Can academics be bloggers?
A truncated version of what I said at the Public Choice roundtable with Michael Munger and Chris Lawrence on the question of “Can Academics Be Bloggers?”:
1) Of course academics can be bloggers. The more interesting questions are:
a) Can academics be good bloggers?
b) Should academics be bloggers?
My answer both of these questions is “yes, with significant caveats.”
CAN ACADEMICS BE GOOD BLOGGERS?
The answer should be yes:
1) 40% of TTLB’s
Higher Beings have Ph.D.s, so clearly it’s possible.
2) Academics possess skills that are useful for blogging — expertise, writing experience, analytical and critical thinking skills, etc.
That said, the answer for many academics is no:
1) To put it gently, some top-notch academics have not completely mastered the art of the blog. In all likelihood this will change, but it points to a barrier to entry for good scholars; unlike lower-level primates like myself, high-profile academics will often attract attention the moment they start blogging, stripping them of the opportunity to stumble out of the gates and move down the learning curve under the radar.
2) Furthermore, tenured academics have to adjust to a new and strange power structure if they start blogging. Suddenly they’re in a world where mere graduate students, or worse yet, people possessing only a B.A., wield more power and influence than them. I mean, it’s
been three months and Munger is still in a fetal position from being exposed to my “mighty” hit count. And that’s just between a full professor and an assistant professor!
3) Richard Posner’s theory of public intellectuals suggests that as academics stray from their area of expertise, their signal to noise ratio of the information they generate drops. Some academic bloggers strongly confirm this hypothesis.
4) Yes, academics have writing experience, but they’ve been trained within an inch of their lives to eschew clear prose for jargon-laden discourse. There are sound and unsound reasons for this within the academy, but for blogging to the general public it’s disastrous.
5) It should be stressed that these hindrances are not permanent, but they do constitute a barrier to entry.
SO, SHOULD ACADEMICS* ENGAGE IN BLOGGING**?
*By academics, I mean untenured ones, for tenured faculty [ motivation to exert oneself is less?, see however Manho Singhman's notes on why he blogs below. ]
**By blogging, I mean [general blogging-- my phrase SPH] rather than blogging only about one’s research, which is an unalloyed good. [emboldening is mine , SPH. See, for example, excerpts below*** from Mano Singham’s Web Journal
1) Blogging can be thought of as part of service. It’s a low-cost way of reaching beyond the ivory tower. It’s also acting like a quasi-referee of public intellectual output.
2) As blogging has become more respectable, the stigma associatedwith the activity has faded away.
NO:
1) It can be addictive.
2) If the blog is successful, it will breed resentment from colleagues, because it creates an alternative path to acclaim where tenured faculty do not function as gatekeepers.
3) Colleagues who do not write for a wide audience will overestimate the amount of time you devote to blogging, because they assume a one-to-one correspondence between public articles and scholarly articles (the actual ratio is more like 1:3). They will also underestimate the possibility that blogging is a complement rather than a substitute to traditional scholarship.
4) Scholars who out themselves as not part of the mainstream political persuasion of academics will have some uncomfortable hallway moments — though this cost is often overestimated.
5) More serious are the academic political minefields that blogging can trigger — you know, thin-skinned senior academics who are perfectly willing to carry a blog grudge into the academic realm.
*There are gradations in professorial rank (in the US, typically, instructor, assistant professor, associate professor, professor– professor the highest).
** Movement through the ranks is supposed to relate to quality in carrying out the actions associated with the role. Generally the actions are categorized as teaching, scholarship and service. While much time can be, and is, in some cases, spent assessing each, in my experience rough and ready solutions are applied in order that committee members can return to more familiar,
and less intense, duties. I would say that, in general the rough and ready translations are: quality of scholarship translates as “number of juried journal publications (prestigious , juried, journals preferred) per year”, quality of teaching translates into a summary of student evaluations on after-class polls and quality of service translates as “number of worthy nonteaching, nonscholarship activities (committee work is typical) successfully undertaken.
***Mano Singham’s “Why I blog”
I reached a kind of landmark this week with this blog. I have been making entries since January 26th, posting one item each weekday, except for a three-week break in June. As a result I have now posted over 100 entries and consisting of over 100,000 words, longer than either of my two published books.
Why do I blog? Why does anyone blog? The Doonesbury comic strip of Sunday, July 3, 2005 fed into the stereotype of bloggers as self-important losers who cannot get real jobs as writers, and feed their ego by pretending that what they say has influence. The idea behind this kind of disparaging attitude is that if no one is willing to pay you to write, then what you have to say has no value.
Of course, there are a vast number of bloggers out there,with an equally vast number of reasons as to why they blog so any generalization is probably wrong. So I will reflect on why I blog. Some bloggers may share this view, others may have different reasons. So be it.
The first reason is the very fact that because of the blog, I have written the equivalent of a complete book in six months. Writing is not easy, especially starting to write on any given day. Having a blog enforces on me a kind of discipline that would not exist otherwise. Before I started this blog, I would let ideas swirl around in my head, without actually putting them down in concrete I should have explored the ideas further and written them down.
The second benefit of writing is that it forces you to clarify and sharpen your ideas. It is easy to delude yourself that you understand something when you have the idea only in your mind. Putting those ideas to paper (or screen) has the startling effect of revealing gaps in knowledge and weaknesses of logic and reasoning, thus forcing a re-evaluation of one’s ideas. So writing is not a one-way process from brain to screen/paper. It is a dialectic process. Writing reveals your ideas but also changes the way you think. As the writer E. M. Forster said “How can I know what I am
thinking until I see what I say?” This is why writing is such an important part of the educational process and why I am so pleased that the new SAGES program places such emphasis on it.
Another benefit for me is that writing this blog has (I hope) helped me become a better writer, able to spot poor construction and word choice more quickly. Practice is an important part of writing and the blog provides me with that. Given that the blog is public and can (in principle) be read by anyone prevents me from posting careless or shoddy pieces. It forces me to take the time to repeatedly revise and polish, essential skills for writers.
When I started this blog, I had no idea what form it would take. Pretty soon, almost without thinking, it slipped into the form that I am most comfortable with, which is that of a short essay around a single topic each day. I initially feared that I would run out of ideas to write about within a few weeks but this has not happened. In fact what happens is what all writers intuitively know but keep forgetting, which is that the very act of writing acts as a spur for new ideas, new directions to explore.
As I write, new topics keep coming into my mind, which I store away for future use. The ideas swirl around in my head as I am doing other things (like driving and chores), and much of the writing takes place in my mind during those times as well. The well of ideas to write about does not show any signs of going dry, although it does take time to get the items ready for posting, and that is my biggest constraint. Researching those topics so that I go beyond superficial “off the top of my head” comments and have something useful to say about them has been very educational for me.
Since I have imposed on myself the goal of writing an essay for each weekday, this has enabled me to essentially write the first draft(which is the hardest part of writing, for me at least) of many topics that may subsequently become articles (or even books) submitted for publication. If I do decide to expand on some of the blog item for publication, that process should be easier since I have done much of the preliminary research, organization, and writing already.
All these benefits have accrued to me, the writer, and this is no accident. I think most writing benefits the author most, for all the reasons given above. But any writer also hopes that the reader benefits in some way as well, though that is hard for the author to judge.
I remember when I was younger, I wanted to “be a writer” but never actually wrote anything, at least anything worthwhile. Everything I wrote seemed contrived and imitative. I then read a comment by someone who said that there is a big difference between those who want to be writers and those who want to write. The former are just enamored with idea of getting published, of being successful authors and seeing their name in print. The latter feel that they have something to say that they have to get out of their system. I realized then that I belonged to the former class, which is why I had never actually written anything of value. With that realization, I stopped thinking of myself as a writer and did not do any writing other than the minimum required for my work. It is only within the last ten years or so that I feel that I have moved into the latter category, feeling a compulsion to write for its own sake. This blog has given me a regular outlet for that impulse.
I would never have written so much without having this blog. I would recommend that others who feel like they have to write also start their own. Do not worry about whether anyone will read it or whether they will like it. Write because you feel you have something to say. Evenif you are the only reader of your own writing, you will have learned a lot from the process.
POST SCRIPT
Paul Krugman is an economist at Princeton University and is a member of the reality-based community. His July 15, 2005 op-ed in the New York Times shows how far politics has moved away from this kind of world and into one in which facts are seen as almost irrelevant.
Thanks to Richard Hake for the following quote by F.M.Cornford, Microcosmographia Academica – Being A Guide for the Young Academic Politician (Bowes & Bowes, Cambridge, 4th ed., 1949 first published in 1908), which might well have been addressed to Krugman and other members of the reality-based community, although it was written over a century ago:
You think (do you not?) that you have only to state a reasonable case, and people must listen to reason and act upon it at once.It is just this conviction that makes you so unpleasant….are you not aware that conviction has never been produced by an appeal to reason which only makes people uncomfortable? If you want to move them, you must address
your arguments to prejudice and the political motive….
**** a more systematic analysis of perceived benefits and detriments on the part of higher education practicitioners; I’m collecting documents now. Suggestions are welcome!
