Category Archives: Academia

Korean Political Science Association 2009 Biannual Meeting: “American Dual Containment in Asia”

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The KPSA had its biannual meeting from August 20 to 22. Unlike the APSA, the KPSA meets only every two years, because of its size. It was a pretty good conference, but the papers generally feel short of APSA standards. This is the first one I attended. A few thoughts:

1. Just about all the attendees – Korean and foreign – got their PhD in the US. The elite universities in Korea are filled with people who got their PhDs in the US. I rarely meet people who attended those schools, only people who work at them. This speaks volumes about the very high quality of US education vis-a-vis the rest of the world. It also suggests graduate education is a major export sector of the US economy, but no one ever seems to conceptualize it that way.

2. Most of the papers were heavily focused on policy analysis and the day-to-day of Korean and regional politics. In this way, it didn’t feel like political science often to me, but like public policy. I guess this is ok, but it allows a lot of room for sheer opinionating and bloviating. But then again, many have complained that US political science is so theoretical and methodological that regular people can’t access it, it has become irrelevant to politics, and it is just another academic world unto itself. That’s true too. My feelings on this are mixed.

3. IR was vastly overrepresented among the political science subfields (theory, comparative, domestic [Korean], IR). At APSA, US politics’ seminars outweigh all the other sections combined. Not here. I think IR was a majority of the panels. I bet this reflects, 1. the general stasis of Korean domestic politics (interrupted by outbursts of violence on the streets or in the National Assembly), and 2. the immense international pressures on a small country like Korea, especially one surrounded by such large powers. It is a luxury of US politics that our internal politics feels so autonomous. As a superpower with good geography, we don’t have to pay attention to foreign opinion much. (Obama’s use of external anti-Americanism as a campaign tool was quite extraordinary.) Korea does not have that luxury, and the PS reflects that.

4. The geographic focus was solely on NE Asia. I didn’t see a single paper about another area. I find this a growing and disturbing trend here, especially when the state slogans are Global Korea, Dynamic Korea, Korea Rising, etc. I almost never meet anyone who knows anything about the ME, Africa, Latin America, or South Asia. In the context of topics like terrorism, religion, or development, one would need some exposure to these areas. But then again, I almost never see work by Korean academics on topics that are not immediately germane to NE Asia. I suppose this East Asiacentrism is forgivable given how small Korea is, but it speaks poorly of Korea and Korean political science that it seems so disinterested in the rest of the world (US excepted). I have met Korean IR political scientists who didn’t know the capital of Canada or that Iran is Shiite. Yikes!

5. About 40% of the participants were foreign – mostly Chinese and Americans, plus a few Japanese and Europeans. This tells me two things. One, there just aren’t that many political scientists in Korea. Two, they believe in recruiting foreign participation, even if the work proffered is pretty poor, because it serves the larger goal of Korea promotion.

6. The Biannual Meeting was used as another venue to, well, propagandize the Korean miracle. Speaker after speaker, both in the panels and in the general sessions like the dinner speakers, told us again and again how Korea grew from nothing to become the world’s 13th largest economy and a global ‘player.’ (I am so sick of hearing that last word.) There were a few government officials invited to speak as well, and they too went through this. It almost feels like a requirement from any serious personage in Korea, particularly when they speak to foreigners. The English language press here is filled with this story too. This incessant Koreaphoria suggests two things to me. a) They are nervous that their gains are tenuous, because they were so rapid. So perhaps telling the tale again and again, and telling foreigners too, and then expecting the foreigners to echo back the same story (and we are expected to repeat this party line), psychologically reinforces the solidity of the miracle on the Han. b) Koreans are extreme nationalists. Such constant self-celebration eventual begins to suggest arrogance and egomania. I try to be tolerant and simply smile as I hear the story told a million different ways. I try to understand why the story is so often repeated (because it feels so unreal, especially after the first 3/4 of the 20th C was so hard on Korea). But at some point, you just have to give in and say it is an example of the intense nationalism so many scholars have noted to exist outside the West. I am unaccustomed to this. My own feelings about the US hardly mirror the intensity of Korean feelings for Korea. It makes me uncomfortable.

7. The panels were far too short and too crowded. I am not sure how to interpret this. A very cynical friend said the answer is the image-consciousness of Korea. It is more important to list the panel and be able to mention it on your CV or in an TV interview, than to actually have it be a substantive process. So you cram as many people into as many panels as possible. Inevitably the panels are too short (75 minutes) and too crowded (1 panel leader, 4 presenters, 2 discussants). This is certainly what happened to my panel. A 20 minute presentation was chopped in half, and I got no meaningful feedback or discussion.

8. My presentation, what there was of it, argued that the US will ally with India in the near future. India is the only country that is also facing China and Islamism, and is democratic too. Here is my abstract, and the relevant graph on US alliance picks:

US grand strategy after 9/11 has turned from post-containment drift to preemption. But the costs are high – suspicion of American power, hedging by traditional allies, expensive, go-it-alone ventures like Iraq. Tried-and-true containment better reflects American values. While forward in the world, containment is also defensive. It reassures skittish partners and reflects liberal, anti-imperial US preferences. In Asia, containment could hold the line against radical Islam and Chinese nationalism without encouraging a global backlash. Democratic India shares these same two challengers with the US; it is the likely pivot in a US-backed neo-containment architecture in Asia.

“The Obama Administration’s Policy toward the Korean Peninsula”

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On April 21, the Korean Association International Studies held this conference in Seoul. I was a discussant on a panel entitled “The Strategic Mindset of the Obama Administration and Its Policy toward Northeast Asia.” The conference was pretty good – a mix of academics and public policy types. IR academics from Korean universities mixed with a few parliamentarians, staff from the foreign ministry, and US embassy staff. I found this a nice change from APSA and ISA conferences.

1. I got into a minor flap over the ‘criticality’ of South Korea, and of East Asia in general, to the US. I argued that SK is tied as an ally with Turkey behind: 1. Canada, 2. Great Britain, 3. Israel, 4. Japan, 5. Mexico, 6. Germany. I also argued the most critical regions for the US before East Asia are: 1. North America, 2. Western Europe, 3. the Middle East. Ranking is a contentious but useful exercise. Pleasantly, the audience of almost all Asians did not respond with resentment, although most seemed unhappy. Most seemed to accept that North America and Western Europe outranked Asia; the ME was more contested. But very revealing was the desire for SK to be high up on the list of US allies/interests. That bespoke the enormous prestige of the US as the G-1 and the craving others have for US recognition. Should it really make a difference to South Koreans how Washington ranks it? Does SK worry where Kenya or Brazil ranks it? The difference is that US can bestow status on middle powers. Even NK craves that recognition by its avowed enemy.

Briefly, I think there is little doubt that the most important region for the US must be North America. This is basic geography. Canada has been the most important US ally for a century for obvious reasons. And despite cultural distance from and an awkward history with Mexico, the US clearly needs it to be stable, if not democratic. Two years ago, no one thought the US would worry about a semi-failed narco-state emerging in Mexico, and now we might have to send troops to the border. Europe too is no brainer. US cultural, religious, linguistic, military, and ethnic links vastly outweigh the bilateralism we pursue in Asia. Americans learn European languages when they learn them at all, and go on vacations and junior years abroad in Europe. By contrast Asian languages with their culturally distant alphabets and pronunciations are just too uncomfortable for Americas. Asian food is challenging to the American palette. And non-theistic Asian religions are too different. Finally, the Middle East is of greater importance, not just because of current crises, but for structural reasons too. Oil and Israel are long-term US interests, and the post-1967 Islamic revival, the extreme edge of which lead to 9/11, will be with us for generations. Regardless of the success of the Iraq war, the neo-con argument that the ME’s dysfunction has become a major threat to the US and will require a long-term commitment to fix is accurate. We fear the radicalization of moderate Muslim opinion far more than NK stalinism or even Chinese nationalism.

2. I think expectations of Obama are wildly out of proportion to his personal time and energy, his ability to impact foreigners’ preferences, and the domestic constraints he faces in Congress, from interest groups, etc. I find myself repeating all the time that Obama is not Jesus or a magician or something. He can’t simply solve NK, or fix the financial crisis.  Like Walt in Singapore, I found at this conference what seemed to me an excessive hope that the great O could simply make things go back they way they were before the financial crisis or breakthrough long standing problems like NK. The big IR problems are deeply entrenched, and Obama, like all presidents, faces enormous bureaucratic-congressional inertia at home. US consumers and the government are tapped out right now, and a return to the US as importer of last resort is unlikely for awhile and probably not very healthy for the global economy anyway. Asian exporters are going to have to focus on difficult reform (cleaning up the SOEs in China, chaebol in Korea, kereitsu in Japan, eg) and domestic demand. And this will be good for them, as simply exporting to the West has sustained political and economic oligarchs around the region for too long

Foreigners’ expectations are enormous, and I think very misplaced. The US consul in Busan told me that he finds himself telling Koreans that he is our president, and that you should expect him to defend the US national interest. This is obviously so, but that it needs to be repeated at all, speaks enormously of just how much the rest of the world hopes Obama can transform almost everything. Eg, what I really learned in listening to Korean high hopes for Obama at this conference was the deep, deep exasperation with NK. You could see in the hope for Obama just how much South Koreans would like the endless NK game to finally stop so that Korea could be a more normal country.

Much of this is fantasy I fear – like that woman who said that Obama will pay her rent. I want Obama to succeed too, but most of the long-standing problems in IR will not succumb to his charisma.  The structures of IR change very slowly. Darfur, Iran, Russia, NK, Palestine – all these may change a bit at the margins due to his personality, but I doubt Obama will achieve major breakthroughs without the long patient work of diplomacy that most US presidents have pursued. But this presidency is a good test of the levels of analysis theory in IR. Maybe Obama can overcome the domestic, state-level impediments and international-level structures that usually dictate IR outcomes.

3. Korean IR, like Latin American IR, seems pretty focused on practical applications and policy. All the conference papers were policy-relevant, and much of the discussion was as well. I attended another conference in November last year and am participating in another on regional order in East Asia tomorrow. Those talks were/are all policy relevant as well. And the Korean IR journal literature is heavily focused immediate issues, such as NK, democratization, Asian growth models, and the character of leadership in Asia. In this way it feels more like International Security than ISQ.

I imagine this focus on policy stems from the huge challenge of the DPRK to the South. IR is an existential issue for the ROK. Theory probably seems like a luxury. Similarly, SK only got wealthy in the last few decades. The practical needs of interaction with the global economy probably trumped model-building or formalism in Korean IPE. All this is relevant to the debate in IR since the end of the Cold War about whether IR is too eurocentric. ISR (10/4, Dec. 2008) had a good symposium on this question. A good addition would be a discussion of Korean IR.

How Come Walt’s top 10 IR books weren’t Assigned in my IR Program?

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So Walt published his top 10 IR books at FP. It is a good list, except that I was not required to read any of them in my grad program. Hah! Pieces of a few of them were listed in secondary suggested reading. By FP’s own ranking, I attended a top 20 IR PhD program. Why is this so?

1. The most important ‘books’ in IR at any one time are not this or that actual book, but the latest issue (book-length) of International Organization, International Studies Quarterly, or International Security. 75+% of my IR reading in grad school was articles. This is where the most recent research was (critical to know because it made you sound smart and ‘cutting edge’ at department gatherings), and the articles usually summarized the major arguments from previous work. So you didn’t need to read books or previous articles unless you had the time, which of course you never did. A lot of the IR books I like and recommend below, I read before or after my course work. Then I had time to actually ‘soak’ in the work and not just plow through the theory chapter as fast as possible so I could get to the next reading assignment.

2. No one had time in grad school to read books. Books are for wimps and generalists; plowing through dense, turgid article prose is the mark of a real social scientist! Besides, they were way too long, and you were already exhausted and out-of-shape from living in your basement, eating badly, rarely going into the sun (your implacable enemy), and binging on the weekends in breakouts of ‘freedom.’ I think I read only 3 IR books cover-to-cover in grad school – Waltz’ Theory of International Relations, Schelling’s Arms and Influence, and Gilpin’s War and Change in World Politics. I read these in my first year when I still thought books were to be read in their entirety. That fantasy disappeared quickly.

3. Walt stress lots of history and history of ideas stuff – like Guns, Germs and Steel or The Best and the Brightest. I would love to have had him as a professor, because these are the sorts of ‘big idea’ books with exciting history attached to them that made me go into IR in the first place. But that is hardly what I read. It was all theory, formalism, and models. This stuff made me a sharper abstract thinker, but it sure wasn’t as exciting as Walt’s list. So I can drone on about escalation dominance or the ideational structures of the ‘new regionalism,’ but undergrads and basically the rest of the world zone-out pretty fast when you shift into ‘social science voice.’

4. Here are my top ten IR books, in order:

Waltz, Theory of IR

Wendt, Social Theory of IR

Fukuyama, End of History

Thucydides

Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations

Carr, 20 Year Crisis

Gilpin, War and Change

Gilpin, Global Political Economy

Huntington, Clash of Civilizations

Schelling, Arms & Influence

Stop Obsessing over Campus Academic Freedom

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This was originally written in 2005.

David Horowitz and a state senator in Ohio have pushed hard for an academic bill of rights for students who feel ideologically oppressed by faculty. And they are correct that universities are overrun with lefty faculty.

But I don’t really have the sense that there is an intellectual repression occurring. I know this is an article of faith on the right, but I am a conservative in my (unnamed) department. If there was some conspiracy, I think I would be on the receiving end of it. I just don’t see any evidence of what Horowitz is saying. He writes "The abuse of students and university classrooms for political purposes is widespread both in Ohio and nationally." Widespread? Nationally? I can’t speak for Ohio, but nationally too? Come on. I just don’t see anything to substantiate that.
But I will go one step further and sound openly naive to the right-wing blogosphere-types. I think lefty academics care pretty passionately about freedom of speech. Yes, they may think their rural students are benighted, or that the market is exploitative, or that W is an imperialist. And they are wrong on all 3 counts. But they are liberals mostly, not stalinists. They are more committed to pluralism than indoctrination. You sorta have to be a liberal – skeptical, intellectually open, critical of the status-quo – to be an academic. Conservatives hate that kinda talk. Smart conservatives are also open and self-critical – I try to be one of them – but that is not the general ethos of conservatism, with its trust in established social matrices and institutions.

The real answers to the ideological diversity in academia that conservatives want are:

1. Find a way to make academia more attractive to conservatives as a profession. The problem is not the persecution of conservatives on campus, but their poor interest in academia. I have never felt persecuted for my views, but I do notice how few other ‘righties’ there are around among the grad students and faculty. But when conservatives do come and they are serious, they can be comfortable. Look at the University of Chicago. Strauss and Hayek have lots of disciples there who are respected. The real problem is that conservatives go into the market and make money. They don’t come to campus to research. If I had to guess why, I would say it is the low esteem accorded college professors in the US. The right seems to think we are eggheads; Democrats have been far more welcoming of the professoriate and social science in general.

2. Crack down on politically protected departments/agencies/centers/etc. The snap between Cornel West and Larry Summers is an excellent example of this. I think there is a deep sense among academics that politically correct or ideologically preferred scholarship is protected/assisted/rewarded. Multiculturalism is ensconced in academia more than anywhere else in America, and I think it drives away conservatives who see it, correctly, as soft and politicized. If state legislatures really want to do something useful for America’s universities, they should look at ethnic and women’s studies departments’ scholarship, and the racial re-balkanization of student bodies. The post-modern departments too should deploy method and rigor, produce politically neutral investigations, and be measured by their ability to publish in serious, peer-reviewed journals. Normative ‘calls to justice’ or ‘expressions of rage’ are not what we are to produce. That’s for advocates and interest groups. Scholarship means data collection and dispassionate analysis, not poetry or homilies.

Unfortunately, partisan conservatives, like Horowtiz, and the GOP broadly speaking, loathe experts and social scientists. George Will has been saying for decades that we just dress up out lefty predilections in the language of objectivity. So I imagine there is little interest in my suggestions. O’Reilly would presumably scoff when I say that academic liberals are more committed to professionalism than ideology. But many years of experience with colleagues who reject my opinions say otherwise. And without a rigorous empirical study to demonstrate ‘nationwide’ oppression, I am hesitant to hand students another tool to make my life difficult. It’s already hard enough to get them to come, take the material seriously, be polite to me and each other, accept poor grades without seeing dislike or ill-will, etc. Now we are telling them that I am an ideologue too.

I think the right has won so much within government that they are starting to turn on other institutions where the left is still dominant – universities and public TV.

Obstacles to Professors in the Classroom

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This was originally written in 2006.

The Market, not the State of Ohio, Incentives Professors in the Classroom

Ohio politicians state that professors at state universities spend too little time in the classroom. But, state action can hardly alter the incentives emanant from structural changes in the economy. Why do professors teach so little, and desire even less?

1. Good research pays much better than good teaching. We live in an information and service economy, which rewards the provision of high-quality, reliable, accurate information. The best of the professoriate has a skill set – in research – that ranks near the top the contemporary economic value chain. Accredited researchers – not just professors, but consultants, lawyers, doctors, and other similar knowledge-generating professionals – are highly prized, and university salaries and benefits packages reflect this. This ‘rock-star model’ of faculty recruitment ensures generous compensation packages to acquire and retain high-quality professors. Part of that is limiting their exposure to undergraduates who, by definition, underexploit their skill set. Places like OSU wish to compete among the top tier of schools and firms for talent. Teaching is simply not a part of the incentive mix.

And there is, of course, a good reason for this. Teaching is easier than research. Most teaching assistants are qualified to teach; very few to write for publication. Most Americans have spent time in school. Most have reasonable interpersonal communication skills and a field of expertise. Yet far fewer are qualified to write a book or serious article on their area of interest.

So the mechanics are simple supply and demand. Prestigious researchers and their product are in very high demand because of the knowledge-based structure of our economy. Part of the price of holding such figures in our universities is a minimal teaching load.

2. Closely related to the financial benefits, are those of stature. Like all communities, scholars seek the affirmation of their peers. A defining book or article, along with the speaking engagements and seminars that accompany it, bring prestige. Excellence in teaching achieves nowhere near this level of recognition. No one speaks before NATO, the World Bank, or on C-SPAN by training undergraduates.

Similarly, prestige affects the ability of universities to exige teaching from their best faculty. OSU, e.g., has a reputation for football and mediocre undergraduates in the middle of a dull farm state. To attract talent from more high profile cities and universities, one must offer congenial packages. Obviously this entails a high salary, but also a reduced load. Higher caliber schools will find it easier to push researchers into the classroom. Ohio does yet have schools to rival the Ivies, and so it must pay – a lot – to recruit and hold talent.

3. Nationally, American universities and their constituent departments too feel the effects of prestige and competition. The internet has fashioned a much more efficient market for research talent. It is much easier to ‘bounce’ in and out schools now, so the competition to retain or lure away high quality faculty – and minimal teaching is always an attraction – is high. Big names – the ‘rock stars’ – expect course releases, or they simply go elsewhere.

And retaining the ‘rock-stars’ has ramifications for the local and regional community. The university system is no sleepy backwater of those who cannot do, and hence teach. Instead, major universities, highly ranked departments, and highly regarded faculty have become emblems of a city or region’s stature, its quality of life, and the dynamism of its economy. There is no doubt, e.g., that Columbus benefits enormously – in both prestige and wealth-creation – from the high concentration of young, dynamic, information age labor clustered around its university. By contrast, cities like Cleveland or Toledo, mired in lower value manufacturing, lack the cachet, infrastructure, and business opportunities necessary to attract and retain higher-end information professionals.

4. Globalization has only accelerated and sharpened these incentives. American universities are the best in the world, because they so focus on research in a global economy that most values information. Knowledge-generation is our area of specialization, and it is at the highest end of the value-chain too. Hence, the international division of labor is increasingly rewarding professors and researchers with American training. This only accelerates the extant trend away from teaching. If high quality researchers were already rewarded far more than good teachers within our national system, professional exposure to the global economy has only accentuated that comparative advantage – and hence the movement of professors into research. In brief, many people can teach, but the serious research training of a major American research school is far more scarce and increasingly rewarded worldwide. All states now face this dilemma, and only huge, and hence unlikely, financial interventions could alter the current market playing field.