The System Works
Slate has been doing a "College Week" this week, with lots of people writing short pieces about what's wrong with American higher education and how to fix it. Slate being Slate, there isn't a really good way to link to a compilation of these pieces (their page for the topic leaves out a whole bunch of stuff), and there are too many of them to link individually.
The articles themselves also tend to be considerably less interesting than their New York Post-esque headlines (sadly, this is also typical of Slate). The most extreme mismatch is probably Robert Boynton's article on academic blogging, which is also the piece most likely to draw attention in blogdom (Dave Munger and Clifford Johnson have already weighed in).
The headline screams:
Attack of the Career-Killing Blogs
When academics post online, do they risk their jobs?
This seems to promise stories of academics being dumped from their jobs for stuff they posted on-line. For an untenured (some might say tenure-obsessed, though that would be redundant) academic, this is like a red flag waved in front of a thing that really likes red flags.
The actual article was pretty dull. It's basically another piece saying "Dan Drezner didn't get tenure. He wrote a blog. The sky must therefore be falling." Most of it is consumed with the question of how to get blogging considered as scholarly activity. This really doesn't excite me-- Dan Drezner and Sean Carroll (who is mostly neglected, as Slate confuses "academia" with "the liberal arts") don't really represent a major trend, because, as Dave Munger puts it, "Chicago is in that league of schools that seems to believe that their reputation is made more by who they deny tenure to than who they grant it to." And I may be in the minority here, but blogging just isn't scholarly activity, and I don't really buy any of the arguments that it ought to be considered that way.
(Not in the sciences, anyway. It may be that there are corners of the humanities in which blog posts might be indistinguishable from actual scholarship. But then, my impression is that there are corners of the humanities in which writing Harry Potter fanfic is indistinguishable from actual scholarship.)
I'm not saying that blogging is a completely frivolous activity. Obviously, I find it personally rewarding, or I wouldn't be maintaining this site. But what I do here isn't scholarship, and I don't expect it to be rewarded as such.
That's also not to say that running a blog can't be beneficial for other academic activities. Many of the physics posts I've put up here over the years have served as basically dry runs for lectures I gave later on those topics. To the degree that this sort of blogging has helped my teaching, I'm already indirectly rewarded for it through our teaching evaluation system.
I haven't received any really direct research benefit from running this site (though it has provided the occasional morale boost), but other science bloggers (mostly theorists) are fond out touting the medium as a new way to exchange ideas with colleagues. While that may eventually lead to new research results, it still doesn't count as scholarship in its own right.
After all, I've gotten great new research ideas from giving tours to visiting speakers. Does that mean showing people around my lab should be rewarded as scholarly activity? Absolutely not. I do (hopefully) get rewarded for the scholarship that results-- in this case, two publications and an NSF grant-- but for every lab-tour conversation that has resulted in improved scholarship, I've had about thirty that were nothing more than gossip and idle chatter.
To the extent that blogging even belongs in an academic evaluation in the first place (which is debatable-- I have colleagues who knit, and I very much doubt that they presented a portfolio of socks to their tenure review committees), it belongs in the category of "public outreach." As Clifford Johnson puts it, "blogging should be no more frightening to our colleagues than you having a course website, or you giving a public lecture in the local bookstore or school." It might be a bit more than that-- maybe closer to writing op-eds for some national paper or the Chronicle of Higher Education-- but that's the manner in which it should be evaluated.
Of course, you might point out that blogging is already rewarded as well as other public outreach activities, which is to say "not at all." (Hence the post title...) I think there's a good argument to be made that public outreach and other service activities ought to be rewarded more than they are under the current academic system. You can perfectly well throw blogging into that conversation, but it has nothing to do with blogging per se, and there's nothing special about blogging that ought to lift it above other sorts of outreach and service activities.
Posted at 8:00 PM | link | follow-ups |