Careers in Academia – Endings and Beginnings

June 7, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

David Rubinstein, professor of sociology, was, by his own account, something of a slacker. Now that he has retired, he’s telling tales out of school (i.e., at the Weekly Standard) about how much he was paid for how little work.

Sure, he didn’t do squat, he seems to have been a lousy teacher. But even though he pranked academia for several decades, and even though he’s standing there, thumbs to ears, waggling his fingers and sticking out his tongue at his former home, I’m ambivalent about lobbing tomatoes at him. You see, I owe my first job, and the prestigious name Princeton on my vita, to a Rubinstein-like professor.

I had finished my third year in grad school and had no more course work to do, just the dissertation. It was a mid-May afternoon, and I was hanging around in the department. The academic business for the semester was over. Almost nobody else was around, and I was chatting with one of the secretaries who I was on good terms with. A call came in. She answered it. I discreetly moved down the hall.

When I came back, she said, “That was John Darley at Princeton. They need an advanced graduate student to be on the faculty. Here’s his number.”

I called back almost immediately. John was the head of the social psychology section of the psychology department. He explained that there was a guy in the department, an older, tenured professor, that they’d been trying to get rid of for years. He taught the minimum, did little or no research, didn’t work with any of the grad students, and spent most of his time in his office on the phone making real estate deals. Finally, he had announced his retirement, leaving the department with a use-it-or-lose-it line and no time to do a real search.

John was calling his old professors looking for a grad student to fill in. I guess I sounded reasonable, for he told me to fly down to Newark, rent a car, and drive to Princeton for an interview. Which I did. The “interview” was a year-end department party, faculty and students drinking and milling around, and I was introduced to them. That was about it.

A day or two after I had returned to Boston, John called and told me I had the job – a lectureship. I wouldn’t really be teaching. I’d run some “precepts” (discussion sections) – basically what their grad students did. My instructor’s salary was at the bottom of the faculty scale, but it was three times as much as the stipends my fellow grad students got. And if I needed secretarial help (this was way before computers), all I had to do was ask. All told, a sweet deal. I had my own office and plenty of time to work on writing my dissertation. Come to think of it, I was bit like Rubinstein myself, getting pretty good money for not very much work.

I’m not sure what Princeton got out of it except a place-holder for two semesters. It was made clear to me that I needn’t bother entering the real search that they were doing during my time there (though I did attend a couple of the presentations). That was fine with me, for as I got to know what academic psychology was, I realized that I definitely was not a psychologist.

That was my first job in academia – two semesters and out. I held what John referred to as the Folding Chair in Social Psychology.

Politics – Means and Ends

June 5, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

Matt Yglesias posted at this chart of poll results in eight states that elected Republican governors. In seven of the eight, if the election were held today, Democrats would win.

(Click on the chart for a larger view.)

Matt calls this shift “buyer’s remorse” and takes it as a rejection of GOP policies (his post is here). Gabriel Rossman has a different take.

Repeat after me: REGRESSION TO THE MEAN.

I don’t doubt that some of this is substantive backlash to overreach on the part of politically ignorant swing voters who didn’t really understand the GOP platform, but really, you’ve still got to keep in mind REGRESSION TO THE MEAN.

Politicos like Yglesias might have overlooked this possibility because regression to the mean is mostly a matter of random “error variation,”* or unexplained variation. Intuitively, that doesn’t seem to fit with political opinions. If I get an unusually high score in a bowling game or a math test, I can try to explain it – something about my footwork or concentration. But I also realize that I may have been playing over my head. I have some sense of my true level of ability. I also know that my scores vary, and for reasons I can’t always explain. If you tell me that my lower score in the next game is regression to the mean, I’m not going argue.

It’s much harder to think this way about my opinion about the governor or anyone else’s opinion for that matter. Whether or not I’d vote for him is not a sample of my opinion. It is my opinion. It’s not random, it’s not an error, and it’s not unexplained. I know why I would or wouldn’t vote for him, and I figure that the same is true for other voters. So you can see why discussions of political shifts tend to leave out regression to the mean.

Even so, is the political shift here regression to the mean? It might help if we had some idea of what the mean is. Suppose that the mean is 50/50 Democratic/Republican. A shift from 8-0 in favor of the GOP to 1-7 in favor of the Democrats is regression way beyond the mean. So, like Lucy, we still have some splainin to do.

* I do not know, though I should, how this variation came to be called “error” or why we persist in using that term.

Graphs - Framing the Data (and the President)

June 1, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

I assume that most people reading this blog have already seen Philip Cohen’s take-down of this graph that’s been spreading through the right-wing neighborhoods of the blogosphere.

(Click on the chart for a larger view.)

Check out Philip’s analysis at his Family Inequality blog (here).

It’s basically a “gee-whiz” graph. The examples I’ve mentioned earlier in this blog (here, for example) worked their effect by skimming the top of the y-axis. The food stamp graph also hacks off most of the x-axis. It’s not very sophisticated cheating, but it’s all for the noble conservative purpose of showing what Michelle Malkin calls Obama’s “mission of dependency.”

Philip provides the graph below to make visible what the right-wingers choose not to see. (I have added the yellow frame showing roughly the portion of the graph preferred and promulgated by Malkin, et. al.)

The Ad That Wasn’t

May 30, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

Bringing in new customers is a challenge for any organization, especially museums.

In the first season of thirtysomething, Michael and Elliot, who run a small ad agency, have to come up with a campaign for the local arts center, which is trying to broaden its base. They struggle, they founder, they fail. The best they can do is a poster with a photo of a hard hat guy and the caption, “Yo, it’s my arts center.” The city, sensibly, rejects their proposal.

But how can a museum reach people other than those they usually reach? Among current museum-goers, according to a survey of 40,000 households,

• 92% are white
• 70% are over the age of 30
• 81% have college degrees
• 82% have incomes above the national median
• For history museums, age was even more skewed – only about a third were under 50.

Enter Jenny Burrows and Matt Kappler and their “Historically Hardcore” Smithsonian campaign.

(Click on the image for a larger view.)

I wish I could report on the success of this campaign in bringing a younger and more diverse audience to the museum. But unfortunately, this campaign, like the one in thirtysomething, was fictional. They did it as an exercise, and the posters lived only in cyberspace, where they flourished briefly. Reddit put them on their front page. Burrows was thrilled at first, then cautious. As she writes on her blog,

I decided it was probably time to get in touch with someone from Smithsonian, just to cover my ass. Well, they were less than pleased about the attention the posters were getting and requested that I take them down immediately.

She scrubbed the posters of any Smithsonian traces. You will never see them on the sides of buses or the walls of the Metro. The Smithsonian, apparently, has no desire to appeal to a hardcore constituency. Our great national institution will continue to round up the usual subjects.*

HT: Total Drek

*thirtysomething was great TV, but it played to the same demographic as museums, though perhaps a bit younger. The show often seemed to be written about, by, and for English majors from elite universities. Here’s a bit of script I found. Gary and Susannah, new parents, are talking with two couples whose children are slightly older – Michael and Hope, and Elliot and Nancy.

GARY
Why would I make something like that up?
Seriously. I swear. I put them both in
front of her, right? Runaway Bunny and Ulysses.

MICHAEL
And let me guess: she went right to Ulysses?

GARY
Right.

SUSANNAH
And put it in her mouth. You
forgot to mention that, right?

MICHAEL
So big deal. Listen. Janey, by the
time she was five months old had
eaten most of the major early work
of Saul Bellow,up to and including
Henderson the Rain King, but hey,
I don't like to brag.

HOPE
Oh, I'm sure Emma's as bright as a button, Gary.

NANCY
Hey, hey, what was that woman on the Lucy Show
that was always bragging about her kids?

SUSANNAH [definitively]
Caroline Appleby. The kid's name was 'Stevie.'

GARY [turning to her, clearly surprised]
I... I thought you hated pop culture?

SUSANNAH
Lucy isn't pop culture. Lucy is God