First, a warm round of applause for everybody who has been commenting at this site. You turn this work into a memorable conversation.
Second, please let me humbly apologize for the disappearance of the comments to date. Now that Google's Blogger service has implemented backlinks, I have resigned from the HaloScan service I was using in order to consolidate my site management tasks in one place. By switching services, I seem to have omitted existing comments.
Third, I know my posting schedule has been light during the mid-semester crunch. Junior faculty around the country who are also webloggers have been careful with their blogging time, following the denial of tenure to a couple much-admired webloggers, such as Daniel Drezner at the University of Chicago. I should add, though, that I have less cause to fear Dan's particular adventures than some faculty webloggers have. Following his rather distressed post in early October ("So, Friday was a pretty bad day"), I thought to myself that perhaps some universities were less oriented toward dusty journals and more oriented toward the civic engagement and passion for real world communication that Drezner exemplifies. A month later, I was delighted and truly not much surprised when he was offered a position as associate professor at Tufts University, at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy ("So Friday was a pretty good day"). Fletcher has a tenure system, but the Friedman School at Tufts does not. Dan and I have already agreed to go out for a coffee or beer when he gets here. Way to go, Tufts.
Was Drezner's tenure denied because of his blog? I haven't read anything that made that clear.
ReplyDeleteIt's not clear. The discussion has been that perhaps junior faculty weblogs run the risk of striking other faculty colleagues the wrong way, or perhaps they simply take too much time that should instead be spent on refereed articles, or perhaps they do no harm at all.
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