There’s been a minor tempest over the Chronicle of Higher Education’s latest anonymous essay, “Bloggers Need Not Apply.” Apparently a hiring committee took a few candidates’ blogs into account when evaluating them for a position – and it didn’t help. Given the difficulties of getting a job in academia, this kicked off a stream of posts from the community of academic bloggers, displaying a fair amount of fear, anger, and surprise. The fear and anger I understand, but surprise? I spent time in a humanities Ph.D. program myself, voluntarily withdrawing a couple years ago after receiving the condolence M.A. My time in grad school taught me that the whole person – right down to the smallest foible – was a legitimate target when evaluating anyone for any purpose. If my own experience was typical, grad students are a very judgemental lot, and who are professors but grad students a little further up the food chain?
I could use this article to make a political point about academia. Race- and gender-based discrimination is already firmly institutionalized there – and once those irrelevant factors become used in admissions and hiring decisions, why not others? It’s a short jump from race/gender to politics, and since ‘the personal is political’ it’s an even shorter jump from politics to personal behavior. However, this argument has been made so often it’s boring. I’d rather take the time to note that while networking is essential both for dot-com employees and academics, the means of networking in dot-com land and academia are very, very different.
In dot-com land meaningful connections can be made through blogs; positing appropriate self-censorship, a blog will help far more than it hurts. This isn’t too surprising – we love technology here in dot-com land and don’t have generations of established practice behind us to gum up the adoption of new practices. In academia, however, there’s already an established structure for networking – presentations at conferences, print publication, and (most importantly) a good deal of string-pulling by one’s hopefully fabulously-influential advisor. Blogging is therefore a departure from the established way of doing things. Even when appropriate self-censorship is done, a blog suggests neglect of – or worse, an attempt to bypass – conventional best practices and power structures. (All that ‘blogs are going to transform the world’ talk coming out of dot-com land has to have reached at least a few hiring-committee members who like things just as they are, thank you very much.)
In short, just because blogging helps in one area of working life doesn’t mean it’s good for all areas.
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