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Policy and the Practice of Political Science

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While I can’t attend the workshop (lame prior commitment with stupid friends), I would like to associate myself, in a wholly disinterested manner, with this part of Dr. Walt’s comment:

What is also needed is a change in academic practice, including the criteria that are used to make key hiring and promotion decisions. The standards by which we assess scholarly value are not divinely ordained or established by natural law; they are in fact “socially constructed” by the discipline itself. In other words, we collectively decide what sorts of work to valorize and what sorts of achievement to reward. If university departments placed greater weight on teaching, on contributions to applied public policy, on public outreach, and on a more diverse range of publishing venues — including journals of opinion, trade publishers and maybe even blogs–then individual scholars would quickly adapt to these new incentives and we would attract a somewhat different group of scholars over time. If university departments routinely stopped the “tenure clock” for younger academics who wanted to do a year of public service, that would enable them to gain valuable real-world experience without short-changing their long-term academic futures. It would also send the message that academia shouldn’t cut itself off from the real world. And it probably wouldn’t hurt if deans, department chairs, and university presidents welcomed controversy, encouraged intellectual diversity, and defended the slaying of sacred cows. As I’ve said before, academics really shouldn’t count it a great achievement when students have no interest in their classes, and when people outside the ivory tower have no interest in what we have to say.

Emphasis added totally at random. As I said, I have no particularly large pack of dogs in any of these fights, and my promotion of these views should not be associated with any specific professional career interests that I may or may not have.

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