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Straussian lovefest.

No, I meant get in touch with the St. John's alumni currently at BC. They will have good and specific advice for you. Many people also recommend getting touch with faculty you would like to work with, but I haven't found that this strategy actually helps anyone get in, and moreover, it's awkward for you and sometimes annoying for the faculty on the receiving end. I would recommend getting in touch with faculty only if you have very specific, otherwise unanswerable questions for them. I don't know anything about philosophy at Tulane, sorry. But yes, personal connections between professors can help, or at least can't hurt. As for Toronto, you're right about no direct PhD admission. That's fine. But everywhere else, aim higher than the MA. And I wouldn't write off UT or ND; they (especially ND) are friendly to your background and may excuse your GREs. Also, you might consider re-taking your GREs if you have time.

Acceptance into BC's MA is plausible--many St. John's students end up there, as I'm sure you know. Some are then picked up for the PhD program, which is a good opportunity. You should get in touch with these people ASAP to discuss the program with them. All the other places you list will look kindly on your background but there is no reason to apply to the MA. Just apply to the PhD and they will automatically defer you to the MA if they don't accept you for the PhD, so you won't loose out on that opportunity, if you believe that an unfunded MA is an opportunity (this applies to BC as well). Toronto might be a stretch given your unconventional training and non-stellar GREs, but it would depend on who is writing your recs and what they say about you. There is no disadvantage for American applicants as far as I know, which admittedly is not all that far. Also, allow me to offer the following unsolicited advice: you really focus on your applications to BC and Toronto out of this list. MSU, CGU, and UNT are all great places, but they may not be great assets on the job market. I would also suggest that you add Notre Dame and UT-Austin to your list--these are much stronger programs for your kind of thing in terms of resources, faculty, and other students. Finally, don't pay for an MA. It's not worth it, no matter how much you love Plato.

Depending on the outlook of the quantitatively-oriented faculty, it is possible that rejecting quantitative methods in principle will set you up for difficulties in a quant-heavy department, particularly if there are quantitative requirements for all students and any course taken outside your subfield will be quant-oriented. Theorists in particular stand to benefit from some coursework in the more established subfields, but if you feel that the faculty teaching those courses will be hostile to you or demand a very high level of statistical competence that would make the courses impossible, then you will miss out on this opportunity. Can you find out anything about the relationship between the theorists and the other faculty? Do they respect one another's work, or is there smoldering enmity between them? Keep in mind also that the faculty's attitudes may be shared or amplified by the grad students, and if the theory contingent is small and embattled, you may find yourself socially and intellectually isolated among your cohort (or, alternately, you may discover the intense camaraderie of enlistment in the defense of the tiny platoon again the Leviathan of social science). It's hard to say more than that without knowing which department you're referring to, but these are general issues to consider.

I think Rossiya is officially my favorite internet personality ever. Can the GradCafe set up some kind of a fan page for her? па русскй?

SBL - Are you in a graduate program now? How did you decide that academia is where you are happiest?

Many programs will ask you which professors you want to talk with and set up meetings for you two, and if they don't, you should ask them to do this. They'll also usually have a current student in your subfield host you, so you can ask that person questions, as well as the students you meet at the lunches and the evening parties the department arranges during the visit. In general, you are being sold the program at these events, so if you want to talk to anyone, you should just ask and the department will try to produce that person for questioning, even if he happens to be in the depths of some pre-historic bog in Australia at the moment. (Usually, if someone is actually out of town, they will schedule a phone call for you or give you an email address.) There seems to be some kind of ancient oral tradition that passes on the set of expected questions to prospective students each year. They include, for professors: what are you currently working on, what are your grad students working on, will you be around next year (and beyond) for me, what classes will you be teaching... For grad students: what are you working on, how do you like it here, how supportive is the department, how high is morale, do most people finish mostly on time, how much do you interact with your professors or advisors, how freely does the funding (and the liquor) flow, what are the sectarian divisions among the faculty and do they affect your life (this will vary by subfield), how well are people like me (insert your particular issue) treated here, does your health plan cover my future (or present) offspring... I attended several of these open houses the year I applied and thought they ranged from mostly to totally useless (the free trip was nice though). You probably already know the answers to most of these questions, and the others don't really have clear answers (unless a department is truly atrocious and crushes all its students so that 100% of your sample will reply that they are miserable, morale is low, and everyone is on the first train out). The meetings with professors can be awkward though if you aren't armed with some time-filler. The most useful and applicable piece of information you can possibly acquire at these events is how socially and intellectually tolerable the other grad students are and how much you want to spend the next few years talking and hanging out with them. Try to engage them in substantive conversations and see if they can carry on a discussion that interests you. Also talk to them about non-academic matters. Find out if they're narrow partisans, or mean-spirited jerks, or pompous self-promoters, or any other sort of people who are unlikely to be be helpful or pleasant. You might try the same with the professors if you feel up to it--suggest some of the arguments you're considering to them and get their thoughts. Some professors are very good at answering the kinds of bureaucratic questions that prospectives typically come armed with, but much less good at helping you develop your ideas, which you will discover too late.

Perhaps they are applying because they have been taken in by insipid advice to pursue their whims (better known as "dreams") no matter how unrealistic or ill-suited, or they have actually convinced themselves that their love for "the game" is so deep and pure that it needs no merely external crutch like, say, income, job stability, personal dignity, or health insurance for their children--they can be happy without all these things so long as they can spend their days regressing Congressional voting data. Or because they have been strung along by the institutions themselves, which need TAs for their undergrads and RAs for their faculty just like top schools, and face no discernible disincentives to taking on far more graduate students than can ever find suitable employment on the academic job market. It has never been clear to me whether anything but the immediate financial situation of the graduate institution and its ability to offer stipends places any constraint on graduate admission. And even that is not a great constraint--many people seem perfectly willing to dig themselves into debt at places like Georgetown for the blessed opportunity to be graduate students. What incentive do graduate programs have to peg their admissions to the academic job market and admit fewer students as fewer jobs open up? Another thing that those perusing placement statistics should be aware of is that departments frequently include graduates in post-docs, and those working in some non-professorial capacity in higher education (for example, in administration or student services) among those placed at "academic jobs" without noting explicitly the nature of their employment. Further Googling may be prudent when dealing with these claims.

For that to be an issue, you might have to be so voluminous in your posting and transparent about your identity that your consuming obsession with graduate admission would be made instantly and screamingly obvious to any casual glance at this forum. Only one of you demonstrates this affliction at this point, but the winter of waiting has been known to break the best of men.

The general policy seems to be generally enforced, but decided on a case by case basis once you're offered admission. I am at one of the programs you list, and know of two people who requested deferrals from my cohort, one to do research abroad for a faculty member in the department, the other to do some work unrelated to the field. The first request was granted, the second denied.

I hear the NIH has lots of money--maybe we can construe poli sci as a branch of biology, too, or at least a discipline contributing to the public health? I have no interest in starving political science of funds, but again, my point is that Coburn is not wrong to claim that most of political science is not science, and that the kind of counter-argument suggested here--that we emphasize the predictive modeling side of the discipline (primarily methodology, as you point out) in order to prove that the entire discipline is scientific does a disservice to those subfields (indeed, the majority) that neither are nor ever will be scientific, regardless of how many regressions they perform on their data sets. The only effect such emphasis will have is to encourage even more statistical demonstrations of the obvious or parochial in order to establish some patina of scientific credibility and funding worthiness. Why not just say, politics does not follow natural laws and is not susceptible to predictive or causal modeling. We study what we can, and it's valuable at least to understand what has happened, if not what will happen, and that's all there is to it. So, armed with this data, we can now repair Iraq? What are we waiting for? If this is the sense in which you mean "scientific," you do not even need a critical approach to Marxism. Marx himself thought of his work as scientific socialism. Maybe if we told this to the NSF, even political theorists, literary scholars, and philosophers could claim a piece of its funding pie? But I'm pretty sure that NSF's mandate to fund "basic science" does not encompass critical theory. Again, problems with predictive modeling and replicable experimentation.

Since it has failed to derive any predictive or universally generalizable laws of politics from replicable experiments? As far as I know, the NSF doesn't operate with an Aristotelian understanding of science (however desirable that might be). Interpretations of Hobbes, case studies of civil wars in Africa, and political behavior studies lacking external validity are not science, though they might be better and more important to politics than science would be. What if the bigger problem is trying to hold this tenuous and self-destructive ground, rather than demonstrating the validity of qualitative and theoretical approaches? It's possible that the real enemies of the humanities and social sciences are not the people who deride them for not being scientific enough, but those who believe they should or could be wholly or even primarily scientific. What are some examples of political science research that has actually resulted in causal and predictive models? I'm not sure how self-criticism and description can be said to qualify as science, unless we are to conclude that poetry and painting and journalism are also sciences because they criticize and observe the world and themselves.

Political science can be important and still not be science. If you argue that it deserves NSF funding because it's a science, you discredit all qualitative, theoretical, and historical work in the field for the sake of a few more federal dollars in your own pocket.

Your chronological interests sound like the history of political thought. However, "justice, equality, power" sound more like issues dealt with by contemporary and critical theorists. There are some departments strong in both--Chicago, Yale, Harvard come to mind--but it might help you to clarify your own purposes by trying to frame a real project you hope to undertake in grad school (which you will have to do in your SOP anyway), the thinkers you'd look to, and the methodologies you'd employ. Then look for professors who study these thinkers and use these methodologies and apply to their departments. How classes are run and what kinds of texts are assigned depends almost entirely on the professor and course design and not at all on the school--this doesn't seem like a consideration you should prioritize in looking for departments. However, Chicago's Committee on Social Thought does, as a program, emphasize holistic textual reading, and it offers many courses focused on just one text or writer at a time. Finally, no, the writing GRE is unlikely to be a major factor if your application materials can demonstrate your writing ability.