Blog P.I.

The Chronicle of Higher Education’s latest weekly Chronicle Review section includes a symposium inspired by Yale’s rejection of controversial Middle East scholar Juan Cole, best known for his widely-read blog, Informed Comment.

Conservatives and supporters of Israel launched a campaign to persuade Yale against making the hire, and speculation leans heavily toward that being a decisive factor. He’s not the only professor whose blogging is suspected to have been an issue at review time: Last year, both Daniel Drezner and Jacob Levy were denied tenure at the University of Chicago. But those deliberations are secret, and unless somebody slips up, we’ll never know for sure.

Now the Chronicle brings us the next best thing: an octet of professor-bloggers, Cole included, addressing the question of what impact blogging has on hiring, tenure and academic freedom. It’s now hidden behind their subscription firewall, but you’re in luck: Blog P.I. has read them all and distilled each to the core argument or the best lines, and we’ve reproduced them below:

• Siva Vaidhyanathan, Sivacracy, NYU — “There has never been a better time to be a public intellectual, and the Web is the big reason why. … Who knows whether, without the fame and widespread respect Cole has earned via his blog, he would have been in the running for a position at Yale? We do know that without his blog as a target, the right-wing hit men never would have thought to make an issue out of him. He used to be harmless. Now he is dangerous enough to try to stop. … But Cole’s experience has shown us all just how tenuous academic freedom is when it comes to stuff that really matters. Thank goodness for tenure. Imagine what his critics would do at Michigan if they thought they could drive him away.”
• Glenn Reynolds, Instapundit, Univ. of Tenn. — “Though the academy gives lip service to academic freedom, it’s quite clear that a candidate’s expressed views, and politics generally, are often important factors in hiring or tenure decisions. … One doubts that an admitted member of the Ku Klux Klan would do well … [but] far less controversial beliefs … might well stand in the way of hiring or tenure at many institutions. Expressing such ideas on a blog merely ensures that they are Google-searchable if anyone bothers to check.”

• Daniel Drezner, Daniel W. Drezner, now at Tufts — “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 … [which] 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.”
• Ann Althouse, Althouse, Univ. of Wisc.-Madison — “If you veer away from purely scholarly writing and engage in polemic or satire or elliptical snark about controversial subject matter, you may very well win a widespread audience … [but also] you will be generating the material [critics] can use to try to bring you down. The very fact that you’re a professor is leverage: This person purports to be a scholar, but look at how he writes!”
• J. Bradford DeLong, Brad DeLong’s Semi-Daily Journal, UC-Berkeley — “It’s a brilliant intellectual community, this little slice of the world that is our visible college. You run into people in the hall and the lounge, and you learn interesting things. … [But] I would like a larger college, an invisible college, of more people to talk to, pointing me to more interesting things. … Over the past three years, with the arrival of Web logging, I have been able to add such people to those I bump into — in a virtual sense — every week. … Are our deans impressed? Not so far, but they should be. A lot of a university’s long-run success depends on attracting good undergraduates. Undergraduates and their parents are profoundly influenced by the public face of the university. And these days, a thoughtful, intelligent, well-informed Web logger like Juan Cole or Dan Drezner is an important part of a university’s public face.”
• Michael Bérubé, Le Blog Bérubé, Penn. State — 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. … 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. … Perhaps some colleagues had believed [Drezner and Levy] were spending too much time online and not enough time on research.”
• Erin O’Connor, Critical Mass, Univ. of Penn. — “Had the University of Michigan … sought to suppress [Cole’s] blog, it would have violated his academic freedom. But academic freedom is not freedom from criticism, nor is it freedom from judgment. And deciding whether to hire an academic is very different from continuing to employ one. … Cole’s Internet status as a Middle East expert emanates from his academic position as a Middle East expert; as a public intellectual, he is better known for his blog than his scholarship. In deciding whether to invest in the entire intellectual package Cole represents, Yale could legitimately have considered Informed Comment. The real issue here is how little faith Cole’s defenders have in academic procedure. … There is no threat to academic freedom in vigorous public discussion. There is only freedom itself.”

And in a response submitted after the initial symposium was posted:

• Juan Cole, Informed Comment, Univ. of Mich. — “Despite the First Amendment, which only really protects one from the government, most Americans who speak out can face sanctions from other institutions in society. … That is why most bloggers employed in the private sector are anonymous or started out trying to be so. … The issues facing academics who dissent in public and in clear prose are the same today as they have always been. Maintaining a Web log now is no different in principle from writing a newsletter or publishing sharp opinion in popular magazines in the 1950s. The difference today is that … [m]y Web log is, for the moment, certainly a mass medium.”