On a recent Sunday in March, Anthea D. Butler, an associate professor of religious studies at the University of Pennsylvania, tweeted more than 30 times about the Oscars as she watched the awards show from her Philadelphia home.
The same day, Jeff E. Nunokawa, a professor of English at Princeton University, published a short literary essay as a “note” on Facebook—his 5,167th such post on the social-networking site. David Albrecht, an accounting professor at La Sierra University, added several LinkedIn connections that day. Robert R. Cargill, an assistant professor of classics and religious studies at the University of Iowa, blogged about a colleague’s recent work.
As professors bring their scholarship and their personalities online, many people in academe are turning their attention to the issue of digital identity. The question, for many scholars, is no longer whether you simply have a digital identity; now it’s a matter of how, and how well, you manage it.
Several years ago, a common refrain among professors was that the line between the digital and the physical had blurred. Today, some scholars say, that line has all but disappeared.
“The digital and the physical are really one and the same for me,” says Mr. Nunokawa, who is publishing an anthology of his more than 5,000 Facebook notes as a book. “I don’t think I could separate the two.”
Terms like brand building and brand management, once relegated to marketing circles and advertising firms, are now commonplace in academe. As professors take to Twitter, Facebook, the blogosphere, and a host of other social-media sites, many questions remain: Should a scholar’s online presence be primarily personal or professional? How should colleges handle academic-freedom issues that arise when professors, particularly junior faculty members, rile up the social-media mobs with a controversial tweet? And for those same junior professors, could a widely read blog post ever carry the weight that a peer-reviewed journal article holds in the tenure-review process?
“We often talk about how the academy will deal with its digital future,” says Reza Aslan, a scholar of religions and an associate professor of creative writing at the University of California at Riverside. “What we really should be talking about is our digital present.”
Mr. Aslan says there are two kinds of academics. “There are those,” he says, “who think of academia as a name in itself. And there are those who use academia as one platform among many platforms to share their ideas and interests with a wider public.”
Mr. Aslan includes himself, along with his faculty colleagues who have also built robust online presences, in the latter category. A decade ago, it may have taken him months to get feedback from more than a few hundred people on a journal article. Today he can access his nearly 60,000 Twitter followers with the push of a button.
Over the summer, Mr. Aslan made national headlines after he sat down for an interview with FoxNews.com’s program Spirited Debate. During the interview, Fox’s religion correspondent, Lauren Green, repeatedly asked Mr. Aslan why he had written Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth (Random House, 2013). In response to a barrage of questions on why Mr. Aslan, who is a Muslim, was interested in Jesus, the professor repeatedly defended his role as a scholar.
Mr. Aslan says he received as much praise as he did social-media attacks from the left and right. His experience underscored what he says is a valuable lesson for scholars with active digital presences: “I learned long ago that it’s a fool’s errand to try to manage one’s digital identity. If that’s something that’s important to you, then you probably have no business being online.”
Mr. Aslan tries to keep his online brand as professional as possible. He is not alone. “The Internet is permanent, and I try never to write down anything that I wouldn’t want everyone on earth to read,” says Mr. Cargill. On his personal blog, Excavator, he posts occasionally about his family, but the blog is devoted almost entirely to his scholarship.
Others, though, say building a personal online brand is essential for any professor who wants to connect with students. Several years ago, Kirsten A. Johnson designed an experiment to find out whether professors with personal Twitter streams would be viewed as more credible by students than professors whose accounts were used strictly for business. Ms. Johnson, an associate professor of communications at Elizabethtown College, found that scholars who were personal scored highest on measures of competence, trustworthiness, and caring—which add up to credibility.
She has used those findings to improve her own online presence. When she recently auditioned for The Voice, a popular television singing competition on NBC, for example, she kept her Facebook network, which includes current and former students, updated on the contest. (She didn’t make it past the first round.)
Regardless of whether scholars tend toward the personal or the professional in building their digital brands, Adam Van Arsdale says it is important for professors to be themselves online. An assistant professor of anthropology at Wellesley College, he recently taught his institution’s first massive open online course. For his final lecture in the MOOC, he recruited his wife and children to help him thank his students. “I didn’t want this to be a fictitious version of myself online,” he says. “I just wanted it to be me.”
In a 2013 report on faculty and social media by Pearson Learning Solutions and the Babson Survey Research Group, some 70 percent of professors surveyed said they used social media in their personal lives. Slightly more than half said they also used social media in their professional lives.
Despite the fervor with which many academics have approached the digital world, there remain many who say they have no interest in building a digital identity.
David J. Williams, a professor of medical illustration at Purdue University’s College of Veterinary Medicine, is among them. He does not know what Twitter is. He thinks he once created a Facebook profile, but he isn’t sure how to find it today. He says he keeps getting requests from colleagues to join LinkedIn, the popular professional-networking site. He wishes they would stop.
Professors’ digital identities “are sort of like billboards,” he says. “It’s like driving down the highway and seeing thousands of billboards for faculty members. That isn’t me.”
Mr. Williams, who is also chair of Purdue’s University Senate, says several factors account for his digital skepticism. One, he says, is his age—he is almost 70. Another is that he is comfortable “just being me,” he says. “I’m comfortable in my own skin. I don’t feel a need to advertise myself to the world.”
Professors’ digital identities “are sort of like billboards,” he says. “It’s like driving down the highway and seeing thousands of billboards for faculty members. That isn’t me.”
Academics like Mr. Williams can be found among the young and the old. Marcus A. Paroske, an associate professor of communication at the University of Michigan at Flint, says he has never been compelled to build an online presence. “I’m sure that I could more fully engage my students personally if I were more cutting-edge in the communication technologies that I use,” says Mr. Paroske, who received his Ph.D. in 2005. “But my personal distaste for it, mainly out of privacy concerns, has kept me away.”
As many academics have embraced social media, some professors have wondered: What role could a junior faculty member’s online presence play in tenure and promotion decisions?
Imagine that two junior faculty members are vying for a tenure appointment. Professor X has an impressive list of traditional academic credentials: dozens of peer-reviewed journal articles, conference presentations, and book chapters. Professor Y has fewer traditional credentials, but he runs an academic blog, where he posts several well-researched, 1,000-word pieces each week for thousands of readers to see.
Who gets the tenure appointment? It depends on whom you ask.
Matthew D. Waite, a professor of practice at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln’s College of Journalism and Mass Communications, hopes that Professor Y would come out on top. Today’s tenure-review process, he says, needs to be more holistic. “There’s very little incentive structure for faculty to have digital identities. For those of us who live our academic lives on the Internet, that’s very discouraging. It needs to change.”
Mr. Williams, of Purdue, disagrees. In his view, listing nontraditional academic credentials on a CV—Twitter followers or total number of blog posts, for example—could count against a junior faculty member down the road. “It might be a negative,” he says, “unless Professor Y could somehow establish to me that having 12,000 people following him on Twitter was due to some special academic endeavor.”
For many professors, building an online presence has
been an avenue to spread their scholarship and drum up interest in their discipline. But there are cautionary tales out there.
In July, shortly after a Florida jury handed down a not-guilty verdict in the Trayvon Martin murder trial, Ms. Butler, the Penn religious-studies scholar, wrote an op-ed essay in the online magazine Religion Dispatches. In an essay about religion and racism in America, she wrote, “I know that this American god ain’t my god. As a matter of fact, I think he’s a white racist god with a problem. More importantly, he is carrying a gun and stalking young black men.”
Ms. Butler later tried to clarify her comments, but the damage was done. A Twitter feeding frenzy erupted. She was in frequent contact with the university police over the next several weeks amid threats to her, and her entire department’s, personal safety.
The social-media fallout from Ms. Butler’s post highlights the pitfalls that can come with having an active, edgy digital identity. “The online minefields are many,” she says. “Sometimes you can step on one, and you have to decide if you’re going to keep walking through or if you’re not. I’d hate to see a junior person lose opportunities to grow in the field, but I’d also hate to see them not get online in the first place. It’s a fine line.”
Some choose to steer clear of the minefield entirely. But others, like Mr. Aslan, the professor interviewed by Fox, say it is worth wading into, if cautiously.
“We as academics spend far too much time talking to ourselves in our dusty basement offices, and far too little time reaching out to the public with our ideas,” he says. “Building an online brand won’t break that mold entirely, but it’s a start.”
