This is part three of hopefully a three part series on the political science academic job market.  I think my stint as WashU Director of Graduate Studies has me thinking about this too often.

Before I start this post, let me make two points.

1. I’m not sure this blog entry title is really appropriate.  There is nothing about supply in here and not that much on demand either.  False advertising.  Just like the Macinistas that told me that Apple products never crash.  I’m going to go Office Space on my MacBook Pro one of these days.
2. One of my colleagues admitted to me that he reads this blog.  He thinks I have a crappy blog name and I need something cool like the Monkey Cage.  My response is that there is nothing cool about political science.  There, I just alienated one of my two readers.  Blog by Nate.

Convergence on Candidates

I chatted with someone yesterday about academic job markets in the natural sciences and how offers (especially senior offers) are usually accepted, while many political science searches (junior and senior) seem to fail.  There are a bunch of reasons for this (the high costs of labs actually makes these natural searches very different than political science searches), but one interesting observations was that even the superstar junior candidates tend to only get one offer.  Not sure how accurate this account is, but sure sounds like job market collusion to me.

Ok, forget the sciences.  In political science I keep hearing that this year we see a ton of talent across fields with lots of candidates that would meet or exceed the bar in most years.  Yet we’ll probably see a competition for the “best” candidates, where a bunch of schools will spend time and money trying to attract a handful of candidates.  Most of these schools will get nothing for their efforts.

Why is it that everyone of going after the same set of candidates?  Don’t they know about the winner’s curse and that NFL first round draft picks are overvalued?

Shouldn’t some schools shoot a little lower and net a very good candidate instead of not getting the excellent candidate?

There are a lot of possible explanations for this, but I thought I would bring up one and then link it back to my previous two posts on the job market.

Risk Averse Committees and Departments

I really like one of Malcom Galdwell’s New Yorker articles that combines two things I really care about.  Teaching and the NFL.

There are lots of interesting elements to this story, but the relevant point is how difficult it is predict success in the classroom and in professional sports.  None of the training, prior experience, or other observable factors are great predictors of success.

Advise to Junior Faculty

My quick take (and this might be a WashU perspective) is that search committees and departments are really risk averse.  Ph.D. institutions, letters or rec, etc are all pretty poor predictors of success.

Most schools have a six year tenure clock.  Work backwards on when your file goes in, how long the peer review takes, how long it takes to write a paper, etc.  For most candidates the majority of their tenure file is work from their first three years on the job.  That is my guess at least.

What numerous people told me at the start of my career were versions of:

• Make sure you get out of the gates quickly.
• Get your dissertation work published immediately.
• Don’t tell yourself that you’ll spend your first year or even the first semester on your teaching.  Get stuff under review.

Actually, that might be advice to ABDs

This is tough advice to follow, but it is a lot easier if you already have a stream of polished papers ready to go out and have some experience in the peer review process.

How does this relate to the job market for ABDs?   Sometimes graduate students ask me how solo authored pieces counted versus work with faculty.  I don’t know of any hard rule, but the point is that articles can signal different things.

But can a student cut it as a junior faculty member balancing a 2-2 teaching load (if you’re lucky) with tons of other administrative duties?  Hard to tell.  But many search committee members assume that students that have figured out how to publish in graduate school are more likely to publish as an assistant professor.  This is imperfect, since there are some students who try hard in graduate school and get a bad luck of the draw in the review process.  There are also graduate students that publish because advisors are driving the bus and the students are along for the ride.

This isn’t to say that students shouldn’t focus on big ideas or skills in graduate school.  The point is that departments don’t want to hire catapillars that might turn into butterflies.  They want to hire butterflies.  Wow, that was a stupid analogy.

How about teams that want a quarterback shouldn’t acquire Tim Tebow.  That wasn’t even an analogy.

I am a Blowhard

My son is asleep and this is my window to finished some research papers, prep my teaching and review articles for a bunch of journals.  I’m also the trifecta of Director of Graduate Studies, dissertation advisor with multiple students on the market, and a chair of a Wash U search committee.  Lots of work to do and I just spend part of the day writing up advice to junior faculty and ABDs on a blog with one reader.  I should probably listen to my own advice.

But look back at my advice in this post.  I bet you’re find some logicaly inconsistencies, factually incorrect assumptions, and downright stupid points.  Maybe that is part of the takeaway.  I’ve been on multiple search committees and had some degree of power over hiring.  That scares even me.

I just blogged about my thoughts and then told you my thoughts are stupid.  Did I just become the M. Night Shymalon of political science?

Back to my point.  Search committees are composed of people.  Very, very fallible people.  They are trying to predict academic success.  And they do a very poor job of it.  But there are huge costs, at least collectively, to making mistakes.

Committees are looking for sure things, and candidates with publications might be the closest to a sure thing.  This doesn’t mean you have to publish to get a job or that students with pubs will always get jobs.  But it does mean you should probably send out your work for peer review.  You also probably shouldn’t take advice from a blog that has a readership of one. Thanks for reading mom.