Political Science and D.C. colleges

sakky
Sun, 26 Nov 2006 03:53:50 +0000

Political science is an academic (aka “liberal arts”) field, not a professional one. Researchers at Rice and LSU did a ranking of how good a job a political science department did in training productive PoliSci PhDs in relation to the size of the program. Their measurement was the research publication activity of program graduates, per graduate. Their list surprised me, and did not match “reputational rankings” which they also included:


Texas A&M
Univ Illinois, Chicago
North Texas
UC Irvine
Cal Tech (a friend of mine was a Poli Sci major at Tech)
Rochester
Wisconsin, Milwaukee
West Virginia
Washington U, St. Louis
SUNY, Stony Brook


No Ivy League school was in the top 20.

These sorts of lists are always interesting. The reputation of academic programs is nearly always different among professionals in the field rather than among people like most of us in CC. You know, those of us who really don’t know what we are talking about from personal expertise…



Well, there is one alternative explanation for this, which is that certain programs imbue an ethic of publication quantity amongst its graduates. Merely having lots and lots of publications is not, by itself, a mark of a good scholar. Scholarship quality is more properly measured by both quantity AND quality. It’s not that hard to generate lots of publications if you are willing to publish mediocre stuff. But publishing a whole slew of mediocre papers is not really going to help your standing in the discipline. In fact, it may actually hurt it. It is far better to publish one truly outstanding and widely cited paper ithan to publish a boatload of mediocre papers nobody cares about and nobody cites or, even worse, end up getting debunked.

To give you an example, take the discipline of physics. Einstein is not so much noted for the quantity of the papers he published, but rather their QUALITY. For example, of the 4 “Annus Miribilis” papers he published in 1905, 3 of them were deemed Nobel-worthy, and one of them (the one on the photoelectric effect) actually won. The other 2 papers didn’t win only because not enough experimental evidence yet existed to support the conclusions, but the Nobel committee believed that the evidence would be forthcoming later (and they were eventually proved experimentally). What about the 4th paper? That was the paper in which Einstein first stated that E=mc^2. Basically, it wasn’t the fact that he published 4 papers in 1 year that made Einstein outstanding. It was that he published 4 papers in 1 year that are among the most important in the history of physics.

So the point is, maybe schools like Texas A&M or UIC simply encourage students to publish lots and lots of stuff, regardless of how good it is.

While I’m no expert in political science, I can tell you that there are certain non-poli-sci departments at both Harvard and MIT that do not encourage students to publish large quantities of papers. Rather, they want students to publish only very high quality papers. The goal to them is placement - to place their graduates in tenure-track assistant professor positions in the top universities in the world. You can get placed at a top school with only 1 high-quality publication, or sometimes with no publications at all but just a very high quality doctoral thesis. You can also win tenure at those schools by publishing only a few high quality papers. I know a prof at MIT who just won tenure with only 2 or 3 completed publications (although several more are now under review). A 3rd one just came out, but I think it was just after his tenure review, and if it came afterwards, then it wouldn’t be counted as an actual publication for the purposes of his review. But in any cases, whether it was 2 or 3, the point is he really didn’t have that many publications. But that’s not important for your review. What is important is that these papers were considered to be quality papers.