Over the weekend Niall Ferguson got himself into intellectual hot water over an off-the-cuff response to a question about Keynes in which he suggested that Keynes didn't value the future too much because he was gay, had no heirs, and therefore didn't care about future generations. Now, Keynes's writings here and here would betray the claim that he didn't care about the future. And the whole "someone who's gay must have a reduced shadow of the future" stereotype is hackneyed in the extreme. So, Ferguson was doubly wrong -- and to his credit, he offered up a real apology (not an "I'm sorry if this offended anyone" variant) pretty quickly.

Critical wounds run deep, however. In response to a lot of online discourse that noted his prior observations on Keynes's sexual orientation, Ferguson penned an open letter in the Harvard Crimson. Some highlights:

I was duly attacked for my remarks and offered an immediate and unqualified apology. But this did not suffice for some critics, who insisted that I was guilty not just of stupidity but also of homophobia. I have no doubt that at least some students were influenced by these allegations. Nobody would want to study with a bigot. I therefore owe it to students—former and prospective—to make it unambiguously clear that I am no such thing.

To be accused of prejudice is one of the occupational hazards of public life nowadays.… 

Not for one moment did I mean to suggest that Keynesian economics as a body of thought was simply a function of Keynes’ sexuality. But nor can it be true—as some of my critics apparently believe—that his sexuality is totally irrelevant to our historical understanding of the man. My very first book dealt with the German hyperinflation of 1923, a historical calamity in which Keynes played a minor but important role. In that particular context, Keynes’ sexual orientation did have historical significance. The strong attraction he felt for the German banker Carl Melchior undoubtedly played a part in shaping Keynes’ views on the Treaty of Versailles and its aftermath.…

What the self-appointed speech police of the blogosphere forget is that to err occasionally is an integral part of the learning process. And one of the things I learnt from my stupidity last week is that those who seek to demonize error, rather than forgive it, are among the most insidious enemies of academic freedom.

Now there are two things going on here. First, to what extent does a person's biography affect his or her role in history? And second, just who are these "self-appointed speech police of the blogosphere"?

Ferguson is correct on the first point in general, though I'm not so sure about this particular instance. I'm in the middle of Jeremy Adelman's magisterial biography Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman, for example. One would be hard-pressed to suggest that Hirschman wrote what he wrote about without paying some attention to his life story. So it is entirely appropriate for a historian to talk about Keynes's personal background in trying to suss out why he argued what he argued.

The thing is, Ferguson keeps eliding important details when he talks about the effect of Keynes's sexual preferences on his policy pronouncements. Take the claim that Keynes's attraction to Melchior affected his views on Versailles. Eric Rauchway points out some additional facts not in evidence:

Keynes made early calculations for what Germany should pay in reparations in October, 1918. In “Notes on an Indemnity,” he presented two sets of figures – one “without crushing Germany” and one “with crushing Germany”. He objected to crushing Germany because seeking to extract too much from the enemy would “defeat its object by leading to a condition in which the allies would have to give [Germany] a loan to save her from starvation and general anarchy.” As he put in a revised version of the same memorandum, “If Germany is to be ‘milked’, she must not first of all be ruined.”

Keynes also worried that too large a reparations bill might distort international trade. “An indemnity so high that it can only be paid by means of a great expansion of Germany’s export trade must necessarily interfere with the export trade of other countries.”

The point of mentioning it is that Keynes developed these concerns prior to going to the negotiations and meeting Carl Melchior.

So even if Ferguson is right on general principle, he's misleading on this particular point.

It's the last paragraph of Ferguson's letter that's quite … quite … 2004 in its formulation. Just who are these "self-appointed speech police of the blogosphere" anyway? The most damning indictments of Ferguson's past discussions of Keynes's homosexuality, Ferguson's more contemporary and woefully wrong economic predictions, and Ferguson's recent intellectual dust-ups come from either Business Insider or the Atlantic. Other prominent online critics of Ferguson over the past week have been Justin Wolfers, Paul Krugman, Brad DeLong, and Rauchway. That's three full professors of economics and a full professor of history.

Ferguson's rhetorical trick here is to try to denigrate the content of their criticisms by pointing to the medium. It's a cute gambit in public discourse, and I suspect it will make him and his acolytes feel better. Intellectually, however, that dog won't hunt.

As much fun as it is to dissect Niall Ferguson -- and I won't lie, I've had a lot of fun at his expense -- this sort of thing gets tedious after a spell. So, please, Niall, try to wade into more interesting intellectual waters the next time you make a mistake.

Oh, and stop claiming "academic freedom" as a shield to protect you from public critiques of something you said at an investment conference. That's not how academic freedom works.

Am I missing anything?

While your humble blogger remains jet-lagged out of his gourd adjusts back to the Western hemisphere, he strongly encourages you to read this fantastic David Barboza story in the New York Times on the predilection in China to use cash for ... well ... everything: 

Lugging nearly $130,000 in cash into a dealership might sound bizarre, but it’s not exactly uncommon in China, where hotel bills, jewelry purchases and even the lecture fees for visiting scholars are routinely settled with thick wads of renminbi, China’s currency.

This is a country, after all, where home buyers make down payments with trunks filled with cash. And big-city law firms have been known to hire armored cars to deliver the cash needed to pay monthly salaries.

For all China’s modern trappings — the new superhighways, high-speed rail networks and soaring skyscrapers — analysts say this country still prefers to pay for things the old-fashioned way, with ledgers, bill-counting machines and cold, hard cash.

Many experts say it is not a refusal to enter the 21st century as much as wariness, of the government toward its citizens and vice versa (emphasis added).

Now you should definitely read the whole thing, but a few thoughts here: 

1) From a personal perspective, as the occasional visitor to China, I can confirm the wads of cash thing -- but it's a bit more complicated than Barboza suggests. First of all, for U.S. academics at least, the payment isn't in renminbi, but in U.S. dollars. Renminbi is sometimes dispensed for things like per diem reimbursements, but not for honoraria. After all, officially, the RMB is still not convertible to dollars outside of the country, so it wouldn't be very nice to get paid in a currency that is technically useless outside the People's Republic.

There are two other qualifiers here. First, at least with respect to academic honoraria, it's not just China that pays in cash -- so does Japan, for example. Second, speaking as an academic who's received the occasional honorarium, it's friggin' awesome. At some point, someone takes you aside and gives you an envelope stuffed with bills. I know it's impolite to say, but every time it happens, I feel like I'm an earner in Tony Soprano's crew. It's soooooo much more satisfying than getting a check (as is the norm in the U.S.) or receiving a bank transfer three months later than it should be and only after haranguing someone a few times (as is the norm in Europe). 

2) The more substantive point of Barboza's story is how the cash-based system reflects the degree of distrust between the government, Chinese citizens, and the financial system. From a global political economy perspective, this cuts in two directions. On the one hand, it suggests that the effects of a real estate bubble popping in China might have a muted effect on the broad mass of Chinese. After all, if they're holding their assets outside the financial system, then their bigger fear will be currency-gnawing rats (read to the end of Barboza's story) than banks closing. 

On the other hand, it's worth reading articles like this whenever someone suggests that the renminbi will soon be a challenger to the U.S. dollar as an international reserve currency. For that to ever truly happen, China's capital account will have to be one hell of a lot more transparent and liberal than it is now. As it turns out, even China's Superbank isn't actually that super once one digs into the numbers. And if Chinese citizens are trying to avoid dealing with China's financial system and the renminbi, then I seriously doubt global capital markets are going to embrace the RMB as a rival to the dollar. 

Your humble blogger has been knee-deep in chairing, discussing, and attending International Studies Association panels all of which seem to have the word "diffusion" in the title and SOMEONE PLEASE MAKE IT STOP!!!

Now, naturally, with the global financial crisis and its aftermath there's been a lot of talk about debts and deficits. And with the defense sequester and what-not, there's been a lot of talk about rising levels of partisanship.  And I've come to the reluctant conclusion that a lot of this talk need to stop, like, right now. 

Here's the dirty truth about most international studies scholars: They know a fair amount about the high politics of international affairs and almost next to nothing about the rest of life. Of course, the rest of life does impinge on world politics, so there's some natural overlap. The problem starts when, in talking about non-IR stuff, we start to think that we have just as much expertise in these areas. Which we don't. At all. 

Last night I tweeted a query about what areas IR scholars should be quiet about and got way too many answers to fit in a blog post. So, here are five things about which I'd really like 99 percent of international relations scholars to shut the hell up:

1) Macroeconomic policy. Should the United States cut its deficit further? Are budget cuts, tax cuts, or tax increases necessary? How can the eurozone escape its current macroeconomic malaise? Most of us have no friggin' clue what the correct answers are for the United States, and that goes double for the euro zone. So unless you're actually publishing scholarly work on global macroeconomic policy, shut up.

2) The role of money in American politics. Foreign policy scholars are far too often shocked -- shocked!! -- when they see interest group politics at work. The Citizens United decision has only amplified this lament. The reaction to this is to either bemoan the general health of the American polity or to start developing simple theories that argue that money or lobbies explain everything about politics. Now I might not be the biggest fan of the American politics subfield, but I'm pretty sure they know more about this topic than we do. So shut up and read what they have to say.

3) Partisanship in the United States. Did you know that it's getting worse? And that it's paralyzing the U.S. government? And that it's getting worse? One of the natural biases of foreign policy scholars is to think in terms of a national interest, and then act appalled when there are different partisan conceptions of that term. Basically, what applies to #2 applies to this point as well.   

4) The Internet. As near as I can determine, when asked about this technology affects international politics, most scholars answer with some variation of "networks networks networks cyber cyber cyber." Some scholars do very good work on this subject. The rest of us should shut up for a spell and read them. 

5) Diffusion. Never again. Ever.   

What else, my dear readers, would you like to see less gabbing about from international affairs scholars? 

Yesterday an amendment to the continuing resolution funding the U.S. government, sponsored by Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, was passed by a voice vote in the Senate. Its purpose? 

To prohibit the use of funds to carry out the functions of the Political Science Program in the Division of Social and Economic Sciences of the Directorate for Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences of the National Science Foundation, except for research projects that the Director of the National Science Foundation certifies as promoting national security or the economic interests of the United States.

Now, from a pure material interest perspective, this should make me happy. I've never received a dime in NSF funding, and I'm sitting on a pretty good grant for the next 5-10 years, so from a strictly relative gains perspective, I acquire more influece in the discipline. Furthermore, the national security exemption means that whatever scraps the NSF throws to political science will go to my preferred subfields like international relations and comparative politics. 

The thing is, though, that I love political science. I want to see more quality research being done, and the NSF cutoff pushes things in the opposite direction. So I'm not happy. 

If I'm displeased, however, then I think it's safe to say that the American Political Science Association is galactically pissed off at this outcome: 

Adoption of this amendment is a gross intrusion into the widely-respected, independent scholarly agenda setting process at NSF that has supported our world-class national science enterprise for over sixty years.

The amendment creates an exceptionally dangerous slippery slope. While political science research is most immediately affected, at risk is any and all research in any and all disciplines funded by the NSF. The amendment makes all scientific research vulnerable to the whims of political pressure. 

Adoption of this amendment demonstrates a serious misunderstanding of the breadth and importance of political science research for the national interest and its integral place on the nation's interdisciplinary scientific research agenda. 

Singling out any one field of science is short-sighted and misguided, and poses a serious threat to the independence and integrity of the National Science Foundation.

And shackling political science within the national science agenda is a remarkable embarrassment for the world's exemplary democracy.

I've blogged at length in the past on the substantive reasons why a cutoff of NSF funds for political science is really, really, stupid. Another post on that question won't change things. And I vented my frustration at the willful ignorance of Senator Coburn yesterday, so there's no reason to go there now. Yesterday, however, there was rollicking debate on Twitter about the need for political scientists to, well, be better at politics. Folks such as Phil Arena, Jay Ulfelder, William Winecoff, and Jacob Levy observed that APSA's tactical response to Coburn's folly -- encouraging APSA members to email Congress and so forth -- was pretty lame. Only if we used the Dark Arts of political science knowledge could we somehow stymie the Senator from Oklahoma. 

Here's the thing, though -- while I'm no expert in American politics, I think I know enough of the Dark Arts to know that we could have the best arguments in the world and still recognize that political science is good and truly f**ked. 

From a straight interest group perspective political scientists don't matter. At all. The NSF funding for political science is a $13 million appropriation spread out geographically. There is no concentrated interest in a particular congressional district or state to motivate a member of Congress to fight for this issue with as much ardor as Tom Coburn or Jeff Flake. 

Now, one could argue that if you believe in epistemic communities -- i.e., the power of collective expertise -- to influence uninformed members of Congress, then maybe political scientists could function as Weberian activists and educate members about the inherent value of political science. The thing is, as I've argued previously, politicians and pundits do not think of politics as a scientific enterprise. Maybe a few pundits developed a new appreciaion for statistics following the 2012 election, but that's not quite the same thing. So an epistemic community of political scientists won't cut it. Hell, all social scientists would be unlikely to persuade the Senate -- remember, this is a body that was copacetic with a Senator blocking a Nobel Prize winning economist from sitting on the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. Maybe we could logroll with all  the natural and physical sciences too, but if the past decade of climate change policy has proven anything, it's that this won't work terribly well. 

Another gambit would be to move public opinion on this issue to the point where Congress had no choice but to accede to the masses ... except the masses likely support the cuts. A mass public that believes the foreign aid budget is a thousand times larger than it actually is likely believes that cutting NSF funding of political science goes a long way toward tackling the deficit. Furthermore, as Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler's research shows, it's next to impossible to correct that misperception. 

There are three other ways for political scientists to alter the status quo -- but each of them has issues: 

1) A political scientist needs to come up with a killer scientific breakthrough that really advances knowledge in the field in an unambiguous manner. We're talking something Nobel-worthy. Oh, wait, Elinor Ostrom already did that, and it didn't matter. Never mind...

2) A political scientist needs to develop a predictive model that's so powerful that it yields substantial profit -- to the point where the political scientists can afford to set up an endowment that substitutes for NSF funding. The thing is, there already are political scientists who have thrived in the private sector -- but I'm not seeing enough cabbage being earned to create endowments. 

3) Finally, maybe a trained political scientist could just run for the Senate, get elected, and apply the necessary counterweight to Coburn et al ... except that one of Coburn's co-sponsors is Arizona freshman Senator Jeff Flake, who has -- wait for it -- an M.A. in political science. 

Am I missing anything, or is political science good and truly f**ked? 

UPDATE: OK, there's one other possibility that could theoretically shift the status quo. Suppose a rival great power -- say, a country that rhymes with "Dinah" -- were to suddenly throw around huge research $$$ to develop a comparative advantage in poli sci. Say that the money was so good that it started to attract the cream of the political science crop. That might spur Congress to freak out about the existence of a political science gap. 

So, any political scientists sitting on fat research offers from China -- now is the time to accept them. 

Your humble blogger was not kidding when he said he was on vacation. Furthermore, this isn't one of those vacations where I can just hide away in my hotel room for hours on end, composing the kind of artisanal, hand-crafted blog posts that make feel Wittgensteinian and all. No, this is the kind of vacation where I can feel the disapproving eyes of my family on my hunched shoulders every time I look at my laptop. 

So, in the interest of making everyone happy, this week's blog posts will be of the more old school, "Hey, read this!" kind of link-o-rama that Twitter has made quasi-obsiolete. For each day, I'll focus on topics that revisit an old blog post of mine, to see if there's anything new of interesting out there. 

Today:  the state of political science research and writing.

1) Greg Ferenstein, "Former Political Scientist to Congress:  Please Defund Political Science." The Atlantic. My take:  In all seriousness, about 85% of all political science research can pass the "mother in law test" -- the question is whether political scientists are articulate enough to do this with their own research. 

2) Stephen Walt, "On writing well," Foreign Policy. My take: outsourced to Steve Saideman. 

3) Jay Ulfelder, "Why is Academic Writing so Bad? A Brief Response to Stephen Walt," Dart-Throwing Chimp. My take: um... yeah, Jay's right. One caveat:  Writing for a general audience requires some genuine craft and care with one's prose style, so those political scientists who want to write for a wider audience do need to care about the writing. Which leads to whispers and murmurs that if they write well, they're not focusing enough on their research. Which leads to a vicious cycle of bad writing. 

4) Adam Elkus, "Relevant to Policy?" CNAS.  My take:  definitely worth a read, and an interesting counter to Ferenstein in particular. 

And now... time to unhunch my shoulders!!

Your humble blogger has been following the raging debate about online education for a number of reasons.  First, like offshore outsourcing last decade, it's a phenomenon that has finally spread to a profession that is pretty traditional -- in no small part because higher education has not thought of itself as a tradeable good.  Second, it's a fascinating development without any consensus about the end point.  And third, as a prof, I have some skin in this game.

Now I have a little more... er... skin in this game.  Over the past year I have been working with The Teaching Company to prepare one of their Great Courses, and it's now available for order.  The course is modestly titled "The Foundations of Economic Prosperity."  Here's a brief description: 

Prosperity has transformed the world. Defined as the ability to afford goods and services beyond basic necessities, prosperity is now a way of life for most residents of developed countries—so commonplace that few people realize what a rare and recent phenomenon it is.

A mere two centuries ago, most people lived at a subsistence level, in or near the edge of poverty, as the overwhelming majority had since prehistoric times. Then the Industrial Revolution began and per capita income shot up. It is still rising today.

But the story of prosperity is far from simple—or complete. Many people in the developed world fear that their children will be less prosperous than they are. Meanwhile, new economic titans such as China and Brazil enjoy year after year of rapid growth and an ever-rising standard of living. Elsewhere in the world, millions are still trapped in poverty, despite the best efforts of organizations such as the World Bank to help lift them out of it.

Fostering and sustaining economic prosperity—whether at the individual, national, or global level—is a multilayered endeavor that reaches far beyond economics into the political and social spheres....

Professor Drezner shows that achieving prosperity involves more than economics. Psychology, sociology, political science, and history also come into play. By taking this broad view, he leads you to fundamental insights about how the modern world works and a deeper understanding of the functioning of the U.S., European, Chinese, and other major economies, as well as an appreciation for the special problems faced by underdeveloped nations.

Buy the whole thing and help me pay for my children's college education learn about the political economy of prosperity. 

Now, this is not a course for credit, or a MOOC, or anything that's bandied about as the future of higher education.  After spending the past year designing  and making this course, however, let me say that those who believe that it will be easy to "scale up" existing lecture courses into the online world are kidding themselves.  Teaching to a classroom audience requires a very different pedagogy than teaching to a captive online audience.  The former can provide instantaneous feedback, which is crucial for a professor.  They can ask for a concept to be repeated, or ask a follow-up question, or query about how the abstract concept under discussion connects to a headline of the day.  None of these things are easy to pull off for an online audience. 

I will also add that the amount of effort I put into the Foundations of Economic Prosperity easily exceeded anything I've had to do for my traditional lectures or seminars.  This is not because I slack off with my Fletcher students -- rather, it's because teaching those courses is a collaborative exercise between me and the students.  With a strictly online course, the professor has to do a lot more work to keep it engaging. 

Developing....

This month Merriam-Webster highlighted their most looked-up words of 2012, with the rather boring conclusion that "capitalism" and "socialism" were the words of the year.  To spice things up a bit for those philologists in the crowd, I would like to suggest that every years, some words get temporarily "retired."  Not permanently, just for a yar or so.  Think of it as a word vacation. 

I don't make this suggestion lightly -- no writer wants to constrain their options as they craft their arguments.  Some words, however, find themselves abused to the point where, no matter how scintillating they might have been in the past,  they need some time in rehab.  Think Ryan Lochte after the post-Olympics publicity tour or Lindsay Lohan after making a Lifetime movie. 

So the worst word of 2012, the word that desperately needs a break is... bubble. 

Since 2008, analysts, commentators, pundits et al have been on the lookout for the next bubble.  To provide one example of how this search for the next bubble abuses the term, let's look at the brouhaha surrouding the "higher ed bubble."  It was brewing in 2011, but this year, with the rise of online education, it's been just lousy in the blogosphere:  Megan McArdle, Glenn Reynolds, and Walter Russell Mead have been hammering away at this concept. 

It is Mead's latest post on the subject that has me thoroughly annoyed.  He links to the lead essay in The American Interest by Nathan Harden that opens as follows: 

In fifty years, if not much sooner, half of the roughly 4,500 colleges and universities now operating in the United States will have ceased to exist. The technology driving this change is already at work, and nothing can stop it. The future looks like this: Access to college-level education will be free for everyone; the residential college campus will become largely obsolete; tens of thousands of professors will lose their jobs; the bachelor’s degree will become increasingly irrelevant; and ten years from now Harvard will enroll ten million students.

We’ve all heard plenty about the “college bubble” in recent years. Student loan debt is at an all-time high—an average of more than $23,000 per graduate by some counts—and tuition costs continue to rise at a rate far outpacing inflation, as they have for decades. Credential inflation is devaluing the college degree, making graduate degrees, and the greater debt required to pay for them, increasingly necessary for many people to maintain the standard of living they experienced growing up in their parents’ homes. Students are defaulting on their loans at an unprecedented rate, too, partly a function of an economy short on entry-level professional positions. Yet, as with all bubbles, there’s a persistent public belief in the value of something, and that faith in the college degree has kept demand high.

The figures are alarming, the anecdotes downright depressing. But the real story of the American higher-education bubble has little to do with individual students and their debts or employment problems. The most important part of the college bubble story—the one we will soon be hearing much more about—concerns the impending financial collapse of numerous private colleges and universities and the likely shrinkage of many public ones. And when that bubble bursts, it will end a system of higher education that, for all of its history, has been steeped in a culture of exclusivity. Then we’ll see the birth of something entirely new as we accept one central and unavoidable fact: The college classroom is about to go virtual. 

Now, let's stipulate that higher education may well be on the cusp of some interesting changes.  Let's also stipulate that some colleges appear to have gone on a borrowing binge (though the linked story fails to note that these debt loads have been declining for the past few years).  Let's further stipulate that Harden's prediction might well be correct -- though even he acknowledges later in the essay that traditional classroom instruction is a necessary component to a good higher education.

Here's the thing, and it's worth repeating:  This.  Is.  Not.  A.  Bubble. 

Here's the FT definition of an asset bubble: 

When the prices of securities or other assets rise so sharply and at such a sustained rate that they exceed valuations justified by fundamentals, making a sudden collapse likely - at which point the bubble "bursts".

I think it's possible that the first part of this definition might be happening in higher education -- though I'd wager that what's actually happening is that universities are engaging in greater price discrimination and trying to capture some of the wage premium effects from higher education that have built up over the past three decades. 

It's the second part of that definition where things don't match up.  Unless and until there is a sudden and dramatic shift in the valuation of a college degree, this is simply not like a bubble.  From a knowledge perspective, there are far too many professions in the economy where degrees are still considered a  necessary condition.  From a sociological perspective, there are also far too many people who got to where they are in their careers because of the social capital built up at universities. 

I think it's possible that the American system of higher education might be facing what happened to American manufacturing over the past fifty years, in which structural and technological forces caused a slow, steady reduction in the workforce and dramatic improvements in productivity and output.  That's something important -- but it's not a bubble. 

[Don't you have some skin in this game?  Aren't you just defending your interest group?--ed.  I teach at a graduate school in which demand for my courses has spiked rather than slowed over the past decade.  I'm also a full professor at an elite school.  I would personally benefit from the changes that Mead et al are describing.   So if I was arguing my own self-interest, I'd be nodding vigorously at what the higher ed bubble gurus are selling.]

Please, let's give "bubble" a break before the term loses all meaning. 

In last week's debate over whether policy wonks should get Ph.D.s, there was a hidden assumption baked into the discussion -- that all doctorates are created equal.  But anyone who spends any time around the academy knows this isn't so.  A Ph.D. from, say, Harvard, is going to find a lot more open doors than a Ph.D. from, say, the University of Massachusetts.  Why that's the case is the subject of some debate (and research in sociology).  One argument is merit-based:  the Harvard Ph.D.s are simply better than the UMass ones.  Another argument is that it's prestige-based:  all else equal, the Harvard student gets a leg up in the job market because of the Harvard credential and the Harvard network. 

How powerful, and how pernicious, is this prestige effect?  This week, the Chronicle of Higher Education, Inside Higher Ed, and The Monkey Cage all ran stories about an essay by Robert Oprisko in the Georgetown Public Policy Review entitled "Superpowers:  The New Academic Elite."  Drawing from his book, Oprisko posits "a system whereby individuals navigate society based upon processes of honor that determine their value."  To my theory-addled ears this sound a bit like Pierre Bourdieu, but that's neither here nor there.  Then Oprisko drops the empirics:

We compiled a database of the tenure-track and tenured faculty in all ranked research universities to determine which of those universities successfully placed candidates at peer institutions. We found strongly suggestive evidence that hiring based upon institutional excellence is ubiquitous.

We used the 2009 U.S. News and World Report rankings for political science graduate programs as a proxy variable to determine an applicant’s academic class, or affiliated honor, in order to determine if it significantly influenced hiring processes officially predicated upon individual talent (referred to as prestige). The aggregation of this data includes 116 institutions and 3,135 faculty members who are either tenure-track or tenured. We hypothesized that affiliated honor would directly correlate to employment success. We also hypothesized that a cascade effect would emerge where institutions would place within and immediately below their prestige level such that a prestige-based hierarchy would present itself. The results dramatically show that we were both very right on the first hypothesis and very wrong on the second. There is a group of highly prestigious universities that dominate the political science academic market, effectively shutting out all competition at multiple levels. The fact that these academic superpowers are so dominant and place candidates ubiquitously indicates that institutional prestige drives hiring practices in academia and, perhaps, other highly selective professions....

[Harvard, Princeton, Stanford and Michigan] contribute 616 political scientists; roughly twenty percent of the total tenure-track lines in the discipline at research-intensive programs. The median institutional ranking for the 116 institutions covered is eleven, which implies that eleven schools contribute 50 percent of the political science academics to research-intensive universities in the United States. Over 100 political science PhD programs are graduating students that will contest the remaining 50 percent of openings.

These numbers likely understate the impact of prestigious universities; the present study does not include the many liberal arts colleges and regional universities that also hire graduates of these programs and increase the network of advocates for graduates from highly ranked universities (emphasis added).

Please do read the whole thing, as well as the Chronicle story by Audrey Williams June, which has numerous additional quotes from Oprisko, including:  "The bottom of the barrel at Princeton is still the bottom of the barrel."

Now, this is clearly the precis of a larger paper that will have all the numbers.  And, clearly, there is some motivated self-interest going on in the analysis:  Oprisko has a 2011 Ph.D. from Purdue University, which U.S. News and World Report ranked as the 62nd best Ph.D. program (though they do better in the NRC rankings).  In the spirit of full disclosure, I got my Ph.D. from Stanford, so I'm naturally going to be resistant to the idea that it's only honor and not merit that's determining these hiring patterns. 

That said, as they continue to crunch the numbers on the larger paper, I hope Oprisko et al address the following arguments that might cut against the prestige argument: 

1)  Cohort effects.  This study takes a static snapshot of all current hires.  The problem is that this likely exaggerates the power of the top-tier institutions due to lagged effects.  Elite Ph.D. programs have likely been around for a longer time -- and, in the past, a lot of these programs also had much larger incoming classes of Ph.D. students.  This would suggest that these institutions should capture a disproportionate number of positions at the senior level.  So Oprisko et al need to show whether this problem is more or less acute among junior hires. 

2)  Parse out the merit vs. honor arguments.  Remember, there are two different arguments at work here, but they both make the same prediction:  Ph.D.s from higher-ranked institutions should do  better on the job market.  There needs to be clear evidence that the "honor" argument is the primary driver. 

I'll confess to being somewhat skeptical.  As Gabriel Rossman points out, there are pretty solid reasons to think that Oprisko's finding are consistent with a meritocratic sort.  Furthermore, based on my own experiences, I'd push back strongly on the "bottom of the barrel" observation.  I've taught at a top ten political science department and a not-that-close-to-top ten political science department in my career.  I will gladly concede that the bottom of the barrel at the top tier institution were much bigger pains in the neck.  They were, nevertheless, also much better trained and more analytically sharp than the bottom of the barrel at the other institution. 

3)  The selection bias likely works in reverse.  Oprisky speculates that the elite effect is likely understated, because they don't examine "liberal arts colleges and regional universities."  The selective liberal arts schools aside, I'd wager that the reverse is true.  Indeed, it's the very "elite" thing that would drive this effect.  People who get their Ph.D.s from Harvard do not want to go teach at Eastern Washington University -- and even if they wanted to at first, they were socialized at Harvard to think of it as a bad outcome.  This is particularly true if the geographical location of the hiring instiution is... let's say "not near a large body of water."  Furthermore, a lot of these places won't take applicants from elite institutions seriously, because they assume that these are "safety school" applications, and that these Ph.D.s really want jobs at R1 research institutions.  I would posit that Ph.D.s from lower-tier institutions are more likely to secure teaching positions at liberal arts schools and regional universities.  One manageable way to test this would be to look at these school categories in two small, matched states -- say, Connecticut and Oklahoma -- and see what the numbers show.  

4)  This ain't that big a concentration ratio.   I emailed Oprisko to ask which institutions were responsible for the largest share of the market, and he was generous enough to let me know.  The top four were:  Harvard with 239 placements; UC-Berkeley with 156 placements; Yale with 149 placements; and Michigan with 141 placements.  Now, if the total size of this market is 3,135 positions, we get the following market share figures: 

Harvard:  7.6%

Berkeley:  5.0%

Yale:  4.8%

Michigan:  4.5%

Let's acknowledge that these are all elite institutions.  Still, this doesn't look like an oligopoly to me.  Using standard oligopoly measures yields a four-firm concentration ratio of 21.9% -- which isn't indicative of an oligopoly.  The Herfindahl-Hirschman Index is 126, which is not remotely close to an oligopoly in industrial organization.  Similarly, in international relations, these kind of market power numbers suggest a world of extreme multipolarity rather than any kind of significant concentration.  Maybe using economic or IR comparisons are inappropriate -- but I'd need to be persuaded why that's the case. 

I think it's extremely useful for Oprisko to bring up these kinds of questions about the political science job market, but I'm going to need to see more to be convinced that this is a concentrated prestige market run amok.

What do you think? 

UPDATE:  Because Georgetown possesses so much less prestige than Fletcher, I somehow missed Dan Nexon's excellent take on this issue. 

I've received a lot of interesting feedback to my post earlier this week about Paula Broadwell as a cautionary tale of attempting to get a Ph.D. as a ticket-punching exercise.  I promise to write a follow-up post on that particular bugaboo very soon. 

However, as I said in that original post, I used Broadwell primarily as the hook to write about the more generic question of why one gets a Ph.D. in the first place.  This raises the question of whether I was fair in my treatment of her case.  The New America Foundation's Tara Maller argues that I was not.  Below is her (unedited by me) defense of Broadwell and her critique of the Broadwell coverage.  Read the whole thing: 

Over the last couple of weeks, I've been hesitant to weigh in on the debates surrounding the multifaceted situation involving General Petraeus and Paula Broadwell.  My reservations have mostly been in light of both my previous role as a former analyst at CIA and someone who has known Paula since 2007, due to her leadership role with Women in International Security in Cambridge, MA. I was deeply saddened by the serious personal mistakes of Broadwell and Petraeus and this piece is not intended to absolve either of blame or responsibility for their personal indiscretions.  However, as an individual who studied international relations, worked in government and respected their service and accomplishments, I've been disheartened by the tone, double standards and arguments exhibited in some of the recent media coverage. 

As The New York Times and other media outlets debate whether Petraeus' next move will be to a prestigious university or corporate board, discussions of Broadwell have been reduced to conversations about her outfits, criticism of her personal drive, complaints about her routine faculty office hour visits and a critique of her motivations' for pursuing an advanced degree. In Professor Daniel Drezner's recent blog post titled "The Broadwell Recognition," he drew on a recent Boston Globe article to critique Paula as someone destined to "flail miserably" and make some broader arguments about the types of people well-suited for Ph.D. programs.  As an individual who completed a Ph.D. program,  knows Paula (along with many other "scholar-officers" from my time in Cambridge), and is generally a fan of  Drezner's writings, I respectfully disagree with Drezner on a number of his points. 

First, there are many types of Ph.D. candidates from a variety of backgrounds and a multitude of goals.  Drezner paints a portrait of just one acceptable type of candidate for a Ph.D. program and implies that Broadwell's career ambitions, background or personality was not the right fit. As someone who knows Paula and interacted with her during her time in Cambridge, I agree with Drezner that individuals like Paula are not the traditional Ph.D. candidate, or typical professionals in the field of international affairs.  There aren't many women in this field, let alone women with two small children, who excelled at West Point, mentored young women over brunch at their home, served as an army intel officer, attended Harvard, completed marathons and served as an unofficial advisor to younger professionals in the field like myself.  In fact, many of the "scholar-officers" I encountered in Cambridge were the most thoughtful, impressive, unique and service-oriented individuals I have ever met in my life.  One of the most rewarding aspects of my program at MIT was the blend of academic, military and policy experience - and the knowledge that our shared educational experience would be used to impact the world in different ways.  Shouldn't we be encouraging our future military and political leaders to pursue higher levels of education?  The "soldier-officer" types or those on their way to "way to power and influence" in Washington tend to be individuals committed to public service and  issues about which they are deeply passionate.  Entering a Ph.D. program to gain skills or expertise to employ in the military or policy community does not make one less equipped for a Ph.D. program nor does it make Paula's motivations any less legitimate. 

Second, many brilliant and successful individuals take breaks or do not finish their Ph.D. due to unanticipated personal or professional challenges or even opportunities.  This does not mean that you aren't able to think critically about ideas or that you were only pursuing a Ph.D. purely for ambition's sake.  Drezner himself even acknowledges many of these challenges, particularly for women, in a previous blog post.  Unfortunately, his recent post fails to mention that during the time Paula was at Harvard (where she did receive a Master's) she had two children in under two years, serving as the Deputy Director of the Tufts University Fletcher School's Jebsen Center for Counter-Terrorism and founded the New England Women in International Security chapter (she has also started the Denver WIIS chapter and served on the executive board of international WIIS).  Her husband was also putting in extremely long hours doing his residency, so she was working to make extra money for her family.  Broadwell gave birth to her first son within a two months of starting the Harvard program and her second son less than two years later.  When she left Harvard's program, she had two children still in diapers.  If there was anything Paula failed at during this particular time period, it was being able to continue to function at a superwoman level as she tried to juggle "having it all" at one time.  Many men and women of our generation need to balance all sorts of life decisions and career trajectories as they struggle with work-life family balance and competing priorities. 

Lastly, one doesn't have to like Broadwell or even think she is a star academic to acknowledge some of the unfair characterizations by the media and higher levels of scrutiny and criticism that women seem to face in these situations.   Over the last couple of weeks, the media has been criticizing Broadwell for many behaviors and personality attributesthat are not only typical of  her peers in academically rigorous program, but ones that are encouraged and desirable. The Boston Globe piece Drezner cites includes criticism of Paula for both seeking out faculty during office hours and promoting her work.  I can't tell you how many times I've heard faculty, career counselors, advisors and public officials in DC advise students to do just these things.   Other articles in the media have lashed out at Paula for being driven and ambitious. I'm pretty sure many successful individuals and leaders have been praised for similar characteristics - including General Petraeus.  It is worth noting that much of her drive was also directed at advocating on behalf of veterans and women in foreign policy.  Michael O'Hanlon of the Brookings Institution recently chimed in on this in an op-ed writing, "She [Paula] never struck me as more ambitious than the average Washingtonian, and she never seemed cutthroat in how she pursued her ambitions." As a Ph.D. student who met Paula in the winter of 2007 through her work with WIIS, I've known Paula as someone who has exhibited leadership and mentorship to advance the careers of many younger women - including myself. If Broadwell was a "self-promoter" of her own work, then she was just as much a promoter of others' work and important causes as well. 

We should be cognizant of the serious implications of some of the arguments made in Drezner's piece and the tone of many other recent articles in the media lest we discourage future generations of very bright and talented young women and men with a commitment to public service from entering the field. 

Tara Maller is a Research Affiliate at the New America Foundation.  She is a former military analyst at the CIA and holds a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

My only rebuttal to Maller's essay is that I had not seen the information regarding Broadwell's personal situation during her time at Harvard reported anywhere else, and Broadwell herself hasn't been commenting on anything -- so it would have been difficult to mention it. 

Still, what do you think? 

As near as I can figure, the David Petraeus/Paula Broadwell story is the ultimate pundit Rorschach Test. Whatever axe one had to grind against the foreign policy community prior to the story breaking, Petraeus and Broadwell merely sharpens it. It's evidence about the sexism and double-standards at play in Washington! It shows the insularity and kiss-assedness of the foreign policy community!! It shows that COIN doesn't work, or that Petraeus was a big phony!!

I'm not immune to this impulse, so I'd like to focus on a lesson that can be drawn from this for those young, impressionistic aspirants to positions of foreign policy influence. If there's anything you can learn from the rise and fall of Paula Broadwell, it's this: do not, under any circumstances, think of a Ph.D. as merely a box to be checked on the way to power and influence in Washington.

As Fred Kaplan notes, Petraeus both benefited from and propagated the desire to develop "officer-intellectuals" within the military:

The impulse was not unique to Petraeus. It grew out of the ethos of West Point’s social science department, where Petraeus had taught in the mid-1980s. The department, known as “Sosh,” was founded just after World War II by a visionary ex-cadet and Rhodes Scholar named George A. “Abe” Lincoln. Toward the end of the war, as the senior planning aide to Army Chief of Staff Gen. George Marshall, Lincoln realized that the Army needed to breed a new type of officer to help the nation meet its new global responsibilities in the postwar era. This new officer, he wrote to a colleague, should have “at least three heads—one political, one economic, and one military.” He took a demotion, from brigadier general to colonel, so he could return to West Point and create a curriculum “to improve the so-called Army mind” in just this way: a social science department, encouraging critical thinking, even occasionally dissent.

Lincoln also set up a program allowing cadets with high scores in Sosh classes to go study at a civilian graduate school, with West Point paying the tuition. In exchange, the cadets, after earning their doctorates, would come back and teach for at least three years. Once they fulfilled that obligation, Lincoln would use his still-considerable connections in Washington to get them choice assignments in the Pentagon, the State Department, the White House, a foreign embassy, or a prestigious command post.

Now, I've encountered a lot of these scholar-officers at my various academic postings.   Many of them are among the best that the military has to offer, and offer a necessary bridge between the scholarly and martial worlds.  On the other hand, some of them are there precisely because they see the Ph.D. as a ticket to be punched on the way to something greater. And these are the ones who will usually flail about miserably.

This appears to be what happened to Broadwell at the Kennedy School of Government. By all accounts, she had succeeded at pretty much everything she had tried to achieve prior to entering the Ph.D. program. At that point, however... well, let's go to the Boston Globe's story:

One of Broadwell’s former professors at Harvard described her as a self-promoter who would routinely show up at office hours.

“It was very much, ‘I’m here and you’re going to know I’m here,’?” said the professor, who did not want to be identified because of the sensitivity of ongoing investigations. “She was not someone you would think of as a critical thinker. I don’t remember anything about her as a student. I remember her as a personality.”

The professor said when Petraeus chose Broadwell to write his biography, there was shock among the national security faculty at Harvard because “she just didn’t have the background — the academic background, the national security background, or the writing background.”

A second Harvard faculty member who knows Broadwell and Petraeus had similar misgivings.

Now, these comments from the Harvard faculty are self-serving and indecorous; as the Globe story goes on to note, these professorial misgivings did not stop the school from embracing Broadwell's apparent success.

That said, as a professor in a policy school, those comments caused me to shudder in recognition (and it jibes with Greg Jaffe and Anne Gearan's reportage that Broadwell's coursework was below par). Any professor in one of these institutions recognizes the student profile in the Globe story. Even standard political science departments are littered with students who have sterling resumes, glittering letters of recommendation from well-connected fixtures of the foreign policy community, and that disturbing tendency to look past the task at hand to plot out steps three, four and five of their Ascent to Greatness.

Here's the thing about these students: 95 percent of them will not earn a Ph.D. -- and most of the rest who do get it will only have done so by finding the most pliant dissertation committee alive. Ambition and intelligence can get someone through college and a professional degree. It can even get someone through Ph.D.-level coursework. What it can't do is produce an above-the-bar dissertation.

In my day, I've known too many students who were talented in many ways, and yet got stymied at the dissertation phase. For people who have succeeded at pretty much everything in life to that point, a Ph.D. seems like just another barrier to transcend. It's not. Unless you are able to simultaneously love and critically dissect your subject matter, unless you thrive in an environment where people are looking forward to picking apart your most cherished ideas, you won't finish. You can guess for yourself at which task Broadwell failed, condemning her to the Jane Babbington fate.

To be clear: I don't write this peroration to suggest that finishing a Ph.D. is a sign of superior intelligence: it isn't. I've met Ph.D.'s in my field who were actually quite stupid. Consider this a public service message. As someone who has advised readers on the relative merits of getting a Ph.D., it's worth pointing out -- repeatedly -- that getting a Ph.D. is not for everyone. If there isn't an idea or a question that truly animates you, if you think of a Ph.D. as merely a ticket to be punched, then know the following: you are looking at a half-decade of misery with nothing to show for it in the end except a terminal masters degree.

Am I missing anything?

In the last few weeks, Fareed Zakaria and Niall Ferguson have found themselves at the centers of controversy. As someone who has written a thing or two about public intellectuals, I confess to finding it all very fascinating. What's striking to me is the vehemence on all sides.  Brad DeLong is an excitable sort, but calling for Harvard to fire Niall Ferguson for tendentious matters unrelated to his scholarly work seems... a bit much. Last week the Washington Post ran a story falsely accusing Zakaria of another act of plagiarism... without independently checking to see if the charge had any validity. 

On the other hand, the defenses that have been mounted also seem a bit over the top. Tunku Varadarajan defended Zakaria in Newsweek with an essay that bordered on the sycophantic, all the while accusing Zakaria's accusers of simple envy:

What one has seen in the past few days can only be described as a hideous manifestation of envy—Fareed Envy. Henry Kissinger’s aphorism about academia (where the “politics are so vicious precisely because the stakes are so small”) applies with delicious tartness to journalism, where media reporters of the kind who hounded Zakaria occupy the lowest rung and exult at the prospect of pulling people down. Zakaria, by contrast, is insanely successful by the standards of his profession: he has a TV show to which few people of any prominence would refuse an invitation, plus columns at Time, CNN.com, and The Washington Post. He also writes academic-lite books that presidents clutch as they clamber aboard planes, and gives speeches at—it is said—$75,000 a pop. He is as much a brand as he is a journalist: he has “inc.” in his veins.

Zakaria himself responded to the Post's bogus second charge of plagiarism in a somewhat curious manner. Here's what he told them: 

Zakaria, in an interview Monday, defended the practice of not attributing quotes in a popular book. “As I write explicitly [in the book], this is not an academic work where everything has to be acknowledged and footnoted,” he said. The book contains “hundreds” of comments and quotes that aren’t attributed because doing so, in context, would “interrupt the flow for the reader,” he said.

He compared his technique to other popular non-fiction authors. “Please look at other books in this genre and you will notice that I'm following standard practice,” he said.

“I should not be judged by a standard that's not applied to everyone else,” he added. “People are piling on with every grudge or vendetta. The charge is totally bogus.”

Ferguson responded to his critics in a similar fashion: 

The other day, a British friend asked me if there was anything about the United States I disliked. I was happily on vacation and couldn’t think of anything. But now I remember. I really can’t stand America’s liberal bloggers....

My critics have three things in common. First, they wholly fail to respond to the central arguments of the piece. Second, they claim to be engaged in “fact checking,” whereas in nearly all cases they are merely offering alternative (often silly or skewed) interpretations of the facts. Third, they adopt a tone of outrage that would be appropriate only if I had argued that, say, women’s bodies can somehow prevent pregnancies in case of “legitimate rape.”

Their approach is highly effective, and I must remember it if I ever decide to organize an intellectual witch hunt. What makes it so irksome is that it simultaneously dodges the central thesis of my piece and at the same time seeks to brand me as a liar.

I'd feel more sympathy towards Ferguson if his term "liberal blogosphere" obfuscates the fact that a Nobel Prize-winning economist is rebutting Ferguson on his use of facts, and then Ferguson didn't compound his economic errors in a Bloomberg interview. 

So what the hell is going on? 

I think there are three interlocking things going on that explain why everyone feels so cranky.  The first, as I alluded to in my Zakaria post, is that the economics of superstars has now reached the world of public intellectuals.  There's been a lot of talk about "brands" recently, and it gets at how the rewards for intellectual output have expanded at the upper strata: 

Not that long ago, getting a column in Time would have been the pinnacle of a journalist’s career. But expectations and opportunities have grown in the last few years. Many writers now market themselves as separate brands, and their journalism works largely as a promotion for more lucrative endeavors like writing books and public speaking.

Replace "journalist" with "intellectual" and that paragraph still works.  Credentialed thinkers like Zakaria and Ferguson, once they've reached the top, become brands that can multiply their earning potential far more than was the case fifty years ago.  The ways in which the Internet concentrates attention on a Few Big Things means that if you are good and lucky enough to become one of those Big Things, money will rain down on your door.  Over at Esquire, Stephen Marche proffered this explanation for what he would call Ferguson's intellectual devolution:

The real issue isn't the substance of Ferguson's argument, though, which is shallow and basically exploded by this point in time. It isn't even the question of how such garbage managed to be written and published. It is, rather, why did Ferguson write it? The answer is simple but has profound implications for American intellectual life generally: public speaking.

Ferguson's critics have simply misunderstood for whom Ferguson was writing that piece. They imagine that he is working as a professor or as a journalist, and that his standards slipped below those of academia or the media. Neither is right. Look at his speaking agent's Web site. The fee: 50 to 75 grand per appearance. That number means that the entire economics of Ferguson's writing career, and many other writing careers, has been permanently altered. Nonfiction writers can and do make vastly more, and more easily, than they could ever make any other way, including by writing bestselling books or being a Harvard professor. Articles and ideas are only as good as the fees you can get for talking about them. They are merely billboards for the messengers.

That number means that Ferguson doesn't have to please his publishers; he doesn't have to please his editors; he sure as hell doesn't have to please scholars. He has to please corporations and high-net-worth individuals, the people who can pay 50 to 75K to hear him talk. That incredibly sloppy article was a way of communicating to them: I am one of you. I can give a great rousing talk about Obama's failures at any event you want to have me at.

Now, railing at the One Percent aside (*cough* Esquire's target demograpic *cough*) Marche is really onto something here. I've heard from a few sources that Ferguson resigned his professorship at Harvard Business School (but not Harvard University) because he calculated that if he gave four or five extra talks a year, he could earn his HBS salary without all the tedious teaching obligations. 

Zakaria and Ferguson got to where they are by dint of their own efforts, but the thing about the superstar phenomenon is that there's also an element of caprice involved. The gap between Zakaria and Ferguson, and their replacement-level deep thinkers is pretty narrow; the gap in the financial and intellectual rewards is pretty vast.

So I suspect that there is a bit of jealousy in some of the criticisms being leveled. These guys earn many multiples of the median intellectual income -- and I guarantee you that the median intellectual doesn't think that either Ferguson or Zakaria is many times smarter.  That's gonna stir up some petty and not-so-petty resentments.  

The top tier of public intellectuals are doing well in this world, and the best are pretty savvy at marketing their ideas across multiple platforms in a Web 2.0 world. But the same dynamics that push these people to the top also increase their vulnerability to intellectual criticism -- and this is the second thing that's going on here. As I noted a few years ago:

The most useful function of bloggers is when they engage in the quality control of other public intellectuals. [Richard] Posner believed public intellectuals were in decline because there was no market discipline for poor quality. Even if public intellectuals royally screw up, he argued, the mass public is sufficiently disinterested and disengaged for it not to matter. Bloggers are changing this dynamic, however. If Michael Ignatieff, Paul Krugman or William Kristol pen substandard essays, blogs have and will provide a wide spectrum of critical feedback.

One can clearly add Niall Ferguson and Fareed Zakaria to this list. Furthermore, the very act of trying to market ideas across platforms -- and the constant drive to generate new content -- leaves these intellectuals vulnerable to criticism. They can get sloppy, like Zakaria, and commit a near-fatal error. They can be tendentious in their use of facts, like Ferguson, and suffer reputational damage. Or, they can simple debase themselves to the point where Evgeny Morozov goes medieval on them. 

For high-flying intellectuals, this kind of public criticism clearly wounds. What the superstar phenomenon gives, it can also threaten to take away (though, to be honest, scandals and bad writing don't seem to actually take away rewards all that often). But in the mind of top-tier public intellectuals, effort and intellect drive their accomplishments, not fortuna. They see online criticism and interpret it as jealousy, pettiness and ideological score-settling. A lot of the time that's exactly what it is -- but the online intellectual ecosystem is also pretty good at fact-checking and substantive criticism. Publc intellectuals don't see that these kinds of criticisms are the flip-side of the very phenomenon that is enriching them in the first place. They also don't realize that in a Web 2.0 world, mere bloggers can fact-check them and scorn them for a lack of citation. 

Which leads to the last thing that I think is going on: this superstar phenomenon is invading one of the last spheres of life where money is not necessarily the Most Important Thing. Getting a Ph.D. means being socialized into a world where an academic job is considered more respectable than becoming a consultant that earns gazillions more in money. The currency in the academic economy is intellectual respect. Even if public criticism doesn't affect their real-world income, it does affect their intellectual standing. Even if Zakaria has left the academy, and Ferguson can "transcend" it, they were socialized into this value system, and they clearly care what their peers think. 

Zakaria's argument that general nonfiction shouldn't be held to the standards of academic discourse rankles academics who know that he should know better -- the first instinct of any person with graduate training is to read the literature and cite, cite, cite. As my friend Delia Lloyd put it:  "I find him culpable because Zakaria comes from the world of academia.... Plagiarism may not be  a major moral failing... in the university setting in which Zakaria was trained and credentialed, it’s pretty much one of the worst crimes you can commit."

As for Ferguson, Timothy Burke blogs about what it is exactly about Ferguson's career arc that nettles him: 

Ferguson would feel more like he was still within the bounds if he either investigated his own distaste for Obama in more reflective, philosophical and recursive ways or if he was willing to lay out a generalized, prescriptive theory of political leadership that didn’t fitfully move the goalposts on intensely granular or particular issues every few seconds. Why? Because I think scholarship requires some measure of self-aware and reflective movement between what you know and what you believe, and the relationship between your own movements and those of your professional peers... A scholar has to believe on some level that things are known or understood only after being investigated, tested, read, interpreted, that there’s something unseemly about robbing the graves and morgues for cast-off “facts” in order to assemble them into a shambling, monstrous conclusion built from a hackish blueprint. Being an intellectual takes some form of thoughtfulness, some respect for evidence and truth, something that goes beyond hollow, sleazy rhetoric that plays dumb every time it gets caught out truncating quotes or doctoring charts. Being an expert means you guide an audience through what is known and said about a subject with some respect for the totality of that knowing and saying before favoring your own interpretation.

Public intellectuals who have PhDs do not want to lose their standing as scholars.  Sure, they can gin up psychological defenses against the hidebound ivory tower, but criticism like the one quoted above will leave a permanent mark. They'll have their riches, but they won't have what they were trained to crave more than anything -- respect. 

In the end, what I think is going on is that, contra Russell Jacoby, top-tier public intellectals have acquired greater power than they used to possess. What they resist on occasion is the responsibility that comes with that power. 

So that's what I think is going on. What do you think? 

P.S.  I think one of the best compliments I've ever received is that Justin Fox independently and simultaneously arrived at very similar intellectual destination on this topic. 

Readers of this blog are aware that I am not a fan of the Flake Amendment, a proposal by the House of Representatives to zero out the political science portion of the National Science Foundation  budget -- and only the political science portion of that budget -- so that the $9 million or so will go to the physical or natural sciences instead.  This is one of those populist measures that sounds peach but in fact relies on either a piss-poor understanding of how public goods work, a piss-poor understanding of how political science works, or both. 

Still, you'd expect that the natural and physical scientists would be at worst neutral about the Flake Amendment.  After all, in a restrictive budgetary environment, anything that plumps up their research dollars can't hurt, right? 

Via Steven Taylor , however, I see that the editors of Nature have a better grasp of political science than, well, some people who write about politics for a living.  I don't agree with everything in this editorial, but I do agree with their main points: 

The social sciences are an easy target for this type of attack because they are less cluttered with technical terminology and so seem easier for the layperson to assess. As social scientist Duncan Watts at Microsoft Research in New York City has pointed out: “Everyone has experience being human, and so the vast majority of findings in social science coincide with something that we have either experienced or can imagine experiencing.” This means that the Flakes of this world have little trouble proclaiming such findings obvious or insignificant.

Part of the blame must lie with the practice of labelling the social sciences as soft, which too readily translates as meaning woolly or soft-headed. Because they deal with systems that are highly complex, adaptive and not rigorously rule-bound, the social sciences are among the most difficult of disciplines, both methodologically and intellectually. They suffer because their findings do sometimes seem obvious. Yet, equally, the common-sense answer can prove to be false when subjected to scrutiny. There are countless examples of this, from economics to traffic planning. This is one reason that the social sciences probably unnerve some politicians...

So, what has political science ever done for us? We don't, after all, know why crime rates rise and fall. We cannot solve the financial crisis or stop civil wars, and we cannot agree on the state's role in systems of justice or taxation. As Washington Post columnist Charles Lane wrote in a recent article that called for the NSF not to fund any social science: “The 'larger' the social or political issue, the more difficult it is to illuminate definitively through the methods of 'hard science'.”.

In part, this just restates the fact that political science is difficult. To conclude that hard problems are better solved by not studying them is ludicrous. Should we slash the physics budget if the problems of dark-matter and dark-energy are not solved? Lane's statement falls for the very myth it wants to attack: that political science is ruled, like physics, by precise, unique, universal rules (emphasis added).

Indeed.  A tip of the cap from this social scientist to the natural sciences -- it's good when nerds unite. 

In the beginning, political science blogs were mostly founded by frustrated policy wonks idiosyncratic scholars.  And lo, Lee Sigelman God spoke, and said, "hey, blogs are cool," and then The Monkey Cage was created -- and it was good.  And now a whole cornucopia of political science blogs are arriving on the scene, written by people who are about as central to the profession as one can get. 

So, for those of you interested in political violence and civil wars, be sure to bookmark Political Violence @ a Glance.  It's a new group blog created by some of the all-starts in the field -- Barbara Walter, Christian Davenport, Page Fortna, Roland Paris, Matt Kocher, Steve Saideman, Andrew Kydd, and many, many more. 

This blog, combined with the debut of The Mischiefs of Faction, have really amped up the presence of political scientists in the blogosphere.  It's just too bad that the mainstream foreign policy community continues to neglect the contribution of political sci--- say, who's that on the cover of the Foreign Affairs?  Is that Kenneth Waltz, Robert Keohane, and Graham Allison I see? 

At a time when the United States is facing serious domestic and international challenges, it sure is nice to see so many political scientists engaged in public discourse on important issues of the day.  I'm sure these contributions will be appreciated by the non-academic wings of the foreign policy community.  Oh, wait...

Lots o' stuff to chat about in the higher education universe, but let's keep it to three items in this blog post:

1)  My student-soon-to-be-Doctor-of-Philosophy Patrick Meier and Chris Albon blog "Advice to Future PhDs from 2 Unusual Graduating PhDs."  They make some interesting, provocative, and dare I say counterintuitive arguments. 

I disagree with a couple of their points.  First of all, I ain't buying "the blog is the new CV."  The blog is a calling card, and if you're lucky it's a branding device -- but it's not the same thing as a vita.  Second of all, I think they tend to inductively generalize from their own experiences and capabilities.  Not everyone should take on outside projects or teach at every opportunity, because these are excellent not-writing-your-dissertation activities.  Finally, I think their seven pieces of advice are out of sequence.  Their #3, #6 and #7 are the most important things.  Only once you've answered those questions should you even consider following the rest of their advice.  Still, read the whole thing. 

2)  I see that Naomi Schaefer Riley got fired from her Chronicle of Higher Education gig for writing a 500 word blog post bashing dissertations-in-progress in African-American studies without reading them.  Riley has written her response on the Wall Street Journal op-ed page.  James Joyner provides an excellent round-up of the affair.  My take is similar to Joyner in that, to be blunt, neither the Chronicle nor Riley come out of this looking very good.  The Chronicle looks like it kowtowed to the pressures of academic political correctness by either not reacting sooner or standing their ground.  Riley, on the other hand, has put herself in the indefensible position of calling for greater academic rigor while whinging that those standards shouldn't apply to her when she blogs for the Chronicle.  So, a pox on everyone's house for this affair. 

3)  The House of Representatives, in its infinite wisdom, has voted to cut funding for political science -- and only political science -- from the Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences part of the National Science Foundation.  Representative Jeff Flake's justified cutting the funding using pretty much the same logic as Senator Tom Coburn did in 2009 when he lamely tried to do the same thing [At least he didn't claim that "social scientists brought our world to the brink of chaos"!!--ed.  Thank goodness for small favors.] . 

See John Sides, Erik Voeten, Michael Flynn , Seth Masket and Jay Ulfelder  for some useful responses.  Ulfelder's point is particularly trenchant:

There’s real irony here in a Republican-controlled House of Representatives voting to defund a political-science program at a time when the Department of Defense and “intelligence community” seem to be increasing spending on it. With things like the Minerva Initiative, ICEWS, IARPA’s Open Source Indicators programs, the parts of the government concerned with protecting national security seem to find growing value in social-science research and are spending accordingly. Meanwhile, the party that claims to be the stalwart defender of national security pulls in the opposite direction, like the opposing head on Dr. Doolittle’s Pushmi-pullyu. Nice work, fellas.

Indeed.