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I wanted to add another thought on the professionalization debate from yesterday. Professionalization does curtail creativity in the sense that it sets boundaries to what is and what is not accepted as a competent exercise of something. In some professions we think of this as an unmitigated good. No-one would decry the demise of creative accounting. In academia, it presents more of a trade-off. We want to ensure that scholarship is competent yet we don’t want to set such strict boundaries to what counts as competent scholarship that it deters groundbreaking research.

This is why the methodology aspects of graduate programs are so important: it is one area where most of us can agree that competence is an unmitigated good. Notwithstanding philosophy of science debates, a scholar who better understands statistics is in general a better scholar. The same is true for qualitative methodology. At Georgetown we have a terrific qualitative methods class taught by Andy Bennett, which for many of our students is the most important training experience of graduate school.

This brings me to a comment Hein Goemans made on yesterday’s post: that graduate school is not all about training. I emphatically agree (and I know Dan would too). Yet training is a very important component of graduate school. What Hein means, I think, is that we have to design the training component of graduate programs in a way that avoids the perception that political science is like accounting where acquiring competence is a guarantee for professional success (sorry accountants, I know I am just using you unfairly to make a point).

One hobby horse of mine is that we ought to encourage students to think more broadly of their profession. We are not IR scholars or scholars of American electoral politics but social scientists endeavoring to understand why social and political life looks the way it does (and how it should look). If we want to encourage creativity, we ought to encourage students to take classes outside their narrow fields and even disciplines. I said yesterday that the best qualitative minds tend to be quite good in statistics. It is equally true that the best quantitative or rational choice scholars have the intellectual curiosity to try and understand how archival research works or what Michel Foucault is really all about.There are professional rewards associated with branching out like this. Let’s be fair, much of what counts as innovation in political science is creative stealing from other disciplines and fields.

Graduate programs can encourage this type of branching out while still demanding competence in methodology. Students too should think about this. My advice is always to take the best classes from the best professors rather than to take classes that most closely resemble what you think you want to study coming into graduate school. I also recommend looking at programs that have good methodology training but a diverse faculty, like Georgetown, where we disagree (even publicly) but get along.