In this post, I erroneously asserted that Dan’s “blogger panel” at APSA was co-sponsored by the New Political Science program division; it was, in fact, co-sponsored by the Political Communication and Information Technology and Politics sections.

Signifying Nothing regrets the error and any confusion it may have caused. Thankfully, however, we were not sued by Lee Kuan Yew ($).

Well, I managed to survive eight quasi-interviews with representatives of various institutions, not to mention a long, but most enjoyable, night last night at The Green Mill jazz club. Now I’m taking a bit of a break in my hotel room, listening to the Ole Miss-Memphis game on the Internet and pondering some late dinner plans.

I enjoyed the bloggers’ panel. Andrew Sullivan was rightfully castigated for his absence, but the remainder of the panel managed admirably in his stead. Ana Marie Cox did ably incorporate repeated sexual references into her comments, but somehow managed to omit references to butt sex, which I suppose was admirable self-restraint on her part.

On a more personal note, I enjoyed meeting (in person) panelists Henry Farrell (who, as it turns out, really sounds Irish in person—try reading his posts sometime with an Irish accent in your head for some amusement) and Laura McKenna, as well as audience members Russell Arben Fox and Stephen Karlson.

One surreal note: an audience member asked Ana Marie about the importance of fact-checking and the blogger’s responsibility for following up on their mistakes as they are more widely disseminated; unfortunately, it appears at this point that the mass media do no better—and perhaps worse—than bloggers in this regard (þ InstaPundit).

Update: Steve the Llama Butcher has a hysterical rundown of the proceedings, wherein the ghost of Woodrow Wilson, esteemed racist bigot and past president of the APSA, makes an extended appearance, although I didn't notice him or INDC Bill in the room (þ PoliBlog and Rusty Shackleford).

At lunch with Dirk today, I mentioned a minor dilemma I’m facing.

Dan’s thoroughly excellent bloggers pannel is organized, in part, by the New Political Science section, a section whose aims are squarely at odds with my personal conception of what the scientific study of politics is all about, but that’s neither here nor there.* This is all hunky-dory and wonderful—except, allocation of panels at APSA is a zero-sum game, and the sums are determined by panel attendance. Showing up at a NPS panel, rather than the competing methods panel, will help NPS get more panels at APSA in 2005, probably at the expense of political methodology (who have already been marginalized down to 7 panels—total).

So, my attendance will be under protest, with absolutely no slight intended to the wonderful panelists, audience members, or Dan’s work coordinating the panel.

Also, I’m taking wagers on which panelist will first mention anal sex. The smart money would be on Ana Marie Cox, but there are others who might be called on to speak first and who might be tempted to raise the issue for discussion.

I sometimes wonder what our students would think of us if they knew what their professors did at parties.

Then again, it would probably just reinforce their stereotype of us as nerds who sit around and talk a lot, even considering the presence of a margarita machine (which, alas, I did not partake of, since I drove to the party) and various incredibly obscene discussions.

William Sjostrom detects a hint of bias in the speaker selection for the upcoming APSA conference. Dan Drezner, while acknowledging the potential bias, also points out that the speakers’ appearances will be lightly attended, largely because political scientists have better things to do. He also manages to summarize part of my research methods class last night:

[T]here’s a difference between political science and politics. Most of the presentations and papers given at APSA do not address normative debates about the way politics should be. Instead, they are more detatched analyses of why things are the way they are. Sometimes the answers can be ideological, but most political scientists just care about whether their answer is correct—or more precisely, whether someone else can demonstrate that their preferred answer is wrong.

That said, something I didn’t mention last night is that many scholars’ normative beliefs drive their scholastic inquiry; witness the cottage industry of campaign finance scholarship, the whole “peace science” coterie, or most inquiry into racial and ethnic politics in America. Not that there’s anything wrong with that…

Update: Meanwhile, Nick Troester notes that people disagree what “political theory” means. Most often, I see it used as a synonym for normative theory, rather than formal theory, which I gather is Nick’s conception of the term—the latter is sometimes referred to as “formal modeling” to reduce potential confusion, and occassionally (erroneously, in my opinion) as “positive” theory.

The blog revolution has apparently reached this corner of academe; one of the topics of discussion at lunch (not raised by me, mind you) among our group of incoming faculty members was whether or not faculty members could set up class blogs on the college server.

That said, I’m still leaning against using blogs for any of my classes, although I do think it would be a good way to help fufill the whole “writing across the curriculum” thing that the college is pushing in some courses.

Well, half of orientation is over. I think I’m starting to recover my enthusiasm for the job (see here and here), in no small part because of the warm welcome I have received from my new colleagues. My fellow new faculty members (numbering seven total, including me) are a pretty interesting and diverse group. So far I’ve been invited to dinner, been interviewed via email by the editor of the campus newspaper, and gotten a new computer for my office (replacing the steam-driven Gateway monstrosity that was there before), in addition to various and sundry activities.

The only real irritant so far is the heavily Microsoftized campus computing environment—I am quickly learning to despise Outlook with a passion, and I suspect my laptop will be getting a lot of use for getting actual work done.

Anyway, I probably should be off to bed so I don’t doze off during Day 2.

Russell Arben Fox has some thoughts on living and working in the relative boonies of academia that may be a worthwhile corrective to the attitudes articulated here by other friends and colleagues.

Very soon now, college campuses will be swarming with incoming freshmen. I have two pieces of advice for any who might be reading this blog. More to the point, I have two pieces of advice for incoming freshman boys. Never having been a freshman girl, I don’t have any particular advice for them, although perhaps some of what I have to say will be applicable.

First, if you are not an experienced drinker, you do not have a good idea how much alcohol you can handle. Always keep this in mind, because if you drink more than you can handle, you are likely to make a complete jackass of yourself. For example, if you drink the better part of a bottle of Absolut vodka, you might throw up in the social room of the freshman girls dormitory, get thrown out by the RA, and not remember it the next day. Or, if you get thoroughly schnockered drinking fuzzy navels, you might call the cute girl you have a crush on, confess your love, and not remember it the next day.

Second, always be really nice to all the freshman girls, because they are taking notes, and they are sharing them. If you do something to make a complete jackass of yourself, perhaps something involving alcohol, they will tell all their female classmates about it, and you will have problems getting dates for the next four years. You’ll probably have to date girls from another school in your city, who will not know what a jackass you are.

One of the little ways us wanna-be professors make a little side money (a couple hundred bucks a pop) is by reviewing textbooks for publishers. At the moment, I’m reviewing an American government textbook for its n+1th edition, which is nothing unusual, except what they sent me to review is the nth edition—which I already had a copy of at home anyway, since I was planning to adopt it for American government in the fall until O’Connor and Sabato was foisted upon me. So I guess I’m technically “pre-reviewing” it, or “post-reviewing” the nth edition, or something. And, in four chapters, I’ve only managed to come up with about a page of comments (and mostly silly stuff like “Unorthodox Lawmaking rocks, add it to the recommended readings on Congress,” rather than stuff like “only an idiot would write this paragraph”). I guess that means it’s a good book or something, but for $X I think they want more than a page of comments.

Since arriving in Ann Arbor last week, I’ve had something of a curious reaction to the revelation that I have a job. The near-uniform reaction, after hearing the details of the position, is that it’s a “heavy” load—which, given that it’s three courses a semester (or “3–3,” in the lingo) and five* preparations over the year, I suppose is a fair assessment, although it’s something of a godsend compared to the 4–4s at complete backwaters (“Research support? That’s your desk.”) I interviewed for, and the load itself doesn’t account for the relatively small classes or the generally engaged undergraduate student body. It’s enough to put something of a damper on my enthusiasm for starting my job in the fall.

Now, it’s possible that these folks just aren’t attuned to the realities of the academic job market, or perhaps just don’t recognize that for many potential scholars, taking a job at a non-Ph.D.-granting institution is a necessity rather than a preference. But it’s also possible that they’re on to something; is it possible that several years’ training as a researcher and methodologist is pretty much wasted if most of what I do the rest of my career is teach “textbook” political science and bivariate regression to undergraduates? Should I really settle for teaching three classes a semester when I could go elsewhere and teach three courses a year, if the research expectations for tenure are such that I’d end up doing the same amount of work anyway, especially when you account for the lack of graduate assistants?

The decision may, in the end, be made for me—if this past year’s experience is any guide, serious research institutions aren’t exactly clamoring to hire graduates of lower-tier (or even middle-tier) Ph.D. programs. But I suppose it’s something I’ll have to bear in mind this fall.

I think Bryan Caplan has really stepped in one here:

Larry Bartels has gotten national attention for his work on Bush’s income tax cut, inheritance tax cut, and public opinion. (Here is the full article; here is the digest version; here is what Alex Tabarrok had to say about Bartels). Bartels’ main point is that public opinion verges on contradictory: the public believes that inequality has gone up, agrees that inequality is bad, agrees that the rich should pay more taxes, BUT still supports two tax cuts that mostly benefit the rich.

Bartels is right, although since I belong to the tiny minority of people who favors however much inequality the free market delivers, for once I have to celebrate the public’s folly.

What Bartels does not seem to realize, however, is that the contradiction he laments is only one of many. [emphasis added]

I suspect very strongly that Prof. Bartels does realize this, as he is one of the foremost experts on public opinion in American politics. Mind you, Caplan’s broader post is a nice primer on the contradictions in public opinion that political scientists have known about (and attempted to explain) since the 1960s—contradictions that Bartels, and any other political scientist studying public opinion, would be well aware of.

Tyler Cowen calls on Dan Drezner to self-assign p values to his fence-sitting. My gut feeling is that this approach would be ineffective; based on the cognitive psychology literature, I’d have to conclude that Dan is probably not the best judge of his own objective probabilities. Instead, I recommend employing content analysis of Dan’s posts to arrive at estimated p values at given points in time, or using a panel of raters, or some other more accurate technique.

Incidentally, the only p value I have a good handle on for myself is that p=1.00 that, on election night, I will be sitting with my undergraduate methods class at some venue with available libations making fun of Brokaw, Rather, and/or Jennings on the big-screen as they call (and uncall) states. Assuming the dean doesn’t put the kibosh on the short field trip, that is…

The part of “Chris” in this post is being played by someone else. The opinions expressed in this post are not Chris’s, particularly if you are looking to hire a methodologist… in which case, Chris’s vita is linked over there to the right, so read it and skip the rest of this post, which will be of zero interest to you.

For the individual in the San Francisco Bay area from a Comcast IP who did a Google search on “Political Methodology ph.d placement rate”: abysmal, if you generalize from an n of one—but pretty good if you consider a visiting position and spending another year desperately avoiding a tenure-track job with a 4–4 load or worse “placement.” Suffice it to say anyone actively looking for a real methodologist who can publish and teach Ph.D. students (as opposed to an Americanist they can also dump undergrad methods on) isn’t going to be happy with me—never mind that that’s what I’ve been trained to do.

On the bright side, your chances are probably much better if you manage to attend a top 25 Ph.D. program. So polish up those GRE scores!

Brett Marston isn’t too impressed with the National Labor Relations Board’s decision last week that removed the right of graduate students to organize at private universities. He writes:

I don’t want to be uncharitable, but the majority seems to have little interest in the function of labor law. They seem to view it as a collection of information about congressional views on categories of relationships between people rather than as an attempt to reduce labor conflicts. For the majority, the relevant question is whether TA’s have a primarily “economic” or a primarily “educational” relationship to the university; if it’s the latter, then the administrators win, because educational relationships are not covered by the rules.

In contrast, the dissent seems to indicate that the function of labor law is to provide a regularization of existing disputes that are characterized by the unionizing participants themselves as labor disputes. It’s the disputes themselves that matter, not the formal relationship categories that Congress has helped create.

My suspicion, however, is that TA unionization doesn’t “reduce labor conflicts” at all; instead, it is a vehicle for graduate students to obtain greater benefits from their employer/educator than they might otherwise receive (by bargaining collectively, rather than on an individual basis), which seems rather orthogonal to the idea of “conflict.” If anything, having a union would seem to create a system by which disputes between graduate students and the administration would be increased and intensified, by being channeled into adversarial activities such as “work to rule” and strikes—events that wouldn’t occur if disgruntled students had individual disputes with the administration.

On the other hand, I was raised in an era and a political culture hostile to unions, and grew up cheering on Margaret Thatcher as she pummelled Britain’s excessively powerful labor unions into submission, so I could be wrong.

When I went to summer camp, all we learned was how to tie square knots and clove hitches. But Tyler Cowen’s daughter is learning a lot more in the Center for Talented Youth program at Johns Hopkins.

Yana, who is fourteen, took a class on the philosophy of mind. She just started another class on the French and Russian Revolutions. This is her third year there, she calls herself a CTY addict. The year before she did Latin. This time we had her for two days between sessions. I heard about modal logic, Newcomb's Paradox, and mind-body reductionism. Yana now knows why she believes in free will, and why she doesn't want to be an undergraduate philosophy major.

Apparently they’re warning these kids about the state of the philosophy job market.

Steven Taylor notes that it’s apparently pretty hard for his university’s administration to figure out that he—and most of the rest of the faculty—are on fall-and-spring semester contracts, and thus have no obligation to set foot on campus over the summer. Personally, I’d be happy to sit in my office all summer for ⅓ of my nine-month pay, but somehow I doubt that would be offered.

Uh-oh. It seems Laura and I are headed for a disagreement over the merits of Avril Lavigne. For what it’s worth, I do find “Sk8er Boi” to be a deeply annoying song. I realize this won’t really redeem me in Laura’s eyes, mind you.

More ammunition here. But if you really want to know what pop sensation I truly have a “thing” for, click here and forever hold your peace.

Dan Drezner ties together the twin themes of less-than-civil bloggers and bad comment hoodoo recently discussed in these parts.

One thing I will say, as a veteran of online fora in general (as an ex-MUD administrator and someone who’s been a part of Usenet since 1992), social problems rarely have good technical solutions. Technology can help—particularly when battling other forms of technology, like comment spam—but dealing with people and their idiosyncracies is a whole other beast.

As far as the negativity Dan has observed and been subjected to in academia, I have to say I’ve largely been spared it (although I will say I was deeply annoyed with the completely worthless one-line review I received for a manuscript once); I don’t know if that’s a function of one’s subdiscipline or perhaps just an example of my relative youth in things academic.

Update: More on this theme from Matt Stinson, who's strongly tempting me to join him in the media black hole that is mainland China.

Kate Malcolm has decided she has little use for core curricula:

I have a problem with [the liberal arts approach to] higher education. It seems to me that this approach assumes that college is necessary to be a productive member of society—“an educated citizen.” It also seems to assume that the quality of education at these universities would not decline if they imposed a larger core of required classes. I can’t say this for certain, but I believe that a larger core of required classes would likely result in bigger, less personable, less detailed classes. It might result in less motivated, less interested professors. It most certainly would sap resources from other courses. And it would also force specialized education more strongly into the graduate realm, depriving students who can’t afford those extra years (for one reason or another) of that educational opportunity.

I say phooey on the silly report. Keep the core out of our universities.

I must beg to differ with Ms. Malcolm, on at least a couple of her points. There is nothing inherent about a core curriculum that requires large, impersonal classes—such an approach is often advocated by penny-pinching college bureaucrats, but that has more to do with penny-pinching than any good pedagogical reason why Macroeconomics should be taught in groups of 100 instead of groups of 10.

To the larger point, I think a liberal undergraduate education is largely necessary to be a fully-versed, competent citizen. The purpose of a university or other four-year institution is not vocational training—if you want that, go to Ivy Tech, or go to engineering school. But no undergraduate degree outside engineering and the “applied sciences” (what respectable colleges call their vocational programs)—with the possible exception of a teaching degree—makes any claim that the degree will make you thoroughly competent in that field. Degrees in the liberal arts and sciences are intended as training in general competencies—how to think scientifically, how to come to your own conclusions based on information, how to think—rather than specific, rigorous training in the minutae of a particular field of knowledge, which is the goal of graduate and professional education (law school, medical school, et cetera).

And, in general, I think (in retrospect; as an undergraduate, I probably concurred with Ms. Malcolm’s assessment) that this is the correct approach—specialists are pretty useless outside their field of expertise without a general education to back it up. Witness the travails of modern journalists, who—armed with a B.A. in communications or some other “soft” specialized degree—routinely butcher the basics of the arts, humanities, sciences and mathematics, and confuse the common consensus of their colleagues with “objectivity,” all because their basic knowledge extends no further than a modicum of grammar and the ability to produce prose in “inverted pyramid” form. Those who deride the inability of the American press to “nail” the president might do well to remember that, “chimp” or not, he’s probably significantly more broadly educated than his would-be interrogators.

More core thoughts here.

Update: Stephen Karlson argues that Ms. Malcolm and I are talking past one another, although I personally don’t see it. My conception of the core is largely (though not completely) in line with that expressed in Millsaps’ core curriculum

Who would have thought that updating two syllabi for classes you’ve already taught before would take so long? Now, the fun part: writing a syllabus from scratch for constitutional law…

Steven Taylor is helping a colleague obtain recent books to donate to Baghdad University in Iraq. In particular demand are recent textbooks in mathematics, the sciences, and medicine, although I suspect any and all donations of relatively contemporary texts (from the last five years or so) would be welcome.

Eric Grey attempts to describe the rules for forming a minority government. There are a few points worth mentioning:

• The rules vary among parliamentary democracies. Some democracies, like Germany, require constructive votes of no confidence; in other words, to get rid of an existing government, you have to nominate a new one, which necessarily increases the stability of the system. In some other parliamentary democracies, the government falls if any government proposal is defeated on a party-line vote (i.e. not a “free” vote). Canada generally follows Westminster tradition, where “confidence” is a customary rather than a legal requirement; since only the Prime Minister (well, technically, the sovereign) can dissolve parliament and call elections, essentially this system is equivalent to the German system—although, since a government could only be replaced by a plurality vote, the PM is more likely than not to call new elections before such a vote could take place.
• Minority governments are somewhat more common than one might suspect. Notably, Israel’s government is currently a minority government. Britain and Canada each have had a few since World War II. Interestingly, minority governments are much more common than coalitions in countries with first-past-the-post (plurality) elections.

An interesting study of coalition government, by the way, is Multiparty Government by Michael Laver and Norman Schofield. Laver and Ken Shepsle’s Making and Breaking Governments is probably also worthwhile (from a more game-theoretic perspective, as is Shepsle’s bent), but, alas, I haven’t read it.

Incidentally, I’d appreciate recommendations on a scholarly text (or even a textbook) on Canadian politics, perhaps something comparable to Philip Norton’s The British Polity. For now, it’s just an idle scholarly interest, but maybe an employer one of these decades will be desperate enough to let me teach some comparative courses.

Stephen Karlson ponders curriculum reform—in particular, an emphasis on interdisciplinary learning. My knowledge of such matters is necessarily limited—I was not a guinea pig for the integrated first-year curriculum at Rose-Hulman (those of us with high-school calculus were too far along), and I was never a freshman again.

All I’ve gotten so far on Millsaps’ interdisciplinary core is the fluffy, press release material aimed at potential students and parents and anecdotal accounts from various participants (principally, my tour guide during my interview)—I assume it works, since they’ve been doing it for over a decade, but I have no empirical evidence either way. It certainly seems more rigorous than NIU’s approach to the problem, but then again there are advantages in such things to being a selective private school that can restrict its enrollment and worry less about the implications of transfers in or out.