The Chronicle of Higher Education
Henry Farrell and Jack Knight
March 10, 2019
Agatha Christie’s murder mystery The Mousetrap is the longest running play in history. Its first run began in 1952, and it hasn’t stopped since. Another perennial whodunnit — "Who Murdered Political Science" — is mounting a strong challenge for the runner up. Regularly repeated performances haven’t stopped audiences from enjoying the traditional denouement, in which the detective accuses Quantitative Methods and Game Theory of conspiring to bash the victim’s head in.
Discerning critics were unimpressed with Michael Desch’s recent "cult of the irrelevant" production, which played recently in this magazine. They found it too reminiscent of past stagings — all recycled quotes and stale nostalgia — and would have preferred a more novel interpretation. Even so, like Christie’s play, it’s a traditional crowd-pleaser.
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The Chronicle of Higher Education
Michael C. Desch
February 27, 2019
In a 2008 speech to the Association of American Universities, the former Texas A&M University president and then-Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates declared that "we must again embrace eggheads and ideas." He went on to recall the role of universities as "vital centers of new research" during the Cold War. The late Thomas Schelling would have agreed. The Harvard economist and Nobel laureate once described "a wholly unprecedented ‘demand’ for the results of theoretical work. … Unlike any other country … the United States had a government permeable not only by academic ideas but by academic people."
Gates’s efforts to bridge the gap between Beltway and ivory tower came at a time when it was growing wider, and indeed, that gap has continued to grow in the years since. According to a Teaching, Research & International Policy Project survey, a regular poll of international-relations scholars, very few believe they should not contribute to policy making in some way. Yet a majority also recognize that the state-of-the-art approaches of academic social science are precisely those approaches that policy makers find least helpful. A related poll of senior national-security decision-makers confirmed that, for the most part, academic social science is not giving them what they want.
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