technocat

Funding at Yale = $25,500/yr for five years, plus what seemed like pretty good health insurance by grad student standards (can include spouse/partner for a fee). When I visited, there seemed to be lots of extra money for travel and summer research. Grad students seemed generally happy in my field (early modern), area around campus was pretty livable, all around good situation. I don't know what you're choosing against, but I was really impressed during my visit and was pretty torn between Yale and my other options. I turned them down a couple days ago though to do a different program. Best of luck!

Declined Penn and Yale, sadly.

Turned down Texas, Georgetown, Notre Dame.

I am planning to decline, unless my last school visit is a disaster and changes all my plans.

My assumptions are based on how you have described your own views. You say that "it is really hard to believe that some of a certain political viewpoint would have the same academic and intellectual ethics I do" and "there is NO FUCKING WAY I could have a Regan lover in a ten mile radius of my dissertation" and that questions that somehow manage to substantially divide the American populace are really just "bullshit things." Perhaps you really are not this disdainful of conservatives, and you don't really think they are ethically depraved, but that is the attitude you convey when you articulate your position this way and use it to justify insulating yourself from views that conflict with yours. It's especially odd when you claim that one of the failings of the religious right is that it fosters an environment of "restricted political exploration"--isn't that precisely the kind of intellectual rigidity that would be encouraged if everyone was taught to "have no respect for" opposing views and only studied in places where the faculty and students all agreed with them politically? I agree with what several posters on this thread have said about avoiding departments where politics may interfere with your research as much as I would agree with avoiding a department where no one studies what you're interested in. That's a practical consideration about where you can and can't do your intended work, and that may have been what the original poster was asking about. However, I don't see how it's necessarily true that because someone believes X, he cannot advise someone who believes Y, or that if you support gay marriage, you should avoid people who don't. That is a question of individual character, not politics or ideology. How a person responds to disagreement, how gracious he is to his students or colleagues, and whether he prioritizes his political views over research--these questions are more indicative of whether you stand to learn anything from him than how he cast his vote in 1980. The professor who is gracious in disagreement and who encourages good work that challenges his own would seem to be a greater asset than the narrow dogmatist whose stance on gay marriage coincides with yours. Obviously, not all debate leads to reconciliation or enlarged views, or even to a new way of thinking about a question. But there are people who debate in good faith and those who don't in every political camp, and it seems to be that, in your academic capacity, it's more fruitful to both seek out and become one of those who do debate in good faith than to demean your opposition. Presumably, you want to be a professor eventually. Even if you successfully seal yourself off from opposing views in grad school, have you considered how you will respond to your future students if they profess their sympathy for "bullshit" views like intelligent design or for something else that flies in the face of what you believe? Will you deride them? Will you mark them down for it because you "have no respect for their political views"? What would be the ideal way to address such a situation? To "be critical" encompasses a broad range of possible approaches, from reconsiderations of past scholarship to advocacy for one's political cause. The latter end of the spectrum strikes me as an activity that belongs in a PAC rather than a university.

People study the Nazis in a lot of different ways, but I think the best studies have been those which have taken them seriously, at the very least, and do not start from the dismissive premise that Nazism is simply "bullshit." If it were, it's unlikely that it would've motivated so many people or done so much damage. But Nazism requires very little explicit condemnation in American society now; everyone already agrees that it's some degree of bad, whereas the questions you dismiss as "bullshit" are live issues in our politics right now, and if you can't possibly imagine how a basically reasonable, upstanding American citizen just like you (assuming you are a citizen) can oppose gay marriage or support intelligent design, then I struggle to see how you can bring real insight to anyone else's understanding of such people. I completely understand starting out with assumptions about one's research questions, but the assumption that you are studying morons or devils of some kind seems to stretch beyond such reasonable starting assumptions that, say, people are shaped by their social environments, or people seek validation from their peers. Moreover, while I also agree that one can learn much from the like-minded and you should not put yourself in an environment where departmental politics might interfere with your research, I'm not sure I see how it is that a faculty member's or fellow student's views on questions like gay marriage or intelligent design will undermine your work. Do people with these views have no place in academia? If If, even after your careful political screening of your department, a person with such views happens to find his way in, what would you do? It's possible that not every disagreement will challenge you intellectually, but do you think that "moving beyond these debates" will be best accomplished by ignoring and demeaning everyone who disagrees with you?

How are you going to research the New Right if you despise everyone you intend to study and have already drawn all your conclusions before starting the research? I was under the impression that sociology was a social science, and so invested in the dispassionate model of research. You say you suspect them of being "intellectually unethical," but believing that an entire group of people is unqualified to be in academia because they don't share your political views sounds pretty intellectually questionable to me.

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If you suspect a professor may be leaving, that may be a good reason to get in touch, but isn't that more about determining where to apply than improving your chances of admission at a school?

That wasn't true for me this year. I was advised by my college professors to avoid contacting potential advisors if I had nothing substantive to discuss with them ("how do you like my research interests?" being an unsubstantive question), so I didn't contact anyone. I was still admitted to some strong programs in history (Yale and UPenn) as well as strong programs in another discipline. If you have a lot to discuss with them about their research, contacting them might make sense, but I don't think you should focus on this as an essential part of the application, particularly if it's something you're really disinclined to do otherwise.

Oh, MAPSS. I could do my undergrad all over again! What an opportunity! If that's what they're waiting for, I think I might prefer a direct rejection.

I am still waiting for official rejection from Chicago, but I heard they rejected all their undergrad alumni this year b/c of department cuts, so the fact that the letter hasn't arrived is not a sign of potential goods news on my end at least.

It's not a good school in that sense of "recognized." But it is accredited, if that's what you're asking.

I speak from the same vantage point.

No one should leave anything to the political theorists.

I got mixed advice about this, and ended up not contacting anyone at any of the departments because I really didn't have anything substantive to ask them. It worked out ok.

About Gtown, I got an email invite for visiting day, and there were about 25 emails cc'ed. So unless they're planning to admit more people who aren't invited to the visiting day, it looks like they might be done.

Yeah, I also got that email, but assume maybe that was just the people in my subfield. Guess not. It seems like a surprisingly small number.

Ok, just to balance out this very unbalanced advice thread, wanting to be near your family is not a ridiculous or petty consideration. Academia is not a religious order that requires you to renounce all earthly goods and obligations, and willingness to sacrifice your home and family for the single-minded pursuit of grad school prestige does not necessarily reflect your seriousness or potential as a scholar. Chicago is a great school (and it's not any more cut-throat than anywhere else), and you should go if you want. Even if you want to apply to law school next autumn, you'll have to wait until 2010 to start, so unless you have a job lined up through then, you might consider going to Chicago and applying somewhere else while you're there if it turns out badly. (Moreover, if you're interested in Latin American immigration issues, the city of Chicago has a large Latin American immigrant population and a lot of organizations involved in immigration policy.) But if you have obligations to your family or just want to stay near them, that's a totally legitimate reason not to go, and it has nothing to do with whether you're prepared for the demands of grad school.

I don't know about other subfields; I'm in theory and was contacted by the theory field chair.

The email I got said official notice would be on Monday.

Nope, no change on the site.

The email I got sounded like advance notice, so I wouldn't worry yet about Notre Dame. More decisions will probably come out on Monday. Plus, there are a lot of applicants from this board, and I seriously doubt they *all* got rejected.

Yup, theory.

As it turns out, I am not a team player.