There’s been much hand-wringing over Chris’s post and related links about the role having a blog might have when it comes to getting an academic job. I think it’s all much ado about nothing, but since I’ve done very well professionally out of blogging I suppose I might think that.
Different types of job candidate might be differently affected by having a blog.
The good student at a weak school. If you’re applying for a job where there are 400 applicants, and a lot of them look a lot like you, you’re going to need a lot of luck to get the job. Having a glowing recommendation from Princeton or Oxford would help, but unless you’re at Princeton or Oxford those are hard to get. In this situation I think it’s really hard to overestimate how important name recognition is, especially when it comes to getting your name onto the first short list of 30-50. When you’ve got 400 applicants, there’s going to be some fairly arbitrary choices made at that first stage, and being known to the search committee will usually help pass that stage. Running a blog is, in the right circumstances, a way of being known. In the overall scheme of things having a blog is less important than having a well-maintained webpage with your best writing prominently displayed, but it can certainly help.
The bad student at the good school. Here you might be better off avoiding blogging. If your game plan for getting hired is to play off a fancy looking CV and get yourself into the comfy office before anyone finds out about your argumentative abilities, I’d recommend against blogging. I’d also recommend against academia, but I don’t suppose you’d listen.
The political deviant. This is where things get tricky. I think there is little or no political bias in philosophy hiring. (As we’ve discussed on CT previously, there is evidence of religious bias, which is much more disturbing. But let’s stick to politics here.) Here’s an argument for that conclusion I don’t think has been run much before. My impression is that philosophy grad students are, as a group, more left-wing than philosophy professors. If there was anti-right political bias in hiring of the sort that would make one worried about having a blog, one would expect that to not be the case I’d think. So unless one has really extreme political views (pro-Stalin or pro-slavery or something) I don’t think there’s much to fear here. Again, since I have political views that are (as far as I can tell) only marginally more centrist than the bulk of the profession, this is a lot easier for me to say than it might be for others.
So overall, I’d recommend having an internet presence, including blogging if it’s the style of writing you prefer, as a way to get a job. The main exception would be if you think knowing more about you, and in particular about your professional work, makes you a less attractive job candidate. But in that case I don’t know what advice I could give.
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).
Damn, so if I am reading this right, politically deviant, bad students at good schools are really screwed?
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.
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.
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.
À Gauche
Jeremy Alder
Amaravati
Anggarrgoon
Audhumlan Conspiracy
H.E. Baber
Philip Blosser
Paul Broderick
Matt Brown
Diana Buccafurni
Brandon Butler
Keith Burgess-Jackson
Certain Doubts
David Chalmers
Noam Chomsky
The Conservative Philosopher
Desert Landscapes
Denis Dutton
David Efird
Karl Elliott
David Estlund
Experimental Philosophy
Fake Barn County
Kai von Fintel
Russell Arben Fox
Garden of Forking Paths
Roger Gathman
Michael Green
Scott Hagaman
Helen Habermann
David Hildebrand
John Holbo
Christopher Grau
Jonathan Ichikawa
Tom Irish
Michelle Jenkins
Adam Kotsko
Barry Lam
Language Hat
Language Log
Christian Lee
Brian Leiter
Stephen Lenhart
Clayton Littlejohn
Roderick T. Long
Joshua Macy
Mad Grad
Jonathan Martin
Matthew McGrattan
Marc Moffett
Geoffrey Nunberg
Orange Philosophy
Philosophy Carnival
Philosophy, et cetera
Philosophy of Art
Douglas Portmore
Philosophy from the 617 (moribund)
Jeremy Pierce
Punishment Theory
Geoff Pynn
Timothy Quigley (moribund?)
Conor Roddy
Sappho's Breathing
Anders Schoubye
Wolfgang Schwartz
Scribo
Michael Sevel
Tom Stoneham (moribund)
Adam Swenson
Peter Suber
Eddie Thomas
Joe Ulatowski
Bruce Umbaugh
What is the name ...
Matt Weiner
Will Wilkinson
Jessica Wilson
Young Hegelian
Richard Zach
Psychology
Donyell Coleman
Deborah Frisch
Milt Rosenberg
Tom Stafford
Law
Ann Althouse
Stephen Bainbridge
Jack Balkin
Douglass A. Berman
Francesca Bignami
BlunkettWatch
Jack Bogdanski
Paul L. Caron
Conglomerate
Jeff Cooper
Disability Law
Displacement of Concepts
Wayne Eastman
Eric Fink
Victor Fleischer (on hiatus)
Peter Friedman
Michael Froomkin
Bernard Hibbitts
Walter Hutchens
InstaPundit
Andis Kaulins
Lawmeme
Edward Lee
Karl-Friedrich Lenz
Larry Lessig
Mirror of Justice
Eric Muller
Nathan Oman
Opinio Juris
John Palfrey
Ken Parish
Punishment Theory
Larry Ribstein
The Right Coast
D. Gordon Smith
Lawrence Solum
Peter Tillers
Transatlantic Assembly
Lawrence Velvel
David Wagner
Kim Weatherall
Yale Constitution Society
Tun Yin
History
Blogenspiel
Timothy Burke
Rebunk
Naomi Chana
Chapati Mystery
Cliopatria
Juan Cole
Cranky Professor
Greg Daly
James Davila
Sherman Dorn
Michael Drout
Frog in a Well
Frogs and Ravens
Early Modern Notes
Evan Garcia
George Mason History bloggers
Ghost in the Machine
Rebecca Goetz
Invisible Adjunct (inactive)
Jason Kuznicki
Konrad Mitchell Lawson
Danny Loss
Liberty and Power
Danny Loss
Ether MacAllum Stewart
Pam Mack
Heather Mathews
James Meadway
Medieval Studies
H.D. Miller
Caleb McDaniel
Marc Mulholland
Received Ideas
Renaissance Weblog
Nathaniel Robinson
Jacob Remes (moribund?)
Christopher Sheil
Red Ted
Time Travelling Is Easy
Brian Ulrich
Shana Worthen
Computers/media/communication
Lauren Andreacchi (moribund)
Eric Behrens
Joseph Bosco
Danah Boyd
David Brake
Collin Brooke
Maximilian Dornseif (moribund)
Jeff Erickson
Ed Felten
Lance Fortnow
Louise Ferguson
Anne Galloway
Jason Gallo
Josh Greenberg
Alex Halavais
Sariel Har-Peled
Tracy Kennedy
Tim Lambert
Liz Lawley
Michael O'Foghlu
Jose Luis Orihuela (moribund)
Alex Pang
Sebastian Paquet
Fernando Pereira
Pink Bunny of Battle
Ranting Professors
Jay Rosen
Ken Rufo
Douglas Rushkoff
Vika Safrin
Rob Schaap (Blogorrhoea)
Frank Schaap
Robert A. Stewart
Suresh Venkatasubramanian
Ray Trygstad
Jill Walker
Phil Windley
Siva Vaidahyanathan
Anthropology
Kerim Friedman
Alex Golub
Martijn de Koning
Nicholas Packwood
Geography
Stentor Danielson
Benjamin Heumann
Scott Whitlock
Education
Edward Bilodeau
Jenny D.
Richard Kahn
Progressive Teachers
Kelvin Thompson (defunct?)
Mark Byron
Business administration
Michael Watkins (moribund)
Literature, language, culture
Mike Arnzen
Brandon Barr
Michael Berube
The Blogora
Colin Brayton
John Bruce
Miriam Burstein
Chris Cagle
Jean Chu
Hans Coppens
Tyler Curtain
Cultural Revolution
Terry Dean
Joseph Duemer
Flaschenpost
Kathleen Fitzpatrick
Jonathan Goodwin
Rachael Groner
Alison Hale
Household Opera
Dennis Jerz
Jason Jones
Miriam Jones
Matthew Kirschenbaum
Steven Krause
Lilliputian Lilith
Catherine Liu
John Lovas
Gerald Lucas
Making Contact
Barry Mauer
Erin O'Connor
Print Culture
Clancy Ratcliff
Matthias Rip
A.G. Rud
Amardeep Singh
Steve Shaviro
Thanks ... Zombie
Vera Tobin
Chuck Tryon
University Diaries
Classics
Michael Hendry
David Meadows
Religion
AKM Adam
Ryan Overbey
Telford Work (moribund)
Library Science
Norma Bruce
Music
Kyle Gann
ionarts
Tim Rutherford-Johnson
Greg Sandow
Scott Spiegelberg
Biology/Medicine
Pradeep Atluri
Bloviator
Anthony Cox
Susan Ferrari (moribund)
Amy Greenwood
La Di Da
John M. Lynch
Charles Murtaugh (moribund)
Paul Z. Myers
Respectful of Otters
Josh Rosenau
Universal Acid
Amity Wilczek (moribund)
Theodore Wong (moribund)
Physics/Applied Physics
Trish Amuntrud
Sean Carroll
Jacques Distler
Stephen Hsu
Irascible Professor
Andrew Jaffe
Michael Nielsen
Chad Orzel
String Coffee Table
Math/Statistics
Dead Parrots
Andrew Gelman
Christopher Genovese
Moment, Linger on
Jason Rosenhouse
Vlorbik
Peter Woit
Complex Systems
Petter Holme
Luis Rocha
Cosma Shalizi
Bill Tozier
Chemistry
"Keneth Miles"
Engineering
Zack Amjal
Chris Hall
University Administration
Frank Admissions (moribund?)
Architecture/Urban development
City Comforts (urban planning)
Unfolio
Panchromatica
Earth Sciences
Our Take
Who Knows?
Bitch Ph.D.
Just Tenured
Playing School
Professor Goose
This Academic Life
Other sources of information
Arts and Letters Daily
Boston Review
Imprints
Political Theory Daily Review
Science and Technology Daily Review