Academia

A theme common to all social scientists in the United States is the complaints lodged at "human subjects committees" or "institutional review boards" (IRBs).  These are committees set up to ensure that faculty research projects do not lead to the mistreatment of the human subjects that are the focus of said research.  This is all to the good for those researchers who are giving human subjects experimental drugs and treatments, mostly to the good for researchers who are running psychological experiments on test subjects, and one whopper of an inconvenience for the rest of us who have to get IRB approval for completely unintrusive investigations. 

In the New York Times, however, Ellen Barry writes about some new requirements for professors at St. Petersburg State University who wish to present overseas.   Their new requirements will make me a little less likely to bitch about IRB procedures: 

Word spread this month among the faculty members of St. Petersburg State University: According to a document signed on Oct. 1, they have to submit their work to administrators for permission before publishing it abroad or presenting it at overseas conferences.

The order, which was circulated internally and made its way onto a popular Internet forum, says professors must provide their academic department with copies of texts to be made public outside Russia, so that they can be reviewed for violation of intellectual property laws or potential danger to national security....

Though scientists have long been subject to export control rules, the St. Petersburg order applies to the humanities as well. It asks for copies of grant applications to foreign organizations, contracts with foreign entities, curriculums to be used for teaching foreign students and a list of foreign students, along with their plans of study.

Deans will clear the work for publication or submit it to an internal export control commission for review, said Igor A. Gorlinsky, the university’s vice rector for scholarly and scientific work. The order was issued to clarify a rule that has been on the university’s books for a decade, but that existed “only on paper,” he said. Dr. Gorlinsky added that the plan might be adjusted or streamlined in response to faculty feedback....

He said he doubted that work in the humanities would be affected unless it violated the university’s intellectual property rights.

“What state secrets could there be in the sphere of political science?” he said (emphasis added).

Ouch. 

Steve Walt weighs in with his take on the relative virtues of NSF funding of political science.  I agree with a fair amount of what he wrote (in particular the lNSF's listing of sponsored research outputs), but this part brought me up short: 

I can't say that I think Coburn is right, but I'm finding it hard to get too exercised about it. I say this in part because I think a lot of NSF-funded research has contributed to the "cult of irrelevance" that infects a lot of political science, and because the definition of "science" that has guided the grant-making process is excessively narrow.  But I also worry that trying to use federal dollars to encourage more policy-relevant research would end up politicizing academic life in some unfortunate ways.

Walt is conflating two different things here -- "policy-relevant research" and "publicly beneficial research."  Believe it or not, those two terms are not equivalent. 

The implicit assumption in Walt's post -- and a lot of discussions on this topic -- is that if political science research cannot produce policy-relevant advice, then it's not worthy of public funding.  But this gets the argument exactly backwards.  One would assume that, the greater the demand is for policy-relevant research, the more outsourcing and consultancies that would be pursued.  And, indeed, I think that's what you're seeing with the rise of political risk consultancies and the Defense Department's Minerva project. 

The key question to ask is whether that kind of policy-relevant research can be produced out of whole cloth or whether it rests on more basic research into political science and international relations -- the kind of basic research for which the free market would underprovide.  Much of Walt's own research, for example, rests on Kenneth Waltz's Theory of International Politics.  This is a book that proffers very little in the way of useful policy advice.  It is, nevertheless, a foundational text; an awful lot of realists build their policy prescriptions off of that book (and, if memory serves, Waltz received NSF funding to write that book).  Speaking for myself, a lot of what I wrote in All Politics Is Global is cribbed from rests on Albert Hirschman's more abstract work Exit, Voice and Loyalty. 

There is a continuum of research that exists in the socal sciences.  One could start with basic theoretical work and empirical data collection that seems far removed from policy relevance, and move to finely detailed policy memoranda.  I don't think the latter are terribly useful without resting on the former -- and one could argue that it's the former that would be underprovided without NSF funding. 

But I could very well be wrong -- perhaps policy analysis can be done independently of more abstract theories and models of political science.  That's a discussion worth having.  Requiring NSF-funded projects to have immediate policy relevance, however, cedes way too much terrain to critics of the discipline.  As Nobel-Prize-winning Elinor Ostrom pointed out, sometimes it's worth investigating the seemingly obvious -- because sometimes the obvious is wrong. 

Following up on the Tom Coburn saga, Patricia Cohen has a round-up in the New York Times about whether the study of political science contributes to the public good.  Some excerpts: 

Much of the political science work financed by the National Science Foundation is both rigorous and valuable, said Jeffrey C. Isaac, a professor at Indiana University in Bloomington, where one new winner of the Nobel in economic science, the political scientist Elinor Ostrom, teaches. “But we’re kidding ourselves if we think this research typically has the obvious public benefit we claim for it,” he said. “We political scientists can and should do a better job of making the public relevance of our work clearer and of doing more relevant work.”

Mr. Isaac is the editor of Perspectives on Politics, a journal that was created by the field’s professional organization to bridge the divide after a group of political scientists led a revolt against the growing influence of statistical methods and mathematics-based models in the discipline. In 2000 an anonymous political scientist who called himself Mr. Perestroika roused scores of colleagues to protest the organization, the American Political Science Association, and its flagship journal, The American Political Science Review, arguing that the two were marginalizing scholars who focused on traditional research based on history, culture and archives.

Though there is still jockeying over jobs, power and prestige — particularly in an era of shrinking budgets — much of that animus has quieted, and most political scientists agree that a wide range of approaches makes sense.

What remains, though, is a nagging concern that the field is not producing work that matters. “The danger is that political science is moving in the direction of saying more and more about less and less,” said Joseph Nye, a professor at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, whose work has been particularly influential among American policy makers. “There are parts of the academy which, in the effort to be scientific, feel we should stay away from policy,” Mr. Nye said, that “it interferes with the science.”

In his view statistical techniques too often determine what kind of research political scientists do, pushing them further into narrow specializations cut off from real-world concerns. The motivation to be precise, Mr. Nye warned, has overtaken the impulse to be relevant.

[Full disclosure:  I'm not now on the editorial board of Perspectives on Politics, and therefore am obligated to link to Isaac's Chronicle of Higher Education essay on this topic.] 

Coburn's focus has been on the past ten years, and I think the biggest irony of that focus is that, compared to a decade ago, there's more policy-relevant research and less paradigmatic navel-gazing. 

[Got any hard evidence, smart guy?--ed.]  This is very tough to measure (if only we had an NSF grant!), but consider the following:

• A political scientist just won the Nobel Prize in Economics using a cluster of different methodologies;
• Demand for the services of political scientists has never been greater.  The Defense Department has awarded political scientists through its Minerva program.  Political risk consultants are all the rage now -- and while I won't fully endorse their product, the fact that firms feel like they are worth paying gobs of money is an example of revealed preference;
• In the past year, political scientists have influenced the public debate on issues such as the Bradley effect in elections or U.S. standing in the world.
• Whether you agree or disagree with them, one can point to several episodes in recent years in which political scientists have provoked some roiling debates over a public policy issue. 
• This is an insufficient sample, but I'd note that political scientists are better represented in the most recent issue of Foreign Affairs than they were in the issue from a decade ago.  Assignment to aspiring researchers/bloggers:  go through the archives of Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, The National Interest, Policy Review, and The Washington Quarterly and see if there are more political scientists publishing in these journals recently than, say, a decade ago. 

I'm planning on posting why I think political sciece is in better shape than it was a decade ago later in the week.  But for now, a question to readers:  are these examples persuasive, or do you need to see more evidence? 

When we last left off with Tom Coburn's jihad against public funding for political science, Coburn was arguing that, "Theories on political behavior are best left to CNN, pollsters, pundits, historians, candidates, political parties, and the voters, rather than being funded out of taxpayers' wallets."

After the blog mockery that this observation received last week, I see that Coburn is doubling down on this strategy: 

[T]he Oklahoma Republicans office was not shy in its point-by-point rebuttal, with jokes about tweed jackets and the cushy life of the average college professor, and questions about whether ivory-tower political scientists aren't overmatched by the semiprofessionals on the cable and network talkfests.

"The irony of this complaint is that real-world political science practitioners employed by media outlets - [George] Stephanopoulos, [Peggy] Noonan, James Carville, Karl Rove, Paul Begala, Larry Kudlow, Bill Bennett (the list goes on) - may know more about the subject than any of our premier political science faculties," Coburn spokesman John Hart said.

Well, one could respond with jokes about the uber-cushy life of the average U.S. senator, or proffer jokes about Coburn's belief that he's a human lie detector, or just marvel at the vast foreign policy knowledge that Stephanopoulos, Noonan, Carville, Rove, Begala, Kudlow, and Bennett possess. 

But I honestly don't see the point anymore.  Matt Blackwell at the Social Science Statistics blog explains why:

In the 111th Congress, Coburn has had very little success with his amendments [batting 3 for 29, or .103--DD]...

Seven of the rejections are instances when Coburn's amendment was tabled without discussion. Most of the rejections have been of proposed budget cuts or banning funds from certain projects And this is just in this year. Out of all the roll call votes on Coburn-sponsored amendments in the Senate over his tenure, only 8 out of 68 have actually passed....

Tom Coburn knows that putting out no-win amendments is a great way to take positions in the Senate without committing to anything. Minority amendments are a costless signal of the blandest kind--even a political scientist can see that.

Yesterday the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel to Oliver Williamson and Elinor Ostrom for their work on what economists call "governance" and what political scientists call "politics" (and what Larry David would call "unwritten law").  In awarding the prize to one economist (Williamson) and one political scientist (Ostrom), the Nobel committee awarded exemplars in the study of political economy.

Lots of (positive) blog reactions to this Nobel.  Henry Farrell does note a trenchant irony: 

It is also worth pointing out in passing (as an email correspondent has brought to my attention) that she has received roughly a dozen grants under the NSF program that Senator Tom Coburn wants to abolish. Tom Coburn vs. the Nobel committee as a judge of scholarly quality – you decide.

And for those who would argue that Obama's Peace Prize makes that decision an easy call for Coburn, bear in mind that the two awards are given by different committees.   

Steve Leavitt has an economist's take: 

What’s interesting is that in the ensuing 15 years, it seems to me that economists have talked less and less about Williamson’s research, at least in the circles in which I run. I suspect most assistant professors of economics have barely heard of him. Yet I suspect the older generation of economists will applaud this choice....

The reaction of the economics community to Elinor Ostrom’s prize will likely be quite different. The reason? If you had done a poll of academic economists yesterday and asked who Elinor Ostrom was, or what she worked on, I doubt that more than one in five economists could have given you an answer. I personally would have failed the test....

This award demonstrates, in a way that no previous prize has, that the prize is moving toward a Nobel in Social Science, not a Nobel in economics.

I think Leavitt is overstating the case a little.  Looking at the last 15 years' worth of winners, I see a few winners who are more appreciated outside of economics than inside the profession (Amartya Sen, Daniel Kahneman, Thomas Schelling).  More of them, however, easily fall within the boundaries of mainstream economics (Lucas, Phelps, Hurwicz, Meyerson, Kydland, Prescott, Heckman, Merton, Scholes, Krugman, etc.) 

Nevertheless, Leavitt's conjecture raises four dandy questions for readers of this blog: 

1. Who will be the next political scientist to win this Nobel? 
2. Who should be the next political scientist to win this Nobel?
3. Who will be the next international relations scholar to win this Nobel?
4. Who should be the next international relations scholar to win this Nobel?

Fire away, readers! 

[And what are your answers to these questions?--ed.  They are closely guarded secrets that will be revealed at an appropriate time.]

The American Political Science Association has informed me that Senator Tom Coburn has introduced a floor amendment to strip away all National Science Foundation funding for political science. 

Now, as a political scientist, I have some skin in this game.  I've never received a dollar of NSF funding, but much of my own work has built off of studies that were funded by the National Science Foundation.  So my natural instinct is to oppose this.  You want to chalk up my opposition to simple material interests, be my guest. 

Looking at Coburn's explanation for his amendment, however, I'm even more perturbed.  This is the first part of his explanation: 

When Americans think of the National Science Foundation, they think of cross-cutting science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Most would be surprised to hear that the agency spent $91.3 million over the last 10 years on political "science" and $325 million last year alone on social studies and economics....

NSF spent $91.3 million over the last 10 years on political "science." This amount could have been directed towards the study of biology, chemistry, geology, and physics. These are real fields of science in which new discoveries can yield real improvements in the lives of everyone.  

Actually, what surprised me is how little the NSF is spending on political science.  Tom Coburn is ticked off because the federal government is shelling out a whopping $9.13 million per year on political science?  We're running a $1 trillion deficit and Coburn thinks that poli sci's $9.13 million is what's crippling the hard sciences?   That dog won't hunt. 

Moving on....

The National Science Foundation has misspent tens of millions of dollars examining political science issues which in reality have little, if anything, to do with science [such as]....

The Human Rights Data Project: which concluded that the United States has been "increasingly willing to torture enemy combatants and imprison suspected terrorists," leading to a worldwide increase in "human rights violations" as others followed-suit;

Hmmm.... seems to me that finding a correlation of that significance is:

1. Most definitely science;
2. Pretty friggin' important.

Going through the rest of Coburn's list of "abominations," I can see one or two grants that might raise my hackles -- but that's going to be true of any grant-giving exercise.  See Henry Farrell and Andrew Gelman on this point as well.  As Gelman observes, "really, the list of 'wasteful projects' seems pretty lame to me. Golden Fleece material, it ain’t."

Here's the key paragraph in Coburn's explanation: 

If taxpayers are going to get their money's worth from the significant funding increases being entrusted to the National Science Foundation, the agency should be held accountable for how those funds are being spent. The political science program which does not withstand scrutiny should be eliminated immediately. Theories on political behavior are best left to CNN, pollsters, pundits, historians, candidates, political parties, and the voters, rather than being funded out of taxpayers' wallets, especially when our nation has much more urgent needs and priorities (emphasis added).

OK, dear readers, I want you to close your eyes and imagine a world in which your entire knowledge of political behavior emanated only from CNN, pollsters, pundits, historians, candidates, and political parties.

Take your time.  I'll wait. 

If that world didn't scare you, well, then, you have nothing to worry about.  The rest of you can marvel at Coburn's failure of logic. 

Basic research in the hard sciences or the social sciences is a public good -- these things tend to get underprovided in a perfectly free market.  It's not clear to me at all why Coburn thinks that the $9 million spent on poli sci is a waste but the gazillions from the public trough spent on the hard sciences are not a waste when private corporations, industrial associations, scientific publications, universities, and private citizens couldn't fund this stuff. 

Now, I must grudgingly concede one point in Coburn's favor:  APSA's response to this is that it, "encourages political scientists to contact their Senator's office TODAY to ask them to vote against Coburn's amendment."  This suggests to me despite our massive federal subsidy, APSA has yet to understand how to influence political behavior. 

Having a couple of hundred political scientists call their Senators ain't going to matter.  Using our vast control of the liberal mainstream media the interwebs to generate media interest in Coburn acting like an ignorant jackass seems much more useful. 

BWA HA HA HA HA HA!!

[Um... is this news?  If Coburn regularly acts like an ignorant jackass, then would this be deemed newsworthy?--ed.  Uh-oh.]

Over at Duck of Minerva, Laura Sjoberg takes issue with my post from last week about the effects beautiful women have on men. 

Though I appreciate the effort, [Drezner's post] is not funny. Some would call me a spoilsport, and not up for a good joke. That might be also true, but isn't the reason I don't find this funny.

"Mainstream" IR engages gender issues rarely if at all, and when it does, it usually does so fairly trivially. I'm not a regular reader of the Foreign Policy Blog, but back searches say that this is one of the few times issues of gender have been mentioned on the blog... and the only time that I can find in the archive that the IR theorists on the blog have mentioned gender issues at all.

Sjoberg goes on to identify three reasons why this is not funny: 

1. "It trivializes gender-based work in IR."
2. The post denies "Agency" to women in world politics
3. By focusing on the beauty angle, I'm "Privileging Sex in IR." at the cost of other gender issues. 

She observes:

Women matter, and have agency, in important ways in global politics - as leaders, as soldiers, as peacemakers, as seamstresses, as housewives, as prostitutes, as business executives, etc.; and where women matter (and even where they do not seem to), gender matters in the shaping of expectations associated with jobs and leadership positions, they way people in those positions are treated, and the way that they treat each other. Again, likely unwittingly, Dan's post replicates traditional assumptions that women are at once without agency and to blame for men's mistakes.

I am somewhat hesitant to respond to Sjoberg's points.  From my past experiences in the blogosphere, blogging about the politics of gender as a Man ranks right around blogging about Israel/Palestine as a Jew in the category of "Things I Do Not Like Talking About on The Interwebs."  These kind of debates have a disturbing tendency to devolve into invocations of Godwin's Law or retorts like, "some of my best friends are women!  Really!  Why are you laughing at that?" 

Still, Sjoberg wants to see more conversation on this topic -- so here goes. 

First, I don't think I'm trivializing gender-based work in IR.  As Sjoberg herself acknowledges, contained within a humorous post are some seriously interesting hypotheses that are worth testing. 

She states that, "this is not the way to encourage/develop the field and those research programs, which are already struggling for resources and legitimacy."  I agree that it's not the only way, but you'd be surprised sometimes what can emerge from a humorous post.  Take zombies, for example.

Part of the fun of blogging is being able to mix the serious with the light-hearted, the quirky with the conventional posts.  In denying the humor of that individual post, Laura (unwittingly, I'm sure) appears to be denying IR bloggers the ability to play with ideas in an admittedly silly, but occasionally productive manner.  Laura is also (again, unwittingly, I'm sure) perpetuating an unfortunate stereotype with this observation -- that gender scholars are both humorless and didactic in their discourse. 

Last I checked, IR research programs don't rise or fall because of my blog posts, and they certainly aren't obscured by them. 

On the denial of agency, a point of concession -- I think Laura is correct.  The linked article suggested that men acted stupidly in front of attractive women, but the title of my post appeared to blame women for a social phenomenon that is really the fault of men.  True, this was a humorous blog post, but that doesn't mean that one shouldn't be as precise as possible in one's blogging.  So, point for Laura.

As to whether I'm denying the importance of other gender issues in international relations, I'm going to put the ball back in Sjoberg's court.  Don't just complain about the absence of gender issues on IR blogs -- start posting about the actual issues. 

Surfing through the Duck's archive of posts about gender, I found little of substance about gender and international relations by Sjoberg.  Actually, to be honest, I didn't find a lot of blog posts by Sjoberg at all.  Memo to Laura:  start blogging more!

There are myriad ways in which gender affects international relations beyond sex and beauty -- click here and here, for examples.  And to defend my FP colleagues, some of them have raised the issue of gender.  But rather than belaboring the point -- or engaging in meta-conversations about it -- just talk about the issues. 

Yesterday the New York Times ran a series of short essays by senior professors proffering advice to incoming students.  Martha Nussbaum, the youngest of this group, started teaching in 1975. 

Most of the advice from the group boils down to the "take risks, live your life, embrace freedom, think outside the box" kind of stuff that is perfectly appropriate at commencement.  That said, today's students might want some more concrete advice. 

Soooo...... I've only been teaching since 1997, but here are four very specific pieces of advice to new university students:

1. Turn off your cell phone before entering class.  You are 21 or under, so think about the following question:  is there any call so important that the pain of missing it exceeds the pain of the death stare that will emanate from our instructor when your Ringtone goes off? 
2. For that matter, shut down your wifi as well.  Think you can check Facebook, e-mail, Twitter, and still absorb the class lecture?  You can't.  Don't even try, because the moment you drift away, it will be next to impossible to re-engage with the class session.  For those students resistant to this idea, here's a pragmatic piece of advice -- try shutting the wifi down for the first 20 minutes of the class session.  If the class still puts you into a stupor, surf away! 
3. Read your f#%$ing syllabi.  There are things that will annoy your professors more than asking questions that are clearly answered in your course syllabus..... things like waterboarding. 
4. Yes, you can use Wikipedia as a research tool; no, you can't footnote it.  Sure, Wikipedia is one obvious route towards researching a paper.  The key, however, is not to stop at Wikipedia, but to follow the footnotes.  Citing a Wikipedia entry is lame; citing a research article referenced by the entry is significantly less lame. 
5. Don't say anything bad about Salma Hayek.  At least, don't say it in my classroom.   

Veteran students and professors should feel free to offer their own advice in the comments.