Amanda Butler, Will Baude, and Waddling Thunder ponder the role of the suit in modern society.

A sociologist friend of mine was quite surprised to witness the spectacle of political scientists parading around the Palmer House Hilton in suits—apparently, sociologists don’t dress up for conferences, but political scientists (for whatever reason) do. I tend to think the suit is best reserved for special occasions; I wouldn’t dream of teaching in a suit on a regular basis (and, in fact, have only done it once—when I had a job interview immediately after class—although I’ll be teaching in a suit tomorrow as well), and if I were the churchgoing sort, I probably wouldn’t wear a suit to church either. On the other hand, I like my suit, and I don’t even mind wearing a shirt and tie on a semi-regular basis (and I have been known to wear a shirt and tie when teaching). Plus my suit actually manages to make me look halfway respectable, which is no minor feat.

As for Ms. Butler’s complaints about footwear, I can empathize—finding comfortable dress shoes is something of a challenge for me, given my rather wide feet, although my recent pair of SAS leather shoes are remarkably comfortable (my mother swears by SAS). I honestly don’t pay much attention to the footwear that female political scientists wear at conferences, though they do tend to dress more casually than the men, so I suspect many eschew heels in favor of more comfortable footwear, a decision I wholeheartedly support.

I am also rather convinced that the only people, aside from those with various fetishes, who care what shoes women wear are other women. Not being a sociologist, though, I can’t explain why this would be the case or how this might affect one’s strategies in making more comfortable footwear acceptable for women’s business attire.

One of the nice things about having a blog is that you can think out loud. The drawback is pretty much anyone can stumble by and read your thoughts, and given my current situation on the job market, it is in my best interest for everyone to think I’ll leap at the chance to take their job offer (which, given that I have fairly transitive preferences, is emphatically not the case).

Nevertheless, I feel the need to ponder aloud. One of the faculty members I was out to dinner with tonight (at a pretty good Chinese restaurant—I guess I should have picked something else for dinner last night, since this was my second dinner of fried wontons and beef fried rice in two days) mentioned that his son is studying for the computerized GRE. The GRE actually has an interesting structure; in the olden days, you answered a block of N questions per section, and everyone answered the same N questions. Now, you answer M questions, and the test is adaptive—if you get questions right, it gives you harder ones, and if you get them wrong, you get easier ones. Thus, it is important to do well early—if you blow the first few questions, there’s almost no way to score in the 700s, because you’ll never get back to the hard questions that allow you to get such a high score. In other words, there is path dependency in the GRE: past actions dictate the range of choices you have available.

One suspects the job market is the same way. Aside from Overby’s career-improvement maxim—generally quoted as “any job is better than no job” (and, its corrollary, “never have an unpublishable thought”)—some jobs are better than others. Course load, service requirements, pay, appointment length (tenure-track versus non-tenure-track), location, and prestige all have effects.

Funnily enough, I think I’ve made my decision, more or less; there are basically two jobs I’d say yes to (one of which I’m pretty sure I’m not in the running for), two I’d have to seriously think about, and one I’d reject outright (there’s also a possibility in reserve which I’m not counting yet). Now I just need to find out what my options are, and react accordingly.

(I promise I’ll stop being so cryptic once I have signed a contract for the fall.)

As expected, the near-legendary faculty review of Ole Miss Provost Carolyn Staton’s job performance was overwhelmingly negative, according to survey results obtained by The Daily Mississippian (who deserve kudos for even the vaguest attempt at investigatory journalism—heck, they deserve kudos for stringing together a coherent article, something rarely seen in the DM outside the Sports section). News at 11.

Though I have to give Bobby Khayat credit where it’s due—he runs a tighter ship than good ol’ Shelby Thames down at USM, and keeps things significantly closer to the straight-and-narrow, even if he engenders similar levels of animus from the faculty and students in the process.

Hmm, maybe this phone interview isn’t going to happen after all… or it’s going to be about the shortest on record, one of the two.

Update: Shortest on record…

Laura of Apartment 11D thinks a war is brewing in academe between the parents and the childless:

Is this war new? I think so. With the pressures of the new economy, workers are turning on each other. Everybody else’s life looks better than their own. The parent workers are jealous of their single counterparts who can work uninterrupted, who get a full night’s sleep and a weekend off. The singles feel that they don’t have the excuse of a soccer game to get them out of a departmental meeting.

Since the decision to have kids has been framed in terms of choice, then that means that the chooser has to accept all the consequences. Of course, you could make the converse argument that the childless choose not to have children, and thus have to accept the consequences. [emphasis mine]

I suppose one can make that argument, but given the relative paucity of women beating on my door begging me to be a sperm donor, I think the “choice” aspect here is massively overstated.

On the other hand, the benefits of not having to convince a spouse and kids that (hypothetically speaking, of course) it’s a good idea for your career to spend the next winter digging out from under snow on the wild chance that a tenure line will open up the next year, especially when you’re turning down a tenure-track offer in much warmer climes to do it, probably shouldn’t be discounted…

Stephen Karlson is the latest to note the news that Duke is getting rid of its 8 a.m. classes in favor of 8:30 a.m. start times. He is also the first to note that the students may not actually be the impetus for the change:

[T]he clustering of classes in the 10 am to 3 pm time blocks, which contributes to a space crunch at many universities, reflects in part a revelation of preferences on the part of the faculty. Northern Illinois University wants at least one third of each department’s class offerings outside prime time. That, too, is not as big a problem for a night owl, or for a morning person. One colleague, now retired, would choose the 8 am classes, be in by 5 or 6 in the morning, and gone by 2 or 3 pm.

Given my future status as “low rung on the ladder,” I don’t expect to have my preferred sleep schedule worked into the formulation of the college bulletin. But I will say the way to this political scientist’s heart is to let him sleep in…

Jacob Levy notes that my papers page may be heading towards obsolecence, given that the Powers That Be in political science have joined forces to launch PoliticalScience.org.

Now, if they can only figure out how to make employers actually pay attention to the vitas posted on eJobs, this discipline might well be organized by the time I’m retired.

I planned to post about this Monday when I got my APSA April e-Newsletter, which helpfully arrived in my email box well after half the events it talks about have already happened, but when searching for my name turned up nothing (when I know for a fact there should be some of my stuff in there, at least if it includes—as advertised—papers from APSA 2003 and MPSA 2004), I concluded the site was useless as-is, being an egotistical snob and all.

I’m taking a short break at my hotel before heading back to the conference, which I have to say has been a pretty good one for me—I’ve gotten to catch up with some good old friends from ICPSR and elsewhere, met some new ones, and had a few promising conversations about job prospects in The Discipline™. Now off to get a sandwich and head back.

(I saw Dan very briefly yesterday afternoon… otherwise, except for Dirk, it’s been a blogger-free weekend so far.)

Well, at last, I have a real, bona fide campus interview, tentatively scheduled for the week after next, for a tenure-track job at a regional state university with a predominantly non-traditional student body in the lower plains (think “where the wind goes blowing…”). I already have a pre-interview scheduled for this weekend in Chicago (with a different school), but this is the first campus visit.

It actually seems like a fun job, where I’d get to play “big fish in a small pond,” and to be honest the idea of focusing on teaching rather than doing research is starting to appeal to me—not that research-oriented departments have been beating down my doors, mind you.

(Now to finish my preparations for the Chicago trip, including a couple of overheads for my paper presentation…)

There are three new philosophy grad student group blogs, one of which is from my graduate alma mater.

• What is the name of this blog? (University of Rochester)
• Orange Philosophy (Syracuse University)
• Fake Barn Country (Brown University)

Looking at the list of bloggers at Rochester, I see two “tenured grad students” who were there when I was, seven years ago. I wonder what the record is for the longest amount of time spent in grad school.

(Link via Crooked Timber.)

Ryan of the Dead Parrots notes the increasing use of anti-plagiarism software tools in academe (to fight the scourge of term-paper copying, something noted by Brock yesterday), the use of which apparently may be spreading to newsrooms to catch journalist-plagiarists (though obviously it won’t catch the Jayson Blairs of the world, who generally invented stories rather than copying them directly).

I have somewhat mixed feelings about these services. On the one hand, they do combat a real problem, and one that potentially damages the academic process. But, like Ryan, I wonder if requiring students to turn these papers in using these services (as a former colleague of mine is doing this semester) creates a presumption of guilt; funnily enough, I’d actually be more comfortable if I (the instructor) were the person submitting the papers to TurnItIn.com, rather than having my students do it. Maybe I’m weird that way.

One of the phone interviews this afternoon seemed to go well; the other felt like a train wreck in slow motion. As of now, both of the phone interviews I’ve had with departments that used a speaker phone seemed to go poorly; the second department today used a real conference call, which went much better.

Now the waiting game begins…

Well, it’s not going to go down as the best paper I’ve ever written, but here’s the Midwest paper in all its glory. Now I have to prepare for those back-to-back phone interviews this afternoon…

Have I mentioned how much I hate writing the front half of research papers? I guess this means I should find a frequent collaborator who likes writing literature reviews but hates data analysis…

(On the other hand, maybe I should just publish in economics journals… that discipline apparently considers three sentences to be a long lit review.)

Back in September, I put a note on my philosophy papers page to potential plagiarists and their professors:

Hey, philosophy professors. If you've come to this page because you've found that a student has plagiarized one of the papers below, drop me a note, philarete at mindspring dot com. I'm curious as to how widely these papers are being plagiarized.

Hey, philosophy students. Don’t plagiarize these papers. For that matter, don’t plagiarize at all. It’s better to fail honestly than to cheat and get an A. Besides, you’ll probably get caught.

Today I received my first email from a philosophy professor confirming that a student has been caught plagiarizing my work. A undergrad at a California university plagiarized two of my papers, one on Bernard Williams on personal identity, and a shorter piece on the Lockean theory of personal identity.

I’m pleased that the professor told me that the student would have received an A, had he or she not been caught.

Sunday’s Clarion-Ledger has three articles on the ongoing Southern Miss saga:

• USM director of resource and risk management Jack Hanbury gives slightly more detail on the background of the investigation of suspended professors Glamser and Stringer; key quote:

  Hanbury said Thames asked him to investigate the professors only after Hanbury received information that indicated “very serious misconduct.”

  The information came from Kentucky and arrived after the issue went public, Thames has said.

• USM’s Angie Dvorak sits down with the Clarion-Ledger to clarify her curriculum vitae.
• Ole Miss journalism professor Joe Atkins has an op-ed on the regional antipathy to unions that ties in Thames’ bogus allegation that the AAUP is a labor union.

In other USM news, the school hired disgraced former Iowa State coach Larry Eustachy as its new basketball coach on Thursday, replacing fired coach James Green.

More updates at Liberty & Power and the Fire Shelby Thames! website.

Eugene Volokh points out a law professor who’s integrating a blog into the classroom experience. I’ve personally wondered whether that would be appropriate for an undergraduate course; presumably, the privacy issue isn’t problematic (or, at least, no more problematic than requiring students to give oral presentations). I guess the main issue is whether a professor can expect students to be technically competent enough to use a blog properly—though I suspect the undergraduate who can’t use a word processor, a harder task than blogging, is few and far between.

Of course, before a practical implementation for LSblog, I’d have to add all the security code I’ve been meaning to add behind the scenes (to make a distinction between users and administrators—at the moment, anyone with a login can hose the blog). Projects, projects…

My more immediate concern, however, is writing a paper for the Midwest conference. I figure if Dan Drezner can spin his blog posts into an article in Foreign Affairs, I can spin this into a conference paper. I’ll post more about it when I actually accomplish something on it…

As James Joyner notes, the Invisible Adjunct is leaving the building: both the halls of academe and the world of blogging. As someone who’s seriously considered departing the academy himself (although for financial rather than career-related reasons—though, if I don’t have a job lined up for the fall by the end of next month, it could very well be for both), I wish IA all the best in whatever she finds to do post-academe.

You kind of have to read between the lines here, but it doesn’t look like the faculty think much of Ole Miss Provost Carolyn Staton. David Steele of the DM leads with:

In a debate lasting more than three hours, the Faculty Senate decided to not release the results of Provost Carolyn Staton’s quadrennial performance evaluation for the moment, citing privacy concerns.

A bit of background: this whole thing started when the quadrennial review of the Provost was scheduled; originally, Chancellor Khayat only solicited evaluations from certain deans and department heads; the Faculty Senate then decided to circulate separate evaluation forms to the faculty and then tabulate the results, stripping identifying information. The results of this evaluation are apparently what the Senate has decided not to release for now.

The whole article feels like it was cut-and-pasted out of order; one paragraph, we’re talking about the USM situation, the next, we’re talking about Staton, and never is it clear how much of the debate appeared in public. Interesting tidbit:

Khayat addressed the Senate on the [Staton?] issue in an executive session.

After that part of the meeting, it seems a little flip-flop happened:

According to Acevedo, some of the information in the provost’s review was good and some bad.

He said people might misinterpret the data, although he stated earlier that he thought the numbers spoke for themselves.

You are invited to try to make heads or tails of this at your leisure. I’m at a loss.

Neither James Joyner nor Kevin Drum are particularly impressed that “Dr.” John Gray is siccing lawyers on people who question the legitimacy of “Dr.” Gray’s academic credentials, a Ph.D. from “Columbia Pacific University” and both a B.A. and an M.A. from “Maharishi European Research University.” The latter organization is affiliated with the Transcendental Meditationists, a movement best known due to perennial Natural Law Party presidential candidate John Hagelin; however, his academic credentials (including a Ph.D. in Physics) are from decidedly more mainstream universities.

The Clarion-Ledger reports that the IHL board is meeting behind closed doors today, one day after IHL university presidents met in a closed-door session with USM president Shelby Thames:

Citing “potential litigation at USM,” Mississippi College Board members today went into closed-door session at about 8:50 a.m. as dozens of faculty and students from the University of Southern Mississippi campus milled about the board’s offices off Ridgewood Road.

Both supporters and detractors of USM President Shelby Thames made the trip to Jackson as the board that oversees the state’s universities discussed Thames’ decision to oust tenured professors Frank Glamser and Gary Stringer and the resulting campus uproar.

More from Ralph Luker, who continues his browbeating of OxBlogger David Adesnik (whose ignorance of Mississippi geography is forgiveable, coming from someone who’s studying in the fens of East Anglia on the banks of the River Cam*) for his inattention to matters that might be of concern of a future Ph.D., even one coming from such high stations as Yale and Oxford and who might not deign to accept a job in the primitive backcountry that is 21st century Mississippi.

Scott has a roundup of Tuesday’s developments at his blog, including an extended discussion of the C.V. of Angie Dvorak, one of the peripheral issues in the situation.

Also of note: Clarion-Ledger columnist Eric Stringfellow thinks Shelby Thames is in over his head as USM president, and the Hattiesburg American wants an open hearing for Glamser and Stringer, rather than the closed hearing their attorney has requested.

I’m now starting to accumulate rejection letters at a not unreasonable pace.

Steven Taylor claims the following today:

The hardest part [of academia] is everything you have to do to get the job in the academy in the first place, and those are quite rare.

In the meantime, I’m happy to report some good job news. A good friend, who’s ABD in sociology, applied for exactly one job this year, got exactly one interview, and was offered, and accepted, exactly one tenure-track job at a well-respected liberal arts college within two hours of the Grande Onze university where she is finishing her Ph.D.

What? You were expecting good job news from me? Surely you jest…

I’m enjoying massive shoulder pain today, so blogging isn’t exactly at the top of my list of priorities. Thankfully, Scott has the rundown of events as of this morning.