As someone preparing to go back on the market for an academic job, this blog is making me increasingly nervous.
Like my son Jonah, I am constantly in battle with myself. I love to get the laugh and the applause, but the best jokes are sometimes the riskiest. People can get offended, meaning can get twisted, and just plain stupid things can get blurted out. Also, the personal posts that I do so enjoy writing can undermine professionalism. A voice that plays well on the Internet does not necessarily translate into the real world.
I have a lot more boundaries about things I write about than I used to -- no discussion of work other than logistical matters or broad generalities about the profession as a whole and no discussion of the neighbors. Still, those boundaries may not be enough.
Bloggers that are a lot more restrained than I am have gotten spanked by the academy this year -- Dan Drezner, Sean Carroll, Jacob Levy, and now Juan Cole was turned down for a job at Yale. There's a collection of essays in the Chronicle about the Cole affair. See the CT and Drezner for the links and commentary.
Does this mean that blogging is a bad idea, or that working at Yale is a bad idea?
Posted by: No Nym | July 25, 2006 at 02:32 PM
The CT thread degnerated quickly into name calling about the middle east, so I didn't bother to say this, but I really think that people should go easy about blogging. Tenure, promotion, and hiring decisions are extremely complicated, with all sorts of relevant and irrelevant factors playing themsleves out. There's no evidence (as far as I know) that blogging was a decisive issue, and second guessing these things is absurd. I once discovered that I'd failed a screening interview because my jacket was too big for me (I am NOT kidding). On the other hand I was subsequently hired for a job which I was not at all the obviousn cadndiate for, and I knew the moment I walked into the interview room that I'd get it because I knew that the key interviewers (both externals) would like me more than the other candidates, and no-one would be able to gainsay them. So, I say don't worry about it Laura. Also, people who read this blog are going to think, "wow, I'd like to have her as a colleague", unless they're idiots.
Posted by: harry b | July 25, 2006 at 07:49 PM
I agree with harry b's last sentence. Hopefully, as blogs get more mainstream, more and more people will have a better grasp of what the online world is like, and will have greater appreciation for prospective hires who have an active, intelligent online life and who are consistently fair and civil with those they disagree with and who maintain smart, varied and well-policed comment boxes. And conversely, there should be a price to pay for being over-aggressive, unfair, bad at understanding other people's writing, and prone to using a tone of professorial authority when speaking about fields where one is woefully uninformed.
Posted by: Amy P | July 25, 2006 at 08:15 PM
Smooch, guys.
harry --ohmygod, the comments on your blog! How can they go on and on like that, even after Henry mocked them all?
No Nym -- I have to think this reflects very badly of Yale. And I really wouldn't want to be at a place that was so uptight, if blogging was the real reason that Cole wasn't invited there. Yeah, Harry, there are a lot of wide card reasons for not getting a job. It's hard to really know if blogging was the issue in all of those cases. It must drive the universities insane to have their hiring discisions so widely discussed.
I've got a big time interview next week, so I shouldn't even be discussing this matter at all right now. But I really do think that blogging has made me a better writer, given me a thicker skin, brought me together with a broad group of crazy, fun, smart people, and forced me to defend my ideas -- all those things should be valued by a university. It's also just a lot of fun.
Posted by: Laura | July 25, 2006 at 08:50 PM
There's also the La Petite Anglaise doocing.
But her employers sound seriously horrible.
Posted by: Helen | July 25, 2006 at 09:33 PM
AT least Levy ended up with a job I would kill for if I wasn't where I am...
Posted by: Scott Lemieux | July 26, 2006 at 07:20 PM
He's going to McGill, right? Canadian beer. Mmmmm. Well, they all landed on their feet, so this blogging thing can't be horrendous for a professional life.
Posted by: Laura | July 26, 2006 at 10:43 PM
Well, thanks for the Chronicle links, I didn't know about those, only the Petite Anglaise "doocing" which was on the news and my husband gave me the link. I should worry about this too since I'm about to get in the job market, but since my blog is insignificant and I don't think I'll get a job anyway, it doesn't much matter :)
Posted by: Lilian | July 27, 2006 at 12:19 AM
I have a post in mind (yes, I do intend to start blogging again...really...any minute now) in which I compile every possible reason for having been rejected I have been given over the past five years by insiders and those in the know regarding positions I got to the on-campus interviewing stage for. It's not a rigorous compilation of evidence obviously; sometimes people are willing to talk and sometimes they aren't. But basically, looking over the list, there were the times in which I may not have gotten the job because I'm white, because I'm male, because my job talk was too esoteric, because my job talk wasn't cutting-edge enough, because I'm too conservative, because I'm too liberal, because I'm religious, because I belong to the wrong religion, because I seemed like an aggressive jerk, because I seemed like mousy unaggressive sort, because they'd already made their decision and were just going through the motions, and (of course) because while everyone liked me and figured I could do the job, the other candidate was a Harvard/Chicago/Berkeley/Oxford Ph.D., and who doesn't want to hire one of them? The point is, never once, reviewing all I've heard about all my interviews, did I ever hear anyone say anything about my blogging that wasn't positive. That doesn't mean it wasn't a negative behind the scenes...but I've simply no evidence to think it was, and as Harry says, second guessing in such cases is absurd. So I don't worry about the blog, and so long as they don't reveal themselves to be an idiot, a necrophiliac, or an Enron executive in their blogging, I don't think anyone else should either. Least of all you Laura!
Posted by: Russell Arben Fox | July 27, 2006 at 09:05 AM
Good Lord, Russell. The fact that you haven't jumped on top of the nearest administration building and started picking off random people with an automatic weapon has got to be a testimony to your strength of character. You've gotten your share of bad knocks. I'm glad that you, too, are landing on feet this fall.
Thanks for the links to Petite Anglaise, guys. She writes so well. I'm enjoying reading through old posts.
I have no idea whether blogging had any impact on the careers of those individuals, but there is clearly a wide spread panic amongst academic-bloggers. Academic-bloggers are more likely to use pseudonyms than other bloggers. I'm interviewing a bunch of them now for a paper and this Juan Cole business keeps coming up. Untenured faculty are very nervous about all this.
Posted by: Laura | July 27, 2006 at 09:40 AM
Academics are just generally paranoid. It's not just blogging. Look at how many Chronicle Articles are written anonymously. Even when people aren't saying a thing that is controversial.
Are academics right to be paranoid? I don't know. There is certainly a sense in the academy that faculty members owe all their time and energy to the discipline and the department. Maybe it's different at non-research I schools.
Posted by: Frolic | July 30, 2006 at 08:49 AM
Juan Cole will be able to write his own ticket soon. Wait and see.
Posted by: Hattie | July 31, 2006 at 07:44 PM