Kieran Healy

Scholar vs Blogger

Matt Yglesias worries that my blog might prevent me from getting tenure by making it look as though I’m not working hard enough. I doubt the blog will make a difference either way, as long as I keep publishing journal articles and the like. One strategy, however, might be to list blog posts on my vita. We are entering a new age of electronic scholarship after all. By this count, I now have just under four hundred publications, which ought to be nearly enough.

Of course, it could also work the other way. For instance, tenure committees could choose to weight a candidate’s publications by, say, the reciprocal of the number of posts in their blog. (Though I suppose this would mean that once you started blogging at all you might as well keep going.) By this measure, at his next post-tenure reivew Brad DeLong would be demoted from being a full Professor at Berkeley to something like assistant hall monitor at the local high school.

You need to set up some sort of faux editorial board first, so you can claim that the posts were peer-reviewed…. ;-)

“you can claim that the posts were peer-reviewed….”

Well, of course his posts are peer-reviewed—he has comments, doesn’t he? ;)

This of course is another place where the standards of academia badly need refurbishing. I don’t think anyone will hold blogging against you, unless you become too popular and well-liked outside of academia, which is always a cardinal sin regardless of the pathway walked to that achievement. But they won’t credit you for it as an academic achievement, which it ought to be. Because of course to assess whether an academic blog contributes to academic knowledge would require most evaluators to actually read the thing and make up their own minds. Most colleagues in most institutions make up their minds about the worthiness of a tenure-candidate’s work not based on their own (probably cursory at best) reading, but what “specialists in the field” say in peer-review letters about the work. Which assures that no tenure candidate will, if he or she is smart, do anything that deviates significantly from what the established “specialists in the field” do.

I suppose you could ask your committee to request a letter from another sociologist blogger :)

I dunno, Kieran. People often respond negatively to things they don’t understand. And, blogging is still not understood, including by most people online. I have to explain what it is all the time.

BTW, a fellow North Carolinian has a tribute to Nina Simone, the artist and the woman, here.

I can’t imagine that blogging will be counted on the other side of the balance sheet—“Yes, he has these articles in peer-reviewed journals… but he’s a blogger!”

In my case, my blog (which hardly anyone reads anyway) is really mostly frivolous in content (unlike yours), and doesn’t contribute anything to ethnic studies or anthropological theory—to the extent that I wouldn’t announce its existence to my colleagues. (Does that mean I’m embarrassed to have a blog? Perhaps. But that’s me with my assistant professor hat on.) It certainly wouldn’t count towards a thick retention and tenure file. If anything, I would be denied tenure for the usual prosaic reasons.