ONE good US placement in 3 years. Embarrassing.
Happy?
Toxic department culture in LSE or Oxbridge?
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Measuring non-US institutions by US placements is stupid. Most of the students going to places like Oxford/LSE/Cambridge/etc don't plan to work in the US. If they did, they would have gone to a US program. When I was at Oxford (within the last 5 years), I only knew a handful of people who applied to US jobs, but just about everyone in my cohort ended up with very good academic jobs, in the UK, the rest of Europe, Japan, Aus, Canada, South America, etc. (A fair few returned to jobs at elite institutions in their home countries, as they had always planned to). You have to be very parochial to see US placement as the best guide to program quality.
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Measuring non-US institutions by US placements is stupid. Most of the students going to places like Oxford/LSE/Cambridge/etc don't plan to work in the US. If they did, they would have gone to a US program. When I was at Oxford (within the last 5 years), I only knew a handful of people who applied to US jobs, but just about everyone in my cohort ended up with very good academic jobs, in the UK, the rest of Europe, Japan, Aus, Canada, South America, etc. (A fair few returned to jobs at elite institutions in their home countries, as they had always planned to). You have to be very parochial to see US placement as the best guide to program quality.
This seems crazy. The US has the best world universities and LSE is regularly seen as good because unlike Oxbridge it is being able to place its PhDs there.
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In what way is it crazy? In political science US institutions rarely hire from outside the US. If you want a job in the US, go to a US institution. But guess what? Lots of people don't want to go to the US. Many prefer to live and work in their own regions. Plenty of others don't wwant to live in a country like the US. Others - lots - are no convinced by the positivism that dominates US institutions, so look elsewhere. (For them, US universities aren't the best in the world). And so on. The US isn't the centre of everything, though some people there seem to think it is. There is a wider world...