Dan Myers tells a story for all you academic bloggers:
Sometime within the past year, a certain person made some very snarky, I’d even say rude, comments on my blog. (I erased the comments, so don’t bother going to look for them). Shortly thereafter, I received a letter from this person’s department asking me for an external evaluation of the person’s work for tenure and promotion. … Did I take the opportunity to punish them for their misdeeds? Of course not. Did they know me well enough to know that I wouldn’t? They did not! My point–be nice, academics. Even if you can’t drum up the humanity to do it, use your own self-interest.
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Alejandro 10.04.07 at 5:06 pm
Ah, but how do you know that the person didn’t insult you in purpose, knowing that your honorable nature and desire to regard yourself as fairminded would make you give a better evaluation of them that you would otherwise have done? There is a story by Borges with this premise.
Alejandro 10.04.07 at 5:08 pm
Er, that question should have been left at Dan Myers’ blog, not here.
anmik 10.04.07 at 5:59 pm
Sure, be nice on blogs, at meetings, and during chance encounters at airport bars (“Professor Berube, I’m a huge fan of your work.”). That’s common sense and good citizenship. But then, what about the very real, very reasonable impulse to softpedal book reviews, to write overly generous tenure evaluations, and on and on? I only ask because the whole idea of peer review, and the review process more broadly, has begun to feel a bit, how to say this, corrupt of late. I noted yesterday some very minor flap in which Chris Matthews, the political “journalist,” admitted that it’s hard to cover the people he sees at cocktail parties. The same is true for scholars, no? And blogs only compound the problem, I suppose.
Honestly, I have no idea where I’m going with this. It’s just something that’s been on my mind recently. And then, seeing this post, I was prompted to comment. By the way, love the blog, love your work, love all that you do. And you look great today. But I don’t mean that in a creepy way.
Rich Puchalsky 10.04.07 at 6:07 pm
Cool. This verifies my assumption that nice people are suckers, and that you can be rude to them with impunity.
c.l. ball 10.04.07 at 6:12 pm
So what should Myers have done( I’m assuming he filed straight reports)
1) wrote a letter or reviewed the NSF app. as he would have if the person had not insulted him or his student
2) declined to write/report without giving a reason
3) declined to write/report based on a conflict of interest
In the blog insult, I would do 1) In the case of the student, I would do 3) — those ASA “colleagues” sound like real assholes.
bi 10.04.07 at 6:14 pm
amnik: That’s why God invented double-blind peer review……
aaron_m 10.04.07 at 6:26 pm
“That’s why God invented double-blind peer review”
Richard Dawkins just got so irritated that he shit his pants.
marcel 10.04.07 at 6:40 pm
Dan Myers sounds like a typical Democrat to me, the “certain person”, a gooper.
bi 10.05.07 at 7:29 am
aaron_m: God bless him. …oops.
Jim Johnson 10.06.07 at 9:15 pm
I always remind graduate students that ‘life is a repeated game …’; it is amazing, though, how often ‘colleagues’ forget that feature of life. I must say that it is difficult to be a nice as Dan seems to be.
anonymous 10.06.07 at 10:02 pm
Probably a silly query, but did you confirm that the person you think wrote the snark actually did? Coz someone comments nastily using my name, and i act when I catch it but…
Dan Myers 10.08.07 at 12:17 am
I’m too nice to respond to most of this. But I will say that I think the double-blind review is largely a myth these days due to a little tool we call “google.” If people want to find whose paper something is, it’s not usually too hard. And many important processes, like tenure reviews, NSF reviews, and fellowships aren’t double blind in the first place.
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