A couple of simple questions…
And the survey says Sue Peterson and Michael Tierney discuss their multifaceted surveys of international relations scholars and scholarship. Their work generated insight on the links between U.S. policymakers and the “ivory tower.” Photo by Stephen Salpukas
…generate a close look inside the collective mind of the ‘ivory tower’
The most comprehensive survey of international relations scholars ever made started at William & Mary with two elementary questions.
The first came in 2003 from a student, James Long ’03. He wanted to know why his professor placed so much emphasis on the causes of war and realist theory in his Introduction to International Politics class. He noted that Mike Tierney, Hylton Associate Professor of Government and co-director of the Institute for the Theory and Practice of International Relations (ITPIR), didn’t do research on war, and he did not employ realist theory in his research either.
At the same time, Tierney and colleague Sue Peterson, Reves Professor of Government and International Relations and co-director of ITPIR, had been pondering why U.S. foreign policymakers routinely ignored the research and suggestions made to them by international relations scholars, even when those scholars were largely in agreement.
Addressing Long’s query meant delving into the relationship between teaching and research and whether other faculty members taught to their research interests—or whether issues raised in class informed their research projects. Posing such questions to William & Mary faculty quickly morphed into the idea of surveying international relations scholars throughout the United States and, later, the world.
The second question, Tierney and Peterson agreed, couldn’t be answered without more complete data on what was being taught in international relations classrooms and what kind of research was being done within the “ivory tower.” Their desire for a better look at the data led to the launching of a series of Teaching, Research and International Policy (TRIP) surveys and the compilation of the most comprehensive database of international relations research articles that are classified in terms of their methods, issues studied, regions covered, theories employed, time periods examined and other categories.
Former W&M undergraduates Long and Daniel Maliniak ’06 have joined Peterson and Tierney as principal investigators on the TRIP project. With administrative support from ITPIR—and an ever-evolving team of researchers that also has included Assistant Professor Amy Oakes and 15-20 undergraduate researchers, including Jennifer Keister ’03, Brandon Stewart ’07, Ryan Powers ’08, Richard Jordan ’10, Will Brannon ’11, Alena Stern ’12 and Lindsay Hundley ’12—the TRIP principal investigators have conducted four surveys since 2004.
In addition to the United States, the team now surveys international relations faculty in 19 other countries. Some of the results of the 2011 U.S. survey recently appeared in a Foreign Policy magazine article entitled “Inside the Ivory Tower.”
Like the previous three Foreign Policy articles on the TRIP project, the latest includes international relations scholars’ opinions on the best schools in the country at which to study international relations, whether at the undergraduate level or in a Ph.D. program.
Best feeder schools for policy jobs
This year, for the first time, TRIP researchers, also asked respondents about the best feeder schools for inside-the-Beltway jobs and prepared a set of rankings.
Other topics covered in the Foreign Policy article included “How international relations scholars see the world”; “Leading scholars on China’s rise, America’s decline—and more”; “Why academics and policymakers don’t get along”; and “What the Ivory Tower survey gets wrong,” an op-ed piece by James Goldgeier, dean of the School of International Service at American University in Washington, D.C. See the full survey and response.
“Foreign Policy always tends to focus on the lists of best schools, which is not surprising, given who their advertisers and readers are,” said Peterson, “but the survey has always been about so much more. It really is about the state of the international relations discipline, what we teach our students, what we study in our scholarship, and what we know or think we know about the world around us that might be of use to policymakers.”
Asked if the 2011 U.S. survey—which encompassed nearly 100 questions and was distributed to all international relations scholars at four-year colleges and universities—contains any surprises, Tierney deadpanned, “Where to start?”
Among the survey’s findings:
- International relations scholars believe that East Asia has already become more important to U.S. national security than the Middle East. “This is a big shift from the 2008 survey,” Tierney said, when large numbers of scholars chose the Middle East.
- The number of women studying international relations is growing very rapidly.
- George H.W. Bush was judged to be the best foreign policy president over the past 20 years. His son, George W. Bush, was judged to be the worst, by far.
- Some 28 percent of international relations scholars have cited a blog post in their academic research, “a huge surprise to me,” Tierney said. Also surprising to Tierney was the fact that 14.6 percent of professors permit students to cite Wikipedia in their research papers. (“We don’t allow our students to cite Wikipedia or any other unattributed source, whether electronic or print,” added Peterson.)
- In the past two years, more than 20 percent of international relations scholars have worked in a paid capacity for the U.S. government. (“So much for being isolated in the ivory tower,” said Tierney.)
- More than 60 percent of international relations scholars claim they supported the use of U.S. military force in Libya, but only 21 percent say that they would support the use of force in Syria. (“The real surprise,” noted Peterson, “is that the international relations experts are highly skeptical of military intervention, whether to stop war between Sudan and South Sudan or to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon.”)
- More than 25 percent said they “don’t know” whether the Arab Spring will be good or bad for the U.S. (“We have been doing these surveys for a long time, and I don’t think we have ever had such a high ‘don’t know’ rate from the professoriate,” Tierney concluded.)
Working on the data
The survey closed in November, and the team still is working on the project, standardizing and analyzing data from all 20 countries.
“We will present some papers using these data at the International Studies Association Meeting in San Diego,” Tierney said. “And, we will host a conference next fall where 20-30 international relations scholars from around the world will descend on Williamsburg to analyze these data and share their findings.”
Peterson added: “Then we will invite policymakers and scholars to sit down together to discuss our findings and think about the role of scholars in the policy process and the place of policy analysis and policy-relevant research in the academy.” 
