We are still offering political theory as a subfield for undergraduate degrees and as a second field for graduate students, but we now have a supermajority in the executive committee to eliminate theory as a first field for PhD students. Our theorists have been dragging down our already middling placement for many years because there are so few opportunities in that field. Now with the additional tightening of the academic job market, we don't see how we can ethically offer this concentration with no real chance of a career at the end. The other major fields, comparative, IR, and American, all place with some frequency and they at least have non-academic opportunities. The same can't be said of the theorists in our experience. Is anyone else's department having these conversations?
Our grad program is eliminating theory as major field
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This is not a conversation we have had, but we should have it. Theorists simply don’t get tenure-track placements here. They do get VAPs sometimes and keep stringing those together for a few years. I assume one or two eventually got a TT, but I’m not our placement director, so I don’t know.
The real reason I want to dump theory as a grad field here is because any time we have an issue among the grad students about climate, it’s always a theorist who is the problem.
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Theory is the only sub field remaining that is not thoroughly infested with SJWs. It's as much political as anything else.
You sound like one of the theorists with no social skills who does something really st00pid and all of us in the department end up having to watch a 45 minute PowerPoint and pass a quiz at the end.
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I think that we are going to be having this conversation in my own department as well, particularly given recent and expected retirements among our theory faculty. There are just too many theorists produced by the top theory programs for other departments--even good ones--to have strong placementes of Ph.D.s in theory. My guess is that we will certainly retain theory as a field at the undergraduate level and as a second field at the doctoral level, but we just have too many other department needs along with too little of a placement payoff for our theory doctoral students. And I say this as someone who is sympathetic to political theory.
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Look, the job market is tough, has been tough for decades, will be really tough this coming year, and theory is a lot tougher than other subfields.
But even the worst R2s or LACs need theory, and really good departments cannot be really good without it. Its lack was one reason Rochester could never become more than just an odd boutique. And cutting it as OP and other suggest just really hurts the department's reputation: look at Penn State. Theory has a market, which can't entirely be filled by the few theorists coming out of the top 10 (Yale, Columbia) or 20 (Penn, Texas). And many successful theorists combine it with something else, like public policy.
The best response is discourage but not ban: accept the rare super-bright theory applicant to your grad program, but don't altogether block theory applicants or eliminate grad courses in theory.
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Look, the job market is tough, has been tough for decades, will be really tough this coming year, and theory is a lot tougher than other subfields.
But even the worst R2s or LACs need theory, and really good departments cannot be really good without it. Its lack was one reason Rochester could never become more than just an odd boutique. And cutting it as OP and other suggest just really hurts the department's reputation: look at Penn State. Theory has a market, which can't entirely be filled by the few theorists coming out of the top 10 (Yale, Columbia) or 20 (Penn, Texas). And many successful theorists combine it with something else, like public policy.
The best response is discourage but not ban: accept the rare super-bright theory applicant to your grad program, but don't altogether block theory applicants or eliminate grad courses in theory.The combination of fuzzy notions that glosses over considerations of causality along with the baseless wishful thinking about the future make a profound case against ever allowing theorists to have any meaningful role in your graduate program.