Stephen Walt in Foreign Policy: In the end, it comes down to what a scholar is trying to achieve. If the goal is just narrow professional success — getting tenure, earning a decent salary, etc. — then bad writing isn’t a huge handicap and may even confer some advantages. But if the goal is to have impact — both within…
Tag: for academics
Now Hiring: John Jay College Dept. of Law & Police Science
“Did you say tenured-track professor in New York City!?” Why, yes I did. My department at John Jay College of Criminal Justice (Law, Police Science, and Criminal Justice Administration) is hiring 3 (count ’em, three) tenure-track assistant-professor lines. Two are police-related; one a more general criminal-justice (or it might be the other way around, but that doesn’t really matter). You…
How the iPhone Changed the Way We Do Ethnography: A Methodological Note
In my partial blog-writing absence (though in case you’re worried, all is well here in Astoria, Queens, post storm — we’re high and dry and with electricity) I wanted to feature a few promising up-and-coming researchers I’m excited about. The first of the young-upstart rising-star whipper-snappers is Jan Haldipur (his email). Jan, an ethnographer from upstate New York,is a PhD…
Help Wanted
My department at John Jay College of Criminal Justice (Law, Police Science, and Criminal Justice Administration) has three full-time assistant-professor tenure-track lines we’ll be hiring for in the fall. Two are for general criminal justice and one is for police. If you know of anybody — a promising PhD candidate or a professor who wants to move to what just…
Food Deserts: Quantitative Research at its Sketchiest
The New York Times reports today on a RAND study (behind the Great Damned Elsevier Pay Wall) by Ruopeng An and Roland Sturm about the lack of “food deserts” in poor neighborhoods. Or more precisely about the lack of link between food deserts and obesity. More specifically, it questions the very notion of food deserts. From the Times: There is…
Irving Louis Horowitz, Sociologist and Ideological Critic, Dies at 82
From the New York Times: Irving Louis Horowitz, an eminent sociologist and prolific author who started a leading journal in his field but who came to fear that his discipline risked being captured by left-wing ideologues, died on Wednesday in Princeton, N.J. He was 82. … Though many considered him a neoconservative, he professed no political allegiance. In a 2007…
Police versus Disciples in Chicago
There’s some good reporting by Frank Main of the Chicago Sun-Times. He goes beyond Police Supt. Garry McCarthy’s bombast (“We’re going to obliterate that gang,” he told police brass in a meeting in June. “Every one of their locations has to get blown up until they cease to exist.”) to talk to actual gang members. I’m generally tempted to dismiss…
Ethical Imperialism
A quick shout-out to Ethical Imperialism: Institutional Review Boards and the Social Sciences, 1965-2009. It’s exactly what it says it is. And it does it well. It’s a book about the IRB. If you don’t know what an IRB is, it’s not your fault, it just means you haven’t done research at a university. (Trust me, then the book isn’t…
Five-oh on bike
What could be more fun than spending a few nights biking around the back alleys, roundabouts, and estates of Basingstoke with a bunch of cops? (One of whom tweets) Seriously. This ismy idea of a good time. Word on the street (or at least in the station) is that I’m the first observer to ever go on bike patrol in…
The Principles That Never Were
It turns out the Peel’s famous “Principles of Policing” are a fraud. I kind of always suspected that… but not so much that I didn’t quote them at length in the afterward to the paperback edition of Cop in the Hood. I should have known better because Susan Lentz and Robert Chaires had already published an article stating as much…