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UD is...
"Salty." (Scott McLemee)
"Unvarnished." (Phi Beta Cons)
"Splendidly splenetic." (Culture Industry)
"Except for University Diaries, most academic blogs are tedious."
(Rate Your Students)
"I think of Soltan as the Maureen Dowd of the blogosphere,
except that Maureen Dowd is kind of a wrecking ball of a writer,
and Soltan isn't. For the life of me, I can't figure out her
politics, but she's pretty fabulous, so who gives a damn?"
(Tenured Radical)

Monday, September 05, 2005

SO THERE

More tribbling from the still-pseudonymous Ivan Tribble, on why tenure-track job seekers shouldn’t blog, in the Chronicle of Higher Education .

Tribble Two responds to the many critics of the original piece, most of whom felt that he/she didn’t understand what serious academic blogs were, and that the effect of the piece was to scare academics off of a reasonable and often valuable writerly, social, pedagogical, and scholarly activity.

Tribble acknowledges that the critics are right, and in so doing gives us a window into the mental world of some academics:

As my original column made clear (and many amid the outcry reiterated) when it comes to blogging, I just don't "get it." That's right, I don't. Many in the tenured generation don't, and they'll be sitting on hiring committees for years to come. If that's bad news, I'm sorry.


When I originally read this, I found myself instantly translating it into language I used to hear from my mother when I was sixteen or so and interested in doing or reading something she found inexplicable and offensive:

“That right! I just don’t get it! And I don’t intend to get it. I only know that I don’t like it. Too bad for you that you still live in my house. If that’s bad news, sorry.”



[For UD's earlier commentary on this, go here and here.]