Professing in the Age of American Autocracy

Before the semester started, I wrote about how the US is now an authoritarian regime, or autocracy for short.  Since then, well, oh my, I have lost track of the many ways that the Trump regime has proven this to be correct, with the latest being the firing of a comedian for daring to make fun of the Mad King.  And all of this has happened as I am teaching US Foreign Policy.  It has raised a few challenges along the way, such as having events happen mid-class (the aforementioned Kimmel suspension).  

The biggest challenge is how to approach the course as a whole.  In the days of yore, I used to teach the class quite conventionally: here are the institutions that shape US foreign policy, here are the interests of the various actors.  And before social media existed, I was able to say critical things of Republicans and Democrats, and students would wonder which side of the political spectrum I was on.  Indeed, in Montreal, more than a few that I was right wing because I studied the military and didn't mind hanging out with folks in uniform.  The advent of social media and the way I am pretty blunt ended that to some degree, but I still tried to be even-handed (although as I referred to the disbanding of the Iraqi army as the dumbest decision in US foreign policy history).

During Trump 1.0, I started to raise questions about whether the institutional approach made sense, and I tweaked the class and was more critical in the course discussions of Trump than the average American president.  At the time, I started getting frustrated with the false equivalence that was often used by the media to normalize Trump, so that affected my teaching.  Trump acting in ways that went beyond normal GOP/Dem differences, like his approach to North Korea swinging from war-mongering to, well, submission.  

Last fall, in anticipation of a possible Trump admin, I assigned most of the usual readings and supplemented with, yes, chapters of Project 2025, and this time, I was quite clear that Trump was a convicted felon and insurrectionist.  That these were not just my political opinions but facts.  

When preparing for this fall, my starting point changed quite a bit from how does US foreign policy work in a democratic society in ways that constrain and incentivize the President to how does US foreign policy work in an autocracy where the constraints are gone and it really is about the personality of the President.  So much so that I started the first class with: is an utterance on social media--a tweet or whatever--policy?  This might seem to be taking a partisan approach, that my personal stance is affecting what I teach and how I teach, but, again, I think we are in a very different situation than in the past based on the objective criteria of coding democracies and autocracies.

• Is the President constrained by the legislature? No, he killed USAID without a vote.  He has refused to spend money allocated by Congress in violation of the Constitution.
• Is the President constrained by the law?  The destruction of Venezuelan boats says no.
• Is the President constrained by public opinion?  Nope, as many of his policies are wildly unpopular.
• Is the President constrained by the media?  Nope, the media has been bullied into submission.
• Is the prospect of the next election serving as a constraint?  Does not seem so.

Which means we have focus on other stuff to explain US foreign policy. I have borrowed readings from the study of autocratic foreign policy, and I am relying a bit more on psychological approaches since the mind of the person at the top matters more when that person has fewer limits on what they can do.

This week, it came to a head for me.  The focus was on public opinion, Congress, and polarization. I warned that polarization can be seen as a false equivalence kind of thing, suggesting that both parties are spinning away from the center equally.  But we know that one party has moved farther from the middle, much farther from the middle on many issues, such as NATO, immigration, and others.  I even drew the myth of centrism--how exactly in between two parties is not the middle but just an average.  That if one party becomes more extreme, the average moves but the middle of the American public may not.  

As the conversation developed, I responded to some of the questions by indicating, yes, the GOP is supporting autocracy, and, yes, it is seeking to deny the rights of various people: trans people most obviously, but also women's rights. The latter refers not just to abortion but, thanks to some outspoken GOP folks, voting rights.  We got into the whole "why don't Dem women date Republican guys" thing, and, yeah, it went that far.  I realized I might be pushing things a bit much, moving from the analytical and the objective to the partisan.

As I was thinking about this after class, a student approached me having just checked her phone, and she told me about Kimmel. This reinforced my thinking about where we are today--the US as an autocracy and the GOP as the party facilitating the end of American democracy.  It sounds partisan, but if it is the objective truth, then so be it.  

I will continue to be uncomfortable.  This is natural when one is living through unprecedented times and having to adjust to an America where the President is unconstrained, where power is being abused on a daily basis, and where fear of the regime drives the behavior of major media conglomerates, Republican politicians, and so many previously relevant actors.  

To be clear, my discomfort pales in comparison to those professing in the US, as I know I won't get fired for writing this.  Too many (one is too many, of course) have already lost their jobs due to fear of Mad King and his mob.   I can only hope that Trump's unpopularity will be his undoing, that the US can start to recover, although it will take much time and concerted effort.  And, yes, rebellions are built on hope.

  

 

Thirty Years Fly By: Teaching IR

 This week is the 30th anniversary of my first day of teaching and of professing (although I think my first title did not include "professor" as a visiting ABD).  The first day of teaching was my best exemplar of being an absent-minded prof: I somehow forgot to bring the pile of syllabi to the first course of the day--Intro to IR... and then to my second course of the day, which was a different section of Intro to IR..... and then to my third course of the day---also Intro to IR.  This was long before folks had courseware, long before stuff was uploaded before classes started.  Profs brought paper versions of their syllabi (shorter then because of little required boilerplate) to the class. And I failed miserably in that basic task.  Have I said this before?  This is now a constant problem in my teaching (and in my blogging?)

I don't have any pics of my
early teaching so this will
have to do.

The good news is that I didn't fail as a teacher that first year.  As a last minute hire, I was lucky to get three sections of the same course, one that I had TA'ed for a few years earlier.  In my second year of grad school, at a school with a quarter system, I got to assist a terrific class, a bad class, and a class that was a bit of a mess as the prof was figuring out how to revise the class as the Cold War was ending.  So, I built that one course from the terrific class, borrowed a few tricks from the class that was a bit of a mix, and learned what to avoid by not doing what I saw in the bad class.

My aims my first year were modest: try to be clear and organized.  I had very extensive notes although I did not try to read off of them.  I spent much effort producing transparencies so that I could show the students the outlines of the lecture to keep both me and them on track.  I did not build in jokes or elaborate stunts to keep them away--the tricks developed later mostly to keep the 600 students awake and engaged at McGill.  At Vermont, I had roughly 30 students per class, did mostly lecture (much more my strength then and now, rather than leading discussion).  I am trying to remember if the classes had discussion sections... I remember not having TA's, and doing the grading myself.  Papers and exams although it has been forever since I have had in-class tests.  And it went well enough that they brought me back even after being ruled of that year's job search. 

I liked teaching quite a bit.  Sure, I am an attention hound, but talking about the stuff helped me understand it better, they asked good questions which made me think, they pushed my curiosity as I didn't always know the answers (I often did not the answers).  They were a lively, engaged bunch and I fed off of their energy.  It has been a long, long time since I taught three classes a day, but I was able to do it then by being an energy vampire.  It was really a terrific place to learn how to teach and how to manage my classes--I was a visitor whose career there was quickly to become finite, so I could focus on the teaching (no dept meetings for the visitors, no dept service either) and on the skiing.  It was also where I started to learn and theorize about department politics. 

It is kind of wild to think that particular batch of students of about 90 poli sci students are now around 50. I have not kept in touch with any of the students from that first year (although I did write a few recommendations for some of them shortly after their time with me) and only occasionally a few profs from that experience.  

Of course, I am celebrating my 30th anniversary of teaching my first classes by ... not teaching.  I am on sabbatical this year, so no teaching (except for the Summer Institute last month).  I hope to be refreshed next year, as I am entertaining the idea of teaching a new class (or an old class that I haven't taught in eight or nine years)

Looking back, I realize that I am very lucky to find something that works so well for my personality and for my excessive curiosity.  I don't enjoy grading, but hanging with the kids has kept me youngish, keep pushing me to think about stuff differently, and keep challenging me.  I have had to ditch my old cultural references, and I have to keep track of my stories better.  

I stayed in grad school in part because I could not imagine doing anything else, and, now?  My imagination still sucks, as I can't imagine anything that would have worked as well for me. 

 

That Time of Year

It takes a team.  L-R: Jean Daudelin,
Marshall, Teddy Samy.

 Despite being in this business for, gulp, nearly 30 years (September is the 30th anniversary of my first day as prof), I have rarely gone to graduations.  I tend to be traveling in June, which is Carleton's grad time, and the various places I have been didn't have a culture of all the profs showing up.  But I did recently and belatedly invest in ye olde regalia with a spiffy, puffy chapeau, so I may show up at a few more before I hang up my blazer with patched elbows.

Many of my Phd students didn't stick around for graduation either, so I don't have much practice hooding my students.  The fun yesterday was that Marshall Palmer is easily my tallest PhD student, so, yeah, I didn't do it so well.  But we got through it.  Marshall finished faster than any other student I have had, and he didn't do that by cutting corners.  He won a Senate Medal for one of the best dissertations at Carleton this year.  I found myself very frustrating when reading the drafts of his chapters, as I had very little to say--they were all on target, clear, and close to ready to go.  And the topic is mildly relevant--foreign election interference!  Which is dominating Canadian politics right now.  

I was the 2nd reader
on Brittany's
Master Research Paper

 Carleton splits all the graduations into segments, so our session was focused on the International Affairs, Public Policy and Admin, Social Welfare, and Infrastructure programs.  Which kept things snappy.  I got to see several students from my classes and CDSN-ing walk yesterday.

Margarita took my civ-mil class
this winter

Jace was also in my civ-mil
class this winter.

 

Gabriel was a CDSN
research assistant last year.
You can see him in the screen
in front of him

Hats were not much of a thing at yesterday's ceremony--none of the students had them, and few of the faculty.  Which made it easier to rock the second best chapeau.  Dean Brenda O'Neil had the best. 

And, yes, one of the problems with using blogspot is having limited control over picture placement.

Anyhow, we are super proud of these ex-students. Rock on!

Prof-ing For the First Time: Some Semi-Solicited Suggestions

 Yesterday, I saw a new prof ask for any tips or resources about how to start teaching graduate classes, so, of course, I have a variety of ideas on that topic and also other getting started stuff.

To start with, the aim for the first year of teaching at any level is just to be clear and organized.  Set the expectations low for yourself--don't try to flip a classroom if you have never done it, don't build in elaborate simulations unless you have done it before or can borrow from those for whom you have TA'ed, don't aim to be wildly funny or entertaining.  The first year means lots of new course preparations, which involve a lot of work.  Get them right and you have the foundation for teaching for, um, much of the rest of your career.  Sure, you will teach new classes and teach the old ones in different ways, but the frameworks you set up will be useful far down the road.  

A fundamental rule, unless one has TA's and one does not usually have a teaching assistant for a grad class, is that whatever you assign, you have to do--read or grade or whatever.  

Borrow what you can--use the syllabi of classes you took as inspiration--either to do or to avoid depending on what you thought of the class.  I was lucky to TA for the same class three times in my second year in grad school--it was taught well, it was taught poorly, and it was taught ... experimentally (the Cold War was ending).  So, I borrowed heavily from the former, a bit from the latter, and avoided what the less good prof did.  

Figure out what the norms are of your department--what are normal office hours, how much reading is generally assigned, what is the normal kind of assignment load.  You want to be somewhere near the department norms as much for student expectations as for fitting in.  Over time, you can deviate, but best not to shake things up at the start.  

Why such a conservative start?  Because the first year is really hard as you will be doing not one new job but several--teaching new classes to new students, researching beyond the dissertation, doing much service to the department/university/profession, public engagement, mentoring, etc.  It is a lot, and it can be very stressful when combined to living in a new place, figuring out who you can trust in your new situation, and all the rest.  

Some other random bits of advice for the person starting out:

• Be kind to staff--many faculty are not.  But they work harder and don't have the freedom that profs have to control what they do.  
• Figure out your rhythm--when you write better, when you read better--and build your office hours and other obligations around your rhythm so that you can try to be productive.  It is really hard to work on one's research during one's first year of teaching, so don't expect too much, but build your schedule as best as you can to facilitate it.  That might mean carving out mornings or carving out one or two days a week.  Whatever works for you.
• Get a sense of the culture--does everybody come in every day or do folks stay home on non-teaching days (this is mostly a post-pandemic question)?  Do people eat lunch together?
  
• Ask your chair about service expectations and see if there is a culture for protecting junior faculty from doing too much service (there should be).  Beware that if you are not a straight white guy, you may be asked to do more service to represent those who have been historically excluded, and that is a real problem since the few get hit with a lot of work, making it hard to progress.  
  

Which leads to the big bit of advice.  It is ok to say no.  Not to everything, not all the time, but be strategic and say no to the things that are huge time sucks that don't advance your career.  Few folks get new jobs or tenure due to great service.  You should contribute to the greater good, but do so in ways that inform you about your new place and don't involve too much work.  This means identifying some people in the department who can be straight with you about what is and is not onerous.  

It has been a long, long time since I started prof-ing.  I have forgotten much, so any suggestions by others would be most welcome.  The good news is that my big day one mistake is one you are unlikely to make: I forgot to bring the copies of the syllabus to the first class on my first day .. and then to my second class on my first day ... and then to my third class on my first day.  These days, that stuff is all online.  So, enjoy whatever your first mistake is--you will remember it, but damn few others will unless you blog about it repeatedly.

Quarantine, Week 56: Summer Is Here?

 Well, I made one good prediction last week: the ISA wasn't the same.  On the other hand, quick dissemination of a story of a senior scholar being awful to junior scholar made it feel like a normal ISA, I suppose.  It was also the last week of classes.  Ok, not quite.  I gave one PhD student a chance to present a week later than planned, so my real last day of classes is Tuesday.  The Canadian academic calendar is both shorter and longer than the American--classes end sooner but we are officially on 12 month contracts so meetings don't stop in the summer time.  Indeed, they accumulate. 

On Thursday, in my Civ-Mil class, we had our last batch of presentations.  It was pretty strange because I had to stop class, "run" off to an ISA panel, and then come back.  The students were great, willing to push the class later into the afternoon to accommodate my schedule.  Usually, I cancel or rearrange classes when I am conferencing.  Not this year.  Anyhow, despite all the hiccups, this class actually went very well.  The students remained engaged the entire term, doing all (ok, most) of the readings, getting into the material, learning how to get me onto a tangent so that I gripe about a certain defence journalist, writing papers on all kinds of civ-mil stuff that I never studied, creating some pretty good memes, and pushing me to think about the stuff.  That is what I enjoy most about teaching--getting pushed to think more about stuff, to see things from different angles.  That these students did so in the midst of a pandemic amazed me.  I also learned what a RobinHood is thanks to a student's decoration.  I usually end a semester by taking a class out to the student bar.  That will have to wait, but I can take some solace from the experience this winter--that they had a decent learning experience amid the madness.

Speaking of madness, damn, was this a bad week for Ontario.  Cases are spiking, hospitals are on the edge of collapse, and the premier (governor) says that things are going well.  FFS!  Doug Ford and his team have been referred to as incompetent murderclowns.   Well, this week, one of his officials said essentially: "well, the models predicted this, but we wanted to see the numbers rise in the hospitals to make sure the models were accurate."  As if we didn't know for damn near a year that hospitalizations are a lagging indicator--meaning that they go up after the thing is spreading so one should act sooner rather than wait for the late signal.  Damn!  And, yes, this scene was prophetic:

Here's a question posed to Ontario public health officials after they gave a modelling update.

"Am I missing something here, or is this presentation predicting a disaster?"

The response?

"I don't think you're missing anything." pic.twitter.com/RPmlQnP6RB

— CTV News (@CTVNews) February 11, 2021

 This was not just foreseeable but foreseen--that the new variants would cause an acceleration of infections if the province did not act.  And it did not act until it was too late with Doug Ford keeping on acting as if this was a reality tv show "come back tomorrow and we will have an announcement."  Make the announcement now, FFS!!!  Or even better, act a month ago when this was entirely predicted.  

The good news is that the number of vaccinations getting to Canada are increasing faster than expected.  The bad news is that several provinces are fucking up the distribution, including, of course, Ontario.  Turns out that electing people to govern who happen to hate government is bad when you need government.  

How to manage this mess?  Baking, eating, and biking.  The weather has turned to spring early, so I have been biking again.  Still mud season so I have to stick to the streets, but the weather has been delightful.  This week's baking project went better than expected.  I don't know why I tried Nigella Lawson's orange and white chocolate chip muffins as I tend not to eat or bake orange desserts nor do I use white cc's much.  But damn if it was not one of the best things I have made.   Sweet and tasty and moist.  

I still have to complete our taxes so I am off to do that now plus a heap of grading.  Do whatever it takes these days as the stress is not over and many folks are hitting the wall.

 

 

 

 

 

Teaching in the Age of Corona, Update

Last year, at this time, I wrote about my first experiences in the new online teaching free-for-all era.  Besides no longer using Corona, what else have I learned from teaching online? [Note, I have only taught five classes so my observations are based on impressions and thin anecdata]

1. It does not have to suck.  The big difference between last spring vs last fall and this winter is that we had no prep time, not chance to design syllabi, no chance to get much instruction or help.  Most of my friends have now put a lot of time into thinking about and then preparing online classes.  Online higher education does not have to suck or be miserable.  It can be, but it is not inevitable.
2. Whether it is close enough to face to face really depends on class size but not in the way I thought.  
• Smaller virtual classes are actually closer to the face to face experience.  Carleton asked what we wanted to do in the fall, and my small dissertation proposal class pretty much all wanted to stay online.  That might be due to the class meeting at night.  My MA class was not as enthused.  However, my experience teaching a seminar of 12-16 has been pretty pleasant.  It has worked in part because I keep it shorter and because the students have mostly kept their cameras on.  If they all turned their cameras off, well, it would definitely be harder to get a sense of the room.
  
• Larger virtual classes tend to require asynchronicity as more people mean more people can't be on at the same time.  Some might say that a large lecture class in person is not that different from lecturing via videos.  No, it is not.  I had no sense last fall of what the students were getting despite the best efforts of fantastic TAs to keep the pulse of the class.  I could not adjust on the fly, I could not refer to current events (very important for an IR class), and it did seem like students were fading away.  I recorded 15 minute videos, and it was a pretty clear pattern that for each week, most students watched the first one, 2/3's watched the second, and 1/3 watched the third.  I put a lot of work into teaching online last fall, and I am sure the students had an inferior experience compared to when I did less work but was able to walk in, revise on the fly, and engage a large crowd in person.
  
• The problem here, of course, is that smaller classes will return to face to face sooner than big ones, but it may just be the big ones that need it the most.  Of course, your mileage may vary.
  
3. There is no way to square the circle of assessments.  The experts tell us that it is better to have more smaller stakes assignments on a regular basis than a few big ones.  Our students tell us that they have a lot of assignments from all of their classes, and it creates tremendous pressure.  It does keep most involved, but perhaps that advice worked well for online teaching when there was not a pandemic.  Pandemic plus a steady drumbeat of assignments was not as kind as we thought it would be.  
4. On the bright side, the combo of pass/fail assignments with a few graded ones means grade inflation! Woot!  
5. Seriously though, given the pressures facing the students, I have been far more flexible about extensions, far more lenient about late assignments, and just as tough as ever on plagiarism.  I have had more students cry in my virtual office this past year than in my real office over the past ten years.  I have no doubt that for many of my students, this has been the toughest year of their lives with family getting ill, with all of the support mechanisms and survival strategies that involve hanging with others cut off, with their present on ice and their futures more uncertain than ever.  The stress of the past year has been as palpable as the stress of the old job placement rooms at APSAs long ago.
   

There is no one correct way to teach during a pandemic.  People should play to their strengths and be flexible and pragmatic.  I actually don't mind staying online for smaller seminars in the fall.  If I ever get the chance to lecture a large class again, I will want it to be in person.  Doing the apple/orange/frisbee thing just ain't the same without real students to throw fruit at. 

Quarantine, Week 39: The End of the Term and Of Other Stuff

The contrast between the personal and the political could not be greater this week.  At home and in my job, it was a very good, very busy week.  In the larger context, it was a brutal week of death and sedition.  I will talk about the latter so that this post can end on a happier note.

I keep getting reminded of this line from Avengers:

More Americans are dying each day than were killed either at Pearl Harbor or on 9/11.  I don't doubt that the daily number will exceed the combined tolls of those two days.  I have younger relatives posting the top ten days of deaths in the US with many of them now being the past week.  What is so awful, of course, is not just the toll, but how unnecessary it is.  That the governments failed the people and, yes, the people failed the people.  It is not hard to wear masks and socially distance, although it is harder for those vulnerable populations who have to keep working in close proximity to each other.  I haven't heard about meatpacking plants lately--are those doing better?  I am sure the prisons and elder care facilities are still nightmares.  While some look at the continuing border closure with relief, Canada is not doing much better.  The scale is smaller because, well, Canada is 10% of the US population-wise, but we have been failed by our leaders, especially the provincial ones, and by our populations as well.  Too many family gatherings, too many bars/restaurants being prioritized over schools, too much short-term, wishful thinking.

Sure, the Supreme Court threw out the incredible dumb Texas suit about the election.  And then the Texas AG starts talking about secession.  To be sure, that will not get as many states on board, but it is all .. horrible.  As a scholar of separatism, I can pretty confidently say that this is not going to lead to a real secessionist movement that goes anywhere.  But I can also say that this will fester.  That the Republican Party does not accept election results if they lose, and that is a very fundamental ingredient of democracy--acknowledging and accepting defeat with the hopes of returning to power down the road.  The GOP might use this "fraudulent election" thing at every opportunity to block governance.  Which means that the rollout for the vaccine and other pandemic relief stuff may get blocked, that Biden's cabinet may get blocked, and so on.  And, yes, 2022 and 2024 are going to be mighty ugly.  Thus far, we have not seen any of these nihilists in the GOP pay a real price for their behavior--we have seen elites split off, but until the voters for the party choose to reject this path, we are truly and deeply fucked.  

And I spent the week arguing again and again that the Secretary of Defense should not be a retired general or admiral. I get it that the representation here is key--the first Black person to run DoD.  However, I have many, many problems with putting retired senior military folks in that position, as I did four years ago.  The entire civ-mil scholarly community shares this consensus.  A few bent their beliefs four years ago because they thought Mattis might be an adult in the room with Trump, but they were wrong. 

So, let's talk about the good stuff instead.  My daughter's activism and that of her colleagues has paid off--the guy who was being railroaded for supposedly threatening to derail a train amid protests was released by the new LA DA.  Elections can have good consequences!  I am so proud of the fierce social justice warrior that she has become.  It has involved risks to health and freedom, but she so far is doing fine and avoiding paying a high cost for this effort.  

Closer to home, I have been super busy writing up a new grant as the Department of National Defence had a different deadline than I thought, much earlier than I had anticipated.  The good news is that the pieces are coming together because the people I have been asking to join the endeavor have been so generous with their time and expertise.  It will still involve a bunch of work, but I am feeling good about where it is going.  Other CDSN initiatives are also paying off with the positive feedback from last week's Year Ahead conference and the last taping of Battle Rhythm for 2020.  I watched my former students rock at a conference organized by a partner of the CDSN: the Network for Strategic Analysis.  The effort to build a Diversity Council to advise the CDSN is starting to come to fruition.  

Speaking of fruition-ing, I had my last class of the term yesterday.  It was only the second time I had a live interaction with the entire class--the first time since the first day of the semester.  The rest of the class was videos, tutorials run by TAs, office hours, writing assignments, and memes of the week.  It was fun to lecture again and try to weave the entire semester together.  I think it worked ok.  And given stream of comments in the chat at the end, I think it worked or the students were grateful that I was most flexible in giving extensions and other accommodations or they had their expectations lowered by a semester of pandemic classes.  I did love one comment:

 

That was referring to my invoking of the conclusion of Back to the Future 3:

Sure, it is cheesy.  And, yes, the final paper could have used IR theory to argue that Doc Brown is wrong (or right).  But I felt it was a good way to conclude--the present sucks mightily, but the future is up to them.

 

 

 

 

Quarantine, Week 23: Summer's End

Summer isn't over yet, but I can see its end from here.  Usually, this weekend is full of end of season ultimate tournaments, panic about getting ready for the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, and starting to think about teaching.  Instead, no ultimate (although I have signed up for a fall league), APSA is a couple of weeks later due to activism over improving its family friendliness and it does not really feel real since I am not flying to San Francisco, and I have been working on my teaching all summer long. 

I had fun making memes to instruct students
on a new assignment: memes of the week!

I have taped nearly every video segment with just two left for me to do and a couple for my co-teacher, David Hornsby to tape.  My daughter, Furloughed Filmmaker Spew, has cleaned up about 40% of the segments, so we should have the first half of the semester uploaded next week.  One of the challenges is that I like to pepper my lectures with examples from current events, and these videos will be watched (theoretically) weeks from now.  So, I keep referring the students back to the summer.'s events  The good news is that they will be engaging more current events via the discussion sections--those will be live.  I will attend more of those than usual to check in with the students.  The rest of the course is asynchronous since having live online classes puts a lot of pressure on the students and on their technology.  For smaller classes--my Phd seminar this fall and my MA civ-mil class in the winter, I will do more live stuff.  I expect those who have gone on to grad school to have their own computers, their own spaces, and more reliable access to the internet.  We shall see if that is fair or not.  The irony is that the person with the crappiest internet may be me--I could not upload those video files so I may be in search of a new router and maybe even a new connection (fiber optic rather than the current system).  I got a lot of help from the Teaching & Learning Services folks at Carleton--they are most patient and good spirited. 

One last thing on the teaching front: I can't express adequately how glad I am that Carleton made a decision late in the spring but early compared to most places to go online in the fall.  They have also signaled that the winter will be online.  It has meant far more work doing course prep, but it was the responsible decision.  As we see outbreaks across the US wherever universities opened up, I know that Carleton made the right call.  Perhaps it is easier to do so up here since the province owns the universities and so we don't fear losing tuition dollars quite as much.  But the institutions in the US really did not prioritize the students' and staff's health as much as they should have.  And so now many places are switching to online late, so that the profs will be repeating the crappy move they made last March instead of spending the time to do online as well as it can be done.  So that is very aggravating.  So much wasted time and endangered people.  Just like the rest of the country.


For the course prep, I interviewed a couple of scholars and will interview one more next week.  This will help give the students some different ways to think about the stuff.  It was good to meet some new folks and see some old friends.  I am currently trying to figure out whether to organize any hangouts for the APSA since we will not be meeting in person and all those great conversations and impromptu introductions aren't going to happen.  My guess is that I will organize one for the civ-mil community and perhaps another for folks from UCSD's grad program in poli sci.  Yes, I am still thirsty for interactions with people.  My introverted wife has not had quite the same compulsion to meet with folks, but this extrovert has been feeling mighty isolated. 

There was progress on the political front as well.  The Democrats pulled off a pandemic convention.  Folks had criticisms about who was featured and for how long, but there is no way anyone could have expected it to go off so well, to be fairly watchable, and for Biden to rock his acceptance speech.  That the main theme was ... decency ... was both smart and interesting.  The Dems pushed back on the arson committed against the US Postal Service.  It may not reverse the damage, but the political costs will be borne by the GOP.  And then we learned Melania destroyed the WH rose garden, indeed chopping down the cherry trees.  Can we impeach Melania? 

The CDSN news was very good this week.  First, we held our annual meetings of the Directors and then of the Advisory Board.  It was good to see those folks and discuss our various initiatives and adaptations.  I use those meetings to find out what the sub-units of the network are doing and to get advice.  I was seeking feedback on our efforts to improve the diversity of the network.  I cam e into the meeting with a proposal for an undergraduate scholarship and left the meeting with ideas for developing both a diversity plan and a diversity council.  More on that as we figure it out. 

The CDSN has another initiative coming this fall--a new podcast!  This one will be in French, co-produced with the new RSA-NSA network.  The two co-hosts are Sarah-Myriam Martin-Brûlé and Thomas Juneau.  It was fun to watch the ideas come in on multiple social media platforms for the name for the new podcast. 

No family baking challenge this week, but I was so frustrated by the computer problems that Mrs. Spew encouraged me to take two of the leftover chocolate chip cookie dough pots out of the freezer and heat them up for some stress-eating.  Earlier in the week, I made my first Bailey's milkshake.  They may become as addictive as the ccc dough pots. 

The weather is good today, so I am off to bike around the area.  Be well and keep your distance!

Teaching Defence and Security Online: Learning From Others

This week, the Canadian Defence and Security Network held a Teaching Workshop.  It really isn't in our mandate, but we have the resources, the time, and the desire to help facilitate collective action, so more than 20 scholars from civilian and military (Canadian Forces College) institutions came together.  It was a very fruitful afternoon, although I am learning that running these kinds of workshops requires multitasking and a heap of energy. 

What did I learn?  [Not going to give credit to any individuals--we didn't say it was Chatham but we didn't say it wasn't]  This is pretty rough, so if you have suggestions, put them in the comments, please.

Rapid Reaction to Carleton's Rapid Reactions

I got two emails this morning from Carleton--results of a survey of the students about their experience last spring and a memo about an extension of the tenure clock.  Overall, I continue to be most impressed with Carleton's reactions to this crisis.  Committing early to going online this fall was huge--providing clarity and sanity while giving profs a chance to try to give a better online experience than they could with the sudden transition in March.

So, here are some of my reactions to the latest stuff, starting with the survey.   A random sample of 5000 students were chosen, almost 35% responded in May and June, which meant that the survey was put together quickly in April and early May.  Well done.

Considering the Fall: Many Options, Few Good Ones

This piece delineates 15 options for the next academic year.  Some seem impossible, some seem awful, and some might be possible.  I am not an expert, but, unlike other areas I stray, I have some stakes in this one. 
1. Back to Normal
Nope. 
2. A Late Start
The big question is whether moving the start of the term back a month or two is going to make much of a difference.  Maybe in places where there is extensive testing so that we have lots of confidence about the curves and where we are at, but I can't help but be skeptical that moving from September to November is going to change the risks to students, staff and faculty.

3. Moving Fall to Spring
This makes a bit more sense--moving the entire school year back four months may make a difference, again if the testing, tracing, and all that starts to pick up.  This might be possible in states/provinces with more modest outbreaks that have quickly flattened out. 
4. First-Year Intensive
"How a student begins their college experience may be the best predictor of how their college experience will end ... this plan brings only first-year students to campus in the fall."  Um, hmmm, will such students then take care not to hang out with their grandparents, with their older faculty, etc?  Also, how many dead Freshman is too much?  This reduces the number of folks on campus by something like 75%.  So, more space in dorms, more space in lecture halls, more space in dining halls.  I am sure the newbies would not violate restrictions regarding distancing, nope, not at all.  As someone who was residential coordinator back in the day, I am confident that these students would respect any and all regulations.  Insert sarcasm emoji here.
5. Graduate Students Only
This makes much more sense as one of the keys of social distancing is smaller groups.  Most grad classes are smaller than 50, so this would help limit the spread.  Likewise, large social gatherings are less important for graduate students.  They can happen, of course, but grad students are not quite part of the fraternity, large party, big sports life-style.  One of the challenges of most of the other models is that separating students in the classroom is very much just the tip of the iceberg.  Grad students tend to be self-isolating much of the time, so this has some potential. Plus labs for the hard sciences and access to technology are so much more indispensable for graduate training.
6. Structured Gap Year
Hey, give us money to keep the lights on while you guys ... do some stuff.  We can call it experiential learning.  While we can debate whether students should pay full tuition for online classes, this approach is much shakier.  And given that the students can't do that other stuff--travel, work--during a pandemic, the gap year will be "what did I learn on the internet today."
So, nope.
7. Targeted Curriculum
"One approach option for fall is to reduce the number of courses being offered to limit on campus density and to prioritize support resources."  The only way this makes sense to me is: lab courses on campus and reduce the role of labs in first and second year classes.  Otherwise, what is the point?
8. Split Curriculum
"In a split curriculum scenario, courses are designed as either residential or online. Students who are able to come back to campus (up to the population in which social distancing rules can be enforced) can choose to enroll in either format. Requiring a defined proportion of enrollments to be in online courses for residential students may increase the number of students that can return to campus."
Anything that brings back a significant number of students brings huge risks since they will not social distance while on campus.  So, sure, this could address the problem of big classes, but I am pretty sure the simulation I saw a few weeks ago was not premised on big classes.
9. A Block Plan
"Students would take one course at a time during much shorter (three or four weeks) sessions or blocks, run consecutively for the entire semester. The advantage, besides an interesting and intensive pedagogy, is flexibility."
This would take such a dramatic change that it could only start next winter.  To build online classes is hard, to build real, short term, intensive classes is also hard.  Asking profs to do both?  Jeez.  I get the point here, but this is a heap of innovation in a short term.
10. Modularity
It confuses me, moving on..
11. Students in Residence, Learning Virtually
Hey, if the students get sick while hanging out with each other, it ain't on us approach.  No.
12. A Low-Residency Model
"Students would come to campus for intensive face-to-face experiences and then return home to complete the semester online."  Um, travel bad. 
13. A HyFlex model
"The HyFlex model is perhaps the most flexible and for many will be the most attractive. It is also possibly one of the more difficult approaches for faculty. In this model, courses would be taught both face-to-face and online by the same instructor at the same time. Students could choose to return to campus or stay home. Those on campus could be assigned certain class slots when face-to-face is an option, allowing the schools greater control of social distancing in the classroom. This model tends to privilege synchronous learning, and to do it well often requires real-time in-class help (a TA or course assistant to manage the online students), an intentionally designed classroom and a great deal of patience from both the students and faculty."
How does this suck, let me count the ways:
a) Doubles faculty effort
b) Synchronous learning is very problematic given that students who stay at home could be spread across the galaxy planet.
c) Does not address the "dorms [called residences in Canada] are the new prisons/eldercare/meatpacking plants" problem.
d) Note that whole patience thing... not a strength of faculty nor students.

14. A Modified Tutorial Model
"Students would take a common online lecture session. Faculty and or TAs would then meet with small groups of students in tutorials that would allow for social distancing to be employed."
Again, the focus here is on how to teach smaller groups, ignoring the plague potential that is the college campus, classes or no classes.

15. Fully Remote
Until we get a vaccine, much better treatment, or real testing/tracing, this is the world we are living in.  Damned near anything else poses too much risks to students, to staff, to faculty. 


What is missing from all of this:
Whatever we do will need to be flexible since we will have at-risk faculty, at-risk staff, and at-risk students.  With diminished budgets, will universities be able to ramp up health support--for those who get the virus and for those suffering from mental health problems that are exacerbated by the pandemic?

Oh, and liability concerns--places are now getting sued for providing lesser education amid the pandemic.  How about places that open up and then have mini-epidemics?  Will the threat of that deter opening?  While the US dynamic right now is awful--Republicans seeking to give protection to firms which ultimately coerce workers into risking their lives, some thought about liability for universities is required if we want them to open.

Teaching in the Age of Corona

I have no background in teaching online.  The good news is that Carleton's technology is actually pretty good even if it has a silly name--BigBlueButton.  It is part of the courseware (CuLearn) that we have, a tool that has always existed, but we are now using much more these days. 

I am lucky in that my MA course has student presentations the last three weeks (plus Canadian semesters end earlier) so I only had to do one seminar that was "synchronous"--live with everyone attending via teleconference.  It went reasonably well.  I lecture better than I run discussions so the dropoff from in person to online was not that severe.  The students had done the reading and were ready to talk about it.  I was able to get most folks involved even if some voices tend to dominate the discussion.  For the rest of the term, students will be posting narrated powerpoint slides that will be their presentations.  Not as good as live and in person, but I am aware that it is hard for students to be all online at the same time--some have kids, some have to share their computer with family/roommates, etc. 

Which gets to the main approach I have right now:

It is unfair and somewhat ridiculous to expect students to perform normally.  I know I am not performing normally even though I have no kids at home and I don't have to share my laptop with Mrs. Spew.  But if I am more distracted than usual, then I can't expect the students to be as focused.  This was a key point that Catherine Sanger discussed on the Duck of Minerva Podcast.  Give it a listen--lots of good suggestions for adopting quickly to online as she teaches in Singapore and is a few months ahead of the rest of us. 

I also agreed with someone who tweeted that they will not be grading as usual.  That they will give students at least the grade they had earned thus far.  That if they do better than their pre-quarantine average, their grade will go up, but if they do worse, the pre-q grade will be their grade.  I told my students the same with two caveats: plagiarism will still be penalized and students must hand in the work ... eventually.  I am willing to give extensions--all they have to do is ask (see above figure).

My PhD class will mostly continue on as normal.  It has five students, with one student presenting their dissertation proposal each session.  It meets in the evening, as it always did.  It is not as hard to get five people plus me to chat in a virtual classroom.  The BigBlueButton has a builtin feature to post slides so you can see the slides and the presenter at the same time.  It is very easy to use, so it has worked thus far and I have figured out how to have others control the slides--the learning curve is not too bad.

What I am most concerned about, besides the physical and mental well-being of my current students, is how I am going to teach in the fall.  Will we be online?  If so, how to teach IR Theory to 90 students?  I do have some ideas, but lecturing for two hours at a time is not one of them. 

Anyhow, the one thing I have figured out is this: perfection is the enemy of good enough.  As one of my students wrote so well, we ought not to put too much pressure on ourselves.

Good luck to all y'all in this difficult time.

Teaching with Pop Culture: Footloose FTW!

I love this tweet as it puts the usual dynamics on their head:

Tip for students going off to college: study 80s/90s pop culture. Particularly Ferris Beuller, Princess Bride, Simpsons seasons 2-5. Your gen x/early millennial profs will try to connect with you through these, and will be confused/sad when you stare blankly at them. Not joking.

— David Mimno (@dmimno) August 2, 2019

Each summer, profs are reminded how much younger the students are and then the onus is on them to update their references.  This tweet nicely makes fun of profs by suggesting the reverse.

As always, I have two reactions to this:
a)  I use Harry Potter, which is timeless.  Or at least, not yet obsolete.  I long ago gave up references to Monty Python.
b)  When a pop culture reference is super-handy, I show it.  I have used Star Trek and Babylon 5 to show the different notions of ethnic identity--ancient hatreds vs. infinitely elastic, for example.  But the go-to reference for me is Footloose.  It shows the power of a fully armed and operational cultural reference.  And, yes, I have discussed this before, but not everybody is going to dig through my old posts where I explain how to make a good pop culture reference for IR.

Let me explain, show, and then explain some more:
One of the key concepts for the discussion of international security is the use of threats.  Thomas Schelling did great work to explain the complexities of using threats in competitive situations.  The game of Chicken where two players have the choice of heading directly at each other or swering to avoid disaster.  This can be expressed in a 2x2 of payoffs that help to illustrate the use of threats and their limitss.  Boomer profs might refer to James Dean, but this one scene from Footloose shows lots of the dynamics that Schelling sought to explain and which do play out in many situations in International Relations.  Indeed, Schelling and Kevin Bacon go together like the music in this video with the action:


So, Ren (Kevin Bacon) is driving one tractor, and Rusty is driving another.  The stakes essentially are the girl (Lori Singer), and I will let those using a feminist lens problematize that.  When I show this to the students, they notice the most obvious and important thing: Kevin Bacon is tied to the tractor so he can't swerve.  That one of the ways to win Chicken to surrender one's ability to swerve.  This puts the onus on avoiding disaster on the other player.  Schelling talks about burning bridges beyond oneself, for example.  In IR, tripwires serve the same kind of purpose--that the deaths of many of one's soldiers ties one's hands and create the sense of automaticity.  The idea of a dead man's switch fits in here.

Ah, but this example allows me to point out to the students that Ren did not communicate being tied to the tractor to Rusty, so things get closer than they should have.  That communicating threats and how firmly one is locked in is key.  To be fair to Ren, his mishandling of the tractor itself is useful signalling--that he can't control it as well as Rusty can control his tractor, so, again, the onus for avoiding disaster is on Rusty.

But that is not all.  I point out that both teens (who both look like they are in their mid 20's) have their friends with them.  This is not at night, they are not alone.  In the IR literature, the parallel is audience costs.  That threats are more credibly if there are domestic audiences who might punish a leader for not following through on their threats.  One could even suggest that Ren has more audience costs than Rusty since Ren is more of a consensus seeking (democratic) kind of guy, and Rusty is a bit of a dick (an autocrat) who cares less about his friends' admiration, etc. I never did play this regime type stuff up before, but that is the joy of this short video--each time I watch it, I see another IR dynamic playing out (not sure how making fun of a young Sara Jessica Parker fits, but whatever).

I always ask what did Rusty do wrong, and the students say that he smoked pot (yes, these Canadian kids!)  My response is that the mistake was not smoking pot, but not telling Ren that he is high.  Pot slows reaction times, reduces (perhaps) sensitivity to costs, and makes it more likely he will not swerve (or at least swerve at the last minute).  My point is that Rusty needs to inform Ren so that the latter is more nervous and swerves. This is the equivalent of Schelling's "toss the steering wheel out the window" to signal a loss of control.

Finally, Ren is new to town, his reputation is not clear.  Which makes it harder for Rusty to figure out what Ren would do.

I just realized something I need to ask the next batch of students (yes, I am teaching undergrads IR theory again--woot!): what happens if they play this game a second time.  A third?  Hmmmm.

Nice to be excited about teaching again with, gulp, just one month left before the students come back.

So Much Supervision, So Much Learned

Today, I was updating my spreadsheet listing all of the students I have or am supervising.  Yesterday, an MA student defended her paper with distinction, and her work gets me apparently to sixty.  That when I entered her info into my spreadsheet, I realized that I have supervised successfully sixty undergraduates, masters students, and PhD students over the years.  This is probably a bit of an undercount since I might have forgotten to update the list with those students where I was the second or third person on the committee.  The total does not include those who did not complete their project for one reason or another.  That number is around ten or so--and is shaky since some students simply switched advisers, others had never really committed to me (and me to them) in terms of advising, but some simply didn't finish. 

I don't know if sixty is a "good" or "bad" number for someone teaching for 25 years at research universities.  I am sure some of my peers have done far more, and others have done far less.  All I know is that it has been a lot of work and a lot of satisfaction.  I do whine about reading many drafts of the same thing, that I have unwrapped many an onion, that I am tired of endless lit reviews, and so on.  But this supervision thing is worth it. 
First, I learn a lot.  I got in this business because I am deeply curious, but I am also very busy and have limited time to study stuff.  My students end up studying stuff that is mostly beyond what I study--different regions, different periods of time, different dynamics, different perspectives, etc.  So, I always learn from these supervisions, and that is cool.  So very cool. 
Second, it really is fun and rewarding to watch and sometimes help younger folks develop, challenge themselves, and see them puzzle through and then figure out the questions they pose and the answers they discover. 
Third, I create an empire of mini-me's.  Actually, nope, that does not happen.  My students often take issue with my work and push back pretty hard.  I don't tell them what to study or how to study it.  I mostly just poke holes in their ideas until their ideas are better developed.  Ok, third, their success makes me feel good.  This is the stuff of job satisfaction.  When teaching regular classes, the evals will always contain at least a few (and sometimes more than that) negative reviews, so one can always walk away noting those (negativity bias is a thing I learned today, thanks, Dan!).  But when a supervision ends (it often never does), the feelings are almost always satisfaction and pride.  Hence my page dedicated to TeamSteve.  Once again, to be clear, the work they have done is theirs, so I don't want to take too much credit for it.  I just like to bask in their success.

This supervision thing is a big part of what we do, but it is not in the classroom.  So, those who ask how many hours we spend in the classroom = teaching are missing the point.  Indeed, they are only noticing the tip of the iceberg.  That kind of sounds negative, as I really do mean it when I say that this is very much one of the best parts of the job.  Even if it does involve a heap of lit reviews along the way.

Quarter Century of Teaching: Time Flies When One Professes

I had a sudden realization that I started teaching on my own twenty-five years ago.  While my memory is lousy, I will always remember that first day.  Why?  I was so nervous I forgot to bring the syllabi to the first class.  And then repeated that mistake an hour or two later for the next course I was teaching.  And then again a couple of hours later.  It was the same course--Intro to IR--taught to three different groups of fresh-faced Vermonters and non-Vermonters.

Despite that start, I loved teaching Intro to IR. At first, I just aimed to be clear and organized.  I had to print transparencies out so I could use the overhead projector (yeah, I am old), but I felt compelled to present outlines from day 1.  To keep me focused and to give the students a roadmap for the class.  I had really good notes to start.  As time went on, I focused more on making the stuff engaging, sometimes crossing the line of edutainment (the first year I found youtube, well, yeah).

One thing that has remained consistent over 25 years: I am far more comfortable lecturing than running discussion.  Which makes my move six years ago kind of strange--moving from the comfy lecturing at my old job to doing entirely seminars at my new one.  As a mid-career shake up, it was a good thing. It has helped me avoid becoming stale or complacent. I am still figuring out how to teach MA students who are mostly aiming to work in the policy world, a very different audience with different objectives than MA/PhD students seeking to go into academia.

I still do teach PhD students, but the primary class I have taught them here at NPSIA is a workshop aimed mostly at getting through their dissertation proposals and a bit of professionalization smuggled in.  It is an interesting but challenging course, as we are a multidisciplinary program, which means reading dissertation proposal pieces far, far from my expertise.  While we want our students to produce International Affairs dissertations, some are far more economic (as in the discipline, not just the topic) and others are more poli sci-ish, which are more familiar to me.  This is the third time I am teaching it and the first time back to back.  Last year's was mostly a success as most students had defendable proposals by the end of the year.  This year will be new in one minor way: will be at night.  I have been advocating more classes at night to allow our Phd students (and maybe MA students) be part-time and work in or near government, and now I am joist on my own petard. 

The really big change in my teaching is that my students used to guess what my party identity was.  Yep, I slammed both left and right, mocking both in the course of my lectures, so, except for some pushback at Texas Tech (eval: you should never teach this class in the south--did I talk too fast?), I think I did a pretty good job of being dispassionate. That eroded a bit when I would talk about the Iraq war and identify the disbanding of the Iraqi army in May of 2003 as the dumbest decision in US foreign policy history.  What, of course, killed this ability to appear to be non-partisan was this blog and twitter.  Students, if they were interested, could figure out where I stand.  Oops.

The bigger challenge is teaching US Foreign Policy in the Trump Era.  I simply cannot normalize Trump, so I make it clear that I am biased--that I think Trump and his crew are burning down American institutions like no other recent administration. So, the class spends the first two hours of each session asking how things used to work and may work again--because my focus has always been on how each institution (State, NSC, Pentagon, etc) operate--and then how are they dysfunctioning under Trump.  It worked, more or less, the last winter.  We shall see how it goes this winter.

Maybe I have Trump to thank for keeping my teaching fresh?  Oy.  Good thing my Civil-Military relations course is entirely unaffected by the Trump Era....  Ooops, never mind.

Anyhow, while I whine about grading, I still enjoy teaching.  The research stuff takes more of my time, but the teaching is what got me here in the first place.  Not every class works out as well as I wish, and I keep tinkering.  The flow of new students each year helps to make my job new again and again, and their enthusiasm rubs off on me.  I know I am getting older, but hanging with the young folks is not a bad way to keep seeing the world with fresh eyes. I will forever be grateful to the students for not just laughing at my jokes but for pushing me to think through the stuff I am trying to convey, to making me re-think my assumptions, and for teaching me about stuff that I didn't know via their papers and presentations.  Grading and letters of recommendation don't seen so painful when put into that context.

Oh, and my students even gave me some always appropriate art:

Advice For The First Year Professor

As August accelerates and academics panic as their summer dreams/plans meet the harsh reality that one usually does not get done all that they want to do, it is time to give unsolicited advice to the new folks.  For great advice on how to manage one's mental and emotional well-being, see this thread.  I have some more tactical advice about expectations and getting through the first year, as I remember making the same mistake three times on the first day of teaching.

• Be Realistic: you will not be able to produce as much research as you hope because your first time teaching on your own requires a great deal of time.  If you can get stuff out and under review before the semester starts, that would be great (note that summer expectation also meets the crashing reality of the time suck that a move almost always is).  
• Be Competent: the first year is not the time to perfect your class.  You will put much effort into creating lectures, developing seminar strategies, figuring out what to assign (more on that in a moment), and everything else that comes with teaching.  You will get better with experience.  The focus should be, in my not so humble opinion, is to aim for clarity and coherence.  Being entertaining/dynamic/exciting comes later.  Labor intensive teaching tactics (simulations is what comes to mind to me) can be incorporated after you get the basics together.  If you don't burden yourself with too much work, then you can let your excitement for the material shine through, and that is what really engages most of the students--that you think this stuff is interesting.
• The caveat here is that you teach at a liberal arts college, teaching expectations will be higher so always, always, always consult those around you for the local standards and expectations.
• Be Conservative: don't assign the students piles and piles of readings you have not read before, and don't assign them piles and piles of assignments that you will have to grade.  Again, try to stay within the local standards, but remember, whatever they have to write, you have to grade (unless you have lots of teaching assistants--which is a good but sometimes challenging complication--as we are not trained to be managers of people).  Think about the timing of assignments--make sure you do right by the students and by you--don't assign stuff to be due the day after Thanksgiving, for instance.  Do give the students plenty of time to do the assignments.
• Be Realistic re Courseware: The learning curve for you and for your students of your campus's crappy version of electronic teaching tools is steeper than it should be.  I have yet to meet a prof who is thrilled with how their system works.  Don't assume it will work well for you--be prepared to have alternative ways to deliver content/assignments/etc, and don't rely too heavily on the system until you have some experience with it.
• Be Communicative: Talk to colleagues (find at least one you feel comfortable talking to) about what works, what does not, tendencies, tactics, and all that.  Experience matters, and you, at this moment, have little or none in general and definitely none at this place.  Talk to your students as well--check in and see if things are going well.  If the class looks confused, then go slower, give more examples and come back to that stuff again.
• Be Calm: Unexpected stuff happens--I still get surprised by stuff in the classroom after twenty plus years.  I have had students answer phones and leave the class to finish the conversation.  I have had a guy try to make a romantic gesture to a student in a 600 person class in mid-lecture.  A campus tour guide led a group of 20 or so people through my class in mid-lecture.  When this stuff happens, you will realize the best way to react to it ... five minutes to three hours after it happened.  
• Be Kind: Be nice to the staff in your department and at your university.  They are not servants but valuable colleagues whose jobs you really do not want.  They can make or break you over the long run.  If you are rude or obnoxious or dismissive in the first year, you are likely to pay for it even if you revise your behavior later.  Also, it is the right thing to do.
• Be Focused (thanks, Phil): Say no when you can to stuff that takes away from research and teaching.  Everyone has to do service, but do what is expected of assistant profs at your place, not what is expected of associate or full profs.  That is, don't agree to serve on admin heavy campus committees or those of the profession when your local department does not care.  Don't join edited volume projects that take you away from your main research unless the networking opportunities are very good.  You will have more demands on your time than you thought possible.  So, say yes when you have to, say no when you don't.

 There is more advice to give, but one of the iron laws of teaching is that the more reading assign, the less the students will do.  The first year is going to be hard as you will face lots of competing demands for your time.  The advice above may sound like I don't care about teaching, but it is mostly about how to get started without inundating oneself.  Not drowning is the first step towards competitive swimming.

Teaching US Foreign Policy in the Age of Trump

I just finished my last class meeting of my MA seminar on US Foreign and Security Policy.  I had feared this class since January of 2017: how to teach this class now that Trump is President.  I decided that I would mix old and new--spend the first two hours discussing a particular institution or aspect as we always have (what are the powers/interests of State, of the Pentagon, etc) and then discuss how it applies under Trump.  Lots more reading about personality/leadership (thanks to Elizabeth Saunders) and more blog posts and short articles. 

As always, we had several sessions where groups of students would take on roles in and around the US government and address an issue.  The various groups picked: Iran deal, Yemen, China, and North Korea.  Speaks much about contemporary US foreign policy: no European stuff, no Africa or Latin America, no climate change.  Not surprised about the lack of international trade or finance--my blindspot is their blindspot?

Today's concluding seminar asked a couple of key questions:

1. Is Trump really that different?  What policies are similar or different, compared to previous USFP?
2. Will Trump have temporary or deep impact on USFP?

The list of similar foreign policies was not as short as I might have expected:

• support Israel, 
• investing in NATO deterrence mission [pretty sure Trump is entirely unaware]
• stay in every forever war
• etc.

The list of different foreign policies:

• NK, war or no war
• TPP
• Climate change
• etc.

  Obviously, how you answer one affects how you answer two.  And answer number two also focuses on how changed the US foreign policy process is--gutting of State, eroding norms of civ-mil--and on how the bad decisions now create path dependencies.   Obama was able to reverse some of the international diplomatic damage of the Iraq invasion/occupation BUT the Mideast remains destabilized and Iran ascendant. 

We just had a discussion rather than a debate--something I might do next year if we live that long.  Overall, it was an excellent although depressing way to end my first shot at teaching this class in the new Trumpian world.

New Classroom Experience: Too Cool for School?

I have had some strange distractions in my classes over the past twenty five years, but today a new one.  Sure, I had a student answer and continue a phone call when cell phones were rare (I speculated aloud that he might be a drug dealer).  I had a student try to have a grand romantic gesture in my 600 person class.  Once, a tour guide took a group of prospective students through my class as I was lecturing.  But today was the first time I threatened to call security and eventually did.

I was teaching a seminar on US Foreign Policy, which is essentially about distractions these days. The door has a glass floor to ceiling window looking out on the hallway.  A girl somewhere between 13-16 decided to put her face up to the glass and then yell at the class.  She then walked away and then came back with two friends who didn't participate but didn't not participate if that makes sense.  I got up, and told her I was going to call security (I had never made that threat in my classroom nor elsewhere in my life).  She said, ooo, go ahead, but then skedaddled. The class returned to the topic after a minute or two of being puzzled.

After class, I called Security, and they said someone else had also complained but more timely so.  The Security folks dealt with these troublemakers--how? I have no idea.  On the scale of distraction, disruption and danger, this was a 2.  When I told Mrs. Spew, she got most concerned because she has read enough stories of violence in American classroom.  And, yes, Canadian classrooms have seen violence.  There was no violence here, just super immature people being super-bored.  But it was a first, and, hopefully, I go another 25 years or so before it happens again.

If only I could insta-meme in the classroom:

Teaching Can Be Fun: Dissertation Proposal Edition

The hardest part of research is starting.  The hardest part of a PhD program, in my humble opinion, is crafting the dissertation proposal.  It means coming up with an original project--which is no easy feat as much good work precedes us.  It means coming up with something feasible.  Oh, and many good questions go unanswered because they are impossible: "hey, could you guys start a war under these conditions, so we can see what happens?" 

I have been teaching a seminar that aims at getting the students through the proposal.  This is tricky enough, but is even more complicated by a few key realities at my school:

• The students are a mix of economists and political scientists, so they have very different research topics with all of the economists and most of the political scientists working on issues and using methodologies that are outside my expertise and often way outside.
• As an interdisciplinary program, we don't always have clear understanding of what is to be expected--how much theory?  How much methods?  How specific? How long should the proposal be?
• The aim is for these folks to work in non-academic settings, but we have no idea what that market is really demanding and most of the profs (nearly all of us) were trained by traditional disciplines aimed at producing professors. 

The way I teach this class is workshop the dissertation proposals piece by piece: the question, the possible answers (the dreaded lit review), the theory, the testable hypotheses, the methods.  Scattered along the way, due to various opportunities, we spend time on grant proposals, research ethics, and other stuff.  Each student gives a practice dissertation proposal presentation somewhere along the way. 

The fun but challenging part is to try to give feedback on projects that are, as I said, all over place and beyond my expertise for the most part.  The good news is I have fresh eyes.  The bad news is that I have no idea if they are asking original questions (I don't know the literatures they are reviewing) or if their methods make sense (if they are working on something fairly technical).  Today was the last course meeting, and I realized I have had fun getting inside their projects, providing feedback where I can.  I was able, I think, to provide some useful advice (take it or leave it, no biggie) even to those working on the stuff that is beyond me, and I had fun with some of the ideas that I could plausibly research myself.  The students have made much progress, although their advisers may be horrified by my suggestions.  Ooops.

Anyhow, as much as we complain about reading multiple drafts of stuff and how work in progress is often very slooooowly in progress, in my conversations during and after class, I was reminded that it is fun to work with folks as they are starting out.  The work is really hard, but the creativity is inspiring, and working with them to figure out how to surmount the obstacles can be fun.  I got in this job in part to play with ideas, and I use the word "play" deliberately.  As this is fun stuff, and I am glad to be reminded of that basic reality, which is often lost in the daily grind.

So, thanks to my INAF 6900 seminar for reminding me.  

Gender and Syllabi: A Progress Report.

Many threads in the past two days on gender and race and citations.  That what ends up being cited and being on syllabi tends to be the product of not so much merit but merit plus path dependence plus other stuff going on, which means women and minorities are under-represented (see this storify that has the threads by Paul Musgrave and Dan Nexon).  Similar dynamics tend to apply regarding syllabi--women are under-represented.*

*  I focus on women here, because I am not sure how to do a better job of adding minorities to my syllabi.  Simply put, it is far easier to identify women (although not always) than minorities via names if I don't know the people. 

I focus on this rather than citations since I just finished the syllabus to one of my classes: Civil-Military Relations.  For the past couple of years, I have been more aware of this stuff, so I have tried to improve the gender balance on my syllabi.  Unlike journal articles where the editors might extend the word count to improve the gender balance (h/t to Dan Nexon, see the storify), a syllabus is more or less a zero-sum game.  I can't add tons of new readings and expect the students to read them all (the iron law of reading assignments--the more you assign, the less they read).  So, some folks do get dropped from required to recommended as I seek to improve the gender balance.  I don't aim for 50%--I just aim for more.

For the stuff I teach, it tends to be not that hard to find stuff written by women.  For some aspects/weeks, it is easier than others right now.  Alliances?  Not a problem with folks like Patricia Weitsman, Sarah Kreps, and others.  For Canadian defence, tis harder.  Counting pieces of required reading by whether is one or more women involved (solo or co-author), my syllabus is 37% women.  I used Jane Summer's tool to see how this syllabus does: it says the authors are 28% women, 1.5% Asian, 9.2% Black, 4.2% Hispanic and 83% White.  I have to get the syllabus into the library so I will send it as is, but in the next year, I will keep an eye out for work that is in this area from groups that are less represented.
Update: Using http://womenalsoknowstuff.com/experts-by-area/, I have found a bunch of women doing civil-military stuff--mostly junior profs and grad students, so I will be revising my syllabus a bit.


Why? Because it is the least I can do.  It does not involve much work--mostly awareness and a smidge of self-awareness.  Students are less likely to model themselves after people who are dissimilar to them, so I think it is a good thing to try.  Also, when it comes to syllabi, some folks are more likely to get promoted if they can prove that their work is used in syllabi around the world.  Tis harder now as many syllabi are on gated coursework sites (blackboard, webct), but not impossible.  Anyhow, it seems like the right thing to do.  And yes, working on this is a good way to procrastinate on the article I need to finish for the APSA meeting in late August.* 

* The deadline for that (August 14th) is silly and according to this survey likely to be disrespected.