Deudney to teach at Johns Hopkins

Political Science Professor Daniel Deudney was forced to find a new job after being denied tenure. Even though he will be forced to leave the University after this semester, popular Political Science Professor Daniel Deudney has already landed on his feet with a new position -- at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. Deudney was denied tenure last year by the Provost's Staff Conference despite being endorsed by the Political Science Department and the School of Arts and Sciences Personnel Committee. Deudney did not file an appeal this year -- his seventh at the University -- because his tenure file did not change since last year. Three schools -- Hopkins, the University of Toronto and the University of Southern California -- extended job offers to Deudney, who teaches international relations theory and environmental politics. Deudney explained that his decision to accept Hopkins' offer above the others was based on the school's academic quality in political science and geographic location. "It's a much stronger department [at Hopkins]," he said. "But the ultimate reason why I went to Hopkins is its proximity to Washington." Deudney said that he plans to commute to Hopkins from Washington, where he has worked for the Worldwatch Institute, an environmental policy organization, and served as a legislative assistant on Capitol Hill. Location was not the only perk of Hopkins' offer, according to Deudney. It also includes a promotion to an associate professorship -- up from his current position of assistant professor -- a 10 percent salary increase, a bigger office and a 50 percent increase in his research budget. He will also only have to teach three courses each year, down from the four he had to teach currently. Faculty members and administrators said Deudney's bid for tenure failed because of his inability to complete a book during his time at Penn, although he is currently working on six nearly-complete manuscripts. All three schools extended offers to him that would have "fast-tracked" him through the lengthy tenure application process. "Tenure doesn't matter that much to me," Deudney said. "I'm just interested in getting into a better department and continuing my research and teaching." He added that "even if I were promoted here, the probability that I would have left still would have been very high." Ian Lustick, the chairperson of Penn's Political Science Department, said Deudney deserves the position in Hopkins' "outstanding" political science department. "It's a credit to the profession's belief in his future," he said. "I don't know if it's shared by everyone on the Provost's Staff Conference but I know it's shared by everyone I've talked to." Deudney's teaching duties in international relations theory will be taken over by David Rousseau, an assistant professor hired away from the State University of New York at Buffalo. Rousseau received his doctorate from the University of Michigan in 1996 and will come to Penn in the fall. "He's an excellent lecturer, a multimedia kind of speaker," Lustick said, adding that Rousseau is "by no means a replacement" for Deudney. "Deudney's a rare person," said Steven Cook, a graduate student in Political Science. "I don't think anyone can fill his shoes." Cook lamented the University's loss of an "academic star." "I just think it's wrong," he said. "It's not wrong for him to accept the offer but it's wrong of the University of Pennsylvania to let this guy go." Lustick noted that Deudney was not the first Political Science professor in recent years to leave Penn. Professors Fritz Kratochwil and Steven Fish were lost to offers from universities in Germany and California, respectively, this decade. Rousseau was brought to Penn as part of the department's drive to increase the size of its faculty, which is about half that of peer institutions. The University's Agenda for Excellence called for the hiring of several new political science professors in the field of American and Comparative Legal and Democratic Institutions, some at the senior level. Despite the tenure issue, Deudney said that he will be leaving the University on good terms, though he described his years here as "a mixture of good and bad." "I enjoyed teaching, particularly the undergraduates," he said. "[But] the primary drawback was the weak and unsettled state of the Political Science Department." "I wish them well in their long-standing effort to upgrade the department," he added. William Connolly, the chairperson of Hopkins' political science department, was unavailable for comment.

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