CAN BLOGGING DERAIL YOUR CAREER?

The Attention Blogs Bring

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By MICHAEL BÉRUBÉ

Juan Cole's blogging may, indeed, have cost him a job at Yale. I think that's Yale's loss rather than Cole's, so I don't see it as a blow to academic freedom or to the professor's scholarly reputation.

In one way, Cole is sui generis: He's a prominent academic blogger who writes about the contemporary Middle East. For the culture warriors of the right, it doesn't matter that he is a moderate who supported the removal of Saddam Hussein; what matters is that he has become the go-to person on the Middle East for many readers of liberal blogs, where is he widely admired (and sometimes criticized) for his commentary on the war in Iraq and all related matters. I can't think of another academic blogger who would generate the kind of vile attacks mounted against him this year by John Fund at The Wall Street Journal (who called him "Taliban Man") and Christopher Hitchens at Slate (who called him "a minor nuisance on the fringes of the academic Muslim apologist community").

But in another way, the campaign against Cole bespeaks a broader phenomenon. In much of academe, blogs are still considered to be variants of personal diaries or individual soapboxes. When two young bloggers — one a political scientist, one a physicist — were denied tenure at the University of Chicago last year, academic bloggers speculated that their blogging had something to do with the decision: Perhaps some colleagues had believed they were spending too much time online and not enough time on research. Perhaps others wondered what a "blog" was and whether this Internet fad would ever really replace the phonograph and ham radio.

I don't know whether my own blogging has enhanced or damaged my academic career. I know it's brought more public attention to some of my academic work; I know it's allowed me to respond quickly and effectively to people like David Horowitz, and I've enjoyed debunking some of his more lunatic claims about me — and about liberal professors in general. So far, most of the feedback I've gotten from colleagues has been good, but I've had plenty of detractors, too.

For what it's worth, I try to be reasonably discreet. I don't blog about my department or my colleagues at Penn State, and I don't bring up any confidential committee matters from the Modern Language Association or the American Association of University Professors. I do, however, engage in bloggy banter now and then, and I am not averse to snark and raillery; I also have a silly sense of humor and an abiding love of certain Monty Python skits. Last but not least, some of my blogging is casual and can be self-indulgent: One day I'll have an analysis of the hockey playoffs, the next day a story about the night my band opened for the Ramones, the next day an account of a trip with my younger son, Jamie. But the way I figure it, anyone who's put off by those things probably wouldn't want me as a colleague anyway. And though there are people who consider my blogging a waste of time, my guess is that many of them see writing for newspapers and magazines to be a waste of time as well. As far as they're concerned, I've been wasting my time for more than 15 years now.

Michael Bérubé is a professor of English at Pennsylvania State University at University Park. His blog can be found at http://michaelberube.com