Year: 2006

This paper about the role of international financial insitutions (like the ILO and the World Bank) on social security policy in Mexico has been conditionally accepted for publication in Global Social Policy. The revisions are not extensive and should make the paper a much stronger article.

Now, this means that I’ve fallen below Munger’s 3 under review rule. Drats. Must. do revisions. quickly. and get something. else. out the door. soon.

When I send out my book ms, will that count as 3 at once?

Hmmm….

Dear grad students,

Thank you very much for recognizing my contributions to your academic and professional development. I am very proud to be the first faculty member to receive the INTAGO “Friend of Graduate Students” award for my teaching and mentoring activities.

I know that my classes can be demanding and difficult and that I have high expectations for you and your work. I know that statisitcs, and even IPE, has not always been easy.

I’m glad you feel I’ve made a positive contribution to your graduate experience. I enjoy teaching you all and wish you all the best in your studies and beyond.

My very best,
Michelle

Our advisor for undergrad international affairs students stopped in to tell me that the other day, she asked a young woman what she wanted to do when she grew up. That young woman said she wanted to be just like me! She wanted to travel, do research, and be a professor. I haven’t taught more than a handful of undergrads in several years (I was in Mexico and since have taught only MS classes), but it was nice to hear that I have made an impression on at least one young woman. It’s a good reason to promote diversity in University classrooms, because you’ll note that she didn’t just want to be a professor, she wanted to be like one of the professors she could identify with and imagine herself becoming.

You have to wade through many, many inane comments before the interesting ones that begin on November 30, 2006.

Update: Thanks to Chris, you can go straight to the pedigree discussion.

I’ve been reading this book that combines a little history of computing with a discussion of the open source software movement. Brian has a stack of other books he’s reading for a research paper that I’ll probably wade through, too.

Among the several tidbits that struck me as interesting was the advice: “Plan to throw one away; you will, anyhow,” which apparently first appeared in this book. You can read ESR’s discussion of the advice here (halfway down the page at #3). In any event, the short version is that you should plan to throw out at least some of what you code because you’ll end up doing so anyway.

This seemed particularly interesting to me last night just after I answered umpteen emails and class discussion board posts from my graduate students as they busily sought to finish the drafts of their first regression papers for my methods class. If I could get students to understand this principle, perhaps their research projects would be less stressful. Perhaps they would also really re-write rather than superficially edit their drafts before turning in their final papers.

In my experience, the paper I first write for a conference and the paper that ultimately gets published in a journal are often very different. Parts have been substantially re-written and even some of the data analysis re-done.

Students, however, seem to cling to their text and results and won’t let go, even when they need to. They just can’t bring themselves to delete a whole paragraph, even though it doesn’t belong in their paper. I suspect that the paragraph may have been difficult to write in the first place, and that’s why they are so attached to it. The same thing happens with their regression “models.” They resist letting go of a bad model sometimes because they’ve gone to all the effort to write it up.

In my methods class, they turn in their projects in parts (first the lit review, then the data description, and then the data analysis) before they revise and complete the final product. In my experience, students seldom do the amount and type of re-writing necessary to turn very rough drafts into solid final papers. And, though I provide extensive comments, they still can’t or won’t re-write. My comments often ask them how a paragraph relates to their research question, or to explain how the critique they are making is important to their overall argument. I tell them that such questions are part of a dialogue we are having about their argument/paper and that they should work on making sure their papers are coherent wholes.

To many students, revise seems to mean, “fix the obvious grammatical errors.” In some cases, it may be a question of time. In other cases, I suspect it’s because they really don’t understand that revise means substantially rewrite , or knowing when you write something the first time, you should plan to throw some of it out. So, how can we get our students to be less wedded to what they write and more willing to re-write, especially when they are learning a new method and way of writing? How can we convince them that it is to be expected that they’ll “throw one away.”

As the time nears for the swearing in of Mexico’s new President, the PAN’s Felipe Calderon, the situation is not looking good. Earlier this month, the PRD’s Lopez Obrador had himself sworn in as President in an unofficial ceremony. Yesterday, a small fight broke out in the Congress (for the leftist version of events) when members of the PRD tried to take control of the dais and the PAN stepped in to stop them. This is not the first time there’s been a tussle in the Congress, though I can’t find the link to my earlier post about another shoving match that occurred during the desafuero period.

Lovely.

And now, in a display of…. what? determination? stubbornness? Members of each party are planning on camping out on the dais until the swearing in.

I wasn’t too crazy about the choice for the new Bond. But I have to admit I was wrong.

Various anonymous bloggers have been discussing why they blog anonymously, or why their blogs do not reveal their identities. Greg points out that men tend to blog under their names and women tend to do so anonymously. Then, he suggests that I’m the only non-anonymous, female political science blogger. (Say that three times quickly.) Perhaps.

I wouldn’t dare speculate as to why others blog, and some political scientists explain for themselves why they blog.

For myself, I’ve discussed why I blog and the pros and cons as I see them regarding the ways that I blog.

I don’t get as many hits as Chris from folks looking for the political science rumor blogs, but I thought I’d provide a related public service announcement in the interest of political science productivity.

It seems that the rumor blogs can suck a lot of potentially productive time from candidates and faculty. If you find yourself checking the rumor blog comment threads more than once a day, I suggest using either co.mments or co.comment to track the comments. I prefer the former, but understand that the latter has more market share. Each will require a little time to set up your comment tracking but not nearly as much time as obsessively re-checking the rumor sites for new entries.

I just finished this really short book. Though some of the experiences are more specific to those at predominantly teaching schools, many of them (such as figuring out how to get students discussing or how to understand department dynamics) are more universal for new faculty. I’d recommend the book to new faculty or advanced grad students. Some parts might also be good for senior faculty, some of whom can easily forget what it’s like to be a newbie.

The situation has been deteriorating in Oaxaca over the last several months, though the news is reporting that negotiations have begun again today.

Last night, in Mexico City, three bombs exploaded. One each at the PRI headquarters, the election court, and a bank. No one was hurt, but this is not good news. As far as I can tell, no one has claimed responsibility yet, and it’s not clear if it’s related to the protest in Oaxaca or the incoming administration. Visit the front page from the leftist daily in the DF.

I haven’t posted in almost a full moon cycle because I have been super busy with research (and grading lit reviews and data descriptions for my grad students’ methods papers). In the last month, I’ve written a chapter for an edited volume on pension reform in Latin America that will be published with Oxford UP, and revised two papers to submit them to journals. By the end of the week, I expect to be on my way to having 3 papers under review and a book manuscript only a couple of weeks from being 90% done, as all harding working untenured folks should. All this while also trying to recruit students for my new summer study abroad next summer in Monterrey.

This year has been a good one so far, I’ve written three new papers that are all under review (or will be soon), revised one other, and written (100+ pages) or revised almost all of my book manuscript. This semester has been especially hectic, but I am also very excited about my research and what I’m working on. I’ve got a couple of new projects with co-authors slated for the spring, and I’m looking forward to those, too. In the spring, I’ll have a one course reduction (much to the dismay of some of our grad students, I understand, since a rumor had been going around that I would be offering a course they could take), and it’ll be great to focus even more energy on my research. I haven’t felt this optimistic about my research in a while, partly because I’ve usually had new preps or responsibilities coming my way.

Things are good for me. Now, a post about how they are not good for Mexico….

This report summarizes the papers and comments made at the conference on pension reform in Latin America held at the Atlanta Fed last March.

From pages 27-28:

Michelle Dion, assistant professor at the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, elaborated on some of the points made by James and proposed some alternative interpretations and solutions to gender inequities. While she agreed that women have made significant gains in lifetime benefits under the reformed systems and that raising the retirement ages in Chile and Argentina would reduce gender discrepancies, taking the gender equity perspective makes it is necessary to interpret the findings more cautiously. The new systems actually compound labor market inequities and such policy changes as raising women’s retirement age in Argentina and Chile might not be effective. Even if women were to work five years longer, the average married women’s replacement rates would still be less than
50%.

In addition, women do not disproportionately benefit from transfers. In Mexico, for example, the social quota (a government-paid benefit) only favors women by a very slight margin. Furthermore, most women do not contribute enough to earn these public transfers. World Bank data show that in Argentina, for example, women with university degrees must meet the thirty-year requirement to get the flat benefit, which means that the transfers do not actually materialize for most women. Incentives do exist for women to work longer, especially in Mexico, which would qualify them for the minimum pension guarantees. On the other hand, she said, evidence from the Chilean Social Protection Survey suggests that people overestimate their contribution rate, so incentives would have to be very strong to encourage women to stay in the labor market long enough to earn the minimum pension.

Intra-family transfers do not favor women. In fact, the reforms have made it harder for women to claim partner benefits because they require documentation, which many Latin American women do not have given the large number of common law marriages. The burden of providing evidence of cohabitating for a certain amount of time disproportionately affects lowincome women. From a sociological perspective, a reliance on intra-family transfers erodes women social citizenship rights and reinforces a male breadwinner bias that undermines women’s independence. Finally, relying on intra-family transfers may create a potential strain on the welfare of the extended families that support women in old age. In Mexico, for example, a large percentage of elderly women get most of their old age support from their extended family. Trade-offs are being made in terms of investment in human capital for younger members of the family.

Dion concluded that alternate reforms could be more appropriate and would help resolve some of the gender disparities. These reforms could address wage inequalities between men and women, invest in women’s human capital, and support women’s workforce participation.

I quote the report at length to remind myself of the points I made in March as I write up a paper for the conference volume now in October.

A recent NYT piece is woefully wrong about what’s wrong with higher education. Hickok makes some claims that probably don’t accurately describe the situation at most public schools, and certainly is nothing like my experience at Tech. He says:

Faculty members decide what they want to teach and when they want to teach, if, indeed, they teach at all. This is particularly true regarding undergraduate instruction, which is something of an afterthought on many campuses. Faculty members typically spend fewer than 200 hours a year in the classroom. That amounts to just five 40-hour weeks.

In my first 3 years on the tenure-track at Tech, I have taught 2 classes every semester except one. I also taught 8 different classes in those three years and all but 2 were required or core elective classes for either our undergraduate or graduate degree. [I’m not even counting the 2 new courses that I taught in Spanish during my Fulbright year.] The two electives were: Latin American political economy (hardly superfluous) and Latin American popular culture and politics as part of an 8 week experiential learning program in Argentina and Brazil the summer after my first year at Tech.

I should admit, from what I understand from my collegues elsewhere, I have perhaps taught several more different course preparations than the average political science professor at a research 1 institution. I am almost certainly one of the few at a research 1 school who has taught in nearly every subfield of my discipline (American, IR (IPE), Comparative, and Methods) at the undergrad level and in two subfields at the graduate level, neither being the primary field in which I conduct my research.

So, did I choose to teach so many different classes? Not really, but my department needs those courses taught, and I am able to cover many different areas, so they ask me to. Only one of the classes that I teach regularly is a class that I would be expected to teach in any political science department at a R1 school: Latin American politics. For all the rest, they would have specialized faculty who would teach in those areas, rather than me.

Do I get to choose when I teach? No. I have taught at 8am. I also teach one class every semester from 6 to 9 at night for our graduate program. This semester, I am teaching it on a Thursday night, arguably the worst slot for a statistics class because everyone is dog tired by then and too exhausted to read/prepare for class. And, I miss Earl and The Office on Must See TV. I would much rather teach that class 3-6pm on Mondays when everyone is fresh and happy from the weekend.

For each of those 8 different classes, I had to develop the course and reading list since we don’t teach a cookie cutter curriculum like they do in many high schools. I suspect that few professors, even those teaching classes like American Government where the textbooks come with ample testbanks and supplementary materials, actually just use the powerpoints or slides that come with the textbook. I sure hope Hickok isn’t suggesting we should “teach to the test” in college and all just some canned curriculum.

This fall (the 4th on my tenure clock), I am teaching yet another new preparation, but this time by my choosing. I am team-teaching with an Economics faculty memberour senior seminar for joint International Affairs and Economics majors. I offered to do this because

1) no one else wanted to do it,
2) I get along well with the Econ professor, who I would also count as a friend,
3) the Econ professor and I quickly agreed on what we wanted to cover in the class,
4) I want my research to move more in the direction of the political economy work we are covering in the class, and
5) I see it as an opportunity to have a class that I will now be able to teach repeatedly (which will reduce the likelihood that I have to teach some other new or less desireable course).

Hickok also argues:

Take a look at what passes for subjects of scholarly and instructional focus on campuses. Should taxpayer dollars really go to underwrite courses in such things as the history of comic book art? Policy makers and tuition payers need to be made aware of what sorts of courses institutions consider appropriate to fulfill core academic requirements, if anything resembling an academic core even exists. And there needs to be a greater emphasis on teaching students what they need to know, rather than what faculty want to talk about.

Most of my discussion above covers these points. Anyone can look at our curriculum online. It’s not hidden. We teach our students what they need to know. I rarely get to talk about what I want to talk about. (I’m so desparate to talk about the Mexican election, that I’m going to have to go to other people’s classes to do it because I’m stuck teaching something removed from my research interests.)

He also claims:

Colleges and universities need to be able to explain why they charge the tuition they charge, what their graduation rates are, what they feel constitutes an educated person and how they propose to get first year students from here to there. The various college rating systems and publications are entertaining and interesting to read, but they don’t provide the sort of objective data tuition payers need to make informed decisions.

Let me start by saying that I think that many of the ranking systems have serious flaws. At the same time, even the US News and World Report rankings punish a school if their completion rate is low. In fact, Georgia Tech used to be punished heavily because many students left Tech once they realized they didn’t want to be engineers. In response, the Institute decided to develop the social sciences into degree granting departments to boost our retention rate. Georgia Tech has only been offering undergraduate degrees in the social sciences since 1990. International Affairs now has 400 majors (some jointly with Modern Languages or Economics) out of 13,000 undergraduates. It seems that this is evidence that universities do respond to the incentives created by (even flawed) ranking systems to improve student satisfaction.

Overall, the title of the NYT post implies that Hickok would have universities adopt some objective measures of student performance at the end of their college education, a la standardized testing at the end of secondary school. Clearly that policy has not done much to improve public education, and in fact, has done much to hurt students who no longer are able to think critically or write well. Once universities begin “teaching to the test,” families will really not be getting their money’s worth and the U.S. will fall further behind the rest of the world in innovation and development.

So, what is wrong with U.S. unversity education? Well, there’s probably too much emphasis put on sports, but then again that makes money for universities that they can’t get from their state legislatures. Then, there’s the problem that they have to build multi-million dollar recreation centers to recruit students instead of spending that money on faculty salaries or classroom facilities. I’d say a big problem is that many families don’t want (or can’t afford) to pay what a good college education costs. Another problem is that universities compete with one another for the favor of 18 year olds, who often (due to their age) are short-sighted and looking for something other than education. So universities woo these students with rec centers, luxury dorms, big sporting events, and other perks that have all to do with student life and little to do with academic learning.

Then, I might be in the market for one of these.

Mike Patton and blogs on All My Children.

Too wierd. What will they do next in their lame attempts to attract young viewers?

It’s the program page for the study abroad program I’m leading next summer to Monterrey Mexico. I finally figured out that I could install WordPress on the Tech servers.

I say it’s a hooptie blog…and it’s totally pimped out. That is, it looks totally fancy with every plug-in and widget possible, but if you look under the hood, the code is totally hacked and rickety. [Just don’t look at it with iexplorer!]

It actually didn’t take as much time to set up as it might look [in part b/c it’s a hooptie, but also] because WordPress rocks and Brian helped troubleshoot stubborn code.

[Misspelling intentional.] If only I had the nerve to tell my students these things.

This post is long overdue. I’d like to be able to say that it’s overdue entirely because classes have begun, I went to the APSA meetings, and then to NYC. But that wouldn’t be true. I’ve avoided writing about the election situation in Mexico because I haven’t wanted to write about it. I’ve been too disappointed to write about it.

I’m disappointed not only in the outcome but also the process that led to it, not for partisan reasons as much as the impact it will have on the new administration and the government for the foreseeable future.

I’m disappointed that Calderon resisted a full recount that could have given his administration more legitimacy.

I’m disappointed that Lopez Obrador seems intent on further disruptions despite the electoral court’s ruling.

I’m disappointed that the IFE didn’t better police before the election those 3rd party ads that were clearly partisan.

I’m disappointed because I suspect that many Mexicans, on the left, right, and center, are also disappointed in their leaders. That can’t be good for collective confidence in political institutions and democracy.

I’m disappointed that though Mexico’s new democracy has so far survived this crisis, it is still in critical condition.

So that’s why I haven’t written a post about the Mexican presidential election lately. It’s just too disappointing.

In fact, I might have predicted the opposite.