For those unable to read between the lines of my recent posts or comments, I’ve declined the offer. I won’t be publicly identifying the university in question, but let me say that I was treated well by them and my decision is in no way a reflection on the fine folks there—rather, in the end it boiled down to a question of whether or not it would be fair (to either party) for me to take a tenure-track position knowing in my heart-of-hearts that I wasn’t planning to stay.

I believe I’m still in a good position to secure a tenure-track job that is more compatible with my interests as a teacher and a scholar, and I have been assured I have a fall-back position here at Duke for the next academic year, should it become necessary. So… back to the salt mines (or at least Emacs).

I never thought I’d be asked a question about Iraq in a phone interview. Go figure.

And the fun never ends… Thursday, I get to have a phone interview with a place that will hire non-Christians, but they won’t tenure them. I get the odd feeling that after I ask the college’s position on hiring Christians who don’t buy into scriptural inerrancy or young-Earth creationism, this one’s going to be over pretty quick.

It feels good to be able to throw away all the ads for one-year visiting positions lying around the computer.

As I alluded to in the comments of the previous post, the offer I was hoping would materialize in Frozen Tundra country seems unlikely to do so. Them’s the breaks; I guess that gives me an extra incentive to sell myself well on the phone interview with a relatively small private university on the west coast I have scheduled for Tuesday at noon. And it gives me the opportunity to do the complete revamp of my application materials—most notably, my thoroughly unsatisfactory statement of teaching philosophy—I’ve been thinking about for the last two weeks.

As of this morning, I have an offer for a tenure-track position (the one in Rams land, for those keeping score at home).

Stephen Karlson has some thoughts that apply well beyond the economics faculty, even if the supply-demand equation in Econ World is a bit less off-kilter than in other disciplines.

Apropos my newfound popularity, I just volunteered to take on a second section of Quantitative Political Analysis in the spring in exchange for a modest pay bump and a TA to handle the grading for the two methods sections. The only real downside is that it looks like I’ll no longer have Tuesdays off.

As someone broadly sympathetic to the idea that students should have full disclosure about the courses they take, I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out this effort at student-run evaluations launched by Duke sophomore Elliott Wolf. He further articulates his motivations in this op-ed in today’s Duke Chronicle.

And, in the interests of full disclosure, he’s my one lonely rating thus far.

Steven Taylor and Dan Drezner link this Chronicle piece by Harvard history grad student Rebecca Goetz that sticks up for academic blogging, adding to the anecdotal evidence that blogging isn’t the career poison it might often be perceived as.

I just got back a couple of hours ago from Frozen Tundra country, where the weather gods almost managed to produce some real frozen tundra for my enjoyment. Instead, I just got bitterly cold winds and rain; I’d have preferred snow, to be honest. The interview process went about as well as can be expected, and of the Realistic Prospects™ I think it’s the place I’d enjoy working the most, but given the crapshoot nature of these things and the fact I believe I may have to give someone else (and maybe even two someone elses) an answer before these folks are in a position to make up their minds I’m not going to be getting my hopes up.

Even better, tomorrow afternoon I get to explore my fallback option at a nearby public institution: a demotion in academic rank and salary coupled with a doubling of workload, but a year-to-year renewable contract. Job security, it’s a good thing.

I currently have 11 students on the waiting list to enroll in my methods class in the spring semester (in addition to the 30 already in the class). Apparently my rep for evilness hasn’t propagated very widely around campus yet…

Steven Taylor is attempting to assemble a list of blogging political scientists; drop in and add your knowledge to the list.

Well, I’m now in the interlude between my two interviews—not much of an interlude, considering I have classes to teach, assignments to grade, and clothes to get washed, but an interlude nonetheless.

In the meantime, my only real thought of the day: who exactly told Terrell Owens that it would be a good idea for him to get a heel manager?

Off to the interview (hopefully the first of many) in 48 hours or so. Sometime in there I need to grade the exams I gave my intro class today and prep for my job talk and teaching presentation, in addition to the typical travel nonsense (packing, figuring out which bags to take, getting rid of anything that might look like a knife to an undertrained x-ray jockey, etc.).

Update: And, I just found out I have to do this all again up in Frozen Tundra country in another week.

Lest I be seen as an outlier, Daniel Drezner is similarly unimpressed with the recycled Chronicle of Higher Ed article by Alan Wolfe I was forwarded by a departmental colleague and complained about yesterday.

First off… a semi-apology to those of you who are getting bored with the “inside baseball” academe stuff.

On to the point of this post. Assume for the sake of argument that my “dream job” is to teach at a liberal arts college (which may or may not appear on the Wikipedia list), and also assume that by the time I have to decide on a job offer, I won’t have any offers from liberal arts colleges.

Question 1: Would accepting a tenure-track offer at a different sort of college or university improve or diminish the chances of landing a tenure-track job at a liberal arts college in the future?

Question 2: Would another year here at Duke (which is by no means guaranteed as of yet), teaching more-or-less what I am teaching now (two sections of undergraduate methods a year and two other courses), getting a bit more research done, and potentially getting a publication or two, improve or diminish the chances of landing a job at a tenure-track liberal arts college in the future?

Question 3: Would a second non-tenure-track job at a liberal arts college improve or diminish the chances of landing a tenure-track job at a liberal arts college in the future?

Question 4: Assuming I don’t get a job at a liberal arts college this year, is there anything in particular that is under my control that would improve my prospects of getting a job at a liberal arts college? Things that are under my control: research, teaching evaluations, future course selection, attending the APSA Teaching & Learning Conference, etc.; things not/no longer under my control: whatever my letters say about me, where I went to school (i.e. not at a liberal arts college), my past experience, etc.

Anyway, I know at least some of my readers are at liberal arts colleges, so I’d appreciate their feedback in particular—informed speculation from folks at other types of institutions may also be helpful, though.

Last but not least: if you are on a hiring committee at a liberal arts college that happens to have my file, you should also be aware that a tenure-track offer at a liberal arts college would “win” any competition with another offer, ceteris peribus.

As a counterpoint to my previous post, note this article in the other, less-relevant Chronicle to which I preemptively responded 15 months ago.

Note to self: grow a thick skin:

“The visiting professors are not up to the quality that the Duke professors are,” said senior Kate Abramson, a political science minor and public policy studies major. She added that she was deterred from majoring in political science partly because of the lack of professors.

After all, we all know that having 17 APSRs on your vita makes you a better teacher.

This time next week, I’ll be off for an interview at a secure, undisclosed metropolitan state-supported university in the former Northwest Territory (of Northwest Ordinance and Northwestern University fame). I am also cautiously optimistic about the prospects of an interview in the same general region (a bit norther, up in badger country, one might say) at a selective liberal arts college with a strangely familiar name, but such things have yet to be confirmed. Both, as it turns out, saw me first at the meat market. Score one for speed dating.

A job by Thanksgiving would be nice. Two competing job offers at Thanksgiving might even be nicer. A third (from left field, perhaps, or a blast from the past)—be still my heart!

I’ve been doing some SPSS labs with my methods class this semester, and I stumbled upon a mildly interesting little finding: in the 2000 National Election Study, the mean feeling thermometer rating* of gays and lesbians is higher among respondents with cable or satellite TV than among those who do not have cable/satellite. It’s marginally significant (p = .057 or so in a two-tailed independent-samples t test). I’m not sure if the cable/satellite variable is standing in for a “boonies versus suburbs/urban areas” thing or something else.

It’s also fun because the test is significant at the .05 level if you do a one-tailed test (though, since I have no a priori theory as to why cable/satellite households would like gay people more than non-cable households, I’m not sure a one-tailed test is legitimate), but not significant at .05 if you do a two-tailed test, so it’s useful in illustrating that marginal case.

Tyler Cowen links a list assembled by Foreign Policy ranking the “most influential political scientists,” who—apparently owing to the sampling frame—seem to all be IR scholars.

Not that there’s anything wrong with IR, mind you…

I just sent out The Damn Impeachment Paper™ for the third and (hopefully) final time. To put things in perspective: when I wrote it originally for my Congress seminar, I was a first-year grad student, and now I’m almost two years post-PhD.

Anyway, read it here. If it seems harsh, consider the one-line review I got of the last iteration (paraphrased): “How is this different from Rothenberg and Sanders (2000)?” Uh, the difference is that they were wrong.

I just realized today that my graduate transcript lists my date of birth on it. At least now I can blame all my rejection letters on hostility towards wunderkinder instead of the blog.

Did I mention how much I hate phone interviews?

One of the interviewers today made the mistake of asking me the question of what appealed to me about their job more than my existing one. I don’t think my answer went over big…

An interesting piece in this quarter’s issue of PS (sadly not online), by Daniel Fuerstman and Stephan Levartu of UW-Madison, looks at the factors that departments consider when hiring new faculty. Notably, everyone seems to care about a nebulous quality called “fit,” teaching is #2 at everywhere except national universities, and nobody gives a shit about conference presentations and awards. Perhaps most interesting: letters rank highly at all types of institutions, despite the common perception that recommendation letters are inherently undifferentiated and thus information-free.