A Hidden Part of Professing: Assessing

 I was talking to someone recently, and I said something about the quality of someone else's argument, I guess, and this person joked that I was being snobby, that I was judging someone else's ideas.  And it made me realize, as much as our job of professing is to generate ideas and share them far and wide, a huge hunk of what we do is judging the ideas and arguments of others.  

It starts with, alas, yes, the literature review.  In damn near every academic publication, after we get through the intro, we start by evaluating the state of the field--what the relevant ideas and arguments are, where they fall short, so that we can show where our contribution is supposed to fit in.  Indeed, I used to joke that grad students are first trained in how to destroy and that the hard part of creating awaits them after comprehensive exams where again much of the effort is in criticizing.

Once we finish our phd and get a job, we are asked to assess and assess and assess:

• Grading: in ye olde days, I don't think we called the assignments assessments or assessment opportunities, but we evaluate whether the students understand the material, can apply it, have applied it, have done the research, and put together cogent, well-evidenced arguments.  Or whatever the assignment is, we assess it.
• Teaching: not only are we grading, but we are assessing the field's arguments so that we can present the material to the students.  We don't assign them craptastic reading unless we do so to make a point (Clash of Civilizations? Yuck but yeah).   When we present the stuff in our classes, we often assess it along the way or we encourage the students to assess it or both. 
• Reviewing: so much of what we do is reviewing.  
• We review manuscripts submitted to journals and presses--are the arguments original, is the research design appropriate and well executed, are the findings interpreted well, are the implications reasonable. 
• We review job candidate files--is the work interesting and well executed, does the person have potential for more good work, will they be a decent colleague, can they teach,etc.
• We review promotion/tenure files: has this person done enough research to make a contribution?  Do they have a good trajectory? 
• Discussant/Moderator/Commentator:  when we are on panels at conferences, our job is to assess the paper and the presentation, giving our take on the ideas and how they are executed.  
• Media: For those of us who engage traditional media, we are often asked to provide factual answers but much of the time we are asked to weigh in on competing claims, evaluating the competing ideas and those advocating them.

People often talk about the marketplace of ideas.  That analogy has all kinds of problems, but in any market, you have experts evaluating products (markets of stuff create markets of assessors?) which then may affect the demand for and consumption of some ideas.  In the marketplace of ideas, there are those who have much invested in the ideas they are espousing, including jobs, power, income, etc, and those who have much less at stake. We call the latter academics.  Sure, academics can get money through their advocacy of ideas and even power, but most are just doing their usual assessing and not getting much in the way of money or pay for it.  Over my career, I have made very little money doing media stuff--some here and there but not enough to buy me or even rent me--and no, it has not led to power, at least, again, not that much.  I absolutely believe it is important to have disinterested or less biased folks in any marketplace of ideas assessing what is bs, what is based on good science, and so forth.  We may not be listened to as bad ideas often have a greater elective affinity than good ideas.  But we try.  

In all of this, yes, professors are constantly assessing and judging.  It may appear that we are arrogant--that we think we are better than other people.  And certainly that applies, but it is not that we all think we are smarter than other people.  It is that we think we have been trained to make assessments, that we are professional assessors.  We should stick to our lanes of expertise, but, well, some of us (me) tend to drive outside our lanes quite a bit.   

This post is just a rumination of a different way of looking at my job and what I do.  That it is not just about creating knowledge (which always sounded a bit high falutin' to me) but judging ideas and arguments.   

Some Basic Thoughts About Anti-Semitism, University Protests, and the Far Right BS Machine

 Watching students getting arrested and expelled was bad.  Watching them get pummeled by right wing assholes (Zionists or far right provocateurs) with the cops' permission and watching cops use "rubber" bullets that are super dangerous has been even worse.  I have many thoughts about all of this so let me spew a bit to figure some of this stuff out.

Some really basic stuff about identity and anti-semitism:

• No individuals or groups are actually acting on behalf of entire ethnic groups despite, oh my, all of the assumptions and data I used when I was an ethnic conflict scholar.  This means:
• Not all allies of Israel are Jews.  
• Not all pro-Palestinians are Muslims.  
• Not all Jews are pro-Israel at this moment. 
  
• What is anti-semitism?  Hatred of Jews.  Criticism of Israel can be anti-semitic but is not necessarily.  Israel is a country, and it has a government.  All governments can and should be criticized when they abuse people and engage in bad policies.  Identifying Israel with all Jews can be anti-semitic because it is generalizing about an entire group.  Not all Arabs or Muslims are pro-Saudi Arabia AND criticism of Saudi Arabia is not always Islamophobic.  

Are these various encampments and anti-Israel protests anti-semitic? It depends.  Sorry, but it is not clear--it depends on their demands, their statements, their treatment of Jews.  If they happen to have a bunch of Jews within them, then they are probably not anti-semitic. 

Back to basic stuff, this time about punishing students:

• Any punishment of students should involve some kind of due process.  No student should be evicted without a big hunk of due process.
  
• Students should not be suspended or expelled or evicted for engaging in collective dissent as long as it is not violent.  Universities are supposed to places where speech should be at its freest.  
• Such protests can be inconvenient and/or annoying--that is how they make themselves known. When I mentioned this on social media, someone raised the John Lewis line about good trouble.  
• What protests should not do and protestors can be punished for is threatening other students. But that raises two important distinctions:
• individual punishment, not collective punishment.  Entire groups of students should not be punished for the statements of individuals or actions of individuals especially if those folks happen to be off campus (see the non-students outside of Columbia)
• Saying negative things about Israel may hurt one's feelings but does not count as threats.  Again, not all criticism of Israel is anti-semitic.  The actual words and actions matter.  It may suck for Jewish students to be on campuses where there are protests against Israel as insults of those sharing one's identity does hurt one's own self-esteem.  But hurt feelings are not tantamount to violence or assaults.  
  
• No president of any university should be calling in the cops to arrest their students unless their students are engaged in or threatening to engage in violence.  Campuses need to be safe for all students, including those engaged in dissent.  Calling in the cops is an escalation that can and often leads to violence.  The students at many of these places have been harmed, way out of proportion to whatever their alleged crimes.  These universities have failed a very basic part of their mission--to protect their students.  Again, there are now cops on campus using rubber bullets and pepper spray.
• Everyone should have learned by now that no one controls the cops in North America AND they like to escalate AND infiltration is probably too benign of a word to address how deeply the far right is embedded in North American police forces.  So, calling the cops is worse than throwing gasoline on a fire because the latter has no illusion of deniability.

Now, let's get to the far right bullshit of all of this: Republicans, Fox, and the rest of the far right apparatus complaining about "anti-semitic" students on college campuses is just bad faith bullshit.  These folks are not interested in protecting Jews, or they might have spoken up a bit with all of the anti-semitism whipped up by the far right.  Charlottesville?  Remember that?  Where were these folks who are so concerned with anti-semitism when the Nazis were yelling about Jews not replacing "us"?  Where were these folks when George Soros was being used to incite anti-semitism?  Oh wait, many of these folks were doing precisely that.  Fuck all of them.  

Ok, one last thing: to put this into context, if Nazis have the right to march into Jewish neighborhoods, like Skokie, Illinois, then even if the students were all anti-semites, they have a right to protest.  So, again, why is it ok for far right anti-semites to protest but not far left?*  To be clear, I am not saying that the students are all anti-semites, but just making the point that if they were, they would still have a right to protest.  On college campuses?  I am not so sure since many have hate speech regulations.  

All I do know for sure is that the college administrators have failed their students and have also abetted the far right in undermining higher education. The urge to do something should have been ignored  The semesters in these places were winding down--they could have easily outwaited the students.  Move graduate ceremonies if you must, but for fuck's sake, don't invite cops onto campus to beat your students and professors!

* I fear far right anti-semitism more than far left.  Why?  First, the far right has far more power.  Second, if one did the math, I am pretty sure the far right anti-semites have killed far more Jews than the far left.  When Netanyahu and others hang out with ideological kindred anti-semites "since everyone out there is anti-semitic," they are just giving those with the greatest ability and the most violent history more deniability. 

Why Does It Take So Long to Publish Academic Books?

Today, I assembled all of the chapters of the Dave, Phil, and Steve book, and it came a day after someone asked Phil on the old social media site why it took so long.  So, a timely question for a still timely book (we hope).  It is also a fair one, as this book has taken longer than any of my other projects.  It took me eight years to turn my dissertation into a book, but much of that time was focusing on other stuff (job hunting, moving, learning how to teach, moving again, pumping out articles since my tenure case was going to rest more on articles than books) and not on the actual book.  My second book came out seven years after my first, and that is a bit deceptive since I spent one of those years in the Pentagon doing no research except one trip to Budapest.  My third book came out six years after the third. My fourth, a spinoff of the third, came out two years later, and it might have been a year faster if not for one picky reviewer who wanted me to cite his unpublished work.  This book, my fifth!, will be coming out nine or ten years after my previous book, depending on the vagaries of the academic publishing process (see below)

I have two sets of answers to this question--some inherent in the academic research and publishing enterprise and some specific to the project. Let's dispense with the dynamics that were specific to this project before I discuss why it takes so long to publish any academic book.

Just to remind folks, the book compares 15 democracies to assess what role their legislatures play in overseeing their armed forces.  Spoiler alert!  Not as much as most would expect!  The cases include countries in five continents (no African cases, no Antarctic ones). 

This book:

• Did I mention 15 countries?  Yeah, that's a lot.  Medium n research (where one does case studies over a number of cases) is no joke.  One of us visited each country (except those where we reside) at least once and a few we went back a few times (Germany and Japan for me, UK and France, I think, for Phil).  That took time, and we had to do that either during sabbaticals, during summer breaks, or squeezed in where we could.
• 
  One of the challenges of doing 15 countries is that we didn't team up and visit the same ones together.  So, we very much had the classic problem represented by this cartoon.  It took us some time to figure out our results.
• There was a pandemic.  Yeah, that.   Phil has small kids, so he was severely impacted (Ontario did perhaps the worst job in Canada of managing the pandemic and its impact on schools).  Dave faced a variety of challenges at his workplace (National Defense University) and at home due to the pandemic.  I was generally in a state of distraction for the first year or two of Covid, not because of family problems (Hollywood Spew handled the pandemic on her own and did so brilliantly. We could worry from afar, but her situation did involve me on any kind of regular, interruptive basis)
  
• This project coincided with our launching of the CDSN, and I cannot lie and say it did not affect the attention I put into this project.

So, yeah, this was not a speedy project, but few academic books are super quick.  Why?  Let's go through the steps.

1. Come up with a researchable idea.  This can be quick, but even the best ideas take longer than the shower than inspired them as one has to figure out the question, what the answer might be, whether it has already been asked and answered (our aim is to generate new knowledge, not just repeat someone else's project--replication is a thing but it won't get folks tenure, fortune, or glory), whether it is feasible, and whether one can do it (it might be feasible by somebody but not by the specific scholar due to skill/time/money limitations).
2. If it requires some funding, then one needs to apply for a grant, which can take a significant amount of time.  In my experience, it takes several months to write a good grant and then several more to get the results.  In Canada, for the social sciences, the main funder (SSHRC) has a deadline of October and then informs us of the results in April.  So, the grant process can take about nine months if one is successful on the first shot (I have tended to be successful on the first time around but not always).  
3. The research.  To do a serious, book length project requires some serious work, whether that is dwelling in the archives, building datasets, traveling to one spot for an extended period of time, or, like us, visiting a number of places.  And we have to do this while balancing the other parts of professing--teaching, service, engagement, etc. (For a more recent and exhausive and thoughtful version of the "what do profs do," see Paul Musgrave's take).  Most of the research for this project was done over four years.  This is why I tell folks to publish their dissertation work, as throwing away 2-4 years of research is a really bad idea even if one is tired of one's dissertation.  
4. The writing.  Sometimes it comes easy, sometimes not so much.  One can write while doing the research, and then revise afterwards, but it still takes significant time.  Unlike the research, we often can only be done during breaks from teaching, one can write the results while doing the other prof responsibilities.  But that depends on one's teaching load, class sizes, teaching assistants (or not), and so forth.  Again, this is why summers are so important and why profs flip out when asked what they are doing with the summer off.  When collaborating, the writing takes both less and more time.  In this project, we each wrote up the cases that we had studied, but so I didn't have to write the British or Nordic cases.  But then we had to put in a lot of work to revise so that it looked like one person wrote the book, not three (we shall see if readers agree), and we had to do a lot of writing/revising for the jointly written stuff--the intro, the theory, the conclusion.  
5. The submitting.  We had to contact a number of publishers, asking them to consider the book, they would then get back to us.  In general, the next step is for a publisher ask to see it, then they have to find reviewers, and then the reviewers have to read it and give their views.  This general takes between three months and a year (yes, it can take a lot of time).  The editor then communicates the reviews and then .... hopefully tells us to write a response letter.
6. For my first and third books, the reviews were positive, so I/we just had to write a letter explaining how we will incorporate the feedback into the revisions--a plan--and then that plan would go to the editorial board.  It might take a month or two or three (I forget) for the board to get back and say they will publish the book.  As long as the reviewers are not too demanding, these revisions might just take a couple of months.
1. Ah, but the reviewers may not be that happy.  For my second book, the first press sent out an examination of the international dynamics of ethnic conflict to at least one comparativist, who wanted a very different book, one looking at the longer dynamics rather than a snapshot of 1990s dynamics.  Since that was not something Bill nor I were willing to do, we had to move to another publisher, so that review process took another several months.  For my fourth book, one of the reviewers again wanted a different book, a more traditional, academic, theory-focused book with, ug, more lit review.  My intent was to tell the Canadian public about what we could learn from the Afghanistan war.  So, the editor asked me to revise and he found another reviewer.  So, that added something like six months.  Did these delays make for a better book?  In the first case, no, as the book didn't change much as the primary review was quite unhelpful.  In the second case, somewhat.  I have generally found article rejection to be more productive, leading to better work, than book rejection.  But that is just my experience.
   
7. Once the manuscript is accepted and sent off to the publisher, it will then take about a year before the book is published.  Part of the time is spent copy-editing, which is desperately needed.  The proofs always come back at an inconvenient time and a short fuse.
8. Then the book is done and it is time to promote it

 Let's do the math: a year to get started (to come up with the idea, to get the grant), at least two years to do the research, one year to write and revise, six months if one is lucky in the review process, and one year to publish: 4.5 years.  For this book, we finished just outside the money the first year we applied for a grant from SSHRC. They tell you where you ranked in the competition, and we were exactly one spot out of getting funded. The next year?  We finished first.  So, that delayed the book by a year.  We then got the money and started traveling--from 2016 to early 2020.  My last bit of fieldwork was a bit of follow up in Berlin in January of 2020 to get a better array of interviews with legislators.  Phil and Dave had some plans to do more fieldwork, but the pandemic ended those plans.  Phil and I did do some zoom interviews to finish up the Canadian case.  So, four years of research.  The writing took, gasp, three years essentially with much of the progress made last summer as we all had "free" time at the same moment so we could revise, send to a co-author, get some revisions quickly, send to the next co-author, get some more revisions and accepted changes, and then back to the first co-author.  

So, that would be eight years thus far from 2015 to 2023.  2024 is for hopefully getting through the publication process. Wish us luck for a speedy, positive experience so that the book is accepted this summer/fall, which would mean a publication date of 2025.  Which would mean ten years from the start and nine years from my last book.  

Good thing I am a full professor and don't need this book for promotion.  It does go to show that there is a hell of a lot of pressure to get a book done at places where one needs a book (and usually a good book at a good to great press) to get tenure.  As mentioned above, this is possible only if one is building from one's dissertation, where much of the research and writing has been done.  In my case, I added a case study (Yugoslavia) which had started and "ended" while I was working on the dissertation and then learning how to teach in my first job.*  And I added some quant work as mixed methods was starting to become the thing, and I had discovered folks had collected data that I could use (thanks to Ted Gurr and the folks at the Minorities at Risk project).  

Anyhow, this could all be read as a rationalization for why it took so long to write this book, but I think it is also a handy example for understanding why academics don't pump out books as fast as Robert B. Parker did in the old days.  We are faster than George RR Martin, so there's that.

 * Never study a moving object.  While I thought much about the Yugoslav case while writing my dissertation as the country broke apart the month I defended my dissertation proposal, I could only really study it once the war ended in 1995. 

 

 

Academic Careerism: What Is Misunderstood

Academia has long been misunderstood in so many ways.  That folks don't understand the academic job market has long been a theme here.  Lately, folks have been wondering about our motives, with some of this questioning the integrity of the average academic.  So, let me take the lenses we apply to politicians and focus them on the average North American academic.  To be clear, there are exceptions, such as the recent scandal about a climate change scholar taking big bucks from polluters to shill for them.  But when I focus on the basics, these tend to apply to most folks, at least in the research university landscape.

I raise this today because folks think that we academics may sell our souls for grant money.  I have been asked whether I filter what I say in order to get ahead in this business.  Folks who know me giggle at the idea that I filter myself much.  So, what does it take to get ahead in academia, and does the desire for/pressure to get government money lead folks to be less critical?

Since we assume that politicians are careerists, that they are motivated by the desire for election and then re-election, it is only fair that folks assume about academics that they are motivated by the desire to be employed and then promoted.  What does it take to get a job and then promoted?  A shit ton of luck these days.  But mostly academic publications.  We don't get academic jobs in the US or Canada (I can't speak about Mexico or elsewhere) because we do television or radio or say nice things about the government.  We get jobs and we get promoted almost entirely based on how many articles/books we publish, where they are published, whether other academics cite our stuff.  

Where does the money come in?  It matters--and how much it matters varies by discipline--but grant money (not consulting money, more on that later) pays for the research, which then gets us the publications.  Some folks need less grant money than others.  If you need to travel to do fieldwork or to access archives, that costs money. If you need research assistants to code data, they don't work for free (ok, sometimes they work for academic credits or for co-authorship, but mostly they work for pay).  As I have said elsewhere, grant money rarely goes into our pockets.* 

Getting back to publishing, does sucking up to the powers that be get you more pubs?  Well, if you mean government, no.  If you mean the bigger names in the field, that depends on the journal/editor/reviewers.  But mostly what sells a paper are a combination of whether it asks an interesting question (interesting to the editor, to the reviewers), whether it poses an interesting answer (ditto), whether the methods are rigorous and perhaps funky (innovative methods can help... and maybe hurt), whether it has important ramifications.  None of this is aimed at the government--while funding trends can drive research to a certain area, like counterterrorism after 9/11 and counterinsurgency after the US poured gasoline all over Iraq and Afghanistan, the reviewers and editors are the key audiences.  

So, what drives our research agendas?  This cartoon illustrates it nicely:

 That is, profs study the stuff that interests them.  We are driven by curiosity.  I always say we can't control where we do our work, but we can control what our work is.  Scholars vary widely in what they choose to study and why they choose to study whatever it is they study, but it is largely up to them, especially after tenure.  Sure, a department hires a prof to do something, like teach and research International Relations, and maybe something more specific like International Trade, but the questions they ask, the methods they use, the answers they get are not stuff that anyone but the scholar controls.  Some profs may aim their research at hot topics thinking that will get them better publications, but we suck at evaluating what is going to be hot in two to seven years--it takes a while to do the research and then more time to publish.  So, yes, folks can try to game things, but mostly profs study what they want and how they want because that is why they became profs.  So, in all of Marvel-dom, this particular scientist just wants to turn people into dinosaurs, and that might be the most realistic villain--a PhD with a specific interest due to their own preferences. 

Other stuff matters in career progression--networking so that the right people end up writing your letters and inviting to you to various reindeer games--edited volume projects, special issues, etc.  But pandering to donors?  Not really a thing.

There is, of course, one potential exception to all of this--consulting.  As profs are experts in their area, folks in the public and private sectors may want to hire some to provide their insights.  And then, yeah, the prof may aim at telling the funder what they want to hear.  Profs should list who they consult for--I have seem some economists with very fulsome conflict of interest statements.  Poli sci doesn't have quite the same norms, at least not yet. 

In my mind, I do think there is a world of difference between grants and consulting contracts, but I don't have much experience in the latter so I can't speak to it as well.   

Is there careerism in academia?  Certainly.  But it does not operate the way some may suggest--ego, ambition, and even greed matter, but who we pander to is not so obvious nor does the pandering lead to betraying most of our ideals and findings.  As always, if you wonder what is driving us, read our stuff.

*In the US, there is this strange thing called summer money--that since one is often technically employed for 9 months, a grant can include some money for summer wages.  That does not exist in Canada since we are on 12 month contracts.  And, yes, fellowships can cover food/rent/etc, unlike grants.  I recently received a fellowship that will help cover my income since my sabbatical income is 85% of my normal income.

More Germany, More Better

My quest for a sabbatical hangout has succeeded (have I mentioned rejection is inherent in this enterprise?).  The Humboldt Foundation is going to fund six months of my hanging out at the Hertie School in Berlin--three months in 2024 and three months in 2025.  The Hertie School is an international affairs graduate program and very strong in international security.  What will I be doing there?  

First, I will be pursuing the next big project: understanding the varying roles defense agencies play in democracies.  I have already been to South Korea, quite recently.  The next step will now be Germany. Obviously, being in Berlin will facilitate the German case as I will have much time to interview folks in their Minister of Defense, in their armed forces, journalists, and experts.

Second, the project involves case studies in other European countries.  So, I will be able to travel to some other parts of Europe to do some of the work for this project.  Which ones?  Not sure yet.

Third, I will get engaged in the life of Hertie, so that I can learn what the students and profs in Europe are thinking about a variety of international security issues.  Marina Henke, one of the very sharpest scholars on alliance politics and international security, is my host, so I hope to learn much from her about how folks are thinking about NATO, Ukraine-Russia, and other topics. 

Fourth, I hope to have some chances to visit various research centers and talk about my work and, again, get different perspectives.  I will be a cheap date for two winters--that it won't be hard to bring me to any place from the UK to Eastern Europe, compared to the costs of flying me across the Atlantic.  That's, um, a hint. 

Fifth, deep into my career, I need a breath of fresh air, a change of pace, a bit of a shake up.  Sabbaticals are good for that, but sabbaticals away from home are better at it. 

Oh, and maybe there will be some time for tourism and skiing.  

So, there will be the complications of getting a visa and finding an apartment, but overall, it is time for this senior scholar to do a happy dance:

Researching the Canadian Military: How Many REB's Do We Need?

 Yesterday, I participated at a roundtable consultation with the Social Sciences Research Review Board* [SSRRB], which is DND/CAF's equivalent of a research ethics board.  The meeting was partly to brief us (some profs researching the military, some research ethics board folks) and partly to get our feedback on how things are going and about potential reforms.

*  The SSRB process is essentially run out of the Director General Military Personnel Research and Analysis.  And that was cool to learn since DGMPRA is a partner of the CDSN, with one of its staff, Irina Goldenberg, serving as one of our Co-Directors. 

I would say that this institution, like research ethics boards, are necessary evils for researchers, but they are not evil.  They can be inconvenient, but as one REB participant said, they create necessary friction.  Social science has a history of doing harm to its research subjects--with the most infamous ones being the Milgram experiments and the Stanford Prison experiments.  What is it about psychologists that cause them to be the exemplars for this stuff?  I don't know, but I do know that Carleton has separate REBs for psych versus other social sciences since the former needs more vigilance than the latter.

Part of the challenge of REBs and especially SSRRB is that we hear the horror stories, but do not have a good sense of how much they slow researchers down, how much of that is due to the researchers and how much of that is due to the review process.  I can give you one example that is most trivial that slowed my latest one down: the Carleton REB required me to change my various documents (the consent form I give to my research subjects, for example) to update the new Carleton logo.  Which is, to be clear, utter bullshit since an old logo or a new one has no implications for whether I would be creating risk for the research subjects if they consented to be a research subject (to agree to be interviewed).  But the change did not take me long.  

Anyhow, SSRRB does not have a website!  So, their ability to convey info is not great, so we can borrow from a organization (and CDSN partner) that interacts with SSRRB quite often: CIMVHR! CIMVHR is the Canadian Institute for Military and Veteran Health Research, and while much of their work is on health stuff, which goes to a different board, their members do a lot of social science stuff (more on that below).  So, the CIMVHR website provides much more help for SSRRB than, well, SSRRB does right now:

We encourage all applicants to review the Social Science Research Review Board (SSRRB) requirements before applying; For SSRRB inquiries contact: ssrrb-cerss@forces.gc.ca

So, our first recommendation was for them to get a website!

Anyhow, they explained the process, and it was most relevant as I just had a student face serious challenges.  To get SSRRB approval, one needs an internal sponsor within the CAF or DND.  What is most confusing about this is that it needs to be an L1 organization--which means the Army or the Navy or the Air Force or a command like CANSOF or CJOC.  Does that mean that it needs to be approved by THE L1?  The commander of the Navy, the chief of the army and so forth?  Um, depends on what you are asking?  If you are asking to survey a specific unit, one can perhaps work with someone at the LCol level rather than having the big boss sign off.  The SSRRB folks said that they could help folks find a sponsor, which my student didn't experience.

Why a sponsor and then why are other approvals needed?  The SSRRB folks said this was mostly to prevent survey fatigue and researchers getting in the way of operations, etc.  I did ask about whether this could serve as a veto in the research process since there is language in the documents (from Treasury Board) about the research being in the interests of the organization.  The SSRRB folks insisted this didn't happen, but it is hard to tell if that is the case.  

The big thing in play is that the Arbour Report had a recommendation (#46) specifically focused on this stuff.  Specifically, why should academics have to go through their university REBs and then do it again with SSRB?  They are working on three three options:

1. Allow for concurrent review with academics so that folks don't have to wait and if they get feedback from one system, they can then revise what is in the other.
2. Have SSRRB accept or waive the ethics stuff in their process if a researcher can provide them with a REB certificate from their home institution, and just work on the stuff that is DND/CAF-centric--security/operational issues, whether the research has already been done (lots of internal research that we don't have easy access to), or whether it gets in the way of operations.
3. Collaborative agreements whereby a university's REB and SSRRB agree perhaps to SSRRB essentially be one-stop shopping--that if one gets SSRRB approval, then the home university accepts that as a legit REB approval.  

The idea here for any reform is to make it easier/simpler/quicker for academics.  Grad students and junior faculty do not have a lot of time to go through multiple processes.  So, this is a work in progress, but it does look like things will get easier although perhaps not easy.  Getting a sponsor is not so easy and getting commanders to approve of research in their area of responsibility is tricky as well.  But eliminating duplicative REB processes would be a big improvement.

I mentioned social science above--one of the things that drives me crazy works in a positive way here: a narrow definition of what counts as social science.  In the minds of the SSRRB folks, as far as I can tell, there is a tendency to consider surveys as social science and may be focus group stuff, but not other stuff, which means that other stuff (which really is social science) does not fall into their domain.  So, one can do elite interviews (the stuff I do) since they are "consultations".  One can also do program eval, which don't count as research if worded correctly.  So, either one's REB or SSRRB can help frame a project so that going through SSRRB's approval process is not necessary.  On the other hand, having that stamp of approval is handy for getting commanders to allow pesky academics to have access to subordinates.

So, the big punchlines are: SSRRB may not be as much a gate keeper as folks think, and if they are gate keepers, they are willing to change due to the Arbour report to make things better.  Oh, and there are ways to dodge them.  I still worry about the parts of their procedures that give senior folks in the CAF the ability to veto research, but the practical reality is that one can't do a variety of research projects on the military if  the commander is hostile, whether or not there is a procedure that gives them a veto.

One last thing: DGMPRA have done a lot of studies on personnel issues, so if one is working on that, it is best to approach them and see if a related project may have produced data--they are willing to share data.  Tis what the collaborative agreements are for. 

 

Sabbatical Plans? We Don't Need No Plans!

 Ok, maybe we do.  Seven years ago, I posted my plans for that sabbatical, my second one. Before discussing my plans for this year (July to June), let me check out how I did last time.

1. Make progress on the legislatures and civ-mil book with Phil and Dave.  Well, I did do a heap of research on that book, going to Japan three times!  The other trips happened later due to impeachments in Brazil and then South Korea.  which should have been finished by now.  We did manage to publish a bunch of articles: on Canada, hCommunity Policing as a metaphor for Belgium/NZ, and the entire set of cases.  But the book itself is not yet complete--we hope to finish it off in the next month or two.  Publishers are interested in it, so we just need to revise to make the entire team-written thing sound like one person wrote it.  
2. Smaller projects although not policy relevance piece nor the bureaucratic politics piece (more on that below). Instead, I finally published the testing the hypotheses about professionalization piece.
3. Apply for the partnership grant.  Yep, it took two tries, but we got it.  It has dominated my destiny ever since.  I have no regrets as CDSN-ing has not only helped fulfill the various objectives we had set out (foster a more diverse/inclusive/equitable next generation, become a world-class network that folks outside of Canada will connect with, advance our understanding of defence and security issues, improve the defence/security literacy of Canadians, foster research projects across the various divides, etc), but has been so personally rewarding--I have learned a lot, developed new skills (management?), traveled to cool places, and engaged with so many folks in and out of government.  
4. Read?  Not as much as I would like.

So, what am I going to do with this sabbatical?  

1. 
   With the legislature book project winding down, I am hoping to make progress on the Steve, Phil, and Ora project: comparing defence agencies around the world.  What roles do ministries and departments of defense see for themselves?  How are they viewed by the militaries they interact with?  This project will merge with the aforementioned bureaucracies project--what is the nature of each democracy's policy marketplace?
1.  Mostly the same cases as before but with new ones.  I don't know exactly where I am going to be during this sabbatical, as a couple of fellowship applications didn't work out, one got deferred, and I applied for two more after the initial results came in.  The joy of comparing 15 plus countries means I can go pretty much anywhere.  This fall, I am probably headed for shorter trips to South Korea and Denmark, but that could change.
2. I do plan to spend much of the winter somewhere, with the contenders right now being Rome, Berlin, and Taipei. 
   
2. I plan to do a better job of keeping my promise re smaller projects.
1. There is the aforementioned policy relevance piece that will have new data soon.
2. There are a few surveys of the Canadian public I am working on with JC Boucher, and we hope to push out those results this year.
3. Start the work to organize a workshop on the uses and abuses, pro's and con's of using principal-agent theory in Canadian defence/security stuff.
   
4. A few other things that are on the edges of my attention right now.
3. CDSN-ing!  We have a variety of new and continuing stuff to execute--the Summer Institute, the Year Ahead, the Capstone, the various other opportunities plus a Meeting of the MINDS workshop for the leaders, project directors, and students associated with the nine MINDS networks.  Oh, and I will start prepping the next big grant application to keep us going beyond the first seven years.
4. 
   Read!  This time, I mean it.  I have a stack of great civ-mil books that I want to catch up on.  I am going to try to set aside one day each week just for reading.  Let's see if that is a pie crust promise!

Sabbaticals are perhaps the coolest thing in academia--a year to reset, refresh, travel, complete old projects, start new ones.  It is not a year off, as we tend to pile on a lot of work into these years--just not service and teaching (especially grading).  I will still supervise the PhD students I committed to, the MA students who have projects underway, and the CDSN-related service.  But I will not be attending department meetings or retreats, and I will not be serving on any committees.  Woot!

It is my penultimate sabbatical unless I want to work an extra five years to get a year of sabbatical.  This is the one for all the marbles, as the next one will probably be a teaching gig someplace that I want to live for a little while.   No pressure!

Gender Discrimination in Security Studies

 Yesterday, I participated in a roundtable on gender discrimination in security studies at the annual conference of the European Initiative on Security Studies [EISS].  EISS is a relatively new network of European security scholars.  This is, I believe, my third time attending, as I have been seeking to build connections between the CDSN and Europe.  It doesn't hurt, of course, that the EISS conferences have been in Paris, Berlin, and now Barcelona.  I presented my very preliminary work on the next project--variations in what Defense Agencies (DoD, MoD, etc) do, receiving lots of very helpful comments during that panel and the lunch that preceded it.  

A couple of months ago, Hugo Meijer, the Director of EISS, asked me if I would be willing to join a panel on gender discrimination.  I had some hesistancy as I am not an expert--as I told the room yesterday, I am a feminist but my work does not take feminist approach to international relations and I don't study gender.  That last bit is not as true as it used to be, as I am involved in a project that has surveyed Canadian security scholars about their experiences, focusing on gender discrimination.  But I agreed to speak since I have seen a lot of problems over the years and was going to be the most experienced (oldest) person on the panel.  Plus I was the only one to give a North American perspective.  I was joined by fellow civ-mil scholar and super kind Chiara Ruffa of Science Po as well as two feminist scholars who were online: Annick Wibben of Swedish Defence University, and Vanessa Newby, Leiden University.

We were asked two questions: when did we first notice gender problems in the field and what is some advice we have for handling this stuff?  The first question was pretty easy: almost immediately as there was a case of sexual harassment in my grad program.  I then discussed that two of the places that I worked had toxic environments thanks to male profs preying upon grad students, as well as citation patterns and hiring stuff.  That men have often reported that women get all of the jobs, which is strange since there are still plenty of men in the discipline.  I didn't have time to get into the love of old boys networks by some senior scholars or how some post-doc funders tended to only give to men back in the day.  In short, lots of problems which I have discussed here from time to time.  Chiara, Annick, and Vanessa had much more to say on this, alas.  

For the second question, I cautioned that I can't really tell women how to behave--not my role--but I had some ideas for making some improvements--building from my CDSN experience--to be deliberate about panel organization--no manels, deny platforms to those who are known to be predators or otherwise assholes, find or found organizations that seek to elevate and mentor women and work with them, as we have with WIIS-Canada, WCAPS-Canada, as well as Out in National Security such as WIIS Europe.  

In the following Q&A, folks raised questions about the pace of change and what can we do in the face of structural problems.  I mentioned this meme: 

 But then I noted an earlier presentation that day invoked structuration theory (something I wrote about in my very first IR theory class in grad school, taught be the gone too soon John Ruggie)--that agent and structure shape each other.   So, we need to act individually and collectively to change the norms, the institutions, and the social structures that, well, maintain patriarchy.  I pointed out that when I started, the room would have been almost entirely male, and that EISS and CDSN are efforts to foster more diverse defence/security communities.  These folks have a right to be impatient, but we ought not be too pessimistic or deterred--we can make a difference and improve things.  

It was a good and important conversation to have, and I hope it spurs further conversations.  It was strange to be discussing this stuff on a day where the US Supreme Court made things worse for women, for LGBTQ2S+, and for other historically excluded groups... but definitely much needed.

Mama, Don't Let Your Kid Get PhDs in Poli Sci

 One could look at this figure and say things are getting back to normal.

Total jobs listed on ejobs' September newsletter, 2016-2022. Not perfect (it includes TT and non-TT jobs), but given that a lot of jobs are announced alongside APSA I think it's a decent measure of the job market across time.

@C_Wolbrecht #psjminfo pic.twitter.com/20mcjRuVUQ

— Michelangelo Landgrave (@MichelLandgrave) January 23, 2023

Woot?  Well, maybe, but the old normal was awful.  The academic job market has been bad, really bad, for a long time, with a few bursts of good years.  We have been overproducing PhDs for a long time.  I wish that figure had included a line for number of PhDs produced as I am pretty sure it would exceed the line of jobs by quite a bit.  

Of course, folks will say: hey, that does not count the number of non-academic jobs that poli sci PhDs get, and that people should look there.  My responses to that are as follows:

• Most of the folks going to academic PhD programs want academic jobs (and so too do a number of folks going to policy PhD programs).  
• How much added value do folks get from academic PhD programs that help them get jobs in the non-academic sector?  Do the five or more extra years give them a leg up over those who just get MAs?  Is that leg up = or > the five+ years of opportunity costs?

I teach at a policy school where our aim is to train folks for the policy world, not the academic work.  In Canada, alas, there is not that much of a market for policy-oriented PhDs.  We don't have much in the way of think tanks, there are only a few govt jobs that either require PhDs or where the PhD gives one an advantage over an MA, and, the govt does not pay someone more if they have a PhD.  So, I have spent my time here wondering why we have a PhD program.  It may be a bit different in the US where there are more job opportunities for policy Phds--more think tanks, etc.

So, I have spent the last twenty plus years discouraging students who approach me about PhDs.  How many have I discouraged?  Pretty sure the answer is between zero and two.  They tend to think that what may be true for other folks is not true for them, that their interests are in demand and super-interesting.  Why am I posting this today?  Because I have a bevy of folks reaching out to talk to me about PhD programs this month.  It must be the season.

I haven't tracked what has happened to all those for whom I have written letters of recommendation.  I do know that a couple of the MA students I had at McGill got great PhDs and then great academic jobs.  I do know that all but one of my PhD students in my previous stops (McG but also TTU) have gotten tenure-track positions, and I am old enough now that all of them have gotten tenure and are either Full or Associate Professors (one is still in the tenure decision process). Oh wait, those are the PhD students who completed their PhDs.  Most did, but some did not.  One thing I have gotten better about is telling those working and flailing at their PhDs to move on.  

At Carleton, I have been asked by students: what happens if I get a policy job offer before I complete my dissertation?  I say, "TAKE IT!"  They say "but it might mean I don't finish my dissertation."  And I respond "Take the job!"  Jobs are not street cars.  So, the percentage of my PhD students who finish here is not as good as it was in the previous spot partly because these students are looking at the policy world and being done is not quite as crucial.  My ego here is not as invested in having students finish--I just want them to be happy and getting paid by someone who is not me.  

I will post this and then folks will ignore it and apply anyway.  Why bother posting it?  Because spewing is venting.

 

Some Self-Imposed Reviewing Rules

 Tis that time of year: to write tenure/promotion letters.  Usually, sometime in the late spring or early summer, chairs/associate deans/etc reach out and ask academics of the right rank (tenured for tenure decisions, full profs for promotion to full) to write letters evaluating candidates for promotion.*  This is a big ask because one is expected to review someone's entire research output (outsiders are in a lousy position to evaluate teaching/service), and, no, we don't get paid to do it.

We feel obligated to do it because others wrote letters about us and because there is an understanding that saying no might be interpreted as saying that person should not be promoted.  I have written about this before, but I am writing now to provide some rules I use to get through this.  I had whined about this on facebook, and someone asked where my rules came from, which inspires this post.

But before proceeding, a few caveats:

• these are my rules--they are not the norms of the profession.  I don't know how they impact candidates since I have not been on a tenure/promotion process in some time (Carleton does this stuff by subcommittee)
• I don't get hit as hard as women and people from historically excluded groups as deans/chairs/whoever seek representation and thus pile on more work on these folks.
• I don't get hit as hard as people with bigger names or people at more prestigious places.  Moving to Carleton from McG helped me in this regard.
• I also don't get as many requests as those who have work that is quite broad.  Working on ethnic conflict then and civil-military relations now means getting requests to review people in both areas but not in an area such as "Congress" or "IR Theory."

Ok, so what are my rules/procedures?

1. I try to do only three letters a year.  Each review takes multiple days to the reading and then drafting the letter.  As a way to manage all of the stuff I have to do, containing this unpaid and unrewarded stuff to just three is necessary.  I have told my friends who get hit hard that three is enough for them too.  Given that we do this every year after tenure and we don't need that many letters ourselves (one per promotion and then maybe for a move or two), we are definitely paying far more forward.  
2. Comparison is the thief of joy.  I actually love to compare, and it is essential to my research.  But I HATE being asked to compare a candidate to other people.  In my view, academia is not a competitive bloodsport but an effort to make contributions to knowledge.  Did someone do interesting research that informed debates and moved the discussion forward?  Not did person x do more research than person y.  Some places will give a specific set of names and say: did the candidate do better than these people?   I have decided not to play this game, as I don't know the conditions at each university of each potential competitor that might facilitate or inhibit the research of the various folks involved--variations in course loads and course releases, help or lack thereof for grading, service requirements, internal funding, etc.  Some people will write letters that evaluate the work but don't recommend promotion because they don't feel they have a good understanding of the rest of the record--they stick with what they can know and say.
   
3. When I get the package, I try to figure out which five pieces to focus on.  I have finite time and I am easily distracted.  So, I am not willing to read the entire package.  And I don't think I need to. If I can't figure out if a person has made a contribution from reading either their five most well placed publications or five publications in my area of expertise, I am not going to find it in publication 7 or 10.  I have no idea how this plays with promotion committees, but I am explicit about it.  For promotion to full, I only read the stuff since they got tenure.  I don't need to re-hash the tenure decision--the question is whether they continued to contribute.
   
4. I will not dodge a negative review.  If I am asked to review someone who falls short of the tenure standards at my school (the letter requests often ask whether person x could get tenure or promotion at my place), I will still agree to write the letter.  I don't want universities to think that no letter means a negative review, and my limited capacity to influence that perception is to write negative reviews when the situations arise.  And, yes, I have done it a few times.  It was not fun, but I try to fairly assess each file--does the person make a contribution, does their trajectory look good, would I promote them at my place?  If the answers are no, no, and no, then I write the letter that way.  

What are my general standards, subject to instruction from the place requesting the letter?  Completion of an original research project--that can be a book, a series of articles, or a mix; the start of a second project.  I do check the citation record, but don't focus on it since the committee can do that.  My job is to assess the intellectual contribution of the work--have they asked relevant questions, have they developed persuasive arguments to answer those questions, have their methods been appropriate for testing their arguments, how has their work advanced the debate?  Not every aspect has to be original.  It can be a classic question with a new answer, or a new method or dataset to test existing arguments, but something has to be different than that which has been done before.  While replication is something we should do more, one's tenure should not be based on replicating previous work.

Finally, I have no idea how my tenure letters are received.  All I know is that almost everyone who I have written a positive letter for has received tenure/promotion.  The exceptions?  The places that deny most/all people--the Harvards and their ilk.  Of those who I have written a negative letter?  I think most or all of this handful have been denied.  And this is one reason why I impose limits on my work in this area--I am not sure I am making a difference (not that I want to--to be the one person standing in the way of someone's tenure).  Since much of this is pro forma one way or the other, it does not make sense that I spend my entire summer reviewing five or six tenure cases and reading every single piece of written work.  

Or at least, that is my rationalization.  I am not sure what other people use as their rules, but I wish we had more transparency on this so that we could all have reasonable expectations and so that committees and deans and provosts would understand the collective action problem they are generating.

*  I just got two requests and said no to both since I am full up.  Asking for letters in late July is not a good strategy in my humble opinion.

Ten Years Off the Market And I Feel Fine

I saw a tweet yesterday about how wrong it is for academics to accept that they can't choose where they live.  For me, I never had more than a binary choice, starting with move for a temp job or ?  and then move to Texas or leave the profession and then move to a foreign country or stay in Lubbock and then move to Ottawa or stay in Montreal.  Not quite a wide range of choices at any stage.  And that was after managing to get a job offer, and it all reminded me that sometime this week will be the tenth anniversary of a strange email that put me on the path of ... chill?  

In the spring of 2011, I applied for a job for which I had no real shot and I knew that going in.  But I was looking for practice and networking, and then something strange happened: I got a different job.  In August of 2011, I contacted a friend I had at NPSIA and I asked whether they could tell me what I had done well and what I had done poorly so that I could improve for the next round of job applications.  That friend said, no, wait, we have a new Dean who will call you soon.  The next week, I got the call and the offer.  Which meant many things including that I was not going on the job market in the fall of 2011.  I had been looking to move on for about four or five years, and that was pretty much my normal state for most of my career--my last year of grad school, my two years as a temp at UVM, pretty much my entire time at TTU, and then the second half of my time at McG--about 3/4s of my career until I got the Carleton job.

Over the course of my career, I applied to hundreds of jobs, got about 20 interviews, and got three offers--TTU, McG, Carleton--and had to explain the job market to those outside academia again and again.  This thread puts some of this into perspective for the current day.  In my experience, being on the market was a constant source of stress, a significant hunk of time, very distracting, and, yes, a significant source of stress (deserves mentioning at least twice).  I did meet some great people along the way, even at job talks where I failed and flailed.  Looking back, I see how each step helped me get to the next step.

And now, what is the next step?  Keeping on keeping on, as I am quite happy where I am at, and I am through running competing for a new job.  I forget how stressed I was for much of my career, but junior folks sharing their experiences on twitter remind me of the bumps along the way.  Losing to none of the above, forgetting a key hunk of my argument, invoking a really bad example that served to distract rather than inform, being delayed so that I arrive unfed just before the plane leaves only to have that plane diverted and then miss my connection home so that I had to sleep at the gate at DFW, ....

I am really grateful for all of the help I received along the way and for all of the solace I received from my family including the dog that accompanied us from grad school through to the first three jobs.  And I am really grateful I don't have to compete for another job ever again.  Now the questions are not about when and where I will move to next but when I will retire.  The answer: not soon.  I really like what I do, who I do it with, and where I do it.  Each step was an improvement along the way, and I am, COVID aside, happier than I have ever been.  

Much sympathy to those on the market in this most difficult time.  Good luck!

Are We Having Fun Yet? Academic Silliness

 I saw this tweet and was kind of surprised:

I feel like academia is often portrayed as an all-serious business. Especially on Twitter.

To provide some balance: What is the funniest thing that happened to you as an academic?

— Eric Neumann (@ericneumannpsyc) April 14, 2021

Because I have seen a lot of funny stuff and, I think, said a lot of funny stuff over the years, I was surprised by this post and had too much to say to fit into a tweet.  It is not rare that we academics do things that make us laugh, that our students often say things that make us laugh, that we end up hanging out and silliness ensues.  So, given how depressing things are in the big wave of COVID here, I thought I would listicle the funniest things I have done/heard/seen over the past thirty years of academia-ing.

1. 
    The funniest thing that has ever happened to me in this academic business is the hardest to describe.  In my big Intro to IR class at McGill (600 students), I often made references to bags of milk as that is how folks in Ontario and Quebec get their milk, rather than jugs, and that more than anything else was a constant reminder I was in a foreign land.  I forget why kangaroos came up, but a student in the crowd said "kangaroo milk" as after I mentioned the roos.  It was the perfect moment, and so I laughed so hard that I couldn't breathe, and I kept laughing and tears came.  It was so very funny, and it is really hard to describe.  I also really enjoyed wearing costumes on/near Halloween if the studnets gave enough $ to UNICEF.
   
   
2. One of the funniest things (at least to me) that I did in a classroom was during a smallish summer school lecture class back around 1996 or 1997.  This was when cell phones were scarce.  I rented a beeper in 1996 when my wife was pregnant.  Anyway, a student's cell phone went off, and he not only took the call but walked out of the class to carry on the conversation.  I was so put off that I mused aloud to my students that I had no policy on this because up until recently, only drug dealers had cell phones.  And then I told my students that I was not saying that this particular student was a drug dealer.  Or that he wasn't a drug dealer.  When he came back a few minutes later after completing his call, all the students looked at him as if he were a drug dealer.  
   
3. A phd student once told me he didn't have to justify the choices in his dissertation proposal to me.  I think this is the hardest I laughed at a student.  
4. 
    For my entire year on the Joint Staff, my direct boss, an army colonel, kept saying that by the time I would leave there, I would be straightened up--short hair cut, no beard, pressed clothes, shined shoes.  So, I showed up at his retirement party towards the end of my year with a crew cut, shaved my beard, in a uniform, etc.  And no, there is no pledge pin on my uniform.  And, no, he didn't recognize me at first.
   
   
5. So many from various conferences over the years, but a few stick out.  Several involve finding new places for the floating ISA poker game because we made too much noise.  I think my favorites are when a publisher was next door--she was most gracious later on--and a recent time where we hadn't even made noise yet.  
6. 
   Speaking of ISA, I tried several times to organize an ultimate game (beach ultimate in Honolulu would have been great last year), and the one time it really worked out was in San Diego.  That was a heap of academic fun:  
   
   
   
7. Does my bachelor party count?  It was by and for political scientists.  I don't remember much of it, but it was a lot of fun. Its funniest moment happened while I was passed out.  Or so I am told.
   
8. Which gets to grad school--I had a lot of fun as I learned how to be an academic (well, they didn't train us in how to profess, just how to think and research).  The funniest non-bachelor party moment?  Perhaps the time the new student introduced his wife to me and my girlfriend (now Mrs. Spew) and asked us if we wanted to swap.  Holy first impression, Batman.  Or it could have been the Halloween parties as the folks dressed up great.  I went as a reporter one year and a pepper another year. 
   
9. I have had so much fun interviewing experts, policy-makers, politicians, and military officers.  I remember so many times driving back to Montreal from Ottawa repeating the mantra "I love my job" as I learned so much interesting stuff from the people I interviewed.  The funniest moment, in retrospect, was me falling asleep on the couch of the Turkish general.
   
10.  In  2007, the Canadian Armed Foces and NATO brought a bunch of academics to Kabul and Kandahar in an effort to sell the Afghanistan mission to the Canadian public.  That, by itself, is a funny idea.  But perhaps the funniest part was the gun show.  We visited the HQ of the NATO forces based in Kabul--French, Germans, Italians (got love that Italian beret).  As part of the orientation/presentation, they took us outside and showed us their weaponry.  It was funny not only because I look silly in a sniper gilly suit, but because this was a wonderfully amusing act of overcompensation.  At the time, those three countries were among the lamest in Afghanistan, limited by restrictions imposed by their home countries. The Italians and Germans could not engage in offensive operations or leave their relatively safe sectors, and the French were pretending that they didn't do violent counter-insurgency because Chirac was still pissed at Bush.  So, a gunshow was so silly--it didn't persuade any of us how warrior-ish these three contingents were.  But I got photos that make me laugh to this day and were handy when presenting my NATO/Canada in Afghanistan stuff.  

I have had many funny students and colleagues over the years.  I have laughed a lot.  If academics are seen as boring and stuffy, well, some of that is true.  But if we are seen as lacking humor, that is entirely wrong.  I love to laugh and to make others laugh.  And over the past thirty plus years (yikes!), I have laughed a lot.  I mean, how can you not at a student piping up in a massive, dark lecture hall, saying "Kangaroo milk!"

The Hardest Part of Starting a Research Project

 I originally asked what the hardest part of doing social science is and folks ended up talking about policy relevance and getting published and getting grants.  So, to be clear, my focus was and is for this post--how to get started and what is the hardest mental/brainpower part. As a prof running a PhD dissertation proposal workshop, as a supervisor of nearly 20 PhD students over my career, and as a researcher, I thought the answer was obvious.  But nope, it ain't:

 What is the hardest part of doing social science?

— Steve Saideman (@smsaideman) February 16, 2021

Turns out all three parts--the question, the answer, how to figure out if the answer is right--are all seen as being the hardest part by roughly an equal percentage of people who answered the survey.  Again, others suggested other parts of the process, but every research project involves at least these three pieces.  And again, I was really trying to ask about what is the hardest mental exercise--figuring out what to study, how to think about it, or how to design the research?

I asked this survey out of frustration--that many of my current students are so focused on the methods that they skip over the thing that logically comes before methods: what is your proposed answer to the question?  What is your theory of x?  What do you think is the key causal mechanisms at work, what are the key conditions associated with the outcome, and why?  What is the logic of all of this?  What is the logical glue that holds together the various things that you think matters most?* 

I do think that coming up with research questions is hard, especially early in one's career. Dr. Wahedi's points here are really important.

But once you've been around a while, started developing your own work, you have a stack of questions that fit into your broader theoretical framework and are limited by what you can get an identification strategy for, or what you can pull off within budget/data constraints,

— Dr. Laila Wahedi (@lwahedi) February 17, 2021

That it is hard to figure out what to ask that hasn't been asked before.  Or, more likely, what has been asked but not answered satisfactorily that one can answer?  Of course, that already begins to bleed into the theory--do I have an answer that hasn't been posed or posed well before? As Dr. W suggests, this probably gets easier over time.  I have found it far easier now than when I started to figure out what questions are interesting and have not been answered satisfactorily.  I now have too many questions, not enough time to figure out the answers and then do the research.

The methods should be driven by the theory.  It can be hard to figure out how to test a theory, but, it is, of course, impossible without having some observable implications derived from a theory to try to, um, observe.  Once one has hypotheses, figuring out to test them can be much work.  Is there a dataset?  Can one construct a dataset?  What kinds of case studies make sense?  Most likely?  Least likely?  A sample representing the different possibilities (one case for each cell of a 2 by 2)?  Outliers?  There are plenty of books and articles that explain not just the methods but how to select which ones.  Why choose negative binomial distribution rather than poisson?  

There are far fewer guides for how to think theoretically.  While there are plenty of courses aimed at improving one's ability to think theoretically, none are so explicit about step 2 as methods courses are regarding step 3 (unless one gets a purely theoretical version of a methods course, like, alas, I got long ago).

Perhaps one reason why my Phd students in the past found this harder than other students is that I am not a disciple nor insist that my students be disciples.  I am theoretically eclectic as my supervisor was before me, and so I can't tell my students to think in a particular way.  If I did, then the challenge they would have faced is: what is a good question to apply our favorite theory to and what are the methods to test it.  For the proposal class, this is doubly true since the students range across International Affairs, from largely economic studies on trade or investment to mixed questions to mostly poli sci type questions.  So, there definitely is no magical theory that all students should be adopting.  Indeed, many of them apply pieces of theories that I am most unfamiliar with.   Which then makes it harder for me to help them through this troublesome stage.  

However, the survey suggests that I was wrong about which part of the research thinking process is the hardest.  Ironically, I have found an interesting question--why do people see the different stages differently?  I could develop a theory, but that would require work.  So, we don't really know what is the hardest part.  Tom Petty said it was the waiting, but Blondie says otherwise.

* My view of all of this is, of course, biased as I am a positivist.  One of my struggles with post-positivism is understanding how their pieces fit together.

 

 

So Many Letters, So Many Futures

Today, I was writing a letter of recommendation... tis the season.  And I noodled around the directory where I keep them and realized I have 748 files in that directory.  That is not equal to 748 letters, I realized, since my basic tendency is to write a letter in word and then turn it into a pdf.  But not always, so I'd guess that I have written something like 500 letters over the course of 26 years.  These cover a range from current/former undergrads to MA students to Phd students to junior faculty to peers.  I haven't written recommendations for people senior to me, but pretty much every one else.  To be clear, I have not recommended 500 different people, as some of these folks were my Phd students, which involved me writing dozens of letters for various jobs and fellowships, and, of course, many of those letters are nearly identical.  Sure, interfolio saved me some work--a website that processes letters so I can send the letter there and then it gets sent to the various targets.

The real question, of course, is whether I have asked for 500 letters in the course of my career.  Probably not, but being on the job market for much of my career and applying for heaps of fellowships ... hmmm.  In the old days, when I was a grad student and then a very junior faculty member, my recommenders would send the letters to where I got my Phd, and their staff sent those letters to the 40-50 places I would apply every year to get my first job/second job/third job.  

So, yes, this is very much about paying it forward.  I needed letters to do what I wanted to do, so I write letters to help folks as they try to find their way.  Yes, I have tried to discourage aspiring law students and Phd students due to crappy job markets, but they don't listen so I write the letters.  I have only refused to write a few times because there is often a spot on the form that asks if I would admit them to my place.  If I can't honestly say yes to that, then I tell the student to hunt elsewhere for a letter.  The few times that has happened have not been fun conversations which kind of proved that my stance was the correct one.  

I do not ask for anything in return.  A friend of mine did ask his recommendees to give him good rate my prof scores.  Sometimes, I have gotten gifts.  I don't expect them.  I do want to get one thing from those I recommend--news: what happened to them?  Did they get in?  Did they go?  How did it go?  While I remain in touch with all of my PhD students, I don't know what happened to every MA student or every undergrad.  I occasionally bump into them on twitter or at a government building in Ottawa.  

We profs tend to whine about writing letters of recommendation because they are ... work.  To do it well takes some time even if one discovers some cheats.  My way to cut corners is to ask the students for a few adjectives that I could have possibly witnessed and examples of how I could have witnessed them.  I borrowed this from Paul Dawson, a prof at Oberlin I was too scared to take.  Students vary in how well they follow my instructions with some not really knowing what kind of attributes admissions committees care about, so I adjust along the way.  The letters tend to be due at awkward times, conflicting with the other things we juggle. So, we complain.  And we wonder how many letters are truly necessary.  Does my supervisor really need to be recommended for stuff 40 years into his career?  Doesn't the CV tell the tale?  

We don't owe any particular student a letter--if I can't recommend someone, I won't.  But we do owe our students the help they need to succeed, when we can provide that help.  The satisfaction comes far later, when we hear what has happened to these folks.  So, my recommendations to those seeking recommendations:

1. Ask politely, giving your letter-writer plenty of time to write the letter.  Give them whatever info they ask for to do the letter.
2. Remind them a few days before the deadline as profs are, yes absentminded.
3. Let them know if you got in.  And let them know if you had a good experience wherever you landed.  If we learn that the place you went is awful, well, you can pay it forward as well.

Good luck.  We know it is far tougher now than it was when we started out.  Sorry about that.  

If I Had Missed the Policy Path?

Yesteday, Thomas Juneau and Philippe Lagassé posted a piece discussing the benefits and possibilities of academics working in the policy sphere (it does not happen much in Canada) and policy-makers spending time in academia.  I indicated that such an experience, my year in the Pentagon, via the Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellowship (designed for this explicit purpose) was career and life changing.  For the better.  

How so?  First, it altered my research agenda.  I started asking questions about NATO because I sat at the Bosnia desk for a year, watching the alliance at work.  This then led, because most decisions are made by NATO members more than the alliance itself, to my focusing on comparative civil-military relations.  Which is where I still am.  I am also working on a belated project on the bureaucratic politics of the US national security process, which came directly from the stuff I observed in 2001-2002.  Second, the year in the policy world almost certainly led to the last two jobs.  The two final candidates for the McGill Canada Research Chair position in 2002 both had CFR IAF experiences.  Probably not an accident.  I am sure having policy experience was important for getting a job at a policy school ten years later.  Third, it changed my teaching.  I not only teach civ-mil relations, but I use the stuff I learned in that one year in my classes all the time.  My students are most practiced at eyerolling to my constant references to "my year in the Pentagon."  I have not only specific stories about the year but learned far more about the processes that operate, the role of personalities, and the intricacies of how the US military operates.  It was a brief but very intense experience.  Fourth, it increased my desire to foster engagement between academics and ... everyone else--the public, the policy world, and so on.

But if I had not had that experience, what would have happened to me and my career?  Well, I might not have gotten the McGill job, which means I would not be Canadian now.  I might still be in Texas, as opportunities to change from one tenured job to another are not that abundant and I don't always interview well.  The McG interview was one of the best ones in my career.  Maybe I would have ended up somewhere else, but the job market is not nearly as predictable as the tides.  So, I don't really know.  I do know that I probably would not have shifted from the International Relations of Ethnic Conflict to Alliances and Civil-Military Relations.  I certainly would not have had as much access to grant money, so I would not have engaged in such ambitious projects as comparing 15 or so democracies and how their legislatures oversee (or not) their militaries.  I would not have spent about half dozen years building a grant to fund a Canadian defence and security network.  I would not have had as many PhD students as there were few at TTU interested in working with me.  So, I would be much poorer with a much smaller TeamSteve.  And I would not have lived in Ottawa or Montreal, which means fewer friends, less ultimate, and less Canada in my life. 

Looking back, I realize that every step along the way has helped me get to where I am (even as I was unhappy and eager to move a few times across my career) and where I am is a pretty cool place.  I love the place I work, I love the work I am doing, I really appreciate the friends I have made in the Pentagon, Montreal, and Ottawa. 

So, yeah, if I had not gone to DC for that one amazing, intense, enlightening, exhausting year, I would be worse off.  I can't recommend enough that academics pursue the rare opportunities to get into the policy world.  It might be as amazing for them as it has been for me.  It may not be as life and career changing, but who knows?