See:
Monkey Cage
politicalviolenceataglance
saideman semi-spew
tompepinsky
coreyrobin
(Thanks to Bob Murray of the Frontier Center for Public Policy for all of these)
My broad reaction to all of this is something along the lines of "thou dost protest too much." Kristof's piece struck a nerve with me as well, but mainly because I am in broad agreement with his basic point. As I wrote in my very first blog post (link), the entire point of the IPE Soap Box is driven by the issues raised by the Stephen Walt article I reference there, some of which are touched on by Kristof. Newspaper columns necessarily simplify issues, so I again recommend you check out the Walt piece (link).
However, the nerve touched by Kristof has me thinking about a few things (three) raised by both Kristof and my disciplinary colleagues who have taken him to task.
Firstly, Kristof is wrong to assert that professors are making poor use of new technologies (like blogs) to popularize some of their research. The sample of blog posts above is a drop in the ocean when it comes to the range of multimedia outlets academics have been taking advantage of for the expression of creative and, in some cases, brilliant, ideas. Yet, although Kristof doesn't note this specifically, I think the mere fact that so many academics are doing their best to popularize their research through various multimedia outlets is an admission of sorts that there is a gap between the imperatives of our discipline and the public sphere that needs filling.
Secondly, Kristof claims that one of the major problems with political science is that it has become too quantitative and therefore too arcane for anyone outside the discipline to understand. This, of course, touches on a much bigger debate in the social sciences and humanities over quantitative and qualitative research methodologies that he should probably have noted, or at least been aware of. These are much deeper waters than Kristof acknowledges and I would strongly recommend he read Benjamin Cohen's 2007 essay (link) on the differences between British and American IPE.
However, more importantly, Kristof should have probed a little deeper into the real problem with some of the quantitative output from political science; the lack of meaningful questions being asked of the data. A few years ago, I attended a roundtable of eminent scholars at the International Studies Association meetings in New Orleans (2010, I think). I don't recall the theme of the panel, but the discussion came around to the training of new scholars and the relationship to public policy. Robert Keohane made a couple of points that have stuck with me for some time (my recollection, not a quote):
- American graduate programs were great at training students to apply statistical methods to large-N data sets, but were not very good at teaching students how to ask meaningful questions of any of it. In other words, quantitative methods are not necessarily bad news. But much depends on the questions being asked of the data; there, statistical methods are no substitute for the judgement of the scholar in teasing out the "so what, who cares" questions.
- There had been a significant decline in the churn between academia and government during his time in the ivory tower. In other words, fewer and fewer scholars spent any time in the halls of power or within the bureaucracies working directly with the subject matter that was often the focus of their research.
On that ISA panel with Bob Keohane was Joesph Nye Jr., one of the more prominent recent examples of a political scientist who took time away from the ivory tower to work in government. There are others, including Anne Marie Slaughter, but the overwhelming majority of those scholars who find themselves in government at some point in their careers are economists (see recent Council of Economic Advisers membership). In this sense, I appreciated Kristof calling out political science. Economists have no special claim on debates in public policy (see story). In 2012, Anne Marie Slaughter wrote a sobering piece in The Atlantic (link) highlighting some of the specific work-life balance challenges facing professional women. Yet, in addition to gender related barriers, there are barriers within the academy to public service that everyone faces, the biggest being that government service is generally seen as detrimental to your academic career.
Kritsof noted the strange ISA motion that would have limited the blogging capacity of scholars holding editorships of major field journals. Yet, the incentives for blogging, media, or any other activity that is not oriented toward "peer reviewed research" are already skewed against it. Most university tenure and promotion processes acknowledge these kinds of public activities, but few recognize such contributions in the same way as peer reviewed scholarship. Time in the public service, even in the midst of an earned sabbatical, is generally treated the same way. In effect, government service is a kind of time-out on one's academic career and should not be undertaken until after reaching the rank of full professor. Each of the academic members of the Council of Economic Advisers is "on leave" from their universities. I would be interested in the details of those "leave" arrangements. In what ways will government service impede or facilitate advancement within their home institutions?
As I noted in my very first blog post, governments need academic input and perspective. We have a lot to say and contribute to the public policy process, but the incentives for doing so either through becoming more publicly visible or through actual government service are all skewed away from that. The utility for our students and scholarship of having more public servants in temporary appointments in universities is also obvious, but also rare. In short, the imperatives of the two institutional settings (academia and government) are not in alignment; they shouldn't be.
This brings me to my third and final point about Kristof's piece. Neither Kristof nor the critics of his piece noted that a major source of scholarly input into the public sphere resides in think tanks, and those based in Washington, D.C. in particular. Kristof's critics are correct to point out that university scholarship is not oriented around the kinds of time-sensitive, pithy, usable research findings that are often in demand by policy makers. Think tank scholars have stepped into that void in a big way, learned to write in more categorical terms, been more willing to bend their research interests to suit the political zeitgeist, and had to be creative in monetizing their ideas in ways university scholars do not. Kristof might have considered the contribution of our think tank colleagues before complaining about the irrelevance of political science.
University-based scholars are rightly tasked with pursuit of basic research that should include the arcane, theoretical, philosophical, and possibly irrelevant. It is from that mush that some of our most important insights into the political world around us come. We don't need to cede all of the practical ground from which policy-makers obtain their information to other disciplines or to think tank popularizers of our work, but there are challenges along that front which need to be addressed for university-based scholars to be more successful at doing so.
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