Drawing on our research and blogging on Israel and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, we make three claims about the role of scholar-bloggers in the social media age. First, as scholar-bloggers with some degree of ethno-national attachments related to our area of expertise, we contend that we are well positioned to issue the kinds of critiques that may resonate more deeply due to the very subjectivity that some perceive as a liability. Second, through the melding of scholarly arguments with popular writing forms, scholar-bloggers are uniquely poised to be at the forefront of public engagement and political literacy both with social media publics and with students. Third, the subjectivity hazard is an intrinsic part of any type of research and writing, whether that writing is aimed at a scholarly audience or any other, and should not be used as an argument against academic involvement in social media. Ultimately, subjectivities of both consumers and producers can evolve through these highly interactive media, a dynamic that deserves further examination.

This research uses data from a national survey of political science department chairs to explore when tenure protects incompetent faculty. The characteristics of the responding institutions and the procedures and standards they use when evaluating tenure applications were analyzed to determine how they related to the protection of the incompetent. The results reveal that tenure is most likely to shield incompetent faculty when collegiality plays a role in tenure decisions and when departments focus on the quantity of articles an applicant publishes. The findings also show that when departments demand that candidates publish in prestigious journals and when higher authorities at the institution have reversed positive departmental tenure recommendations, the probability that the incompetent are protected declines.

The experience both of being exposed to unfamiliar systems and places and of being an anonymous face in a large class can be not just alienating for undergraduates, but antithetical to effective learning. We propose a number of active learning strategies designed to help students fully master the material presented even in very large classes in comparative politics and international relations, while also improving students' attendance and interest and developing critical thinking, reading, and writing skills, without overburdening the instructor. Among these strategies are Team-Based Learning, interactive approaches such as debates and simulations, and low-stakes assignments such as “minute writing.”

Rivalry is pervasive in politics and beyond. Drawing on unique survey data, this article examines how instructors can draw on students' perceptions of rivalry to explore different aspects of the rivalry concept. The data show that different ways in which students tend to think about rivalry tend to reflect differences in scholarly conceptualizations of interstate rivalry. The data also suggest that referencing sports rivalries may be useful to introduce the concept of rivalry, drawing on parallels between sports rivalries and interstate rivalries and students' greater interest in and familiarity with sports than international affairs. This article provides an understanding of how students tend to think about rival relations to help instructors effectively lead classroom discussions on interstate rivalry.

Although professors may be aware that rubrics shorten grading time and improve grading consistency, many are not aware that rubrics offer a powerful analytical punch. Given the demands for active learning in today's college classroom, rubrics allow instructors to focus on analytical quality while engaging students in a variety of assignments. Rubrics are useful not only in more traditional applications—for example, papers and oral presentations—but also for more creative purposes. Using rubrics in both self and peer assessment engages students more in assignments, allowing them to reflect on their own performance and their peers. Going one step further, instructors can engage students in the construction of rubrics that will be used to grade their own work. Finally, rubrics force instructors to be clear about their own purposes for an assignment, and over time, instructors can become more attuned to the analytical possibilities in even traditional “busywork” assignments.