So I'm just easing out of travel mode and gearing up to get full-on back-to-business and decide to put things off for another hour by getting caught up on online reads. Mistake. A few sites in, and the Chronicle of Higher Education (something I've been peeking in on since I started rounding the bend towards completion) stopped me dead in my tracks. The headline read: "Bloggers Need Not Apply," written by a pseudo who tells of sitting on faculty search committees who, after shortlisting applicants, checked their blogs - and subsequently crossed them off the list of potential candidates. Here's a little snippet to get your blood a-pumpin:
You may think your blog is a harmless outlet. You may use the faulty logic of the blogger, "Oh, no one will see it anyway." Don't count on it. Even if you take your blog offline while job applications are active, Google and other search engines store cached data of their prior contents. So that cranky rant might still turn up.The conclusion to the triteness reads:
The content of the blog may be less worrisome than the fact of the blog itself. Several committee members expressed concern that a blogger who joined our staff might air departmental dirty laundry (real or imagined) on the cyber clothesline for the world to see. Past good behavior is no guarantee against future lapses of professional decorum.
We've seen the hapless job seekers who destroy the good thing they've got going on paper by being so irritating in person that we can't wait to put them back on a plane. Our blogger applicants came off reasonably well at the initial interview, but once we hung up the phone and called up their blogs, we got to know "the real them" -- better than we wanted, enough to conclude we didn't want to know more.Yeah. Learning that your possible new-colleague is a real live person must be a terrible thing.
Now, I could go on a mad rant here, but (fortunately, as I don't want to bust the post-trip zen) others have already started the fist-shaking. Bitch PhD (with header: "This right here is why I don't blog under my real name") led me to a tide of others worth reading: Planned Obsolescence is brilliantly appalled and worth a read; One Man's Opinion is also a good skim; as is "Blogs and the Market," ABD (almost bloody done), D. Drezner's warning to grad students and untenured faculty, as well as Jess' Obsessing. Acephalous can take you the next step further on the tour of responses, a route worth wobbling through:
Because anonymous or not, the almost instant response of working academics to an article published in the Chronicle is the very reason more academics ought to be blogging, not evidence of why more shouldn't.The responses are all over the proverbial map.
Like we soon-to-be-pee-aych-dees don't already have enough to worry about.
***
Scarily enough, today (for the first time since I started this little experiment) I actually considered making steenblogen public - if only to heighten my already rampant obsession with tracker statistics (*shudder*). Decision made. If a committee wants to look for dirt on me in the form of a scandalously human weblog, the bastards should have to work for it. And if they do, then I probably shouldn't want the gig anyway.
9 comments:
Oh dear. I guess we should stop writing altogether. You never know when a letter written to an ex may get into the wrong hands and screw us forever. I wonder what would happen if they had a look at our cd collections (horrors!) But, if faculty search committees are intent upon only hiring those with the same views as themselves (and we all know how completely even handed and just search committees are) I think a boycott of the so called academic premise may be in order. I am still naive enough to believe in the power and necessity of thinking for oneself and (again...oh the horror) not being afraid of self-expression. If universities insist upon churning out a by-product instead of a productive mind, frankly, I think many inspired individuals are better off finding an alternative source of 'higher' education.
That has to be a lawsuit waiting to happen. And an exciting example of an institution that anyone with any sort of forethought would run screaming from. "Quaint Old College" indeed. Q.E.D. Now I am in industry rather than academia but I have always felt that if a company doesn't want to hire me because I don't fit into their little drone model then by golly that is a company that I don't want to work for.
I see that article as laughable and luddite. And self-contradictory too - I would imagine that someone who has just gone through a process in which they learned vital information through these prospective candidates' blogs would shut up and let others fall into the same trap. Or would he rather have hired the wrong person, let them get tenure and then had to suffer through a few decades of misery? And such misery too, imagine that, someone applying for a liberal art position who has a fascination with technology! Goodness me, what a catastrophe that would be. Doesn't poor Professor Turbo Geek know that the definition of a renaissance man was etched in stone around the time of Newton's dabbling with Alchemy? For shame.
Underhanded academics are always willing to dig up dirt on candidates they don't like, and blogs just make it slightly more convenient. The worst of the bunch, are flat out prepared to lie slanderously to protect their little empires from a perceived threat. However, I suspect that you have ten times more to fear from corporate organizations, and it is public critical thinking in relationship to the private corporate systems that have the narrowest protection of intellectual freedom in our society.
One should always approach the internet as public sphere, and be suitably vigilant, in terms of authorship, and connections to professional acheivements. Its a bit like not getting dressed for the leather bar in your office, as you leave work. (depending on what department you are in, of course!)
It comes down to how you wish to define your various existences on the web. Some [like myself] maintain various levels of security, and multiple personalities, and keep the private community stuff distinctly separate from the pseudo-professional.
One important question about the specific case is, did the candidate submit this as part of their dossier? Was it on a website that was specifically included for deliberation? I don't think it would be a very good idea to include photocopies from your diary as part of a package of job materials!
On the other hand, some tenured academics who sit on hiring committees, blog themselves, and are very sympathetic to privacy considerations, and would never dream of misappropriating the thoughts that bloggers are generous enough to share with the rest of the world.
Blogging is a unique and undefined activity, in the way that it moves fluidly between diaristic and journalistic modes of practice. The biggest issue here is the definition and right to anonymity in virtual communication. Which is why I remain,
anon.
(& there are occasional conspiracies for good, too!)
Underhanded academics are always willing to dig up dirt on candidates they don't like, and blogs just make it slightly more convenient. The worst of the bunch, are flat out prepared to lie slanderously to protect their little empires from a perceived threat. However, I suspect that you have ten times more to fear from corporate organizations, and it is public critical thinking in relationship to the private corporate systems that have the narrowest protection of intellectual freedom in our society.
One should always approach the internet as public sphere, and be suitably vigilant, in terms of authorship, and connections to professional acheivements. Its a bit like not getting dressed for the leather bar in your office, as you leave work. (depending on what department you are in, of course!)
It comes down to how you wish to define your various existences on the web. Some [like myself] maintain various levels of security, and multiple personalities, and keep the private community stuff distinctly separate from the pseudo-professional.
One important question about the specific case is, did the candidate submit this as part of their dossier? Was it on a website that was specifically included for deliberation? I don't think it would be a very good idea to include photocopies from your diary as part of a package of job materials!
On the other hand, some tenured academics who sit on hiring committees, blog themselves, and are very sympathetic to privacy considerations, and would never dream of misappropriating the thoughts that bloggers are generous enough to share with the rest of the world.
Blogging is a unique and undefined activity, in the way that it moves fluidly between diaristic and journalistic modes of practice. The biggest issue here is the definition and right to anonymity in virtual communication. Which is why I remain,
anon.
(& there are occasional conspiracies for good, too!)
Sorry about duplicate posting - its the coffee!
heres a great link:
http://www.eff.org/bloggers/
I love a rally!!
eff.org is interesting...but so american - I wonder what the deal is for the Canadian context? cyberspace may traverse borders, but law doesn't...
Since so much of domestic (canadian) law flows from international agreements & thus "obligations for domestic law policy of signatory member nations", there is an erosion of autonomy for formulating law that reflects true national will. This is especially true in broadcasting, intellectual property & copyright.
I think that looking at the EFF offers a good critical perspective on the results of the DMCA implementation (& the Sonny Bono copyright expiration extensions). Especially as our own parliament considers and ultimately implements its own corporate friendly version in the next 18 months. (all in the name of the artists, naturally). In the states, copyright is not held by the federal gov't, but in canada it is held by the "crown" for a period of 50 years.
Fun trivia: Apparently Sonny is a member of the church of scientology, which has aggresively sought to limit public scrutiny of its religious documents, prefering instead to charge small fortunes for the privilege of learning about Xenu & silence detractors through copyright/trademark/IP lawsuits. Stuff like this, you just can't make up.
"In the states, copyright is not held by the federal gov't, but in canada it is held by the crown for a period of 50 years."
Should have clarified. (Refers to works produced by federal or provincial gov't or its agents in the line of duty, (in spite of being in essence publicly commissioned).
It is actually quite a murky area, but recent legislative indicators suggest a shift towards implimenting provisions that favour those media groups that can afford really really really expensive lawyers.
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