Laura McK continues to ponder academic career patterns. In drawing the comparison between Ph.D.s and M.D.s, she notes:

The AMA has done a far better job protecting doctors from flooding the markets. Paul Starr’s book [The] Social Transformation of American Medicine relates how the AMA purposely regulates the numbers entering medical school in order to keep the demand for doctors high and thus guarenteeing them higher salaries. Academics should learn from their example.

Arguably, the bar exam has similar (but weaker) effects on the legal profession. However, I wonder about the morality of turning away someone who wants to earn a Ph.D. in the name of “protecting academics from flooding the markets.” Unlike law and medicine, an academic degree isn’t solely a gateway to a profession, and unlike those fields, there’s no overarching body that can be an effective gateway to discourage free riding. (Good luck trying to get accrediting boards to decertify Ph.D. programs that don’t limit intake.)

The central drawback is more that a lot of people earn Ph.D.s who’d probably be happy doing something else, but they’re 22 and not ready for the “real world,” for whatever reason. But the incentive structure is such that academic departments want to have students around—they help with recruiting and retaining faculty by improving departmental prestige, provide cheap labor for teaching and research, and attract resources from the university administration. On the other hand, it’s hard to make a case for turning away—or worse, failing out—students who are qualified, and I think good programs do, in fact, warn students coming in that they may not get a job. (One former faculty member at Ole Miss is famous for his “Bull Durham” speech, which has struck fear in the heart of many a grad student—including this one.) And that is laying aside the tenure issue, which I’ve seen chew up a number of promising scholars at varying institutions—due to the vagaries of publishing, departmental and administration politics, and other issues.

I don’t know that I have any good or easy answers here. After all, I’m just starting out (heck, I still have to defend on Tuesday—and I’ve got work to do before and after that). Maybe there’s something to be said for adding more value to the terminal master’s, reserving the Ph.D. for those who want to pursue a research-track career. I honestly don’t know.

Steven Taylor has some pretty comprehensive advice on whether or not to pursue the Ph.D. There’s some other advice I’d add:

• Pick up a copy of Getting What You Came For, by Robert L. Peters.
• Research grad schools before you apply. Make sure they offer what you want beforehand; there’s no point in coming to Ole Miss or FSU if you want to study political theory, for example.
• If you’re still an undergrad, try to bum your way into a conference or two. It will give you a flavor of what you’re going to spend the rest of your life doing; better to find out if you like it at 22, when you can still get a J.D. or M.D. instead, rather than once you’ve accumulated sunk costs.
• Don’t just go somewhere just because it’s close to home, or because they’re making you the best assistantship offer. It can be a consideration, but that shouldn’t be the determining one.
• The rankings (particularly in US News) are often outdated, as changes in reputation take time to filter through disciplines. Especially when you consider that #20-25 will be completely different when you’re done, which is when the reputation will really matter.
• Look for schools with faculty—particularly tenured faculty—who publish regularly. That’s a leading indicator of reputation improvement.
• Unless you’re going to a top-tier program, you probably won’t get the “ideal Research I job” straight out of grad school. On the other hand, it may be easier to get a liberal-arts (teaching-focused) job out of a less prominent institution, as they’re less likely to think you’ll jump ship once you have two or three years under your belt.
• If you do want to be in the “Research I” rat-race, look for a postdoc at a top-tier institution to help close the gap between you and the applicants with top-tier Ph.Ds when it comes time to get the “real job.”

All that being said, you can’t beat the job of an academic. Where else can you get paid for doing pretty much whatever you want, whenever you want?

Robert Prather of Insults Unpunished links to a WaPo piece on a list, compiled by conservative stuents, of ten UT-Austin professors who allegedly use their classrooms as a forum for proselytization instead of teaching.

I do think it’s sometimes a professor’s job to challenge the views held by their students, to ensure that they are actually considered viewpoints; however, there’s a difference between that and becoming an advocate. Particularly in large lectures, where there is often little time for discussion, and where there may be an incentive for students to try to curry favor with the professor by claiming to share the professor’s views, I think it’s best to avoid advocacy.

My cardinal rule in the classroom is to keep my students guessing; the highest compliment I’ve received was from a student who indicated that she and some of her friends couldn’t figure out what my politics were—which, I think, means I was doing my job just fine.

Glenn Reynolds has the latest from our friends at the International Society of Political Psychology. He notes this email received from the group’s president by anti-left gadfly John Ray. Both are probably correct that no scholar with a right-wing bias would have written such an email; however, I’d attribute it more to a failed attempt at humor than to ideology per se.

I will note two empirical datapoints: my dissertation, which straddles the boundary of political psychology and mass political behavior, doesn’t have a single citation to a piece that appeared in Political Psychology, the society’s journal, despite citing nearly 250 distinct works—by comparison, the similarly obscure journal Political Behavior, which has significant overlap in scope, received 8 citations. A colleague, whose dissertation was even more explicitly in the political psychology tradition, also had zero citations of Political Psychology.* Since most people who join groups like the ISPP do it to receive the journal, if the society can’t publish a single journal article that would be even tangentially relevant to our dissertation topics (which, basically, is the criterion for a citation), it speaks volumes about the relevance of the ISPP to research in the subfield.

* There is a possible source of bias here: the University of Mississippi library doesn’t subscribe to Political Psychology—which may also speak volumes about the relevance of the journal to the subfield…

Mark your calendars… December 2nd is the day, at a secure, undisclosed combined conference room/classroom somewhere in Deupree Hall on the University of Mississippi campus. Of course, that’s not exactly the end of the tunnel, but pretty darn close.

Matthew Stinson, a fellow member of the patriarchy who is similarly burdended with false consciousness, has an entertaining and informative post about on-campus politics at FSU. For some odd reason, far-left identity politics hasn’t gained much of a foothold here at Ole Miss, so it’s nice to see that it’s alive and well elsewhere in the South.

I wrapped up* the final substantive chapter of my dissertation Saturday evening, then spent a few hours down at the Square downing a few $1 PBRs. Once I’ve given a copy to my committee chair sometime today, I’ll probably post a link to a PDF of it here in the blog.

For the morbidly curious, it currently weighs in at 123 printed pages, not including about 10 pages of front matter—the title page, acknowledgements, dedication, abstract, table of contents, and lists of figures and tables—and the yet-to-be-written conclusions chapter. It is typeset entirely using the gatech-thesis class in pdflatex in 12-point Palatino, with the included Trellis graphs generated by R’s pdf graphics driver.

My recommended reading for this month, The Adventures of Amos and Andy: A Social History of an American Phenomenon, holds a special place in my heart—it’s the first real scholarly book I ever read, at the tender age of 15, while I was otherwise bored out of my mind at a family reunion in Richmond. It was written by Melvin Patrick Ely, a cousin of mine (first cousin, once removed, to be precise). I think that book, more than anything else, is what set me on the path to an academic career. The least I can do in return is hopefully steer a few bucks in royalties his way…

Apparently, researching guns makes you adopt alternate personas that defend your work. Or maybe it’s just being an academic fraud that does…

Tyler Cowen has the scoop on the Economics Nobel prizes, which are being given to the inventors of two time-series econometrics techniques: ARCH and cointegration. As Tyler points out, Granger is more famous (perhaps even infamous) for his contribution of the concept of “Granger causality”; the typical joke is that, by the Granger defintion, summer “Granger-causes” fall (or autumn, if you don’t live in North America).

Anyway, very cool stuff; I’m not a time-series guy myself, mainly because there isn’t all that much great cross-sectional time-series data on mass political behavior at the individual level, but ARCH and cointegration are a big deal for political scientists looking at things like presidential approval and aggregate voting behavior over time, and the Nobel is well-deserved by both.

Henry Farrell, Daniel Drezner, David Adesnik, The Invisible Adjunct, Erin O‘Connor and Jacob Levy (whew—did I get everyone?) are among those discussing David Brooks’ latest NYT op-ed on the alleged liberal bias of the academy, particularly in its hiring practices. (I previously blogged about this topic back when Horowitz was making his splash but can’t be bothered to search for the post. Oh, well.)

I think Jacob Levy is onto something when he writes:

What we do is also: research. It’s always been pretty clear to me that there are people who have the reputation of subordinating their research to an ideological mission, and doing bad research as a result.

I think the danger for a lot of scholars—on the left and the right—is that they will fall into this trap. However, it’s a much more deadly one for rightist scholars than leftist ones; I can recall a particular gathering at which one particular political science faculty member was fawning over Michael Bellesiles’ then-new (and then-undiscredited) Arming America; one suspects my colleagues were not quite so entralled by John Lott’s (also-then-undiscredited) More Guns, Less Crime. In the medium-to-long term, Bellesiles is likely to resurface relatively unscathed somewhere in second-tier academia, while Lott will be most fortunate if he ever sees a room with students in it again in his life. Of course, neither of these men are political scientists (just as well, I suppose, since that means we don’t have to disavow them).

I’ve been relatively fortunate in my career to fall in with faculty who, if they don’t share my political beliefs, can at least accept that they are legitimate and sincerely-held. I think it’s also the case that in more empirically-oriented parts of the social sciences, ideological differences don’t matter as much as what the data can tell us, provided we are honest researchers. After all, Johannes Kepler started out believing—as his mentor, Tycho Brahe did—that the Earth was the center of the universe, but ended up producing the laws of planetary motion for our sun-centered system that astronomers still use today.

The epitome of good science is a willingness to revise—and if necessary, reject—your preconceived notions if the evidence cannot support them. In the end, that is the only ideology that should matter.

The announcement of a new winter intersession here at the University of Mississippi is coupled with news that the fall and spring semesters will be a week shorter each, starting in Fall 2004. Anyone who’s suffered through our interminable semesters—either teaching or as a student—will be positively thrilled at this news. (Don’t get me wrong; I love teaching. But semesters that start two weeks before Labor Day and don’t end until mid-December are just a tad too long.)

David Adesnik has a response to the critiques of his earlier posts at OxBlog and the Volokh Conspiracy. He first notes that he’s just as annoyed by new data sets as by old ones:

Actually, I’m far more frustrated by the new data sets than the rehashing of the old ones. Just three days ago I was at a presentation in which a colleague described the data set she assembled on over 120 civil wars that have taken place since 1945. Since Latin America is the region I know best, I pulled the Latin American cases out of the data to set look at them.

What I found was that a very large proportion of the cases were “coded” in a misleading or flat-out wrong manner. Why? Because no one can study 120 civil wars. But pressure to come up with data sets leads scholars to do this anyway and do it poorly. Of course, since their work is evaluated mostly by other scholars who lack the historical knowledge to criticize their work, they get away with it. And so the academic merry-go-round spins merrily along.

That’s a fair and reasonable critique—of that particular dataset. There’s always a tradeoff between parsimony on the one hand and depth on the other. You can collect data on 120 civil wars, and try to explain with parsimony why—in general—civil wars occur, or you can soak and poke in one civil war and try to figure out all the myriad causes for that particular one. Each has its pitfalls; figuring out why Cambodia had a civil war in 1970 (my years are probably off, me not being an IR scholar) through a “soak and poke” really doesn’t help explain why Pakistan had one in 1973. On the other hand, oversimplifying the causes can be problematic too.

But that strikes me as more of a coding problem in a particular dataset than a problem endemic to social science research; ultimately, you have to simplify the real world to make scientific explanations of it. And this isn’t a problem unique to “soft” sciences like political science: physicists don’t really think light is composed of photons that are both a particle and a wave (for example), but the only way for humans to currently understand light is to model it that way, and chemists don’t think that nuclei are indivisible (but, for their purposes 99.9% of the time, they might as well be).

David does take me to task for my admittedly flip remark that Hamas was comparable to the Sierra Club:

With apologies to Chris, his comment summarizes everything that is wrong with political science. Who but a political scientist could think that ideology is not a good explanation for the differences between the Sierra Club and Hamas?

Both groups have fairly revolutionary ideologies, yet they pursue their ends through different means. The Sierra Club operates in an environment where at least some of its goals can be accomplished from within the existing political system, while Hamas’ goal is the obliteration of the existing political system in Israel and the Palestinian territories. One need not resort to ideology to see that the Sierra Club doesn’t need to engage in violence to pursue its goals while it’s pretty clear that for Hamas to produce revolutionary change in the former Palestinian mandate, it does.

That the goal has something to do with Hamas’ ideology is rather beside the point; they can’t accomplish it without obliterating the Israeli state through violent action. The Sierra Club, on the other hand, has a sympathetic political party, a regulatory agency whose civil service employees (if not its politically-appointed overseers) share its goals, and other sources of active support that mean that they can achieve their goal of reducing pollution and other environmental impacts without resorting to violence. Ideology may define the goal, but the goal itself will be pursued through means that are shaped by the political environment.

Of course, in some cases, ideology may affect the means chosen. But a theory of how Osama Bin Laden operates isn’t very generalizable; it only explains how Bin Laden behaves, without explaining how ETA, the Tamil Tigers, or the Real IRA operate. That’s the tradeoff—you can spend a lot of time trying to explain how one actor will behave, and nail that, or you can spend a lot of time explaining how multiple actors will behave, and maybe get close. Maybe Bin Laden deserves case study attention. But most political actors don’t; they’re frankly not that interesting.

For example, in-depth case study of how my neighbor across the street makes his voting decisions tells me next to nothing about how my next-door neighbors vote, much less how people vote in general. My resources are probably better spent trying to explain how most people vote from large-scale survey data, and getting close, rather than studying one person so I can predict precisely how he’ll vote in 2032.

Around Harvard, all one hears is that incorporating statistics into one’s work significantly increases one’s marketability (and I don’t just mean at the p<.05 level—we’re talking p<.01 on a one-tailed test.)

I will grant that the use of statistics—or more accurately, the demonstrated ability to use statistics—helps the marketability of political scientists. For one thing, this is because of hiring practices in political science—your primary or major field defines the sort of job you will get. Unless you are looking for a job at a small liberal arts college, no school that is hiring in IR will care if your second (minor) field is comparative, theory, or American, since you’ll never teach or do research in those fields. The exception is in political methodology: you can get a job in methods with a substantive major and a minor in methods. The downside (if you don’t like methods) is that you will be expected to teach methods. The upside is that you aren’t tied to a particular substantive field.

More to the point, in some fields it is difficult to do meaningful research without statistics. In mass political behavior and political psychology—my areas of substantive research—at least a modicum of statistical knowledge is de rigeur. Which brings me to Dan’s point:

I’d argue that the greater danger is the proliferation of sophisticated regression analysis software like STATA to people who don’t have the faintest friggin’ clue whether their econometric model corresponds to their theoretical model.

For every political scientist that knows what the hell they’re doing with statistics, there are at least two who think typing logit depvar ind1 ind2 ind3 at a Stata prompt is the be-all and end-all of statistical analysis. Frankly, a lot of the stats you see in top-flight journals are flaming crap—among the sins: misspecified models, attempts to make inferences that aren’t supported by the actual econometric model, acceptance of key hypotheses based on marginally significant p values, use of absurdly small samples, failure to engage in any post-estimation diagnostics. And, of course, “people who don’t have the faintest friggin’ clue whether their econometric model corresponds to their theoretical model.” Several thousand political scientists receive Ph.D.’s a year in the United States, and I doubt 20% of them have more than two graduate courses in quantitative research methods—yet an appreciable percentage of the 80% will pass themselves off as being quantitatively competent, which unless they went to a Top 20 institution, they’re almost certainly not.

David then trots out the flawed “APSR is full of quant shit” study, which conflates empirical quantitative research with positive political theory (game theory and other “rat choice” pursuits), which, as I’ve pointed out here before, are completely different beasts. Of course, the study relies on statistics (apparently, they’re only valid when making inferences about our own discipline), but let’s put that aside for the moment. The result of all this posturing is our new journal, Perspectives on Politics. Just in case our discipline wasn’t generating enough landfill material…

He then turns back to the civil war dataset his colleague is assembling:

Take, for example, the flaws in the civil war data set mentioned above. I’m hardly a Latin America specialist, but even some knowledge of the region’s history made it apparent that the data set was flawed. If political scientists had greater expertise in a given region, they would appreciate just how often in-depth study is necessary to get even the basic facts right. Thus, when putting together a global data set, no political scientist would even consider coding the data before consulting colleagues who are experts in the relevant regional subfields.

Undoubtably, this particular political scientist should have consulted with colleagues. What David seems to fail to understand is that she did: that is why your colleague presented this research to you and your fellow graduate students, to get feedback! Everything political scientists do, outside of job talks and their actual publications, is an effort to get feedback on what they’re doing, so as to improve it. This isn’t undergraduate political science, where you are expected to sit still and soak in the brilliance of your betters while trying not to drool or snore. You’re now a grad student, expected to contribute to the body of knowledge that we’ve been assembling—that’s the entire point of the exercise, even if it gets lost in the shuffle of “publish or perish” and the conference circuit.

And one way to do that is to say, “Yo, I think you have some coding errors here!” If this political scientist is worth her salt, instead of treating you like a snot nosed twit, she’ll say, “Gee, thanks for pointing out that the Colombian civil war had N participants instead of M” or “Cuba’s civil war was a Soviet-supported insurgency, not a indigenous movement? Thanks!” (Again, these are hypotheticals; I’m not an expert on Latin American history.)

As for the lag time in Pape’s piece, well that’s the peril of how the publication process works. If it’s anything like any other academic paper, it’s been through various iterations over several years; you don’t simply wake up one morning, write a journal article, and send it off to Bill Jacoby or Jennifer Hochschild. At least, not if you don’t want them to say nasty things about you to your colleagues. Anyway, you can fault the publication process to a point, but I think it’s a safe bet that Pape’s thesis predates 9/11, and that people were aware of it before his APSR piece hit the presses.

James Joyner reports that Edward Said, Palestinian apologist cum Middle Eastern Studies scholar, has passed away at the age of 67. Reports that Said was “too sexy for his coffin” have not been substantiated.

I’m back in Memphis after returning from APSA in Philly yesterday afternoon, and will be heading back to Oxford sometime today. A few odds and ends:

• Dan Drezner (the only fellow blogger I knowingly ran into at the conference) has some choice quotes from attendees (none of which I can take credit for) and a modest proposal for a new organized section; Henry Farrell of Crooked Timber compares the APSA experience with science fiction conferences; and Laura McK notes that political scientists don’t talk much about politics:

  One truly amazing aspect of the political science conference is the lack of interest in real politics. You would expect political scientists would live and breathe current events. They should sit around arguing whether or not it's time to get out of Iraq, the merits of the Dean campaign, and the state of the deficit, but no, they don't. For academics, politics has to be discussed years after the events and with clinical coldness. They only touch politics with sterile rubber gloves.

  For what it’s worth, I did have a (not-very-sober) discussion about the prospects of the Dean campaign with my roommate and two Oklahoma grad students, reiterating my belief that due to the electoral rules in place and the lack of a consensus candidate backed by the party establishment it’s Dean’s campaign to lose.

• Five hours is far too long to sit in a single bar. But it was worth it to see Ole Miss beat Vanderbilt, in their typical, lacksadaisical fashion.
• Somehow I ended up with a pair of my hotel roommate’s pants. I’d keep them except they don’t fit (as a pair, we sort of resemble Laurel and Hardy).
• Most of the Ole Miss political science department would have been wiped out had our Northwest flight (nonstop from Philly to Memphis) crashed on Sunday.
• Now that I’ve told half the discipline that my dissertation will be done by the end of the month, I guess that means it’s time for me to start cracking!

Dan Drezner (who I saw just to wave at yesterday) reminds us that things are happening outside APSA (and, more specifically, the Independence Brew Pub).

Stephen Green points out that two of the authors of the dopey Berkeley piece (you know, the one that basically resurrected a discredited fifty-year-old theory by selectively mining the literature for bivariate correlations) have decided to take to the pages of the Washington Post in defense of their pathetic excuse for a journal article. Except their defense is basically impenetrable garbage that lacks even the minor benefit of the nicely-formatted tables with pretty stars that adorned their original piece. Try this paragraph on for size:

It’s wrong to conclude that our results provide only bad news for conservatives. True, we find some support for the traditional “rigidity-of-the-right” hypothesis, but it is also true that liberals could be characterized on the basis of our overall profile as relatively disorganized, indecisive and perhaps overly drawn to ambiguity—all of which may be liabilities in mass politics and other public and professional domains. Because we assume that all beliefs (ideological, scientific and otherwise) are partially (but never completely) determined by one’s needs, fears and desires, we see nothing pathological about this process. It is simply part of what it means to be human. Our “trade-off” model of human psychology assumes that any trait or motivation has potential advantages and disadvantages, depending on the situation. A heightened sensitivity to threat and uncertainty is by no means maladaptive in all contexts. Even closed-mindedness may be useful, provided one tends to have a closed mind about appropriate values and accurate opinions; a reluctance to abandon one’s prior convictions in favor of new fads can be a good thing. The important task for social scientists is to identify the conditions under which each of these cognitive and motivational styles is beneficial, rather than touting one or the other as inherently and invariably superior.

If you actually understand this paragraph or can figure out what the hell these blithering idiots are talking about, feel free to explain it to me. Bonus points if you can actually relate this assertion to the actual contents of the article, which lacked such a noncommittal attitude toward conservatism.

And, in my humble opinion, the important task for these social scientists is to learn how to do proper research (or—better yet—original research!) instead of cherry-picking results from papers that agree with their research hypothesis and apparently discarding the rest. It might also help if they figured out that correlation is not causation, since they have presented absolutely no evidence that (for example) either “fear of death” or “lower cognitive complexity” is causally prior to “conservatism.” They uncritically accept that the articles they cite in favor of their arguments measured the things they purport to measure accurately. Nor do they explain how they concluded that Paul Krugman—a man not known for having either nuance or psychological training—was an authority on the relative cognitive abilities sophistication of conservatives and liberals.

But the note at the end is priceless:

Arie W. Kruglanski is distinguished university professor of psychology at the University of Maryland. John T. Jost is an associate professor in Stanford’s Graduate School of Business. This article was written in collaboration with Jack Glaser and Frank J. Sulloway, both of the University of California at Berkeley.

I guess that answers the age-old question of how many professors it takes to fuck up a journal article or a WaPo op-ed.

The flight to Philly wasn’t entirely horrible, although at times I felt like I was on the screaming baby express. That and I had a nice aisle seat at the rear of the plane where I got to hear the engine up close and personal. I did meet someone else coming to APSA across the aisle from me (who flew from L.A.; I’m not sure how Memphis ended up on her itinerary), but I didn’t catch her name because of the aforementioned engine. Then when we arrived there was a nice scene where an irate man with an English accent decided to wig out because the shuttle van couldn’t carry all 324 pieces of luggage he and his wife/mistress/daughter had with him. Good times. Have I mentioned how much I despise flying?

After I checked in, being the good political scientist that I am, I wandered over to the convention center to pick up all my APSA goodies—and so I’d know where the hell I was going tomorrow. However, even though registration was open today, the free shuttle doesn’t start until tomorrow—and (for a change, not by choice) I’m at the hotel that’s furthest from the convention center.

So I had a nice pleasant 7pm stroll through downtown Philadelphia. Anyone who alleges that downtowns are the hub of life in America should try wandering the streets of a city after working hours. From what I can tell, Oxford’s a more happenin’ town than downtown Philly after 6 p.m. (This pattern is repeated in virtually every major downtown I’ve ever visited. New York may be an extreme outlier in this regard.)

To make an incredibly boring story short, I got my APSA stuff, including my name tag and lovely canvas bag and my irreplacable but inaccurate program (apparently APSA thinks that controling the distribution of programs will reduce free-riding; I think lowering the registration fee and junking the progressive taxation tiered membership dues structure would be more effective). So now I have to wander back to my hotel with a giant canvas bag that virtually announces to the world, “Hi, I’m a tourist! Please mug me!”*

In other news, my friend Sara (who got a hotel within non-mugging distance of the convention center) and I have been running up our cell phone bills with conversations that half the time include her ancient Sprint PCS phone going dead for no apparent reason. And I found out that if I’d signed up for the hotel’s frequent guest program before I left Oxford I could have saved myself the $10 I’m paying for this Internet connection tonight.

Apropos of this weekend, Daniel Drezner and Kieran Healy have some advice for first-time attendees of academic conferences, while Kevin Drum just wonders what all the fuss is about.

Kevin Drum basically sums up my reaction to the latest John Lott go-around. Since being an arbiter of whose econometrics is less shoddy is not (yet) my job, I’ll just say I’m not convinced by either Lott or Ayers & Donahue. So far, the case Ayers & Donahue have made is that using the corrected Lott data and Lott’s (quite possibly flawed) econometrics, there is no statistically-significant evidence of there being any effect.

What this means substantively largely depends on how much stock you put in the so-called precautionary principle (and thus is a political question). I’m one of those people who thinks human liberty is more important than fretting about what people might do with that liberty, so my inclination (even aside from constitutional guarantees) is to reject any regulation that does not show a significant positive effect.

Anyway, this is probably the last I’ll say about Lott until either (a) someone who actually knows what the hell they’re doing with econometrics analyzes the data (something I’ve seen absolutely zero evidence of thus far, since even the statisticians involved in the debate apparently refuse to dirty their hands with real-world data) or (b) I analyze it myself after sitting down with my copy of Greene for a nice long while and realizing I’m probably kissing my academic career goodbye by even getting involved.

Dan Drezner has expanded his site. Meanwhile, since I’ve publicized it for the eJobs placement service anyway, you can read my vita too. (Any emailed recommendations for beefing up or otherwise enhancing my vita would be greatly appreciated.)

John Lemon has sparked an interesting discussion at Kevin Drum’s site about whether or not conservatives are discriminated against in academia. My two cents, from my end of the universe:

1. I’ve seen surveys of political scientists, and their political beliefs as a whole are decidedly left-wing. (One such survey was made available at the 2003 MPSA convention, but I can’t seem to find a copy online.)
2. There are relatively few self-identified conservatives in political science. I know one self-identified Republican, and he considers himself a liberal Republican—and he’s a Ph.D. student. There are probably a larger pool of either independent or libertarian-leaners in the academy, including my dissertation chair, but to my knowledge none of them have described themselves as Republicans either. I do know a few other students who have expressed sympathies that are consistent with conservatism.
3. Conservatives and Republicans routinely receive abuse that, if directed at women or racial or ethnic minorities would be grounds for an EEOC lawsuit on the basis of a “hostile work environment.” For example, I have never heard a positive word about George Bush from anyone in a tenure-track job. In general the same goes for people with strong religious beliefs.
4. There are probably subfields in which this matters more than others. I suspect—but have no evidence—that more empirically-oriented research programs are more accepting of conservatives, since there is less scope for personal political beliefs in such scholarship. (Speaking for myself, in general what I study is fairly divorced from left-right debates, although there are implications in terms of what we can expect from democracy.)
5. I also suspect that this discrimination is less widespread the higher up the “prestige ladder” one goes in the discipline. I would be surprised if Ohio State, Rochester or Michigan denied someone tenure on the basis of their political beliefs, but I wouldn’t put it past Podunk State University.

What does this add up to? I’m not sure. But I’d be inclined to believe Lemon’s account.

Serendipity: Matthew Stinson at A Fearful Symmetry has some observations from a Florida State (not to be confused with Podunk State) perspective. And, the MinuteMan has more too…

Pejman passes on news that one of the Ivys (specifically, Cornell University) has offered professional race-baiter and ex-Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney a guest lecturer’s position. $20 says it’s teaching “political science” courses.

Southern Appeal has dug up the press release, with the additionally-exciting news that none other than John “I idolize Robert Fisk” Pilger will also be receiving a guest professorship at Cornell. Ah well, at least I don’t have to disown that university.

Jacob Levy and Matthew Yglesias have been having a discussion about taking attendance in class.

My general policy is not to take attendance, for a couple of reasons; one, it wastes time (particularly in a large class), and two (if you do the “pass around a sign-up sheet” method), it encourages petty fraud. However, in my intro class I do offer “virtually nobody showed up” extra credit a couple of times per semester (usually worth some small number of points toward the quiz average, generally only when attendance dips below 50%), and occasional announced quizzes. I have heard rumors of universities that have “swipe your ID” attendance systems for large lectures, but I’ve never witnessed one myself. My general philosophy is that if a student really doesn’t want to be sitting in my class, I don’t particularly care if he/she is there either. Call it mutual indifference. There is a strong positive correlation between attendance and grades even without a formal participation score, so I really don’t feel the need to compel attendance through grading policy.

I don’t take attendance at all in upper-level courses. I do keep mental track of the attendance record of students to help decide how lenient I want to be when they come begging for grade bumps, though. (Ole Miss doesn’t give plus or minus grades, except in the law school, so a few points can make a big difference in class grades.)

Virginia Postrel points out the real problem with the god-awful Psychological Bulletin piece:

As someone who believes social science can and does discover new truths about how people live and think, I find this sort of idiotic research particularly appalling. It teaches the general public that social science is bullshit. (It also demonstrates that university press offices can be really stupid about what they choose to publicize.)

That hits on the head why I find the research so egregious. It frankly makes me embarrassed to be a social scientist. It gives more ammunition to the people who want to dismiss good social scientific research, not to mention those who allegedly study politics who have neither respect for, nor understanding of, empiricism.* The only good news surrounding this study is that at least nobody thinks these professors were political scientists.

Meanwhile, Jonah Goldberg makes the point that dogmatism and simplicity are hardly the province of conservatives alone.