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3 Sep 2014
by Brandon Valeriano
9 Comments

Stop the Madness: Reviewer Demands and Quantitative Models

The madness has to stop. Things are getting out of hand for those that do statistical research and try to publish their results. Reviewers for quantitative political science articles have gone off the deep end in their requests for revisions of models. A recent Journal of Peace Research article had a table with 37 different models for robustness checks. It is not unheard of to see other articles with hundreds of different models in an appendix or footnotes. New variables, robustness, new methods, the requests never seem to end and only escalate.

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28 Aug 2014
by Brandon Valeriano
0 comments

Don’t Let it Die- When to Save an Article

I have written before about terminating a research article, taking it out back and killing it. Sometimes it’s just better to eliminate something rather than put more energy into saving a piece that really can’t be saved (cue the Coldplay song). It seems so often our work is predicated on simple alterations in prior models or theories. When our International Relations findings are incremental and muted, these articles become very tough to publish. At that point, kill it. Kill it with fire. The deeper question is when to save something, when to persist despite all the signals that your should give up the project and move on?

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27 Aug 2014
by R. William Ayres
0 comments

Civility in Academia

In the wake of the Salaita “non-hiring” decision at the University of Illinois, there’s been a lot of discussion about whether “civility” should be used to judge academics in hiring decisions. The Chronicle has a pretty good rundown of some of that conversation, much of which has been framed in terms of rules, power, and the AAUP. I’ll add my 2 cents as both a faculty member and an administrator, because I think a lot of the public discussion misses some important points.

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26 Aug 2014
by R. William Ayres
1 Comment

The Job Search Letter: An Administrator’s View

My colleague Brandon Valeriano wrote an excellent post yesterday responding to a much-circulated blog at the University of Washington purporting to give grad students advice on the “dozen sentences” needed in their job search cover letters. There is much to criticize in that original post, and Brandon has done a very good job. Let me add a few points, both from my own career and from my position as an academic administrator.

Let me first underscore a point Brandon made: “not every school is looking for the best researcher”. I have taught in my career at a wide range of schools, from small private liberal arts colleges to large flagship state universities with a number of stops in between. I have been involved in searches (on both sides of the desk) at nearly every one of those institutions. Rare indeed is the institution that is looking, first and foremost, for the best researcher. This might be 20% of the job market, but that’s probably an exaggeration.

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25 Aug 2014
by R. William Ayres
0 comments

The Salaita Case, Academic Freedom, and Modern Conflict: We Have Met the Enemy and He Is Us

There is a lot of debate and discussion about the almost-hiring/top-down “firing” of Steven Salaita at the University of Illinois. For those who have missed the story, you can find a recap in the Chronicle here.

Academics, of course, love to argue. Many have argued that the “un-hiring” of Salaita was a gross violation of academic freedom. Others have raised concerns about the start of a trend: more aggressive central administration “meddling” in academic hires. Many have been critical, even severely critical, of UI Chancellor Phyllis Wise. Whatever you think of the other issues involved, this last group is dead wrong.

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25 Aug 2014
by Brandon Valeriano
1 Comment

The Letter of Interest: Less than a Dozen Sentences…

I am not sure why this post on the dozen sentences you need in your letter of interest has gained so much traction, but it has. It does not seem to include any information that immediately pops out as useful or novel. In fact, I think it misses lots of key points and information. More importantly, it is focused too much on being a junior scholar and a graduate student. This is a bad move for this modern job market. It is almost necessary for an applicant to be finished with their PhD and have a number of publications to succeed. Of course there are exceptions, but these are rare and typically come from elite schools. This leads to my first point:

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22 Aug 2014
by Barak Mendelsohn
2 Comments

Mom, did you see me on TV?

With APSA just around the corner and chilly wind makes Cambridge evenings so pleasant it is time for some reflection on the summer break and a great opportunity to raise the topic of media appearances by political scientists. Of course I’m raising this question because it reflects my unique experience this summer. This was the summer when I revealed the media, or perhaps the summer that the media found me. Either way, as the world was going nuts (and my region of expertise, the Middle East, really outdid itself in the past few months), I got media exposure I never knew before.

It is strange how those of us who study international security benefit from the pain of others. I keep reminding myself that while 9/11 helped me get an academic job, the attack and the events that followed were not my fault. But that issue may be a post for some other time. Here I want to discuss some of the pros and cons I identified as I was going through the media circus. It is one of the many things that graduate school don’t prepare you for. Teaching in a small liberal arts college such as Haverford I cannot say that I was mentored on the question even after graduation. So I hope that such a discussion could help other. I know that I need it myself because I’m still not sure about my own position as I’m still trying to figure out whether interacting with the media is actually worthwhile. As I cannot claim to have an answer I’ll settle for suggesting some pros and cons instead of making sweeping and confident statements.
The pros of media appearances: Continue Reading →

19 Aug 2014
by R. William Ayres
0 comments

The Politicization of Reality: Tribal Identities and Everyone’s Pet ‘Facts’

Crises happen periodically in both domestic and international politics. Except in America, where crises always happen in twos. I don’t mean that a crisis at home (say, Ferguson, MO) is always matched by a different crisis abroad (the Islamic State in Iraq). What happens instead is that any one crisis is immediately divided down the middle, much as King Solomon proposed dividing the baby, the result in both cases being a bloody mess. And unlike the real mother in Solomon’s time, both sides seem intent on having their half of the baby in each new crisis.

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14 Aug 2014
by R. William Ayres
0 comments

My Enemy, My Friend? Why the Islamic State May Be the Best Thing to Happen to Iraqi Kurdistan

Watching the sudden and (to Western eyes) unexpected unfolding of the Islamic State and its territorial gains in Iraq has been fascinating. The dynamics have been heretofore unpredictable – a few weeks ago a conflict scholar asked on a social media forum whether ISIS (as it was then known) would bother with the Kurds in Iraqi Kurdistan or concentrate on Baghdad. The consensus at the time was that the Kurdish peshmerga, battle-hardened from years of war, were probably too much for this new upstart force and that the Islamists didn’t really want to rule the Kurds anyway.

Turns out we were wrong. While the Islamic state has been pushing south towards Baghdad, it is also pushing east towards Erbil and Kirkuk, the heart of Iraqi Kurdistan. And along the way it’s been doing pretty well, by press accounts, in battling what had been Iraq’s most organized and formidable military force. The popular explanation for this, which may be true, is the imbalance of heavy weaponry (tanks, armored vehicles, and artillery) between the Islamic State forces (which have taken significant quantities of these weapons from the dissolving Iraqi military) and the Kurds (which have few if any heavy weapons). This looks bad right now for the Kurds – but it this crisis may contain the seeds of their greatest victory.

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12 Aug 2014
by Brandon Valeriano
1 Comment

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes as the Ultimate IR Blockbuster

by Brandon Valeriano and Andrew Stevens (recent University of Glasgow graduate)

Movies are important teaching tools in the field of International Relations. We have to be honest with ourselves; students now are less inclined to read assigned materials. On top of this, visual media and active learning techniques have been demonstrated over and over again to be more effective when compared to traditional methods. This (past) last weekend Valeriano saw Guardians of the Galaxy and Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, while Guardians was perhaps the most fun, original, superhero movie of the modern era, Dawn was likely the ultimate reflection of important themes in the International Relations field and a seminal reflection on the roots of violence. Dawn will be a useful teaching tool for some time, so we wanted to highlight some of the major themes and issues it addresses.

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