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When it comes to doctoral students, there are two issues for faculty: 1. Should you agree to be an adviser? and 2. How should you train people?

Agreeing to be an adviser: Overall, my opinion is that every student who can demonstrate that they can finish a dissertation should have an adviser. The student needs to show an ability to independently generate competent work. If the student can’t do that, the department needs some clear signals early on – a failed qualifying exam, strong criticism of the master’s thesis, and so forth.

If a student is in good standing, then you should accept a student as long as you aren’t overburdened. Even though I am still early in my career, I feel no problem accepting any student who asks for help. My belief is that as long as I am qualified and not overextended, I have an obligation to help a student complete their degree.

Even though I have an open policy, that doesn’t mean that just anyone can sign up. I expect students to treat their doctoral dissertation seriously. So I usually make most students do some task, like a literature review, or prepare some of their own data for analysis before I officially sign up. My experience is that if you can’t do that simple task in a timely fashion, it’s unlikely that you can finish the degree.

Technique: I train graduate students in the way that we would train anyone else: repetition. I encourage frequent meetings that are focused on doing specific tasks, like prepping data, making a table, or writing up field notes. I also encourage the completion of concrete tasks like preparing a paper for journal submission.

Philosophically, I believe that a lot of doctoral training is ritualistic. The real test of academia is blind peer review. The faster you get to it, the better. The implication is that I place little weight on proposals, defenses, and so forth. If a student can push a paper through the arduous publication process, the dissertation and its rituals will take care of themselves. This doesn’t mean that I’ll accept a junky dissertation. What it does mean is that I encourage publication first because it is the core skill of the academic profession.

Finally, I make sure to have a constant, non-stop, conversation with students about their career goals. If they are interested in a teaching intensive career, then I don’t worry too much about journal placement. If they want to compete for research or elite liberal arts positions, they’ll need to focus early and hard on publication.

That’s my formula: focus on publication quality research from the get go; constant interaction; and pegging outputs to career goals.

Experienced advisers are encouraged to relate their training strategies in the comments.

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Got a recent email from Ben. He bought the Grad Skool Rulz and is seriously thinking about graduate school. He is curious about what it’s like to be a working academic. Smart guy. Ask now.

Here’s how I’d describe it. There are three stages to being a tenure track professor professor: trainee (grad  student), probate (tenure track), and zombie (tenured prof). It’s important to recognize that this does not describe the majority of academics. These days, the average college instructor is an adjunct (part time) instructor). Some people like this arrangement, especially clinical faculty, such as lawyers, who are hired to teach the occasional course in a professional school. For most, however, the adjunct career track is low paid work that requires “freeway flying” between far flung campuses.

But let’s stick to the tenure track because that’s what Ben is shooting for:

• Trainee: Graduate school is uneven. The first two years are courses, then you have an extended period of self-directed study and research. You also have to learn to be an adult. Learn to do your work without a boss or deadline. Don’t get published and you’ll get a career failure. Don’t do your dissertation and you have nothing to show for your work.
• Probate: Assistant profs are paid and have a high stress level. It usually takes a long time to execute a project and get it published. You may have five or six years, but it goes by quickly as you work on these big projects. The difference between trainee and probate is quality. The dissertation is a student exercise, so a competent work will get approved. In contrast, the competition is tough for journals and publishers. Top publishers routinely reject 90%+ of submissions. The other big difference is teaching. Research faulty teach 4 courses a year, though they can buy some out. Liberal arts faculty do more.
• Zombie: You have enough experience with publishing and you’ve managed to balance teaching and research demands. The killer here is committee work. If you are in a research department, you also have graduate student training.

My days are usually divided into teaching days and research days. Personally, I try to cram all classroom time, office hours, and grading into a few long days. It’s about minimizing transaction costs. So a few days a week, I roll into campus late in the morning and teach these long seminars and meet with students. Since I pack a lot into a few days, this may go into the evening, especially if I have afternoon/night classes.

Research is a bit different. Since I am a multi-method researcher, doing research can mean very different things. Currently, I am involved in some surveys. So I spend time writing grants. At other times, I do ethnography. So it’s about making travel arrangements or deciphering field notes. Then, at other times, I may be programming. But unless I am traveling, research usually means reading current research,,working with data, and writing papers/book manuscripts. That entails sitting in front of computers for a long time.

Teaching and research are interrupted by committee meetings. This is utterly boring. Sometimes the meetings are boring and crucial (like hiring or promotion), or boring and not crucial (listening to an administrator tell us about the latest mission statement). Regardless, they are a necessary evil of the academic profession. I am lucky to be in a program where meetings are kept to a minimum.

At the zombie level, you also do a lot of evaluation. Senior professors are asked to review papers for publication, book manuscripts and write letters of recommendation, including tenure letters.

Finally, Ben asked about research topics. This is easy. Just pick up the journals, books, and recent dissertations in your area. Read them and see if they inspire you. If they leave you cold, then academia probably isn’t for you.

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The current issue of Accounts has an interesting article by Dan Wang called “Is there a Canon in Economic Sociology?”. It’s a study of the contents of more than fifty Econ Soc syllabuses looking to discover which authors are most often assigned. (I don’t remember seeing the call for the data, which is odd.) There’s a lot of interesting stuff in there, including a variety of measures of “canonicity” and different ways of counting the importance of different texts and authors. Once you start thinking about it, there are all kinds of complications involved in deciding how to code and classify things. Here I just want to higlight an interesting aspect of this network of references:

According to the article, this picture presents the largest component of reference class session co-listings. “Nodes represent references, node size reflects degree centrality, and more orange nodes reflect higher degree centrality. A tie between two nodes signals that two nodes have been co-listed in the same class session on at least two separate syllabi. Tie thickness reflects the number of syllabi on which two references were co-listed in the same class session.” Note that the unit here is articles, so authors may appear in different places in the figure based on different works of theirs.

Two things struck me about this. First was that the visualization is consistent with the field characterization in Marion Fourcade’s ABS piece from a few years ago—you’ve got the structural/embeddedness people and the broadly cultural/Zelizerian work forming one large group, and then (disconnected from both) the insurgent social studies of science/finance people. Second, though, was that the network is quite fragile. But, second, the big component in the network is fragile. If you deleted Geertz (1978), Granovetter (2005), and Swedberg (2001), then you’d have four separate components which you might crudely characterize as soc of finance, culture/Zelizer, Granovetter/network embeddedness/social capital, and Polanyi/political embeddedness. Moreover, two of the bridge pieces are more reviews than research pieces: the Granovetter 2005 is his JEP piece, I think, and the Swedberg piece is his “Sociology and Game Theory” paper, I believe. The Geertz paper (the Bazaar one) is a surprisingly tenuous bridge between the structural and the cultural approaches.

Another thing I’d be interested in seeing is the list of actual works the labels refer to—most of them I know unambiguously, but there are a few that are ambiguous (because the author published more than one thing that year) and I’d be interested in seeing which one is being counted.

Update: As Omar points out below, this fragility interpretation is all wrong, because I failed to notice the tie is defined by whether the readings are assigned in the same week or not. As you were.

Michael Dorf and Sid Tarrow have an Op-Ed piece today on CNN titled “How the right helped launch same-sex marriage movement.” It’s a clever argument about the role that the conservative movement played in galvanizing and even decisively re-orienting the direction taken by one of its antagonists, to its likely long-run cost:

How, in less than a decade, did America go from being a country in which some states punished gay sex with criminal penalties to one in which the highest elected official in the land now champions the right of same-sex couples to marry? The answer can be found in the interaction between supporters of marriage equality and the Christian conservative movement over the past few decades. As late as the 1980s, same-sex marriage was on virtually no one’s radar screen. … It happened like this: In 1993, in the case of Baehr v. Lewin, the Hawaii Supreme Court decided that the state’s prohibition on same-sex marriage was discriminatory. In 1998, Hawaii’s voters passed a referendum giving the legislature the right to declare same-sex marriage illegal, but in the meantime, social conservatives had taken the issue to the national stage, where it promised to pay handsome dividends. Same-sex marriage was still so unpopular that in 1996, tremulous Democrats joined Republicans in overwhelmingly passing the Defense of Marriage Act, or DOMA, signed by President Bill Clinton. … DOMA was thus a preemptive strike by the opponents of marriage equality.

But the act helped to call into being the very marriage equality movement it aimed to combat. Encouraged by their surprising, if temporary, success in Hawaii, and outraged by the blatantly homophobic arguments that had been made in favor of DOMA, the lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgender movement reluctantly began to turn its energy and resources toward the goal of marriage equality.

This was a fundamental shift, not made without controversy within the movement, where many worried that calling for marriage equality would unleash the fury of the Christian Right. Whereas many activists had given higher priority to such issues as employment discrimination, HIV/AIDS education and protection against hate crimes, the denial of marriage equality now came to be seen as a broad symbol of second-class citizenship for LGBT Americans.

And thus did we start down the road toward the unlikely spectacle of a Black President endorsing gay marriage. Nice—counterintuitive, compelling, and more than a little ironic. But while I was reading this it struck me that I had heard this argument made somewhere before. Where? Oh yeah.

In her 2008 book, helpfully titled How the Religious Right Shaped Lesbian and Gay Activism, Tina Fetner argues, in part:

To many, it may have appeared that the push for legislation on same-sex marriage was driven largely by the lesbian and gay movement, but in the early 1990s few lesbian and gay movement organizations were engaged in activism around this issue. There had been a few unsuccessful court cases in which same-sex couples challenged marriage-licensing practices, when one case in Hawaii caught the nation’s attention, as well as that of the lesbian and gay movement. In Baehr v. Lewin … the Hawaiian state supreme court ruled that the practice of denying marriage licenses to same-sex couples would be unconstitutional unless the state could provide a “compelling state interest” for it … Up to this point, same-sex marriage had not been a top priority for the lesbian and gay movement. Many in the lesbian and gay community oppose same-sex marriage as a patriarchal, heterosexual institution … Others saw [it] as an equal rights issue and, indeed, supported an assimilationist tack … Rather than spark a major internal debate … most lesbian and gay movement organizations simply ignored the issue putting it on the back burner in light of other priorities such as non-discrimination ordinances and anti-gay violence. …

Religious right activists, on the other hand, saw their opposition to same-sex marriage as an issue with strong cultural resonance and popular support. Many leaders in the religious right considered marriage to be a tipping point for conservatives who had not yet joined the movement. … From this perspective, to allow two men to marry would trample upon a holy gift. The idea of two women or two men marrying each other evoked such passion among conservative, evangelical Christians that the religious right considered this to be an issue worth pursuing.

Pursue it they did, in a massive grassroots mobilization throughout the country. At the federal level the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) was quickly passed by the Senate and House and signed into law by President Clinton. … Leaders in the religious right may have thought that this issue would be an easy victory, given how important the symbolic aspects of marriage are to many people. … However, perhaps unexpectedly, this issue has also mobilized the lesbian and gay movement in response, including many lesbian and gay people who had not previously been involved in activism (Pinello 2006).

Dozens of new lesbian and gay movement organizations emerged to fight for same-sex marriage. National organizations began to devote resources to the marriage issue and, to varying degrees, to partnership issues more generally. To a greater extent than ever before, lesbian and gay movement organizations began to frame lesbian and gay rights in terms of relationships and families, rather than just individuals.

And thus did we start down the road toward the unlikely spectacle of a Black President endorsing gay marriage.

Of course, Dorf and Tarrow might have come up with this idea themselves: they’re smart people. If they did, I can see why they might want to claim it as their own—it’s a good idea! Too bad. It seems to me they were scooped fair and square by someone writing five years ago, and they should have acknowledged it. I suppose it’s not outside the realm of possibility that while researching the question of how the religious right shaped lesbian and gay activism they never came across How the Religious Right Shaped Lesbian and Gay Activism. Either way, it looks like a case of credit where credit’s due. I’m well aware that the literary conventions of Op-Eds do not accommodate the tedious mechanics of scholarly attribution. But there’s plenty of room for a single “As sociologist Tina Fetner has argued in her book …” —if not in this particular Op-Ed, then at least next time round.

From Nina Strohminger’s review of philosopher Colin McGinn’s book on The Meaning of Disgust. From the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticsm:

In disgust research, there is shit, and then there is bullshit. Colin McGinn’s book belongs to the latter category.

It gets better:

The sad fact is the reader would learn more about disgust by reading Mad magazine.

For the rest of us—those who actually care about disgust, or aesthetic emotions, or scholarship at all— the book is bound to disappoint. “Who can deny the mood-destroying effect of an errant flatus just at the moment of erotic fervor?” he writes. McGinn’s book is just such a flatus, threatening to spoil an exciting intellectual moment for the rest of us. Sometimes with books, as with farts, it’s better to just hold it in.

Nina, don’t damage the fine reputation of Mad magazine.

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For the last few days, I’ve been getting a  lot of email over a recent blog post in the Chronicle of Higher Education. The author, Naomi Schaefer Riley, wrote a post about how Black Studies should be eliminated because of the low quality of its research, especially its dissertations. Not surprisingly, there was an outcry and the Chronicle fired Schaefer.

Even though I’ve spent my career analyzing the discipline of Black Studies, I’ve been slow to respond for a few reasons. I was traveling while this broke out last week. Scholars within Black Studies are perfectly capable of defending themselves. Also, I didn’t want to comment while people slinging mud back and forth. Instead, I’m writing a detailed commentary for the Teachers College Record that will appear next month.

Probably the most important reason that I didn’t rush to respond is that I’ve heard this before, many times. While doing the research for my book on Black Studies’ history, I read many, many calls for the elimination of Black Studies from conservative pundits.* The roster of conservative Black Studies haters is a long one: San Francisco State’s John Bunzel (1969), Martin Kilson at Harvard (1970s), Charles Sykes’ Profscam (1988), Dinesh D’Souza Illiberal Education (1991), John Derbyshire in National Review Online (2002), Robin Wilson in the Chronicle of Higher Education (2005), and now we have Naomi Schaefer (2012). There are so many, I’m sure I’ve missed some good ones.

The pattern goes something like this. A conservative writer will get an op-ed, or blog post in modern times, and call for the elimination of the field. Sometimes, it’s part of a book attacking higher education for being too liberal. Then, liberals will jump into the fray. There are charges and counter charges of racism. Then, silence for a few years and the whole pattern starts over. It’s an academic Seinfeld episode. No hugging, no learning.

When I read Schaefer’s criticism, I just said to myself, in a Reaganesque tone, “There you go again.” It becomes so predictable after a while, so bland. Even within the history of Black Studies skepticism, Schaefer’s screed isn’t that insightful. Basically, the entire blog post is simply picking a few unfinished dissertations and mocking them. Dissertations certainly deserve criticism, but Schaefer even admits that she hasn’t read them. She just hates the concept of the dissertations. For example, one mocked dissertation addresses the role of Blacks among midwives. Schaefer finds this to be a silly topic. All I can say is that a conservative who thinks childbirth to be unworthy of scholarly attention reveals an epic smallness of mind.

That’s why I didn’t rush into this. No need to jump into a predictable fight that I’ve seen too many times before. Instead, I’ll slow down and write a detailed commentary on a question that I wish that Schaefer had addressed: who gets their own their own discipline? In the mean time, I’ll be happy to watch from the sidelines. Maybe, if Schaefer decides to explore the field of Black Studies and do the readings, I’d be happy to send her a copy of my book and we could have an extended discussion about Black Studies’ history and its scholarly contributions.

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* And yes, Schaefer fits the mold. She’s given a two week journalism seminar at Hillsdale College, which is a well known conservative liberal arts college.  She also writes for publications with conservative editorial boards such as the Wall Street Journal. Being conservative neither qualifies or disqualifies you from commenting on Black Studies, but it does fit the broader pattern of conservative attacks on the discipline.

Recently, our friend and emeritus guest blogger, Celeste Watkins-Hayes  helped organize a conference at Northwestern on the topic of African-American Studies doctoral programs. Sadly, I was not able to attend, even though I’ve spent much of my academic career analyzing the evolution of African-American Studies. I hope that the proceedings will be published so I can read what people have to say about the status of the field.

Until then, I was hoping participants in the conference could tell me if any of the following questions were addressed:

1. Temple University began its doctoral program in 1983. Has there been any comprehensive analysis of the graduates of that program? How many graduates? Where do they teach? Do they produce well cited scholarship?
2. Any evidence that the afrocentric approach incubated at Temple is being transmitted through its PhD graduates? Or is this a dead issue in the field?
3. Imbalance: Numerous observers have noted that Africana doctoral programs have done well and they’ve expanded in elite research institutions, but Africana Studies remains an embattled field of study in other institutional contexts. Is this claim true? If so, how can the recent growth of Africana Studies be translated to liberal arts colleges and regional universities?
4. PhD Careers: Africana Studies units tend to be small in size. Is there enough room to absorb the PhD graduates? Or is the Africana Studies PhD more like an interdisciplinary degree that allows you to teach in a range of social science and humanities programs?

Any insights into these questions, or other comments on the conference welcome.

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I’ve now been in the academic game for a while, in multiple fields and in multiple programs. I’ve had the chance to see a lot of people come and go. I’ve also had the time to read some of the literature on achievement, such as Keith Sawyer’s book on creativity. This post will summarize what I think is important for academic success. If you want the extended version for grad students, you can get a copy of the Rulz.

First, most academic success is cumulative, built from working every day. Thus, the work habits developed as an undergraduate are counter-productive. You can’t pull an all nighter and get a job. So go to work and get *something* done everyday.

Second, a little bit of time management goes a long way. Academic success is built on a record of teaching and research. Teaching is important, but too much and it can overwhelm you. Learn how to run a course and be able to predict the time it takes.

Time management in research is even more important. You never know how a research project will pan out. It may be quick (rarely) or it can explode into a multi-year slog. Both have happened to me. So learning to prioritize, identify problems,  and *quickly* solve them is important.

Third, submit your work. This, I think, is the issue with many graduate students and faculty who have problems. Many people have excellent ideas that are worth reviewing, but they don’t submit them nearly enough.

One problem is fear. I think a lot of people simply fear rejection. And I can see their point. If you got an A- GPA in your undergraduate, it means you were successful most of the time. In contrast, our top journals have rejection rates of 90%. Some journals  reject 95% of the time.

Another problem is perfectionism. Yes, we want our papers to be excellent, but there is also a problem of diminishing returns. You would never submit a first draft to a journal, but most people won’t notice the difference between draft #24 and #25.

Think of quality as a function of time spent: Q=f(T). The Q-curve has an S-shape. If T~0, then the paper is probably a mess. If T–> 00, then the extra improvements are so small that it won’t matter. The issue is to get beyond the middle of the curve. Once you’ve done that, submit the paper.

The enemies of success are bad time management, not working everyday, fear of rejection, and perfectionism. Of course, there are exceptions. If you are an epic historian, and you will only publish one or two books in your career, you’ll probably take a lot of time. But most social science doesn’t work on that model. Most social scientists write a series of books and papers on a few related topics. If that’s your track, then the daily grind and a tough skin is your best chance of success.

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See Grad Skool Rulz #3 as well.

April 15 is tough in academia. The professors file their taxes, the undergrads must make a final choice for graduate school. On Friday, I started an open thread on the topic of choosing a graduate school. Here, I’d like to offer some more concrete views.

The idea is called “backwards induction.” This is an idea from game theory. If you want to win, you then ask what you have to do to win. If you want to achieve X, then work backwards and figure out what leads to X.

So, the “final stage” of the grad school choice is the type of job you want. Here, you have to be honest. What do you want out of life?

1. Private industry/consulting or policy
2. Junior college teaching
3. Liberal arts/teaching intensive
4. Research

If you want a private sector or policy job, it *usually* doesn’t matter where you go as long as you go to a legitimate program. There are exceptions, of course. But non-academic employers are a lot less interested in status.

If you want a junior college job, you may not even need much graduate education. It’s changing, surely, but many j.c. teachers have BA or MA. Many also have professional degrees or work experience.

If you want an academic job, then rank is important because employers are super-sensitive to prestige. What it comes down is that universities sell/rent prestige. Intro physics is the same no matter where you go, but people pay $$$ for the prestige of taking the course from a leading scientist.

Prestige can be had in two ways. The first is research excellence. Publish a famous paper and you can probably get a decent job. But most fresh PhD don’t have great papers. If they are lucky, they may have a paper or two in good journals, many which will be forgotten. So the main signal is PhD program prestige. To get into the right pile of applications, you need to be in a highly ranked program to start with.

The other countervailing factor is department culture. Departments that undermine students cancel out the benefits of prestige. The big indicator of a functional culture is placement record. That’s why the way you should judge a program is “prestige + placement.” One can compensate for the other. But it’s not a good idea to go to a place that that’s bad on both counts.

Finally, there are teaching intensive institutions. Here, prestige is also important. While they aren’t so focused on publishing in the right journal, these schools still need prestige. The private liberal arts schools charge a lot of money and it’s harder to do that if you are staffed with people from PhD programs no one has heard of.

Bottom line: Prestige is the great driver in academia, but you also need competence in graduate training. That’s the default in the business. Outside academia, prestige is much less importance.

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Teppo and Jerry discussed the issue of the multiple r&r. When thinking about the issue, I like to start off with “what is the best way to discover the truth?” An R&R suggests that the editor thinks the article is correct or presents an issues that deserves debate.

If you believe that point of view, then there is no point in having a 1RR rule. If the article presents an important finding, why should it be rejected just because it needs a little more work? That’s nonsensical. If the editor truly believes in the article, a rejection means that you are simply delaying (or even preventing) the publication of something that is true.

At the same time, rejection after revision is sensible if the revision reduces confidence in the main finding. However, if the editor thought it was a decent finding to start it, the paper’s argument should remain relatively constant after additional evidence or argumentation is introduced. Thus, rejection after revision should be relatively rare.

What I’m saying is that I favor a model similar to that used in some disciplines, like economics, where R&R means that the editor has confidence in article and that there is a high probability of acceptance, assuming that the results are robust. And if that means that some papers (and authors) suffer some drawn out revisions, I can live with that.

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Our friend Jerry “Chickpea” Davis has sent a notice to authors and reviewers of ASQ. As editor of ASQ, he’s announcing some new policies about how the journal is run.

• They’ll desk reject in a week and do full reviews in 7-10 weeks. They super-promise a 90 day review, max.
• No more “reject and resubmit.”
• No more “only 1 R&R.”* The editor can invite additional revisions if  appropriate.

Also, a web site redesign that makes it easier to access ASQ. I wish Jerry the best in continuing ASQ’s record of excellence.

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* Thank god. I’ve been burned … grrr…

Rakesh Khurana and former orgtheory guester JC Spender have written a provocative, forthcoming piece titled: Herbert A. Simon on What Ails Business Schools: More than ‘A Problem in Organizational Design, Journal of Management Studies.   (Here is Simon’s original 1967 Journal of Management Studies essay: The Business School, A Problem in Organizational Design.)

Rakesh and JC’s piece essentially traces the history of business school education, links it with the Carnegie tradition and then reflects on Simon’s essay about business schools and highlights some of the extant problems.  I enjoyed their historical discussion though I disagree with the end-conclusions about an “intellectual stasis” – along with the associated rigor-relevance issues.  I’ll post about that beef later on.  But the essay is most definitely worth reading!  It raises all kinds of interesting issues.

Here’s the abstract:

We critically examine Herbert Simon’s 1967 essay, ‘The business school: a problem in organizational design’. We consider this essay within the context of Simon’s key ideas about organizations, particularly those closely associated with the ‘Carnegie perspective’ on organizations and how they influenced the reinvention of American business schools in the post-Second World War era, and were deeply influenced by the post War context and also were appropriated by the Ford and Carnegie Foundations to reform business school teaching and research. We argue that management educators misappropriated Simon’s concept of an intellectually robust and relevant research and educational agenda for business schools that has in part contributed to the intellectual stasis that now characterizes business education research and its capacity to inform management practice.

Last week, we got into a discussion about how to evaluate people for tenure. Darren raised the issues of coherence and independence. We want senior faculty to have independent thoughts and have an agenda that makes sense. On the first count, I agree completely. A tenured position, frankly, is a very comfortable position and it should only be given to those who have shown a degree of intellectual leadership. On the second count, I disagree with Darren. I’ve heard people talk about coherence, but I just don’t buy it.

First, coherence is hard to enforce. A smart person could take a fairly diverse set of articles and/or book and frame it the right way. Outsiders may buy this completely. Second, I’ve always viewed academia as a place where people are promoted for discovering what is true or, in the humanities, what is insightful. This can come in many packages. Some folks may do the classical approach – pick a topic and drill deep. Others, may move from topic to topic. And if each piece is good, then knowledge is created. Disconnected quality is better than connected mediocrity. In the end, coherence of research is probably orthogonal to quality.

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A few months ago, a graduate student asked why I was charging for the Grad Skool Rulz e-book. First, much of the rulz are still free and can be accessed from this website. Furthermore, if someone needs the book and finds the $2 price burdensome, I will give them a free copy. Second, I enjoy getting a reward for my work. Third, the $2 e-book is much better than the blog posts. Color cover image, hyper linked table of contents, and you can read it on just about any device (iPads, Kindles, smartphones, PDF for the desktop, etc.) There’s also lots of stuff for junior faculty. $2 for advice derived from a 19 year career in the academy is a good deal.

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This is a post about how senior faculty should judge people coming up for promotion. Now that I am about two years past the assistant rank, I’ve begun thinking about the standards applied to people coming up for promotion. How should academics judge each other?

Let me articulate the Jeremy clause. In judging graduate students, he notes that while there is a lot of disagreement, the process does seem to work. The same goes with faculty. I bet we’ll disagree on some issues, but we end up making decent choices anyway.

I think a lot of successful tenure cases in research oriented programs go something like this:

1. Have they published anything?
2. Have they successfully published their dissertation research?
3. Have they published anything beyond the dissertation?

For most departments, the farther along the scale, the better off you are. Remember, most departments aren’t super picky elite programs. Some reasonable publications will help you out in most cases. Picky programs will likely demand publications in high prestige journals.

In less elite programs, volume is enough to make people happy. In more competitive programs, people will likely ask about impact. That’s tricky. It can mean citations, public discussion of work, or professional awards. It can also rely the judgment of the voters. People are free to say, “I don’t care where it was published, this is garbage.”

My view is that I respect the profession’s judgment first (but not exclusively). Someone who has produced a string of publications in the right journals has earned my vote. If nothing else, they indicate that other experts think what they say is important, even if I have my doubts.I would have to have serious reservations about the work for me to overturn the profession, but that’s very rare.

Second, I’m willing to let my judgment of quality act as a compensating factor. If someone writes something that I think is amazing, I’m willing to go to bat for it, even it it isn’t published in high status outlets. Ultimately, we’re here for the truth, not the journal status hierarchy.

A lot of people told me that tenure votes are a “forward looking decision.” That sounds right to me. If someone can show that they will be working on good stuff in the future, I am open.

Teaching is extremely important, but it deserves another post. Especially, since teaching in a liberal arts school is treated differently than teaching in a research program. Finally, all I’ll say about service and collegiality is that I have very low standards. If you harass people or you are disruptive, you won’t have my vote. But as long as you are above that admittedly low standard, you’re ok, even if I think you are a bit of a jerk.

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A few days ago, philosopher Colin McGinn wrote an op-ed in the New York Times demanding that his discipline drop “philosophy” as its name. The essence of his argument is that what used to be called “philosophy” bears little resemblance to what now dominates academic philosophy.

To understand this exercise in meaning construction and boundary work, it helps to understand what modern philosophy professors do. I think it might be described to outsiders as “using precise language to understand conceptual and logical issues.” So, a philosopher who looks at sociology might ask what we mean by “society” or “actor,” and then examine the meanings of these terms and their logical implications. If you want a great example on our blog, see Omar’s recent discussion of social constructionism.As you can imagine, that sort of intellectual work is a bit different than what used to be called philosophy, or what defines heterodox types of philosophy.

What’s at stake in this argument? I think this is an exercise in purity that uses the physical sciences as its claim for status. Consider the following passage:

Our current name is harmful because it posits a big gap between the sciences and philosophy; we do something that is not a science. Thus we do not share in the intellectual prestige associated with that thoroughly modern word. We are accordingly not covered by the media that cover the sciences, and what we do remains a mystery to most people. But it is really quite clear that academic philosophy is a science. The dictionary defines a science as “a systematically organized body of knowledge on any subject.” This is a very broad definition, which includes not just subjects like physics and chemistry but also psychology, economics, mathematics and even “library science.”

I am very partial to this argument. I think that sociology is a science in the common sense use of the term. Sociologists collect data, test hypothesis, and argue about the link between theories and observation. We just do it about people, while physicists do it about energy and matter.

But I am not about to let McGinn off the hook. I don’t think that the practice of philosophy is as pure as he makes it out to be. There are important chunks of the academic discipline that don’t fit into a physical science model. For example, there are quite a few people who do history of thought. And earlier types of philosophy are not completely divorced from the discipline.

Nor would I buy McGinn’s argument that being systematic is enough to make you into something like chemistry. Yes, philosophy is systemic, but falsifiability through logic is qualitatively different than falsifiability through experiment or observation. That’s why I’ve always thought that philosophy is akin to purely logical fields like math and pure statistics, more than chemistry and physics.

In the end, through, I approve of McGinn’s status seeking exercise. Systematic investigation of logical arguments is different than art history or music performance. As a member of a discipline whose mission is to discover what is correct, I can recognize that philosophy is also about “rightness” and less about judgment. But I am happy to let philosophy live in a sui generis position that is different than the physical and social sciences until they can show me that they are engaged with a reality that exists beyond our heads.

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Market Veteran wrote the following comment yesterday:

For example, there are virtually no hiring committees advertising for cultural sociology, despite it being apparently the largest section of ASA. By contrast, there are a tremendous number of jobs advertising for expertise in criminology, quantitative methods, health, etc. The reason is clear: because those tend to be popular majors and have wide availability of external funding.

So, who exactly owns sociology?

1. The senior faculty. They control the journals and the tenure committees. They like reproducing themselves.
2. The junior faculty. They are trying to impress the senior faculty.
3. The graduate students.  They are hatching tomorrow’s sociology.
4. The undergraduates. They want social problems and criminology.
5. Deans. They want interdisciplinary work because it sounds cools and gets you grant money.
6. The funders. They want to end poverty.
7. The professional schools. They already own some chunks of sociology, like orgtheory.

Currently, I think the balance of power is probably #1 and #3. Higher ranked programs tend to do as they will, which usually means hiring people that senior people think will be “hot” in the future. At most other programs, your budget depends on enrollments, and few programs are willing to be less popular by teaching non-social problems/crim.

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This post is about moving up in the academic system. A few disclaimers: First, I speak from the view point of someone who has been very lucky. But still, I think I can offer some insights because I’ve been hiring and grad school recruitment committees. I’ve also had my own successes and failures. Second, the current job market is very hard for people. Not only are we still in a recession, there is a backlog of applicants. Third, I’m a measured optimist. I don’t believe that everyone will magically get an amazing job. But I do think that hard work does yield results over your career.

Each stage of your career entails different mobility strategies. So let’s go through them:

1. Undergraduates: At this point, you can’t change where you went to college and you can’t fudge your GPA much. However, there is one low-cost strategy that boosts your chances – master the GRE. You can study for it and you can retake it. And yes, it costs money – but you should learn some cost-benefit analysis. Getting into a decent graduate school can lead to a life time of guaranteed earnings. $160 per test is a pittance. A few hundred bucks for tests, prep and reports in exchange for a career worth about three million bucks is a no brainer.
2. MA stepping stone: Students with not so great GPAs can spend a year or two in an MA program. Many have excellent reputations and placement records.
3. Graduate students: If you are at a low tier school, you can transfer should you be focused on mobility. Also, a relentless focus on publications is important. Most “move ups” in the job market go to students with published articles, often to those in top journals or primarily authored by the student. In most disciplines, dissertations don’t carry much weight.
4. Faculty: Once again, it really boils down to publication. Yes, sometimes people move based on personal connections, or luck, but the typical move up is due to spending the time to get articles through the review process. Key phrase: “What have you done lately?” Caveat: What counts as “good” depends a lot on subfield and personal trajectory.

In all stages, I strongly recommend the strategy of large N. Undergads should apply to many schools. Graduate students should apply to many jobs in many regions and in many fields. All scholars should produce a healthy number of manuscripts and send them to many journals/publishers.

If you have experience, please post your comments.

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Over at Scatterplot, there have been some really helpful posts on academic issues:

1. Shamus on book contracts.
2. Olderwoman on ASA submission.
3. Jeremy on the oddly intrusive IRB policies at Northwestern.
4. Andrew on IRB mission creep.

Recommended.

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On FB, Dan H posted this nice image of the lineage of sociology depicted as a family tree. The image was created by the staff at Norton.

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Over the last few weeks, we have a lengthy discussion of professional issues in sociology. An issue that comes up is whether academia is meritocratic. I believe that this is a very tricky question. So let’s start with one possible definition of meritocracy:

The degree of meritocracy in a field is defined by the correlation between rewards and what participants believe to be observable measures of performance or quality. We say that fields with a stronger (or weaker) association of performance measures and rewards is strongly (or weakly) meritocratic.

Thus, meritocracy is when people who achieve more at work get more stuff. Of course, this definition is itself open to criticism. There may be fields where there is no consensus over what counts as good. Another problem is that many fields are opaque and it is hard to measure quality. E.g., did your lawyer really do well on your case? In practice, it is often hard to tell.

An issue that I avoid is that the ability to do well may not depend on how hard an individual works or the talent they have. A child who goes to a school in a poor neighborhood may not even have the chance to take an advanced math class., and thus may not be competitive for a selective college. And it’s really out of their hands. That is why you have to distinguish between meritocratic decisions and the justice of resource allocation before the decision. One can be fair, while the other is not. They are related, but distinct issues.

Now, let’s get back to academia. Is academia meritocratic? Let me focus on job market and simply admit that there are pre-job market inequalities that deserve a separate discussion. Well, it turns out that there is a literature on academic job market performance and it shows that academia has both meritocratic and un-meritocratic components. Let’s start with the meritocratic parts:

• For example, a literature going back to the 1970s shows that academic jobs and promotion are significantly correlated with observable measures of success like # of publications and status of the journals.
• As we discussed before, GREs and GPA correlate well with admissions and future graduate school performance. This is a very strong finding from the higher education literature.

There is evidence of un-meritocratic components of the academic labor market:

• In many studies, there is a correlation of labor market outcomes and gender, even when controlling for # of articles and other relevant performance measures. It may be the case that there is outright prejudice. It may also be the case that gender is correlated with other behaviors that are judged differently by the labor market. Erin Leahey has a series of papers, for example, arguing that gender is correlated with specialization in research, which is correlated with labor market outcomes. Meritocratic? It’s up for debate.
• Studies like Burris (2004) that show that elite programs dominate the market and people are often judged by status of the PhD program, even when there is evidence of publication.

As an issue of social science, I think it’s fair to say that academia is somewhere in the middle in terms of how meritocratic it is. At the top of the hierarchy, it’s clear that there is a lot of hard work and halo effects at the same time. Faculty at top programs are constantly fighting for space in top journals. It’s nearly impossible to get tenure at a research university without good publications. But still, many hiring decisions rely on prestige, image, who your adviser is, and so forth. At the macro level, as these studies show, there is a persistent correlation between GPA, GRE, and publications and labor market outcomes.

At the level of advising  people, I’d say the following: academia is meritocratic enough. Not perfect by a long shot, but there is enough openness so that working hard is a rational strategy and you aren’t wasting your time. Academia is a great example of where acting as if everyone is virtuous is probably the smart thing to do.

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A question that is often asked goes something like this. “I am working  in an academic career. However, my record isn’t so great. What can I do to improve my position?” For example, last week, a student asked the following question:

The first half of my college career was atrocious and my GPA suffered tremendously, which led to being put on academic dismissal. After three years I came back to school and I have been doing well, even making the Dean’s List last semester. Unfortunately I don’t think I’ll be able to raise my GPA up to 3.0 by the time I graduate, even if I continue to have 4.0 semesters. Is there any hope for me to get into a Grad program?

The analogous question for faculty and graduate students is “how do I move up even though I am at a low status place?”

Overcompensate. If you had an atrocious year as an undergraduate and you have a bad GPA, then work double hard to maximize your GRE.  Get into an MA program and write a really innovative MA paper – and get it published. If you are in a low-status PhD program, then get published in a well known journal. The same advice goes for faculty.

Of course, this isn’t easy. That is why so few people pursue this strategy. But it does increase your chance of success. If you look at most (but not all) top 20 programs, you will see some faculty with PhDs from non-top 20 programs. If you look at graduate students at top programs, many come from not so fancy undergraduate institutions. What these people have in common is that, at some level, they moved on from the fact that there was something “imperfect” about their academic record and focused on being excellent.

Let me finish with an observation about academia. It’s a system that combines inertia and prestige chasing. That’s why being at the bottom of the pecking order can be frustrating. At the same time, the farther you get into your career, oddly, the less status matters. The rewards go to those who publish.

The truth is that very few people are consistently publishing quality material and few are consistently good teachers.  While I have personally known a few good publishers who had tenure problems, most people with good records get promoted. Graduate students with publications do better on the job market than those who have none. Consistent publishers have an easier time moving to desirable jobs. Easy? Not at all. But excellence is the solution most likely to solve your career problems.

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In the last ten years, the big news in the elite chunk of the sociological profession is that Princeton’s department has developed a knock out placement record. Having been on hiring and recruitment committees, I’ve had the opportunity to closely examine many dossiers from Princeton. They are very impressive. It’s not that an Ivy League program can recruit top students. Rather, there is a style of sociology that has been hatched in that program. Not all graduates employ that style, but enough do that it merits a name.

On the faculty side, you have a cluster of high caliber profs who focus on this topic (DiMaggio, Zelizer, Reuf, and, for a while, Lamont). They aren’t playing the same game, but they are in the same sport. Starting in the late 1990s, there’s been a steady march of graduate students who focus on the mutual relationship between culture/meaning and organizations/fields. Our own Kieran Healey is a great example (organ donation institutions). There’s Bethany Bryson (multiculturalism as meaning in higher ed), guest blogger Fred Wherry (the meaning of craft  markets), Cristina Mora (the institutionalization of Latino ethnicity), Abigail Saguy (cultural analysis of harassment policies), guest blogger Gabriel Rossman (cultural industries). Very different people, but they share common threads of culture, institutions, and markets.

I’d be interested to know if there is a write up of this school. At best, it’s probably to be found in the Annual Review articles written the PSoS faculty and graduate students. I’d also be interested in personal recollections of either faculty or students, if any exist.

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My Facebook news feed is filled with colleagues commenting on graduate program admissions. Let me take this opportunity to make a few comments and open it up for discussion.

1. If you are applying to IU, I am quite sorry. We probably won’t be offering you admissions. It’s just a fact. We reject the overwhelming majority of applicants, including many who will go on and have great careers in sociology.

2. The rest of my comments are directed at faculty who are serving on admissions committees. First, departments vary in their strategies and procedures. Here are IU, we read through every single application. Of course, some folders get more attention than others. The folks with rock bottom GRE’s and a 2.9 GPA won’t get more than a quick glance, if that.

We do read a lot of folders in detail because IU employs a sort of “Moneyball” strategy. We look for diamonds in the rough. A lot of our star students, who go on to dominate the job market, were high performers at relatively low status schools. So we don’t rely on a steady feed of polished applicants from the West Coast and Ivy League. We find the gems from the liberal arts and public schools of the Midwest and South. It’s a strategy that requires reading folders closely, but it pays off in spades. IU has great students.

3. It is hard to develop meaningful distinctions with a certain class of students. You might call them the stereotype sociology undergrads. The profile is that they major in sociology and have a decent GPA. They also have decent verbal scores, but bad to miserable math scores. Unless they can make the case that their math score is an aberration (e.g., they did well in freshman calculus), it’s hard for them to move to the top of the pile.

4. Admissions committees often have trouble interpreting applications from foreign countries. Sometimes it’s language, sometimes it’s simply a different grading system. Also, you have to work extra hard to distinguish between students who are more interested in migration than the academic career. Some regions have a reputation for less than trustworthy credentials. That’s why it’s good to consult with colleagues from those nations  if there’s a candidate who might be a good fit. If I were to advise foreign applicants, I’d insist that they show that they “get it” (i.e., understand academia) and have a credible signal of commitment to academia.

5. Letters of recommendation: My opinion of letters continues to slide over time. The more I do admissions, they more flaws I see. First, there is little variance among letter writers. Second, there is a double selection effect. Students only approach profs who like them and who have given them good grades. Third, a lot of letters are obviously lame. For example, I have read many letters that insisted the student was top notch (top 1% or 5%), yet the GRE’s and GPA were clearly atrocious. Fourth, a lot of students, especially those in low status schools or who have non-academic employment, have letter writers who are not in a position to write honest and thoughtful evaluations. I’ve seen a lot of letters by bosses, academic advisers, project supervisors, and so forth. I don’t count it against students, but it doesn’t help.

6. The 1% of letters:  Still, every once in a while, there’s a letter that makes a clear and compelling case for a student. The profile of the letter writer is that they are an active teacher and researcher. They provide some concrete evidence that the student is actually exceptional, or that they are better than the transcript. They often have extensive experience with the applicant, or they can explain why the performance in one course is remarkable. Sadly, I’ve read only four or five letters that fit this mold, out of hundreds. The rest are generic and uninformative.

7. Random thoughts: Statements are good for sorting students, but only broadly. If the applicant is interested in social work or activism, academic sociology isn’t a good fit. I read transcripts carefully to spot praiseworthy or suspicious behavior (e.g., lots of withdrawals, hard courses, upward trajectories). Writing samples are good measures on general writing, but still, I am reluctant to make a decision on a product that was often not originally intended to be research sociology (e.g., a term paper in history or a policy report).

Add your admissions questions and remarks in the comments.

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A long time ago, in graduate school, my television was stolen and it changed my life. I now had lots of free time. I never understood on a gut level what I was missing until my tv was gone. There was a whole world beyond my living room low rent studio apartment. Jacob Levy once told me during a party, “Fabio, if you don’t watch tv, you had better be very well read.” Indeed, fair ranger, I am now quite well read.

I learned a second lesson. Most television is garbage. Once you unplug and then start watching later, you are immediately confronted with this truth. Ever since childhood, I was accustomed to watching whatever came on. Sure, I had preferences. Some shows are better than others, but I was letting someone throw rubbish at my face every night for hours at a time. For free!

Later, I realized that the issue wasn’t drama or comedy. Ultimately, there’s no harm in having an abnormally thorough knowledge of the Jeffersons and its catchy theme song. There real issue is television news.  As a social scientist in training, I began to believe that I am seeking the truth about social life. It’s my calling. It is what I have decided to dedicate my life to at  the expense of more remunerative careers. Therefore, it is unethical for me to consume or support cultural products that are misleading depictions on the social world.

You don’t need to be a die hard Chomskian who believes that the media is a mere tool of corporate and state interests, although that does happen to fair degree. Rather, you need to compare social science 101 to what happens on the news.

Example 1: Local television news is driven by “if it bleeds, it leads.” That gives the impression that crime is ubiquitous. Instead, much evidence shows a long term decrease in criminal violence in Western society. Steven Pinker’s recent book on violence merely documents what historical criminologists have known for a while.

Example 2: Election coverage is highly misleading. Journalists (and many historians) will regale you with stories about how this debate or that scandal totally changed the election. A common finding among political scientists is that speeches, scandals, media buys, and other electioneering events don’t affect a lot of elections. National elections are driven by the economy and war casualties. Smaller elections are run on somewhat different principles, but on the average, not affected by daily electioneering. Brendan Nyhan uses his twitter feed to point readers to political science research that corrects the non-stop misleading coverage of elections.

Example 3: Let’s stick one of my research areas – higher education. Every year, we get horror stories about how it is impossible it is to get into college. This is a false. Most institutions of higher education have an acceptance rate of over 50%. This finding goes back decades (e.g., economists William Manski and David Wise covered this in their great1982 book “College Choice in America”). There’s only about 50-100 schools (out of thousands) that might be considered competitive. These schools are the ones you expect – Ivy League, flagships, the service academies, about 20-30 of the liberal arts schools, plus a few others (e.g., Duke or Stanford). Basically, unless you want to go to a really elite school, just about any high school graduate in America can find a legitimate college that will accept them.

The news is rife with stories that are at best misleading and at worst factually incorrect. I can’t blame the journalists because sensationalism and short deadlines drive their salaries. I can’t blame viewers because most aren’t trained in research and it isn’t their job to care. However, social scientists should know better. If it is your job to search for truth, then turn off the tv during the news hour.

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A few weeks ago, I noted that Indiana sociology is one of the stingiest graders in the university. About 30% of our grades are A’s, making us the 10th toughest grader in the university. From internal data, I know sociology gives lower grades than the rest of the College of Arts and Sciences, which gives lower grades than the rest of the university. It also turns out that I’m a GPA Terminator. In my large lecture in social theory, about 10% got any version of an A, with a single unadorned A.

I am not alone. The comments on the original post suggest that at a number of schools sociology tends to be harder than most majors in terms of grades. One commenter noted that sociology might just be graded harder. True. Sociology isn’t nuclear physics, but there some reasons to think that sociology is harder than it looks.

1. Most sociology programs requires one semester of statistics, which can’t be faked.
2. You have to take social theory – which is reading hard original texts from authors like Weber, Marx, Durkheim, and so forth. It’s like taking a course in Western civ. at a place like Chicago.
3. A lot of sociological research is not narrative, like history. Rather, it’s about variables, even when it’s historical.
4. Sociology instructors expect writing that combines variables/analytic thinking with college level expository writing.

Students are attracted to sociology because it’s accessible and many think it will be easy. Instead, they get this Frankenstein major that requires some math, some philosophy, analytical/deductive thinking, and clear writing. Few students possess all of these skills at once, which is why the grades are lower than in comparable majors.

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The status of books is complicated in sociology. The discipline is heterogeneous in that journal articles and books are both considered valid forms of publication, but the weight given to them varies. For example, I have noticed that book contracts  often get you little notice in the job market. There are some good reasons for this.

For example, many presses will give “advance contracts” that do not promise publication. Rather, they only promise that the book will be reviewed by the press once it is written. Presses need such documents so they know an author has committed to them, but job search/tenure committees are justified in giving them little weight. Advance contracts are written, but many books are never produced. However, books do often make it through the review process and then there is the final contract that is an agreement for publication. That usually happens after peer review. The final contract is approved by the press’ board of directors.

Assuming that the text is original research and not an edited volume, books at this stage (final contract/forthcoming/accepted) usually count for tenure. But my informal observation is that they don’t count much for hiring. In sociology, book oriented scholars usually have an article or two done before the book. Personally, I have known only one scholar whose only “publication” pre-PhD was a book contract and managed to get a decent job. More recently, people whose only publication is the contract have told me that they’ve had a tough time on the job market.

Is my observation accurate? If so, do book contracts deserve their low status? I’ve only been faculty at one soc program that leans heavily in favor of articles, so I’d be interested in the views of faculty at other soc programs and related fields like management, education, and social work.

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We all have gripes about the publishing process.  Scholastica is a cool initiative by set of grad students at the University of Chicago to take the pain out of academic publishing.  Specifically, “Scholastica makes it easy to create and manage peer reviewed journals online by streamlining administrative tasks and helping you find enthusiastic, qualified reviewers.”

Definitely a worthy cause!  Be sure to check Scholastica out.

Another reason for professors to take back the night. As I was getting an article ready for final publication through the journal publisher website, I was given the option of offering the article as “Open Access”:

I acknowledge that publishing my article with open access costs € 2000 / US $3000 and that this choice is final and cannot be cancelled later.

Whoa. First, any normal publishing industry pays the authors! Second, as the person who authored the work (and is giving it away for free) I am quite frankly appalled by the fact that I would be paying a large sum for free distribution. Sure, I have no beef with a for-profit firm providing a service for a fee, but the crazy price indicates that they are exploiting a monopoly that we have voluntarily given them. In a world with cheap self-publishing alternatives, this is not tolerable. Until we actively come up with an alternative, publishers will continue these extreme pricing practices.

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Over the last year, I have been asked this question at least three times:

What advice do you have for graduate students at low status programs? I’m publishing, I’m working with faculty who are publishing, but I feel like I’m at  a disadvantage. What should I do?

A few responses:

1. You have to come to grips with the fact that academia is status oriented. People from more prestigious schools will get breaks that you won’t get. Once you have accepted that fact, move on with your life and stop thinking about it.

2. Overcompensate. Fortunately, there are a lot of good journals. In soc, we have 2 (or 4) lead journals, a number of specialty journals, and good journals in related fields that will be acceptable within sociology. Submit enough times and you will succeed.

3. Choose your mentors wisely. Lower ranked schools have heterogeneous faculty. Some professors are just as accomplished as those at elite schools, while others have not kept up. Choose advisers who remain active. Hang out with the winners.

4. Think long term. In a low information environment, people rely in status. In a high information environment, people rely less on status. As you progress in you career, you will find that people who are quality researchers and teachers are rare. And if you can bring in grant money, even better. Thus, there are chances to rise to the top if you are consistently good. Check the directories of leading programs and you’ll always see some graduates of non-elite programs.

5. Don’t do anything to reinforce negative impressions. Don’t settle for book chapters or publications in obscure journals until you have at least one or two publications in more highly regarded places.

Overall, there is an uphill battle to be fought, but there is a plausible long-term strategy that you can execute and it has a reasonable chance of success. Now get back to work – and buy the grad skool rulz book!

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Sally Hillsman, executive officer of the ASA, gave me permission to post this email:

I just read your October 26, 2011 posting on OrgTheory. I wanted to assure you that the ASA has been working extremely hard for a number of years on federal human subjects regulations in close collaboration with COSSA (the executive committee of which I chair) and other social science organizations, as well as AAAS. Most recently, we collaborated with a group of social science associations to submit a very detailed response to the HHS regarding their proposed directions for change in the Common Rule.  It is on the ASA home page http://www.asanet.org/ .  Footnotes has covered it as well; the forthcoming issue will have an editorial on the issue.

This is only the latest in a long series of substantive work ASA staff and members have done on these issues with HHS and Congress, including beating back the last Congressional move to make research more difficult without improving the protection of human subjects. We will continue. I hope you will have time to review the ASA joint submmission to HHS on our website. If you have anything to contribute to our thinking on these matters, I would be very interested in hearing from you. Please do keep in touch.

Please read the document (link here) and use the comments section. IRB reform is very important.

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Public radio Bloomington (WFIU) did a study of the academic units at Indiana and Purdue that gave the most and least A’s. Sociology? The 1oth toughest department in terms of giving A’s!

SOURCE: IU & Purdue Registrar grade distribution data, Spring 2011. Excludes courses with three or fewer students, for which grad

Social theory students, you’re getting coal in the stockings this year.

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My post on writing your dissertation has been republished by Inside Higher Education Check it out!

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Got a recent email from a friend and sociologist who was horrified that her dues and journal fees came to a little under $300. Are people still upset at the dues structure? Or have people just accepted it as a fact of life within sociology?

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I have argued that we have too much college. I have also argued that it may not be wise for everyone to go to college considering the astronomical cost. These views have attraced much criticism on this blog.

So why do I stick to these views? As a blogger, I do enjoy the debate, but there’s a more important reason for supporting an unpopular view: I am a “college realist.” I do not take a religious stance toward education. Formal schooling is a tool to an end. If the tool fails to do its job, I can live without it.

What’s the alternative? I think there are three positions one can take toward education:

• College fundamentalism: College is always good for everyone. Everyone should have it no matter the cost or the measured effect. We should massively subsidize college for anyone who asks for it.
• College realism: College is good for some people, but maybe not for everyone. The benefits of college should be compared to the costs and liabilities.
• College skepticism: College is mainly a waste of time. It is not needed and we should dismantle higher education.

There are educational skeptics. Home schooling might be seen as K-12 skepticism. The writer Ivan Illich argued that we needed to “deschool” society. But there aren’t too many hard core skeptics. Rather, the big debate is between college fundamentalists and college realists.

There are many college fundamentalists. For example, policy makers in America often promote more student loans to increase enrollments. Education researchers spend more time, relatively speaking, on access (getting people into college) than impact (see how it matters). The knee jerk reaction to proposal to limit or shrink college education is a symptom.

I’m a realist because there’s too much evidence against a fundamentalist position. We know that many students fail out of college and those that remain fail to learn much. And it isn’t because of finances. Many students lack the ability or maturity to complete college.  Furthermore, there’s evidence that college is overpriced relative to future earnings. This all suggests to me that college education should be focused, not given to all who ask.

I think the right policy stance for a college realist is “targeted access.” Rather than try to get every kid into college regardless of academic skills, we should focus on people who have the ability and desire to succeed. The wealthy will take of themselves. We - the higher education community – should instead work on identifying promising young people from less wealthy families and building financial resources, like endowments and grants, that will make college affordable for these people. Our efforts should be on identification of merit, targetting people who need help, and price control, not merit-blind loans and other policies that bloat and distort higher education.

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