Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast

Fear of a Blog Planet

Job seekers need to eliminate as many negatives as possible, and in most cases a blog turns out to be a negative

So begins an "Ivan Tribble" Chronicle First Person column about the missteps of faculty job applicant-bloggers at his college. (It's on page C3 of the print version of the publication; access it on-line here.)

Because I am a (hopefully future) faculty applicant and because I write this blog, this seemed to be a good article for me to read with my morning coffee...

What is it with job seekers who also write blogs?

the author of the piece asks.

Our recent faculty search at Quaint Old College resulted in a number of bloggers among our semifinalists. Those candidates looked good enough on paper to merit a phone interview, after which they were still being seriously considered for an on-campus interview.

That's when the committee took a look at their online activity.

"On line activity"? That sounds like a euphemistic phrase for the viewing of kiddie cyber porn or something, instead of the publishing of an on-line journal. Had this departmental search committee unearthed via their digital goings-on a humanities terror cell? Were these applicants running a fake dissertation distribution operation?

Well, no. As I read on I saw that the "activities" the job seekers were involved in was regular old blogging. To be fair, the columnist does not appear to be making a blanket statement against blogs or blogging. In fact his idea of what an academic blog could be mirrors my own:

It was easy to imagine creative academics carrying their scholarly activity outside the classroom and the narrow audience of print publications into a new venue, one more widely available to the public and a tech-savvy student audience.

Based on the examples the columnist gives, these people were decidedly not using their blogs for the above-quoted creative purpose. These applicants seemed to be maintaining blogs that I would not consider professional or otherwise appropriate for viewing by folks they were hoping might hire them. For example, as a result of one applicant's blog content the columnist and his fellow search committee members wondered if traditional therapy might be called for.

The columnist also points out something I have been thinking and writing about recently: the idea that most blogs in practice do not have a true "peer review" process built into them. Instead, blogging is

a publishing medium with no vetting process, no review board, and no editor. The author is the sole judge of what constitutes publishable material, and the medium allows for instantaneous distribution. After wrapping up a juicy rant at 3 a.m., it only takes a few clicks to put it into global circulation.

I have thought very carefully and seriously about just these issues during the course of my experience maintaining this blog. And they are frequent topics in my conversations with faculty members and fellow graduate students about blogging. The central issue seems to be about boundaries: “Where—and how—do you draw and maintain them?”

Towards answering this question, I have instituted a few safeguards in my own blogging. First, I have an overarching “measure twice, cut once” practice. (Thank you HGTV and “This Old House”!) I changed my default post status for entries from “publish” to “draft.” That way I can edit and revise and think about an entry over the course of a day or a couple days before finally changing it to “publish” and clicking “save.” If I think a draft entry doesn’t seem “ready for prime time” even after all this attention, then I may delete it entirely.

Second, I have a “face check” policy. This is where I simply ask if I would be comfortable saying what I wrote in an entry in person, face-to-face, to anyone. That’s anyone—my mother, my husband, my committee members, my gradstudent officemates, a future boss, my future self, even that clerk that was so rude to me who I am considering ranting about via my blog. If I could never imagine saying what I am writing to someone’s face, then I don’t post it.

Third, I only post as myself, no pseudonym or super hero alternate identity. Once I became tech-savvy enough to pull it off, I added an About page to my site that links to my full CV-site. I blog through UThink, the blog service hosted by my university’s library system. Thus, with my school user name (perry032) that appears at the end of every post any reader could search for me on the U of MN site and find out/verify any number of things about me. If I write an entry that I wouldn’t feel comfortable to see side by side on a Google results list with other aspects of my graduate student life, then I don’t post it.

SO. I think I’m covered on the “appropriate content” and “professional boundaries” front.

But this paragraph in the Chronicle column makes me doubt whether this is enough:

The content of the blog may be less worrisome than the fact of the blog itself. Several committee members expressed concern that a blogger who joined our staff might air departmental dirty laundry (real or imagined) on the cyber clothesline for the world to see. Past good behavior is no guarantee against future lapses of professional decorum.

This, I think, may be the real issue. It is not so much that some academic-bloggers use their blogs as virtual therapists. It is not so much that there are few checks and balances on blog content. It doesn’t even matter if you’ve maintained appropriate boundaries and professionalism over the course of many months or even years of blogging.

Instead, it is the very presence of scholars who blog that is seen as threatening.

Put lofty ideals like "academic freedom" aside: This is the day and age of university "branding," students and their parents as "clients," and "accountablility" to all manner of moneyed and politically-powered "stakeholders." And, in this environment perhaps the biggest fear about academic blogs is that they have the potential to be a showcase for the not-so-bright side of an institution reaching the light of global cyberspace.

I admit to having a brush with the possibility of this fear negatively impacting me. In my case it was not a job application, but an application for one of the University’s dissertation fellowships. My carefully compiled application portfolio was under review by distinguished faculty members from across the university at the same time that, here on SITBB, I was offering my opinions about the University’s strategic planning process and hammering out my nascent research ideas, some of them promising but others quite stupid.

Doubts—despite confidence in my “measure twice, cut once” policies—were inevitable. I combed through my entries with a dense brush: Did I come off as anti-University? Does this post sound like I am unsure of my research topic? Do I have too many posts, perhaps giving the impression that I’m not a serious scholar? Am I talking too much about my kids, giving a similar impression?

Even, Do I come off as “too Black”? (If there could be such a thing and, if so, whatever that may mean…)

In my case, in the end I guess all this worrying was for nothing. Maybe the faculty reviewers never looked at my blog. Or maybe, if they did, they saw nothing troubling there. Maybe they even liked it. Or, more likely, it just did not make a huge difference one way or another—especially in light of the other pieces of my application. I say I worried for nothing because I *cough-cough* was awarded one of these fellowships.

But I recognize that future encounters with committees tasked to evaluate me may not have such a happy ending. And I will probably never know in these cases if SITBB or any potential future blog may be to blame…

The title of the First Person column I've been quoting here is "Bloggers Need Not Apply." Substitute any other group of folks, from “knitters” to “parents” to “Republicans” to “feminists,” in that phrase to see how truly strange it is. It would be a shame if academic departments, and universities and colleges in general, allow such an irrational fear to overshadow important decisions in the academy.

And it would be a shame if academic-bloggers allowed this to happen.

Posted by perry032 at July 8, 2005 11:39 AM | TrackBack
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