The second exam in American government had good and bad points; the good point was that the average, an 82, was basically where I wanted it to be. The bad point is that, somehow, the standard deviation was 4. So bad, in fact, I was sorely tempted to rescale the scores so there would be a larger standard deviation. Even worse, the correlation between scores on the first two exams was something like 0.2.

In layman’s terms, somehow I managed to ask 30 multiple choice questions, about 25 of which were either too easy (almost everyone got them right) or too hard (the only way people got them right was by guessing); coupled with the essay questions that never seem to discriminate well among students, I produced an exam that was borderline useless. Ugh.

As alluded to below, I am very pleased to announce that I have accepted an appointment as a visiting assistant professor at Duke University for the 2005–06 academic year, which—if nothing else—will make Duke the most blogged political science department in the world. Thankfully for Messrs. Troester and Nyhan, however, Dr. Munger has chosen to inflict me primarily on the undergraduate population.

I’m told that my offer of employment is conditional on learning how to spell Coach K’s full name, so I suppose I should get to work on learning that, as well figuring out why a glorified gym is referred to as an “indoor stadium”—perhaps because the events at the outdoor stadium, absent the good graces of Mr. Spurrier, are such a disappointment.

In other news, the paper I sent to APR got rejected (or, as I like to call it, “revise and resubmit—but elsewhere”). At least it wasn’t in turnaround hell forever.

Update: Will Baude quibbles with my assertion that Duke is now the “most blogged” political science department in the world. If one were to count the joint-appointed and intermittent blogger Cass Sunstein and the silent Jacob Levy, I might grant his point, although I’ll raise him the equally-silent Dan Lee in the Blue Devils’ defense. Of course, Drezner can squash us all like bugs, but on one-person, one-blog rules I think we’re essentially tied.

Further Update: Mr. Troester adds D. Laurence Rice to the list, pulling Duke ahead by my estimation.

The crisis continues: Mr. Baude has dug up two more UC types with blogs. Can my fellow Cameron Crazies meet this challenge?

I just finished preparing my invited presentation for the NAFTA symposium this coming weekend at the University of Memphis. I have absolutely no clue how my presentation on the Interstate 69 corridor will be received among such papers as “Intersecting Capitalism, Patriarchy, and the Environment: Looking at NAFTA through a Gendered Lens” and “NAFTA and the Legal Consciousness of Caribbean Migrant Farm Workers.” Hopefully all will go well.

Anyway, here’s the PDF version of the presentation in all its glory. It’s nothing particularly spectacular, and if you’ve read I69Info.com it’s nothing new, but it gets the job done.

I’m glad to see I’m not the only college professor who is sick and tired of TIAA-CREF’s current advertising campaign. In particular, I’m not entirely convinced that one prof lecturing to a room of 200-plus bored undergraduates (the centerpiece of one of these ads) is “serving the greater good,” or even the individual good of anyone involved in the process. Plus, given most college faculty’s antipathy-to-outright-hostility toward Division I athletics, one suspects TIAA-CREF’s members might question the organization’s expenditure to help pay CBS’s bills for airing the tourney.

Prof. Karlson’s point about the “greater good” being served by such things as comparative advantage and a market-based economy, in addition to doctors and college professors, is also well taken.

In terms of the tournament itself, color me deeply pleased that two of America’s most overrated basketball programs, Syracuse and Kansas, both got spanked by rank outsiders today.

Steven Taylor is putting out feelers for someone who knows international political economy for a potential gig at Troy State University. If you’re interested, you know where to find him…

Now it’s public, I’d like to congratulate my cousin Melvin Patrick Ely, author of Israel on the Appomattox and professor of history and African-American studies at the College of William and Mary, on winning the Bancroft Prize in American History. More here.

I love my students most of the time, but I’ve got to hand it to the guy who sent me an attachment today with the title IMFUCKED.WPS. Actually, the title is very appropriate, as I wasn't able to open the file using OpenOffice, Word, or WordPerfect; you can’t grade what you can’t read. Thankfully (for the student, at least), a bit of googling implicated Microsoft Works as a possible producer of this document, so maybe I can figure out a way to get it into OpenOffice so I can print the thing.

As some may already know, I was one of three participants in a panel entitled “Can academics be bloggers? Can bloggers be academics?” at the Public Choice Society conference in New Orleans, organized by Mike Munger and co-starring Mike and Dan Drezner. I think we had a really good and interesting discussion with the audience, although I’m uncertain how much my participation really enhanced things.

I also had the serendipitous opportunity to catch up with the lovely Leslie Johns from NYU, a friend and fellow TA from ICPSR this past summer; Dan, Leslie, and I ended up having a nice dinner at Arnaud’s (which Dan kindly paid for), followed by some sort of alcoholic slurpee concoction from a Bourbon Street vendor and beignets at Café du Monde.

After a pretty up-and-down week, it was nice to have a low-stress conference and a day with some good company.

Every time I log on to MyAPSA, I have to scroll past this stupid message:

Thank you for submitting your proposal to the 2005 Annual Meeting program. We received a large number of excellent proposals—too many, unfortunately, to be able to incorporate all of them into the program. Your proposal has not been accepted to the program.

We appreciate your interest in the upcoming APSA Annual Meeting and hope that you have the opportunity to attend.

Now, if I were just someone who had submitted a proposal and been rejected, I’d be annoyed by the reminder every time I log in that I got dinged—on the first login, I could see it being valuable, but by the 30th or so I think I’d be pissed off. But I didn’t even submit a proposal, so it’s just insulting me for no good reason. Jackasses.

Just another reminder that, as Mr. Pravda says, “it’s always a good idea to underreport your professional income when paying dues to the APSA.”

Do any of my readers need a guy pushing 30 with a Ph.D. in political science for anything? Statistical analysis of data, teaching undergraduate students, lawn mowing, assistant fry cook, you name it. He’s available end of July; maybe sooner.

Just curious.

The Times today also has a piece on the trend of more students taking both the ACT and SAT, due in part to recent changes to the SAT. I found this passage in the article somewhat disturbing, however:

“There’s almost no reason not to take ACT,” said Lisa Jacobson, chief executive of Inspirica, a tutoring and test preparation company in New York. “The only significant reason not to is if a kid is totally stressed out, and doesn’t want to spend another Saturday taking tests.”

Students have nothing to lose by taking the ACT, she and others say, because they can take the test as many times as they want and choose which scores, if any, to send to colleges—a calming option for students with severe test anxieties. In contrast, all SAT scores are sent to all colleges a student applies to. [emphasis mine]

Doesn’t this fact shoot any meaningful comparability between the two tests straight to hell, despite the well-known “equivalency tables” between the two exams?

Congrats to James of The Dead Parrot Society for getting tenure and to James of Outside the Beltway for getting their 3 millionth hit.

I think the title for this job ad is what should be on this one.

David Bernstein has moved up from shilling his books to a post that can essentially be summed up as “please help pay my salary.” I kid you not.

Considering George Mason Law School? Are you considering attending George Mason, academic home of me and co-conspirator Todd Zywicki? People telling you that it’s crazy to consider Mason over a “superior” (i.e., higher-ranked in U.S. News) school? Well, I’m meeting an increasing number of GMU law students who have turned down, among other schools, local and regional competitors William and Mary, George Washington, and Georgetown (in fact, I’ve run into several students who turned down G’town but not G.W.; I didn’t think to ask, so I’m not sure if they didn’t get in or didn’t apply to G.W.). Several years ago, such students were few and far between, but not anymore. I don’t have exact numbers, but I’d say it’s pretty common (given that G.W. and G’town have way bigger entering class sizes than Mason, it wouldn’t take, from their perspective, many students who turned them down to make up a significant proportion of a GMU class—20 each, and you have a quarter of a GMU entering class!). Your mileage may vary of course, and one’s choice of law school is a highly individual decision. But if your heart is with GMU, and you want to reject a higher-ranked school, go for it, you will not be alone.

Why not include a referral code while he’s at it? If he doesn’t already have one, I suggest ”?exclude=davidb.”

Look, I get the institutional pride thing. If some kid with the grades and SATs asked me if he should go to Millsaps or one of the other alma maters, unless he was hard-core into engineering or really into math I’d tell him or her to come here—the hard-core engineer or mathematician I’d send to Rose-Hulman, and I’d only include math because they have a much bigger department. I’d even say the best undergraduate education you can buy in the Deep South (Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina) is right here. But the idea I’d whore out my blog to plug my employer is patently ridiculous.

Leopold Stotch is none-to-impressed with the University of Memphis’ hiring practices, quoting from an ad that I’ve seen myself:

The University of Memphis invites applications for a non-tenure-track position in political science at the rank of instructor for the 2005–06 academic year. The main responsibilities of the position are in the area of International Relations and include lower division courses in International Relations plus upper division and graduate courses in International Conflict, International Relations Theory, and Research Methods and Statistics. The teaching load is five courses per semester; the salary is $30,000; Ph.D. is desired.

Necessary disclaimer: a fellow Ole Miss grad student (ABD, who also happens to be a Millsaps alum) currently holds this position. Did I mention I pray to God every day thanking Him that I only have to teach a 3–3?*

Stephen Karlson writes:

I expect juniors and seniors to have a basic understanding of the meanings and spellings of simple words.

An expectation, mind you, that is largely in vain. In my public opinion class last week, when talking about affect (in the public opinion context, a synonym for emotion), I ended up explaining the difference between the words affect and effect in common usage. I’m pretty sure this was the first time any of my students were made aware that these two words, in fact, are not the same.

Of course, it doesn’t help by the time students have reached me they generally have had 13–16 years of experience with teachers and professors in various fields whose reaction to shoddy grammar and usage can be summed up as “eh, it’s not my job to fix it,” rather than the proper response of whacking them over the head repeatedly with a copy of Strunk and White.

I haven’t had much to say about Ward Churchill in a while, but this post by Stephen Green (þ: InstaPundit) lept out at me, mainly due to the Rocky Mountain News article Green dug up. Read it and weep.

BOULDER—Ward Churchill was rejected by two University of Colorado departments in 1991 before the communication department agreed to give him tenure. Even in the communication department, the chairman-elect was “uncomfortable” with the decision, according to documents released Friday by CU.

At the time, CU officials were shopping for a department that would accept Churchill, fearing they would lose him to another university.

In a memo to the communication faculty, Michael Pacanowsky, who was in line to become chairman, said Churchill needed to join a department, since the program that sponsored his Native American Studies courses did not have the authority to grant tenure.

“Ward’s file was circulated to sociology and political science, and they did not agree to roster him in their departments,” Pacanowsky wrote in an e-mail dated Jan. 10, 1991. “Because Ward’s graduate degree, an MA, was in communications, we were contacted next.”

The University of Colorado at Boulder is what us academics used to call a “Research I” institution (now it’s a “Doctoral-Research Extensive” institution under the Carnegie classification system, which is essentially equivalent). In other words, the job of UC-Boulder in academe is to do cutting-edge research and produce people with doctorates (and the undergraduate program is largely designed to subsidize those activities by bringing in tuition to subsidize research and giving you guinea pigs for your Ph.D. students to practice teaching on). You do that by hiring the best people with doctorates you can find. You don’t do that by hiring fake Indians who have produced questionable scholarship and don’t have terminal degrees just to engage in quota-filling exercises.

Don’t get me wrong—if Churchill’s only crime against academic society was being an offensive jackass, that might even be a qualification for granting him tenure. But shoddy scholarship and a tenure file shockingly bereft of what most academics would consider to be tenurable activity are another matter entirely.

An interesting piece in today’s Clarion-Ledger about academic misconduct at Mississippi colleges and universities.

Funnily enough, I just talked about this topic Wednesday with my public opinion class when I handed out their take-home exam. It seems to me that honor codes and the like are just part of the puzzle; just as important is for faculty members to create circumstances in which students will be less tempted to break the rules—or, failing that, writing exams that would be very hard to effectively cheat on.

Fail to win reelection? Well, if you’re well-connected enough, you may get to stay on the state’s payroll.

Laura points out that better-qualified adjuncts are probably quite annoyed that lovable losers like Jim Florio, Al Gore, David Dinkins, and Ronnie Musgrove are pulling in real money to teach 1–2 classes a semester at various private and public institutions.

Eugene Volokh has a lengthy post questioning the wisdom of an Oklahoma state legislator’s proposal to define any sexual activity between a student under 21 and a university employee as “rape”.

I tend to agree with Eugene’s position—the position, incidentally, staked out in the most recent addendum to the Millsaps faculty handbook (I think; I’ll look it up when I’m at work tomorrow)—that relationships betwen faculty members and students they are currently instructing are inappropriate, for a variety of reasons that he details in his post. I generally also think that faculty members are just asking for trouble if they get involved with undergraduates—whether or not they are responsible for assessing their work—but I can’t see any good reason to make consensual sexual conduct illegal as long as both parties are over 18.

The Jawa Report has a Foothill College professor’s response to allegations of political bias in grading an essay assignment about the writing of the Constitution.

I also like Rusty’s response to student complaints that he gives too many F’s:

In fact, not a semester goes by where at least one student doesn’t accuse me of giving them an F because I don’t like their politics or have some personal vendetta against them. The fact is that neither is true.

The reason I give so many students an F is because there is no lower grade to give.

As the Blogfather would say, “heh.” (þ: Steven Taylor)

Eugene Volokh is soliciting new surnames for embattled UC-Boulder professor Ward Churchill in an effort to find a compromise.

Alex Tabarrok notes recent research suggesting that Georgia’s expensive HOPE scholarship program has done little to improve access for disadvantaged students to the state’s higher ed system, at the expense of producing rampant high school grade inflation and encouraging students to avoid challenging courses in college so they can keep their scholarships.

The best that can be said for the program is that it keeps talented students in-state, which may reduce the mobility of smart people away from Georgia; whether that’s sufficient to justify a massive middle class entitlement program (financed off the stupidity of the poor, in the form of lottery ticket sales) I leave as an exercise for the reader.

Marc Cooper has some fighting words for his bretheren on the left who are giving Ward Churchill’s remarks a free pass:

Free speech and the first amendment should cover all professors, no matter how repugnant. I think it legitimate to defend Churchill’s right to be a vocal asshole (heaven knows most universities are densely populated with such types on both the Right and Left).

What I’m worried about is the way that some liberal groups are hemming and hawing on what he actually said. I’ve seen that some Colorado peace groups are praising Churchill as some sort of font of wisdom and downgrading his remarks as merely “stupid.” Other similar groups are actually supporting him—like this statement from the Rocky Mountain Center for Peace and Justice who in lauding Churchill characterize his remarks as only “ill-chosen.”

No. Not ill-chosen. They were carefully selected, hateful, unforgivable and demented, frankly. And having kept half-an-eye on Churchill since he emitted his execrable screed, I noticed that he has continued to be invited as a guest or panelist at numerous lefty events instead of being ostracized and ignored.

Mind you, Cooper wouldn’t have Churchill fired; neither Stephen Bainbridge nor Eugene Volokh would fire him either. Glenn Reynolds also has some linkage on Churchill’s connections (or lack thereof) to the American Indian Movement and native American ancestry in general; apparently being a “fake Indian” is even more popular than I thought previously.

Henry Farrell and Orin Kerr both are somewhat optimistic about Inside Higher Ed, which is intended to be a web-based (and free) alternative to the venerable Chronicle of Higher Education.

I’m cautiously optimistic myself, but I wonder if its job service’s self-described mission of “transforming the tedious, time-consuming and expensive process of applying for academic jobs into something almost enjoyable” might be a tad inflated. (Indeed, transforming the job market in political science to something even vaguely resembling that mission statement would require replacing the APSA “meat market” with a proper hiring-only event that is scheduled to correspond with actual disciplinary hiring practices.)