Tuesday, August 06, 2013

Phil Schrodt on Retiring from PSU

Wow.  This is really something.  62?

Excerpt:

Unexpectedly, writing Seven Deadly Sins rendered me useless as a methodological  instructor. I am convinced that garbage can models are worthless, but in order to get tenure at any place worth getting tenure, you’ve got to publish garbage can models, and lots of garbage can models, and that is not going to change any time soon. In my former subdiscipline, the response to Achen’s 2002 critique of garbage can models was a journal-length methodological suicide note, Conflict Management and Peace Science Vol. 22, No.4. I’m not going to win that battle.

There is absolutely nothing worse than the stereotypical old fart in the cluttered office telling people “It’s all crap!!!”—while pulling down, year after year, a handsome if static salary—and I’m perilously close to that. In classical Chinese philosophy there is an oft-repeated motif of the sage who writes a book and then departs beyond the frontiers, never to be seen again. Perhaps 7DS is that [non-]book.


2 comments:

Jeff said...

I liked the "ships abandoning a sinking rat" line.

Anonymous said...

“State College: a drinking town with a football problem.” -- as a PSU alum who's seen us on one too many Top 10 Party School lists (including Huff Post's current one), I can't deny this.