Blogademia

Authors

Craig Saper

Document Type

Article

Abstract

[First paragraph]

Academics, especially in the arts and humanities, have taken to blogs like ducks to water. At the same time, some of these blogs, especially those produced by graduate students and untenured faculty, have opened themselves to charges of wasting time gossiping about colleagues, and wallowing in unprofessional discourse, instead of working on serious scholarship. One blogger told me confidentially,

I just password-protected my blog for the period of my job search after reading this article in the Chronicle of Higher Ed, I actually got in trouble with my senior colleagues last semester for making a posting about a faculty meeting

I just password-protected my blog for the period of my job search after reading this article in the Chronicle of Higher Ed, I actually got in trouble with my senior colleagues last semester for making a posting about a faculty meeting.

Producing a discourse outside the bounds of professional publications and decorum has provoked one senior scholar, on a hiring committee, to note that, "job seekers who are also bloggers may have a tough road ahead, if our committee's experience is any indication"(anonymously quoted in Tribble). Perhaps in response to the tense situation, sites now appear, like academic coach, with the slogan "Earnest exhortations and random tidbits for dissertating grad students, post-doctoral job hunters and tenure-track faculty." The coach's blog, with a hubristic URL, that includes the phrase successful academic, reads like a cross between a training manual for institutional intelligence and an Ann Landers type problem solving forum codifying gossip as self-help. Some, like New Kid on the Hallway, begin with descriptive slogans about the life of an academic.

Partner in a long-distance marriage. Parent to three cats. Educator to the enthusiastic and indifferent alike. Runner on the tenure track. Slave to Haagen Das caramel cone ice cream. Gearing up for year two on tenure-track job #2. Still trying to avoid the bullies and hang out with the cool kids on the academic playground. Still trying to keep things new.

The Kid's site also has a revealing URL, including the phrase "academia in all its glory," that suggests a desire to lay-bare the machinations of academia. Some sites' figurative titles describe their tenuous positions in academia like Academic in Exile: The Little Professor. The Synecdochic Prof, with the slogan Fear and Loathing at Coca-Cola University, wants to tell the particular academic story, about the enormous amount of unrecognized work in reading and evaluating other people's work, usually missing from Vitas and promotion files.

One of the things that I like about academic blogs is that they register the work that academics perform that don't often get noticed. For me, this kind of reading (and writing the reports and comments generated by such reading) is a big part of what I do. For what it's worth, I'm trying to total up what I've read since the semester ended.

Repository Citation

Saper, Craig. "Blogademia." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 6, no. 4, 2006, pp. 1–12. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol6/iss4/8