Courtesy of xkcd.
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Tag Archives: academia
Quick links
1. “Shame on me: Why it was wrong to cost the Millennium Development Goals” : Shanta Devarajan, Chief Economist for MENA at the Bank, on why he thinks that costing the MDGs may have “helped shift attention away from what is needed to reach the goals, and hence contributed to the perpetuation of poverty.”
2. Is teaching in college no longer a middle class job?
3. Dark Leviathan: How even the deep web, in desperate need to signal credibility, cannot escape the need for the “law merchant” (and eventually the state, or some generalizable norms a la Avner Greif).
4. The American South, on the map and in the mind.
5. Doing a book tour in China (with a censor in tow).
Introducing the African School of Economics
Dr. Leonard Wantchekon of Princeton has set the ball rolling on what is a promising project.
The [African School of Economics] ASE will meet the urgent need for an academic institution capable of generating the necessary human capital in Africa. Although the region has seen significant improvements in primary and secondary education in the past few decades there is still a pressing need for advanced education centers. Through our PhD programs, we hope to provide the missing African voice in many Africa-related academic debates. Furthermore, through our Master in Business Administration (MBA), Master in Public Administration (MPA), Executive MBA and MPA (EMBA and EMPA), Master in Mathematics, Economics and Statistics (MMES), and Master in Development Studies (MDS) programs, we will provide the technical capacity that will enable more Africans to be hired into top management positions in development agencies and multinational corporations operating on the continent. This will foster sustainable hiring practices that will retain talent and experience in Africa.
The school will open its doors in 2014.
Check out an introductory video by Dr. Wantchekon here.
Explaining academia’s liberal bias
According to the New York Times it is more than just self-selection. There is also screening:
“The tendency of liberals to pursue advanced education isn’t a result of higher I.Q. or less materialism or any such indirect factor,” Dr. Gross told me. He pointed instead to a direct factor: the liberal reputation of the profession since it came of age in the Progressive Era. “The liberalism of professors is explained mostly by self-selection,” Dr. Gross said, arguing that conservatives avoid fields with reputations that don’t fit their self-identity.
But many conservatives insist that a liberal reputation wouldn’t dissuade them from taking a gig with tenure and summers off. The self-selection theory doesn’t satisfy Peter Wood, the president of the National Association of Scholars, a group critical of what it calls liberal bias in academia. Dr. Wood, a political conservative, is a former professor of anthropology and associate provost at Boston University.
….. Dr. Wood wrote. “If it comes down to it, entry can still be impeded through other techniques, the feminist and the multiculturalist vetoes on the faculty search committee being the deadliest as far as conservatives go, although there are others.”
…….. If you were a conservative undergraduate, would you risk spending at least four years in graduate school in the hope of getting a job offer from a committee dominated by people who don’t share your views?
Is Peer Review in Decline?
One more reason for academics to keep blogging….
Glenn Ellison in this paper notes the general decline in the need for academics from top institutions to publish in top journals because they can get citations [hopefully confirming that they were right] by other means – through sites like SSRN [and perhaps even by sharing their works in the blogosphere]
Over the past decade, there has been a decline in the fraction of papers in top economics journals written by economists from the highest-ranked economics departments. This paper documents this fact and uses additional data on publications and citations to assess various potential explanations. Several observations are consistent with the hypothesis that the Internet improves the ability of high-profile authors to disseminate their research without going through the traditional peer-review process.
The author further notes that:
I started this paper by pointing out two trends: economists in several highly regarded departments are publishing fewer papers in the top field journals; and Harvard’s economics department is also publishing fewer papers in the top general interest journals.
Several pieces of evidence bolster the view that one factor contributing to these trends is that the role of journals in disseminating research has been reduced. One is that the citation benefit to publishing in a top general interest journal now appears to be fairly small for top-department authors. Another is that Harvard authors appear to be quite successful in garnering citations to papers that are not published in top journals. The fact that the publication declines appear to be a top-department phenomenon (as opposed to a prolific-author phenomenon) suggests that a top-department affiliation may be an important determinant of an author’s ability to sidestep the traditional journal system.
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