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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)

Thursday, November 17, 2005

Blogoscopy Update

In his scary blog story, the Slate writer [scroll down one post], like so many on the subject, quotes the pseudonymous Ivan Tribble in the Chronicle of Higher Education in order to give plausibility to the claim that blogs harm academic job candidates and tenure-seekers.

UD has for some time wrestled with the ethical implications of what she’s about to do, but given the growing currency and credibility of Tribble’s anti-blog arguments, she’s decided it’s time to reveal who he is.

UD would have respected Tribble’s right to a pseudonym had it not turned out (she’s unable for now to say how she discovered this) that “Ivan Tribble” is in fact Mrs. Jeanne Spurrier, recently retired head of the Moline, Illinois chapter of the La Leche League.

Although expert in methods of breast milk expression and storage, Spurrier knows little to nothing about the realities of contemporary American academic life. What she does know seems to have been gleaned by listening to one of the new mothers - the wife of a local professor - she recently coached. A fierce enemy of all new technologies, which she sees as dehumanizing (hence her lifelong devotion to the goals of La Leche), Spurrier apparently became incensed on hearing about yet one more effort to disrupt “nature’s flow,” as she puts it in one of her unpublished writings (to be deposited at her death in the Rare Book Collection of the Moline Public Library).

Spurrier’s opposition to blogs, in other words, isn’t so much, as Tribble’s pieces seemed to suggest, about the defense of certain academic traditions - although this is how she argues her case, in order to gain an audience. Instead, her abhorrence is a small part of a vast abhorrence of virtually all technology.

How was the Chronicle taken in? Ask Slate itself. Their own Ivan Tribble was “Robert Klingler,” whose work they published until they discovered he was an imposter. This sort of thing happens pretty frequently, even at the most careful and high-profile publications.