Tuesday, 19 September 2006

Consolidating democracy = not fun

There’s been a coup in Thailand; as someone who has a passing interest in democratic consolidation and Asian politics (whose sum knowledge of Thai politics is due to having a dad who served there during the 70s and a professor in grad school who decided to focus on southeast Asian politics after several decades studying American politics), I don’t have any particular insight to add here beyond “countries with legacies of authoritarian rule typically have difficulty adopting democratic norms”—particularly since my job title doesn’t have the phrase “comparative politics” in it.

Matthew Shugart does have the fancy title and some more meaningful comments, as do James Joyner and Dan Drezner.

Monday, 18 September 2006

Joe Lee Done

When your team has already lost to East Carolina and a team that just got its ass whipped by perennial SEC-cellar-dweller Kentucky, it’s probably time for a change; at least, that’s apparently Memphis coach Tommy West’s thinking as he cans well-travelled defensive guru Joe Lee Dunn.

Would that Coach O could fire his defensive coordinator… except, well, that’s Coach O. D’oh.

Sunday, 17 September 2006

Your academe roundup

I really didn’t want this blog to become a bastion of academic navel-gazing, but there’s good linkworthy stuff here and there—a few of these are a little old, since I’ve been lazy in clearing out my Google Reader feeds:

QotD, academe edition

From Stephen Karlson: “By definition faculty without tenure are on the job market all the time.”

Know your role

I have yet to master the art of being a “non-tenure-track but otherwise nominally co-equal” faculty member, an art being made more problematic by (a) being expected to attend departmental faculty meetings, at which grand and lofty visions are discussed and (b) participation in said vision being contingent on my continued employment, the odds of which are nominally in the 25–33% range, all job candidates being equal—which surely they are not. That’s better than the 0.5–2.5% range that probably exists normally in these searches, but it’s hardly the sort of odds I’d be betting on either.

It’s hard not to become invested in things in a situation like this one, although working on job applications is a relatively mind-numbing distraction from thinking too hard about these things.

Thursday, 14 September 2006

Suckerdom

For the first time in my teaching career, I got suckered into teaching a class outside today. Of course, the fact the classroom smelled today like a high school gym’s locker room at the height of summer probably contributed to my decision as well.

Wednesday, 13 September 2006

101 and all that

Craig Newmark notes a Slate Explainer that tries to answer the question, “why are introductory college courses numbered ‘101’?”

Oddly enough, of all the institutions I’ve taught at, only Ole Miss numbered a political science course (in that case, Intro to American Government) as 101. At Millsaps, the same course was 1000; Duke was 91 (or 91D if taught with discussion sections); and here at SLU it’s 110 (we have a “100” but no “101”). Not only that, but all four institutions also use different abbreviations for political science—POL, PLSC, POLSCI (or unofficially PS), and POLS, respectively.

Gameday photos from Mizzou

Here are some photos from the game last weekend, for the curious or otherwise disturbed.

County government customer service

Last Thursday, I emailed the St. Louis County traffic division requesting a crosswalk signal be installed at a traffic light on Brentwood Blvd at the Galleria. Today, just six days later, it was installed and working, complete with buttons and everything. I have to say I’m most impressed.

Sunday, 10 September 2006

Football weekend

I have to say I had a pretty good time in Columbia this weekend, despite Ole Miss’ general ineptitude leading to a 34–7 drubbing at the hands of Mizzou. I also enjoyed the opportunity to catch up with one of my professors from grad school days, Marvin Overby, and getting together with Frequent Commenter Alfie and the gang for a Midwestern tailgate and pub crawl.

In other football-related observations:

  • Line of the weekend: Brad Nessler, Paul Maguire, and Bob Griese are calling a game on ESPN (Oklahoma–Washington, I think). Maguire sets up Nessler to plug his doing play-by-play on the late MNF double-header game, and this exchange follows:
    Maguire: What about me and Bob? We’re not doing anything Monday night.
    Nessler: You’re not doing anything now.
  • Incidentally, that game was worth watching for Bonnie Bernstein alone.
  • NBC should have left the “players introduce themselves” video packages with the rotting corpse of ABC Sports where they found them.
  • Fox’s NFL graphics package looks a hell of a lot more professional this year than in years past. CBS… not so much.
  • The solid ABC bug on ESPN on ABC needs to go away. Now. Before plasma TV owners start calling in death threats to affiliates.
  • ESPN needs to give up on trying to hype its “talent” to get people to watch its shows. Telling me that I can hear Colin Cowherd spew his ignorance on ESPNU while I get queasy from the SkyCam (and Cowherd), or trying to dupe me into watching the Sunday night SportsCenter with Stoo-yah Scott by promising more of Chris Berman’s stale act, is not effective promotion of the brand unless I accidentally find another Disney network to watch instead.
  • People sitting in a studio don’t need to be using hand-held microphones. Either body-mike them or use a frickin’ boom mike.

Finally, any sports bar that has blown $5k on a widescreen flatscreen television should not be showing a stretched standard-definition broadcast of anything, much less a football game available in high definition. At the very least, switch off the damn stretch mode—am I the only person alive who thinks that exaggerating people’s width by ⅓ is a bad idea?

The first law of Internet email

Any email message containing the phrase “this is not meant to be a flame” inevitably is a flame.

Thursday, 7 September 2006

Publish this

I just found out that the Damn Impeachment Paper™, born circa November 1998, has been accepted for publication in a reasonably prestigious peer-reviewed political science journal, pending some revisions for length. This makes me very happy, although thinking about all the extra work this creates for me is making me very sleepy.

Wednesday, 6 September 2006

Remember the name Dexter McCluster; Tommy West sure does

Probably the highlight of Sunday’s Ole Miss–Memphis matchup is this play from true freshman Dexter McCluster, who may be the first player in college football to get the Arena league “offensive specialist” label (since I can’t figure out if he’s a receiver or a back), only slightly marred by the commentary by ESPN weasel Stuart Scott:

þ: EDSBS

Pass it forward

The first two legal forward passes in American football—probably the play that separates the North American version of the sport from the various forms of rugby football—were thrown by the SLU football team 100 years ago. Somewhat ironically, these days SLU is better known for its success in association football (soccer) and its long-running rugby club team than for college football, which was ended here in the middle of the last century during a period of budget cutbacks.

Non-monetary compensation

Both Glenn Reynolds and Laura McKenna take note of this op-ed by Tom Lutz that appeared in Monday’s New York Times on the academic lifestyle:

On paper, the academic life looks great. As many as 15 weeks off in the summer, four in the winter, one in the spring, and then, usually, only three days a week on campus the rest of the time. Anybody who tells you this wasn’t part of the lure of a job in higher education is lying. But one finds out right away in graduate school that in fact the typical professor logs an average of 60 hours a week, and the more successful professors work even more — including not just 14-hour days during the school year, but 10-hour days in the summer as well.

Why, then, does there continue to be a glut of fresh Ph.D.’s? It isn’t the pay scale, which, with a few lucky exceptions, offers the lowest years-of-education-to-income ratio possible. It isn’t really the work itself, either. Yes, teaching and research are rewarding, but we face as much drudgery as in any professional job. Once you’ve read 10,000 freshman essays, you’ve read them all.

But we academics do have something few others possess in this postindustrial world: control over our own time. All the surveys point to this as the most common factor in job satisfaction. The jobs in which decisions are made and the pace set by machines provide the least satisfaction, while those, like mine, that foster at least the illusion of control provide the most.

To be honest, if I could find a job that let me make my own hours I’d be sorely tempted to leave academia; I’ve seriously considered a few administrative jobs that would give me some teaching responsibilities (and I have one on my stack of “applications to be sent” at present), but, at a fundamental level, the flexibility to make my own schedule within reason probably is more important to me than the privilege of teaching bright young people.

That said, since said non-academic jobs appear to be largely nonexistent, I suspect I’ll be in the academy for quite a bit longer—so long as anyone will have me, of course.

More Death Cab

Joy notes that Death Cab is on tour again this fall, including a stop in St. Louis. Très cool.

Tuesday, 5 September 2006

Meandering toward fun

This afternoon I taught the most enjoyable Intro to American Government class I think I’ve ever had; I don’t know yet whether to attribute it to my new practice of giving quizzes on the readings before class on WebCT (thereby ensuring I have students who have read), having less than 20 students (thereby allowing me to stare down the incommunicado students easily), or letting the first 45 minutes or so be more driven by the class rather than my outline.

Not that the other two classes weren’t fun either—well, to the extent that you can lecture on measuring concepts and make that “fun”—but the intro class really stood out for me today.

In other news, I was challenged by an intermediary to come up for an explanation why I don’t have a tenure-track job yet that isn’t “Duke offered me an obscene amount of money to be a sabbatical replacement, so I turned down some tenure-track interviews,” “the department’s faculty apparently didn’t think I’d move permanently to Wisconsin, unlike the guy they hired who was from there,” or “I didn’t feel like spending the rest of my professional career just teaching intro to American politics and research methods every semester.” Now there’s a toughie…

Saturday, 2 September 2006

Ambushed by college football

The college football season has sort of snuck up on me this week, although I did get ESPNHD active in time to see South Carolina manhandle State on Thursday night. Today’s games have been moderately entertaining, including seeing overrated Cal get exposed by a newly-reinvigorated (although I’m not sure I’m willing to say “improved” before they face somebody decent in the SEC) Volunteer squad.

All this, of course, is an appetizer for Ole Miss-Memphis tomorrow afternoon; Frequent Commenter Alfie predicted (in a text message I got last Sunday) the Rebels will win 21–10, which seems plausible enough to me, so we’ll make that the official Signifying Nothing guesstimate of the week.

Thursday, 31 August 2006

If you don't submit an SAT score, one will be imputed for you

This New York Times article (þ: Margaret Soltan) probably makes more of the vague trend towards deemphasis of the SAT in college admissions than is probably justified. Then again, I’m one of those weird social scientists who thinks that psychometrics are reliable and valid measures of student abilities, albeit—like all measures—subject to error. The real issue with the SAT is not its psychometric foundations or learning effects from “test prep,” but rather its wide error bounds, which make it too advantageous for students to repeat the exam. The scale of the numbers probably psychologically amplifies this effect; put the score on a range from 1.0 to 4.0, and I suspect you’d see retake rates plummet with absolutely no other changes to the exam.

Even though most admissions committees probably don’t do this in a very sophisticated way (at least, not yet, although one suspects that some of the SAT-optional trend can be attributed to admissions committee innumeracy or hostility towards numeric measures than any real problem with the SAT), the lack of SAT scores can be worked around with some fancy stats: you can just impute the missing data from the information you do have (mean SAT scores, likely available at the school or school district level; GPA; some measure of school quality; grades in math and English classes), albeit with an adjustment to account for an important selection effect: that the SAT score, which is probably known to the student, is more likely to have been reported if it is above the mean imputation (my gut suspicion is that reporting is distributed complementary log-log about the mean SAT score).

Wednesday, 30 August 2006

Fantasy Bud ads

Frequent Commenter Scott sent me a link to this blog post that answers the unasked question, “What if Bud made an ad celebrating bloggers?”

Tuesday, 29 August 2006

First day

I’m now 2/3 of the way throgh my first day of classes; I have my American politics class in about 40 minutes. Except for overpaying for lunch, missing my Metrolink train by two minutes (which wouldn’t really be much of a problem, except for trying to catch SLU‘s infrequent twice-hourly shuttle along Grand), and ending up with a Cherry Coke at a vending machine, it’s been a pretty good day thus far.

Plus I get a real paycheck tomorrow for the first time in three months, which is a nice bonus.

For the morbidly curious, here’s my pathetic collection of Metrolink photos thus far. No jumpers, tunnel collapses, or broken train windows yet.

Monday, 28 August 2006

Blame Wal-Mart

Diet Coke with Splenda is Wal-Mart’s fault. Keep this up and I may join the legions of liberals and communitarians suffering from Wal-Mart derangement syndrome.

Friday, 25 August 2006

Tales from the positional arms race

Two posts from a couple of my favorite academic bloggers crossed the wires today, on two different aspects of what Stephen Karlson calls the “positional arms race” in higher education. Margaret Soltan excerpts a Newsweek piece looking at the argument that more prestigious undergraduate institutions do a better job of educating the masses than the “mid-majors”:

Underlying the hysteria [of parents wanting their children to attend “elite” institutions] is the belief that scarce elite degrees must be highly valuable. Their graduates must enjoy more success because they get a better education and develop better contacts. All that’s plausible—and mostly wrong. “We haven’t found any convincing evidence that selectivity or prestige matters,” says Ernest T. Pascarella of the University of Iowa, co- author of “How College Affects Students,” an 827-page evaluation of hundreds of studies of the college experience. Selective schools don’t systematically employ better instructional approaches than less-selective schools, according to a study by Pascarella and George Kuh of Indiana University. Some do; some don’t. On two measures—professors’ feedback and the number of essay exams—selective schools do slightly worse. ...

Kids count more than their colleges. Getting into Yale may signify intelligence, talent and ambition. But it’s not the only indicator and, paradoxically, its significance is declining. The reason: so many similar people go elsewhere. Getting into college isn’t life’s only competition. In the next competition—the job market, graduate school—the results may change.

At another end of the spectrum, Prof. Karlson takes note of Richard Vedder’s report that his colleagues at Ohio University have voted themselves a reduced teaching load without a lot of public accountability; quoth Vedder:

In 1960, the teaching load in the OU economics department was 12 hours a week When I started work in the mid 1960’s, it was already reduced to 9 hours. In 1967, in moving to the quarter system, we reduced it to eight hours. Now, it is the equivalent of 6.7 hours, a 44 percent reduction in roughly 44 years. That is not at all atypical. Quality liberal arts colleges these days very often have a 6 hour load—two three hour courses per semester. Top research universities have still lower loads.

When my department voted to go from six courses a year (two per quarter) to five, it essentially eliminated at least 10 classes a year from being taught. To make up for that, my department could have hired two professors, at a cost of perhaps $200,000 a year (counting fringe benefits). Or, it could turn away more kids from classes needed to graduate, increasing the length of their education and thus the cost of it. Or, it could increase average class size. In fact, it is probably doing a combination of all three of these, for example, adding one professor at a total cost of perhaps $100,000.

Why are they doing this? Supposedly, to increase the research output of the faculty. My prediction is the departmental output of articles may rise from 15 to 16 or 17 a year – roughly 10 percent. Is it worth $100,000, bigger classes, and more closing out of students in classes to publish perhaps two more papers per year, each one of which will probably be read by a best a few dozen readers? Is anyone doing a cost-benefit analysis of the advantages of this move? The answer, of course, is no. Universities simply do what they want, namely the things they like (writing papers which help get faculty promoted and tenured), rather than the things the public that is paying the bills thinks is most important, teaching students. No one is accountable, the decisions are hidden from the public, and the returns on many of those decisions are very low in relation to the costs.

Karlson concurs in part and dissents in part:

Is it the number of articles, or the quality of the articles? Will the Economics faculty use the reassigned time to polish their work so as to make it more attractive to Journal of Political Economy or Economic Inquiry or Economics Letters, or will they simply be ensuring that Rivista Internazionale Numere Due di Bovini will be able to meet its production schedules? If the latter, perhaps the decision will inefficiently allocate resources. But what’s special about the former journals? Publish in the former journals and your department moves up in the disciplinary league tables. Why does that matter? Because the league tables color the impression observers have of the prestige of a university. So what? People engage in positional arms races to get into universities with a lot of prestige.

Ultimately, then, the responsibility is on the public to quit spending money on getting their kids into “prestige” universities with brilliant research faculties that spend no time with undergraduates, particularly not with freshmen, and on the public to quit recruiting their entry-level employees from those universities. But until there are changes in those behaviors, it is not an error on the part of the Ohio faculty of Economics to offer working conditions more like those prevailing at the “prestige” campuses. Ohio might secure a recruiting advantage thereby, and some Ohio faculty might publish work that attracts the attention of a department higher up the academic food chain.

Note that “people” in the arms race are not just students but also faculty; the preordained superstars (and occasionally those who manage to publish their way out of the ghetto) go where the teaching load is lowest—and, since they’re the superstars, their pay is the highest. This is rational behavior for a department seeking to attract bright young faculty to a place more known for its reputation as a party school than its research output, and (indirectly) to create upward pressure on salaries for the department’s faculty—after all, if OU needs to attract bright young faculty, they’ll have to pay market rates for that labor, and concerns about salary compression and fairness to the longtimers will ensure everyone else gets paid too.

Everyone wins—well, except the public, who will be, over the long term, paying more money for less work, and the students, who will see the shortfall in offerings filled by adjunctification or auditoriumization of classes, or an extended undergraduate career spent chasing classroom space in the major and gen-ed distribution requirements while padding the required courseload in the meantime with filler.

Freedom's end

Classes commence on Monday, and I’d say I’m around 85% organized—the only things I really need to take care of are fixing the room assignment for my research methods course and setting up my class stuff in WebCT.

On the job application front, I sent out six more Thursday, and have a stack of about twenty more to work on, about half of which I hope to take care of this weekend. No news yet on the 15 or so applications I’ve already sent, but I suppose that’s hardly a surprise…

Wednesday, 23 August 2006

Triangle rapid transit plan on life support

Stephen Karlson and Craig Newmark take note of the most recent developments in the rapid transit plan proposed to link Raleigh and Durham, which has been placed on deathwatch after the regional transit authority has decided to stop seeking federal funding for the project.

I can’t say I’m particularly surprised, for a few reasons. First, not only does the region largely lack the sort of dense developments necessary to support transit, it also lacks the need for those dense developments. My suspicion, from looking around at the “transit-oriented development” going on here in St. Louis, is that most of these developments would end up attracting well-to-do people who like the cachet of saying they live on a transit line (and the amenities of new construction, with the pricetag to match) but end up using their car for everything anyway; while it may make for nice visuals outside the stations, the aesthetics probably don’t translate as well into ridership as one might hope.

Moreover, while a Raleigh-Durham link makes some logical sense to outsiders, it really doesn’t reflect commuting patterns in the region; people who work in Durham either live there or in Chapel Hill, and those who live in Cary work in Raleigh (or in Cary). There’s a giant state park in the middle where nobody can live. The only major magnet for commuters from both directions is Research Triangle Park, which is not the sort of employment center that attracts transit riders—most of the workers at RTP are “choice” commuters, who aren’t going to walk more than a block or two from a station or transfer to a bus to get to their place of employment. The bottom line is that this route wouldn’t serve many more people than the bus service already in place.