TigerHawk talks eminent sense about the legal drinking age:

On the drinking age, I think the right answer is now and always will be obvious. Individuals should be able to purchase alcohol on their own account starting at age 19, which would liberalize the current law considerably and still allow for the policing of unsupervised drinking among high school students. In addition, teenagers older than, say, 15 should be able to drink in the company of their parents, either in private or in restaurants. Responsible drinking has to be taught. One can’t help but believe that the current generation binges because it has had no opportunity to learn that responsibility from the people in the best position to teach it to them.

The only thing I might add is that I’d prefer some sort of policy that got colleges and universities out of policing student prohibition. Lowering the drinking age to 19 would continue the temptation for “student life” officials to (largely ineffectually) regulate all alcohol consumption by students, regardless of age. I’m not sure what the exact solution to that conundrum is, but I am certain that I’d rather have freshmen drinking openly than “out of sight” in the basement of some frat house or off-campus apartment.

Tomorrow I leave for a weekend trip to Memphis for the wedding of Frequent Commenter Alfie and his lovely fiancée Annie. I get back Sunday night, then Monday morning I leave for yet another job interview. No rest for the wicked… or at least the aloof.

I wouldn’t be up now if I hadn’t forgotten I had things sitting in the washing machine for several hours.

Well, actually I probably would still be up given my chronic insomnia, but at least I wouldn’t be waiting for my laundry to get finished.

I’m trying to figure out how to get a flight to a smaller airport with very little mainline jet service (and of course none that’s non-stop from St. Louis, as that would be too easy) in the next week or two. The ideal combination of flights for me is to go on Northwest and come back on either Continental or Delta; the most direct feasible return routing is on Continental. Despite the alleged codesharing alliance among these airlines, the following situation obtains:

• Northwest will sell me* a ticket that goes on NW, Continental, or Delta, but only returns on NW or Continental, and at least one flight has to be on NW.
• Continental will only sell me a ticket that is all on Continental, or a bizarre routing that backtracks from Cleveland to Detroit via Northwest.
• Delta will sell me a ticket that leaves on NW or Delta and returns on NW or Delta; at least one flight has to be on NW.

All will sell me a roundtrip on their airline for about the same price, and Northwest and Delta will sell me a roundtrip using both for that price too, but the roundtrip involving Continental—which works best for my schedule—is $300 more, unless I do it all on Continental. Flying on Continental means all four flights are on regional jets, which admittedly is more fun for me on Continental’s ERJ-135/145s than on Northwest and Delta’s CRJs—but I’d rather be on a mainline jet than either.

On the other hand, I suppose life could be worse and I could not have these sorts of problems.

* I have to pay for the ticket, but I will get reimbursed—in theory at least.

I really don’t know what to say about the tragic events today at Virginia Tech, but Dean Dad’s reaction tracks with mine, by and large.

College campuses are incredibly vulnerable places. They’re open, they’re highly populated, they’re lightly patrolled (if at all), and they’re full of stressed-out people. In a way, they’re almost naive, if it’s possible for institutions to be naive. As I’ve mentioned before, they really aren’t built for easy lockdown modes. Most were built before that term was even coined.

Those awful ‘what if’s’ are always in the back of my mind. One of my committees is the group that tries students accused of plagiarism or other cheating. We set up the room so that we’re closer to the door than the student is, just in case. One of my colleagues has suggested to me, gently but clearly, that it might be a good idea to hide the pictures of my kids that I keep in my office – you just never know. (I haven’t, but I haven’t been able to shake the thought, either.)

Such situations are not unheard of in higher education—the infamous sniper in the tower at UT-Austin from years ago comes immediately to mind—but given the vulnerability of campuses and their tendency to attract some really creepy people (a few people I encountered in my life as a student spring immediately to mind; I haven’t seen it so much as a faculty member), it’s almost surprising stuff like this is as infrequent as it is.

I just got back from the Midwest conference in Chicago; Frequent Commenter Scott and I shared a rather palatial room on the nosebleed level—at a price significantly below the conference rate to boot. I can say that all three panels I participated in were intellectually stimulating and full of intriguing papers, the choices of food and beverage destinations by FCS were all excellent, it was great to catch up with a few Signifying Nothing groupies readers in the discipline, and Southwest Airlines did its usual quality job of shuffling my derrière from point A to point B with minimal fuss. Given my time constraints on Wednesday, I had to abandon my earlier plan of riding the train, although the CTA did get a healthy chunk of change from me while in Chicago (to/from Midway and on our gastronomic touring).

Now I just need to track down a local source for 312 and Honker’s Ale.

Tyler Cowen seeks to explain Pam Beesley.

This working paper by Holger Lutz Kern and Jens Hainmueller just crossed the POLMETH wire and may be of some substantive interest—particularly for those who are debating the use of state-subsidized broadcasting into authoritarian states, like the U.S. broadcasts into Cuba and many of the BBC World Service’s foreign-language services:

A common claim in the democratization literature is that foreign free media undermine authoritarian rule. No reliable micro-level evidence on this topic exists, however, since independent survey research is rarely possible in authoritarian regimes and self-selection into media consumption complicates causal inferences. In this case study of the impact of West German television on political attitudes in communist East Germany, we address these problems by making use of previously secret survey data and a natural experiment. While most East Germans were able to tune in to West German broadcasts, some of them were cut off from West German television due to East Germany’s topography. We exploit this plausibly exogenous variation to estimate the impact of West German television on East Germans’ political attitudes using LARF instrumental variable estimators. Contrary to conventional wisdom, East Germans who watched West German television were more satisfied with life in East Germany and the communist regime. To explain this surprising finding, we demonstrate that West German television’s role in transmitting political information not available in the state-controlled communist media was insignificant and that television primarily served as a means of entertainment for East Germans. Archival material on the reaction of the East German regime to the availability of West German television corroborates our argument.

So, I have this job interview… and the university in question decides to use a car service instead of having a department member shuttle me to/from the airport, which a perfectly rational decision on their part—and probably better for candidates’ sanity anyway, but nobody asked us what we think of being interrogated by a search committee member just minutes after enduring airline hell. But I digress.

Anyway, I arrive at the airport and get in the guy’s van, and I get to spend an hour listening to the guy’s treatise on the global monetary system (his issues with debasing the currency, fiat money, the whole nine yards). He drops me off and I go on my merry way. Same guy picks me up after the interview and, in the course of the airport journey, asks me if I’ve thought about 2008 and I try to steer the conversation to about the driest, most academic discussion of front-loading known to man. Unfortunately, this doesn’t work—and at this point, the driver tells me in no uncertain terms that the only candidate for 2008 who’s a “real American” is Ron Paul (his distinct lack of popularity—like the low prices of gold and silver the previous day—being attributed to The Man keeping him down).

Debian 4.0 is now released. There are definitely a couple of ugly reportbug issues that made it into the release (primarily in the Unicode and memory use areas), but I don’t know whether or not a fix for those will be allowed in to the first point release.

But it is a time for rejoicing nonetheless, especially when paired with the election of our new Debian Project Leader for the next year, Sam Hocevar, in a pretty darn close election—Sam was preferred to Steve McIntyre, my top preference, by just eight net ballots.

Robert Axelrod has belatedly discovered the blogs, and he’s missing the forest for the trees. Quoth our esteemed leader:

In discussions with APSA colleagues, I have learned that a number of private web sites and blogs have emerged recently that are widely used by political scientists, particularly graduate students, to discuss the academic job market. In their best form, such sites afford a new vehicle for the “grapevine” discussions that have always accompanied the academic labor market. However, I have also been shown anonymous postings on these lists making racist, sexist, and homophobic attacks on political scientists. The context makes clear this language is coming from within our discipline. There is little we can do to respond directly to these anonymous postings. We can speak out however. I urge you to stay attentive in the departmental communities you lead to gauge whether there are incivilities in the exchanges among your students and colleagues. Where you hear evidence of them, directly or indirectly, confront this behavior in whatever ways you consider appropriate and best. I truly believe these events are infrequent and at the fringe of our community. But the integrity of our professional exchange is the bedrock of our community. I hope you’ll agree with me it is our obligation as leaders of the discipline to sustain the respectful and civil treatment of colleagues.

Since Bob’s late to the party, I’ve had my response prepared for nine months:

In terms of wider disciplinary conversations in the blogosphere, I think the truth of the matter is that there are some serious grievances about the discipline among political scientists that simply will not be aired in non-anonymous public fora. That inevitably means there is going to be some nastiness, as those with private agendas use anonymity to attack others. I am unsure what the proper balance is, but I do know that the same themes raised at the American/Comparative jobs blog are the subject of whispers in the hallways of conferences and other gatherings.

The bottom line, I think is that if we are going to have more “openness” and “reform” in political science, we are going to need some brutal honesty about issues beyond methodological pluralism in the APSR—things like overproduction of PhDs, hiring practices (including the fundamentally broken hiring process), the dominance of doctoral-granting departments on the boards of the APSA, journals, and regional associations, differing standards for what is considered “quality” scholarship among subfields, and more. And I think that brutal honesty is going to need people who are willing to speak up about these issues non-anonymously without the protection (not from outside interference as originally intended, but from our own colleagues) of tenure. Personally, I don’t see that happening any time soon, but I would love to see someone prove me wrong.

Except for the overuse of scare quotes, I think it still basically applies today. Anyone who believes that “racist, sexist, and homophobic” attacks are solely motivated by a lack of civility—rather than being based on (quite likely falsely-held) beliefs about widespread non-merit-based decision-making in hiring, tenure, and promotion at most institutions and within APSA itself—is quite simply dangerously naïve.

Somehow I doubt New York City will be seeing long lines of uncircumcised adult males volunteering to get their foreskins lopped off, even if it does substantially reduce their risk of getting AIDS from unprotected sex.

Update: As Jane Galt notes (thanks for the link!), “In all this, the obvious point was missed: is anyone really going to take the city up on this?” Not bloody likely—with an emphasis on the word “bloody.”

Heather Mills denies she’s a “gold digger.”

I have real no post, I just wanted to channel Kanye West. Or make fun of Ringo Starr.

According to this table, the median 2006-07 academic year salary for a first-year political scientist was $50,207. I’m told the same researchers also found that every six-year-old girl in America got a pony at Christmas, just like she asked for.

Via Julian Sanchez: Alanis Morrissette remakes “My Humps” by the Black-Eyed Peas, radically improving the song in the process (not that that would be hard).

Update: Dan Drezner dissents.

Lisa Edelstein (Dr. Lisa Cuddy on House) is not Paget Brewster (Jessica on Andy Richter Controls The Universe).

That is all.

Dan Drezner seeks eyeballs for a chapter on blogging in the upcoming “APSA Guide to Publication,” which is worthy of your input for reasons beyond the fact that my name appears sandwiched between those of Leslie Johns and Jacob T. Levy in the acknowledgments.

While the mystery table dude(tte) sorts out his/her issues with Blogger, you can get to the political science jobs wiki here. And, no, I’m not the table dude(tte), in case you were wondering.

I can’t imagine why my big news hasn’t appeared yet… but maybe you shouldn’t believe everything you read on the Internets on April 1.

My connecting flight from Memphis to St. Louis last night was canceled, so I got to spend the day today with mom and my step-dad before flying out this evening. While I was in town, Mom and I went to see Blades of Glory, which was highly amusing.

I also had the distinct displeasure of having a relatively well-known political scientist go after me for having the temerity to treat Daron Shaw’s measure of campaign resource allocation as valid. I’m not sure if I scored any points by standing my ground or not, to be honest—I pointed out that it appeared in a top-3 journal, so presumably the reviewers lent some credence to the measure; that Shaw was a tenured professor at the University of Texas, so presumably he wasn’t an idiot; and that his results were consistent with other scholars’ measures.

On one of my flights headed to my latest job interview, my seat was directly in front of one occupied by Sandra Bullock, who I wouldn’t have recognized in a million years (except that her travel companion, whoever he was, seemed to make a point of announcing her name to people). I do have to say that without professional makeup and in jeans and a sweatshirt, she basically looked like any moderately attractive 40-year-old brunette of average height and weight (not that there’s anything wrong with that).

A textbook called Looking at Movies mysteriously arrived for me today. I say “mysteriously” because I don’t teach any classes that have anything to do with film, although I’ve always wanted to teach a course on depictions of politics in the mass media—not a “politics of film” course per se, more a course looking at how the political system is portrayed in a variety of movie and TV genres.

Certainly one segment would be on speculative fiction, wherein most political systems shown are implausible or ridiculous (the new Battlestar Galactica and Babylon 5 being far less absurd than most). It’s a shame there’s no movie of Clarke’s Songs of Distant Earth, for its “Jefferson Mark-3 Constitution” would be worth some serious mockery, although I suppose wags might say after the 2004 election that any two randomly-selected Americans would have made better candidates than the two foisted upon us by the GOP and Democrats.

Here’s how I voted for Debian project leader:

[ 3 ] Choice 1: Wouter Verhelst
[ 3 ] Choice 2: Aigars Mahinovs
[ 3 ] Choice 3: Gustavo Franco
[ 3 ] Choice 4: Sam Hocevar
[ 1 ] Choice 5: Steve McIntyre
[ 3 ] Choice 6: Raphaël Hertzog
[ 2 ] Choice 7: Anthony Towns
[ 3 ] Choice 8: Simon Richter
[ 4 ] Choice 9: None Of The Above

For the uninitiated, Debian uses the Schulze method of vote counting (a Condorcet method) to decide its elections based on ranked ballots cast by Debian developers. In English, my preference order was McIntyre > Towns [the incumbent DPL] > (any other candidate) > (nobody).

Thankfully, another candidate withdrew from the election, saving me from having to cast a ballot ranking nobody ahead of a candidate for the second consecutive year.

Timothy Burke advocates moving away from “writing-intensive” courses in favor of a requirement for courses that include assignments that emphasize the development of information literacy and library research skills. Now if we only included such a course in each major—perhaps one that also included instruction in, oh I don’t know, the appropriate methodologies for the given discipline—perhaps we might get somewhere in the academy.

Julian Sanchez succinctly explains the rational basis test as applied by the courts:

Now, understand: For a law to be “rationally related” to a legitimate state purpose, it’s not necessary that it actually achieve that purpose, let alone achieve it without bringing about various ancillary harms in the process. It’s enough that a sane legislator might reasonably believe it to contribute to the relevant goal.

In other words, whenever the Supreme Court strikes a law down while claiming to apply the “rational basis test,” they weren’t actually applying the rational basis test. Case in point: Romer v. Evans, in which the court laid the foundations for Lawrence v. Texas by essentially applying heightened scrutiny to discrimination against gays and lesbians—even though they claimed they were simply applying the rational basis test.

This Chronicle piece including some “student evaluations” of Socrates has been getting a bit of play around the blogosphere and is pretty damn funny. I thought this was the funniest part:

He always keeps talking about these figures in a cave, like they really have anything to do with the real world. Give me a break! I spend serious money for my education and I need something I can use in the real world, not some b.s. about shadows and imaginary trolls who live in caves.

He also talks a lot about things we haven’t read for class and expects us to read all the readings on the syllabus even if we don’t discuss them in class and that really bugs me. Students’ only have so much time and I didn’t pay him to torture me with all that extra crap.

þ OTB (among others).