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Saturday, October 15, 2005
Inefficient Reputation Economies
Tim Burke has a good post about tenure, cronyism and pluralism. He’s springboarding off Sean’s post about the Drezner decision, in part. He’s rebutting an ignorant op-ed, like so: “Groupthink and insularity in academia mostly don’t come from cronyism or nepotism.” Yes, if you don’t understand that, you don’t understand. There’s a sort of ‘all institutional politics is local’ moral to the story, which I think is probably right, although there’s more to the story - and Tim’s post - than that. Go read it.
I’m assuming you’ve already read Bérubé and Inside Higher Ed (and a couple other things you can find by clicking around.)
Comments
I think that Timothy Burke has a number of good things to say about lack of cronyism. But I don’t agree with the implications of “Dan Drezner’s blog is a “value-added” asset for the University of Chicago (or was until he was denied tenure) but most of us know, including Dan, that it was never likely to be accredited as such.” If a blog is a hobby, and shouldn’t be looked at by these committees, then you shouldn’t get credit for it either. If it isn’t a hobby but rather a potential asset or discredit to the university, then you can’t dismiss the Tribblism of looking at someone’s blog and making judgements about the person based on it. Does every blogging academic really want to write their blog in full conciousness that it will be evaluated according to whether it will be a value-added asset to their university?
I lot of the furor over Drezner strikes me a blog triumphialism, the feeling that since he’s a popular blogger he must somehow deserve tenure. I think that in its own way this is as bad as the Ivan Tribble bit that you’d better not blog if you want tenure. Let’s try to keep some space for non-academic writing within the lives of academics.
While I wish he were wrong, I have to agree with Rich. It’d be nice if whoever hired me <a href"=http://acephalous.typepad.com/acephalous/2005/07/fixing_a_hole_w.html">saw I how spent my summer</a>, but unless there’s some “sea change” (to borrow the Shakespearean expression of the ‘00s), there’s no way my blog will appear on my CV. I’m not ashamed of it; in fact, I’m proud of the fact that since I’ve kept it I’ve had my eye to the academic grindstone (well, that’s what it feels like sometimes, but you know what I mean). I’m a more responsible scholar, more inclined to engage opposite and apposite positions with researched, responsible answers than I was before; and I hope that’s something that’ll appeal to whatever hiring committee interviews me for some position I’ve less than a three-in-a-thousand chance of winning. Granted, I have no illusions, but I believe that blogging (and my interaction with both vehemently analytic and decidedly Continental thinkers) has made me a better, more open-minded scholar. I wish I could mention this in interviews, but I know that, as of now, I can’t. Still, when it’s all said and done, I think the benefits, in terms of intellectual development, far outstrip the costs. If a department doesn’t want to hire me because I’ve decided to test the mettle of my ideas against those whose intelligence I respect but ideas I reject, do I really even want to work for it? (Plus, if all else fails, there’s always Google-bombing, no?)
[I edited this so that I might give Rich the credit I originally, for whatever reason, gave Jonathan. Not that he doesn’t deserve credit on occasion...]
My scholarship has been deeply affected by the time I’ve spent at bars discussing with professors and fellow grad students, but all the same, I’m not going to put my regular bar attendance on my CV.
I’ve pencilled in a total blog stoppage for when I’m ABD. That’s two to three years away, though, and the aforementioned sea change might roll in before that—or else I may go underground. Okstok Mada may well be showing up in a comment thread near you in late 2007.
My thought is not that a blog should be credited to the individual scholar as a form of publication, but as a form of service. Which I connect to my thought that most universities do not really understand or care about the kinds of labor that actually make them function day-to-day as institutions, nor do they really understand the larger economy of reputation outside, only the kinds of reputation narrowly contained within conventional publication and dissemination. In another sense, they’re right not to care, because by and large the general public also doesn’t care when they evaluate reputation of institutions what kinds of faculty labor actually are productive at maintaining community and instruction, nor do they accord greater reputation to institutions that heavily subsidize faculty who communicate well with the public sphere. Some major institutions with strong reputations privilege insular, specialized, noncommunicative faculty who behave like dysfunctional children or who retreat into personal monasteries when it comes time to help the institution actually function and thrive; they appear to suffer no consequences for that. This strikes me as vaguely wrong but there’s no easy way to conceive of a metric that might help convince the public or institutional leaders to have a different evaluation.