Here we have a great (partial) paragraph from Alexandra Samuel* on the conservatism of political science, based on her experience heading back to the meeting of the American Political Science Association in Seattle after a few years “away” from the discipline.

I am most intrigued by the idea of unsettling a field that one APSA blogger excorciated for its innate conservatism. That conservatism is not so much a political position (like many academic fields, political science skews left) as a temperamental one. As I noted last week, this is a conference in which people still focus on publishing books and talking at you on panels. They take notes on paper, and nobody seemed to be having a panic attack at the lack of wifi. The Internet revolution has arrived, and given way to the social media revolution, and political science has remained largely unchanged except for the appearance of a few booths hawking e-textbooks and software tools for data analysis. And that conservatism makes sense, in a way, because we’re talking about a field based on the idea that research is a cumulative and incremental process in which each researcher builds on those who have gone before. [more]

I agree that such conservatism makes sense in a way, but I also find it regrettable. As Samuel notes, the Information Technology and Politics section is, predictably, a bit different, but it’s also small. Political scientists, I think, face a relevance dilemma: how can they be relevant to society, to readers or information consumers outside the discipline’s guild, and of course to students.

It is no longer the case that almost every academic with a blog studies the internet, but active use of online media would help academics understand the way their students communicate. Professors should be on Facebook and other platforms that are so essential to the way college students communicate. The professor’s teaching job, after all, is to communicate with students. The research task is to produce scholarship that will endure. Consider readers who grew up with the internet and social media, and tell me a manuscript with lumbering literature reviews is the way to share knowledge.

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* Of course, I mistyped Samuel’s name as Samuels. Apologies, and it’s fixed.