How do colleges and universities go about hiring tenure-line (or the equivalent) faculty in politics and international relations? Back in 2013, I provided a short overview of the typical U.S. process: Starting in the late summer, political-science departments post...
Seems to be the time of year when folks post their advice for aspiring professors on how to succeed at the job talk. While there are other parts of the process--being interviewed one on one by...
With all of the recent essays on the Duck this summer about the job market, citation indexes, and lack of confidence, there seems to be a brewing undercurrent about the anxiety of another academic...
This is a guest post submitted by Chris Barker, Assistant Professor of Political Science, Southwestern College For the past three weeks, “Political Science Rumors” (PSR) has been on fire over a...
To continue a thread I started some weeks ago: If you're thinking about getting a Ph.D., think again. Its a dysfunctional industry. From today's NY Times op-ed pages, Mark Taylor writes:GRADUATE education is the Detroit of higher learning. Most graduate programs in American universities produce a product for which there is no market (candidates for teaching positions that do not exist) and develop skills for which there is diminishing demand (research in subfields within subfields and publication in journals read by no one other than a few like-minded colleagues), all at a rapidly rising...
In other depressing academic-job-market-related news, Wisconsin Lutheran College has apparently decided to eliminate its entire Political Science department. Indeed, they appear to be removing Political Science entirely from their list of offerings:[A spokeswoman] noted that current majors will be able to take political science at other colleges in the area, at Wisconsin Lutheran's expense. And she said that the college determined it wasn't necessary to its liberal arts mission to offer political science. "We have interdisciplinary majors and other majors that can get you where you are going...
For any students out there who aspire to graduate education to launch a career in this discipline, allow me to offer the one bit of advice that no one wants to tell you: Don't. I really hate to be the one who rains on the parade, but the stark reality is that the Academy is a collapsing profession--while we seem to be producing more and more PhD's, the academy has fewer and fewer jobs to ply the trade of "academic." We don't appreciate or really recognize the contributions of those operating outside the university / peer reviewed journal realm, and yet that's where more and more of our...
The life of an academic is all about balancing the scales. The pay isn't so hot, but the hours are good. Grading is a pain, but they give you money to read stuff. And so on.But one thing that really does unequivocally suck about being an academic, at least in political science, is the constant rejection - or the existential threat of rejection. Russell Arben Fox captures this feature of academic life quite well (although I wish he didn't have the need to):April is the Cruelest Month... especially for academics, and more particularly those who act the part of such. April is when the last,...