This is off topic, except insofar as it deals with the academy, but there is a quite eloquent and interesting recent post about tenure (sparked by a controversial denial to someone) at http://slavesofacademe.blogspot.com
Scary. I better stop blogging. JK
what did the folks on that panel say? anything of interest?
lc
Some interesting bits of advice, though they were not addressing the topic of our earlier conversation much - I will expound on that in my next post.
For a few choice sound-bytes, see my edits above.
Hah. Krasner and Nye are both right about the need to be a chameleon and camouflage one's coloring to fit into either environment. Keohane's snapshot is as self-righteously priggish and unhelpful as I would have expected. But beyond personal career tips, was there any interesting discussion of how their academic work informed their policymaking, or vice versa?
lc
No, not really - it was more about the perils and pitfalls to one's career of trying to navigate between worlds, less about the implications for foreign policy itself of this socially constructed 'gap.'
The closest comments came from Krasner, and I was going to discuss them a bit more in a post I'm developing. He said toward the end that bridging the gap is the wrong metaphor: that Kingdon's garbage can model is more helpful, and we should think about academics as just another set of actors contributing to the policy "soup." My question is then, don't we have to monitor and study that process of contributing to the soup as much as we would study anything else political? More once I'm formulated my thoughts on this.
P.S. My snapshot didn't realy do justice to Keohane's remarks: he listed a range of positive and negative benefits (to scholars) of interfacing with the policy world, and he argued that we have a responsibility to ask questions about things that actually matter to real-world policy. I agree with him there.
Interestingly, the presentations on the ISA panel (at least those I caught) while describing the pitfalls and benefits of "engaging" the "policy world," constituted a reification of this idea that the two "worlds" are distinct. And maybe they are (or are thought to be) in all the ways described. But maybe the boundaries blur together more than we like to think, and if so surely there is some analytical leverage to be gained by reflecting on and even studying these interstices. See tonight's post.
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