Hello, my name is Ernie Jeff, and I'm an academic blogger.

It looks like the ever-increasing tendency for academics to loudly proclaim their opinions on, you know, real life and stuff has hit another free-speech snag: Doug Gillette's political blog, as well as his comments on another politics blog, may run afoul of state election laws, since he posted his comments from work, using state-owned equipment. Doug is an editor at the creative services department of the University of Alabama, where I reckon they don't hold much truck with card-carryin' pinko comyoonist libral flag-berners and such.

Ahem.

The Gillette case started a long distributed discussion on various academic blogs about academic blogging, and anonymous acadmic blogging in particular. Naturally, everyone and their mother-in-law seems to have an opinion on whether posting under a nom-du-blogue is a "legitimate" academic activity and what motivates academics to post pseudonymously. Rather than linking to every relevant post, since reading them all would be is about as productive as reading the minutes of a typical long-winded faculty meeting, I'll just point to a few highlights by ~profgrrrrl~, Elizabeth Carnell, Bitch, Ph.D., Steven Krause (2 3 4), and a cast of thousands.

<soapbox>
Personally, I think the question "Why are there so many (anonymous) academic blogs?" has very little to do with academia per se. It's just that academics are, by both nature and nurture, opinionated about stuff. We get paid to have opinions. We're used to standing in front of a (not entirely willing) audience several times a week and preaching the gospel of Ontological Realism, or The Battle of Hastings, or Voronoi Diagrams, or what have you, despite the knowledge that most of the audience could(n't) care less.

And we read. A lot. And we write. A lot. It's our job. We like to think we're good at it.

And like everyone else, we're drawn to people like ourselves, with similar experiences. Most academics have several anecdotes in common:

• The Clueless Professor Down the Hall
• The New Campus Computer System That Never Ever Works
• Endless Fretting About Getting Into Grad School/Passing Quals/Finishing My Thesis/Getting a Job/Publishing My Book/Getting Tenure
• The State Legislature Who Couldn't Pass a Budget So We Couldn't Hire TAs
• My Nightmare About Forgetting to Write a Final Exam
• The Student Who Cried Because She Got a B- Instead of a B
• Dear God, Some of These Students Couldn't Write/Program/Reason Their Way Out of a Wet Paper Bag with a Map and a Sherpa
• The White Frat Kid Who Dresses Up Like an Indian and Dances Around at Halftime Embarrasing Us Academics (Who Don't Understand the Whole Football-Team-As-University-Identity Thing Anyway) By Making Us Look Less Than Completely Committed to Cultural Diversity and That's Why Our English Department Sucks.

Okay, maybe that last one's a bit specific. But you get the idea.

Anonymity adds a nice comfortable shell to hide behind while scratching the reading, writing, and ranting itches. It provides a simple way to distinguish between the professional personas we present in our papers and lectures—almost always under the names our parents gave us—and the public comments we make about our lives and worries as mere human beings. A pseudonym allows the author to freely opine about matters outside their professional sphere without accidentally sullying their reputation among students, colleagues, deans, and oh yes, admissions and tenure committees.

As Elizabeth Carnell points out beautifully, the fear of professional reprisal may not be reasonable, but it is plausible. It's like wearing a tie to a CS faculty interview: It seems sort of silly, but lots of people do it anyway. Everybody know that you probably won't be wearing a tie on the job if you become a professor. Not wearing a tie will have no impact on your chances of getting an offer, at least in good departments. There's really no reason to do it other than misguided tradition. On the other hand, if not wearing a tie will make you nervous that everyone is wondering why you're not wearing a tie—or if you just like wearing a tie—you should wear a tie.

You can always burn it later, when you get tenure.
</soapbox>

Comments

Quite the furore.. as for me, I avoid political commentary (a) because everyone does it
but also (b) because I am not a citizen and don't want any trouble with Father A :). Having a pseudonymous blog might have helped, but I don't trust computer security enough to feel like I couldn't be tracked down.

paranoid ? maybe... but oh well....

[Jeff Erickson]

Paranoid? Maybe. But that doesn't mean you're wrong!