Cheating

Nota bene.

Yet a recent University of Guelph study has discovered that more than half the student body in Canada is cheating its way through school. And there is no recall. There is not even a great sense of urgency around the problem. The value of a degree is being debased, and there is mounting evidence that a lack of integrity in the university system will have a far-reaching effect on our economy in the years to come.

The numbers on academic misconduct at both Canadian and American post-secondary institutions are startling. The Guelph report puts the percentage of Canadian students engaging in serious cheating on written work at 53 per cent. In the U.S., according to some studies, 70 per cent of students admit to cheating in one form or another.
[...]
Of all Canadian universities, perhaps McGill's policies are the most stringent. It instituted mandatory assigned or scrambled seating and differing test versions for all their final exams in 1990, largely to curb cheating on multiple-choice questions. All final-year multiple-choice exams are subsequently run through McGill's Exam Security Program, which analyzes wrong answers for telltale similarities. "The more identical wrong answers two or more exams have, the more it becomes suspect," says David Harpp, a McGill chemistry professor who helped pioneer the program. "McGill is actually being quite conservative in its parameters. We could probably catch more cheats, but we are only catching the real idiots." Despite the success of Harpp's method, he knows of no other university in Canada that has adopted it.

McGill has used turnitin.com, a Web-based essay authentication database effective in identifying cases of plagiarism, since 2004. Though use of such databases is widespread at Canadian universities, only McGill has written it into its policy. If suspected of cheating, a student must either have the paper checked against the database or choose another means of authentication, as some student groups had copyright-related complaints about the database. Smaller class sizes, where students have been shown to cheat less, as well as boned-up exam monitoring, are McGill's priorities. "The point isn't to catch people," says Morton Mendelson, deputy provost at McGill. "The point is to convince them that they'll be caught if they cheat."

Herouxville update

CBC reports:

The town council in Hérouxville amended its provocative immigrant code of conduct Monday night to remove certain rules.

Council adopted the changes, which include removing references to "no stoning of women in public" and "no female circumcision."

Councillors said the rules were open to misinterpretation by journalists who have flocked to the Mauricie town of 1,200 since it adopted the code of conduct in January.

The Herouxville saga, Part II
(See part I below.)

Part of what is offensive about the Herouxville norms is the way that they run together very different issues and blur distinctions-- as if there are some relevant (or even meaningful) similarities among burning widows (which, to the best of my knowledge, hasn't really been an endemic practice in Montreal), covering one's face on a day that's not Halloween, wishing to eat kosher or halal food, an questioning the prevalence of crosses and Christmas celebrations. It's offensive to imply that there are immigrants champing at the bit to burn widows; that's been the focus of a considerable amount of attention. But it's also offensive to take the ordinary stuff of cultural and religious practice (much of which doesn't require any formal 'reasonable accommodation' in law, just basic freedoms) and link them to widow-burning.

So to draw some distinctions, the Herouxville norms include:

1) some norms of fundamental nonviolence and the criminal law: no burning, no 'beating to death.' There are few of these, but they happen early and set the tone. They also allow a faux-naive "what could be wrong with what we said?" defense: "It's true that we have a norm against widow-burning, and we should, so what's the problem?"

Note that the English text refers to death by "beating" in public places and to burning, so it appears that the only specific practice being singled out is sati. But the French text, which is the more fundamental, refers to lapidation, that is, stoning, not "beating." "Stoning" calls up a much more culturally- and religiously-specific practice.

2) some highly contested issues of the accommodation of individual religious practice, including the wearing of kirpans and of headscarves or veils. These are settled by fiat, with no acknowledgement that "we" in Quebec (I don't include myself here, since I'm not a citizen) have disagreed about these questions, and that there is live democratic and legal debate about them. "We" don't wear real or symbolic weapons to school, "we" don't cover our faces except on Halloween.

3) some highly contested and difficult questions (also settled by fiat) about what we'll call, following Dworkin, external preferences: the preferences of some members of some religions governing the behavior of others, not necessarily of their religion. Men and women doctors, nursing home caregivers, and police officers may interact with you whether you're a man or a woman. Men and women, boys and girls, may be in the public swimming pool at the same time as you. People in commercial gyms may be dressed in ways that seem to you immodest, and on display in windows where you can see them. This last is a reference to a dispute that arose in Montreal this winter; some Orthodox Jewish men successfully petitioned a YMCA near their neighborhood to cover its windows so that they would not be subjected to the sight of women in exercise clothes.

This is where a great deal of the current lines of debate and dispute are. (Compare this post from Ingrid Robeyns at Crooked Timber last week: "This morning a neighbour asked me whether I wouldn’t be interested in enrolling my son for such a [Dutch municipal] pre-playgroup. But, she added, it’s only for mothers, fathers are not allowed. Apparently the justification is that otherwise mothers from certain ethnic minorities, where gender segregation is an important issue, would not attend with their children." These questions aren't unique to Canada or Quebec.) And I think that we multiculturalists (that 'we' does include me) haven't done enough to talk or think about these questions, or even to acknowledge them. There is a difference between toleration of internal or individual religious norms (headscarves, say) and allowing them to be exported via external preferences. Religions may ban heresy-- that is, they may forbid heretics from remaining members of the religion-- but they may not legitimately seek its criminalization, or otherwise seek to alter the surrounding society such that it would be impossible for them ever to encounter heresy or to know that it exists. They may not export their internal rules of religious belief.

And yet, there are hard questions both of manners and of prudence about how hard a line to take. It's polite to go at least a bit out of one's way to accommodate the preferences of others; it's impolite to go out of one's way to offend them. (It would be impolite for me to dart my head around trying to force my eyes into the field of vision of an Orthodox Jewish woman trying to avoid eye contact with me.) And manners are a category of morals. Prudence: as I've written about here before, a hard line about making no accommodation in medical care for preferences for same-sex interactions may well have the result that, say, women in the most conservative religious groups are prevented from seeking medical care altogether.

But of course gender nondiscrimination in professional settings is a deeply important value, and becomes very hard to sustain if the frequency of people expressing such preferences rises dramatically. We know the analogy about catering to the external preferences of racist-- and, while many people think the analogy is obviously conclusive or obviously fallacious, I'm much more torn about it. There's something obviously right and something obviously wrong about it-- the rights of women in the workplace are at stake, yet in medical settings in particular the preferences at stake are about oneself as much as they are about the behavior of others, and it doesn't seem obviously bgoted to me for women to prefer women medical providers. If that's right, then it is bigoted to say, "It's all well and good for secular women to prefer women medical providers, but religious women may not have, or express, such a preference." And so on. It's impossible to stay off the slope of preferences regarding interactions with others, and impossible to roll the whole way down the hill because, in a diverse society, our preferences will vary and aren't compatible or compossible.

As I said, this stuff is hard. And I think its importance has been underacknowledged except by full-on critics of multiculturalism such as Okin and Barry. Some opposition to multicultural accommodation comes from a concern about freedom and equality in the larger society, and from a concern about the export of the cultural group's norms to that society. This was Pim Fortuyn's cause, and it's not going away.

4) A lot of autoexemptions. "You may not have religion, but we will have crosses and Christmases and what have you and will call them part of our history and culture and patrimony, and so they're not religious and you may not question them." I do especially love the 'no face-covering except on Halloween,' which can't help but make you wonder just what kind of principle is supposed to be governing.

5) And a fair number of declarations about cultural practices that don't require any special accommodation from the majority, but which are nonetheless presented as governing norms to which members of minorities will be expected to conform. We eat all kinds of meat, and don't care how it's butchered, and freely mix it with other foodstuffs.

So the list mixes together public norms which are obviously right (but which no one is challenging, and which it's offensive to treat as if they are under threat); purely private cultural norms which it's actually wrong to demand minorities to adopt; fiat resolution of a number of legitimately-disputed questions of public norms; and some overt hypocrisy about the way Catholicism will be treated.

Multiculturalists need to recognize these distinctions, too. It's not racist or bigoted or illegitimate to raise and worry about the stuff in category (3). It's not racist or bigoted or illegitimate to take a strong no-accommodation stance on that category, though I think it's wrong. The problem with (1) isn't its content but its implication about what immigrants are like; the problem with (5) isn't the implication (it really is the case that Jews and Muslims have norms about food that aren't typical Quebecois norms) but its content.

Running throughout-- and here I want to tread delicately-- there is a problematic 'we.' Cultural and religious accommodation are treated as a gift that we post-Catholic francophone Quebecois might, but probably will not, offer to you religious and cultural immigrants-- as if there had not been native-born Jews and Muslims in Quebec for generations, or as if they were not full members of the society; as if the question of Catholicism's status hadn't been an object of massive democratic dispute within Quebec for generations; as if there were uniformity and consensus where there has always already been disagreement and debate. That said, the question of the 'we' of Quebec is a tricky one, and one that-- as an Anglophone non-Canadian Montrealais-- I don't want to focus on. There is something pretty bad about the first-person plural pronouns in the Herouxville Norms, but I don't at all think that multiculturalism is incompatible with a recognition of the distinct and enduring character of Quebec as a society.

The Herouxville saga

Quebec Liberal Premier Jean Charest has asked sociologist Gerard Bouchard and philosopher Charles Taylor to head a commission studying 'reasonable accommodation' of ethnic and religious minorities.

This is in response to the Herouxville norms, (see background here, and the raw nerves they've exposed.

I don't know much about Bouchard, but Taylor is clearly an inspired choice here-- not only one of the world's leading philosophers and a towering figure in Quebec intellectual life, but also simultaneously a partisan of Quebec identity and adefender of multicultural accommodation of minorities; and simultaneously a committed religious believer and a progressive. (He was also, of course, the dominant figure in the building of political theory in my department at McGill over the course of decades, though he's not here now and I've only met hi a couple of times.)

But Taylor's stature doesn't mean the commission will be able to finesse the gap that's been exposed between the expectations of some Quebecois and the expectations of some minority immigrants. I expect to blog about this a bit more soon, but carefully-- unlike Taylor, I'm very much a guest in Quebec. The desire to be a polite guest has prevented me from blogging about the story up until now, even though it got play in the worl dpress and lies squarely within my area of expertise. But I thought that the appointment of Taylor would be of interest to political theory and political philosophy blog-readers.

Come spend your sabbatical in beautfiul Montreal...

Call for applications: McGILL UNIVERSITY FULBRIGHT VISITING RESEARCH CHAIR IN THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF FEDERALISM, 2008-09

Grant Activity: Conduct research, develop collaborations and deliver
occasional lectures to graduate and/or undergraduate students; take
part in the university's intellectual life in existing workshop
series; and share work in a more focused way with the McGill Political
Science faculty who study federalism from their various methodological
and regional perspectives.

Specialization(s): Empirical comparative studies of federalism;
analytical or formal modeling of federal systems; normative research
on the justifiability and justifiable shape of federalism; the study
of the intellectual foundations of federalism.

Additional Qualifications: Senior or emergent scholars are encouraged
to apply. Applicants must be American citizens or permanent residents
not employed in Canada and not also holding Canadian citizenship or
permanent residence.

Location: Department of Political Science, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec.

Length of Grant: 4 months or 9 months

Starting Date: September 2008 or January 2009 for one-semester grants;
September 2008 for academic year grants

Stipend: Research Chair awards provide a fixed sum of U.S.$25,000.
Confirmation is pending for the stipends for 2008-09.

Comments: The McGill University Department of Political Science
carries on a long and pioneering tradition in the study of politics in
North America. Founded in 1901, the Department's distinguished
faculty is actively involved in a wide variety of ongoing research
projects, and is committed to achieving a high level of academic
excellence in research, graduate, and undergraduate education. This
is an internationally recognized Ph.D. granting department with 31
faculty members with interests spanning Canadian Politics, Comparative
Politics, International Relations, and Political Theory. A letter of
invitation is not required but applicants are encouraged to contact
the institution to discuss research interests. For more information
please contact Francois Carrier, director, Office of International
Relations, at francois.carrier@mcgill.ca; tel. 514.398.4197. The Web
site for the Department of Political Science is
www.mcgill.ca/politicalscience; information on the Canada-U.S. Fulbright Visiting Research Chairs Program can be found at http://www.fulbright.ca/en/chairtext.asp.

Dark Days for The Kings of the Geeks

Peter Jackson off The Hobbit.

Kevin Smith hanging out with his buddy Jennifer Garner in what sounds like a truly pointless movie.

And now, Joss Whedon off Wonder Woman.

So, so, very...

beautiful..

(Warning: not safe for geek-free workplaces. HT: Henry.)

Here's my contribution:

6th level: Bigby's bureaucratic busywork

Caster may accurately complete any one set of forms, e.g. for grant applications. An administrator with Knowledge: nitpickery gets a saving throw against the spell to be able to identify errors; the DC is the caster level plus the caster's own ranks in Knowledge: nitpickery, if any.

Be sure to check out the comments on the thread, too. Samples:

The only problem, of course, is that some of us don't sleep often enough to regenerate used spells before we have to teach or grade again...

I'm holding out for the "Shield of Tenure" spell, which is permanent and effective against all academic monsters, and most political ones.

May be an important early indicator of something I'd rather not see happen

(Warning: inside baseball for poli sci folks.)

Have a look at the pretty pictures in APSA's latest job market survey.

We traditionally identify political science as made up of four core fiefdoms, ahem, subfields: American, comparative, IR, and theory. Then there's a lot of other stuff that some departments identify as available subfields or hiring priorities. Public law is the classic case, methods the obvious one in recent years.

By Figure 3, primary field for job listings, theory now looks like a member of the core four only as a matter of courtesy, and one doesn't place much stock in courtesy. The three other core subfields each had 180+ job listings. Theory at 62 is immediately followed by public law (60) and public admin (57, a surprisingly high number). It's a lot closer in magnitude to the trailing field, methods (28) than it is to any of the other three core fields.

Figure 4, tracking all fields listed in job ads (not just the primary fields) is even worse. After the big three, it's a big drop-off to... public policy, then public admin, then theory, with public law very near behind.

A few Oscar questions

1) What is the definition of 'adapted' such that Borat was an adapted screenplay? Yes, the character and shtick existed in another medium, but I wouldn't think that was sufficient. On the other hand, if one thinks that the movie was a complicated piece of performance art then maybe it was enough-- the shtick is the heart of the matter, whereas for most movies there needs to be a novel or a play with a plot and a number of characters before it's an adaptation.

2) I love Melissa Ethridge. But, good god, the song at the end of An Inconvenient Truth made me burst out laughing-- ridiculously over the top in its earnest preachiness, even with my standards for such things already having been battered by the movie I had just watched.

3) Ah, the wacky foreign language film rules and category. How entertaining is it that Water is the entry from Canada? Or that Best Picture nominee Iwo Jima can't be a foreign-language nominee because it doesn't have a non-US sponsoring country?

4) Surprised to see how little award business The Good Shepherd has done. I have the vague sense that The Departed, Blood Diamond, and The Good Shepherd were competing for the same oxygen, and that The Departed has ended up sucking most of it up. I wonder whether Matt Damon had a nominee's worth of votes, but they got split between Departed and Shepherd.

The unlicensed CV Doctor

Dear academic job applicants,

There are circumstances in which it's important to be able to specify the software packages which you can operate. Entry-level stats scholars, for example, often do specify whether they work in SAS, SPSS, etc.

Under no circumstances is "Microsoft Word" a skill worth listing on your C.V. Neither is Power Point or Excel.

Unless you're a certified sys admin, under no circumstances is any version of Windows or a Mac operating system a skill worth listing on your C.V.; it means "I know how to turn my computer on."

And-- really, truly-- under no circumstances is your ability to e-mail or to operate a web browser a skill worth listing on your C.V.

These things aren't just weighted at zero. They make you look ridiculous.

Some things end up weighted at zero-- if the OS you list is Unix or Linux, I don't actually care, but it shows enough tech cred that I understand why you want to list it. Similarly for LaTeX; at the end of the day it's your word processing software and I think it's silly to list, but it's not actively embarrassing. But why bother? Someone with higher tech standards than I might well view it as the equivalent of listing Word, and you'll do yourself damage.

JTL

Montreal winters and grad school

At the indispensible P.H.D.

(No, it's not really set in Montreal, but it could be.)

It's time for a holy war

I now have a heresy named after me. (See background here and here.)

But I see no reason to accept the designation, for the reasons I offer in that last link; it's the pagan DeLong who's proposing to do away with an obviously canonical text.Will no one rid me of this troublesome apostate? Where are my Fremen legions to fight my jihad?

On the other hand, I'm pretty sure the following does count as a heresy on my part, and I won't pretend it's an orthodoxy. I finished readin Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? yesterday-- my first time to read it or any Phillip Dick. (Embarrassing, I know.) And: Blade Runner is almost incomparably better. Not only are the characters richer and deeper and better-developed; not only are every one of the major plot changes made by the movie clear improvements over the book; and not only is the mood and environment and sense of change over time better set with "blade runners" and "replicants" than with "bounty hunters" and "androids." But also the core Dickian themes of identity confusion, memory confusion, and not knowing which way reality lies are explored in a (I'm going to get attacked here) pretty tedious and plodding fashion in the book, whereas the movie (the Director's Cut, I mean) successfully spins the viewer around and brings him or her in to the characters' confusion and uncertainty.

I think it's worse than that. I think I just didn't like the book very much. It was only the search for glimmers of the movie's greatness that kept me going through it at all; on its own it was entirely flat. The couple of scenes of ostensible head-trippy confusion about identity just inspired in me a reaction of, "Oh, OK, I guess that's what's going on. Oh, no, that's what's going on. Ah."

I can't think of a time when I've thought a movie so outshone its source book; and I can't imagine how people saw such potential for a movie in such an ordinary story. It turns out the potential was there, but I think that most of what makes the movie interesting (e.g. Roy's and Rachel's struggles with their limitations, the pathos of J.F., the Deckard-Rachel dynamic, even the kind of future that's being inhabited) was not even incipient in the book. The accomplishment was that of Ridley Scott, Hampton Fancher, Vangelis, and Syd Mead and David Steiner, much more than that of Phillip K. Dick.

All right, I'll now go peacefully to my burning.

Today's reading assignment

Simon Blackburn on Bernard Williams in TNR. Get ye hence.

Not sure what I can possibly add to this.

France proposed U.K. union, papers show

January 15, 2007
Associated Press

LONDON – Would France have been better off under the Queen?

The revelation that the French government proposed a union of Britain and France in 1956, even offering to accept the sovereignty of the British Queen, has left scholars on both sides of the Channel puzzled.

Newly discovered documents in Britain's National Archives show that former French prime minister Guy Mollet discussed the possibility of a merger between the two countries with then-British prime minister Sir Anthony Eden.

"I completely fell off my seat," said Richard Vinen, an expert in French history at King's College in London. "It's such a bizarre thing to propose."

Eden rejected the idea of a union but was more favourable to a French proposal to join the Commonwealth, according to the documents. One document added that Mollet "had not thought there need be difficulty over France accepting the headship of her Majesty (Queen Elizabeth II)."

While the two countries, separated by a thin body of water, have been bitter rivals since the Middle Ages, the two EU partners now concentrate on trading tourists rather than arrows. What animosity remains has been relegated to world culinary name-calling.

Proposals for Anglo-French unity are not necessarily new. English royalty claimed the title of "King (or Queen) of France" into the 19th century.

Winston Churchill, in a last-ditch attempt to keep France on the side of the Allies in Second World War, appealed for a full union of the two countries in June of 1940.

After the war, Ernest Bevin, Britain's foreign secretary, also toyed with the idea of a "Western Union," a European and African bloc led by Britain and France.

The proposals all shared an element of desperation, said Kevin Ruane, a historian at Canterbury Christ Church University, England. ``It's so impracticable an idea that it has only been raised in extreme situations," he said.

Threatened by an Arab revolt in French Algeria and hobbled by instability at home, France was desperate to maintain its independence from both the Soviet Union and the United States, Ruane said. Eden, who fought in France during First World War and spoke the language fluently, might have seemed particularly approachable to Mollet, a former English teacher.

But even under the circumstances, the suggestion that France accept the British Queen struck historians as bizarre.

Mollet was a Socialist, and left-wing Frenchmen looked to the execution of French King Louis XVI as one of the crowning achievements of the French Revolution. They would have been unlikely to welcome a foreign monarch with open arms. "It must have been some kind of eccentric gesture," Vinen said.

The former French leader's memoirs showed nothing about the proposal, said Francois Lafon, a history professor at La Sorbonne in Paris and a Mollet biographer. Lafon suggested it was probably a political tactic to pressure the British to firm up their role for the imminent attack on Egypt.

A year after Britain turned down France's proposed merger, the French joined the Common Market, the European Union's predecessor. By the time Britain tried to join seven years later, the tables had turned.

Charles De Gaulle had brought a new order to French political life and largely revived its international standing, even as Britain's economy continued to stagnate. De Gaulle vetoed Britain's attempts to join the European Economic Community, twice.

"In retrospect, the irony of this was that the losers were the British," Vinen said. "Maybe we'd be in a better position being ruled by Charles de Gaulle in 1965 than Harold Wilson."

Not all Frenchmen were so sure.

"Can you imagine?" said Jose-Alain Fralon, author of "Help, the English are invading!" "What would the English tabloids do if they could no longer tell stories about the froggies, and what about those French who blame everything on the English?"

The British, he added, are "our most dear enemies" and "we would lose all of the saltiness in our relationship" had the two countries merged.

Still, he said, the two peoples complement each other marvelously.

"Roast beef and frogs don't go together in the same dish. But frogs legs as a starter and a good roast beef as the main dish – c'est merveilleux," he said.

The documents, which have been declassified for over twenty years, were found by a BBC producer late last month.

Sigh.

Immigration as a topic makes people say and do stupid things.

Mr. Ramirez, 20, received his change in American coins and said he liked the chain’s new “Pizza por Pesos” promotion. He had been in the United States for 15 days — his home is in Guanajuato, Mexico — and he wanted to spend the last of his Mexican currency.

“I just arrived,” he said in Spanish, smiling nervously. “It’s my first time here.”

The employees at this Pizza Patrón in East Dallas, one of 59 in five Southwestern and Western states, were still puzzling over the conversion rates almost a week after the chain started accepting peso bills on Jan. 8.

But the promotion has already hit a nerve in the nationwide immigration debate. The company’s Dallas headquarters received about 1,000 e-mail messages on Thursday alone. Some were supportive, but many called the idea unpatriotic, with messages like, “If you want to accept the peso, go to Mexico!” There were even a few death threats.[...]

Just before 8 p.m., the phone rang with another boycott announcement. “Next thing you know, we’re going to be raising Mexico’s flag,” the caller complained.

Where to begin?

Many smart businesses on both sides of the Canada-US border have accepted both currencies for decades. And not only tourism-intensive businesses; tat the supermarket where I worked as a teenager, some 200 miles south of the Canadian border, we accepted up to a dollar in coins at face value and then were supposed to check for an exchange rate after that point.

Business establishments all over the world accept the U.S. dollar under a variety of conditions.

Airports often function in multiple currencies, and there doesn't seem to be any reason to restict that convenience to people who travel by air.

As someone who hops back and forth across a border a fair amount, I instantly recognized the pizza place's rationale:

“It’s for convenience,” Mr. Palacios said. “Most of Mexico’s people, they go in December to Mexico to celebrate and be with family. They come back and say, ‘Oh, I’ve got 200 pesos; what do I do with it?’

The default answer is "stick it in a dresser drawer and hope you remember to get it out before your next trip" (just like all my old Washington MetroCards)-- at which point you'll spend it in the other country. What's the dimension on which it's worse for the U.S. to have people buying an extra pizza in the U.S. than hoarding their money and spending it in Mexico? The amounts are too small for it to make sense to go to a currency exchange; the commission would eat it up. So the options are spend pesos in the U.S., spend them in Mexico, or don't spend them.

I know, I know, it's supposed to be all "symbolic."

“It’s a trivial example, but Hispanics now have their own pizza chain,” Mr. Krikorian said. “It’s a consequence of having too many people arrive from a single foreign culture, and may well reflect a kind of cultural secession"

But it's an act of interpretation, not a natural fact, that makes this a symbol of "cultural secession." And it's a particularly bad synecdoche. Why not treat it as symbolic of the cleverness of Mexican-American entrepreneurs, and their canniness at combining currency trading with pizza delivery and thereby speeding up their pursuit of the American Dream? Or, for that matter, why not express appreciation to the consumers who are spending their had-earned pesos north of the border rather than south, and keeping the local economy that much stronger?

I'm surprised that the massive remittance economy hasn't ever been demagogued; seems ripe for it. But this is effectively the reverse of remittances. Weird.

Winter

Brad DeLong complains:

Oh S--- It's Cold!
Headed out the door at 7:15 AM with the Labrador. Sun rises at 7:20. It felt like... Labrador: 22F.

This isn't supposed to happen in San Francisco.

I am not, repeat not, moving to Canadia anytime soon.

My gloves are inadequate. I can't find my facemask with the neoprene mouth covering. I'm not evolved for this.

To which I reply in his comments:
Well, the day that it was 22 in the beautiful Bay area it was 39 here in New France. This climate change thing has worked out well for my first winter in Montreal-- very mild overall, milder than I remember New Hampshire winters of my youth. Took the chien for a 2-hour bike ride yesterday.

On the other hand...

On the other hand, the good times may be ending. Highs in the next week are predicted at 18, 14, 8, 30, 31, 13, 4. (I can think in kilometers and kilograms and liters but *cannot* think in celsius.) So, yes, if 22 frightens you, you might want to hold off on joining us in Canadia.

Bad signs, good signs

It's a bad sign-- of incipient middle age, or senility, or old-dogness, or just falling into caricaturable absent-mindedness-- when seven years of "Tuesday-Thursday 1:30-2:50" schedules leave you so programmed that, on just the third day of class at your new university, you show up half an hour late to your own 1-2:20 lecture.

It's a good sign-- that your students are highly dutiful and responsible, or reliable and eager, or maybe even interested in hearing your wars of religion lecture-- that almost all of them are still there when you arrive.

Award season

I had always been faintly impressed with the X-Men movies for featuring three Oscar-winners: Ian McKellan, Halle Berry, and Anna Paquin.

But I just channel-surfed past Mars Attacks! with:

Jack Nicholson (12 nominations, three Oscars)
Glenn Close (five Oscar nominations)
Natalie Portman (one nomination)
Annete Bening (two nominations)

What movies that themselves couldn't possibly have been Oscar contenders have had the biggest concentration of heavy-hitting actors, either by Oscar nominations or Oscar wins? I hope that the answer is some lesser Altman pic with a sprawling cast, or some high-ambition catastrophe like Ishtar or Cleopatra, or else some legendary monstrosity like Caligula, or at best something quirky like Murder By Death. But I fear that it'll be some goofy cameo-heavy thing akin to Mars Attacks!-- maybe a Cannonball Run. Wouldn't that be awful?

Godfather III of course doesn't count-- it was, after all, nominated for Best Director and Best Picture. And I'll resist the temptation to count Titanic, since everyone else in the world seemed to think it was a great movie, even though I think it was a high-ambition catastrophe that happened to draw a couple of brilliant young actors in the making (it took me a couple of years to be able to see DiCaprio and Winslett as actors again, notwithstanding Gilbert Grape and Heavenly Creatures-- really for DiCaprio it took me until this year, when The Departed and Blood Diamond successfully applied a sledge hammer to my head and forced me to see past "I'm king of the world!") as well as Kathy Bates.

And no, that judgment is not just because I now live in a city whose most famous resident is Celine Dion.

Fascinating.

Via The Chronicle, news of a for-profit, annually-updated ranking service for doctoral programs-- one without a pure reputational component (subscription needed). Unsurprisingly, it seems that Washington University St. Louis is a big beneficiary of rankings that measure research productivity without getting confounded by name recognition-- that's a kind of face verification of the service's plausibility.

It looks like the Political Science rankings (again, subscription probably required) use the following data:

Number of faculty
Percentage of faculty with a book publication
Books per faculty
Percentage of faculty with a journal publication
Journal publications per faculty
Percentage of faculty with journal publication cited by another work
Citations per faculty
Citations per paper
Percentage of faculty getting a new grant
New grants per faculty
Total value of new grants per faculty
Average amount of grant
Percentage of faculty with an award
Awards per faculty

And the top ten departments:

Wash U
Harvard
Yale
SUNY Stony Brook
UIUC
U Kansas
U Maryland College Park
Princeton
UCSB
UVA

Update:

Chris Lawrence observes: "I’m not going to say that they’re implausible, but the fact that there’s one UC school ranked in the top ten and it’s not located in Berkeley or San Diego makes me a mite skeptical."

True enough. I treat Wash U as intuitive confirmation; Wash U in general and political science in particular has turned into the kind of place that's much better than its reputation, because reputation is such a lagging indicator. I certainly won't say that the list as a whole conforms to my intuitions. Of course, if all the rankings did was to confirm intuitions then no one would be paying $30,000 a year to subscribe to it. But there's plausibly counterintuitive and... less plausibly counterintuitive.

A few quirks:

Maryland seems to make the top 10 list on the basis of very high "faculty with a book" and "books per faculty" results. On the other hand, Stony Brook has no books but lots of articles. We're used to poli sci rankings that track American Politics rankings which are more journal-dependent; Maryland's more a theory/ public law/ APD kind of place, where books are more important. It's to the ranking system's credit that it recognized poli sci was a hybrid discipline, whereas books don't show up in, e.g., the chemistry rankings. We're not told how heavily the two categories are weighted, nor are we told what counts as a relevant "book publication" (probably *not* only a peer-reviewed monograph from an academic press). UVA also seems to be very pulled up by the book measure.

The citation measure has a huge range, from more than 9 citations/ faculty member at Harvard to 1-1.25 at Kansas, Maryland, and Virginia. Insofar as that means the latter three are producing a lot of work that doens't get read in the discipline, that's a bad sign, and maybe an underweighted bad sign. I suspect that, if we saw the top 20 on this measure alone, it would correspond a lot more closely to informed intuitions; and that's a vote in favor of the informed intuitions.

Grants are a funny category. On the one hand, they're inputs not outputs, and so in some sense shouldn't be counted at all-- but that ship has long since sailed. And they're inputs that are directly relevant to grad student support. On the other hand, I look at the tiny Princeton figures and think, "well, yeah, why bother with big bureaucratic grant programs so often when you're institution's so rich that it can routinely provide research accounts comparable to a smallish NSF grant?" And money already sloshing around the institution is just as good for grad students as money coming in on government checks.

FINAL UPDATE: So, it turns out that the formula is 60% publications and citations, 30% grants, and 10% awards (from Fulbrights to Nobels), which is arbitrary but fine. But for hybrid book-journal fields, the formula within "publications" is 5:1 books:articles. I'm all for books, and am well within the bookish part of the discipline; for political theory a 5:1 ratio is probably fine. (Always assuming that "books" means "peer-reviewed monographs.") But it clearly underweights journal articles in American and methods in particular and maybe in IR as well. Given the dominance of American in both numbers and disciplinary centrality, that's a problem.

In memoriam

Two major losses to the American academy in the past few days; two insightful and iconoclastic scholars passed away.

Elizabeth Fox-Genovese

Seymour Martin Lipset

Wow.

John Holbo, as evidenced by his MLA talk, is very, very smart. I hope he brings this level of A-game to the other conference at which he's presenting before he returns to Singapore.

My favorite line:

"First, necessity is not the mother of subventions."

(It's not just a good pun-- it's really powerfully important to the point he's making.)

Now this kind of thing isn't my kind of thing. I'm a cloth-and-paper traditionalist, and I haven't been in any hurry to see blogging as more than a sideline to scholarship and an efficient means of information distribution. But John makes an excellent case. Often more-moderate arguments are more-effective ones, but not, I think, here. He's not arguing in an apologetic spirit for blogging to be seen as a kind-of-okay thing for scholars to be doing that they shouldn't be embarrassed about or denied tenure for. He's arguing in an aggressive, almost confrontational manner that blogging and related phenomena can be central, and can help fix a lot that is currently broken. He's directly challenging the romanticized image of the monograph-journal-and-library institutional framework, and pointing out that it doesn't work as imagined now, and couldn't work as imagined givem the various constraints, so rearguard attempts to conserve it are likely to be counterproductive.

I've known, since before The Valve got launched, that John was up to something big that I didn't quite get. I'm starting to get it.

Go read.

What I'll be doing this semester

Borrowing a blogging idea from Brad De Long, since I enjoy it when he does it.

Political Science 613: Hume, Smith, and the Scottish Enlightenment

This is a graduate seminar on the political and moral thought of David Hume and Adam Smith, and as a secondary matter on their contemporaries and intellectual context in the Scottish Enlightenment as well as in France. It aims to convey, through close readings of primary texts, supplemental readings of secondary texts, discussion, and a research paper, both a broad understanding of the intellectual currents of the Scottish Enlightenment, and at least a moderately deep grasp of Hume and Smith. The most important themes of the course will include justice and sympathy; the theory of commercial society and its development; the relationship between private morality and public benefit; the critique of 17th-century contractarianism; and Hume’s and Smith’s contributions to political economy and political science as descriptive and explanatory disciplines.

1. January 3: Introduction
2. January 10: Locke, Hutcheson, Mandeville
John Locke, Two Treatises of Civil Government, Peter Laslett ed., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960 [1688]: Second Treatise chs. 2, 3, 5, 7-9, pp. 269-282, 285-302, 318-363

Francis Hutcheson, Philosophical Writings, R.S. Downie ed., London: Everyman, 1994 [1755], pp. 155-88, 191-7

Francis Hutcheson, An Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions and Affections, with Illustrations on the Moral Sense, Aaron Garrett ed., Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2002 [1728], pp. 22-9, 110-137

Francis Hutcheson, An Inquiry Into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue in Two Treatises, Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2004 [1725], pp. 85-134

Bernard Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees, vol 1, F.B. Kaye ed., Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1988 [1725], pp. 3-57, 85-93, 107-172

3. January 17: Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws; all but Books 27-28, 30-1 but with greatest attention to Books 20-21.
Recommended: The Fable of the Troglodytes, from Montesquieu, Persian Letters

4. January 24: Hume, Treatise
5. January 31: Hume, Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals— with discussion of the Treatise continued.
February 7: Hume, Essays, essays #1-26 (recommended: the remaining ‘withdrawn’ essays)
February 14: Hume, History, selections TBA

February 28: Ferguson, Civil Society.
Course packet:
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Discourses and Other Early Political Writings, Victor Gourevitch ed., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997 [1755]; Second Discourse, pp. 114-188

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, William Payne ed., Amherst NT : Prometheus, 2003 [1762], pp. 259-308

March 7: Smith TMS, entire
March 14: Smith TMS, discussion continued
March 21: Smith LJ
March 28: Smith WN—read as much as possible, but at least Books I, III, and IV
April 4: Smith WN, discussion continued; read the rest of the work

April 15: Special Montreal Political Theory Workshop daylong symposium on Hume and Smith, with papers by Samuel Fleischacker, Sharon Krause, Sankar Muthu, and Andrew Sabl.

Core recommended secondary reading:

Alexander Broadie, ed., The Cambridge Companion to the Scottish Enlightenment
Athol Fitzgibbons, Adam Smith's System of Liberty, Wealth, and Virtue
Samuel Fleischacker, Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations: A Philosophical Companion
Charles Griswold, Adam Smith and the Virtues of Enlightenment
Knud Haakonssen, The Science of a Legislator
Knud Haakonssen, Natural Law and Moral Philosophy
Knud Haakonssen, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Adam Smith
Istvan Hont, Jealousy of Trade
Istvan Hont and Michael Ignatieff, eds., Wealth and Virtue: The Shaping of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment
John Stewart, Opinion and Reform in David Hume’s Political Philosophy

Science of a Legislator, Wealth and Virtue, and Philosophical Companion should be considered just shy of being required reading to finish befor the end of the semester.

Additional recommended secondary reading:

Jonathan Israel, Radical Enlightenment and Enlightenment Contested
J.G.A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, especially vols. 2 and 3
John Robertson, The Case For The Enlightenment
Jerome Schneewind, The Invention of Autonomy

A different question about federalism

Matt Yglesias writes:

States seem to differ primarily in how they deal with some fairly trivial regulatory matters. Each state's rules governing alcoholic beverages differ somewhat from its neighbors, cigarette taxes and where (if ever) you're permitted to smoke indoors vary, but you don't see a ton of policy variation. No state, no matter how right-wing, has just voted to dismantle its public school system nor have we seen a state attempt single-payer health care. I wonder if this is parasitic on the fact that there's shockingly little institutional variation among American states.

US federalism is somewhat unusual in that the states have essentially total autonomy in terms of how they want to arrange the institutions of state government. The federal constitution only contains a vague requirement of a "Republican form of government" which seems to offer a lot of leeway. Nevertheless, 49 out of 50 states choose bicameralism. Zero states out of fifty opt for parliamentary-style governance where the state executive must maintain the confidence of the legislature. All fifty states, including tiny Rhode Island, implement a an interstitial country (or "parish") level of government between the state and towns and cities. All the states elect their legislators on the basis of single-member constituencies. You'd think that some state, at least, would try something different along some of these dimensions and see how it works out.

As a number of his commentators note (and see also Will Baude), there really is a fair amount of variation o those policy questions that haven't been taken away from the states by either Congressional preemption or federal judicial constraints. And some of the range of permissible institutional variation got removed in the 1940s-60s. (This is one of those assaults on federalism that I think was necessary to break Jim Crow but that we should still recognize was constitutionally costly-- ideally the 14th Amendment, 15th Amendment, and Voting Rights Act should not be interpreted to constrain institutional choice as tightly as they have been read in the last half-century, but otherwise southern states seemed likely to use their institutional leeway to concoct further ways to keep blacks out of political power in perpetuity.) Moreover, the different systems fo selecting judges and the different rules about initiatives, referenda, and recalls do make for very different kinds of political systems.

But still-- he's right, there's been no radically green or libertarian state government, no state government that was operationally socialist no matter how aspirationally socialist some of the old Scandianvian midwestern states were, etc. And every state has a separately-elected unitary governor, only one state has a unicameral legislature, no state has tried to get a PR or statewide STV system through VRA approval. Two observations.

One is that there was much more institutional variation during the period 1776-89. After the federal constitution was ratified, it became a focal point for how Americans thought about constitutional organization.

The second is that, as far as I can tell, this is actually very common in federations. So I doubt that "shockingly little" and that "somewhat unusual." I think the U.S. is typical here. I know a lot about a lot of federal systems (though of course not everything about all of them) and this kind of isomorphism between provincial governments and the federal government is, to the best of my knowledge, universal. To take the simplest case: I don't know of any federation with a presidential form of government that has even one province with a parliamentary one, or of any federation with a parliamentary form of governance that has even one province with an independently-elected executive.

Some federations do constrain institutional choice more than the "republican guaranty" clause does in the U.S. constitution-- India, for example-- but in general the constraint just seems to be familiarity. There might also be party issues at stake. Federations are hard on parties to begin with-- any parties that aren't explicitly provincial/ regional (e.g. the Parti Quebecois) have to juggle their national and their provincial positions, trying to appeal to the very different median voters of each province severally as well as of the country as a whole. If parties had to compete in completely different electoral environments from one province to another, I imagine that the task would become hopeless. First past the post rules send you toward the median voter; proportional representation rules and STV rules mandate very different strategies. If I were a political party, I wouldn't want my strategic calculations to be rendered impossible like that. So the dominant political parties in any system might have a strong interest in isomorphism between the central and the provincial governments.

Indeed as a constitutional designer I'd worry that different electoral systems from state to state would encourage the growth of very different party systems at the state and the federal levels. (This turns out to be bad. See Mikhail Filippov, Peter C. Ordeshook and and Olga Shvetsova, Designing federalism: A theory of self-sustainable federal institutions, one of the best political science books on comparative federalism.) But that worry can't explain the isomorphism, just justify it. I suspect the explanation lies in some combination of party self-interest and sheer familiarity.

Five things

Dan tagged me with this game (it's not a "meme," people-- it's just a blogospheric parlor game). Five things most people don't know about me:

1) I type using two index fingers and my right thumb for the spacebar. People call this "hunt and peck" but I don't look at the keyboard, and I move along at 60-65 words per minute. I started typing very early, both because of my terrible handwriting, and because my grandfather was determined to introduce me to computers early on (so I spent a summer when I was six or so pointlessly writing programs in BASIC on his Commodore PET-- I had fun and learned a lot of math while learning what BASIC's math functions did, and it's only in retrospect that the pointlessness is apparent). So I was typing long before anyone was going to teach me to touch-type, and the habits were way too ingrained to unlearn later.

Unfortunately, other than the PET my typing was done on a manual typewriter-- and one of the habits I've been unable to unlearn is pounding on the keys much too hard. It's not only noisy; in the long run it's bad for the keyboards.

2) Career paths not taken, part 1: from the ages of 9 through 17 or so, I was almost constantly involved in theater, stage, performances, etc. I took a couple of years of kids' acting lessons from this guy (and he was in most of my earliest plays-- local Equity stock theaters that cast area kids in choruses and extra parts). When I was 10 I appeared in a TV ad for my uncle's race for a Florida judgeship [judicial elections-- shudder]; indeed I gave a 29.5 second testimonial to him, and he appeared only to speak the final two words ["Thanks, Jacob!"] I was never what you would call a good actor; and I didn't have my first dance lessons until I was 16, which was way too late for getting very far in musicals. The crowning moment was my honest-to-god Broadway tryout, for Oliver!-- which happened to come during the ten-day period when I dropped from soprano to bass. (Think Peter Brady singing "Who Will Buy?")

For a couple of years I was in one of those kids' song-and-dance troupes that goes around singing at malls, outside the entrance to Fanieul Hall, and so on. For several months we were the opening act for a solo tour by "Maria of Sesame Street," as she was billed. One of the other kiddie performers in the troupe (and someone I also went to high school with) was future CBS News correspondent (and an operatic singer to boot) Trish Regan.

3. Career paths not taken, part 2: politics. Let's see: I was, at 18, an elected delegate to the New Hampshire Democratic Convention. (My birthday was after the filing deadline but before the election; no one filed; I ran a write-in campaign.) At 21 I ran for the NH House of Representatives as a Libertarian, winning 12% of the vote. At 16, when my hometown had a Charter Commission (the local equivalent of a Constitutional Convention), I wrote, circulated petitions for, and spoke at Commission meetings on behalf of the creation of a nonvoting seat for a student from the local high school (which I didn't attend) on the school board-- as far as I know the provision's still in place. The first holder of that seat was Chip Griffin, now a blogger and political consultant. I was a tireless teenaged letter-to-the-editor writer, was heavily involved in one city council race and one gubernatorial race, and interned for a term in the Washington office of then-Congressman (now-Senator) Byron Dorgan. My own State House race was my test to see whether I really liked electoral politics and wanted to carve out a place for it in my life. The answers were no and no.

4. Career paths not taken 3: journalism, radio, and business administration. After three years as a reporter for my college radio station, I became its CEO for a year-- during the 91-92 recession, with bankruptcy looming. (The station is an independent corporation and depends on commercial ad revenue.) I've fired two people (non-student full-time staffers); one filed suit purporting discrimination on the grounds of anti-Semitism (yes, I'm Jewish, and so was her immediate supervisor); and I still authorized paying her a settlement because it was much, much cheaper than paying our lawyers for a suit would have been. Glad I've had to make payroll in my life, and glad I don't have to do it on a regular basis.

5. I was pretty isolated and out of the loop as a kid-- and, in pre-internet days, geeky kids didn't always have a way of finding out what other geeky kids did. When I went to math geek camp [a.k.a. Johns Hopkins' CTY program] at age 13, that was my first exposure to Dungeons & Dragons. 1984 is shockingly late for a kid as geeky as I was to have first played D&D...

Tag: (Ah, fun with exponents! You tag five people, then they tag five people, and so on, and so on until you're in a Clairol commercial that has used up all the atoms in the universe.) Belle Waring, laloca, Aeon Skoble, Andrew Norton, and Fabio Rojas.

Upcoming

In Washington this week: the annual meetings of the American Association of Law Schools, the Federalist Society, and the American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy. I'll be giving "Three Perversities of Indian Law" at the Federalist Society Friday morning. The ASPLP program follows. As always, to join the ASPLP and receive the volume of Nomos that will follow from this volume, click here and e-mail me.

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Friday, January 5, 2007

3:30-5:15 pm: "American Conservative Thought and Politics: Perspectives from Political Science"
Washington 4, Exhibition Level, Marriott Wardman Park

Paper: Nathan Tarcov, Professor of Social Thought and Political Science, University of Chicago
"Leo Strauss and American Conservative Thought and Politics"

Commentator: John Holbo, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, National University of Singapore
Commentator: Arthur Jacobson, Max Freund Professor of Litigation & Advocacy.

Chair: Melissa Williams, Professor of Political Science and Director, Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto

6:30 pm: Wine and Cheese Reception
Washington 3, Exhibition Level, Marriott Wardman Park


Saturday, January 6, 2007

8:00-9:00 a.m: American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy Breakfast
Marriott Salon III, Lobby Level, Marriott Wardman Park

9 am- 10:40 pm: "American Conservative Thought and Politics: Perspectives from Law"
Marriott Salon III, Lobby Level, Marriott Wardman Park

Paper: Richard Garnett, Associate Professor, Notre Dame Law School, Notre Dame University
"“Two There Are”: Church-State Separation and Religious Freedom"


Commentator: Robert George, McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence, Princeton University
Commentator: Elizabeth Harman, Assistant Professor of Philosophy and the University Center for Human Values, Princeton University

Chair: Sanford Levinson, W. St. John Garwood and W. St. John Garwood, Jr. Centennial Chair,
University of Texas Law School; Professor, Department of Government, University of Texas


10:50am- 12:30 pm, "American Conservative Thought and Politics: Perspectives from Philosophy"
Marriott Salon III, Lobby Level, Marriott Wardman Park

Paper: David Sidorsky, Professor, Department of Philosophy, Columbia University
"Liberty, Equality, Fraternity: Pluralist Perspectives "

Commentator: Patrick Deneen, Associate Professor of Government and Markos and Eleni Tsakopoulos-Kounalakis Chair in Hellenic Studies, Georgetown University
Commentator: Elizabeth Emens, Associate Professor of Law, Columbia University

Chair: Jacob T. Levy, Tomlinson Professor of Political Theory, McGill University