Deciding between top programs

[IRdreams]

Perhaps The Realist will chime in, but in my experience this varies widely empirically. Sometimes disagreements are purely intellectual; sometimes they turn personal. To the extent that departments can balkanize and have disagreeing parties operate in separate spheres, the atmosphere is better - thus one sees separate speaker series and grad student workshops divided by methods approaches. My hunch is that things get truly contentious as the stakes rise; this means that individual grad students are almost never directly affected, but curriculum and hiring decisions are where things can get ugly.

As an incoming grad student this is almost never an issue - it has not been anywhere I have spent time - but in putting together a dissertation committee it is worth figuring out what the relationships among the faculty members are like. This can be hard to do, but it is worth getting a handle on.

As a student from a methodologically divided department, I can reaffirm some of the things said here. My school has two cleavages: one methodological and the other generational. The old guard are predominantly qualitative scholars while the junior hires are people with strong applied methodological backgrounds. The power dynamics of this divide result in it generally not devolving into personal disputes. However, it does create odd effects such as multiple research colloquiums depending on methodological orientation. For example, at one IR seminar, the median age of faculty participation is substantially higher than the more quantitative research forum. The combined effect seems to place the junior faculty in a particularly precarious position. On the one hand, they are hired for being different than the department's culture and on the other hand they are pressured to adopt this culture. For example, one of the juniors was a race horse hire who the department brought in expecting this person to teach a sequence on formal theory. However, these same courses are not well received by the senior faculty who have the most voice in tenure decisions. A very prominent scholar even suggested to this professor that he design more nonmethods courses despite the department lacking someone with sufficient background to teach them if the junior does not. Thus, these divides can dramatically affect the training one receives because courses are viewed as part of the battleground between factions.

This results in me partially disagreeing with P.H. about the effects these divides have on grad students. As a student who has more in common with the junior people, it was difficult for me to select a senior person to work with. My committees subsidiary members are all junior and therefore one has to wonder whether they will be there in the years to come. The debate about world view also strongly affects how syllabuses are constructed for the field seminars. The result is that the same seminar taught by a junior versus a senior are radically differnt. This adds to the pressure for preparing for qualifying exams since you essentially get one view of the field from one set of professors and another very different view from the other set, but either could write your exam questions. While this sounds like it might encourage the broadening of horizons, the end result is that some faculty focus on very parochial elements of the field in an attempt to develop a legion of the faithful rather than giving you a general contour of the field.

Edited March 12, 2011 by IRdreams