This fall term, Pepperdine international law professor Roger Alford made sure his students gave something back (my take, not his), as he explains at Opinio Juris:
This semester I took Peter Spiro’s suggestion to heart and assigned my international law students to write a Wikipedia entry as a small part of their class requirements. The only limits I put on the students was to pick a topic that was relevant to international law and that was not currently included in Wikipedia (or at most was a stub). The results were quite impressive.
I will not give you the details of each entry to avoid compromising the next phase of the experiment. But essentially they wrote on topics ranging from prominent international law professors and judges, several major decisions of international courts, two Supreme Court decisions, a key aspect of a major environmental law treaty, principles of international law jurisdiction, an undeveloped topic relating to the use of force, a major international investment arbitration issue, and an issue relating to corporate conduct and core labor standards. They wrote the entries in Wikipedia format to maximize the chances that the entries will be accepted by the Wikipedia editors.
First, this is a terrific idea for a course assignment — I wish there had been a Wikipedia when I was in school. Second, this is great news for Wikipedia itself. I’d like to see media outlets that picked up the John Seiganthaler controversy last year run a small feature on this development. Third, this makes a lot more sense than a whole class about Second Life.
Content hat tip: ExMo. Headline hat tip: zefrank.
Following up on the Chronicle of Higher Education symposium Blog P.I. summarized on Saturday, participating blog Sivacracy (but not participating blogger Siva Vaidhyanathan) zings fellow participanting blog Instapundit good on the lacking substance of many an Insta-post. It doesn’t qualify as “shortering,” but it is pithy enough to be unsummarizable.
Zingee Glenn Reynolds is actually on vacation this week, so the post’s author, Univ. of SC prof Ann Bartow, will actually see a rising word-to-link count thanks to his guest bloggers over the next few days. Which may only reinforce her point.
In Reynolds’ defense, dashed-off posts may be the unavoidable result of “instant punditry.” Still, “SURELY THE END TIMES ARE UPON US: Ana Marie Cox is now Time.com’s Washington Editor” hardly qualifies as “punditry.” And if Reynolds’ law school dean truly thinks his blog counts as “scholarship,” let alone legal scholarship, the academy might have bigger problems than mere blogging.
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.”
Continue reading ‘A Million To Juan’
L’Affaire GoldFrisch III: We All Knew This Was Coming
This post was co-written with Tim Dreier of The One-Handed Economist; both of us are graduates of the University of Oregon in Eugene, where Deb Frisch once taught and now lives. As a matter of full disclosure, we’ve had a few scrapes with Frisch of our own, she having trolled the blog of a student magazine we both once edited. That’s covered below. For previous Blog P.I. coverage, see here and here.
The saga of Deborah Frisch, longtime comment troll and all-around kook, took another troubling, if not exactly unforeseeable turn in the last 48 hours. As far as we know, she is now the first troll of the political blogosphere to face criminal charges relating to such activity. On August 21 she was arraigned in an Oregon courtroom on charges of stalking and telephone harassment (PDF). The docket can be found at the link preceding, but is captured below for your viewing pleasure:
According to Don’t Hire Deb, a blog devoted to documenting Frisch’s outrageous behavior while depriving her own site of traffic, Frisch posted either $4,000 bail or $400 to a bondsman, and must reappear in court on September 25th. As is speculated in DHD comments and elsewhere, this likely stems not from Frisch’s well-publicized Jeff Goldstein-related misadventures (to the best of our knowledge she’s never called him) but rather similar interactions with former colleagues at University of Oregon (where she was denied tenure in 1994 and served as an adjunct until July 2001) including calling, emailing, and a quickly-removed post to her blog.
Just a few months ago, Frisch was an obscurity known only to the blogs she trolled, such as our own Oregon Commentator and Steve Verdon’s Deinonychus Antirrhopus. But at this point, she is undergoing the most severe public self-destruction we’ve seen yet. And when you consider that includes Jason Leopold and other, better-known individuals, that’s saying something. Academic John Lott and attorney Glenn Greenwald may be guilty of sock-puppetry, but that’s bush-league compared to Deb’s prolonged breakdown. Michael A. Bellesiles? A liar and a hack, but so far as we know he never ended up in jail for his antics. And no, having his Bancroft Prize revoked is not the same thing. Hell, Jayson Blair managed to spin his utter fecklessness into a book deal, as did “fabulist” Stephen Glass. Frisch, though, is in a class of her own: a vitriolic sociopath whose delusion knows almost no bounds.
For those of you just tuning in, Deb made a name for herself in the rightosphere by making altogether disturbing, one might say John Mark Karr-esque comments about Goldstein’s family. Within hours of
Goldstein having publicized her identitybeing called out by Goldstein’s readers, Frisch resigned from a Univ. of Ariz. teaching job, thereby pre-empting a probable termination. The story got some press play in the Tucson Citizen, Eugene Register-Guard and Inside Higher Ed. Goldstein sought and obtained a restraining order against her, and that might have been the end of it.Instead, her online behavior became even more erratic: Posting fake suicide notes, angering colleagues on an academic listserv, claiming to pursue legal action against Goldstein, Ace of Spades HQ and Matthew Heidt of Blackfive. And most strangely, attacking the folks at lefty satire blog Sadly, No!, well known for its disdain of Goldstein, and which had previously belittled the Frisch controversy. More recently she has gone so far as to heckle Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden (whom she had claimed an interest in working for) and, apparently, now managed to stalk and harass former colleagues in Oregon.
Commenters at DHD, Patterico’s Pontifications and Ace of Spades HQ have posited that the cyclical nature of Deb’s “teh crazy” implies a drinking problem. Whether a joke or conventional wisdom, the notion has has gotten so much play that after the first of Deb’s bizarre attacks, the S,N! regulars mentioned her drinking whilst tearing her a new one:
Three days later, Frisch was in a Lane County courthouse.
Over the course of a few short weeks Frisch has gone from employed university adjunct to unemployable Internet sociopath with a rap sheet. It’s one thing to troll a few right-wing sites for fun and attention, but another matter entirely to make thinly veiled threats about a man’s child, imply that he’s a pedophile, and then proceed to alienate essentially everyone in the blogosphere and more than a few in what we might call “meatspace.”
If we didn’t know any better, we’d call the whole thing unbelievable. But having followed the unfolding Frisch fiasco, it’s more than believable. It was an inevitability.
Update: Kevin Hayden from The American Street, in the comments:
This sounds right to us; far from being her only target, Goldstein was just the one with the biggest soapbox. We won’t join in the clinical depression/alcoholism debate, and we certainly hope we don’t give the impression of gleefully piling on. Fortunately, the only person likely to be hurt in all this is Frisch herself — alas, not so fortunate for her.
Update 2: An interesting possibility raised in a non-political message board, found via our referrer logs:
The poster is based in Kentucky, while Frisch was charged under Oregon laws, so we’re not sure if this is applicable or not. We haven’t had a chance to look into Oregon’s cyber-stalking laws, so we don’t know whether this is the case in California’s Canada. If anybody knows the answer, please let us know.
Update 3: Having perused Oregon’s H.B. 2918, a cyberstalking law passed in 2001 and a (perhaps too) brief summary of S.B. 1067 relating to “telephonic harrassment,” it’s our guess that this charge actually does pertain to actual use of telephones. On the other hand, IANAL, and neither is Tim.
Update 4: John Dunshee, a self-described Poor Schmuck, offers a clarification of Oregon bail procedure in the comments:
This is news to me, having never been arrested and only going through Lane County’s court system after getting caught at a university neighborhood bar with a fake ID. But I can affirm that Oregon does like its jobs programs: For a whole summer during college, I pumped gas at a Portland-area Chevron. At most gas stations in Oregon and New Jersey and nowhere else, self-service is illegal.