COLUMN: The folly of Ian Lustick

From Edward Sherwin's, "The Lower Frequencies," Fall '00 From Edward Sherwin's, "The Lower Frequencies," Fall '00Don't worry, Professor Lustick, it's almost over. For nearly three years, you've presided over the precipitous decline of Penn's Political Science Department. You've watched a lot of the dead wood professors retire, a lot of the young guns leave for greener pastures and a lot of high-profile faculty recruits fail to make their way to West Philadelphia. Over three years when the department was supposed to have grown significantly, it's actually shrunk. Yes, I'm saying it -- any of your flaws notwithstanding, it's not your fault. Whenever over the past three years individuals have noted that the department is not where is needs to be, it was never in malice. There is no media conspiracy against you, as you may think, just a number of people who wish that the department would meet its stated hiring goals so they can take a decent seminar. And yes, Professor Lustick, the department has problems. As you say, the faculty is good -- from my experience, damn good. But there just aren't enough warm bodies to keep the department vital and consistently good in all subfields, and to satisfactorily meet the growing demand from undergraduates for courses in Political Science. Yes, you've had to deal with a lot, but it's not your fault. It's not your fault that the University administration has for the last three years pursued a flawed recruitment strategy emphasizing impossible-to-hire senior professors over young, eager junior faculty members who could quickly build up the faculty's size and its reputation. It's unfortunate that this strategy is only now being repudiated. And it's not your fault that Dan Deudney isn't here anymore. The department recommended him unanimously for tenure, but he was rejected at a level beyond your control. And you couldn't exactly force the man to publish. It's not your fault that JosZ Antonio Cheibub is leaving. You couldn't give his wife, a professor at another school, the position that Yale did. And you couldn't give him the extra years Yale could to bolster his tenure file. And it's not your fault that Jim Tulis didn't leave the University of Texas at Austin for Penn. A previous SAS administration pulled the funding out at the last minute. It's not your fault that Karen Orren didn't defect from UCLA; Penn's French Department couldn't give her husband as good a job as he has out west. And it's not your fault that Steve Skowroneck didn't leave Yale -- he was only going to come to Penn if Orren came first. It's not your fault that Paul Light didn't come to Penn either. If he didn't accept the offer from Brookings, he very likely would have taken the one from Harvard. And now, it's not your fault that John Ikenberry is leaving. You couldn't make him a full professor, and with the quality of his scholarship, it was only a matter of time before a better department scooped him up. You also couldn't help his desire to be in the D.C. area. So know this, Professor Lustick. No one who knows how these things work is blaming you. You're not the victim of some vast right-wing conspiracy, you're the victim of circumstances beyond your control -- in the University administration and the academic job market -- that prevented you from making the faculty any larger. Everyone, however, would be correct in saying that the department is too small and has failed to meet its stated size goals the last few years. The blame, if anywhere, rests with the administration for taking control over hiring away from the department for too long and for pursuing a highly flawed strategy of pie-in-the-sky senior recruitments. But now, it appears that better sense will prevail. Indeed, the department should get much better under Nagel. With the appropriate support of the deans, Poli Sci will set about hiring a slew of talented junior faculty members -- some of whom might actually stick around to get tenure -- building the department up the same way the History Department did so successfully in the 1960s. But this anticipated success won't be a reflection on Jack Nagel any more than the past three years have been a reflection on you. It's nothing personal, just academics.