Nearly a decade ago, blogging was young, and its place in the academic world wasn’t clear. Back in 2005, I wrote about an anonymous article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, a so-called “advice” column admonishing academic job seekers to avoid blogging, mostly because it let the hiring committee find out things that had nothing whatever to do with their academic job, and reject them on those (inappropriate) grounds.
I thought things had changed. Many academics have blogs, and indeed many institutions encourage it (here at Imperial, there’s a College-wide list of blogs written by people at all levels, and I’ve helped teach a course on blogging for young academics). More generally, outreach has become an important component of academic life (that is, it’s at least necessary to pay it lip service when applying for funding or promotions) and blogging is usually seen as a useful way to reach a wide audience outside of one’s field.
So I was distressed to see the lament — from an academic blogger — “Want an academic job? Hold your tongue”. Things haven’t changed as much as I thought:
… [A senior academic said that] the blog, while it was to be commended for its forthright tone, was so informal and laced with profanity that the professor could not help but hold the blog against the potential faculty member…. It was the consensus that aspiring young scientists should steer clear of such activities.
Depending on the content of the blog in question, this seems somewhere between a disregard for academic freedom and a judgment of the candidate on completely irrelevant grounds. Of course, it is natural to want the personalities of our colleagues to mesh well with our own, and almost impossible to completely ignore supposedly extraneous information. But we are hiring for academic jobs, and what should matter are research and teaching ability.
Of course, I’ve been lucky: I already had a permanent job when I started blogging, and I work in the UK system which doesn’t have a tenure review process. And I admit this blog has steered clear of truly controversial topics (depending on what you think of Bayesian probability, at least).
2 responses to “Academic Blogging Still Dangerous?”
There’s no such thing as academic freedom of Thomas Kuhn would nat have had to write “Scientific Revolutions”. As long as a professor has a say in hiring a colleague, ANY idea he/she has (about what color a tie should have, whether one should be clean shaven or not etc. etc.) will enter into his/her decision. Psychology has reams of data on that. But there’s a difference: ANYTHING they DON’T know cannot be held against you. The more they know, the easier it is to find excuses. Or: which of the other candidates who did not have a (n identifiable [!!!]) blog was maybe the next campus shooter etc.? Maybe the problem takes care of itself when everybody has something -thanks to Web 2.0- that can be held against them. Then again is the playing field even.
There’s no such thing as academic freedom of Thomas Kuhn would nat have had to write “Scientific Revolutions”. As long as a professor has a say in hiring a colleague, ANY idea he/she has (about what color a tie should have, whether one should be clean shaven or not etc. etc.) will enter into his/her decision. Psychology has reams of data on that. But there’s a difference: ANYTHING they DON’T know cannot be held against you. The more they know, the easier it is to find excuses. Or: which of the other candidates who did not have a (n identifiable [!!!]) blog was maybe the next campus shooter etc.? Maybe the problem takes care of itself when everybody has something -thanks to Web 2.0- that can be held against them. Then again is the playing field even.