CAN BLOGGING DERAIL YOUR CAREER?

The Trouble With Blogs

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By DANIEL W. DREZNER

When I was an assistant professor at the University of Chicago, a senior colleague once told me his secret to academic success: One bad article equals five great ones. His point was that the worst thing a scholar can do is to publish too much, as opposed to too little. Any substandard publication creates a black mark that is difficult to erase.

That point came back to me as I read about Yale's decision to reject Juan Cole for a senior position in Middle East studies — despite the recommendation of two departments to hire him. The combination of little to no comment from either Yale or Cole and the "star chamber" politics of hiring at elite institutions has led to speculation that Cole's prominent, left-wing, take-no-prisoners blog played a role in his nonhiring. That seemed to be the hope of Michael Rubin, of the American Enterprise crowd, when he wrote in the Yale Daily News that Cole has paid a price because he has "abandoned scholarship in favor of blog commentary." That was also the fear of Cole supporters like Philip Weiss, who noted in The Nation that "it is hard to separate Cole's scholarly reputation from his Internet fame." After I was denied tenure at Chicago last year, there was news-media conjecture that my blog was partly to blame, so Cole's story evokes an uncomfortable sense of déjà vu.

Blogs and prestigious university appointments do not mix terribly well. That is because top departments are profoundly risk-averse when it comes to senior hires. In some ways, that caution is sensible — hiring a senior professor is the equivalent of signing a baseball player to a lifetime contract without any ability to release or trade him. In such a situation, even small doubts about an individual become magnified.

The trouble with blogs is that they seem designed to provoke easy doubts. Blogs are an outlet for unexpurgated, unreviewed, and occasionally unprofessional musings. What makes them worth reading can also make them prone to error. Any honest scholar-blogger — myself included — could acknowledge a post or two that they would like to have back. At a place like Yale, one bad blog post can erase a lot of good will very quickly.

There are other risks. At Chicago, I found that some of my colleagues overestimated the time and effort I put into my blog — which led them to overestimate lost opportunities for scholarship. Other colleagues maintained that they never read blogs — and yet, without fail, they came into my office once every two weeks to talk about a post of mine. Today's senior faculty members look at blogs the way a previous generation of academics looked at television — as a guilty, tawdry pleasure that should not be talked about in respectable circles.

In some ways, this problem is merely the latest manifestation of what happens when professors try to become public intellectuals. Most members of the academy unconsciously accept the maxim that "foolish names and foolish faces often appear in familiar places." Blogging multiplies the problem a thousandfold, creating new pathways to public recognition beyond the control of traditional academic gatekeepers or even op-ed editors. Any usurpation of scholarly authority is bound to upset those who benefit the most from the status quo.

In a perfect world, blogs would play no role in hiring decisions. In the world in which we live, perhaps university committees should consciously factor in the positives — quality blogs allow scholars to link grand theory to real-world events, cultivate new ideas, and spark public debates — that come from scholar blogging. Apparently, it has become impossible for the negatives to be ignored.

Daniel W. Drezner is an associate professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. His blog can be found at http://danieldrezner.com