So, as many of you know, sometime during the past week this happened: These posters were found on the bulletin boards in Hagerty Hall, which houses the World Media and Culture Center, the Center for Languages, Literatures and Culture, the Diversity and Identity Studies Collective, and other centers that focus on multicultural issues. It’s also where […]

A Washington Post opinion article by Steven Pearlstein entitled “Four tough things universities should do to rein in costs” got a lot of buzz on social media yesterday. The attention paid to it isn’t surprising: it’s election season, after all, and skyrocketing student debt numbers have focused candidates’ attention on the cost (and value) of […]

One of the first things that I tell students in my Data Literacy and Data Visualization course is that, when they walk in the door, they should leave their ideological predilections behind. I don’t care whether they’re Sanders socialists or Rockefeller Republicans—the point of the class isn’t to learn how to support Team Red or Team […]

Research notes have all but died in political science journals. I think that’s a bad thing. Back in 2007, I noticed a subtle but very significant problem with a well-established social science methodology. This methodology is not really central to my research agenda, though, and I had other things to work on. So I set […]

Following Nicholas Kristof’s provocative call to social scientists to be more engaged in public debates (“Professors, We Need You!“), Ezra Klein has weighed in with a thoughtful riposte (“The Real Reason Nobody Reads Academics“). To a much greater degree, I think, Klein hits the nail on the head: even interested journalists have a hard time […]

About a decade ago, I wrote an article on interaction terms. In it, I tried to clear up some common misperceptions about how interaction terms can and should be used in regression (logit, probit, etc.) equations. A fair number of people seem to have heeded most of the advice in the article, but in retrospect […]

After tossing out a brief opinion on the value of networking at conferences like APSA (nutshell: say smart things, don’t worry about networking per se), I was surprised to find that I’d become part of a controversy on the subject. Will Moore both indulges his considerable intellectual curiosity— I invite Professors Saideman, Drezner, Voeten, and […]

Over the course of the past couple of years, I’ve read quite a few application essays. Most are very thoughtful. Some are inspiring. All are written by smart people. Yet many, if not most, suffer from a single pathology: their authors sprinkle commas through their sentences with a pathologically unbridled enthusiasm. To be honest, I […]

(with apologies to Lakatos and Musgrave) When you’re a professor, you’re likely to get involved in the occasional discussion about the high price of a college education. One common answer is, “If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.” As the Freakonomics guys demonstrated, that’s also a correct answer: college degrees generally pay for themselves […]

When I sat down to transcribe some thoughts on technology and teaching, I had no idea that Nathan Heller’s excellent piece on the subject (Laptop U: Has the Future of College Moved Online?, New Yorker, May 20) was forthcoming. Reading and reflecting on it has prompted me to clarify what I think are some of […]