“Another Damned Medievalist”:http://www.blogenspiel.blogspot.com worries in “comments”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001522.html about the perils of blogging for the untenured academic.
bq. I’d like to ask those of you who already have tenure and may be on hiring committees — what happens if you know a candidate from the blogosphere? Should people on the market blog (Ms Mentor says to be careful)? If the blog is not academic, is it relevant to the search (although I can’t imaging that it wouldn’t have some influence on whether a candidate is a ‘good fit’? Inquiring minds want to know!
As an untenured faculty member meself, I have little wisdom to offer.
{ 10 comments }
harry 03.18.04 at 8:48 pm
I’d be amazed if it worked against people in my department, mainly because most of the non-bloggers seem unaware of the practice, but also because if the issue arose my guess is that the bloggers (me and 2 of the folks at 617) would assert bloggers rights as it were. But each department is idosyncratic, as is each blog. I have seen blogs which have appalled me by their rudeness, carelessness, and apparent revelations of the character of the blogger — but I doubt I, or my colleagues, would let that override an otherwise positive assessment of the person.
Is adm thinking of dropping pseudonymity? In adm’s case I’d say that would not be a bad move at all.
Brian Weatherson 03.18.04 at 9:35 pm
I’m not quite tenured yet, but close enough so I’ll throw in 2 pennies worth.
I can’t imagine it would make a huge difference except in two cases.
First, if I know someone’s name for any reason at all, including through their blog, it’s a lot harder to cut them out at early stages. So their file might get looked at much more closely than a lot of other files which are, inevitably, fairly similar. I think standing out from the crowd for any reason at all is important, especially when there’s 400 or so applicants, all of them prima facie impressive.
Second, the blog might let me know that the person does interesting stuff outside their speciality area. That matters a bit to me, so that might help.
But the blog would be less important than the quality of the writing sample, job talk and so on, so it wouldn’t make a huge difference either way.
Timothy Burke 03.18.04 at 10:01 pm
For me? I’d be charmed and delighted unless the blogger-scholar turned out to be one of the true bottom-feeders of the blogosphere. And I can’t think of anyone about whom that could be said, actually (scholar-blogger and bottom-feeder).
For my colleagues? I don’t think most of them would care, unless they felt that this was *all* the person did or published. Then they’d care a lot and it wouldn’t be a good thing. As long as you could demonstrate a sufficiently respectable productivity in “normal” research domains, I don’t think it would be a problem. Possibly it would be an issue for a highly political or intemperately controversial scholar-blogger depending on the circumstance. I don’t think most of my colleagues would even bother to look at a web page that a candidate maintained, though.
Michael Tinkler 03.18.04 at 11:16 pm
You don’t list your blog on your CV, do you?
As a non-anonymous aca-blogger let me say that precisely NONE of my 160 colleagues have discovered my sideline. I revealed myself to 2 — to one close friend and to one senior faculty member to ask advice.
No one has bothered to google me, either — The blog shows up above my ‘professional’ page.
None of my students has mentioned it.
As someone who’s been on search committees, I can’t say that anyone has suggested “let’s google everyone in the top 25” or “conference interview list” anymore than they’ve said “let’s check for previous felony convictions,” though.
So, I’m not worried. Maybe someday googling candidates will occur to a committee, but I haven’t seen it yet!
Miriam 03.18.04 at 11:32 pm
Perhaps the question to ask yourself is: are you really revealing anything more than what a search committee would gather from your letter, CV, references and interview? For a job candidate, there might be a legitimate concern when you move into what are legal no-go zones for search committees–politics, personal life, religious beliefs. Then again, no matter how rigorously you self-censor, you’re always going to rub somebody the wrong way (and probably for the reason you’d least expect…).
Unless you’ve run into a really stuffy search committee–and I can remember some–I suspect most would feel engaged rather than otherwise with bloggers who took time out from the Theory of Everything to post about their pets (cute), vintage record collection (cool), film-going habits (useful topic of conversation), vacation plans (ditto), and so forth.
John Quiggin 03.18.04 at 11:51 pm
I agree with Brian’s point that, unless you’ve really embarrassed yourself, any name recognition that goes with blogging has to be a positive in the early stages of a search process.
Contrary to Michael’s experience, lots of my colleagues, and other friends and acquaintances, have mentioned my blog to me – rather more in fact that my visitor stats would lead me to expect, and quite a few more than mention my fortnightly column in a national newspaper. Admittedly, the newspaper is the Financial Review which is not that widely read in the circles in which I move, but still it has a circulation of nearly 100,000 compared to 400 unique visitors/day for my blog.
eszter 03.19.04 at 9:30 am
I don’t think it’s that easy to see the potential effects whether negative or positive. As with so many things we do, it’s sometimes hard to trace why things happen. That is, we go to conferences and meet people, we email with colleagues, etc, and although some of these activities lead to other things directly (e.g. an invitation to give a talk somewhere) others happen wihout a clear picture of why it came about, why someone knew about you and your work, why someone cared to contact you, etc.
I think as long as it’s one of many other things you do I can’t imagine it to be negative, but can see benefits. An important aspect was noted recently (by Brian?) in the “why academics blog” thread: the opportunity to try out ideas before pursuing them fully.
Of course, as others have stated, there can be exceptions if the tone of the blog is especially bad or rude and if your posts make it seem as though you’re clueless about your own field. But if you are then I suspect that comes across in your work anyway so you may not make the cut.
By the way, I was blogging for about six months when I went on the job market and did fine so I doubt it had any negative impact (but of course we never know why we didn’t make the cut somewhere so I can’t know for sure).
McColl 03.19.04 at 4:12 pm
I believe that Matt Kirschenbaum (whose blog is listed in Crooked Timber’s blogroll) is not yet tenured. His is a great example of how to use blogging to create a space for an intellectual community of sorts.
Naomi Chana 03.19.04 at 11:54 pm
I’m not yet tenured, but I have served on hiring committees, and I don’t think a consciousness of blogging has penetrated most of the academic world (although this varies by displine — lawyers and political scientists/philosophers seem especially well-respresented to me). I know of nobody from my department except myself who has ever thought to Google a candidate or wonder whether s/he blogged — and I have never actually Googled a candidate, simply because I always felt I’d gotten plenty of information with which to make my decision at each interiview stage. I do check out short-listed candidates’ websites when they tell us about them.
If a fellow blogger applied for a job at my institution, I’d probably tend to root for them unless they had an especially lamentable blog (I can’t think of any offhand), and if it was a fellow blogger with whom I regularly and fruitfully interacted I would mention that to my colleagues as a large positive.
All that said, I am as private of a person as it’s capable to be while blogging the occasional life detail for the benefit of whoever wanders by. ;) I like to control what information about me is available under my professional name. Also, blogging doesn’t lend itself to quite the same level of rigorous editing and fact-checking I put into my published scholarly work. So I’m staying pseudonymous until I get tenure and can formally thumb my nose at the system. ;)
sorry, but anon 03.20.04 at 5:57 pm
What led me to give up my own blog is that quite a few people who I knew read it would not admit to reading it. (Acadmics often have very revealing ip-addresses — sometimes with the name of the person written right into it.) My impression is that this is true in general: a lot of people look at blogs the way they look at, shall we say, the drudge report — guiltily and disapprovingly and with an interest that can only be described as salacious.
I’ve concluded that the blogosphere is a dangerous plan for any nonanonymous untenured academic to hang out. Harry says that “non-bloggers seem unaware of the practice,” but I’m sure that’s not true. Look at your logs. There are a lot of people in the academy reading blogs, forming opinions of bloggers, and I have to assume letting those opinions influence their hiring and tenuring decisions — all without ever admitting to anyone that they’ve even heard of the medium.
We who have blogged tend to be charitable toward other bloggers, since we know how hard it is. I fear that those who merely look on may, for all-too-predictable psychological reasons, not be as charitable.
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