For those of you who are curious about the relationship between scholarship and the real world, with particular reference to the social sciences, I recommend FT columnist John Kay's recent essay "The Map is Not the Territory: An Essay on the State of Economics." Kay is an experienced professional economist himself, and the essay is a penetrating critique of the kind of divorced-from-reality thinking that has dominated a lot of macroeconomic research over the past few decades. As you'll see if you read the piece, he's especially irritated by the unwillingness of some prominent macroeconomists (including Nobel Prize winners like the University of Chicago's Robert Lucas) to acknowledge that the failure to anticipate the financial meltdown of 2007-2008 casts some well-founded doubt on the direction that economic thinking has taken in recent decades.

Kay's essay also contains some valuable lessons for political science and other academic disciplines. My favorite passage:

For many people, deductive reasoning is the mark of science, while induction - in which the argument is derived from the subject matter - is the characteristic method of history or literary criticism. But this is an artificial, exaggerated distinction. ‘The first siren of beauty', says [macroeconomist John] Cochrane, ‘is logical consistency'. It seems impossible that anyone acquainted with great human achievements - whether in the arts, the humanities or the sciences - could really believe that the first siren of beauty is consistency. This is not how Shakespeare, Mozart or Picasso - or Newton or Darwin - approached their task.

The issue is therefore not mathematics versus poetry. Deductive reasoning of any kind necessarily draws on mathematics and formal logic; inductive reasoning is based on experience and above all on careful observation and may, or may not, make use of statistics and mathematics. Much scientific progress has been inductive: empirical regularities are observed in advance of any clear understanding of the mechanisms that give rise to them. This is true even of hard sciences such as physics, and more true of applied disciplines such as medicine or engineering. Economists who assert that the only valid prescriptions in economic policy are logical deductions from complete axiomatic systems take prescriptions from doctors who often know little more about these medicines than that they appear to treat the disease. Such physicians are unashamedly ad hoc; perhaps pragmatic is a better word.

Needless to say, I like this argument because I believe it is important for the social sciences to be a diverse intellectual ecosystem instead of a monoculture where one approach or method reigns supreme. Even if one approach or theoretical model were demonstrably superior -- and that is rarely, if ever, the case -- there would still be considerable value in having lots of other scholars working in different ways. Sometimes we learn by exploring deductions in a formal model (though we often just restate the obvious when we do); at other times we learn by "soaking and poking" among policymakers, by constructing a data set and exploring patterns within it, or by immersing ourselves in the details of historical cases or by exploring the categories of thought and discourse that surround a given policy domain. Given that all these approaches yield useful knowledge, why would any serious department want to privilege one approach over all others?

But because academic disciplines are largely self-defining and self-policing (i.e., we determine the "criteria of merit" and success depends almost entirely on one's reputation among fellow academics), there is the ever-present danger that academic disciplines spin off into solipsistic and self-regarding theorizing that is divorced from the real world (and therefore unlikely to be refuted by events) and of little value to our students, to policymakers, or even interested citizens. This tendency occurs primarily because proponents of one approach naturally tend to think that their way of doing business is superior, and some of them work overtime to promote people who look like them and to exclude people whose work is different. Anybody who has spent a few years in a contemporary political science department cannot fail to have observed this phenomenon at work; there just aren't very many people who are genuinely catholic in their tastes and willing to embrace work that isn't pretty much like their own.

This situation creates a real dilemma: if you believe in academic freedom (and I do), then you don't want outside authorities interfering in the production of knowledge, telling academics how to do their work, or setting stupid criteria for evaluating scholarly contributions. But without some pressure to be at least potentially relevant, the social sciences are prone to drift off into what Hans Morgenthau once decried as "the trivial, the formal, the methodological, the purely theoretical, the remotely historical -- in short, the politically irrelevant." I've already touted my own prescriptions for this problem here, but I don't have enormous confidence that any of them will be heeded. But at the risk of seeming to tout my own employer (and similar programs elsewhere), that's why I increasingly expect the most interesting and relevant work to emerg from schools of public policy, and not from the increasingly arcane worlds of traditional disciplinary departments.

I will be flying to Seattle tomorrow to attend the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, so blogging for the rest of the week will be light. I'm on a roundtable discussion of John Ikenberry's new book Liberal Leviathan, and plan to offer some friendly but provocative points about the book. I'm also running for the APSA Council, as part of a broad effort to democratize its governance structures, encourage more open elections, and support efforts to make academic political science more attentive to real-world policy issues.

But the really important shift this week is a structural change in my home life.  As of tomorrow, I move from the multi-polar system in which I've lived for the past sixteen years to a tri-polar world. Translation: my wife and I are taking my eldest son off to college, with pride and high hopes and every nickel we can scrape together.  I just hope that the gloom-and-doom accounts of U.S. higher education that I've been reading lately are overly pessimistic.

What role should academics play in public discourse about major social issues, including foreign policy? I've taken up this issue in the past, as has FP colleague Dan Drezner. The Social Science Research Council has a continuing project on the topic of "Academia and the Public Sphere," and they asked me to contribute an essay on the topic of "International Affairs and the Public Sphere." It just went up on the SSRC website, and you can find it here.

Briefly, in this paper I argue that academic scholars have a unique role to play in public discourse -- primarily as an independent source of information and critical commentary -- as well as an obligation to use their knowledge for the betterment of society. In particular, university-based scholars should resist the "cult of irrelevance" that leads many to limit their work to a narrow, obscure, and self-referential dialogue among academicians. But I also argue that greater involvement in public life has its own risks, most notably the danger of being co-opted or corrupted by powerful institutions who may be eager to enlist academics to help them justify policies that will benefit those same institutions. "Speaking truth to power" is not simple.

The article also includes six recommendations for improving academic participation in the public sphere. They are:

1. Give Greater Weight to Real World Impact when Evaluating Individual Scholars and Academic Departments
2. Encourage Professional Associations to Honor Public Impact
3. Encourage Younger Scholars to Participate in Policy-Related Activities
4. Engage Policymakers and Knowledgeable Citizens in the Research Process
5. Convince University Administrators to Value Participation in the Public Sphere
6. Broaden the Discussion of Academic Ethics and Responsibilities

I lay out the rationale for these suggestions in the paper, and you'll have to read it for yourself to find out what they are. But here's the bottom line:

If scholars working on global affairs are content with having little to say to their fellow citizens and public officials and little to contribute to solving public problems, then we can expect even less attention and fewer resources over time (and to be frank, we won't deserve either). By contrast, if the academic community decides to use its privileged position and professional expertise to address an overcrowded global agenda in a useful way, then it will have taken a large step toward fulfilling its true social purpose. Therein lies the good news: the fate of the social sciences is largely in our own hands.

Discuss.

As readers of the New York Times (and Jewish Week) already know, the Board of Trustees at City University of New York voted to table the awarding of an honorary degree to playwright Tony Kushner after one member of the board, Jeffrey Wiesenfeld, accused Kushner of supposedly "disparaging" Israel.  Kushner has been critical of some Israeli policies-which hardly makes him unique among human beings, or among Jews, or even among Israelis.   But none of his comments on these issues are outside the bounds of civil discourse or worthy of censure, especially by an institution that is supposed to be committed to freedom of thought and the open exchange of ideas. If you're curious, you can read Kushner's response here.   Wiesenfeld is unrepentant, by the way, and defends his attack here.   For an update on the evolving situation, see Justin Elliott here.

I have only two points to make about this incident, which one of the many attempts by self-appointed "defenders" of Israel to control discourse on this issue.

First, the main reason that hardliners like Mr. Weisenfeld go after someone like Kushner is deterrence.  By denying critics of Israeli policy any honors, they seek to discourage others from expressing opinions that challenge the prevailing "pro-Israel" orthodoxy to which Weisenfeld is committed.  Kushner was not nominated for an honorary degree for his views on Middle East politics; he was obviously nominated because he is an exceptionally talented and accomplished playwright and literary figure. But if someone like him can also be critical of Israel's treatment of the Palestinians and receive an honorary degree, then -- horrors! -- other people who feel similarly might be empowered to speak out themselves and pretty soon such comments will cease to be taboo. People like Mr. Weisenfeld don't want that; they want people who do not share their views to be constantly aware of the price they might pay for expressing them.  And it never seems to occur to them that maybe Kushner's views might be both more humane but also better for Israel than the position that Weisenfeld apparently holds. 

Second, what this incident also reveals is the reflexive timidity of many academic organizations. There doesn't seem to have been any sort of organized campaign to deny Kushner the honorary degree; instead, the board voted to table the nomination after one member (Weisenfeld) made his disparaging remarks. I've spent more than a quarter century in academia, including seven years as an administrator, and the board's reaction doesn't surprise me a bit. Despite their public commitment to free speech and open discourse, nothing terrifies deans and trustees more than angry donors, phone calls from reporters, and anything that looks controversial. By tabling the nomination, they undoubtedly thought they were avoiding a potentially uncomfortable controversy.

But in this case the CUNY board blew it big-time, both because Weisenfeld's accusations were off-base but also because they would not have been grounds for denying Kushner an honorary degree even if they had been true. And meekly caving as they did is contrary to the principles of intellectual freedom that universities are supposed to defend. The end result is that this incident will get a lot more attention than awarding the degree would have garnered (Kushner already has several), and the board's shameful lack of vertebrae has been publicly exposed.

And why does this matter for foreign policy? Because as John Mearsheimer and I wrote a few years ago: "America will be better served if its citizens were exposed to the range of views about Israel common to most of the world's democracies, including Israel itself. . . Both the United States and Israel face vexing challenges. . .and neither country will benefit by silencing those who support a new approach. This does not mean that critics are always right, of course, but their suggestions deserves at least as much consideration as the failed policies that key groups in the [Israel] lobby have backed in recent years" (pp. 351-52).

Like most residents of New England, I've spent the past day digging out from a major snowstorm. Unlike most of my neighbors, I've also spent many hours grading the take-home final from my course. It occurred to me that some of you might like to know what we asked our students, and what some of them had to say about it.

The exam was in two parts, and the first part consisted of the following hypothetical question:

 Q1: "Due to an unexpected movement of tectonic plates, the United States and China have switched geographic locations. The United States is now located in East Asia; sharing borders with Russia, North Korea, India, Mongolia, Vietnam, etc., and is much closer to Japan, while China is now located in North America, in-between Canada and Mexico. Assume that all other features of the two societies are unchanged (i.e., each state faces this new situation with the same populations they have today, along with the same natural resource endowments, military capabilities, economic systems, political institutions, etc.).

 The question: how would this development affect contemporary international relations? Your answer should draw upon the theoretical material covered in this course (e.g., realism, liberalism, constructivism, etc.) but feel free to add your own ideas as well."

Students were given 1250 words (5-6 pages) to address this question, and most of them did pretty well with it. The question is obviously designed to get them to think through what different theories tell you about how geography would affect relations between states. For instance: would US relations with India and Japan deteriorate if the US were located nearby, or would shared democratic values dampen potential rivalries? Would China try to establish regional hegemony in the Western hemisphere, and would states like Canada, Mexico or Brazil try to contain it? Or would they "bandwagon" with China as they have done with the United States? Would the United States have to curtail its global ambitions in order to deal with security problems closer to home -- such as Pakistan, North Korea, Burma, or Russia -- or would it feel compelled to use force against a threatening neighbor like North Korea? There's no single "right answer" to this sort of question; what I'm looking for is a clear, logically consistent, and well-argued set of predictions.

Not surprisingly, many of the papers argued that switching places would be a tremendous benefit to China. In particular, students clearly recognized that the United States enjoys some enormous geographic advantages. In addition to being wealthier and more powerful than any of the other major powers, the United States is protected by two enormous oceanic moats and has no great powers in its immediate neighborhood. Moving from East Asia to the Western hemisphere would put China in this same favorable position, and place the United States in a much more problematic location in East Asia.

But what was really interesting was an implication that some (though hardly all) students drew from this line of argument. A number of them argued that China would be so secure in the Western hemisphere that it could focus even more attention on economic development, and not worry very much about military or security developments elsewhere. It would want to defend its own territory, and it would worry about securing energy supplies from Canada, Venezuela, Mexico, and elsewhere, but otherwise it would be sitting pretty and could remain aloof from lots of other security issues. The United States, by contrast, would be facing all sorts of challenges over in Asia and would have to try to deal with all of them.

An obvious question, therefore, is: why doesn't this same logic apply to the United States today? Instead of devoting trillions of dollars to transforming the Middle East, trying to bring Afghanistan into the 20th century (or is it the 19th?) and generally interfering all over the world, the United States could almost certainly do a lot less on the world stage and devote some of those resources to balancing budgets and fixing things here at home. It's called nation-building, but we'd be building our nation and our future, not somebody else's.

What some of our students have intuitively grasped (and not because we told them), is that there is in fact a very powerful case for a much more limited U.S. military posture overseas. Indeed, given the existence of nuclear weapons, there is even a cogent case to be made for something approaching isolationism, as laid out by people like the late Eric Nordlinger, by the CATO Institute's Chris Preble, or the team of Gholz, Press, and Sapolsky. I don't go quite that far myself (i.e., I'm an offshore balancer, not an isolationist), but I recognize that there is a serious case for the latter position. And because this view does have a certain appeal, the current foreign-policy establishment has to do a lot of threat-mongering and engage in a lot of ideological oversell in order to get Americans to keep paying for foreign wars and sending their sons and daughters out to garrison the globe. It also helps to portray anybody who advocates doing less as some sort of idealistic pacifist or naive appeaser.

But this debate is beginning to open up. When states and local governments are facing bankruptcy, when military adventures like Iraq or Afghanistan yield not victory but at best only prolonged and costly draws, and when there is in fact no ideologically motivated great power adversary out there trying to "bury us," then continuing to try to manage the whole goddamn planet isn't just foolish, it's unconscionable. It will probably take another decade for this reality to work its way through our hidebound national-security establishment, but the winds of change are already apparent. And not a moment too soon.

1. Don't Ask Don't Tell is suspended. It would be even better if Congress made this official, but it's a step that any good realist should support.

2. Harvard students showed that they have clearer ethical vision than Harvard's leaders.

3. The Obama administration's loss is Just World Books' gain. (Translation: Ambassador Chas Freeman has written a book: America's Misadventures in the Middle East.) Buy it and read it and you'll be really annoyed that he was witch-hunted out of public service.

4. The Israeli human rights group Breaking the Silence was short-listed for the Sakharov Prize and right-wingers go bananas. The award eventually went to a prominent Cuban dissident, but anything that drives the WSJ op-ed page crazy is probably a good thing. See the Magnes Zionist here.

5. Britain's defense cuts confirm my view of NATO's future. Like Dorian Gray, the alliance is slowly fading into irrelevance while trying to keep up appearances. No matter how many new "strategic concepts" get written and how many nice meals they serve at the next ministerial meeting, the high-water mark of transatlantic security cooperation is behind us.

6. NYT columnist Tom Friedman had a moment of clarity.

7. NYT reporter Ethan Bronner did too! There are even hints that a few people in the Obama administration may be aware of just how badly they have screwed this one up. I'm not really smiling at this one, of course, but it is gratifying when occasional flashes of insight emerge from the cloud of propaganda and prevarication that normally surrounds this topic.

8. Walter Russell Mead offered a fat target. Dan Luban didn't miss.

9. I finished my first Barry Eisler novel, and rejoiced in the fact that there is a whole bunch more that I haven't read it. Combined with the new John Le Carre book, my addiction to espionage fiction will be sated for awhile.

10. Leon Russell lives!

I had dinner a couple of weeks ago with a group of Harvard colleagues (and a visiting speaker), and we got into an interesting discussion about America's future as a world power. Nobody at the table questioned whether the United States was going to remain a very powerful and influential state for many years/decades to come. Instead, the main issues were whether it would retain its current position of primacy, whether China might one day supplant it as the dominant global power, and whether U.S. standards of living would be significantly compromised in the future.

One participant (a distinguished economist), was especially bullish. He argued that the United States enjoyed a considerable demographic advantage over Europe, Russia, and Japan, largely due a higher birth rate and greater openness to immigration. These societies will be shrinking and getting much older on average, while the United States will continue to grow for some time to come. He also argued that the United States remained far more entrepreneurial than most other societies, and a better incubator of technological innovation. Despite our current difficulties, therefore, he was optimistic about the longer-term prospects for the U.S. economy and for America's position as a global power.

But then came the crucial caveat. After reciting this long list of American advantages, my colleague remarked: "of course, our political system could screw it all up." And everyone around the table nodded in agreement.

Read on

My wife and I spent part of our honeymoon in Paris (where I am at the moment), and we had gorgeous weather the entire time. I've been back here without her three times since then, and the weather has been grey and gloomy (if not downright awful) each time. There's an obvious lesson to draw from this pattern of evidence (though the causality is murky), and I conclude that I need to stop coming here without her. Make a note....

But I digress. The hotel where I'm staying has rather primitive internet access, so posting will be light this week. I did manage to get online for a few minutes this morning, and caught up on some of the news. Two quick comments on things I read:

Via Sullivan and Yglesias, I picked up on Chris Beam's amusing essay in Slate asking "What if Political Scientists Covered the News?" Instead of breathlessly reporting every up-and-down in the news cycle, and trumpeting events that research has shown to be largely meaningless, as journalists tend to do, political scientists covering the news would undoubtedly provide better analysis of the underlying forces that shape political outcomes and help everyone see the forest for the trees. Political scientists would also be more inclined to discuss foreign policy in terms of long-term economic and demographic trends, underlying social forces within and across states, shifting balances of power, the role of interest groups, the impact of shifting normative discourses, etc. With perhaps a few exceptions, they'd be less inclined to highlight personalities and inside-the-Beltway gossip.  

Movement in these directions would be an improvement. But speaking as a card-carrying political scientist who is (mostly) proud of my chosen profession, there'd be a pretty clear downside too. If political scientists wrote the news, we might see a lot of articles about trivial topics of little interest to anyone but a handful of other scholars. (Check out the next APSA annual program if you don't believe me). Moreover, most political scientists would be reluctant to tackle anything that might be controversial for fear that someone might say something mean about them in response. Journalists can be thin-skinned, but most academics are notoriously sensitive to even fair-minded criticism.

Read on

I don’t agree with everything that comes out of CNAS, but this post from the Abu Muqawama blog on the role of quantitative analysis in security studies couldn’t help but bring a smile:

“Here is what I think a Hippocratic Oath for Quantitative Analysis in Security Studies should look like:

War is a human endeavor. I recognize that it is a phenomenon that does not conform to neat mathematical equations.

I will use quantitative analysis in conjunction with theory and qualitative analysis to describe what I see as phenomena in war and peace. I will be honest about the limits of both my theory and my analysis.

In war and peace, the variables are infinite, and not everything can be measured or assigned a numerical value.

I will not use numbers to signify what are fundamentally qualitative assessments without acknowledging to my reader that I have done so in order to satisfy a departmental requirement, gain tenure, or get published in the APSR. Or because I have been in graduate school for so long that I have forgotten how to effectively write in prose.

I recognize there are no mathematical equations in Vom Kriege and that it is nonetheless unlikely that my legacy will transcend that of Clausewitz.

I recognize that very few squad leaders in the 10th Mountain Division have ever taken a course in statistics yet probably know more about the conduct and realities of war than I do.”

Wise words indeed.  I’d just add that Nobel prize-winning economist and strategic guru Thomas Schelling offered a similar warning in The Strategy of Conflict, cautioning against any tendency “to treat the subject of strategy as though it were, or should be, solely a branch of mathematics.”

That’s not to say that various types of mathematical analysis aren’t useful, whether one is talking about operations research, basic statistics, game theory, or whatever.  But it’s just a tool, and ought to be used in conjunction with other methods and with an appropriate degree of humility.

Last week a colleague who has been facing repeated and unfair attacks in the media and the blogosphere (for making arguments that cut against the conventional wisdom) sent around an email asking a number of friends and associates (including me) for advice on how to deal with the attacks. Having been smeared in similar fashion myself, I circulated a list of the lessons I learned from my own experience with "grabbing the third rail." A few of the recipients thought the list was helpful, so I decided to revise it and post it here. If any readers are contemplating tackling a controversial subject -- and I hope some of you will -- you'll need to be ready should opponents decide not to address your arguments in a rational fashion, but to attack your character, misrepresent your position, and impugn your motives instead. If they take the low road, here are ten guidelines for dealing with it. (The advice itself is politically neutral: it applies regardless of the issue in question and no matter which side you're on.)

1. Think Through Your "Media Strategy" before You Go Public. If you are an academic taking on a "third rail" issue for the first time, you are likely to face a level of public and media scrutiny that you have never experienced before. It is therefore a good idea to think through your basic approach to the media before the firestorm hits. Are you willing to go on TV or radio to defend your views? Are there media outlets that you hope to cultivate, as well as some you should avoid?

Are you open to public debate on the issue, and if so, with whom? Do you plan a "full-court" media blitz to advance your position (an article, a book, a lecture tour, a set of op-eds, etc.), or do you intend to confine yourself to purely academic outlets and let the pundits take it from there? There is no right answer to these questions, of course, and how you answer them depends in good part on your own proclivities and those of your opponents. But planning ahead will leave you better prepared when the phone starts ringing off the hook and there's a reporter -- or even someone like Bill O'Reilly or Jon Stewart -- on the other end. Don't be afraid to listen to professional advice here (such as the media office at your university or research organization), especially if it's your first time in the shark tank. It's also a good idea to let your superiors know what's coming; deans, center directors, and college presidents don't like surprises.

2. You Have Less Control Than You Think. Although it helps to have thought about your strategy beforehand, there will always be surprises and you will have to think on your feet and improvise wisely. Sometimes real-world events will vindicate your position and enhance your credibility (as the 2006 Lebanon War did for my co-author and myself), but at other times you may have to explain why events aren't conforming to your position. A vicious attack may arrive from an unexpected source and leave you reeling, or you may get an unsolicited endorsement that validates your views. Bottom line: life is full of surprises, so be ready to roll with the punches and seize the opportunities.

3. Never Get Mad. Let your critics throw the mud, but you should always stick to the facts, especially when they are on your side. In my own case, many of the people who attacked me and my co-author proved to be unwitting allies, because they lost their cool in public or in print, made wild charges and ad hominem arguments, and generally acted in a transparently mean-spirited manner. It always works to your advantage when opponents act in an uncivil fashion, because it causes almost everyone else to swing your way.

Of course, it can be infuriating when critics misrepresent your work, and nobody likes to have malicious falsehoods broadcast about them. But the fact that someone is making false charges against you does not mean that others are persuaded by the malicious rhetoric. Most people are quite adept at separating facts from lies, and that is especially true when the charges are over-the-top. In short, the more ludicrous the charges, the more critics undermine their own case. So stick to the high ground; the view is nicer up there.

4. Don't Respond to Every Single Attack. A well-organized smear campaign will try to bury you in an avalanche flurry of bogus charges, many of which are simply not worth answering. It is easier for opponents to dream up false charges than it is for you to refute each one, and you will exhaust yourself rebutting every critical word directed at you. So focus mainly on answering the more intelligent criticisms while ignoring the more outrageous ones, which you should treat with the contempt they deserve. Finally, make sure every one of your answers is measured and filled with the relevant facts. Do not engage in ad hominem attacks of any sort, no matter how tempting it may be to hit back.

5. Explain to Your Audience What Is Going On. When refuting bogus charges, make it clear to readers or viewers why your opponents are attacking you in underhanded ways. When you are the object of a politically motivated smear campaign, others need to understand that your critics are not objective referees offering disinterested commentary. Be sure to raise the obvious question: why are your opponents using smear tactics like guilt-by-association and name-calling to shut down genuine debate or discredit your views? Why are they unwilling to engage in a calm and rational exchange of ideas? Let others know that it is probably because your critics are aware that you have valid points to make and that many people will find your views persuasive if they get a chance to judge them for themselves.

6. The More Compelling Your Arguments Are, The Nastier the Attacks Will Be. If critics can refute your evidence or your logic, then that's what they will do and it will be very effective. However, if you have made a powerful case and there aren't any obvious weaknesses in it, your adversaries are likely to misrepresent what you have said and throw lots of mud at you. What else are they going to do when the evidence is against them?

This kind of behavior contrasts sharply with what one is accustomed to in academia, where well-crafted arguments are usually treated with respect, even by those who disagree with them. In the academic world, the better your arguments are, the more likely it is that critics will deal with them fairly. But if you are in a very public spat about a controversial issue like gay marriage or abortion or gun control, a solid and well-documented argument will probably attract more scurrilous attacks than a flimsy argument that is easily refuted. So be prepared.

7. You Need Allies. Anyone engaged on a controversial issue needs allies on both the professional and personal fronts. When the smearing starts, it is of enormous value to have friends and associates publicly stand up and defend you and your work. At the same time, support from colleagues, friends, and family is critical to maintaining one's morale. Facing a seemingly endless barrage of personal attacks as well as hostile and unfair criticisms of one's work can be exhausting and dispiriting, which is why you need others to stand behind you when the going gets tough. That does not mean you just want mindless cheerleaders, of course; sometimes allies help us the most when they warn us we are heading off course.

One more thing: if you're taking on a powerful set of opponents, don't be surprised or disappointed when people tell you privately that they agree with you and admire what you are doing, but never say so publicly. Be realistic; even basically good people are reluctant to take on powerful individuals or institutions, especially when they might pay a price for doing so.

8. Be Willing to Admit When You're Wrong, But Don't Adopt a Defensive Crouch. Nobody writing on a controversial and contested subject is infallible, and you're bound to make a mistake or two along the way. There's no harm in admitting to errors when they occur; indeed, harm is done when you make a mistake and then try to deny it. More generally, however, it makes good sense to make your case assertively and not shy away from engaging your critics. In short, the best defense is a smart offense, even when you are acknowledging errors or offering a correction. For illustrations of how my co-author and I tried to do this, see here, here, and here.

9. Challenging Orthodoxy Is a Form of "Asymmetric Conflict": You Win By "Not Losing." When someone challenges a taboo or takes on some well-entrenched conventional wisdom, his or her opponents invariably have the upper hand at first. They will seek to silence or discredit you as quickly as they can, so that your perspective, which they obviously won't like, does not gain any traction with the public. But this means that as long as you remain part of the debate, you're winning. Minds don't change overnight, and it is difficult to know how well an intellectual campaign is going at any particular point in time. So get ready for an emotional roller coaster -- some days you might think you're winning big, while other days the deck will appear to be stacked against you. But the real question is: are you still in the game?

The good news is that if you have facts and logic on your side, your position is almost certain to improve over time. It is also worth noting that a protracted debate allows you to refine your own arguments and figure out better ways to refute your opponents' claims. In brief, think of yourself as being engaged in a "long war," and keep striving.

10. Don't Forget to Feel Good about Yourself and the Enterprise in Which You Are Engaged. Waging a battle in which you are being unfairly attacked is hard work, and you will sometimes feels like Sisyphus rolling the proverbial stone endlessly uphill. But it can also be tremendously gratifying. You'll wage the struggle more effectively if you find ways to keep your spirits up, and if you never lose sight of the worthiness of your cause. Keeping your sense of humor intact helps too; because some of the attacks you will face are bound to be pretty comical. So while you're out there slaying your chosen dragon, make sure you have some fun too.

Ever since Hiroshima, the role of nuclear weapons in international politics has been a central part of the security studies field. Think of the seminal works of Bernard Brodie, Albert Wohlstetter, and Thomas Schelling, as well as the somewhat less enduring but still important work of people like Pierre Gallois, William Kaufmann, Herman Kahn, Hedley Bull, and others. (If you want a real hoot, try to re-read Henry Kissinger's Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy (1957), the book that made his early reputation but has -- to put it politely -- not aged well). Discussions of nuclear strategy were a cottage industry in the 1970s and 1980s (think Robert Jervis, Colin Gray, Desmond Ball, Bruce Blair, Paul Bracken, John Steinbruner, Ken Waltz, etc.), and former statesman and policy wonks routinely weighed in on the issues of nuclear proliferation and arms control.  

Indeed, when I got my first job at Princeton in 1984, I was hired in part to teach a course on nuclear weapons and arms control, and it routinely attracted 50-100 students. The Cold War was still going strong and the Reagan administration was raising the nuclear temperature in various ways, so concerns about nuclear weapons were front and center. Interest in the topic hasn't vanished entirely since then, but there's no course of that kind at Harvard these days (or at Princeton, for that matter), and I haven't detected much student demand for one.  (That may also reflect that fact that there is only one regular faculty member in Harvard's Government Department whose main research interest is the study of war and peace, but that's another story).

Read on

One of the more unfortunate trends on contemporary social science has been a growing "cult of irrelevance," a set of implicit standards that encourages smart young scholars to write more and more about less and less for fewer and fewer readers. The principle of academic freedom and the granting of lifetime tenure are supposed to free academics to tackle controversial subjects or ambitious research projects, but all-too-many social scientists choose to devote their efforts to meaningless displays of methodological firepower and to attack questions that are only of interest to a small group of like-minded scholars. Even when they do stumble on to a topic that is of general interest, they will present their results in a manner designed to make it incomprehensible to even a well-educated educated lay-person.

Some of my own thoughts on this subject can be found here and here. But I would also commend to you a recent essay by Craig Calhoun, who is currently president of the Social Science Research Council. Money graf:

What scientists work on and how they formulate their questions shape the likelihood that they will make significant public -- or scientific -- contributions. Of course there are and must be research projects driven by intellectual curiosity and by attempts to solve theoretical problems -- and these may produce useful, even necessary knowledge for a range of public projects. But it is also true that many academic projects are driven by neither deep intellectual curiosity nor pressing public agendas, but simply by the internal arguments of academic subfields or theoretically aimless attempts at cumulative knowledge that mostly accumulate lines on CVs. To justify these by an ideology of pure science is disingenuous. To let these displace the attention of researchers from major public issues is to act with contempt towards the public that pays the bills. Making the sorts of social science we already produce more accessible is not sufficient; we have to produce better social science. This means more work addressing public issues-and being tested and pushed forward by how well it handles them-and high standards for the originality and importance of projects not tied directly to public issues."

Calhoun's essay has lots of smart things to say about the relationship between "applied" and "pure" research (a dubious distinction that he neatly dissects), the growing (and not always constructive) role of "think tanks," the virtues of writing clearly (as opposed to the priestly obscurantism that infects so many academic journals), and the value of university-based scholars doing work that actively contributes to our broader public discourse.

I would only add that the current current "cult of irrelevance" is not inevitable; it is merely the unfortunate result of a host of individual decisions about what sorts of virtues to emphasize when hiring or promoting scholars. The members of any discipline get to decide which criteria to privilege and which to downplay, and if we hire and promote people who have little to offer our fellow citizens, then we shouldn't be surprised if nobody takes our business seriously and if those same citizens eventually decide that there is no longer any need to support it. Or we can follow Calhoun's advice, and think of social science as a central part of society's broad effort to improve itself, and not as a privileged guild devoted solely to the abstract pursuit of "scientific" knowledge.

Darren Hauck/Getty Images

One of the pleasant frustrations of modern life is that there are far more good books out there than any of us have time to read. Browsing the Brookline Booksmith -- the wonderful local bookstore in my hometown -- is simultaneously delightful and depressing: I get intrigued and excited by all sorts of titles, but then I have trouble deciding which to buy and which to read first.

I'm know I'm not the only person with that problem -- which is why book reviews exist -- so I thought I'd help out by suggesting a few books I've recently read that got my own synapses humming.

The first is John Mueller's Atomic Obsession: Nuclear Alarmism from Hiroshima to Al Qaeda, which relentlessly punctures the various ways that analysts of all persuasions have overstated the dangers and the importance of nuclear weapons. (For a preview of Mueller's argument, see the FP excerpt here). It is an equal-opportunity critique, as Mueller goes after hawks, doves, realists, and other Cassandras with equal relish and a playful but pungent wit. He emphasizes that nuclear weapons are in fact highly destructive and need to be handled with great care, but convincingly shows that policymakers and pundits have 1) routinely exaggerated their destructive power (i.e., by suggesting they can "destroy the world"), 2) inflated their importance in deterring war, imparting influence, or enhancing status, and 3) overstated the risk of nuclear accidents, nuclear terrorism, or other very low-probability events. And instead of encouraging a useful prudence, Mueller argues that our "atomic obsession" has led us to adopt various policies that wasted a lot of money and may have actually made the situation more dangerous rather than less. Not everyone will be convinced by Mueller's arguments, but the book will certainly make you think. Added bonus: It's immensely fun to read.

My second recommendation is Campbell Craig and Fredrik Logevall's America's Cold War: The Politics of Insecurity. This is a creative, carefully researched, and incisive analysis of U.S. strategy during the long struggle against the Soviet Union. There are plenty of good books on this topic already, but Craig and Logevall's is one of the best, and their interpretation has important implications for contemporary strategic debates. In brief, they argue that America's initial response to the Soviet threat in Europe was both necessary and successful, but overselling by early Cold Warriors also put in place a worldview and a set of domestic institutions that consistently exaggerated U.S. insecurity and led to costly and counterproductive excesses over the next 40 years. The Soviet Union is now gone, but that worldview and those institutions remain in place today. Which is why the United States spends more on defense than the rest of the world combined, why we find ourselves bogged down in places like Iraq or Afghanistan, and why we panic over countries like Iran (whose defense spending in 2007 was a whopping $7.5 billion, or about 1 percent of America's).

My third suggestion is Margaret MacMillan's Dangerous Games: The Uses and Abuses of History, which I read on my recent trip to Norway. Based on a series of invited lectures, it is a set of pointed reflections on history, historians, and the ways in which the past is employed (and distorted) for both noble and ignoble purposes. If not quite the intellectual tour de force of a book like David Hackett Fischer's Historians' Fallacies, her reflections nonetheless provide a smart and eminently sensible set of warnings for citizens and leaders alike. History is essential to our identities, but it can also a dangerous weapon in the hands of anyone with a political agenda.

And speaking of history, my last recommendation is Eugene Rogan's The Arabs, which I acquired last week. I haven't finished it, but so far it's an entertaining, gracefully written, and eye-opening look at a diverse people whose history, culture and character are often badly misunderstood (if not actively distorted) here in the United States. Read it. You'll learn a lot.

RAMZI HAIDAR/AFP/Getty Images

This week the Los Angeles Times published an op-ed by Rivka Carmi, the president of Ben Gurion University. It was a response to Neve Gordon’s earlier op-ed announcing his support for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel's occupation. Gordon is a tenured faculty member at BGU and chairman of the international relations department. He is also a decorated IDF veteran, an accomplished scholar, and a long-time peace advocate. (See here for my earlier discussion of Gordon's op-ed, including my own disagreements with it).   

Carmi's initial response to Gordon's article showed that she has little understanding of the core concept of academic freedom, insofar as she and her official spokesperson both made it clear that they think Gordon should consider leaving the university (if not the country) on account of his views. Her op-ed makes it clear her early reactions were not just a hasty misjudgment but rather a reflection of her core values. As such, they reveal why she is unfit for academic leadership at any institution that prizes free inquiry and open discussion.

Here's the key passage from Carmi's op-ed:

Academic freedom exists to ensure that there is an unfettered and free discussion of ideas relating to research and teaching and to provide a forum for the debate of complicated ideas that may challenge accepted norms. Gordon, however, used his pulpit as a university faculty member to advocate a personal opinion, which is really demagoguery cloaked in academic theory.

In other words, if your research and expertise leads you to express a "personal opinion" on important and controversial issues, and if that opinion isn't acceptable to your University's president, look out. By her standard, an American academic who concluded and openly stated that either the invasion of Iraq or the Bush/Cheney torture regime justified an international boycott of the United States would be unfit for a faculty position and could be sanctioned by his or her university merely for stating that view. Similarly, a scholar whose research led him or her to conclude that assassinating foreign leaders is morally or strategically preferable to invading an enemy country could also be sanctioned, because that recommendation was a "personal opinion." (Just to be clear, I'm not endorsing either of those views, although I know a few scholars who might).

Needless to say, everything that scholars write is their "personal opinion," based on the knowledge they have accumulated in the course of their research. And the concept of academic freedom is intended to insulate scholars from precisely the sort of pressure that Carmi is trying to bring to bear on Gordon. Anyone's research and commentary can be denounced as "personal opinion" if some administrator doesn't like it, or if it is inconvenient for those in charge, which is precisely why the principle is so important. The reason we have open scholarly debate and discussion is so that we can weigh these "personal opinions" (and the evidence behind them) and come to greater collective understanding of important issues.  

Carmi then reveals her real concern: 

This is particularly pernicious for our university, a proudly Zionist institution that embodies the dream of Israel's first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, to bring development and prosperity to all the residents of the Negev region. This work -- which includes community outreach and scientific innovation in Israel and around the world carried out by nearly 25,000 students, faculty and staff -- is being threatened by the egregious remarks of one person, under the guise of academic freedom.

I can't tell if Carmi believes that all BGU faculty members must be committed Zionists (which would presumably rule out Israeli Arabs, anyone advocates of a bi-national state, or even some ultra-Orthodox Jews) but it's clear from the full text that her real concern is fund-raising. Specifically, she's worried that donors will punish BGU because of the views of one faculty member, and that's why she has to go after him in public. But a principle like "academic freedom" isn't worth much if you sell it out because it might cost you a few checks from wealthy donors. To have the president of a university leading a public flogging like this can only have a chilling effect on the overall atmosphere. If I were an untenured member of the faculty at BGU, or even a tenured member, and I was thinking about writing something that might be controversial, I would now have to ask myself: "what will President Carmi think and what might she do to damage my career?" Is that a situation likely to encourage free thought and discussion?  

She goes on to charge that:

Gordon has forfeited his ability to work effectively within the academic setting, with his colleagues in Israel and around the world. After his very public, personal soul-searching in his Op-Ed article, leading to his extreme description of Israel as an "apartheid" state, how can he, in good faith, create the collaborative atmosphere necessary for true academic research and teaching?

Carmi presents no evidence that Gordon "cannot work effectively" with his colleagues, and her claim is contradicted by the fact that nearly 200 Israeli academics and students (including colleagues at BGU) have already signed a petition defending him (without necessarily endorsing his views, of course).  Universities are usually filled with people who disagree with each other -- sometimes vehemently -- and every faculty I've ever been on also has a few loners who don't collaborate well with others and can be difficult to manage.  But presidents, deans, and other responsible administrators are supposed to hold those diverse communities of thought together, not try to drive out anyone with whom they disagree. Yet President Carmi has said that demands that Gordon resign his post as department chair are "legitimate," and that she hopes he will "reach the right conclusions."

Several other aspects of this incident merit comment. First, although Carmi obviously disagrees with what Gordon wrote -- which she's entirely free to do -- her op-ed devotes almost no space to actually refuting either his claim that Israel has become an apartheid state or his claim that an international boycott is the only way to save Israel from itself. These are controversial assertions, to be sure, and a number of thoughtful people -- including prominent leftists like Uri Avnery -- have offered sharply-worded critiques of his position.  But instead of explaining why she thinks he's wrong -- as a true scholar would -- her focus is on the damage he allegedly has done to BGU and his unfitness for continued service there. She admits she can't fire him, but leaves little doubt that she would if she could. Now that's an attitude that is likely to encourage free thought!

Second, like Phil Weiss, I suspect the LA Times printed her piece because they took a lot of heat for running Gordon's original op-ed. But instead of giving the space to someone who would challenge the substance of Gordon's claims and recommendations, they gave the space to his boss, so that she could explain why his remarks were bad for the university she runs. This is unfortunate, but not unusual when dealing with the always-sensitive subject of Israel in the United States.

Third, this issue is important because universities are among the last bastions of free thought and debate in many democratic societies. The think tank world in most countries -- and this includes the United States -- is heavily donor-driven, and many of them exist solely to disseminate a particular world-view. "Academic freedom" has little meaning in most think tanks. Consider, for example, what would happen to you if you worked at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy -- an important part of the Israel lobby -- and you publicly stated that you thought Neve Gordon was right. You would probably be fired or forced to recant, because WINEP (and many other think tanks) isn't in the business of encouraging truly open inquiry. I don't expect to see anyone at AEI defending socialism either, and if they did, I wouldn't expect them to stay there for long.

But universities are supposed to be different. They are also sensitive to what donors think, of course, which is why the principle of academic freedom has to be defended vigorously. Contrary to what many people think, donors don't get to pick the faculty and don't get to determine what they say (although some of them might like to!). But academic administrators do pay attention when donors are unhappy, which is why universities need strong and principled leaders who know where to draw the line and can stand up to outside pressure. If they don't, the faculty quickly learns what might get them into trouble -- even if only marginally -- and many will begin to trim their sails. The result is either scholarship that avoids controversial subjects or that confines its commentary within “acceptable” boundaries. And when that happens, foolish but well-entrenched policies are less likely to be examined, and the society as a whole is more likely to suffer.

If President Carmi understood her job correctly, she would make it clear that she disagrees vehemently with Professor Gordon's views, while making it equally clear that she defends his right to hold and express them, and that she is proud that Ben Gurion University is an institution in which especially unpopular views can be expressed and debated. Sadly, that is not going to happen.

Finally, the Middle East Studies Association has sent a letter to President Carmi on Gordon's behalf, see here. If you're interested in the American Political Science Association's general statement on academic freedom, see here.

One more thing: In a bizarre parallel, the New York Times reported earlier this week that government authorities in Iran are contemplating a purge of social science faculties at Iranian universities, which are believed to have been incubators of discontent as manifest following the recent elections. In particular, some faculty members are accused of fostering "un-Islamic" ideas. I'm not suggesting that the two situations are identical, but it reminds us that once people start enforcing orthodoxy in academic settings, it can be hard to know where to stop.

donjd2/Flickr