academia

When someone publishes an op-ed, longer essay, or book, they have to write a tagline.  It's usually two sentences describing their title and affiliation, and whatever big projects are associated with them. 

After watching the preview for The Invention of Lying, however, I began to wonder what these tag lines would look like if they were brutally honest.  With a nod to Megan Mcardle's "Full Disclosure" post from a few years ago, here's fifteen examples I came up with: 

• Jack Silver is a fellow at the Institute for Strategic Studies.  He has been Henry Kissinger's bitch for something like three decades, so when Henry passed on writing something for us, he was the next logical choice.     

• Suzie Wong has never been to the country about which she is writing.  What's in this op-ed is culled from a quick perusal of the Economist and a few phone calls.     

• Cass Bunstein is a law professor.  He dashed off this essay in his head while commute to work this morning, wrote it in under thirty minutes, and it's still smarter than anything, my dear reader, that will ever pop into your brain. 

• Augustine Cornington has been teaching at an obscure state school for two decades, lying in the tall grass, waiting for her archnemesis to make a mistake in print.  This book review is her chance to completely eviscerate him. 

• Joe Schlub Jr. is a law professor.  This essay is a badly mangled version of an interesting idea he heard Cass Bunstein riff on at a cocktail party last week. 

• Andrew McClutchen is a former governor.  He hopes that this op-ed is the first step in getting beyond that horrible sex scandal from a few years ago. 

• Madeleine McFadden is a former cabinet secretary, and did not write a single word of this policy essay.  It is possible she read the first few paragraphs of it, but that's being really optimistic.

• Jane Babbington has no extraordinary policy expertise.  She does have an awesome book jacket photo, however, and will have better hair and skin than you do until the day she dies.  

• Lou Marston is a very smart professor at Princeton University.  This op-ed is woefully underplaced because he took his own sweet time writing it, and this issue is from last week's news cycle.  

• Robert Knaus lost the capacity to write long-form essays years ago - what you just read is what an intern scraped together from one year's worth of Twitter tweets. 

• Ann Stoneham is the foremost expert on this topic, and cannot write her way out of a paper bag.  Her uber-competent editor busted her ass for the last 48 hours to try and convert this essay into semi-readable prose

• Gwen Pollard is an area expert at a prominent DC think tank.  She fervently hopes that everyone has forgotten how completely wrong she was about this topic just five short years ago.

• C. Thomas Pope is a professor at the University of Chicago, and his worldview hardened into an inpenetrable black mass the day he turned twenty-four.  As no amount of contradictory evidence will cause him to change his mind, he is perfectly willing to make absurd, idiotic statements without worrying that he is wrong. 

• Richard Jensen is a professor at Harvard University.  He has the Mother of All Balloon Payments due on his mortgage next year, so any extra income helps. 

And, of course.....

• Daniel Drezner is a professor at Tufts University, and is publishing the fifth version of exact same idea with this essay.  Seriously, the man would be nothing without the cut and paste function.

Readers are warmly welcomed to come up with their own brutally honest tag lines in the comments. 

One of the biggest mistakes traditional academics make is to take all words equally seriously.  That is to say, academics who do not write for a non-scholarly audience tend to assume that it takes an equal length of time and effort to compose a journal article, an op-ed, or even a blog post.  In reality, it's kind of like circuit training -- each activity exercises a different set of writing muscles (that said, journal articles require way more reps than other forms of writing).

I bring this up because I have now joined Twitter, in a desperate, far-too-late-effort to catch up to my FP colleague Mark Lynch -- who is securely ensconced in the FP Twitterati Top 100.  Right now he's crushing me in terms of followers, so I warmly encourage all my readers to start following me on Twitter -- and then feel free to ignore my tweets. 

Somewhat more seriously, my Twitter postings will mostly be on matters that are other off-topic for Foreign Policy or things I don't have time to develop into the long, nuanced sentences required for blogging.  So, just to clarify for those academics in the audience, here is the official Hierarchy of Drezner Publications -- from highest degree of effort to lowest degree of effort: 

1. University press books
2. Peer-refereed journal articles
3. University press book chapters
4. Editor-refereed essays
5. Non-university press books and chapters
6. Op-ed essays
7. Commentaries for Marketplace
8. Blog posts about Salma Hayek and zombies
9. Other, lesser blog posts about trade, finance, etc.
10. Twitter tweets/Facebook status updates
11. Comments on friend's Facebook pages
12. Mutterings under my breath while waiting for airport security
13. Things I shout at the television during Red Sox-Yankee games
14. Things I say at the bar on the third day of the American Political Science Association annual meeting after I have three vodka tonics in me.
15. Things I say at the bar on the third day of the American Political Science Association annual meeting when completely sober. 

Also, just an FYI -- usually you can write off a technology the moment I embrace it.  So if tech stocks go down today, that's on me. 

The International Studies Association announces a book contest: 

The International Studies Best Book of the Decade Award honors the best book published in international studies over the last decade. In order to be selected, the winning book must be a single book (edited volumes will not be considered) that has already had or shows the greatest promise of having a broad impact on the field of international studies over many years. Only books of this broad scope, originality, and interdisciplinary significance should be nominated.

Hmmm.... which books published between 2000 and 2009 should be on the short list?  This merits some thought, but the again, this is a blog post, so the following choices are the first five books that came to mind: 

1. John J. Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (2001)
2. G. John Ikenberry, After Victory (2001). 
3. Mia Bloom, Dying to Kill (2003)
4. Raghuram Rajan and Luigi Zingales, Savng Capitalism from the Capitalists (2003). 
5. Gregory Clark, A Farewell to Alms (2007). 

I don't agree with everything in these books -- but they linger the most in the cerebral cortex. 

So, dear readers, which books do you think are worthy of consideration for this award? 

There's a lovely passage in John Le Carré's The Secret Pilgrim in which George Smiley explains why governments don't simply rely on open source information instead of spending gazillions on their own intelligence operations:  "governments, like anyone else, trust what they pay for, and are suspicious of what they don't." 

Oddly enough, in studying the global political economy, the sentiment often works in reverse in the academy.  Scholars, understandably, tend to prefer open source research while looking askance at private sector work that requires $$$ to unlock. 

I'm genuinely on the fence about this kind of question.  In writing about sovereign wealth funds, for example, I found the private sector stuff far superior on the empirics to the open source research.  The private sector stuff is also usually published before academics enter the breach (a good rule of thumb for aspiring IPE types -- if your literature review consists mostly of corporate research, then you are ahead of the academic curve on a new issue area).  On the other hand, the private sector work often lacked the analytical bite of scholarly work.  For some of it, I could not escape the sense that someone was trying to sell me something. 

I raise this conundrum because Martin Wolf's latest column is essentially a precis of a Goldman Sachs report that requires cashy money to read.  Wolf's summary: 

The paper points to four salient features of the world economy during this decade: a huge increase in global current account imbalances (with, in particular, the emergence of huge surpluses in emerging economies); a global decline in nominal and real yields on all forms of debt; an increase in global returns on physical capital; and an increase in the “equity risk premium” – the gap between the earnings yield on equities and the real yield on bonds. I would add to this list the strong downward pressure on the dollar prices of many manufactured goods.

The paper argues that the standard “global savings glut” hypothesis helps explain the first two facts. Indeed, it notes that a popular alternative – a too loose monetary policy – fails to explain persistently low long-term real rates. But, it adds, this fails to explain the third and fourth (or my fifth) features.

The paper argues that a massive increase in the effective global labour supply and the extreme risk aversion of the emerging world’s new creditors explains the third and fourth feature. As the paper notes, “the accumulation of net overseas assets has been entirely accounted for by public sector acquisitions ... and has been principally channelled into reserves”. Asian emerging economies – China, above all – have dominated such flows....

The authors conclude that the low bond yields caused by newly emerging savings gluts drove the crazy lending whose results we now see. With better regulation, the mess would have been smaller, as the International Monetary Fund rightly argues in its recent World Economic Outlook. But someone had to borrow this money. If it had not been households, who would have done so – governments, so running larger fiscal deficits, or corporations already flush with profits? This is as much a macroeconomic story as one of folly, greed and mis-regulation.

I'm pretty sympathetic to this argument, but I can't fully embrace it unless I can read the friggin' paper. 

Question to readers:  compared to academic work, how reliable is private sector research? 

Earlier this week, I pointed out that American higher education was not like the American auto sector, because it's actually quite competitive in the global marketplace.

I see that the Washington Post's Susan Kinzie has a story that nicely illustrates this point: 

Until fall 2007, the number of Chinese undergraduates in the United States had held steady for years, at about 9,000, according to the Institute of International Education, which promotes study abroad. But that year, it jumped to more than 16,000.

Experts say China's increasing wealth, fewer delays in obtaining visas and technology that makes it easier for Chinese students to learn about U.S. schools have helped fuel the boom. It shows no sign of letting up.

"People just think the education offered in the U.S. is undoubtedly the best in the world," said Betty Xiong, 20, a U-Va. junior from Shanghai....

Historically, students have been more likely to come to the United States for advanced degrees and research opportunities. The dramatic shift is in the rising number of undergraduates.

"In China, because so much of the growth is tied to international trade and multinational corporations with investment in China, the value of U.S. higher education is clearly understood and worth the investment of cash on the other side," said Peggy Blumenthal, chief operating officer of the Institute of International Education. Students started arriving about 1980, after the normalization of relations. There was a dip in applications after the Tiananmen Square crackdown in 1989, Blumenthal said, because the Chinese government made it more difficult for students to leave.

It's not easy being an international relations scholar [Cue world's smallest violin!--ed.]  When we're not being compared to AIG executives, we're being told that we are irrelevant to policymakers

Being  swamped with work yesterday, a typically out-of-touch academic, it took me 24 hours to notice Joseph Nye's Washington Post op-ed about out-of-touch international relations scholars (thanks to Laura for flagging it): 

While important American scholars such as Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski took high-level foreign policy positions in the past, that path has tended to be a one-way street. Not many top-ranked scholars of international relations are going into government, and even fewer return to contribute to academic theory. The 2008 Teaching, Research and International Policy (TRIP) poll, by the Institute for Theory and Practice in International Relations, showed that of the 25 scholars rated as producing the most interesting scholarship during the past five years, only three had ever held policy positions (two in the U.S. government and one in the United Nations). The fault for this growing gap lies not with the government but with the academics.

But... but... but what about hip IR scholar-bloggers?!

Even when academics supplement their usual trickle-down approach to policy by writing in journals, newspapers or blogs, or by consulting for candidates or public officials, they face many competitors for attention. More than 1,200 think tanks in the United States provide not only ideas but also experts ready to comment or consult at a moment's notice. Some of these new transmission belts serve as translators and additional outlets for academic ideas, but many add a bias provided by their founders and funders. As a group, think tanks are heterogeneous in scope, funding, ideology and location, but universities generally offer a more neutral viewpoint. While pluralism of institutional pathways is good for democracy, the policy process is diminished by the withdrawal of the academic community.

The solutions must come via a reappraisal within the academy itself. Departments should give greater weight to real-world relevance and impact in hiring and promoting young scholars. Journals could place greater weight on relevance in evaluating submissions. Studies of specific regions deserve more attention. Universities could facilitate interest in the world by giving junior faculty members greater incentives to participate in it. That should include greater toleration of unpopular policy positions. One could multiply such useful suggestions, but young people should not hold their breath waiting for them to be implemented. If anything, the trends in academic life seem to be headed in the opposite direction.

Nye is -- mostly -- preaching to the converted here.  Right now, the strictures against junior faculty taking an interest in the policymaking world are very, very strong.  A decade ago, for example, I received a fellowship that allowed me to spend a year in the government.  At the time, a senior member of my old department flat-out advised me against taking it because it would taint my career with the whiff of policy.  I showed him.  Oh, wait...

That said, just to throw some sand in Nye's gears, I don't accept that this is only the academy's fault.  Even when IR scholars try to speak with one loud voice, the result is often a deafening silence in the policy world. 

As for individual scholars, the political barriers to government service by aspiring academics are pretty high at this point.  Academics have long paper trails that are easy to manipulate, and politicians are well aware of this Achilles Heel.  Exhibit A:  the Obama administration's vetting process.  Exhibit B:  Harold H. Koh. 

Note what I've just done here.  Rather than offer my full-throated support for Joe's eminently sensible advice, I thought about this critically and then offered some... criticisms.  This skill lets academics excel at cutting down other ideas to size.  It makes it far harder, however, for IR scholars to offer constructive, useful policy advice. 

Which is why Joe is so unique. 

See Henry Farrell and Peter Howard for further academic-y reflections on Nye.   

The Obama administration has wreaked havoc across the landscape of America's public policy school deandom, wantonly plucking top administrators to staff their foreign policy machine.  [Is "deandom" even a word?--ed.  Roll with it.] 

First James Steinberg, Dean of the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas, leaves to be Deputy Secretary of State. 

Then Anne-Marie Slaughter, Dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, leaves to become the Director of Policy Planning at the State Department.

Over at Harvard, Joseph Nye, the former dead dean [Whoops!  I swear, this was a typo, not a Freudian error!!--DWD] of the John F. Kennedy School of Government, has been rumored to be the next Ambassador to Japan. 

I stayed silent when all these deans were poached -- and now they've gotten my guy: 

Having recently returned from a fact-finding trip to North Korea, Stephen W. Bosworth, dean of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, will have little time to unpack his bags in Medford before heading back to the region - this time as President Obama's special envoy to North Korea, according to administration officials.

Bosworth, 69, is expected to be named today the top US diplomat to the six-nation talks that have sought for more than five years to persuade the reclusive North Korean regime to give up its nuclear weapons program in return for an end to nearly 60 years of economic isolation.

I received direct confirmation of this appointment from Bosworth himself -- an nice perk that comes from attending faculty meetings.  It's my understanding, however, that Bosworth's appointment will not be full-time.  Instead, he will serve in an advisory capacity to Christopher Hill, who will continue to run the North Korea portfolio at Foggy Bottom. 

I wish my Dean the best of luck, assured in the knowledge that trying to manage faculty meetings at the Fletcher school is excellent prep work for negotiating with the obsteperous officials of the DPRK. 

Meanwhile, if I was Jessica Einhorn, David Ellwood or John Coatsworth, I'd be watching my back to make sure an Obama spokesman isn't stalking them.  It's just a matter of time....