Revolt of the political scientists

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

>NY Times, November 4, 2000
>
>THINK TANK
>
>Political Scientists Are in a Revolution Instead of Watching
>
>By EMILY EAKIN
>
>The protester used the code name Mr. Perestroika. His e-mail messages
>preached popular revolt. "Head for the Parliament folks! (just as they did
>in Belgrade)," one read in part. "When people are pushed to the brink, the
>leaders go, the regime goes, the country changes!" read another.
>
>The 17 sympathizers who received Mr. Perestroika's original message
>forwarded it to others, and within 10 days the movement had grown to more
>than 100 people. By the middle of this week, drafts of several letters
>calling for change were circulating on the Web.
>
>So who are these Internet guerrillas who have been fomenting revolt over
>the last two weeks? They are American political scientists, more accustomed
>to studying revolutions than to waging them. And their target? The leaders
>of their professional organization, the American Political Science
>Association, and its journal, the American Political Science Review.
>
>At the heart of this latest uprising is a decades-old split in the field
>over the best way to study politics. On one side are quantitative
>researchers who favor rigorous mathematical techniques and on the other are
>more traditional qualitative researchers who look at history and culture,
>using case studies, written documents and firsthand observations. For
>shorthand, you can think of the feud as the pronumber versus the nonnumber
>folks (terminology that could no doubt spur a protest of its own). And
>what's at stake are jobs, power and prestige.
>
>Indeed, after receiving Mr. Perestroika's original e-mail message, dozens
>of scholars wrote back saying they had seen colleagues denied jobs and
>tenure and have trouble publishing their work because their research
>methods did not conform with the quantitative approach championed by the
>powerful minority that controls the association and the journal.
>
>"Why does a coterie of faculty dominate and control A.P.S.A. and the
>editorial board of A.P.S.R.?" Mr. Perestroika asked. "I hope this anonymous
>letter leads to a dismantling of the Orwellian system that we have in
>A.P.S.A. and that we will see a true Perestroika in the discipline."
>
>Mr. Perestroika, who receives messages at an anonymous e- mail account at
>Yahoo.com and is rumored to be not one but several junior professors (or
>possibly graduate students), is orchestrating the protest under the cloak
>of anonymity, presumably out of fear of reprisals.
>
>Yet the anonymous protest created one on the record. Yesterday 125
>scholars, including prominent people like Theda Skocpol, James C. Scott and
>Adolph Reed Jr., submitted a letter summarizing their grievances and
>suggesting changes in the association's leadership and the editor of the
>review. The letter, drafted by Rogers Smith, a professor of government at
>Yale University, argued that in its current state, the discipline was "in
>danger of alienating a larger and larger number of those who should be its
>active members, and contributing less and less to the kinds of
>understanding of politics that it is our responsibility to advance."
>
>Full article at: http://www.nytimes.com/2000/11/04/technology/04TANK.html