Comments on: Blogging and Academia

By: Brian Weatherson

Brian Weatherson — Tue, 13 Jan 2004 01:39:17 +0000

Eszter’s comment reminded me of something I should have been more wary of. Some schools’ hiring practice is that if there’s any feature of a candidate that anyone on the committee dislikes, they get weeded out. (Well, no one works exactly like that, but at some schools it’s more a process of attrition than of a leading candidate shining through.) In such a process a blog may be a bad thing because it makes you a ‘big target’ (to use a bit of the contemporary Australian political vernacular). Having a blog means it is more likely some people will have heard of you, and maybe even like your work. It also means it is more likely you’ll have said something someone will have disliked. In searches I’ve been in the former is more valuable than the latter is costly, but at places not like that a blog could be a cost.

By: eszter

eszter — Tue, 13 Jan 2004 00:04:29 +0000

I can’t imagine it would hurt if people liked your work. The only way I could see it hurting (assuming the person is a productive scholar producing some good work) is if there are people on the committee who want to find problems. For example, some may be concerned that blogging takes away from academic writing. Frankly, anything can be turned into something bad if someone’s looking to find something bad about a candidate. I had a person tell me during one of my interviews that my CV was too long and I had too many publications. What’s one to do? There is clearly not one universal right way of doing academic job market preparation. The upside of blogging is precisely what Brian mentions.. name recognition could be very helpful. There are additional benefits that are much more indirect.. the oppotunity to flesh out one’s ideas for something more academic in such a forum, or even just the satisfaction one can get from having a blog that contributes to one’s well-being which in turn may improve one’s work or productivity. This would be nearly impossible to measure but I believe it’s there.

By: robin green

robin green — Mon, 12 Jan 2004 23:30:45 +0000

I think one of the points against blogging (under your real name) was that when posting an article to a blog – or even more so, when posting a comment to a blog – there is a slight tendency to (a) let fingers dart ahead of brain, and (b) the somewhat overlapping problem of posting sophomoric arguments, like cruel ad homenims (sp.) which one wouldn’t dream of using in a journal paper or something like that. It seems to me, although I haven’t been a reader for long, that Crooked Timber suffers refreshingly little from such problems (right, that’s enough flattery – ed.), though they are not completely absent.

By: Conrad barwa

Conrad barwa — Mon, 12 Jan 2004 23:14:30 +0000

Damn, so if I am reading this right, politically deviant, bad students at good schools are really screwed?

By: harry

harry — Mon, 12 Jan 2004 22:52:18 +0000

Here’s some more advice: avoid giving lectures to rabid right wing think-tanks unless those lectures will be published on the web (and are appropraitely reasoned etc). I’m embarrassed by how prominently my talk to the Institute of Economic Affairs comes up when I am googled, and only relieved by the fact that it is published in full, so that if people read it they can see that it is against their grain. I suppose the advice is that if you are going to put yourself in a position of being associated with people you disapprove of by google, make sure your disapproval shows (unless you think that being associated with them will help your job prospects—I really doubt mine would be helped in this case).