Attempting to get the full story on Professor Jeremy Rabkin's departure from Cornell's government department to the George Mason School of Law, I sought answers from Rabkin himself, as well as the chair of the department, Prof. Valerie Bunce, and other colleagues. Only Rabkin responded. His answers are excerpted and annotated with links below. ... There are two things worth saying about this. First,the move was attractive in itself, for all sorts of reasons. GMU really tried hard to recruit me. They offered not only a very substantial raise (I mean, in salary) and other nice things to attract me but people there also called me regularly to coax me into coming. I was attracted to working with some very fine colleagues at GMU. For someone with my research interests, Washington offers unique opportunities, anyway. (GMU's Law School is two Metro stops from DC.) And I have been at Cornell a long time. My kids were students at Cornell but the older one is moving on this year (with an MA in CS) and his brother will finish next year. So it was much easier to think about moving now then it might have been a few years ago. On the other side is this: Cornell made no effort of any kind to keep me here. I told my department chair that I had this offer. She told me I could have an "exit interview" to discuss my feelings about Cornell before I left. She did not offer to ask the administration for a counter-offer -- which is the usual thing to do in these circumstances. She did not ask me to wait until I saw what Cornell would offer. She did nothing at all. I waited some five weeks, in the course of which I was never contacted by the chair (Val Bunce) or by anyone else. In the circumstances, I did not feel I had any choice. If an institution wants to keep a senior person, it does what it can to match an outside offer. Cornell didn't even bother to inquire what the details of GMU's offer actually were.
The easiest question to answer is the last -- yes, I have been nominated to the board of the Institute of Peace. The nomination requires Senate confirmation to take effect, so it may be a while before I am actually sworn in there. On the other hand, the Institute is required by law to have a balance of Republican and Democratic members, so even the current Senate will have to swallow some nominees they might not like and I hope they will
be indulgent toward a professor. One point of relevance is that the Institute makes grants. It might, for that reason, have been helpful to Cornell to have one its own on the Board. But no one here seems to have paid any attention to that. People here certainly knew it was in the offing, because the FBI spent a week interviewing all my colleagues about my potential infirmities and I then had to explain (at least to a few of them) what that background check was for.
More after the jump....
