I was forwarded this article and it was chockful o’ good stuff: I’m citing fair use in my copy and paste of it below, but that’s only because the website doesn’t offer any public access to this article.
I’m not going to cite any of the content: it’s worth reading in its entirety, I think.
It is interesting to see how many different views there are. Where some see this as a valuable way to get additional comments on a pending article (“Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.), others see it as too great a risk to their professional standing. Some revel in the levelling of the hierarchy, while others are not so comfortable yielding any of their status.
This article is available online at this address:
http://chronicle.com/weekly/v49/i39/39a01401.htm
– The text of the article is below –
From the issue dated June 6, 2003
Scholars Who Blog
By DAVID GLENN
Is this a revolution in academic discourse, or is it CB
radio?
In one form or another, that question inevitably arises in
conversationswith scholars who have taken up the habit of
writing Web logs, or “blogs.” Some have started blogging in
order to muse aloud about their research. Others want to
polish their chops at opinion-writing for nonacademic
audiences. Still others have more urgent and personal reasons.
(“The black dogs of depression are snarling at my feet,” reads
the first entry of one scholar’s blog.)
It’s perilous to generalize, but the typical blog entry
comments on — and links to — a news article or an entry on
someone else’s blog. Most scholars’ blogs allow their readers
to post short comments of their own.
In their skeptical moments, academic bloggers worry that the
medium smells faddish, ephemeral. But they also make a strong
case for blogging’s virtues, the foremost of which is freedom
of tone. Blog entries can range from three-word bursts of
sarcasm to carefully honed 5,000-word treatises. The sweet
spot lies somewhere in between, where scholars tackle serious
questions in a loose-limbed, vernacular mode.
Blogging also offers speed; the opportunity to interact with
diverse audiences both inside and outside academe; and the
freedom to adopt a persona more playful than those generally
available to people with Ph.D.’s.
No wonder, then, that scholarly blogs are sprouting like
mushrooms. A directory maintained by Henry Farrell, an
assistant professor of political science at the University of
Toronto at Scarborough, lists 93 “scholar-bloggers,” most of
whose blogs made their debuts during the past six months.
(Almost all are in public policy, law, or the social sciences;
only 14 of the blogs in Mr. Farrell’s directory are by
scholars in the humanities or natural sciences.) The most-read
of these — at the very top is Instapundit, also known as
Glenn H. Reynolds, a law professor at the University of
Tennessee at Knoxville — have thousands of visitors each day.
“The development of the blog lowers the cost of publishing
almost to the vanishing point,” says Jack M. Balkin, a
professor of law and the director of the Information Society
Project at Yale University, who maintains a blog called
Balkinization. “It really does help realize the promise of the
Internet as a place for wide-ranging public discussion.”
A Day on the Blog
Consider a typical day (May 8) at the Volokh Conspiracy, a
group blog (with roughly a dozen regular contributors) founded
in 2002 by Eugene Volokh, a professor of law at the University
of California at Los Angeles. One author pointed readers to a
draft of his forthcoming law-review article (“I’d be delighted
to receive any comments on the paper; the final version won’t
be out until November, so there should be some time to tweak
it between now and then”). Mr. Volokh asked for help in
thinking through a scholarly article he might write about
private detectives and the proper scope of individual privacy,
and he relentlessly plugged his new book on academic legal
writing. Someone posted a one-panel cartoon from another site
(prisoner to his cellmate: “I’m not sure it was worth it, but
it certainly was the world’s best judge joke”). Most of the
day’s posts, however, were responses to entries on other blogs
— civil, fact-laden arguments about judicial confirmations,
William Bennett’s gambling habit, and the relationship between
urban cosmopolitans and rural cultural conservatives in the
Republican Party.
“What blogging offers is immediacy,” says Eric L. Muller, a
professor of law at the University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill, whose four-month-old blog is titled Is That Legal?
“Compared to what we’re all used to in academia, where you
submit something and then maybe when you have grandchildren
you’ll hear whether it’s going to be published, the immediacy
is something that we’re all unaccustomed to. I think a lot of
people feel sort of like kids in a candy store.”
Also like kids in a candy store, academic bloggers are
sometimes subject to twinges of self-consciousness and guilt,
and fear that their elders will think they’re misbehaving.
Most commonly, the anxiety takes this form: “Is it really OK
for me to blog about topics outside my academic expertise?”
Last spring and summer, Jacob T. Levy, an assistant professor
of political science at the University of Chicago, took a
five-month hiatus from his blog. When he returned, he
explained his reluctance to commit to blogging: “I’m worried
about public-intellectualitis — the well-known tendency for
professors with real expertise in one field to pose as experts
in many others, the pose of authority that comes with
academics’ comments on issues of the day.”
Mr. Levy tentatively concluded, however, that blogs might
actually offer an antidote to academic posturing. Blogging
“has some of the best aspects of peer review built into it,”
he wrote. Scholars’ entries “are instantly monitored and
responded to by others as well-informed as they are.” Also,
because blog entries can be as long as the author likes,
there’s little tendency to fall into “the scholarly sound bite
— the public career built on offering quick juicy quotes to
the press.” And finally, he noted, “At least so far, there are
no financial returns to blogging. Much bad
public-intellectualism seems to come about because of the
temptation to (to put it bluntly) sell out.” (Mr. Levy
subsequently abandoned his solo blog, and is now one of the
authors of the Volokh Conspiracy.)
Daniel W. Drezner, another assistant professor of political
science at Chicago, is somewhat more relaxed about the
exper-tise question. In March, he posted a long essay on his
blog about prospects for democratization in Iraq.
Democratization theory is not part of Mr. Drezner’s own
research, but he read plenty of it in graduate school. “The
best advantage a scholar has in terms of blogging is not so
much what they produce as the literature that they consume,”
he says. “I would hardly consider myself an expert on
democratization, but I have read enough so that — relative to
a lot of the people reading my blog — I do feel like I can
claim some expertise. That’s one advantage of the doctorate,
just simply knowing where to look.”
Still more sanguine is Mark A.R. Kleiman, a professor of
policy studies at UCLA, who says that he trusts his readers to
know when he is stepping outside his realm of scholarly
expertise. In an interblog discussion several months ago, he
says, “Eugene Volokh and I got into a long exchange about the
meaning of a passage in Thucydides, and I don’t think anybody
thought that I was trying to be a classicist.”
What many scholars find most thrilling about blogging is the
knowledge that anyone at all can read and comment on their
discussions. Unlike on a political-science e-mail list, for
example, it was entirely possible that an actual classicist
might have Googled his or her way to Mr. Kleiman and Mr.
Volokh’s argument and weighed in with comments. “It’s
astonishing, the range of people who seem to read my blog,”
says Mr. Drezner. “I’ve gotten e-mail from probably 15
different countries. I’ve heard from stay-at-home moms,
retired military veterans, other academics, and a lot of grad
students from outside Chicago. And certainly the level of
discourse is higher than what I get at a cocktail party.”
In particular, most academic bloggers report that the project
has brought them into contact with people of diverse political
persuasions. “I’ve certainly changed my picture of what
libertarians are like,” says Chris Bertram, a senior lecturer
in philosophy at the University of Bristol, in England, whose
blog persona is “Junius.” Mr. Bertram, a social democrat, says
that he and his fellow political philosophers sometimes suffer
from a constricted field of vision, with “all kinds of
received opinions that just aren’t shared by most other
people.” Mr. Bertram says that debates with other bloggers
have taught him that many libertarians do not follow Robert
Nozick’s philosophical principles, but instead favor markets
“for other, basically more pragmatic, reasons.” He adds,
“There’s been a mildly rightward pressure on my politics.”
To a remarkable degree, blogs also appear to bring full
professors, adjuncts, and students onto a level field. With no
evident condescension, senior faculty bloggers routinely link
to the political-affairs blog maintained by Matthew Yglesias,
a senior at Harvard University. “Nobody knew my name when we
started this,” says Josh Chafetz, a current Rhodes scholar
whose OxBlog, written with two fellow Americans at Oxford, has
made him a well-known figure among academic bloggers. “In many
ways it really is almost a pure marketplace of ideas. You can
build up a readership. You just have to write things that
people like.”
“You do see some of the barriers of rank and hierarchy break
down,” says the woman who blogs pseudonymously as the
Invisible Adjunct. (She granted an interview on the condition
that her identity not be revealed.) “An undergraduate and an
adjunct can speak to someone with tenure on a more or less
equal footing.”
Mr. Balkin sees this openness and pluralism as a rebuke to the
argument posited by Cass Sunstein, a professor of law at
Chicago, in his 2001 book, Republic.com (Princeton University
Press). “Cass’s view was that the Internet was going to become
an increasingly closed-off set of ideological communities, and
that people would become more extreme over time. His argument
was based on his assessment of what the technology looked like
around 2000. But one of the things about the Internet is that
it is protean. Its architecture is constantly changing.” (Mr.
Sunstein did not reply to an e-mail invitation to respond to
Mr. Balkin’s comment.)
Others are less hopeful. Mr. Muller says that he perceives
among academic bloggers “a talk-radioization of the discourse,
which I’m not especially interested in participating in. It’s
becoming very personality-driven, very combative, very
adversarial. There’s a kind of ideological categorizing that
goes on. … It really does start to feel like the Rush
Limbaugh show.”
Watchdog Blogs
One of the most combative strains of scholarly blogging is the
investigation of alleged academic misconduct. The work of John
R. Lott Jr., a gun researcher who has been accused of
inventing the results of a telephone survey out of whole cloth
(a charge he denies), has persistently been scrutinized by at
least six bloggers. Mr. Lott’s research, in fact, is the sole
topic of a blog maintained by Timothy D. Lambert, a lecturer
in computer science at the University of New South Wales, in
Australia. And it was another blogger, Julian Sanchez, a staff
writer at the Cato Institute, who discovered and confirmed
that Mr. Lott had been participating in Internet discussion
groups under the name “Mary Rosh.”
In an essay in the May issue of Reason magazine, Mr. Sanchez
noted that blogging permitted the investigation of Mr. Lott to
proceed much more quickly than a controversy two years earlier
about the former Emory University historian Michael A.
Bellesiles, whose book Arming America: The Origins of a
National Gun Culture (Alfred A. Knopf) was ultimately exposed
as error-ridden. (Mr. Bellesiles concedes having been careless
with certain data, but denies many of the charges of error.)
Mr. Bellesiles’s earliest critics communicated primarily via
e-mail, which meant that their conversations were much less
likely to be detected by professional journalists or by other
assorted people with relevant expertise. In Mr. Lott’s case,
however, the story has evolved much more rapidly, with
bloggers picking up one another’s cues and investigating
small, scattered allegations. (Mr. Lott himself had just
started his own blog dedicated to defending his record.)
Kieran J. Healy, an assistant professor of sociology at the
University of Arizona, who has occasionally weighed in on the
subject of Mr. Lott’s troubles, is skeptical of Mr. Sanchez’s
account. “There’s always a danger of overstating how much
novelty there is in these things,” he says. “One person’s
‘distributed journalism’ is another person’s echo chamber.”
Certain other blogs focus not on particular scholars but on
particular follies of academic life. Critical Mass, written by
Erin O’Connor, an associate professor of English at the
University of Pennsylvania, advances a generally conservative
critique of grade inflation, sensitivity training, and speech
codes. (In Ms. O’Connor’s comments section, heated arguments
sometimes arise between libertarian and traditionalist critics
of academe. Her readers have been sharply divided, for
example, about a state legislator’s attempt to censure the
popular sexuality course taught by Dennis Dailey, a professor
of social welfare at the University of Kansas.)
And the Invisible Adjunct’s blog, as the name suggests, almost
exclusively concerns the crisis of academic labor. “I’m a bit
of a Luddite, so it’s actually rather odd that I would be
entering into this,” she says. “But I wanted to talk about a
lot of academic issues, especially issues related to
employment.” In the three months since she began her blog, she
says that she has gathered a substantial readership of
adjuncts who are eager to exchange ideas.
Avoiding Addiction
In April, Mr. Drezner traveled to Beloit College to give a
lecture. After his talk, as he later reported on his blog, he
was startled when “my host explained to one of his colleagues
that I needed to get to an Internet station — because it had
been some time since I’d updated the blog.”
Mr. Drezner and others are determined not to let that sort of
pressure from their readers get to them. Junior faculty
members, in particular, want to ensure that their blogs are
not a distraction from their primary research. “I try to make
clear that it’s not my main focus,” says Mr. Healy. “I write
posts early in the morning or late at night, after I’ve come
home.”
Mr. Balkin offers similar counsel. “My advice to junior
faculty is to write on your blog only when you think you have
something to say. You shouldn’t allow this particular tail to
wag the dog of your academic career.”
For some people, however, blogging itself is a direct form of
career development. Mr. Yglesias, the Harvard senior, wants to
become a political journalist, not an academic. In September,
he will begin a writing fellowship at The American Prospect.
Mr. Levy and Mr. Drezner have each recently begun to write
columns for The New Republic’s Web site because an editor
there noticed and admired their blogs. And Mr. Chafetz, of
OxBlog, writes occasionally for The New Republic and The
Weekly Standard.
Daniel J. Urman, one of Mr. Chafetz’s collaborators on OxBlog,
says with a laugh that “Josh is an animal. He’s capable of
spending 16 hours a day online. … Josh and David [Adesnik,
another OxBlog author] will blog even when they’re on
vacation. It’s like an IV or something.”
So will we all find ourselves someday hooked up to the same
IV? Will the practice of blogging become near-universal in
academe? Or is it, as the Invisible Adjunct sometimes
imagines, “a temporary trend that will run its course”? Mr.
Balkin notes that blogging, like many other phenomena on the
World Wide Web, is organized according to a power law. That
is, the most popular nodes, like Instapundit, tend to have 10
times more readers than blogs on the next tier, who in turn
have 10 times more readers than the third tier. “Is that
distribution going to stay fixed?” he asks. “The answer is
that we don’t know how fluid this economy will be. I would be
amazed if in two years’ time you went to look at the list of
most popular blogs, that the list will be the same — but it
will probably still be organized as a power law.”
A BLOG TAKES OFF
On January 20, Eric L. Muller, a professor of law at the
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, started a Web
log, which he playfully titled “Is That Legal?” Two weeks
later, with few readers, Mr. Muller was considering shutting
the blog down. Then lightning struck. On February 4, U.S. Rep.
Howard Coble, a North Carolina Republican who is chairman of
the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, and
Homeland Security, told a Winston-Salem radio audience that
the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II was
justified.The ensuing controversy was tailor-made for Mr.
Muller, the author of Free to Die for Their Country: The Story
of the Japanese American Draft Resisters in World War II
(University of Chicago Press). He sent a draft essay to 15
newspapers, but received almost no interest. With his blog,
however, he was able to quickly publish commentaries far more
detailed than the space any op-ed page would permit. Within
hours, Mr. Muller’s comments were noted (and linked to) by
several prominent bloggers, and he had increased his
readership more than fivefold. (As of early May, Mr. Muller’s
average daily hit count had settled down to 204.)
February 4
Approximately 8 a.m.: In a radio call-in show, Representative
Coble justifies the internments, saying, “We were at war.
[Japanese-Americans] were an endangered species. It wasn’t
safe for them to be on the streets.”
Mr. Muller’s hit count: 35
February 5
1:09 p.m.: After seeing a local newspaper item about the
comments, Mr. Muller posts his first entry about
Representative Coble: “It is just staggering to me that a
person in a position of this sort could be so ignorant of the
real story. I’ll blog more on this later, but I wanted to get
it up quickly.”
1:24 p.m.: The Volokh Conspiracy, a widely read blog about
legal issues, links to Mr. Muller’s first post.
11:49 p.m.: Mr. Muller notes that in 1988, Representative
Coble spoke on the floor of the House against an act that
provided $20,000 payments to the surviving internees. “Folks,
this is the guy running the show on homeland security in the
House of Representatives. The guy who will have oversight over
how well Tom Ridge’s new department of homeland security is
balancing national security with individual liberties.”
Mr. Muller’s hit count: 387
February 6
9:56 a.m.: Instapundit, which has by far the highest
readership of any scholar’s blog, links to Mr. Muller’s
comments.
11:18 a.m.: Riffing on another blogger’s commentary, Mr.
Muller discusses a little-known fact: Conditions at the
internment camps were largely dictated by state governors, not
the federal government. The Republican Ralph Carr of Colorado
was the only governor who supported a liberal, non-barbed-wire
policy, and he lost a re-election bid in part for that reason.
3:19 p.m.: Mr. Muller notes a comment made by another North
Carolina lawmaker the previous week. Asked about terrorist
threats to local communities, Rep. Sue Myrick, a Republican,
said, “You know, look at who runs all the convenience stores
across the country. Every little town you go into, you know?”
(She acknowledged that the comment could be misconstrued.)
Mr. Muller’s hit count: 922
February 7
7:21 a.m.: Mr. Muller promises to answer a challenge made by
Representative Coble, who has declared that he will apologize
only if someone proves to him that protecting
Japanese-Americans was not one of the Roosevelt
administration’s reasons for interning them.
12 p.m.: Mr. Muller posts a detailed refutation of Mr. Coble’s
claim. He also faxes this material to the congressman’s
office. (On the following days, Mr. Muller posts PDF images of
government memos from 1942 that make clear that protecting
Japanese-Americans’ safety was not among the goals of the
internment policy.)
1:27 pm: Instapundit links again, noting that Mr. Muller “is
fact-checking Howard Coble’s ass.” Several other blogs
subsequently link to the same entry.
Also on February 7, Representative Coble refuses to concede
error to an Associated Press reporter, saying, “I was just
stating historical fact.”
Mr. Muller’s hit count: 2,953
SOURCE: Chronicle reporting FROM NASCAR TO UGLY ROBES: SOME
ACADEMIC BLOGS TO NOTE
Title: Instapundit
URL: http://instapundit.com
Author: Glenn H. Reynolds, professor of law at the U. of
Tennessee at Knoxville
First post: August 5, 2001
Average daily hit count: 100,000
Recent topics: persecution of bloggers in Iran; federalism and
the problem of combating prison rape in state correctional
systems; “The E.U. — Haven for Cat-Skinners?”
Title: The Volokh Conspiracy
URL: http://volokh.com
Author: 12 authors, of whom the first among equals is Eugene
Volokh, a professor of law at the U. of California at Los
Angeles
First post: April 10, 2002
Average daily hit count: 8,000
Recent topics: the gun industry’s political clout (or lack
thereof); ugly red judicial robes in Maryland and Germany; the
differences between awards in economics and awards in
political science
Title: OxBlog
URL: http://oxblog.blogspot.com
Author: three graduate students (two of whom are Rhodes
scholars) at the U. of Oxford
First post: April 23, 2002
Average daily hit count: 3,400
Recent topics: reconstruction and “nation-building” in Iraq;
North Carolina Gov. Mike Easley’s hapless experiment with
Nascar driv-ing; free-speech controversies at Yale
Title: Critical Mass
URL: http://www.erinoconnor.org
Author: Erin O’Connor, an associate professor of English at
the U. of Pennsylvania
First post: March 14, 2002
Average daily hit count: 1,800
Recent topics: thefts of student newspapers at the U. of
California at Berkeley; allegations of grade inflation at
Brooklyn College; animal-dissection policies at the U. of
Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Title: The Invisible Adjunct
URL: http://www.invisibleadjunct.com
Author: anonymous
First post: February 28, 2003
Average daily hit count: 347
Recent topics: union organizing at the U. of Pennsylvania;
adjuncts’ morale at the for-profit U. of Phoenix; Leo Strauss
and neoconservatism
Title: Daniel W. Drezner
URL: http://drezner.blogspot.com
Author: Daniel W. Drezner, an assistant professor of political
science at the U. of Chicago
First post: September 10, 2002
Average daily hit count: 2,100
Recent topics: President Bush’s free-trade proposal for the
Middle East; violence and disorder in rural Afghanistan; “Are
liberals less cosmopolitan than conservatives?”
Title: Thoughts Arguments and Rants
URL: http://philosophyweblog.blogspot.com
Author: Brian Weatherson, an assistant professor of philosophy
at Brown U.
First post: October 30, 2002
Average daily hit count: 250
Recent topics: the gender imbalance in academic philosophy;
the boundaries of the U.S. Midwest; rankings of philosophy
programs (A companion site,
http://philosophypapers.blogspot.com, allows visitors to
comment on draft papers in philosophy by scholars throughout
the world.)
Title: Kieran Healy
URL: http://www.kieranhealy.org/blog/
Author: Kieran J. Healy, an assistant professor of sociology
at the U. of Arizona
First post: May 21, 2002
Average daily hit count: 2,400
Recent topics: the mechanisms behind occupational gender
segregation; plagiarism; the absurdity of economists’ claims
to monopolize scientific rigor in the social sciences
Title: Semi-Daily Journal
URL: http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/
Author: J. Bradford DeLong, a professor of economics at the U.
of California at Berkeley
First post: February 2002
Average daily hit count: 50,000
Recent topics: bleak economic prospects in Europe; a critique
of President Bush’s tax-cut proposals; how Mr. DeLong spent
his office hours one afternoon
Directories of academic bloggers are maintained at
http://rhetorica.net/professors_who_blog.htm and
http://www.henryfarrell.net/blog/
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Copyright 2003 by The Chronicle of Higher Education