COLUMN: Building from the ground up

From Edward Sherwin's, "The Lower Frequencies," Fall '00 From Edward Sherwin's, "The Lower Frequencies," Fall '00Jeffrey Tulis, a professor in the Government Department at the University of Texas at Austin, has a world-class reputation and a list of publications as long as your arm. Tulis -- an expert in constitutional theory and American political development -- was fully prepared at the time to uproot his personal and professional lives and move to West Philadelphia. Instead, an unexpected budget shortfall in the School of Arts and Sciences stymied the deal in its final stages. Tulis' case is representative of the Political Science Department's acute problems over the last several years. Behind the scenes, the department has nearly landed a number of impressive hires. But its failure to actually do so has engendered its public image of a department in turmoil and disarray. Most with knowledge of the hiring process are quick to deflect blame from the department and its beleaguered chairman, Ian Lustick. Instead, the University administration -- which has handled much of the recruitment in Political Science through its much-ballyhooed American and Comparative Democratic and Legal Institutions initiative -- is the focus of greater scrutiny. In 1997, President Rodin unveiled ACDLI as one of her six academic priorities, essentially relieving the aging and shiftless department of its recruiting function. The results, to say the least, have been unspectacular. Over the last three years, Penn has managed to secure only one superstar senior professor -- Princeton's John DiIulio --while the department itself has actually shrunk. Blame -- when it is placed -- has gone to the administration for its failure to close deals like the one that would have brought Tulis to Penn. "Any time you have administrators making appointments to departments, rather than intellectual leaders, you're not in a good situation," one senior administration official conceded. "That kind of priority-setting has to go on at the department level." Indeed, the University is in a sense torn by an ongoing conflict over how to best rebuild a department that has fallen on hard times. The administration currently prefers a "trickle-down" approach to faculty hiring. The theory is that by recruiting a few big names to the department, others will follow, of their own volition, to work with these luminaries. It's a nice theory. However, for Penn at least, it has failed to work in practice. The goal of this rebuilding strategy is to hire "mooseheads" -- the term one graduate student used for those scholars you'd like to display on the wall. DiIulio is one such moosehead, and Tulis might have been another. But administration officials, by their own admission, didn't realize how hard it would be to draw big names to Penn. For starters, whatever salary increase Penn offers can be easily matched by a scholar's home school -- and indeed, some scholars sought through ACDLI have used an offer from Penn as leverage back home. Others have spurned Penn's advances because of the weakness of our Political Science Department -- a depressing Catch-22 for a department trying to improve. For others, it comes down to whether a spouse can also get a faculty appointment at Penn. And Tulis is far from alone among the near-misses. Paul Light of the Pew Charitable Trusts, MIT's James Snyder, UCLA's Karen Orren and Yale's Stephen Skowronek are other star political scientists whom the administration recruited heavily but could not deliver at the end of the day. Clearly, the policy pursued by the administration has been a failure. Penn has neither the reputation nor the resources to bring a herd of top-notch senior faculty members to Political Science, and may not as long as the department remains as small as it is. This frustration has led many, particularly within the department, to advocate another approach. Like Yale -- which recently hired 10 new junior profs in one fell swoop -- they advocate bringing in a number of "warm bodies and decent folk" at the junior level to build the department from the bottom up. Penn's difficulties holding onto talented junior Political Science professors are legendary -- the names Steven Fish, Daniel Deudney and now JosZ Antonio Cheibub are familiar to many. But if the administration can't bring the best in the field to Penn, then it should try to develop the next generation of leaders from within. And as one administrator forecasts, in the coming year, the hiring focus could shift from the senior to the junior level. But ultimately, this is a process that must be conducted from within the Political Science Department itself, and not by a distant administration. "I think a lot of people regard [Penn] as a potentially exciting intellectual environment," Tulis said. "But there's some skepticism as to whether the administration of the University knows what it's doing. They didn't do whatever was needed to be done." And as one Penn graduate student told me, "Faculty hiring is a political process." It may be political, for sure, but it's certainly a process the University doesn't have down to a science.