I’ve been thinking more about Farrell’s Chronicle article on academic blogging. I say yes, yes, yes to everything he wrote, particularly his idea that blogging is an act of subversion undermining traditional hierarchies that define university life. I just want to add one more thought.
A friend of mine with a PhD in Renaissance Literature went on the job market last year. He was at an interview at a top ranked university. The academic interview process is just hell on wheels – a day long ordeal of job talks and lunch chitchat. Anyway, the interview was going just fine. He was getting a lot of encouraging smiles and winks from the faculty and he knew his talk went well. Then, during dinner, he started a conversation about Medieval literature. Gasp. It was a major gaff to talk about a subject outside of his expertise and he didn’t get the job.
With the stakes so high in academia, everybody is afraid of making errors. Ideas are turned around so slowly in academia with lengthy review processes and multiple cross checks. There is something very brave about putting out half baked ideas on a blog, some of which might turn into something more baked and some of which will turn into nothing. It’s just part of the creative process, that has been lost in the university.
Today, I sing the praises of the half baked idea.
Apt. 11d 
It was a major gaff to talk about a subject outside of his expertise and he didn’t get the job.
?? It would be pretty stupid of academia to have disincentives to become interested in fields outside your expertise. Cross-pollination of ideas is a great way to spur progress.
And I’m reading a short novel (assigned for my econ night class) where a character is up for tenure, and they mentioned that the Promotion & Tenure board doesn’t even interview the candidates, making their department head speak on their behalf. If true, that’s pretty stupid as well, emphasizing politics more than it already would be.
Isn’t academia supposed to be made up of smart people? If so why’d they design such systems that seem so inflexible? Academia sounds less and less attractive to me the more I learn about it.
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Academic hiring is mysterious and open to any number of criticisms. But I find myself a bit skeptical of this story. I’ve been to a lot of interview dinners in my day, and most are partly a chance to ask more questions stemming from the talk, partly a chance for the candidate to ask questions, and partly social chit-chat. I can’t think of a hiring decision where the dinner was in any way definitive in the hiring decision. Now if the candidate ended up in a fight over Medieval literature, then maybe it would matter. More likely, I think, is that they were not hired for some other, possibly equally questionable, reason. But since decisions are shrouded in secrecy, the system gives rise to rumors and unfoudned gussses.
My other quibble is about multiple cross checks. Maybe it’s not a quibble, but an observation. I am finding in my current work that little or no effort is ever put into checking, verifying, replicating other people’s work. So while academic publishing is indeed slower than some glaciers, the result is not, sadly, a correspondingly high level of accuracy.
Of course saying this at an interview dinner might be enough to keep one from getting a job. Oh, and I love the half-baked idea, even more than I love the half-baked cookie!
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Certain universities do have this attitude that the field is divided into discrete sections of which different topics you may never partake since they “belong” to that field’s specialist.
Makes me very happy I teach at a small enough institution that they’re happy with anything I suggest teaching. I’ve been able to teach on topics from the Ancient Near East to World War II without the headache that a grad school colleague of mine had finding that her interest in teaching a seminar on a small European country 1400-1500 was considered to be poaching a colleague’s turf since he had the exclusive teaching rights to the history of that small European country from 1100-1450.
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Like RCinProv, I’m a bit skeptical. Not of your pal’s veracity, but that Getting Medieval was responsible for not getting the job. It was probably something else entirely, and because of some weird reaction someone had, it was the only possibility your pal could think of.
Hell, it could have been my department! I was on the committee that hired a Renaissance person last year. I don’t think we ever told the other candidates why we didn’t hire them (and it’s certainly not my place to do so).
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The Medieval friend was told that stepping outside of his field was definitely a gaff, though it is possible that other factors were involved with his failed interview.
In other academic news, I’m furious that Dan Drezner was denied tenure. The guy had a 19 page CV. He worries that blogging might have had contributed to his denial.
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Yeah. And I’ve seen someone mention that Jacob Levy was also denied.
I think there’s a pretty eery parallel with SCOTUS nominations. The incentives are not to pick the most qualified candidates, but the ones less likely to provoke strong negative reactions and thus are good at hiding information. Not exactly the quality one wants at all in an ideal justice or academic.
Of course, does anybody think academia is a meritocracy? I have to imagine tenure mucks up incentives a whole lot in and of itself. Our political system, of course, is even worse.
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Yes, Jacob Levy was denied tenure at Chicago. He was kind enough to fill me in on some of the details via e-mail; suffice to say, so far as he can tell (and he seems to have a pretty clear grasp on what went down, far more than any of us would, anyway), it wasn’t at all related to blogging–which he had done very little of for a year or so, in any case. Not that that makes their decision any more sensible.
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I am very worried that all this online discussion of Levy’s, Carroll’s, and Drezner’s rejected tenure is going to screw up their chances of lining up another job. Future employers might not want the hassle of the online community peering over their shoulder.
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Yes, Jacob Levy was denied tenure at Chicago.
Sheesh. Well, regardless of whether blogging had anything to do with anything, the odds of me applying to U of C just took a big hit.
Not that they’ll care (I haven’t even taken the GREs yet), but I figure weighting the quality of faculty blogs is my small part to help incentivize academia to not view the Internet like the RIAA views the Internet. Gosh, you’d think academia would be smarter than the RIAA…
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