Back during the saga over Daniel Drezner’s tenure denial, it was revealed that another blogging professor in the same department, Jacob Levy, was also denied tenure. Jacob did not, at the time, wish to have his case discussed in the Blogosphere (and, indeed, e-mailed me to request that I remove a reference to his case from a comment here at PoliBlog that was showing up on Google).
He has now broken his silence here. The short version is: it wasn’t about the blogging. The longer version, which is interesting if one is familiar with the intellectual debates with political science and the machinations of academic politics, is that certain factions in his department felt compelled to pursue a specific trend in political theory, and that therefore tenruing Jacob would take up space with an excellent scholar who was engaged in study of political theory in an alleged passé fashion.
Academia can be one strange, petty and short-sighted place.
The good news is that Jacob shoud land, like Drezner, a very good job.
h/t: Chris Lawrence
December 16th, 2005 at 1:59 pm
I am not sure why it is “short-sighted” for a department to develop its department’s identity and focus along its perceived strengths. This happens all of the time in the corporate world where talented people are let go because their talents did not necessarily fit with larger goals of the unit.
As an analogy, think of last year’s baseball world champions–the Chicago White Sox. They made some “questionable” trades last winter, particularly giving up one of the best all around hitters in baseball, Carlos Lee, and signed some players with bad reputations, AJ Piersynzki and Carl Everett. As a result of these off-season moves, they were predicted to finish around .500.
Of course, during the season they were the most dominant team in the American League, they maintained first place in their division for the entire season and rolled through their opponents in the playoffs.
They did this because administrators decided upon a set of values that they thought would move them to dominance in their field.
While academia is different than baseball, there is nothing wrong with developing a departmental identity that will maintain their reputation as a top department. Levy, apparently, doesn’t fit in the plan.
I can guarantee you that U of C is not going to see a significant fall in the quality of their applicants as a result of their decision to drop Levy and Drezner.
December 17th, 2005 at 5:48 pm
It wasn’t the blogging
Former Volokh conspirator Jacob Levy decides to comment about his tenure case (via Drezner).
Mainly I’m putting this up because the publicity around Dan Drezner’s case led to a lot of e-mailed questions and some blog speculation about mine. If you…