Old Comparative Job Rumors
I am back...and will be monitoring the blog again so your bad behavior will be detected more readily. Try to keep this blog for job rumors only. If you want to have a discussion on a topic that isn't related to jobs, let me know and I will start a new thread.
posted by American and Comparative Politics Job Blog at 6/03/2007 06:06:00 AM
757 Comments:
I think we were having a reasonable discussion of jobs and careers, and that we needn't limit this to "rumors." Inevitably discussion of job opportunities and career opportunities involves discussion of trends in research areas (regional, thematic) and methodologies, teaching vs. research oriented jobs, and other issues. As long as we don't get into mudfights, this is a good forum for all of these things -- as well as for rumormongering.
totally agree.
As my note said, topics related to jobs are perfectly reasonable. If you have a topic that is related to jobs, then you are welcome to discuss it as long as it doesn't personally attack anyone. I simply started a new thread because the others were becoming cumbersome. And, I wanted people to let me know if they wanted a new thread started that would be topic-specific.
Well you did a pretty good job of breaking the continuity with the previous productive (IMO) discussion. But something will begin to happen here pretty soon, I would guess.
Tsebelis staying at UCLA? Or off to Michigan?
Actual Rumor. EBdM to Chicago.
Wow! He's going to Harris? That's CRAZY!
Harris pays very well. So I don't see why such a move should be surprising.
Because it's a backwater, maybe? Because he had Top 10 offers from real political science departments? Something is odd about this. It must involve some non-professional factors.
Dude(tte), Harris is currently paying around 35-45% more than a top 10 Political Science Department.
You do the math.
So what kind of numbers are we talking about?
Might be true.
I know of a certain Full whose offer from Harris entailed a 35% salary raise (s/he was a Full at a very good Poli Department).
Terry Moe?
Didn't EBDM have a tenured offer from NYU? Are you saying that Harris outbid NYU? That seems like nonsense.
From UNC's website:
Cecilia Martinez-Gallardo will be joining our faculty as an Assistant Professor effective July 1, 2007. She comes to UNC from Notre Dame, where she was a Visiting Fellow with the Helen Kellogg Institute for International Studies.
Usually Policy Schools pay considerably better than Political Science Departments.
On the Harris Salaries, see
http://margaretsoltan.phenominet.com/2007/05/university-is-sometime-thing-faculty.html
sorry, try
http://www.winonadailynews.com/articles/2007/05/30/wi/03wi0530.txt
I'll post the correct link (you don't seem to have done so)...
http://margaretsoltan.phenominet.
com/2007/05/university-is-
sometime-thing-faculty.html
So in American and Comparative, is the Harris School now a better program than the Chicago poli sci department?
Chicago-bashing seems to be the norm on this website, but the poli sci department continues to be strong. In American - Mark Hansen, John Brehm, Michael Dawson are a few of the notable seniors. The comparative faculty goes through periodic cycles - it's a small group, and associates cycle through and then go to Stanford, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, but it's always rebuilding and thus hits low and high points. Many of the CP greats have spent time there, and I'd predict CP will be back on the rise shortly.
Hansen is in administration and doesn't do much research anymore. Brehm had a serious health issue and doesn't do much research anymore.
Totally wrong on Brehm. He's now in good health and going strong. Hansen is still involved with students and teaching.
Harris School tried to recruit Bruce BdM as its director some years ago. Perhaps they may now settle for the son.
do you mean as its dean?
Yes. That was at about the same time that the big reinvestment in NYU's polisci department was beginning. I don't recall the exact timing.
And it well predated the time a few years ago when Bruce BdM was commencement speaker at NYU and gave a speech in which he praised Bush's attack on Iraq -- to the disbelief and critical disapproval of his audience of mostly very liberal graduates and their parents, a couple of whom I know (their daughter was graduating at the time). They asked me if I knew anything about this guy, who he was. What was I to say? He is a great political scientist but caught up in the Neocon self-delusions.
He is great? Depending on whom you ask.
"Many of the CP greats have spent time there, and I'd predict CP will be back on the rise shortly."
You may be right... but you also may be wrong.
Truth of the matter, though, is that, right now, Chicago CP is very weak. And that should be communicated to prospective graduate students who might otherwise go there because of a simple halo effect.
Not as strong as 5 years ago ≠ very weak. Lisa Wedeen, Steven Wilkinson, Gary Herrigal, and Dali Yang aren't exactly slouches. Granter, Chicago is lacking "mainstream" comparativists.
I've heard s rumor that Wedeen will be Chicago's new chair. Can anyone confirm? Does this mean they will be hiring in CP next year?
Anyone else having trouble when trying to update the wiki?
Yang is reportedly leaving Chicago.
Yang is leaving Chicago? That is old news. He is supposedly heading to National University of Singapore.
Will Wedeen become the new chair? That is a newer rumor, at least beyond the friendly confines of Pick Hall.
Will U of C be hiring to replace Yang in the fall? I don't know (no inside knowledge), but I'd doubt it. I suspect he is not severing all links yet and he will likely go to S'pore first on a "trial" basis, and only officially resign his post in Chicago in a couple years. Lots of deans are leery of authorizing a line to replace someone who has not formally left (especially in departments with fewer than about 40 FTEs).
Any senior hires still in the works in Comparative?
I've heard that Yang is NOT leaving Chicago.
I have heard "firm confirmation" from 6 independent sources (including some in both Chicago and Singapore) that Yang IS indeed going to NUS. What is less clear is when (or whether) he will cut his links to the U of C, as well as exactly when he plans to start at NUS.
Is Mary Gallagher really joining Cornell's labor school? Will she be affiliated with the polisci dept there? I also heard that Cornell is seeking someone to replace Shue who is now at Oxford although I strongly doubt how successful they can be in their recruiting efforts.
Did the Shues resign/retire (from Cornell) when they took their Oxford positions?
By the way, Oxford seems to be turning into a bit of a retirement home for Americans! The Shues, Bermeo, and I heard of another similar case in the making.
Funny you mention Oxford. Someone just alerted me to an opening there (Ethnic politics and related fields). Salary looks competitive with the US (assuming they don't want a Full).
Academic jobs
Department of Sociology and Nuffield College, University of Oxford
University Lecturership in Sociology in the field of Ethnicity
The Department of Sociology at the University of Oxford seeks to appoint a University Lecturer in Sociology, specializing in the field of ethnicity. The appointee will also be offered a Fellowship at Nuffield College. The anticipated starting date is 1 October 2007, or as soon as possible thereafter. The combined University and College starting salary is £50,841 p.a. with additional College benefits such as generous research and housing allowances.
Applicants should have a doctorate or equivalent, a strong record of research achievement at an international level in the study of sociology with an emphasis on ethnicity, and the demonstrated capacity to publish in top-rated journals and with top-rated presses in the sociology of ethnicity. The successful candidate should have the ability and experience necessary to teach mainly at the graduate level, to supervise doctoral students, and to win external research funding. Further information, including details on how to apply, is available to download here.
The closing date for applications is 22 June 2007.
I cna confirm Wedeen as chair. I presume Chicago will be hiring in comparative because regardless of Yang, since they've still got lots of slots unfilled (over the time that they've lost a half-dozen senior people, they've hired only Wilkinson and Slater). But they won't get a new line just to replace Wedeen; chairs aren't considered in need of 'replacing' that way.
Chicago was supposedly ready to make 3 Comparative offers this year. It's just they didn't like most of what they saw, and who they liked, reasonably enough, went elsewhere.
Chicago has lost Rudolphs, Suny, Stokes, Boix, Kalyvas, and (Medina), not to mention a few earlier departures (e.g., Laitin) in the past years.
They will lose Sewell, Silberman, and Yang(?) soon.
They have hired Wilkinson, Slater, and Simpser.
So, more than 5 lines?
Yes. You are right that Chicago has lost many fine comparativists to other jobs or retirement.
That said, I doubt they will hire 5-8 new people in the next year (though I could be wrong). More likely, at least a couple of these slots will be filled with senior hires. The others may be at junior level, but they will not likely come all at once (or even necessarily in the next 5 years).
As a previous post said, even when departments have the authorization to make multiple offers, it does not mean they will always find sufficiently numerous candidates or that the ones they do find will all accept...
Mary Gallagher is joining the Cornell Government Department, with some links/affiliations to the labor school. Not the other way around. As far as I have heard (from multiple sources), Cornell will indeed seek a second China/East Asia person, likely at the junior level.
I think Gallagher is starting at Cornell in either Spring or Fall 2008. I would doubt they make a move on the China/Asia front until she is in place (i.e. Fall 2008 at the earliest, maybe Fall 2009).
U of Illinois has just posted an ad on APSA for an open-level open-comparative job. They say regional specialty and rank are truly open, but does anyone know if there is a sub-text (e.g. it is advertised as "open" but they really want a senior latin americanist or a junior middle east person or whatever)?
UI in UC or in Chicago? If the former, they strike me as the kind of Department likely to go for the best person they can find (and attract), as opposed to someone who fits a narrowly defined subfield/specialty.
Urbana, not Chicago.
Many departments say in their ads and propaganda that they operate the way the last post said, but very few actually do. The comparative field is still largely divided up by world area for better or for worse.
Comparative at UIUC lacks leadership.
False. UIUC has been improving for quite a while.
Any Institute of Peace fellowship news?
I've seen this comment about UIUC comparative lacking leadership a number of times, but no evidence. My understanding is that they interviewed early last year, made some offers and were turned down by candidates that ended up in some very top programs.
That said, as someone interested in an interview there, I'd like to know what they are looking for.
Will Duke or UNC be searching in Comparative?
Anonymous said...
I've seen this comment about UIUC comparative lacking leadership a number of times, but no evidence.
++++++++++++++++
Investigate the placement of comparative PhD students over the past 5 years (or longer). Very weak.
On UIUC:
Would I like a student of mine to get her Phd there, at least as of mine? No. I'd hope they can get into better programs.
Would I like a grad student of mine to take a job there, as of now? Yes. It'd be hard for at least some of them to get a job offer of a better place, all things considered.
Without having any info on Duke, I'd say it's probably unlikely (they made three CP hires this year).
Not to air other peoples' dirty laundry, but did anyone see this article:
http://www.cnn.com/2007/EDUCATION/06/05/fleeing.faculty.ap/index.html
It seems that the massive turnover is not limited to the previous discussion of Chicago. Is this part of a larger trend? Are other big university systems--and political science programs--suffering the same way?
Sorry, that one got cut-off.
http://www.cnn.com/2007/EDUCATION/06/05/fleeing.
faculty.ap/index.html
Yes. Nearly all public schools face this problem.
One thing that might help would be to increase undergraduate student fees. Another might be to reduce the number of graduate students or scale back the number of FTEs in departments (by not replacing every person who retires or leaves). Of course, the best thing would be for states to commit more money to their universities, but that is a pipe dream in general.
There may be increasing problems with this because of the way the market now works: one or two ABDs become "hot" each year and scoop up multiple offers; all the other offers go to people who already have jobs. This means that candidates who receive offers are generally in a strong position to "bid-up" potential employers, making salaries explode. I know in at least 2 large top-tier departments I'm familiar with, salary inflation for new assistant professors has been over 20% per year for the past 3-4 years. This exacerbates the problem as more assistant profs realize they are pretty badly under-paid by year 3 or 4 on the TT and go back in the market in search of better offers, and so on....
As someone who has interviewed there in the past, my sense is that UIUC's criteria really are open, at least respect to geographic area. I think, like many programs, they've decided that they would like to fill gaps but that they are happy to build on their current strengths, if there are some interesting candidates in those areas.
I was suprised to see that UIUC doesn't really have anyone active in Russia/former Soviet Union... which is strange, given the strength of their area studies center.
Regarding UW, even though according to the CNN story the semi-freeze in salaries began 3-4 years ago, UW has had very low salaries for a very long time -- decades. Frankly, it's nice to see this story. But the idea that a $10 million retention fund is going to help very much is crazy. In any case, whatever they do come up with has to be continuing funding, not a one-time thing.
What was particularly cool about the story was its focus on political scientists. Usually, those stories focus on hard sciences, but it is nice to know that the loss of some of our kind is felt and makes a few waves.
Seems like Wisconsin should take a nosedive in the rankings. Can we say it's a Top 25 department anymore?
I wouldn't worry too much about Wisconsin. They still have a lot of good people and are located in a really nice place to live. I think they'll be fine.
I think you have to be careful not to attribute every departure to the financial situation. Some of those people who've left recently have been shopping themselves for a long time, and probably not because of money. For that matter, they're not among the superstars of the discipline.
I'd say Wisconsin is definitely a top 20 department--the American cohort definitely anchors the department, with a pretty respectable placement record lately. They haven't been able to replace key departures in IR, comparative (and theory for that matter), which is probably why it garners some attention from CNN and elsewhere.
Plus, as 5:44 noted, it is a great, vibrant university in one of the best cities in America. One could do a hell of a lot worse than ending-up in Madison!
Best cities in America? While this is always a matter of taste, come on. Madison is great, but this is a stretch.
It is true that people leave for reasons that are not always financial - as the cnn piece alluded to early on (Wisconsin has always been a hunting ground for Harvard, Stanford, etc.) - but when you are consistently paying "very low salaries" over decades (as one recent post said), you are going to lose people, even if you are a top-20 department in a good location (which Wisconsin clearly is).
Re: Political science salaries...could it be possible that we are also better trained than we were 30 years ago. Someone with methods skills can jump to the private sector rather than put up with some of the bs at third tier state schools. Schools are also learning that there is a limit to how few t-t faculty you need to run a department. The labor market is not to bad for political scientists with methods skills
And yet, we are still very much behind from Econ. A key reason for Econ (not to mention Business Schols) salaries being so high is that job candidates have many interesting job options in industry.
They must have something going, since so many political scientists try to imitate economists. Not so many (any more) imitate other fields of inquiry -- sociology, history, for example, or even psychology. But of course there are some.
Wisconsin might take a cue from UVA, which I understand faced similar salary freezes under Mark Warner. This spurred the university to largely cut itself off from state funding -- allowing it to increase tuition so that it is now closer to some of the privates. (no need to subsidize those rich parents from northern VA.)
Don't want to make too much of this without knowing the details, but my impression is that UVA is much better at competing on salary and has increased the number of polsci faculty in recent years. And, like Madison, it's a great place to live.
Public schools are going to have to decrease their overall budget share from the state govt to compete in the future. I agree that $10 million the WI governor is asking for doesn't even stop the bleeding.
10 million, if it is an annual budget allocation, can pay to retain maybe 50 faculty. If it's a one-time shot, forget it. No impact.
The real problem, one that has not been discussed here so far, is at unionized schools, where raises have to be based on seniority and outside offers cannot often be matched.
Did anyone read the set of stories in the Chronicle of Higher Education recently on the US News Rankings? Any thoughts? One thing that really stood out was the difficulty public universities have in competing, based on the ranking criteria.
OK. If we are talking about the US News rankings of undergraduate programs, very true. 3 of the most important criteria are funds per student, student:faculty ratio, and alumni giving amounts/rates. On all three of these just about all large public universities will do worse than smaller private ones. There was some talk of ranking public and private school seperately a few years ago, as they already do for research universities and liberal arts colleges.
Returning to JOBS RUMORS:
How likely are Princeton and/or Columbia to hire in the China field this fall? There have been lots of rumors in the past, but little firm news. Can anyone confirm or deny with reasonable certainty?
business school salaries are high because they have cash cow programs like executive MBA degrees NOT because a Phd in entrepreneurship means you're capable of running a store or selling something.
I think 6/7 7:27 might have been too optimistic about salaries at Virginia. Check out this link, through which you can see faculty salaries in 2004:
http://www.cavalierdaily.com/features/
salaries/departments.asp?Year=2004
I punched in the names of a few political science faculty members whose work I am familiar with, and was shocked at how low their salaries were. Maybe things have improved in the last three years, but it would have to be quite a turnaround to make up for numbers this low. If these are the fruits of their privatization strategy, I don't think Wisconsin or anyone else will want to emulate it.
9:41am, Virginia public universities (UVA, William and Mary, Va Tech) that have chosen the semi-privatization ("Charter") option couldn't do so until July 2006. I imagine that we wouldn't see any effect until this hiring cycle.
"business school salaries are high because they have cash cow programs like executive MBA degrees NOT because a Phd in entrepreneurship means you're capable of running a store or selling something."
Do you know what kind of salaries a PhD from a top 20 Business School commands, especially if s/he does Finance, Accounting, or Economics? It doesn't seem like you do.
Business Schools also hire primarily (not exclusively) Economics PhDs. And Economics PhDs make very good money if they choose to work in industry - from hedge funds to investment banks to...
6/07/2007 9:41 AM
Careful, those are the base salaries. Public schools are experts when it comes to throwing in extras that will increase actual salary without the base salary reflecting it. That's how the manage to compete for/retain highly sought after people.
Re: 6/07/2007 8:57 AM
Columbia hired a junior China scholar from Stanford last year.
for the thread on moves in the China field:
Texas hired William Hurst, currently at Oxford, last year. He is set to start this Fall.
Anyone know what happened with Magaloni/Dias-Cayeros? Weren't they up for tenure this year?
I (wrongly, I think) assumed they had been turned down. But I haven't seen them interviewing elsewhere, which must mean(?) that they did get it(?)
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
um, relax 9:49...first MOST phds in business fields are not from teh top 20 programs, second, most faculty in business schools are NOT econ phds - it depends on the dept - but mainly - settle down? why get so agitated? in short, wtf cares what business schools do since we mainly aren't in them in poli sci - go kick your dog or stiff a waiter or whatever you do to feel powerful and spare us your astonished faux outrage ...
Columbia hired a junior Japan specialist last year, or so I heard. They supposedly looked at, and passed up, a number of China people in that search.
Kay Shimuzu, a student of Jean Oi, does both Japan and China. Columbia seems to have also interviewed Mary Gallagher, Kellee Tsai, and Yu Zheng.
Will Columbia search in Comparative? Subfield?
Columbia seems to be one of those schools that is always searching in comparative and genuinely seems open to hiring unexpectedly in different fields or at different levels from what it can appear to be searching for, like last year.
They'll probably post an open comparative ad, but the specifics of what they want won't be revealed until an offer is made.
Columbia may well be looking to hire in W Europe if Mares is heading back to Stanford.
I would assume Victor Shih (Northwestern) will be in the mix for some of the China jobs.
Why do you say that?
Because he understands that it's a buyer's market, and he's as good as anyone in the field.
We should probably let people speak for themselves as far as their intentions to enter the market or not, but I am not so sure the China field is a real buyer's market.
How many strong candidates are available? How many schools are looking to add a China person? Demand looks to be growing faster than supply. Not quite like Middle East yet, but a far cry from what it was like even a few short years ago.
Mares is staying at Columbia.
Hey, 6:48:
Besides Shih, who else do you think is going to be in the mix for China jobs?
Is Toronto going to hire in comparative this year?
Re: public schools switching to largely private funding. Great strategy, and very effectively implemented by some places (Michigan, Penn State) but probably takes a good twenty years to pull off. Still, I'm guessing that in another 50 years that will be the situation for virtually all of the public R1s. For example my institution -- without really consciously adopting the strategy -- has seen state support drop from about 50% of budget to 25% of budget in the last 20 years, and in exchange has been able to get out of a lot of state oversight (greater control on its own budget, notably). That 25% has been made up from a combination of research overhead, increased tuition and alumni contributions (though these still disproportionately go to the athletic programs).
My sense is that this is a long-term, rather than temporary, response due to the increasing sense that higher education is a private rather than a public good, the general pressure on state budgets, and perhaps a sense that the best of the state-sponsored higher education system, the public R1s, having been essentially invented in modern form in the 1950s (yeah, yeah, Morrill Act was in 1862, but the 20th century expansion was in response to the GI Bill and the Boomers), are grown-ups now and can go off on their own.
The public R1s in current form cannot really go off on their own totally without radical reform.
They are simply too big. They operate by attracting lots of undergrads with cheap in-state tuition. They teach most of these with armies of grad students, supported by state funds, undergrad fees, and outside/private funding.
Going off state funding would mean losing the state subsidy for undergaduate fees. If fees go way up, they will lose students to SLACs and private schools. If they reduce the number of undergrads markedly to compete with these, they wil be seriously "top-heavy" with grad students and faculty.
The basic model of the public R1 is not broken beyond repair, but we need to realize that maintaining it will produce one or more of the following outcomes:
1) Need for significantly increased funding from state budgets/taxes.
2) Continuing distortion of the academic job market because of "over-production" of PhDs by public R1s that can't scale back because they need the TA's.
3) Continuing inequality in salaries between public and private schools with publics always having to play catch-up.
4) Increased use of adjuncts and lecturers for undergraduate teaching in R1, combined with likely further increases in average class size etc. to preserve resources for attracting and retaining top faculty and grad students.
I think Toronto will be searching for a China person this year. They tried to hire two last year and lost out on both.
Mares is staying at Columbia.
6/08/2007 7:20 AM
=======================
Are you sure? Someone from Stanford told me otherwise a few weeks ago.
Anyone know what's up?
China field's more luminous star is Lily Tsai currently at MIT. She has a book from Cambridge's cp series, and a recent APSR piece, among others. I assume Shih doesn't have these yet (perhaps in the works though). Princeton has been trying to recruit Tsai for a number of years. I am sure she will get tenure at one of the top 3 places eventually.
Not sure what the top 3 places are. Surely MIT is not one of them in the China field (Harvard, Berkeley, and where is the third?).
Anyhow, though the last poster is correct, Tsai is only one person. She can't take every job - and there are many opening now.
6/8 7:36 makes a lot of good points. The move away from state funding is not something every institution will be able to pull off effectively. Two complicating factors come to mind.
First, the decline in state funding does not always come with greater institutional autonomy, especially when it comes to setting tuition. State legislatures may not want to fund you, but they also don't want to see tuition increase too much. Their constituents complain.
Second, some public schools have done better than others in raising an endowment from alumni donations. There are some public systems that were more or less prohibited from doing so until recently, and others that don't command the kind of alumni generosity one is likely to see at a Michigan or a Wisconsin.
Every state system needs a patch of resource-rich land to fund a "rentier-endowment" a la TX or AK.
UM has to be one of the best places fro china because of the distinguished June Dreyer
Is this going to be the start of another round of U. Miami-bashing? Let's stop here if yes. If not, we would like to hear more about Dreyer about whom little seems to be known.
Re: Toronto and Comparative Politics positions
Toronto is also going to be hiring in Comparative Aboriginal Politics next year. They have done two searches in the last two years but did not hire anyone. The first search did not even short list. The second search shortlisted three candidates this year but did not make an offer to any of them.
What does Comparative Aboriginal Politics mean? Ethnic Politics?
Re: Top places for China
There are really only two places now that combine the institutional resources, dynamic senior people, and grad student production to be in this league: Berkeley and Harvard.
Nothing wrong with Miami or Dreyer, but these two are really where it's at now.
Others like Stanford, Princeton or Michigan have been strong before and could jump right back into it with one or two of the right senior hires.
Who might make the good candidates for the "right senior hires"?
You, someday, if you go back to work and stop wasting so much time in here.
That's actually a serious problem. The generation who graduuated from about 1985-1995 (i.e. about 10-20 years beyond PhD) is VERY thin. Those outside that professional age band are really either too young or too old to bring the needed clout. Dali Yang might have been a good one, but he got away to Singapore. The other alternative would be to wait anout 3-5 years until some prominent people right around tenure time or just past it now become big enough stars.
Diaz-Cayeros and Magaloni are not up for tenure until this year I believe
I'm a china scholar at a top 15 program and I've never heard of dreyer. Google scholar suggests the work is normative, cold war era opinion type work - this had to ahve been a joke
Wow, Diaz Cayeros has been at Stanford since 2001, she since 1999. Stanford is giving them a lot of time.
RE: Stanford's tenure cases... Their record seems quite weak next to Rodden's. So that might (or, admittedly, might not) be an indication of what's about to happen.
Incidentally, did Tomz get tenure at Stanford?
Is Rodden going to Stanford?
Is Mares staying at Columbia or is she going back to Stanford?
I heard Mares was going back to Stanford, but someone on this blog recently claimed otherwise.
It would be a little odd to go from Stanford to Columbia and right back again all within a couple years, but there are precedents for this sort of thing...
Rodden is reportedly going to Stanford.
What's the latest on Steve Ansolabehere?
If you post that in the American thread you might be more likely to get an answer.
Vague rumors of multiple comparative slots opening this fall at the following schools:
Chicago
Toronto
Princeton
Michigan
Oxford
Can anyone confirm, deny, or elaborate on any of these?
Definitely true at Chicago.
I'd be surprised if Princeton is looking for junior comparative, but hey - I've been wrong before.
Michigan supposedly is getting Tsebelis, no?
MIT may be having multiple comparative searches, though each specialized (one focused on methods; the other merged with IR as a general security/conflict hire)
So far, then, we have:
Yes for Chicago
Tentative No for Princeton
and
Surprise entry for MIT (with caveat that searches will be narrowly focused)
Any other news?
I think Tsebelis has not said yes to Michigan.
Has Koremenos said No to UCLA? Or, alternatively, has UCLA said No (again) to Koremenos?
What happened with MIT and Sambanis?
Any word on Michigan or Oxford - or more definitive word on Chicago or Princeton?
British universities are desperately trying to hire right now due to some sort of governmental evaluation they are subjected to every once in a while. So right now they need to inflate their faculty rosters with productive faculty to get more government $$.
This is not exactly right.
British unviersities face the "Research Assessment Exercise" (RAE) every several years, this is true.
BUT, this upcoming RAE takes place in December 2007. They would need bodies in chairs by 12/07 to count these people for this round of the RAE. This is not going to happen with anyone they hire in the fall.
What some schools are trying to do is hire RIGHT NOW (in the Spring/Summer) in hopes of getting people under contract before Dec 2007 and fudging it or, in the most delusional cases, thinking that the people offered jobs now will actually come in the Fall of 07.
This ought not to influence Biritsh hiring in the Fall cycle substantially.
As I said, "So right now they need to inflate their faculty rosters with productive faculty to get more government $$."
At leat that's what I was told at Midwest by someone who works in the UK.
Ah, those Brits. Is that why they have been turning into a retirement destination for U.S. academics? I heard people like Shue, Bermeo, etc moved into Oxford or Cambrdige, can't remember which one. And a few years ago I think the Colliers were toying with the idea.
British Political Science, especially International Relations, is - with very few exceptions - in shambles. Unless you share the views of ILP, that is.
Who cares about the backwards Brits.
Let's stick to job rumors.
Since we are talking about the British system, I heard that when you are hired at a British or European University, you practically are tenured from the very start. Is this true?
True indeed.
What is the "ILP"???
How is British political science or British IR worse than it ever was?
RE: ILP, refer to the Methodological Discussions thread in this blog.
British PS/IR is probably not worse than before.
Clearly a floor effect though.
All depends on sub-field. If you work on Europe or Political Theory, British polisci ain't half bad. APD is also surprisingly strong at selected schools. Any other branch of comparative, though, and there is an obvious gap with the top-tier in the US.
Re: British PS
"Same as it ever was"
- to quote the old Talking Heads song most of you on this blog probably can't recall - you probably associate the quote with the horrible mid-90's flash in the pan "House of Pain".
(Visual of hand slapping forehead, driving head back)
Strong rumor:
Princeton will look to hire a junior China person this year.
Funny you think Britain is a retirement destination. We still have mandatory retirement ages (or, rather, these are currently up in the air legally after anti-discrimination law last year). People who move here at 60, can't bank on working past 67 or so. More people, historically, have crossed the pond in the other direction for second careers.
That, too, is inaccurate. Mandatory retirement in the UK is no longer in place (Brit expat here).
Now, why my compatriots hire the American scholars they have hired recently is (mostly) beyond me.
Trivia.
Which senior Brit scholars have moved to the U.S. over the last 5 years or so?
Which senior American scholars have moved to the U.K. in the same time period?
It's always nice to see a reference to the Talking Heads. Kudos to the poster.
Thanks. It was a "once in a lifetime" chance.
I'll bite with the trivia...
I know of Henry and Vivian Shue who are at Oxford. And I heard Nancy Bermeo moved to somewhere in the UK too (not sure where to, and not motivated enough to look that up).
Kristian Gleditsch moved to Essex (due to spousal issues) not long ago.
Lastly, a couple whose name I can't recall (PhDs from Davis or TAMU or UCSB or some similar school) took jobs somewhere in the UK.
As to Brits moving recently to the US I can't really think of anyone (but I am an Americanist, so who knows).
You should also stop making sense in here. This blog seems to favor non-sense.
A little nonsense now and then, favored by the wisest men...
Watch out, you may get what you're after.
From my undergrad years in the UK I remember a lot of garbage being packaged as "British School of IR". Are you telling me that hasn't gone away yet over there? Disheartening to say the least.
A friend once told me the world of British IR was changing and she was right there with it (and she was).
But, seriously, no IR scholarship coming out of the UK in the past 15 years or so has been "burning down the house" with its impact. But, on that note, what IR scholarship anywhere has been doing this? Seems like its all about either methods or parts of comaprative politics 99% of the time.
British IR?
Qu'est-ce que c'est?
Is Rodden starting out at Stanford in Fall 07? Or Fall 08?
Who cares? We'll all find out who is starting when and where soon enough.
Any news about what junior jobs are going to be open in the fall?
We know where we're going, but we don't know where we've been....
Maybe you wonder where you are, but I don't care....
We're on the road to nowehere....
8:18 -- One might say: Who cares? We'll all find out soon enough what junior jobs are opening up are going to open up in the fall when the ads are posted.
Well said 6/10/2007 8:52 AM
Fair enough, BUT:
Many - perhaps most - departments tend to list ads as "open" when in fact they are not. It is most helpful to know if an ad that says "open" is really for an Africanist or for a China specialist, etc.
And only ABDs can use the "apply everywhere" approach without costing themselves valuable reputational capital in their departments and time they could be spending on publishing to obtain tenture!
Unlike spending long hours in this blog, right?
Reading a blog will not hurt your reputaion the way applying to 50 schools where you never stood a chance of landing a job can.
Oxford will search for a junior China person in the fall. This is true.
The University of Essex is bringing in candidates for their IR position. Invitation letters went out last week.
Who's interviewing at Essex?
I hear a lot of talk here about "star" ABDs, and the general inability of "non-star" ABDs to land junior positions.
Where exactly is the "star" cutoff? Are we talking a dozen or fewer? Are we cutting off by program strength (Top 10? Top 20?)? What then is the expected value for an ABD on the market?
Re: Junior "stars"
This is a bit unpredictable. It does not vary strictly with prorgam strength, pubication record or anything else. It just seems that once some ABD gets a top jobtalk early in the season, others pile on.
There is clearly an advantage for people with certain methodological orientations - most "hot stars" at the ABD level are either quantitative or formal/gmae theory people (with an edge for the latter).
Coming from a top-10 or top-15 program and having glowing recs from top people in your subfield are prerequisites for star status. But these are not sufficient either.
Expected outcomes for an ABD in the market:
a) if you are a quant or formal person from a top program you have about a 1 in 5 chance of becoming the star ABD.
b) if you meet the above criteria but do not become the star, you'll still likely land a decent job at a top-30 school.
c) if you are non-quant/formal, but you come from a top place and have an impressive publication record, you have about a 1 in 3 or 1 in 4 shot of landing a good job, depending on your subfield. If you do not land a good job, you are nearly sure to get a good postdoc or visiting job.
d) if you are not formal/quant and have no publications, even if you are from a top program, you should stay off the market. Landing a postdoc is possible if you are close to done and committee vouches for that. Otherwise, bad idea to go out.
e) if you are not from a top-tier program, no matter how good you are, you will not do well in the market as an ABD.
I heard the TomTom Club may be hiring in Ir
What is the TomTom club?
Maybe we should start a new thread for IR rumors, unless they really overlap with comparative?
That's interesting about the TomTom Club. What about the Casual Gods?
What's the relevant subfield for the Tom Tom Club opening? I'm interested.
On a different note, predicting who will be a "hot" ABD is as hard as predicting which movie will be hot. Pretty damn hard. Lots of randomness involved.
I'd say a good strategy is not to worry too much about your hotness factor, and simply focus on producing good research and having a very polished file/talk.
True, you never can tell who is going to be the hot one in any given year.
An interesting thing to look a would be hot ones versus non-hot ones 10 years out. Particularly if you control for subfield and what programs people came out of. Who has tenure at the top places? Who is most productive? Who has become deadwood? Who has left academia? Seeing as being the hot one confers an enormous advantage in the early rounds of a career (i.e. everything pre-tenure), I'd expect to see at least some positive effect of having been the hot one on one's status 10 years out, but I would also bet that boost is a lot smaller than might be expected....
I think it's relatively easy to predict which ABD will become a star. 4:46 AM is generally right. But I'd also add:
1) the star's substantive topic has to be interesting; all the methodological prowess in the world won't be enough. In fact, I'd say most people really dislike sophisticated methods wasted on showing something trivial.
2) The potential star has to have an ok personality too
Ex-post it's easy to claim so. Ex-ante it isn't.
I would be able to name names to illustrate this, but I don't think that'd be cool.
Definitely not cool to name names 6:36, though I could too, but I agree with you completely.
4:46 speaks with authority, and has numbers to bolster what I'm thinking is probably a guess about what it takes to be a star. Got the actual data? Do really know that there's a 1 in 5 chance for a good quant person?
Anecdotally, I know a good few people in the no pubs/no quant category who have been fairly hot on the market.
Remember, we are talking about ABDs not postdocs, people in visiting jobs, or people looking to move in the first several years on the TT. There is a big difference in terms of what makes or breaks people in each of these 3 stages:
ABD: "buzz", potential, killer recs, and los o' luck.
Postdoc/visitor (degree in hand): all of the above, but can be trumped by strong publication track record and credible progress on second project.
TT asst prof: pubs and "impact on the field" beats all else.
Almost all true "stars" are ABDs. People at the later stages are usually not in the game to the same degree and have very different incentives in the market.
tom tom club = talking heads -DB
"stars" is an abuse of the word
I think it's even money whether the "it" kid any given year flames out. There was a big person a few years back, got all the interviews, regularly tlaked about on the blogs,went to an IV and now 3 years out ahs yet to publish anything...Paris Hilton is a 'star" because of hype, pre-publication record stars are driven by hype - sometimes there is a reason for it, sometimes not
Were there blogs three years ago?
YEah. About 50-50 might be too generous on the id kids' potential. I'd say more like 60-40 or even 70-30 odds they don't make it through to tenure in a top-15 place (definition of living up to all the hype). Usually this has to do with lack of publication results.
Is Princeton not going to hire this year then?
I have to disagree with 4:46's advice regarding non-formal / non-quant ABDs. The market is not great for them, but it's certainly not that bad!! There are plenty of qualitative ABDs who have landed jobs and (certainly!) post-docs without publications. Quality of writing samples and (possibly) quality of recommendations definitely matter here.
Agree with above. Look at Wilkinson, Lieberman, and many others. There are many routes to success (and failure).
Well, Lieberman landed his job when he was a post-doc, he does quite a bit of quantitative work in addition to pretty in-depth qualitative work, and I am pretty sure he had at least 1 or 2 pubs by the time he finished his degree. I am less familiar with Wilkinson.
I would not say the rules hold 100% of the time, but I have to agree that there are probably only rare exceptions to what 4:46 laid out.
This is not to say us quals can never get a job. But the path to fame and glory is most often a much longer one than for quants & game theorists. The market also gets more competitive all the time. It is really hard in a lot of subfields to land a job without a degree in hand.
That said, demand in many subfields comes in waves. If you go out as an ABD in a high-demand year, you are at a great advantage compared to those who go out in low-demand years.
Still, no one would describe Lieberman as a quant or a formal scholar, as far as I can tell.
Yoshiko Herrera, Steven Levitsky, Cindy Skach are all at Harvard. So there are clearly some very well placed non-quant, non-formal, people out there.
No one said otherwise.
Go look at those people's pub records, though, and see if they were hired as ABDs.
Again, not that there are never exceptions. There always are. But in the great majority of cases, it is extremely hard to land a plum job as a non-quant/formal ABD without a damn good publication record.
I thought we were talking about "stars", i.e. people with a dozen or so interviews as ABDs. I can't think of a single qual who fits this description.
Of course, there are plenty of quals who get great jobs as ABDs. But they usually don't have a dozen interviews...
Jusko's work is data rich, thick description of 1 case and she had no problems getting interviews. She can do some formal/ quantitative work but I don't think that is what set her apart.
Please note: I do not intend for this to jump into a discussion of her or her work but merely to note that what it takes to be a "star' is at minimum some expertise that is really well developed in (at least) one of three fields (number crunching, formal theory, or an interesting case) and then also a good theoretical hook.
oops-on that last post I meant to focus on Lisa Blaydes, not Jusko. Typing too fast.
And thinking real slow.
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