otherwise, to do searches two years in a row) decide to take a crapshoot on the leftovers from the first wave.

In the meantime, it’s strangely liberating to have only sent one job application in the past month and only have a couple on the “I am seriously considering applying” pile—a two-year postdoc at a liberal arts college and a research-only job in my field that is quite a longshot but would be a ticket to the top of the Social Sciences Citation Index, the latter of which I just found out about today.

Brian Weatherson has some advice that is contrary to the conventional wisdom for his readers. Color me deeply skeptical.

þ: James Joyner, who aptly summarizes Weatherson’s argument thusly:

Go to grad school if you can get a free ride to a top ten institution or if you don’t mind being relegated to the backwaters of academia teaching dull students or don’t mind losing ten years of earning potential before going into another line of work.

Since none of those three really apply to me (except possibly #3), I think we can safely say I am an idiot. Frankly, if I weren’t really good* at teaching a class (research methods) that most political scientists hate to teach with an unrivalled passion†, I’d have no career.

* By “really good,” I mean “not as horribly as 99% of other professors.” I freely admit that I could be better.
† The reasons are two-fold: people who teach methods typically get terrible student evaluations, particularly at schools where methods is a requirement for the major, and teaching methods is typically harder work than sitting around talking about one’s own “substantive” research interests or spewing out the intro outline for the 17th time.