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Wednesday, November 16, 2005
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BLOGOSCOPY I don’t get this thing on blogs from Slate’s “College Week” collection of stories. It’s got a big ol’ scare headline - Attack of the Career-Killing Blogs - but cites no example of even career-damaging blogs written by up-for-tenure academics. It starts with Dan Drezner’s recent denial of tenure at the University of Chicago and darkly hints that el evil blog done did him in. Then the Slate author waits until his very last paragraph to tell you that Drezner got another first-rate academic job at the Tufts Fletcher School (plus a good number of other offers) days after the Chicago thing. Here are the last two sentences of the scary career-killing blogs article: How did Tufts learn he was available? They read it in his blog. So, uh, the author gives no examples of jobs lost or threatened and gives one example of a blogger turned down for tenure (at the sort of school that often turns people down for tenure) who - in part because of his blog - lands dramatically on his feet. As for the cultural and scholarly value of blogs, the author has this to say: [A]cademic blogging represents the fruition, not a betrayal, of the university's ideals. One might argue that blogging is in fact the very embodiment of what the political philosopher Michael Oakshott once called "The Conversation of Mankind"—an endless, thoroughly democratic dialogue about the best ideas and artifacts of our culture. Drezner's blog, for example, is hardly of the "This is what I did today …" variety. Rather, he usually writes about globalization and political economy—the very subjects on which he publishes in prestigious, peer-reviewed presses and journals. If his prose style in the blog is more engaging than that of the typical academic's, the thinking behind it is no less rigorous or intelligent. …So, might blogging be subversive precisely because it makes real the very vision of intellectual life that the university has never managed to achieve? In fact the real point of the article is to worry, reasonably enough, about how institutions might go about reviewing the scholarly quality of articles posted on blogs rather than in journals: If anything, [emerging peer-review] blog-influenced practices … might reclaim for intellectuals the true spirit of peer review, which, as Harvard University Press editor Lindsay Waters has argued, has been all but outsourced to prestigious university presses and journals. Experimenting with open-source methods of judgment — whether of straight scholarship or academic blogs — might actually revitalize academic writing. |