Both political science majors and non-majors gathered in Pendleton last Friday not only to hear a lecture, but to contribute to selecting a new professor for the Political Science Department. Current faculty members narrowed down applicants for the tenure-track position to four candidates: Christopher Stout, Francisco Pedraza, Ryan Enos, and Mike Murakami. Each of the four candidates delivered lectures to students in Pendleton followed by extensive question and answer sessions. The selection process incorporates student participation with surveys on each candidate following the talks to assist professors in decision making.
Political Science Professor Tom Burke confirmed that these lectures have been part of the hiring process in the past. According to Burke, the hired candidate would not be filling an open spot in the department, but would be an addition. “The person isn’t filling any position we’ve had before in the department. One way to look at it is that Marion Just, who used to teach full-time is now teaching half-time,” Burke said. “We’re trying to move away from using adjunct, one-year, fill-in professors—the idea behind this is that we want to hire more full-time, tenure-track professors who could fill in when professors are away.” The Department is especially seeking a candidate who can teach POL 199: Introduction to Research Methods in Political Science.
The candidates all boast extensive resumés. Christopher Stout is a PhD candidate at the University of Irvine and a Peltason Fellow at the Center for the Study of Democracy. He was the recipient of the 2009 John A. Sullivan Award for best graduate student paper in the Elections, Public Opinion, and Voting Behavior section of the “American Political Science Association.” His work has appeared in several journals including the “Ralph Bunche Journal of Public Affairs,” the “Asian American Policy Review,” and in the edited volume “Clicker Politics: Essays on the California Recall.” Stout’s current research addresses how high-profile black candidates and elected officials can aid black political incorporation. Stout’s lecture was on the “Hillary Effect,” in which he discussed using statistics to assess polling accuracy for female candidates.
“As someone who truly benefited from working closely with professors, I recognize the importance of dedicated teachers in shaping the lives of college students,” Stout said. He also men tioned campus diversity and support for faculty research among his desire to teach at Wellesley. “I strongly believe that students receive the best education when the student body is diverse. Students broaden their understandings of the sociopolitical world when exposed to others from different cultural backgrounds and experiences,” Stout said. “[Support for research] is evident in the College’s rich tradition of cutting-edge studies in the social sciences.”
The second candidate to give a guest lecture was Francisco Pedraza, a PhD candidate at the University of Washington with subfields in American Politics, Methodology and Race and Minority Politics. He was the winner of 2009 Best Paper on Latino Politics, an award from the Western Political Science Association, with his paper titled, “The Cold Shoulder in Immigrant Political Attitude Formation: How Perceived Discrimination Moderates the Effect of Acculturation.” His research focuses on Latino contested political integration. Pedraza delivered a talk to students on state and local immigrant policy in the new millennium.
Ryan Enos was the third candidate to speak. Enos is currently a PhD candidate in Political Science at UCLA and a Visiting Fellow at the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University. He studies how racial segregation affects how people vote and whether candidate appearance influences voter’s decisions. He teaches classes on racial segregation and politics, elections and the U.S. in the 1960s. In 2009, he was awarded the UCLA distinguished Teaching Award and the John Randolph and Dora Haynes Foundation Award. His presentation focused on whether voters make decisions based on a politician’s physical appearance.
“Wellesley College has impressed me as a place where I can interact with high-quality students—the young women have struck me as intelligent and ambitious, which makes teaching all the more enjoyable,” Enos said. From his perspective, Enos believes that the College has a good balance between teaching and research. “Many institutions disproportionately favor one over the other…both teaching and research are essential to being a good scholar and that they compliment each other in that a scholar that is good at one should be good at the other. It strikes me that Wellesley not only believes this, but practices it,” Enos said. “The campus is also quite lovely.”
The final candidate to present was Michael Murakami, a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Government at Georgetown University, where he teaches and conducts research on American politics, methodology, political psychology and Congress. He has been a post-doctoral fellow at Yale University’s Center for the Study of American Politics and an American Political Science Association Congressional Fellow. His current research focuses on understanding how polarization is affecting the political behaviors and attitudes of the mass public, how public support for policies is affected by popular notions of democratic legitimacy, how the party and race of candidates interact to affect vote choice in national elections and how ideology and partisanship affect the career decisions of politicians. He received his PhD in Political Science from UC Berkeley in 2008 and received his BA in Economics from Harvard University.
In his lecture titled, “Do Democrats and Republicans Perceive the World Differently?” Murakami explained that while people are biologically the same, the context in which they see something makes room for interpretation in an automatic unconscious sense. “When we fail, we attribute it to outside forces. When we succeed, we accredit it to ourselves and our personalities,” Murakami said. Party polarization can be attributed to the same phenomenon—Democrats may accredit Obama for making the economy better, while Republicans may accredit Ben Bernanke for working at improving the economy. As a result, Democrats and Republicans may experience different economies. “When emotions get involved and we have strong unconscious motivations, we tend to see the world differently,” Murakami said.
Political science major Rachel Mattson ’11 attended all four talks and found Stout’s “Hillary Effect” and Enos’s “Good Looks in Politics” lectures most interesting. “We are definitely lacking a more quantitative member of the department. We need someone to show us how to do political science research and back it up with numbers,” Mattson said.
Student opinions varied on candidates. While some students thought that all four were equally well qualified, others were more critical. Student comments on all four candidates varied from well-composed to arrogant. With all four lectures given and student responses submitted, the decision to choose the most suitable addition to the Political Science department now lies in the hands of its faculty members.
1 comments