Crooked Timber: Academics and blogging :
I’ve always been curious about why some academics blog and some don’t.
The responses to this are likely to be as diverse as the respondents. Digging back into my recollections in the academic quagmire where I spent the bulk of 2003, let me pass on these observations.
* I think a good weblog, unless the author is a good off-the-cuff (that is to say, non-academic) writer, would be written by someone who reads them and understands what works and what doesn’t.
* It also helps if the author is open to dissenting viewpoints: the Crooked Timber crowd don’t seem to feel threatened, and that’s as it should be.
* No one I knew in my academic institution knew much about them, if anything (calling them “blogs” to sound hip was as far as they got). I sounded a few people who could have been influential — the associate law librarian (who understood it but lacked the inclination, even after I set one up for him) and a librarian whose function to evangelize technology in education. She didn’t get it, even after I pitched the idea as knowledge management and a way out of the “oral tradition” that hampered so much. She didn’t see any need for knowledge management . . .
* In the department where I worked, the only notable weblogger they knew of was Larry Lessig and the jealousy and resentment over his success and celebrity was enough to torpedo doing anything that he was doing. Wendy Seltzer was also well-known and well-liked, but not by the personality(ies) in power.
When I look back on the institution and it’s reputation as a stand-offish, unapproachable place among the locals (even among its alums) and factoring in the drop in US News rankings of 20+ places in one year (very bad news for a trade school that only succeeds if its graduates do), it seemed like some kind of charm offensive like weblogs would have been useful. The faculty are often featured as experts in news media from CNN to local radio and TV, so it’s not like they’re all devoid of personality or insight.