This is why my political blog is carefully anonymous, while the occasionally-updated blog under my own name is educational, discrete, and covers only issues relevant to my profession.

Even with that, Mr. Tribble's comments give me something to think about.

LOL, "do not hire anyone ever again." Yup, that about sums it up.

Increasingly, academia comes across as a stereotypical small town ruled by Mr and Mrs Pecksniff and their friends. Why would anyone want to spend time there?

As a recently completed graduate student & a job-seeker, I plead guilty as charged.

One looking for academic or professional positions should not place anything on their blogs which they can not reasonably defend.

Outside of that one message I have to wholeheartedly agree with DD's #1 piece of advice completely.

One would think that any hiring committee would be interested in creative/honest people who are unafraid to lay it on the line for all to see.

I do believe jealousy may play a part as well. I am sure that Dan could post one article on his site and reach more people in one week than the collective lifetime works of others.

As always, IMHO.

Everyone worried about this should add to their template some simple html that will prevent google and archive.org from saving their posts should they decide to delete the entire blog later. You can also ask archive.org to delete all references (realiability uncertain) or manually enter posts for deletion into google's archives. I wiped out the previous pseudonymous blog this way, and the new one has never been archived, so I can pull the plug and walk away at any time.

David Foster wonders why anyone would want to
spend time in academia.

Well, if you are a far-left extremist you will
find many who openly share your political views
here. Not so in the "real world" of commerce.

From a programming/doing things perspective,
the problems and issues you get to resolve are
fascinating. Vastly more interesting than
re-writing the 1,305th version of "an important"
report for yet another operating entity.

This is why I wait with blogging until I have finished my PhD...

Erm, I wouldn't assume that such attitudes are restricted to academia. The corporate world is quite well acquainted with the desire to restrict it's employees public speech to what conforms with the companies image.

Are Blogs the natural evolution of the scholarly journal for the ADD generation?

I suspect this has to do far more with human nature. In many things, when we lack information, we assume the best. Don't know his political views: they're probably rational (i.e. my own). Don't know about his home life: probably reasonable (i.e. like my own), etc.

Essentially, any nonessential extra information that will inform someone's opinion of you is very likely to *decrease* their opinion of you, unless you're *completely* compatible.

It works like that in politics as well. Don't know a candidate's position about something: we assume that it's close to our own. A candidate who lays out his opinion about everything has lost points to the candidate who only speaks in generalities.

Of course, once you know someone well, differences are not such a black mark. But if you only have a short while, then you really want to limit the information to only what you know will go over well.

Of course, there's always the *chance* that you will click with an interviewer on something so that it exceeds their generic expectations, so if one likes to gamble, you can always expose oneself, but as a general rule, I'd avoid it.

"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...."

As a non-academic academic, I find this bit of confession troubling. I thought we always assume the people we work with are not going to suddenly turn on us. This expressed fear seems entirely unreasonable, if not a little paranoid. As I see it, you could imagine even those people who are required by the terms of their employment to not have a blog, could still complain, perhaps even with justice.

It seems to me I've been compartmentalized in my life, a fact that has troubled me. And so, to encourage myself to take responsibility, I put my name on my posts and on my blog.

I thought you always suppose that the stuff you write, even in a letter, if ill tempered, thoughtless, or cruel, for example, might hurt someone. If not sooner then later. And I would have thought this caution would inform anyone's blogging.

The fact that you might discuss your personal problems would seem to be of no interest to a hiring commitee. If someone found a box of some candidate's love or hate letters, and brought them in because they contained juicy gossip, should we expect "Ivan Tribble" to factor them into the hiring evaluation? If they were, I'd say the department itself should get some offline counseling.

I wouldn't take this piece by Ivan as a good argument against blogging.

As a computer scientist, I especially appreciated Tribble's remark, "...we can't afford to have our new hire ditching us to hang out in computer science after a few weeks on the job." His department certainly sounds like one that asks for ditching.

i know this is somewhat off the subject, but did anyone notice that Jeffrey Sachs has a G* blog going. dan, you should post on this.
www.ft.com/sachsblog

What crap. He could have condensed it to a single sentence: "Given information of no predictive value regarding future behavior, we nonetheless reject candidates out of fear that, should the candidate behave inappropriately, we'll still be blamed." Academic freedom, indeed.

But the bloggers here sound like Darwin award winners. It's nothing new to know not to blog under your own name where this could affect your job prospects. How did flakes like these make it so far in the selection process -- they were semi-finalists, selected over hundreds. I have more thoughts here.

I think I detect the usual academic snobbery from the old guard in the academy. It is obvious that many are reluctant to give up their "gate-keeper" roles although they are being steamrolled by the openess of bloggers.

If such scholars were more open, perhaps we wouldn't see reports such as this July 10, 2005 Associated Press article that says: "Allegations of misconduct by U.S. researchers reached record highs last year as the Department of Health and Human Services received 274 complaints — 50 percent higher than 2003 and the most since 1989 when the federal government established a program to deal with scientific misconduct."

The article by AP National Writer Martha Mendoza said, "Research suggests this is but a small fraction of all the incidents of fabrication, falsification and plagiarism. In a survey published June 9 in the journal Nature, about 1.5 percent of 3,247 researchers who responded admitted to falsification or plagiarism. (One in three admitted to some type of professional misbehavior."

Those of us who blog, whether academic or otherwise, are subject to instant scrutiny and criticism. If you are a plagiarist, it will be immediately known. On the other hand, I can understand the reluctance of the gatekeepers,and those seeking their approval for entry into the academic fort, to allow themselves to be vetted based on what they shared with the world rather than only with their peers.

A simple question? What consequential problem has any blogging solved? It seems that the Very Vast majority of "blogging" are statements and positions in which commentors simply stage a forum slanted to suit their own positions and invite comments to support them. An opposing position will find hordes of mercenaries upon them to tear them to shreds. Is blogging a way to outshout others in writing? I have purused many sites, and most of it is just boring debate from people who are not in any position to make any difference about anything. Does George Bush care that blogging exists? Does he even know what it is? Does anyone in high public office care? This country isn't educated enpugh to understand the language or interested enough in the activity to care. They will still go to the polls and elect some dummy that the major political parties front; like the one that is now potentially the most dangerous singular man in the world. Carefull disect the last five years of this presidential administration. There are authoratative bloggers who are quite satisfied with all that has transpired under this person, who looks like a deer in headlights when he has to say something not previously written by someone else. I cannot believe he has any ideas of his own; that he is surrounded by equally inept and partisan people and the next three years will prove it to even the blindfolded and earplugged conservatives...although there will be no admissions. Blog all you want. Your debate is unheard by people who have the power to affect change.

This is actually a far more interesting and subtle problem than "Ivan" implies. It's part of the question of how we consider a candidate's personal life in the application process. Of course, there are aspects of their personal lives (such as marital status) that are illegal to consider, but in the hiring committees I've been on it's has usually been considered unprofessional to consider a job candidate's personal life even as evidence of personality relevant to job performance.

But that attitude was probably based on an expectation that one's private life will remain private, or at least local. I would think that if a candidate had a national TV show or newspaper column, that would have been discussed, but, of course, it never came up. Now, as Dan indicates, anyone can put their views before the world in a matter of minutes. Does this make it more legitimate to discuss a candidate’s personal life? Are only the topics of an existing blog fair game (an existing blog indicates an existing interest in presenting one’s views on a subject to the world.)?

I think the best advice for grad students is to keep their professional and personal lives as separate as possible. Using different names (I just use different versions of my name) is probably a good practice. It would be nice if every hiring committee (and colleague) kept your professional, political, and personal life separate. But it’s tough to expect that if you mix them up on your web site or blog.

I don't think we should take seriously the suggestion that across the board, the wouldbe job seeker would be wise not to blog. I'm a grad student at a small, unranked department in Nebraska. How am I supposed to network without my blog? It is my only contact with the outside world. I doubt that my situation is all that different from the vast majority of phil grad students. Maybe they shouldn't describe in juicy details their arrests or plots against members of their committees, but they have to do something to impress potential employers and it seems a well run blog is one way to do that.

I saw this on Drum, and here's what I posted there:

I would posit that many people who are paid to know better haven't exactly thought through blogging. Online outline for original expression is great, but the blog ethos of "skim facts, form opinion, write blog post" is not necessarily compatible with academia. Nor is it the way that non-published writing has to be. But that's what the connotation of "blogging" is, so people just walk into that trap.

Put another way: 10 years ago in school, I would have loved just to be able to skim the webpages of all the professors to see what they were currently researching on a daily basis. But if they were posting in the Winer-winger blog fashion, it would have mostly been a waste of time

Thanks for the post. "The default assumption you should make is that the academy has a lot of people who share the Tribble worldview of the blogosphere."

I agree. I also have thought very carefully about this issue. In the end, I decided I'd rather take a stab at "full disclosure" and blog under my own name. I'll just have to see how things go...

nyhan will blow this mold for polisci.

Bob_Rogers - Good points. I wonder what exactly Tribble's search committee thought it was looking for when it started Googling candidates' names. I somewhat doubt it was strictly to explore their academic background, since that's usually available via vitaes, transcripts, and journal searches.

Ideally the search committee may want to stick to strictly academic guidelines and leave personality entirely out of it, but that's not how it works a lot of the time; one of the reasons for both the formal interviews and for more informal gatherings while a candidate is in town is to reassure the faculty that a prospective hire is someone with whom they'll feel comfortable. So, it seems like avoiding blogging is just trying to obscure one's real nature, at least until you get the job, which is a dishonest (if canny) way to go about things IMO. To be sure, exercising discretion over what one puts out for public consumption is good advice, but that's true generally, not just for academics.

Another thing: should there be a "statute of limitations" where anything a person says before age 18 or 21, or before they get their B.A., needs to be considered verboten for search committees? There's a lot of foolish stuff which people say while still growing up, but the Internet assures that a lot of that is being preserved in some form even years or decades later. It seems like there should be guidelines for what aspects of online activity should be considered 'valid' for consideration and which aren't. There's precedent for this in not considering things like marital status, sexual orientation, etc. in candidate selection.

I tried, unsuccessfully, to trackback to this post. I have some thoughts about the subject here.

"Past good behavior is no guarantee against future lapses of professional decorum.... "

Could that not be true of ANY situation, outside of bloggage even? I mean, what about the gung-ho grantgetter who (it turns out) has burnt himself out in grad school or postdoc, and never lifts a finger to do research once he has the job?

Or what about the person who, let's say, conducts serial affairs with students - wouldn't be a clue of that in the interview process (unless they happened to leer openly at several attractive undergrads coming down the hall)

What about the person who comes off as calm, meek, and well-mannered in interview but turns out to have major anger-management problems under the stress of an ordinary semester?

Sure, some of this could come out in the references, but it's not really that likely to - people cherry pick their references and choose people who reasonably will give them a good review.

I really think that that blanket statement above reveals Tribble's basic distrust of humanity - "Ohhh, everyone is strange and bad, how can we possibly find another paragon like myself for the department?"

Feh.

I've served on several search committees, and based on the sheer volume of applicants, I was doing well to get through all the "official" application materials they sent - I'd have never thought to Google their name - not only would that have taken even more time, but frankly, would have felt like spying in their trashcan to see if they ate all their vegetables or if they lived off of McDonald's and Oreos...

I have been glad to see this topic attacked with energy in blog-dom. I've been a writer for over twenty years and a teacher that long (adjunct, economically challenged, productive). I've been blogging for about six weeks. I think that there is much potential creative benefit for bloggers. The judgments about candidates' blogs presented in the article sounded like rationalizations to weed out. Many people, shy or outspoken, are drawn to this medium. It is a valid way to communicate, to think out loud.

My son is still a student and I have just decided to advise him not to blog unless he does it pseudonymously

People applying for jobs are often googled. If you're in private industry, don't post left-wing opinions. If you're aiming at an academic position, don't post right-wing opinions. It may well be used against you in connection with that ridiculously vague notion of "collegiality". I don't know how often this happens, but I've seen it happen.