rfmcdonald | [BRIEF NOTE] Grad Students and Blogs (Reply)

Before we embarked on a fun gaming session last night, some of my grad student/blogger friends talked about this essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education, which suggested that blogging graduate students were at a disadvantage. Daniel Drezner, an academic blogger himself, commented at length. He noted, via another blogger, that there was a certain confusion at work.

Shorter Chronicle of Higher Ed: blogging is dangerous because hiring committees are paranoid, conservative, and illogical. Even if you are not indiscreet on your blog, you could become so--but if you don't have a blog, you couldn't possibly start one and therefore never be indiscreet. Publishing pseudonymous articles about your search committee deliberations in the Chronicle of Higher Ed, though, is not indiscreet.

Drezner concluded, reluctantly, that anonymous blogging might be the best course of action.

I'd like to say that Ivan the Tribble is your classic piece of outlying data, but I can't. The default assumption you should make is that the academy has a lot of people who share the Tribble worldview of the blogosphere. I seriously doubt that any amount of reasoned discourse will alter this worldview. So think very, very, very carefully about the costs and benefits of blogging under one's own name.

Thoughts?