I like to imagine a little cash register sound going off every time one of these numbers increases. Never mind that cash registers don’t make that sound any more…

In related news, the reader for my intro class this summer is apparently lost in the ether, so I guess I’ll be making use of the library reserve a lot.

In what seems to be becoming something of a theme, I had dinner this evening with yet another blogger—in this case, Signifying Nothing alumnus Robert Prather. We ended up talking for about three hours at the Steam Room Grille, mostly about graduate school but with some forays into politics and economics.

Like Robert, I start summer school Wednesday, albeit at the other side of the desk. I guess I should be working on getting organized for that, although at this point I’m still not even sure if I have enough students to bother teaching the classes, or, for that matter, to bother writing up syllabi—the per-student remuneration works out to be about minimum wage if only one student enrolls, although if you look at it as additional pay (since I am being paid through September 1st by Millsaps on my 9-month contract) rather than living pay it feels better.

Others are already doing the summer school thing, of course: Jeff Quinton isn’t having much fun so far, which I suppose is understandable given the material.

The debate over the evolving nature of the pre-tenure academy continues today with more contributions from Mike Munger and Stephen Karlson. Again, I have little to add in terms of insight, which may just be the result of my relatively weak socialization into the norms of the academy.

Anyway, I’ve got to pretend to get ready for my trip in 38 hours, so back to work on that.

Mike Munger and Stephen Karlson are having a bit of a back-and-forth over the evolving nature of work habits in the academy. I don’t have anything in particular to add, although I will say that being passed over for tenure-track opportunities does have some minor advantages in terms of the time commitment (outweighted, of course, by the iterant lifestyle).

Now to dig out those R&Rs and rejects and get some work done on them by June 1st (when students will want to be educated again)...

Update: Additional thoughts from Michelle Dion on the additional problems faced by junior comparativists.

Eszter Hargittai and Brendan Nyhan point out (as I noticed sometime in the past few days when surfing eJobs) that the American Political Science Association has condemned the AUT boycott of Israeli universities. I’m glad to see the $77 I sent the association last year (not to mention the hundreds of dollars I have spent in the past) has finally produced something of even minor value.

Of course, the complete uselessness of the APSA has been a recurring theme on this weblog…

If you’re a college president who doesn’t like your public image, there’s always the solution of getting your PR flacks to come up with a 32-page puff piece about your “leadership” at taxpayer expense. Download it here in all its glory.

Stephen Karlson dressed down today to administer his final exams. I actually got a bit of joshing from the gallery when I showed up to give my intro final a couple of weeks ago in a polo shirt and jeans; apparently it never occurred to them that the main reason I wear a shirt, slacks, and a tie on days I teach is so I look older than they do.

Well, the real evaluations—rather than the fake ones here—are in, and they’re much better than those from last semester, by well over a standard deviation. (I’d sit down and do the independent samples t test, but I’m not that bored. t test below the fold…)

I’m just chalking this one up as yet another in a series of little ironies that have been running around for the past couple of months.

Every time I have some little complaint about my job, I should remind myself of today—or at least days like today, for today was commencement at Millsaps, and my first commencement as a faculty member (here or elsewhere). While I didn’t know these seniors as well as I might have liked, I hope I touched at least some of their lives in the way that professors past have touched mine.

Of course, it was a bittersweet day for me and a few other colleagues, including the oft-mentioned Kelly, as it also marks the official end of our employment by the college.* To all the friends, colleagues, and students (not mutually-exclusive!) I have encountered, it’s been a blast, and I’d do it all again… well, as long as I got a tenure-track contract next time!

My students are apparently laboring under the delusion that I am “hot.” Oy vey. I could buy that rating for Ms. Mueller or Dr. Galicki, to say nothing of the legendary Dr. Tegtmeier-Oertel, but not for me.

Elsewhere: Dr. Huffmon’s students love him (except the student who fails to properly recognize that he is the Messiah), but inexplicably fail to award the coveted chili pepper. Mass delusion, I tell you. (þ sorta-kinda: Mungowitz End)

I know of which Russell speaks all too well—and one of my best friends, not a political scientist, is going through the same hell at the moment… as, for that matter, was I not so long ago (not to mention, as I keep reminding myself, I didn’t even have a job offer until this time last year). There but for the grace of God, or at least the grace of KGM.

Incidentally, I made myself two promises last year: that I’d quit academia (or at least go and get an M.S. in statistics or survey research or maybe even a J.D.) if I didn’t get a tenure-track job for 2005–06, and that I’d get myself that social life I’d been putting off for the past decade-plus. I went 0–2—or maybe 1–1, depending on how you evaluate my social life (much better than in Oxford, but from a pretty negligible baseline)—but I’m not all that convinced that the first promise was the right one, since there’s nothing else I’d rather do than what I do now, even if the job security sucks. Thus I contribute to the collective action problem that leads to the proliferation of non-tenure-track jobs even at institutions that can afford them.

My future boss links an interesting article in today’s Duke Chronicle about the curricular and extracurricular use of blogs at Duke.

I’m still pondering to what extent I want to use blogs in my classes; I had a really good idea for using blogs in a State and Local class, but it only would work in a state capital. I probably will decide to work blogging into intro in the fall, at least in a limited fashion, instead of requiring a term paper—the Culture War papers this semester were OK, I guess, but I think there may be a better way to work with that idea in a “journal” type format as opposed to the term paper. (þ: Nick Troester)

A friend passed along the Ron Mexico name generator. My alter ego is apparently “Bruno Jamaica.”

Incidentally, at least none of my students in intro last night thought the Supreme Court case that applied the exclusionary rule to the states was People v. Ron Mexico. (On the downside, I did have one student who thought the Shakira-Aguillera test had something to do with the free exercise clause.)

This is my entry in today's DIY OTB Traffic Jam.

Can anyone recommend some good books that teach one to use SAS for econometrics? I bought a couple of books from Amazon, which were highly recommended, but apparently not for people that are interested in econometric applications. The types of books I would be looking for would list ALL of the options for the commonly-used procedures (proc reg, proc means, proc ttest, etc.) and list them together with the command, rather than having them scattered throughout the book (and then only some of them).

A book with a f*cking index would be valuable as well. Another good book would include examples of programs written using both SAS procedures and IML, again of the kind an economist would use.

I plan to learn Stata in the not-too-distant-future but it’ll do me no good for class, which requires SAS.

I really love it when my students give me extra work to do—in this case, an hour of fighting with OCR software and Word’s “compare documents” feature so I have evidence to take to the dean on Monday. To coin a phrase, I plan to shoot ‘em all and let the Honor Council sort ‘em out.

Gordon Smith writes:

When I entered academe just over a decade ago, almost every law school had a standard teaching load of four courses or 12 credit hours per year. In the past decade, the norm among top law schools has shifted to three courses or 10 credits per year.

The average political scientist teaches a 4–4 (or eight courses per year); at the moment I teach a nominal 3–3,* but with directed readings every semester and an honors thesis to supervise it’s more like a 4–4. Perhaps the most direct equivalent to law school teaching, in departments with MA programs, usually only nets a 3–3; it’s only in the somewhat rarified air of Ph.D. programs that the 2–2 load that Smith says is typical for law schools is common. Even in Ph.D.-granting departments, however, faculty rarely teach just graduate students.

Don’t know if this means anything important, but it’s interesting nonetheless.

This is some pretty damn hideous carpet, even by institutional standards—my grad student office at Ole Miss had hideous carpet too, but at least it was more-or-less one color.

Actually, there was also some hideous solid orange (well, modulo the bits with various stains) carpet at the Museum of Contemporary Art today, but the little sign claimed it was a deliberate choice of an artist so I guess that makes it pardonable.

After adding fuel to the Munger-Drezner blogging feud (rather lopsidedly decided for Drezner, I might add), I’ve discovered more evidence to back up the rivalry: namely, that the latest US News rankings have Duke and the U of C tied for 8th place in the “political science” rankings. You’ll have to go and read the copy at your local bookstore to verify this yourself, unless you want to drop $14.95 for online access to the full list.

Of course, the standard caveats about the US News rankings being complete garbage apply. These rankings, based on refereed journal publications, are probably a bit better (and put Chicago well ahead of Duke), but omit effects such as book output, Ph.D. placement, and the like, as well as publications in journals outside of political science.

I finally made it to Chicago after missing my connection in Atlanta due to the nasty storms out by the Jackson airport delaying my flight to Atlanta. In five minutes in the lobby, I ran into five different political scientists I know (four of whom actually recognized me), two of whom are named Chris. For a change, the folks at the Palmer House actually honored my request to be near the elevator (I guess finally making Silver HHonors membership has its privileges), but then again that may have just been a coincidence.

Hopefully I’ll be able to catch up with Dirk tonight; then I can get organized for my panel tomorrow morning and my discussant gig Friday morning, so I’ll be free to work on the “things to do in Chicago” list Kelly gave me Friday night most of the rest of my time here.

1. What’s the deal with Lindsay Lohan?
2. So… how about them Dodgers?
3. Complete the analogy: George Bush is to chimpanzee as (blank) is to Lurch.
4. Would Ashlee Simpson be famous if her sister weren’t Jessica Simpson?
5. If you were the president of Haiti, how would you increase your exports of baseball players to match that of the Dominican Republic?
6. Explain the song “Dip It Low” by Christina Milian in one sentence.
7. How does theft of silverware and glassware from the Caf affect the international system? Give examples.
8. “If PBS doesn’t do it, who will?” What is “it”?
9. Under the CAN-SPAM Act, what is the maximum prison sentence that the assistant director of intramural athletics can receive for mailbombing the campus population with four announcements of a 3-on-3 Dodgeball tournament?
10. Isn’t it ironic, don’t you think?

Todd Zywicki has a lengthy post at The Volokh Conspiracy on the merits of intellectual diversity on campus, most of which I am in full agreement with. However, Zywicki seems to have picked a rather poor example of indoctrination:

My “History of the American South” class was a one semester narrative by a Marxist professor on how rich southern whites had conspired to manipulate racist sentiments among lower-class whites to keep them from banding together in the “natural” economic alliance of poor whites and blacks to plunder the property of rich whites. He was the only one who taught it, so if I wanted to take it (I was from South Carolina, so I was interested in it), I had to take it from him.

I hate to break it to Zywicki, but that’s basically what rich whites did during the post-Civil War era in the South, a phenomenon that continues (in diminished form) to this day. You don’t have to be a Marxist to buy that argument, although I suppose it helps.

Granted, there are other important aspects of Southern history and politics (although most of them are connected, at least somewhat, to the twin issues of elite dominance and race as well), so if the entire semester was just a rant on that particular topic I’d say Zywicki had a rather poor instructor. But “divide the have-nots through racist appeals” was a cornerstone of planter-elite strategy to maintain political and economic power, particularly in the Deep South, well into the 1960s.

A couple of somewhat weird articles have appeared on the Chronicle of Higher Education website in the last few days. First off, a graduate student decides to reinforce some stereotypes of academics:

After years of reading The Chronicle, I’ve heard just about every complaint that teachers can make—about a lack of appreciation for what we do, trouble getting students to talk, the vagaries of grading—but there’s one basic complaint that has gone unexplored so far: What if you’re so hot and bothered that you have trouble teaching the class?

Um, I’d advise sucking it up and dealing with it, or getting a girlfriend to solve that whole being “hot and bothered” thing. For what it’s worth, it’s 80 degrees out today and everyone’s pretty much half-naked here.

Second, Gene Fant of Union University (in lovely Jackson, Tennessee) explains why I can’t get a job in the geographic area that I want to work in. Now someone tells me.

Before I become Staff, Departmental and blank, there’s still a job to be done here—most notably on my current radar, administering written comprehensive exams to 24 seniors on Monday night, then grading the American portions of said exams and sitting in on oral comps the following week. Happy happy, joy joy.

If I’d known there was a T-shirt with this logo on it, I might have considered purchasing it to wear at the conference this weekend. Somehow I doubt the humor would have been highly appreciated.

Some interesting discussion is happening on the H-PolMeth list over an apparent policy by the editors of the American Journal of Political Science to reject papers for a variety of reasons, most controversially including summarily rejecting any article that advances formal theory without an empirical application of that theory. Without taking sides (I can always hope I might get a pub in the AJPS someday, and the people on the other side of the dispute include at least one good friend of mine), all I can say is that this one could become highly entertaining real quick.