So what do international relations specialists think?
After being in a news black hole for a week, I’ll be getting back into blogging a bit slowly. However, here’s something for the academics in the audience: last year a group of IR profs put together a survey of what other IR profs thought about the field, current affairs, etc. The preliminary results can ...
After being in a news black hole for a week, I'll be getting back into blogging a bit slowly. However, here's something for the academics in the audience: last year a group of IR profs put together a survey of what other IR profs thought about the field, current affairs, etc. The preliminary results can be found in this paper by Susan Peterson and Michael J. Tierney, with Daniel Maliniak entitled, "Teaching and Research Practices, Views on the Discipline, and Policy Attitudes of International Relations Faculty at U.S. Colleges and Universities" Some of the interesting topline results:
After being in a news black hole for a week, I’ll be getting back into blogging a bit slowly. However, here’s something for the academics in the audience: last year a group of IR profs put together a survey of what other IR profs thought about the field, current affairs, etc. The preliminary results can be found in this paper by Susan Peterson and Michael J. Tierney, with Daniel Maliniak entitled, “Teaching and Research Practices, Views on the Discipline, and Policy Attitudes of International Relations Faculty at U.S. Colleges and Universities” Some of the interesting topline results:
1) Teaching moves more slowly than research. Even though scholars recognize that contructivism is a much more active research program than Mrxism, the latter is taught more frequently in introductory IR classes. [This is because the academy is all lefty, right?–ed. Well, the survey has the median IR prof between “liberal” and “slightly liberal”, so there’s a small grain of truth to that. However, I suspect this has more to do with academics being small “c” conservative, and therefore reluctant to change syllabi that have been entrenched for years. 2) “Eighty-seven percent of respondents?exactly the same percentage in the previous question who reported that the war in Iraq will decrease U.S. security?report that the Iraq war has hurt the war on terrorism.” 3) “Despite the fact that most respondents believe that the war in Iraq has hurt US security and the war on terrorism, few (17 percent) believe that terrorists are better able to attack the United States today than before 9/11.” 4) “The foreign policy consensus among international relations scholars observed in the previous questions about Iraq extends to the issue of free trade. More than three-fourths of all respondents report that free trade agreements have been a good thing for the United States, while only 7 percent report that they have been a bad thing.”
Go check it out.
Daniel W. Drezner is a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and co-host of the Space the Nation podcast. Twitter: @dandrezner
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