While I watched wrestling all day Saturday, uhm no, not wrastlin', but real wrestling (my seven year old wrestled in his first "open" tournament, not a great experience for a novice, but hey he had fun and I got some great action pics during the 12 hours spent in a gym) and then went to church, did some grocery shopping, took a nap, watched some Winter Olympics on Sunday, the blogs and tweets of my Political Science colleagues went up in arms over Nicholas Kristof calling us irrelevant in an op-ed piece in the New York Times. So, I read Kristof's piece a few moments ago, and so what?
Kristof is entitled to his opinion. His opinion boils down, if I read it correctly, to most social scientists being irrelevant because we are not heavily engaged in public policy prescription and exploration in our research. Kristof uses one of the Political Science journals to make his point. Apparently Kristof is unaware of the hundreds of other political science journals, dozens of which are actually aimed at taking our in-house discussions and debates (which are published in many of our journals) and making them accessible to the public. Oh, maybe Kristof means that we are irrelevant if we are not conversing with the Washington DC crowd in our research. Well, so what? My research allows me to make policy prescriptions to draw conclusions about human behavior and pontificate on what governments might do positively or negatively to change the circumstances that lead to human behaviors or how governments might act because of what human behaviors tell us about the impact of political process and decisions. I do not express in great detail the technical aspects of how I arrived at my understanding of human behavior when discussing the potential responses. However, in our professional academic journals and in professional academic conference papers I do engage in the specifics because my target audience wants and needs those specifics. Kristof, for my two cents just simply is not wide read in social science or he, if he chose to be honest in his appraisal, would have recognized the numerous forums in which we as Political Scientists are engaged in public discourse. We have not abandoned society, and if society believes we are irrelevant, well so what?
Kristof is entitled to his opinion. His opinion boils down, if I read it correctly, to most social scientists being irrelevant because we are not heavily engaged in public policy prescription and exploration in our research. Kristof uses one of the Political Science journals to make his point. Apparently Kristof is unaware of the hundreds of other political science journals, dozens of which are actually aimed at taking our in-house discussions and debates (which are published in many of our journals) and making them accessible to the public. Oh, maybe Kristof means that we are irrelevant if we are not conversing with the Washington DC crowd in our research. Well, so what? My research allows me to make policy prescriptions to draw conclusions about human behavior and pontificate on what governments might do positively or negatively to change the circumstances that lead to human behaviors or how governments might act because of what human behaviors tell us about the impact of political process and decisions. I do not express in great detail the technical aspects of how I arrived at my understanding of human behavior when discussing the potential responses. However, in our professional academic journals and in professional academic conference papers I do engage in the specifics because my target audience wants and needs those specifics. Kristof, for my two cents just simply is not wide read in social science or he, if he chose to be honest in his appraisal, would have recognized the numerous forums in which we as Political Scientists are engaged in public discourse. We have not abandoned society, and if society believes we are irrelevant, well so what?
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