A blog of career advice and resources for classical liberal graduate students and faculty 
In this Kosmos Online podcast, I interview Dr. Dan D'Amico of Loyola University in New Orleans about cultivating a libertarian community in your graduate program. He discusses how reading groups can benefit the students both inside and outside the classroom, and echos some of the same sentiments about doing good research as Chris Coyne from his lecture during the Humane Studies Fellowship Research Colloquium.
Dr. Chris Coyne of George Mason University gave a talk at the Humane Studies Fellowship Research Colloquium in Alexandra, Virginia yesterday. The talk focused on doing classical liberal research as a scholar. His main emphasis was dissuading future academics of any potential downside of doing good research with classical liberal leanings. What follows is a running diary of his talk and the Q&A session, highlighting the major points made by Dr. Coyne and the other faculty in attendance.
For a running diary of Dr. Randall Holcombe's talk on navigating the academic waters from graduate school through tenure, click here.
Dr. Randall Holcombe of Florida State University gave a talk at the Humane Studies Fellowship Research Colloquium in Alexandria, Virginia today. The talk focused on being a successful academic as a classical liberal, and navigating the waters from grad school through tenure. What follows is a running diary of his talk and the brief Q&A session, highlighting the major points made.
Thinking about applying to graduate school? Getting read to go on the market? This new $2 ebook may provide some helpful advice: Grad Skool Rulz: Everything You Need to Know about Academia from Admissions to Tenure.
From the Publisher: Get the inside scoop on graduate school and the tenure track. This no-nonsense guide gives you blunt advice about everything from admissions to dissertations to getting tenure. Filled with concrete strategies for surviving graduate school while keeping your sanity.
And of course, you can read our guide for graduate students, Scaling the Ivory Tower, for free. The guide includes words of wisdom from Mike Munger, Dave Schmidtz, Matt Zwolinski and James Stacey Taylor.
The London School of Economics and Political Science has put out this extremely helpful handbook on maximizing and measuring the impact of your academic research. From the LSE website:
There are few academics who are interested in doing research that simply has no influence on anyone else in academia or outside. Some perhaps will be content to produce ‘shelf-bending’ work that goes into a library (included in a published journal or book), and then over the next decades ever-so-slightly bends the shelf it sits on. But we believe that they are in a small minority. The whole point of social science research is to achieve academic impact by advancing your discipline, and (where possible) by having some positive influence also on external audiences – in business, government, the media or civil society.
Via Marginal Revolution, Fabio Rojas has a new e-book about grad school, modestly titled "Grad Skool Rulz: Everything You Need to Know About Academia". It has Tyler Cowen's seal of approval, and is only $2, so if you're thinking about--or currently in--graduate school, it seems like a worthy investment.
Until I began attending IHS events about two and a half years ago, I had never had the pleasure of knowing a single economist. As tends to happen, the events put me in touch with a large number of these "dismal" - yet surprisingly delightful - scientists, and this philosopher soon picked up enough economics to be dangerous.
My economist friends, their professors, and the economist bloggers I subsequently began to read showed me that economics consists a way of thinking more than a fixed set of research questions. They use the tools of economics to study such diverse topics as pirates, voting, and culture, and everything you could imagine in between. In that spirit, I'd like to put a few economics concepts to work in explaining some of my opinions regarding attending graduate school these days.
Co-authoring papers with others is a great idea. When done the right way, it can build bridges, improve your reputation, increase your efficiency, and help you learn and grow as scholar. Done the wrong way, collaborative work can inhibit all these goals. Here’s the first part in a two-part series on what you need to know about co-authoring papers.
Why Should I Do Collaborative Work?
There are all sorts of reasons to do collaborative work. Here are a few.
“Hi, welcome to Liberal Arts U. Here’s your office, and here’s the schedule of classes we’d like you to teach. When you’re not actually in the classroom teaching – which will be most of your time – we’d like you to do some research, and maybe some committee work. As far as the research goes, feel free to start on it now or put it off for a while. You can do it here in your office, or you can do it at the local coffee shop, it’s not like you’ve got a timecard to punch or anybody looking over your shoulder. And you should be working on, well, I don’t know. Something that you think other academics in your field will think is interesting. We’ll check back with you in about six years and see how things are going. If we like what you’ve done, we’ll offer you a job for life. Second prize is you’re fired.”
Welcome to your first tenure track job.
Dr. Bruce Caldwell is a professor of economics at Duke University, and has been kind enough to write the following article about starting the Center for the History of Political Economy at Duke, and how you can start a successful center at your university.
I am the Director of the Center for the History of Political Economy at Duke University. The Center was established in 2008 with a generous grant from the John W. Pope Foundation. The mission of the Center is to support and promote the teaching of, and research in, the history of political economy. Duke has long been known for its excellent program in the history of economic thought. With my arrival there are now five faculty members there who specialize in the field. The premier journal in the field, History of Political Economy, is published there. And the Special Collections library has among its holdings the Economists’ Papers Project, an extensive collection of the papers, correspondence, and related materials. Nine Nobel laureates in economics have their papers housed there, as well as those of the American Economic Association and such diverse figures as Carl Menger, Oskar Morgenstern, Paul Davidson, and Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen. It was and is a perfect place for a Center devoted to promoting the history of economics.