I learned today that two events for two subjects i I previously thought happened at time t_i actually happened at time t_i-3 (where time is measured in years). Suddenly my internal calendar seems way too leisurely.

IHE reports on an APSA panel debate over whether the American politics field has outlived its usefulness. I generally (but mildly) agree with the proposition, but then again I’m one of the relatively few “Americanists” who would self-identify as a behaviorist/applied methodologist with a dash of neo-institutionalism, primarily interested in the politics of North America and Western Europe.

A (regrettably final) update for those of you interested in the Arthur Miller saga: a correspondent emails that Miller’s body has been discovered and that campus authorities have ended their investigation into his alleged indiscretions. My sympathies go out to Miller’s family and his current and former students.

Jacob Levy reports on efforts by some conservative APSA members to organize a boycott of the 2009 APSA Annual Meeting, to be held in Toronto, Canada, not-very-proud home of Human Rights Commission Kangaroo Courts ‘R’ Us.

I, as always, support all boycotts of APSA in body, although not in spirit—in spirit, I agree with Jacob that this boycott is at least as dumb as “NO-LA 2012.”

Iowa political science professor Arthur Miller,* recently accused of attempting to trade students sexual favors for grades, has apparently gone missing with his family fearing the he has taken his own life (I got the link via the rumor mills). While I had a little fun with the case here earlier this week, and think Miller’s conduct was reprehensible assuming the allegations are true, nonetheless it’s hard not to feel at least some sympathy for him and particularly his family, even if the horrible situation Miller was in professionally was entirely self-inflicted.

* Whom I do not know personally, although I did cite a short essay he wrote on schema theory in my dissertation.

I preface all of this by saying this is nothing personal against the HR folks here, who were actually quite pleasant today; I just feel the need to rage against the machine.

My day began way too early with a 22-year-old video with the production values of a small-market cable TV ad detailing the fun and excitement of the Texas Hazard Communication Act, which explained that huffing paint fumes and drinking benzene for the next 30 years probably wouldn’t be smart. Later on I spent waaay too much time doing five separate training modules online on things that either would be blindingly obvious to someone with a postgraduate degree or wouldn’t be so obvious if I hadn’t been already subjected to training in such matters at all of my previous employers as well. All of the training, needless to say, was presented in such a way that none of the examples were actually relevant to the work situation that professors find themselves in—instead of “don’t take bribes from the textbook companies” and “don’t fondle your students in exchange for grades,” it was “don’t use the on-campus physical plant facilities to fix your buddies’ cars.”

Also needless to say, none of these training modules included the only one that would be useful—namely the one I have to do to get IRB approval to sneeze in the direction of data collected from people I’ll never meet, because without the training I’d apparently be the first political scientist in history capable of abusing human subjects backwards through time.

And to top things off I think the thunderstorms killed my the state’s computer over the weekend.

Orin Kerr on boycotting-but-attending academic conferences:

Whoever thought up a boycott that requires you to be in San Diego in January but forbids you to attend the panels has a keen sense of how to appeal to the academic mind.

Like this is some sort of innovation. By this standard, I’ve been boycotting conferences (at least the panels I’m not supposed to be participating in) for years.

My OTB colleague James Joyner links a post by Dean Dad on graduate school placement statistics, noting that the key question is “how would you define ‘success’ for a doctoral program?”

I think this is, at some level, a relative question; the “expected placement” for various programs differs wildly and the bandwidth of that expectation also varies, often between specialties. In American politics, at least, supply and demand are pretty well balanced; my “travails” on the market probably have had more to do with my personality as an interviewee and my pickiness when it comes to job opportunities than a placement issue. On the other hand, if I defined success not as “a tenure-track job” but “a tenure-track job in a doctoral program”—which is how many of the faculty and graduate students I’ve interacted with over the years at ICPSR and EITM have defined it—my career is destined to be a failure, since I have no real interest in such a job except as a means to obtaining another job (I suppose now is as good a time as any to offer my apologies to those PhD-granting departments I applied to under semi-false pretenses).

Those who are skeptical that any single, useful, standardized measure of placement can be adopted are probably right, although there are some surveys available that get at the basics, and I think this answer gets to the crux of the situation for the potential student:

Programs with a good placement record will keep track of placements and brag about them.

If you can't get a straight answer from a department/program, THE REAL ANSWER SUCKS.

Time to clear out the Google Reader “to be blogged about” queue, while I wait around for the Safelite guy:

• The old debate over academic titles resurfaces with questions over whether Barack Obama’s teaching at the University of Chicago Law School merited his claim of being a professor; Orin Kerr says yes and I am inclined to agree, particularly given that at most institutions instructors with a terminal degree in the field (which in most fields of law, horror of horrors, includes the professional JD degree) would receive the title “adjunct professor” even when teaching a single course.
• Amber Taylor describes why she doesn’t sound like a Houstonian. My accent, on the other hand, is not really the result of any deliberate plan; it just seems to have worked out that way.
• Political scientists only pay attention to the importance of SES in their research, not in graduate admissions.

That wasn’t all of the queue, but it took care of most of the highlights.

After grading 2008 exams in 6 days, loitering on the deck with my Nokia N770 and a Yuengling is nicely relaxing. Hopefully tomorrow we’ll get done early so I can get the full beach experience.

Michelle’s post‡ today on laptops in the classroom (in a similar vein to this article I read last month on the suggestion of Glenn Reynolds) reminded me that I had a few items from the past few weeks still in my Google Reader queue of “things to blog about” related to Margaret Soltan’s continuing crusade against the use of PowerPoint* and its ilk, and specifically Timothy Burke’s partial rebuttal:

What’s the difference between bad usage of PowerPoint in lectures and bad lectures that involve hand-outs, overhead transparencies and writing on the chalkboard? Are we just complaining about old wine in new bottles here? Is the real culprit professorial droning at classrooms of 200+ students followed by recite-repeat-and-forget examinations? I think it’s at least plausible that the technology is just giving us a new reason to pay attention to a pedagogy whose effectiveness has been suspect for two generations.

I dare say I’m among the last doctoral students who was “trained”—and I use that word loosely—to teach prior to the widespread use of PowerPoint. Four years of full-time in-classroom experience, mostly with small lectures and seminars, has brought me basically to agreement with Burke on this point—complaints about PowerPoint essentially boil down to complaints about either instructional laziness or the whole nature of lecturing, or as a Burke commenter puts it, ”[e]xactly how does one teach even 80† students at once without succumbing to passive data transfer?” The non-use of PowerPoint or some other form of instructional technology seems to me to be a luxury confined to those who only teach small seminars and graduate students, and while my personal career aspirations lean in that direction the reality is that I’m several years away (in terms of research productivity) from being there—if I ever get there.

Burke in his comments hits the nail on the head, I think, when it comes to any sort of visual presentation in class:

It seems to me that the absolutely key thing is to avoid speaking the slides literally. They’re best as definitions, key concepts, images: the kind of thing you’d stop your flow of lecturing to write on the chalkboard. They’re not the lecture itself.

I think there are three useful aspects to a lecture: what you put on the board (or slides), what you say, and the general outline. If you’re preparing a handout or something to stick on Blackboard for students, the outline or outline-plus-slides is what they need, along with space to fill in the gaps. An alternative approach is to make the slides/board material the outline; several of the more effective teachers I had (my high school history teacher and a political science professor at Rose-Hulman) took that approach. But you can’t shovel your script into PowerPoint and expect that to work well, any more than you’d expect that writing it up on the board, or for that matter reading a paper verbatim at a conference would be a good presentation, to work.

All this discussion leaves aside the question of teaching anything that involves symbols (chemistry, mathematics, statistics) which I think requires a different approach than bullet-points. In class, mathematics and statistics (and, by extension, social science research methods courses) lend themselves to a combination of “passive” PowerPoint-style presentation and more spontaneous problem-solving and brainstorming; for example, one of my early activities is to have the class try to operationalize (define in terms of a measurable quantity or quality) a concept like “globalization,” which you can’t really do with a static slideshow even though you can define terms like “operationalization” that way. Similarly, while you can step through the process of solving a problem in a slideshow I think it’s more effective to demonstrate how to step through the process on the board.

Unfortunately, many classrooms aren’t set up to allow you to present and use a board simultaneously; some of TAMIU‘s lecture halls have a nice design where the projection screen is above the board, so you can write on the board without having to do anything special with the slideshow, but rooms most places are designed for “either-or” which can be a real pain—fiddle with the control system to blank the screen, raise the screen, write on the board, then lower the screen, switch the screen back on. After a few iterations of that in a single class, you’ll never do it again.

I freely admit I haven’t figured everything out yet; my current methods slides are pretty good lecture notes but pretty rotten for projection. One of my projects for this summer (postponed from last summer after I learned I wouldn’t be teaching any methods courses this year) is to work on my research methods lectures to incorporate advice from Andrew Gelman’s book so I can lay the groundwork for my plot to take over the world effort to produce a workable, but rigorous, methods curriculum at both the undergraduate and master’s levels for political science, sociology, and (at the grad level) public administration.

More on this theme from Laura at 11D, who takes note of some of the more positive technological developments associated with academe. And, another of Burke’s commenters links this hilarious example of what not to do with your slides.

* I use “PowerPoint” as shorthand for the use of a computer-projector based slideshow-style sequential presentation of items associated with a lecture, a technique obviously made famous by the Microsoft software package but also available with many other software packages such as Apple’s Keynote, OpenOffice.org Impress, and several PDF viewers including Adobe Reader, xpdf, and GNOME‘s Evince.
† I’d put the cutoff significantly lower, at around 30–40 students. Beyond that point, one might as well just blow the cap off the class.
‡ By the way, it’s nice to see Michelle’s blog back from haïtus! (Where else would I keep up with current Mexican politics?)

The tempest in a very tiny teapot over the APSA‘s meeting siting policy has hit the Times-Picayune.

Mind you, there are there are thousands of very good reasons to boycott APSA meetings already—I believe they’re called “political scientists.” In a city the size of Chicago you can escape from the teeming hordes of them, even at APSA, but there’s likely to be no such luck in New Orleans. In my mind, the fewer folks who show up the better, at least in terms of improving the experience for those who do attend.

Andy Guess at Inside Higher Ed reports on the growing trend towards abolishing Friday classes at commuter campuses due to increasing fuel costs. I’m sure there are a few college classes that lend themselves to the MWF, 50-minute pattern—I think foreign languages probably lend themselves to a more intense approach, which you wouldn’t get meeting 1–2 times per week—but I don’t think I’ve ever taught a political science class that worked very well in the MWF pattern. Killing the MWF pattern might lead to underutilization of classrooms on Fridays, but Duke solved the problem by creating a WF pattern as an alternative for the MW pattern and having some 150-minute Monday and Friday classes, primarily graduate seminars.

Another potential cost reduction would be to cut course loads, either by increasing most courses to a nominal four-hour standard from the three-hour standard (Millsaps’ solution), or replacing hours with “credits” (as Duke does) and requiring fewer total courses; the bachelor’s degree at Duke is around 34–36 credits, equivalent to 102–108 semester hours in terms of classroom contact and far short of the 120+-hour requirement at most institutions.

Given the tendency for general education requirements to accumulate over time, you could only really do this successfully with an overhauled gen-ed approach—Millsaps did this by adopting a somewhat flexible ten-item core, while Duke’s seemed more like a traditional system. But many graduates these days end up taking several pointless electives to get to the required 120+ hours, so perhaps you wouldn’t have to sacrifice much from either the major or general education to get the course count down to a more efficient number.

Viking Pundit links an Economist article on Saturday’s election in Kuwait; one of my public opinion students this semester (a Kuwaiti) wrote an interesting paper on attitudes towards female candidates in that election.

Said Kuwaiti was also one of the graduates today, although he is one of the students I don’t remember crossing the stage—I saw all three of my honors thesis kids and about a dozen or so other seniors, but not by all means all of them. I posted some photos over at Flickr; when they say ”[i]t features the pomp and circumstance expected of a traditional Commencement celebration but with a New Orleans twist,” they’re not lying—although I don’t remember “Pomp and Circumstance” itself, so maybe they are. Or maybe it was just rearranged so much that I didn’t recognize it, which is pretty much the same thing as not playing it at all in my book. Overall it was an enjoyable experience, although I personally could have done without the fireworks, which seemed designed to thin the ranks of the tenured faculty by provoking sudden cardiac arrest.

Margaret Soltan is on the case of yet another diploma mill fraud, this time the head of Jackson Academy in one of my former hometowns.

All involved apparently recognize that Pat Taylor’s doctorate is garbage. Yet I am forced to wonder how much we should really be bothered when Taylor could easily have gotten his degree from an accredited and moderately-well-respected institution such as, say, SIU Carbondale, where the standards for doctorates in educational leadership don’t seem to be significantly higher at least in some individuals’ cases. If the credentials in an entire field are deeply suspect to begin with, whether the degree was bought from Uncle Bob’s House of Academia and Animal Husbandry or “earned” at Harvard really doesn’t seem to make that much difference.

Congratulations to all of my former students who are graduating this week or thereabouts. It’s certainly hard to believe that the freshmen I taught in Fall 2004 at Millsaps in my first year of full-time teaching are now going to be college graduates—I officially now feel old.

One of my hobbies since before accepting my new job at TAMIU has been to peruse the Laredo Morning Times, so I can at least pretend to hit the ground running when I arrive in town. The occasional article provokes a bit of a double-take; this one, on the search for a new vice president for instruction and student development at Laredo Community College (the two-year institution that TAMIU was sprouted from back in the dark ages of academe) induced a bit more of a startled reaction:

After three attempts at hiring a vice president for instruction and student development, LCC has narrowed its search to one finalist: Beatriz Treviño Espinoza. The Yuma, Ariz.-based Espinoza is the former vice president of learning services at Arizona Western College and is now serving as assistant to the president for program development.

Last September, faculty at AWC gave Espinoza a vote of no confidence, just two months after she was named vice president of learning services, according to news reports from Yuma and AWC. ...

According to new reports, faculty became upset with Espinoza when she attempted to enforce a requirement that faculty work at least 30 hours a week and stop selling for personal gain textbooks mailed to them by publishers.

On a personal level, I really don’t think faculty should sell free textbooks—in my case, they usually accumulate on my bookshelf, although I’ve been known to give some of them away when moving. I wonder, however, how Espinoza thought she would be able to “enforce” this rule in practice.

I’m rather more intrigued by the idea that Espinoza would attempt to enforce a 30-hour work week for faculty. The typical teaching expectation for full-time community college instructors is around five courses per semester, or 15 hours (where an “hour” is usually 50 minutes). Presumably faculty then have office hour expectations; I’d say something like six hours per week is a reasonable standard for “posted” times for first-come, first-served meetings, maybe a little more during advising season. Assume that committee service and department meetings and miscellaneous crap (student-related extracurricular/cocurricular activities and the like) add about three hours per week, on average over the course of the semester. That would get us to around 24 hours or so of “face time”—e.g. some visible presence on campus.

Now, faculty also have to do other things—grade assignments, prepare for classes, keep up with (in the case of community college faculty) or produce (in the case of four-year college faculty) research—but these things can’t really be done during “face time” in any intensive way; I do accomplish some minor stuff during office hours, but you can’t expect to accomplish anything substantial in advance because you could have a student or six decide they are going to meet with you then. These things take several hours per week (I’d give a rough estimate that, for the average faculty member who’s teaching courses they’ve previously taught and not doing anything all that intense research-wise, we’re probably in the ballpark of ten hours or so), spread rather unevenly throughout the semester. And the ideal place to be accomplishing these things is rarely one’s own office, which is the first place that additional work seems to find faculty members.

Again this gets us back to the question of enforcement. If Espinoza wanted her faculty to teach 15 hours a week and sit in their offices with their doors open waiting for random students to decide to show up for another 15 hours with no expectation that they’ll accomplish anything worthwhile during the bulk of that time just so she can see more warm bodies on campus, and then add all the other stuff that faculty are expected to do—well, let’s just say that the no confidence motion would carry my household handily.

The debate over the proposal before the APSA to move the 2012 annual meeting out of New Orleans due to the state’s voters’ approval of an anti-same-sex marriage initiative has hit the rumor blogs.

I didn’t bother to keep a copy of the message I sent to APSA from the website regarding the proposal—silly me expected it would be copied to me once it was sent—but I generally made the argument that both proposals on the table (either an outright policy of avoiding states that had passed anti-same-sex-marriage constitutional amendments or some sort of bizarre “case-by-case consideration” provision that reeks of committee-generated compromise) were fundamentally stupid and missed the point if the stated goals of the proponents—namely assuring the legal protection of individuals who are part of legally-recognized same-sex-married couples who attend the meeting—were the actual goals of the exercise. I also associated myself in my comments with the statement made by my colleagues at Tulane in their entirety, although I was not a signatory of their letter and my signature was not solicited.

My admittedly non-expert understanding of the legal situation—as someone who is neither gay nor in any sort of marriage-like partnership—is that legal recognition of same-sex marriage or an approximately equivalent status is confined to (within the realm of North America) Massachusetts, Vermont, and Canada. Of these places, there are perhaps a half-dozen or so cities capable of hosting APSA, and only one of them is in the United States (Boston, the site of the 2008 meeting). The symbolic opprobrium of anti-same-sex marriage constitutional amendments is, in practice, insignificant; California, Illinois, and New York authorities are no more likely to recognize a Massachusetts same-sex marriage than Louisiana’s authorities. So, in reality same-sex-married couples from the states and provinces that recognize such things are no more “at risk” of legal troubles in New Orleans than they would be in San Francisco, Chicago, or New York City.

If members of the APSA want to protest the symbolism of these amendments or just don’t want to be seen in retrograde states that don’t comport with their vision of a just and liberal society, they should be honest and forthright about that position rather than hiding behind outlandish hypotheticals that really don’t distinguish between the “enlightened” and “backward” states—and given the success of Oregon’s anti-same-sex-marriage ballot measure, that distinction is far narrower than most of us would care to admit.

Update: You can also have at the discussion here if you so choose.

I am all for students dropping by my office hours, scheduling appointments at other times, or asking questions via email or IM.

However, if you ever pull a stunt like showing up in my office to conduct a three-hour debate over my grading policy you can rest assured that the one thing you shouldn’t expect as a consequence is more lenient grading from that point forward. Moreover, I have a very strong suspicion that most college professors would take the same position.

In an apparent continuation of my recent movie-going kick, I went to see Smart People Thursday evening. Most of the reviews I’ve seen have rightly praised Dennis Quaid’s performance as a stereotypical “bitter prof” who, for added measure, also bags a former student, just in case we hadn’t wandered too far into stereotype territory yet. Without giving too much away, Quaid’s character (naturally a member of the species “tenured deadwood” who’s too lazy to even remember the name of a student he’s had in multiple courses the prior semester) ultimately gets involved up to his eyeballs in academic politics at its most petty seeking a goal he really has no desire to achieve except to spite his colleagues, who he hates to the last man and woman, and who wholeheartedly reciprocate the feeling. Clearly screenwriter Mark Jude Poirier has spent far too much time around academics.

I thought most of the remaining cast did admirable jobs as well. I’ve seen some criticism of Ellen Page’s character, Quaid’s cynical daughter Vanessa, being essentially another riff on Juno McGuff, which seems a bit unfair to me; other than being high school kids who aren’t as smart as they think they are (that last part may be redundant), there isn’t a lot of commonality; Vanessa strikes me as Tracy Flick meets Mary Richards, complete with the bad dinner parties, with a dash of Alex Keaton for good measure (left unexplained is how Vanessa picked up the apparently-recessive Republican gene in her family), while Juno’s at least a partially-functional wannabe hipster. I also enjoyed Thomas Hayden Church’s turn as Quaid’s loser brother Chuck and the small role played by David Denman, formerly Roy on The Office.

The only character I really didn’t get was Sarah Jessica Parker’s, who to my mind hasn’t done anything worthwhile on the screen since 1995 or so (I count her role in L.A. Story as the ditzy So-Cal skater girl SanDeE* as the apparent pinnacle of her acting career, although she was also pretty good in Extreme Measures); it’s certainly not all that clear why Quaid would be be drawn to Parker’s character except out of sheer laziness in finding someone else to date, although her character’s motivations are somewhat clearer. The vague feeling she’s going to go blab it all in the next scene in graphic detail to Samantha, Miranda, and whatever-the-hell-Kristin-Davis’-character-is-called doesn’t exactly help either. But my Parker issues didn’t detract overly much from the film, which really doesn’t dwell on her character much anyway, as this movie operates on the rule that the female romantic lead has no scenes that don’t in some way relate to her romance with the male lead, a rule which I think I read in the blogosphere years ago but can no longer find. So, overall, I recommend the film.

There’s nothing like that late-April feeling of ennui to put a final punctuation mark on the semester. I’m not sure exactly why I’m making this post two weeks earlier than I did last year, but surely that’s not a good sign.

Apropos the discussion Tuesday, there are further thoughts on this topic from Ilya Somin (also here; I think the parallels between being a law professor and a professor in most non-professional fields are very weak, however) and Thoreau, while Dan Drezner, Ingrid Robeyns, and Laura McKenna consider whether there’s such a thing as being a part-time academic, at least in a setting where some sort of scholarly development is expected.

Arnold Kling and Megan McArdle have generated some discussion concerning, in Margaret Soltan’s words, “why American university professors are bitterly jealous status-obsessives.” I tend to think the following reasons identified by Megan are the most important:

It’s so hard to switch jobs. Job mobility is so low that you can’t salve your ego by telling yourself that your current job is merely a waystop en route to something better.

Academics have virtually no control over where they live. They usually seem to go where the best job is, regardless of whether or not the local area suits them. In many cases, this further focuses them inward on academia, because there aren’t all that many other people around who share their interests.

[I]t’s all terribly zero sum. Any article a colleague gets into a good journal is one less slot for your articles; any good tenure-track job secured by a friend is one less job you an apply to. All industries involve competition for market share, of course, but few have such a fixed supply of both jobs and customers.

Another important factor identified by one of Megan’s commenters is the incentive structure of the position itself:

People with PhD’s are [not] trained to be teachers. They’re trained to research—whether that research be population migrations in sub-Saharan Africa or Syriac poetry. The only way one has any possibility of “moving up’’ in the academy is to publish books or articles that few will read but those who do read them have a good amount of control over your future employment. This research is a job in itself, and it easily consumes 80 hours a week.

Yet within the broader world (and among your students) you are known primarily as a teacher. You teach graduate and undergraduate courses, you grade essays or problem sets, you meet with students, you participate on committees. Many academics find this quite meaningful and another job unto itself, but it has little or nothing to do with promotions, ability to change jobs, etc.

Certainly as I’ve considered tenure-track positions over the last four years these issues have been at the front of my mind. At the low end of the perceived status hierarchy, the incentive structures for gaining tenure and getting another job are almost entirely non-overlapping (to the point that some items that count as tenurable “research” at my future institution wouldn’t count at all in any category when being considered for a position at another institution)—in large part because there are no external metrics for anything but research. Another employer has no real way to determine whether or not I’m a good teacher except (a) by reading the teaching evaluations which I provide to them (and which are inevitably cherry-picked to include the most positive evaluations) out of any institutional context, (b) by presuming that if I weren’t a good teacher I wouldn’t have a job, or (c) by bringing me in and having me teach a class (which has its own problems). Service has even less in terms of definable metrics.

Further, the first and second factors I borrowed from Megan overlap. There is a non-negligible chance that even if I were to decide the first day I arrived at my future job that I hated it and wanted out, I could nonetheless not be able to secure another job but, because of the non-overlapping criteria for tenure and mobility, get tenure—at which point the potential mobility for academics drops even further, particularly in the upward direction on the status ladder (downward parachutes tend to have softer landings as long as you’re not at the bottom to begin with). This fear isn’t entirely rational, in that there are other job options for most academics (for-profit teaching, community colleges, secondary-school teaching accreditation, and non-academic work), but given that the academic job market is arbitrary and capricious there is no guarantee that merit (which to external observers is generally defined as “count and placement of peer-reviewed publications” and little else) will win out over less merit-based factors, such as perceived political leanings, the status of the institution where the person is teaching at, where the person got their undergraduate degree, etc.

$20 says if Jefferson Parish compares the grade distribution now with the grade distribution two years after this change they’ll find no significant difference.

And since when is a 69 a failing grade? Are these idiots on crack? (And by “idiots” I mean the school board; I already can guess the answer for the students.)

As reported in today’s edition of InsideHigherEd, a New Jersey teen has discovered something heretofore only known to every potential adopter of Wilson and Dilulio’s American Government text: namely, that the authors are conservative and take that viewpoint in their textbook. The Center for Inquiry has cataloged a few problems with the textbook, most of which can be chalked up to sloppy phrasing or editing (a problem endemic to American government texts, to say nothing of textbooks in general).

For example, much of the CoI complaint is about the authors’ mischaracterization of the Supreme Court’s rulings on prayer in public schools, but the mish-mash of rulings from the court aren’t exactly clear—hence why the report spends pages going into the nuances of those rulings—and they border on being contradictory (essentially requiring judges to mind-read whether a state or locality mandating “moments of silence” had religious intent or not when adopting the law). Furthermore, I suspect most students’ eyes would glaze over at a full treatment of this minor subject in what is supposed to be an introductory text; hashing out the nuances of the Supreme Court’s establishment clause doctrine would take 2–3 lectures in a constitutional law course, and you’re not going to do justice to it in at most five minutes of intro lecture.

That said, Wilson and Dilulio appear to have overstated the degree of controversy within the scientific community over global warming and climate change—but that doesn’t change the fact that there is little political consensus within the United States about the appropriateness of particular public policies to combat climate change, or even a political consensus that the scientific consensus is correct.

There is also a broader concern, in that the College Board is apparently reviewing the “appropriateness” of the use of the text in AP government courses. Frankly (speaking only in my individual capacity and not as an employee of ETS, the corporation that grades the exam on behalf of the College Board), the only criterion the College Board should be using is whether or not the textbook covers the topics that are examined on the AP exam in sufficient depth and accuracy. If the Wilson and Dilulio text contains a greater-than-average degree of factual inaccuracy (which, in my view, seems unlikely given the number of egregious errors or omissions I regularly discover in textbooks when asked to review them), then it should be avoided, but whether or not the authors take positions on anthropogenic global warming that conform with the political beliefs of the College Board is immaterial. In that regard—and probably only in that regard—I am in agreement with Richard Vedder.

All that said, I don’t use Wilson and Dilulio’s book, as I would not use any book that has a strong ideological bent in my introduction to American government course (similarly, I wouldn’t use Miroff, Seidelman, and Swanstrom’s book, a textbook from the same publisher written by three left-leaning political scientists, either—another disclaimer: Todd Swanstrom and I worked together at SLU). And I’d have a problem with it being assigned as the primary textbook in a mandatory course in a public school where students had no choice as to which instructor’s course to take—but AP Government is an elective intended to replicate a college-level course where students are not expected to be mindless consumers of the course materials but instead to engage critically with them even if they disagree with the ideas of the authors, so that complaint doesn’t fly here, and takes it over the line from a “force-feeding of ideology” issue into an “academic freedom” issue.

So, in sum: the teen is right to complain about the factual problems with the text, and those should be corrected (shame on the reviewers and editors for allowing those to get through). But otherwise Wilson and Dilulio have every right to write a textbook that reflects their views about American politics, just as seemingly hundreds of other professors have exercised their similar right to do so, and the instructor has every right to choose that book if he believes it provides the best preparation for students to succeed on the examination (which, in an AP course, is really at the heart of the instructor’s primary responsibility—you can complain about “teaching to the test” all you want, but in this case the test is the whole point of the course).

Update: Also covered at Hit and Run, Watts Up With That?, and No Left Turns.