One year position available at HWS

I just listed the following position with the APSA:

Hobart and William Smith Colleges invites applications for the position of Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science.  The position is a one-year position in American Politics/American Political Thought, to begin in August 2007.  Candidates with Ph.D. in hand (or ABD) preferred. We are particularly interested in candidates who can offer an introduction to American politics and upper-level courses in American political thought, religion in American politics, American conservative thought,  and/or the American Presidency.  Courses in American political thought might take up questions of the American founding and the relation of this founding to those who preceded the colonists and founders, consider civic republicanism and Teutonic origins theory, attend to the work of the suffragettes (HWS is close to historic Seneca Falls), and explore the theorization of struggles for rights and recognition in the United States. They might discuss central debates in American political thought, such as between the Federalists and Anti-Federalists or over expertise and popular power as in the debate between Walter Lippman and John Dewey. They might consider as well questions of constitutionalism, federalism, pluralism, sovereignty, and democracy. The teaching load is 3/2. Candidates must have a strong commitment to undergraduate teaching and active research interests. Hobart and William Smith Colleges are committed to attracting and supporting a faculty of women and men that fully represent the racial, ethnic, and cultural diversity of the nation and actively seek applications from under-represented groups. The Colleges do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, marital status, national origin, age, disability, veteran’s status, or sexual orientation or any other protected status. Please send a letter of application, curriculum vitae, writing sample, graduate transcripts, a statement of teaching philosophy, and three letters of reference to Professor Jodi Dean, Dept. of Political Science, Hobart and William Smith Colleges, Geneva , NY14456.  Deadline for applications is March 19, 2007.

Comments

[pensans]

You know I honestly find it hard to believe that someone who could post the kind of hate speech you have about evangelical Christians could make unbiased hiring decisions involving an evangelical.

I wonder if you realize that that's how you'd seem to others? Do you think evangelicals responding to this ad who check your blog won't be dissuaded from applying?

Would you post articles that attack Jews and expect them to flock to respond to your ads?

How many conservative Christians are in your department? Are they resresentative of the numbers in the United States? Or is that not the kind of diversity that you care about?

[Jodi]

Actually, I would think that an evangelical might welcome an opportunity to evangelize.

[pensans]

You don't deny your hate speech.

(Incidentally, posting hate speech seems to violate your institution's formal standards. See Community Standards, p, 92 (forbidding community members to "post or distribute via any form of electronic communication "hate speech" regarding a group's . . . religion.") You may wish to discuss with university counsel whether posting your belief that a religious minority is plotting a takeover of the United States violates this policy. You might discuss the effect your conspiracy theory is likely to have on students from that religious minority in your classes and the effect it will have on hiring given your role in the hiring process.)

You think you actually fulfill your colleges' policy of seeking underrepresented groups by attacking evangelical Christians. You claim to believe that they are attracted to it. (Does Lacan have a term for those who justify hatred by claiming others like being hated?)

For your information, since you probably have never had an evangelical academic at your institution, evangelicals are not attracted to hostile work environments. Nor (despite your conspiracy beliefs) are evangelicals only attracted to institutions to convert them into Christian enclaves. Despite what you seem to believe, evangelicals academics seek to research and teach, just like you "normal" people.

[Jodi]

You know, there is no test for religious belief for job applicants. For jobs in political science, it doesn't come up. I've never heard a job applicant bring up religion.

And, let's be clear: evangelical Christians are not an underrepresented minority.

[Alain]

Though Jodi does editorialize from time to time, she is mostly pointing out the obvious fact that certain evangelical leaders have a great deal of influence in the Republican party. And it is clear they have a strategy for implementing social and political changes. Is that a form of hate speech if she does not like those changes or even expresses anger about their methods and objectives?

[Jodi]

Alain--good point. What I've been mulling over is the role of the term 'hate speech' in culture war. That it emerged on the left as a legal weapon is clear. Now it is deployed by the right (which goes to show you how legal weapons can be easily deployed)!

[Adam Kotsko]

Wouldn't the belief that evangelical Christians are plotting to take over the country (assuming Jodi actually holds this belief) indicate that evangelicals in general would have to know a lot about politics?

If there was someone who continually beat me at chess, even if I didn't like the person, I wouldn't hesitate to recommend that person to teach my friends to play chess.

[peBird]

If there has been any hate speech (which of course is not a loaded term), it has been toward those that call themselves evangelical Christians. I would say that ontological category is still up for grabs - but I don't want to instill hate in anyone.

[peBird]

I love the "For your information, since you are probably ...". It could be restated more accurately as "For your information, I am speculating ..."

[pensans]

Alain, Jodi's school specifically prohibits posting hate speech about a group's religion.

But she has posted Elders-of-Zionesque accusations about evangelicals' fascist drive to subvert democracy, not observations about evangelicals' political involvement. Far from denying her hostility to evangelicals, she has indicated that her expressed hostility should attract evangelicals, claimed that everything is okay as long as evangelicals hide their faith and denied that evangelicals are an under-represented in her university.

Her prior posts and comments are irresponsible for someone involved in the hiring process and a violation of her university's policies.

If one were to take her posts and (1) remove the word "evangelicals" and (2) insert the word "jews," and (3) send them to her department head, university president and local media, she would be disciplined on the spot for violation of university policy.

But she knows because there are no evangelicals in her department that she can get away with it becaus most of her colleagues share her hate.

At best, her position is close to: "Sure, I publicize hateful conspiracy theories about evangelicals, but that doesn't interfere with fair hiring -- they just need to hide their religion. As long as they do that, everything will be just fine."

Well, the law and her university policy don't require anyone to hide their religion or endure conspiracy theory attacks. She ought to cease airing her hatred of evangelicals or remove herself from the hiring process.

[Sinthome]

Pensans, you seem to miss Jodi's point that questions of religion don't even come up in the hiring process. Rather, the relevant factors on one's publications, teaching record, graduate work, etc. Moreover, it seems to me that you're conflating criticism with hate speech and suggesting that the public policies sought by fundamentalist Christians should be off-limits where criticism is concerned. I don't see how Jodi has done anything more than point out that Christian x has said y and this is disturbing as she disagrees with the policy in question. It seems that you would like to exempt yourself from public debate and that you're using the charged term "hate speech" as a way of disingeniously doing so.

[Jodi]

Sinthome--great point. I love the disingenuous of the religious right: on the one hand, they say that they should not be excluded from politics; on the other, they scream religious persecution any time they are criticized.

So, they want to have their cake and eat it, too. They want to participate in politics but then shield themselves behind religion when they encounter the political criticism and disagreement.

[Adam Kotsko]

The strategy of rhetorically identifying oneself with the "ultimate victims" is definitely interesting -- and totally appropriate, given that the vast liberal conspiracy is making evangelicals wear armbands with crosses, segregating them into separate ghettos, shipping them off to death camps, etc.

Interestingly, Jews aren't persecuted in America, either!

[peBird]

Let’s take Ralph Reed as just one example - if he is an evangelical Christian, his political activity and statements validate Jodi's theses many times over.

If he isn't, it is the responsibility and duty of "real" evangelical Christians to call him out and accuse him of distorting the true faith.

But everyone wants it both ways - let the Ralph Reeds (Pat Robertsons, ad nauseam) of the world do the dirty work, while maintaining the personal option of disavowing any spiritual connection to his actions in the name of your religion.

Which is why I've called religion politics by other means.

In the old days, we called that hypocrisy, which I can't believe could be a foundational ethic of any real evangelical Christian.

[old]

Also pensans, Jodi's "hate speech" is directed at *most* evangelicals' politics. If you are willing to admit that Bush's hatred of 'Islamic fundamentalism' means that he is constantly spewing hate speech against the Islamic religion as a whole, then I'm sure we'd all be willing to grant that, by your standards, Jodi has run afoul.

Strange, still, that if you had looked at recent posts you might have noticed that J. had her daughter participate in the Christmas drama at their church. The fact that Jodi might be more inclined to hire an otherwise qualified evangelical of Jim Wallis' stripe than one of Jerry Falwell's doesn't strike me, as a Christian who graduated from Falwell's school, as anything like discriminatory or hateful with respect to "religion."

To reverse a line from The Proclaimers: What do you do when victimization is all through, what do you do when majority means you?

[Adam Kotsko]

"In the old days, we called that hypocrisy, which I can't believe could be a foundational ethic of any real evangelical Christian."

You'd be surprised.

[rwilson]

As a former HWS student and Political Science major I find this post fascinating. I couldn’t even imagine having an evangelical Christian as a professor in that department. I find it funny that HWS is a school that is adamant about its commitment to diversity, while it houses a political science department that is about a homogenous as the shoppers at a suburban J. Crew. All admit to agreeing with left-wing politics (including several proclaimed socialists), most are anti free market, anti religion and all but one don’t believe in quantitative methods (circa 2005). As a right-winger, I loved this major, not because I thought that I was receiving a superior education, but because I knew that if I could deal with trying to deal with those you don’t agree with and teach complete nonsense would be a great test in my ability to be patient with those that are different than me. If one of the colleges’ goals is diversity it would be nice to get more variation in the professors’ beliefs.

[Jodi]

Um, Ryan, how is a course that assigns Locke, Rousseau, Kant, Douglass, Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche 'complete nonsense'?

And, you blur together a number of things in your description of the department. Focusing on 'qualitative' over 'quantitative' methods is a choice situated in the contexts of larger debates in the academic discipline of political science where quantitative methods dominate. Not only has our department had a difficult time staffing a quantitative course (it tends to require a lab, the evaluations are low, it's a lot of work, the initially teaching it got sick of it and decided not to do it any more), but we thought it made more sense given our school to focus on qualitative methods. Quant types can take courses with Wes. Very, very few of our majors go on to graduate school in political science and so have any interest in quantitative methods. A couple of years ago, Lucas received extra training because he is interested in teaching a methods course, but he isn't tenured yet and so doesn't have the time to put into creating such a demanding new course at this point. Really, the omissions in the department are much greater than you suggest--at this point, no one teaches latin american politics or east asian politics either. Fortunately, we just hired two people--one to do mideast and the other southeast asia and development (he used to work at the IMF and his research is on risk assessment in financial markets).

[Craig]

The critique of/attack on positivism (i.e., quantitative social science) isn't limited to the theoretical left. Readers may be familiar with Strauss and his students - certainly all of them are right wingers - who are likewise hostile to positivism. The point is that quantitative vs. qualitative methods isn't a decision that is inherently associated with a particular politics.

Like Jodi, I don't see how a standard course in the history of political theory is either "nonsense" or inherently biased.

[peBird]

Ryan's just pissed you didn't offer insurance salesmanship in the Poly Sci curriculum.

[Jodi]

PE Bird--excellent! and then it made me wonder: what would faith based insurance sales look like? Is insurance faith based? or is the absence of faith, the taking care of things in case the worst happens? Or maybe, it's faith on the part of the insurers and lack of faith on the part of the insured.

[Sinthome]

Ryan, frankly I don't even understand the point that you find it unimaginable to have an evangelical professor at HWS. Presuming that HWS is like most other universities, how would you know the religious orientation of your professor one way or the other? If the professor is doing his or her job, then the focus of their pedagogy should be the material being read or the empirical data being studied. How would the issue of religious orientation come up? Is the implicit suggestion in this discussion that evangelicals are somehow being persecuted because they can't use the classroom as a platform for espousing their religious beliefs (as in the case of pharmacists employed by major pharmacies like Wal-Mart who want to claim they have the right not to sell certain drugs)? This would be unacceptable in any academic context as university courses are about developing the critical skills of the students, not platforms for the professor to espouse *one* particular position to the detriment of all others (you'll note that Jodi teaches a wide variety of texts, not just Marxist texts).

Some professors are quite upfront about their beliefs at the beginning of the semester, but for my own part, I think I've failed pedagogically if they know what I believe by the end of the semester as my task should be to argue a theologian like Thomas Aquinas just as persuasively as Friedrich Nietzsche so that my students might begin to develop facility in carefully reading difficult texts, discerning the arguments made by those texts, and critically evaluating these texts, not indoctrinating my students into one set of beliefs. It seems to me that this skill is exactly what bothers *some* fundamentalists so much about higher education. At any rate, 1) how do you know you've had no evangelical professors? If they're doing their job, you shouldn't know one way or another. And 2) what is so vital about having a strong presence of religion in the classroom? Is this a poorly hidden manuever to grant profs the right to assert that the world is 6000 years old or, based on a very poor and selective reading of the Bible, to claim that "homosexuality is morally wrong, period, because the Bible allegedly says so"? What's the real issue here?

[Alain]

Speaking as someone who works with insurance, sales are completely predicated on the consumer having faith in the claims paying ability of the insurance company. Almost every transaction could be described as faith based.

[Anthony Paul Smith]

What a bizarre thread.

Oh, for all the Stalinistas out there, I heartily denounce the programmatic use of false accusations of hate speech in the interest of furthering some agenda of the religious right. That said, I demand the death penalty for myself as I have also accused Jodi of Articles of Zion-ish moves in her stuff on Evangelicals.

[Adam Kotsko]

If not for "deal with dealing with," I would've thought that rwilson's comment was cut-and-pasted from some standard boilerplate. That's because I've heard the same thing a trillion times. A TRILLION! (You can tell I didn't take many courses in quantitative stuff at my Christian college, where all the profs were evangelical but most of them just stuck to the topic at hand.)

[pensans]

Jodi, I am sure there are hypocrites among professing Christians, although I find your primitive stereotyping nauseating in the context of your expressed personal hostility and conspiracy theorizing.

In any case, evangelical hypocrisy in no way diminishes the positive illegality of your attitude towards evangelical Christians.

It is against the law to require Christians to hide their faith in hiring. (As to hypocrisy, I am sure you don't support "don't ask/don't tell" in the military, but you believe that it is okay for Christains applying to you for employment.)

It is also illegal to create a hostile work environemnt for religious minorities. But you have broken the rules that your university created to protect the working environment for all by posting hate speech in the form of conspiracy-theory allegations that charge evangelical Christians with a secret plot to take over the United States.

Your own students find it inconceivable that an evangelical Christian could work in your department because of the monolithic ideological leftism of the faculty.

If you really don't think any of this violates your university's policy, write a letter to your university president explaining that you feel personal hostility to a minority-religious group in the United States that is involved in a secret nationwide conspiracy to overthrow the country by force and ask him whether this should affect your involvement in hiring decisions.

As to bias in instruction, in her Modern Political Theory class, Jodi curriculum is so ideologically limited that it would seem nonsensical to anyone who did not share her convictions.

She teaches only one classic figure in the history of liberalism: Locke, and him for just three and a half hours. The dominant political philosophy in American history gets far less time in her class than Marx and Nietzsche.

No wonder her students think its nonsense. They don't even get a rudimentary foundation in the liberal theory necessary to understand their own country and the dominant economic philosophy of the day.

After Locke, they only get two more classic figures in political theory -- Rousseau and Marx before turning to Jodi's ideological hobby horses like Mary Wollstonecraft, Frederick Douglass, and Nietzsche. That's the whole course!

Is it nonsense? Consider, in no particular order, some of the possible alternatives: No Rawls, no J.S. Mill, no Adam Smith -- indeed, no one from the entire Scottish Enlightenment, no Bentham -- no introduction to utilitarianism -- no De Toqueville, no Grotius -- no introduction to the natural-law tradition at all, no Machiavelli, no Hobbes, no Montesquieu, no Kant, no Federalist Papers, no Paine. No conservative or libertarian figures at all: no Burke, no Hayek, no Friedman, no neo-Thomists, no Nozick.

Isn't it nonsense to have just two classic figures of political theory -- and just one defender of classical liberalism -- with no post-19c representatives of liberal tradition?

[CR]

A particularly nasty curse for the blogosphere:

"May trolls sift your syllabi, and critique them in your comment threads!"

[Anthony Paul Smith]

Pensans,

You're being a ridiculous ass. Nothing Jodi has written qualifies as hate speech and to suggest as such is idiotic. The way you are representing those writings is beyond bullshit (in the technical sense), and I say this as someone who argued with her about her posts.

As to her choice of teaching texts, frankly that is not your call. I took a course in the History of Political Theory at conservative evangelical school with a conservative evangelical professor and he taught roughly the same figures. We did Plato, Locke, Rousseau, Nietzsche, Marx, Machiavelli, before turning to his personal hobbyhorse - Voegelin. And the whole course was taught under the rubric of Voegelin's philosophy. Jodi's syllabus looks good to me and if I could learn quite a bit from the conservative evangelical course I took (being neither conservative nor evangelical) I'm sure a conservative and classical liberal student would be quite fine, and benefit, with Jodi's.

Now, please, grow up.

[phillwv]

All seem to have missed the crux. How can a course, and tenure, in American political thought last more than a few days?

[Jodi]

Thanks, Anthony (and Adam)--this is a weird thread.

PhilW--I don't understand your point

CR--the weird thing, is that the troll doesn't seem able properly to read a syllabus or to recognize that I teach more than one course(Modern Political Philosophy stops at the beginning of the 20th century because I offer a course in contemporary political theory every couple of years) or to recognize that syllabi may change over the years, adapting to the students, to my interests etc. Nor does he consider that there might well be others who cover people he has mentioned (Rawls figures heavily in the philosophy department).

My intro to political theory is: Thucydides, Antigone, Apology, Crito, Republic, Nichomachean Ethics, Aristotle's Politics, Machiavelli Discourses and Prince, then Hobbes. This one has changed quite a bit. I used to teach segments from the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament (usually Genesis, Exodus, Job; Matthew, John, Romans). Cicero and Marcus Aurelius were in for a while, as were Augustine and Aquinas. And, for quite a while Christine de Pisan was featured.

There are many ways to design courses. Faculty have to figure our how much we can cover in a designated period of time and at what depth. Choices have to be made and important people will always be left out. I only assign primary texts--no summaries or overviews, so going through them takes time.

In my view, a good course in political theory/history of political thought provides a frame or arc, a sense of key debates, issues and problems, and skills for reading. With those three components, students should be able to then read other texts from the period and have a sense of where they fit, what makes them important, etc.

To me, the biggest problem with my modern course is the absence of Hume. He was in for quite a while and I consider from time to time bringing him back. But, the overall narrative of the course is the dynamic of freedom and slavery, the codetermination of these notions and the struggle around them in modernity. So, Douglass fits well here (so would Wollstonecraft, but I cut her when I brought in Douglass, in part because the class discussions of Wollstonecraft tended to fall to a not very interesting level). Also, students found the trifecta of Hume, Kant, Hegel really brutal and this led them to resist and get less and less out of each subsequent text.

[Jodi]

Pensans--I didn't call anyone a hypocrite. It is against the law (I think; I know this is our policy and it was vetted through lawyers) to ASK any candidate about their religious affiliation, political persuasion, sexual orientation, or marital status. Candidates may choose to reveal these things or they may find them irrelevant for, say, how they would teach a course on the American Presidency or on American Political Thought.

Also, I never charged anyone with carrying out a secret plot. The involvement of the Christian Right in American politics is public knowledge--there is nothing secret about it.

[Alain]

As an unreconstructed, post-secular Jew, I am fascinated by Pensans comments. He has suggested that if Jodi replaced "Evangelical Christian" with "Jew" the wrath of the liberal Gods would descend upon her. The funny thing is that many folks have pointed out (correctly in my opinion) that most of the so called "neocons" are Jewish, coming from families with radical leftist backgrounds. Their influence on current politics is undeniable. While it is true that some have suggested the criticism of the neocons is antisemitic, it seems obvious that their common background has some relavance to their views. I am not offended when these facts are pointed out and I do not see why a Christian would take Jodi's comments as hate speech within the current context. In fact, the alliance of the neocons and evangelical leadership is one of the more interesting aspects of the Republican coalition. And wasn't Jack Abrahmoff and Ralf Reed very close associates?

[Adam Kotsko]

Let's have a vote. Who wants pensans to go away and never come back? (I vote yes.)

[Kenneth Rufo]

Wait, seriously: when did Frederick Douglass become an ideological hobby horse? Was their a memo that dropped him from the mainstream of American political theory? I'm having difficulty even figuring out what ideological hobby horse means in this instance.

Did I miss anything else? Did Sojourner Truth get dropped from sociology of American gender classes?

And pensans, I suspect that your professors are just being kind if not having you read Adam Smith. So far, the consensus is that conservatives who actually _read_ Adam Smith end up totally confused, as the economics and politics Smith advocated look little like modern neoliberalism.

[Craig]

I bet there's a good dissertation (or, perhaps, M.A. thesis) in writing the history of abridgements of Smith.

[Jodi]

Craig--I heard on NPR that there is a new book coming out on Smith, I want to say by PJ O Rourke, but this might be a kind of weird error on my part; anyway, he was going on about the pain of reading Wealth of Nations but praising the Theory of Moral Sentiments.

[Craig]

I agree: Moral Sentiments is a neglected masterpiece. (See Singer's article on Smith and Montesquieu in The Journal of Classical Sociology, 2004). There seems to be a general upsurge of interest in the Scottish Enlightenment, and I think that's a good thing. There's a lot of good stuff there, especially if it moves Smith beyond The Wealth of Nations to include Moral Sentiments and his lectures on jurisprudence. Maybe people will take the time to re-consider Hume as a political thinker? Or take the time to read Ferguson's History of Civil Society - likely the most complex and developed historical narratives at the time.

[Jodi]

John Ransom aka Swifty at Long Sunday is working on Hume.

[pebird]

Sorry to drop in late (long flight) - a few unreleated points:

1. Adam - you're right, but I want to start feeling surprised again, it's hard to get rid of 25+ years of personal cynicism.

2. Insurance is the ulitmate expression of perverse socialization - the remainder of the process -- those excluded (claim denied, no insurance for you, pre-existing condition) -- are precisely those that should be getting insurance in the first place. I'm working on a Lacanian discourse of insurance.

3. Thank God (sorry, wrong term) for bizzare threads.

4. If pensans were serious, he would file a lawsuit - don't hold your breath.

[Anthony Paul Smith]

"I only assign primary texts--no summaries or overviews, so going through them takes time."

Good enough for me. The best classes follow this very basic rule.

[Jodi]

P E Bird--a lacanian discourse of insurance sounds fascinating!

[Craig]

Aaron Doyle and Richard Erikson, both Canadian criminologists, have an ongoing research programme on "risk and insurance." A lot of other people have been working in this vein over the past decade or so, such as Jon Simon and Pat O'Malley. (Pat's working on an interesting project on the history of fire regulations.) None of it, as far as I know, is anything remotely psychoanalytic; most is vaguely Foucauldian.

[neographite]

By the way, can we please not conflate Christianity or evangelism with the Christian Right? I would place, say, Jimmy Carter firmly in the former (even if I would probably agree with all of Jodi's criticisms about him), and people like R. Reed in the latter (though considering him insufficiently Christian for my tastes).