Scholars Who Blog

The soapbox of the digital age draws a crowd of academics

Is this a revolution in academic discourse, or is it CB radio?

In one form or another, that question inevitably arises in conversations

with scholars who have taken up the habit of writing Web logs, or “blogs.” Some have started blogging in order to muse aloud about their research. Others want to polish their chops at opinion-writing for nonacademic audiences. Still others have more urgent and personal reasons. (“The black dogs of depression are snarling at my feet,” reads the first entry of one scholar’s blog.)

It’s perilous to generalize, but the typical blog entry comments on -- and links to -- a news article or an entry on someone else’s blog. Most scholars’ blogs allow their readers to post short comments of their own.

In their skeptical moments, academic bloggers worry that the medium smells faddish, ephemeral. But they also make a strong case for blogging’s virtues, the foremost of which is freedom of tone. Blog entries can range from three-word bursts of sarcasm to carefully honed 5,000-word treatises. The sweet spot lies somewhere in between, where scholars tackle serious questions in a loose-limbed, vernacular mode.

Blogging also offers speed; the opportunity to interact with diverse audiences both inside and outside academe; and the freedom to adopt a persona more playful than those generally available to people with Ph.D.'s.

No wonder, then, that scholarly blogs are sprouting like mushrooms. A directory maintained by Henry Farrell, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Toronto at Scarborough, lists 93 “scholar-bloggers,” most of whose blogs made their debuts during the past six months. (Almost all are in public policy, law, or the social sciences; only 14 of the blogs in Mr. Farrell’s directory are by scholars in the humanities or natural sciences.) The most-read of these -- at the very top is Instapundit, also known as Glenn H. Reynolds, a law professor at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville -- have thousands of visitors each day.

“The development of the blog lowers the cost of publishing almost to the vanishing point,” says Jack M. Balkin, a professor of law and the director of the Information Society Project at Yale University, who maintains a blog called Balkinization. “It really does help realize the promise of the Internet as a place for wide-ranging public discussion.”

A Day on the Blog

Consider a typical day (May 8) at the Volokh Conspiracy, a group blog (with roughly a dozen regular contributors) founded in 2002 by Eugene Volokh, a professor of law at the University of California at Los Angeles. One author pointed readers to a draft of his forthcoming law-review article (“I’d be delighted to receive any comments on the paper; the final version won’t be out until November, so there should be some time to tweak it between now and then”). Mr. Volokh asked for help in thinking through a scholarly article he might write about private detectives and the proper scope of individual privacy, and he relentlessly plugged his new book on academic legal writing. Someone posted a one-panel cartoon from another site (prisoner to his cellmate: “I’m not sure it was worth it, but it certainly was the world’s best judge joke”). Most of the day’s posts, however, were responses to entries on other blogs -- civil, fact-laden arguments about judicial confirmations, William Bennett’s gambling habit, and the relationship between urban cosmopolitans and rural cultural conservatives in the Republican Party.

“What blogging offers is immediacy,” says Eric L. Muller, a professor of law at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, whose four-month-old blog is titled Is That Legal? “Compared to what we’re all used to in academia, where you submit something and then maybe when you have grandchildren you’ll hear whether it’s going to be published, the immediacy is something that we’re all unaccustomed to. I think a lot of people feel sort of like kids in a candy store.”

Also like kids in a candy store, academic bloggers are sometimes subject to twinges of self-consciousness and guilt, and fear that their elders will think they’re misbehaving. Most commonly, the anxiety takes this form: “Is it really OK for me to blog about topics outside my academic expertise?” Last spring and summer, Jacob T. Levy, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Chicago, took a five-month hiatus from his blog. When he returned, he explained his reluctance to commit to blogging: “I’m worried about public-intellectualitis -- the well-known tendency for professors with real expertise in one field to pose as experts in many others, the pose of authority that comes with academics’ comments on issues of the day.”

Mr. Levy tentatively concluded, however, that blogs might actually offer an antidote to academic posturing. Blogging “has some of the best aspects of peer review built into it,” he wrote. Scholars’ entries “are instantly monitored and responded to by others as well-informed as they are.” Also, because blog entries can be as long as the author likes, there’s little tendency to fall into “the scholarly sound bite -- the public career built on offering quick juicy quotes to the press.” And finally, he noted, “At least so far, there are no financial returns to blogging. Much bad public-intellectualism seems to come about because of the temptation to (to put it bluntly) sell out.” (Mr. Levy subsequently abandoned his solo blog, and is now one of the authors of the Volokh Conspiracy.)

Daniel W. Drezner, another assistant professor of political science at Chicago, is somewhat more relaxed about the exper-tise question. In March, he posted a long essay on his blog about prospects for democratization in Iraq. Democratization theory is not part of Mr. Drezner’s own research, but he read plenty of it in graduate school. “The best advantage a scholar has in terms of blogging is not so much what they produce as the literature that they consume,” he says. “I would hardly consider myself an expert on democratization, but I have read enough so that -- relative to a lot of the people reading my blog -- I do feel like I can claim some expertise. That’s one advantage of the doctorate, just simply knowing where to look.”

Still more sanguine is Mark A.R. Kleiman, a professor of policy studies at UCLA, who says that he trusts his readers to know when he is stepping outside his realm of scholarly expertise. In an interblog discussion several months ago, he says, “Eugene Volokh and I got into a long exchange about the meaning of a passage in Thucydides, and I don’t think anybody thought that I was trying to be a classicist.”

What many scholars find most thrilling about blogging is the knowledge that anyone at all can read and comment on their discussions. Unlike on a political-science e-mail list, for example, it was entirely possible that an actual classicist might have Googled his or her way to Mr. Kleiman and Mr. Volokh’s argument and weighed in with comments. “It’s astonishing, the range of people who seem to read my blog,” says Mr. Drezner. “I’ve gotten e-mail from probably 15 different countries. I’ve heard from stay-at-home moms, retired military veterans, other academics, and a lot of grad students from outside Chicago. And certainly the level of discourse is higher than what I get at a cocktail party.”

In particular, most academic bloggers report that the project has brought them into contact with people of diverse political persuasions. “I’ve certainly changed my picture of what libertarians are like,” says Chris Bertram, a senior lecturer in philosophy at the University of Bristol, in England, whose blog persona is “Junius.” Mr. Bertram, a social democrat, says that he and his fellow political philosophers sometimes suffer from a constricted field of vision, with “all kinds of received opinions that just aren’t shared by most other people.” Mr. Bertram says that debates with other bloggers have taught him that many libertarians do not follow Robert Nozick’s philosophical principles, but instead favor markets “for other, basically more pragmatic, reasons.” He adds, “There’s been a mildly rightward pressure on my politics.”

To a remarkable degree, blogs also appear to bring full professors, adjuncts, and students onto a level field. With no evident condescension, senior faculty bloggers routinely link to the political-affairs blog maintained by Matthew Yglesias, a senior at Harvard University. “Nobody knew my name when we started this,” says Josh Chafetz, a current Rhodes scholar whose OxBlog, written with two fellow Americans at Oxford, has made him a well-known figure among academic bloggers. “In many ways it really is almost a pure marketplace of ideas. You can build up a readership. You just have to write things that people like.”

“You do see some of the barriers of rank and hierarchy break down,” says the woman who blogs pseudonymously as the Invisible Adjunct. (She granted an interview on the condition that her identity not be revealed.) “An undergraduate and an adjunct can speak to someone with tenure on a more or less equal footing.”

Mr. Balkin sees this openness and pluralism as a rebuke to the argument posited by Cass Sunstein, a professor of law at Chicago, in his 2001 book, Republic.com (Princeton University Press). “Cass’s view was that the Internet was going to become an increasingly closed-off set of ideological communities, and that people would become more extreme over time. His argument was based on his assessment of what the technology looked like around 2000. But one of the things about the Internet is that it is protean. Its architecture is constantly changing.” (Mr. Sunstein did not reply to an e-mail invitation to respond to Mr. Balkin’s comment.)

Others are less hopeful. Mr. Muller says that he perceives among academic bloggers “a talk-radioization of the discourse, which I’m not especially interested in participating in. It’s becoming very personality-driven, very combative, very adversarial. There’s a kind of ideological categorizing that goes on. ... It really does start to feel like the Rush Limbaugh show.”

Watchdog Blogs

One of the most combative strains of scholarly blogging is the investigation of alleged academic misconduct. The work of John R. Lott Jr., a gun researcher who has been accused of inventing the results of a telephone survey out of whole cloth (a charge he denies), has persistently been scrutinized by at least six bloggers. Mr. Lott’s research, in fact, is the sole topic of a blog maintained by Timothy D. Lambert, a lecturer in computer science at the University of New South Wales, in Australia. And it was another blogger, Julian Sanchez, a staff writer at the Cato Institute, who discovered and confirmed that Mr. Lott had been participating in Internet discussion groups under the name “Mary Rosh.”

In an essay in the May issue of Reason magazine, Mr. Sanchez noted that blogging permitted the investigation of Mr. Lott to proceed much more quickly than a controversy two years earlier about the former Emory University historian Michael A. Bellesiles, whose book Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture (Alfred A. Knopf) was ultimately exposed as error-ridden. (Mr. Bellesiles concedes having been careless with certain data, but denies many of the charges of error.) Mr. Bellesiles’s earliest critics communicated primarily via e-mail, which meant that their conversations were much less likely to be detected by professional journalists or by other assorted people with relevant expertise. In Mr. Lott’s case, however, the story has evolved much more rapidly, with bloggers picking up one another’s cues and investigating small, scattered allegations. (Mr. Lott himself had just started his own blog dedicated to defending his record.)

Kieran J. Healy, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Arizona, who has occasionally weighed in on the subject of Mr. Lott’s troubles, is skeptical of Mr. Sanchez’s account. “There’s always a danger of overstating how much novelty there is in these things,” he says. “One person’s ‘distributed journalism’ is another person’s echo chamber.”

Certain other blogs focus not on particular scholars but on particular follies of academic life. Critical Mass, written by Erin O’Connor, an associate professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, advances a generally conservative critique of grade inflation, sensitivity training, and speech codes. (In Ms. O’Connor’s comments section, heated arguments sometimes arise between libertarian and traditionalist critics of academe. Her readers have been sharply divided, for example, about a state legislator’s attempt to censure the popular sexuality course taught by Dennis Dailey, a professor of social welfare at the University of Kansas.)

And the Invisible Adjunct’s blog, as the name suggests, almost exclusively concerns the crisis of academic labor. “I’m a bit of a Luddite, so it’s actually rather odd that I would be entering into this,” she says. “But I wanted to talk about a lot of academic issues, especially issues related to employment.” In the three months since she began her blog, she says that she has gathered a substantial readership of adjuncts who are eager to exchange ideas.

Avoiding Addiction

In April, Mr. Drezner traveled to Beloit College to give a lecture. After his talk, as he later reported on his blog, he was startled when “my host explained to one of his colleagues that I needed to get to an Internet station -- because it had been some time since I’d updated the blog.”

Mr. Drezner and others are determined not to let that sort of pressure from their readers get to them. Junior faculty members, in particular, want to ensure that their blogs are not a distraction from their primary research. “I try to make clear that it’s not my main focus,” says Mr. Healy. “I write posts early in the morning or late at night, after I’ve come home.”

Mr. Balkin offers similar counsel. “My advice to junior faculty is to write on your blog only when you think you have something to say. You shouldn’t allow this particular tail to wag the dog of your academic career.”

For some people, however, blogging itself is a direct form of career development. Mr. Yglesias, the Harvard senior, wants to become a political journalist, not an academic. In September, he will begin a writing fellowship at The American Prospect. Mr. Levy and Mr. Drezner have each recently begun to write columns for The New Republic’s Web site because an editor there noticed and admired their blogs. And Mr. Chafetz, of OxBlog, writes occasionally for The New Republic and The Weekly Standard.

Daniel J. Urman, one of Mr. Chafetz’s collaborators on OxBlog, says with a laugh that “Josh is an animal. He’s capable of spending 16 hours a day online. ... Josh and David [Adesnik, another OxBlog author] will blog even when they’re on vacation. It’s like an IV or something.”

So will we all find ourselves someday hooked up to the same IV? Will the practice of blogging become near-universal in academe? Or is it, as the Invisible Adjunct sometimes imagines, “a temporary trend that will run its course”? Mr. Balkin notes that blogging, like many other phenomena on the World Wide Web, is organized according to a power law. That is, the most popular nodes, like Instapundit, tend to have 10 times more readers than blogs on the next tier, who in turn have 10 times more readers than the third tier. “Is that distribution going to stay fixed?” he asks. “The answer is that we don’t know how fluid this economy will be. I would be amazed if in two years’ time you went to look at the list of most popular blogs, that the list will be the same -- but it will probably still be organized as a power law.”

A BLOG TAKES OFF

On January 20, Eric L. Muller, a professor of law at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, started a Web log, which he playfully titled “Is That Legal?” Two weeks later, with few readers, Mr. Muller was considering shutting the blog down. Then lightning struck. On February 4, U.S. Rep. Howard Coble, a North Carolina Republican who is chairman of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security, told a Winston-Salem radio audience that the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II was justified.The ensuing controversy was tailor-made for Mr. Muller, the author of Free to Die for Their Country: The Story of the Japanese American Draft Resisters in World War II (University of Chicago Press). He sent a draft essay to 15 newspapers, but received almost no interest. With his blog, however, he was able to quickly publish commentaries far more detailed than the space any op-ed page would permit. Within hours, Mr. Muller’s comments were noted (and linked to) by several prominent bloggers, and he had increased his readership more than fivefold. (As of early May, Mr. Muller’s average daily hit count had settled down to 204.)

February 4

Approximately 8 a.m.: In a radio call-in show, Representative Coble justifies the internments, saying, “We were at war. [Japanese-Americans] were an endangered species. It wasn’t safe for them to be on the streets.”

Mr. Muller’s hit count: 35

February 5

1:09 p.m.: After seeing a local newspaper item about the comments, Mr. Muller posts his first entry about Representative Coble: “It is just staggering to me that a person in a position of this sort could be so ignorant of the real story. I’ll blog more on this later, but I wanted to get it up quickly.”

1:24 p.m.: The Volokh Conspiracy, a widely read blog about legal issues, links to Mr. Muller’s first post.

11:49 p.m.: Mr. Muller notes that in 1988, Representative Coble spoke on the floor of the House against an act that provided $20,000 payments to the surviving internees. “Folks, this is the guy running the show on homeland security in the House of Representatives. The guy who will have oversight over how well Tom Ridge’s new department of homeland security is balancing national security with individual liberties.”

Mr. Muller’s hit count: 387

February 6

9:56 a.m.: Instapundit, which has by far the highest readership of any scholar’s blog, links to Mr. Muller’s comments.

11:18 a.m.: Riffing on another blogger’s commentary, Mr. Muller discusses a little-known fact: Conditions at the internment camps were largely dictated by state governors, not the federal government. The Republican Ralph Carr of Colorado was the only governor who supported a liberal, non-barbed-wire policy, and he lost a re-election bid in part for that reason.

3:19 p.m.: Mr. Muller notes a comment made by another North Carolina lawmaker the previous week. Asked about terrorist threats to local communities, Rep. Sue Myrick, a Republican, said, “You know, look at who runs all the convenience stores across the country. Every little town you go into, you know?” (She acknowledged that the comment could be misconstrued.)

Mr. Muller’s hit count: 922

February 7

7:21 a.m.: Mr. Muller promises to answer a challenge made by Representative Coble, who has declared that he will apologize only if someone proves to him that protecting Japanese-Americans was not one of the Roosevelt administration’s reasons for interning them.

12 p.m.: Mr. Muller posts a detailed refutation of Mr. Coble’s claim. He also faxes this material to the congressman’s office. (On the following days, Mr. Muller posts PDF images of government memos from 1942 that make clear that protecting Japanese-Americans’ safety was not among the goals of the internment policy.)

1:27 pm: Instapundit links again, noting that Mr. Muller “is fact-checking Howard Coble’s ass.” Several other blogs subsequently link to the same entry.

Also on February 7, Representative Coble refuses to concede error to an Associated Press reporter, saying, “I was just stating historical fact.”

Mr. Muller’s hit count: 2,953

FROM NASCAR TO UGLY ROBES: SOME ACADEMIC BLOGS TO NOTE

Title: InstapunditURL: http://instapundit.comAuthor: Glenn H. Reynolds, professor of law at the U. of Tennessee at KnoxvilleFirst post: August 5, 2001Average daily hit count: 100,000Recent topics: persecution of bloggers in Iran; federalism and the problem of combating prison rape in state correctional systems; “The E.U. -- Haven for Cat-Skinners?”

Title: The Volokh ConspiracyURL: http://volokh.comAuthor: 12 authors, of whom the first among equals is Eugene Volokh, a professor of law at the U. of California at Los AngelesFirst post: April 10, 2002Average daily hit count: 8,000Recent topics: the gun industry’s political clout (or lack thereof); ugly red judicial robes in Maryland and Germany; the differences between awards in economics and awards in political science

Title: OxBlogURL: http://oxblog.blogspot.comAuthor: three graduate students (two of whom are Rhodes scholars) at the U. of OxfordFirst post: April 23, 2002Average daily hit count: 3,400Recent topics: reconstruction and “nation-building” in Iraq; North Carolina Gov. Mike Easley’s hapless experiment with Nascar driv-ing; free-speech controversies at Yale

Title: Critical MassURL: http://www.erinoconnor.orgAuthor: Erin O’Connor, an associate professor of English at the U. of PennsylvaniaFirst post: March 14, 2002Average daily hit count: 1,800Recent topics: thefts of student newspapers at the U. of California at Berkeley; allegations of grade inflation at Brooklyn College; animal-dissection policies at the U. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Title: The Invisible AdjunctURL: http://www.invisibleadjunct.comAuthor: anonymousFirst post: February 28, 2003Average daily hit count: 347Recent topics: union organizing at the U. of Pennsylvania; adjuncts’ morale at the for-profit U. of Phoenix; Leo Strauss and neoconservatism

Title: Daniel W. DreznerURL: http://drezner.blogspot.comAuthor: Daniel W. Drezner, an assistant professor of political science at the U. of ChicagoFirst post: September 10, 2002Average daily hit count: 2,100Recent topics: President Bush’s free-trade proposal for the Middle East; violence and disorder in rural Afghanistan; “Are liberals less cosmopolitan than conservatives?”

Title: Thoughts Arguments and RantsURL: http://philosophyweblog.blogspot.comAuthor: Brian Weatherson, an assistant professor of philosophy at Brown U.First post: October 30, 2002Average daily hit count: 250Recent topics: the gender imbalance in academic philosophy; the boundaries of the U.S. Midwest; rankings of philosophy programs (A companion site, http://philosophypapers.blogspot.com, allows visitors to comment on draft papers in philosophy by scholars throughout the world.)

Title: Kieran HealyURL: http://www.kieranhealy.org/blog/Author: Kieran J. Healy, an assistant professor of sociology at the U. of ArizonaFirst post: May 21, 2002Average daily hit count: 2,400Recent topics: the mechanisms behind occupational gender segregation; plagiarism; the absurdity of economists’ claims to monopolize scientific rigor in the social sciences

Title: Semi-Daily JournalURL: http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/Author: J. Bradford DeLong, a professor of economics at the U. of California at BerkeleyFirst post: February 2002Average daily hit count: 50,000Recent topics: bleak economic prospects in Europe; a critique of President Bush’s tax-cut proposals; how Mr. DeLong spent his office hours one afternoon

Directories of academic bloggers are maintained at http://rhetorica.net/professors_who_blog.htm and http://www.henryfarrell.net/blog/

http://chronicle.com Section: Research & Publishing Volume 49, Issue 39, Page A14