This isn’t very bloody reassuring.
Not every case is so consequential. And in truth, we did not disqualify any applicants based purely on their blogs. If the blog was a negative factor, it was one of many that killed a candidate’s chances.
More often that not, however, the blog was a negative, and job seekers need to eliminate as many negatives as possible.
We all have quirks. In a traditional interview process, we try our best to stifle them, or keep them below the threshold of annoyance and distraction. The search committee is composed of humans, who know that the applicants are humans, too, who have those things to hide. It’s in your interest, as an applicant, for them to stay hidden, not laid out in exquisite detail for all the world to read. If you stick your foot in your mouth during an interview, no one will interrupt to prevent you from doing further damage. So why risk doing it many times over by blabbing away in a blog?
We’ve seen the hapless job seekers who destroy the good thing they’ve got going on paper by being so irritating in person that we can’t wait to put them back on a plane. Our blogger applicants came off reasonably well at the initial interview, but once we hung up the phone and called up their blogs, we got to know “the real them” — better than we wanted, enough to conclude we didn’t want to know more.
This obviously requires a bit more thought.
Whether the author is paranoid, irritable, or an asshole is secondary to whether he or she describes a real situation in job committees around the country. I don’t know enough to say whether the above is generally accurate or not, but it’s enough to have me quite concerned.
Part of the concern on the part of departments about blogging is reasonable. Bloggers talk about both the personal and the political, and often end up mixing the two. Rants about co-workers, employers, students, and others that were once either confined to coffee shop chaps or bottled up inside can now be found in the public arena. It’s reasonable for an employer to be genuninely concerned about this.
On the other hand, this passage really bothers me:
Several members of our search committee found the sheer volume of blog entries daunting enough to quit after reading a few. Others persisted into what turned out, in some cases, to be the dank, dark depths of the blogger’s tormented soul; in other cases, the far limits of techno-geekdom; and in one case, a cat better off left in the bag.
The pertinent question for bloggers is simply, Why? What is the purpose of broadcasting one’s unfiltered thoughts to the whole wired world? It’s not hard to imagine legitimate, constructive applications for such a forum. But it’s also not hard to find examples of the worst kinds of uses.
A blog easily becomes a therapeutic outlet, a place to vent petty gripes and frustrations stemming from congested traffic, rude sales clerks, or unpleasant national news. It becomes an open diary or confessional booth, where inward thoughts are publicly aired.
The dank, dark depths of a blogger’s soul are utterly irrelevant to his or her professional responsibilities. Who, precisely, is to say what a legitimate and constructive application of the blog is? Academics? Really?
It gets worse:
Worst of all, for professional academics, it’s a publishing medium with no vetting process, no review board, and no editor. The author is the sole judge of what constitutes publishable material, and the medium allows for instantaneous distribution. After wrapping up a juicy rant at 3 a.m., it only takes a few clicks to put it into global circulation.
This is just infuriating. First, a reasonable academic can, and does, understand that different media and different fora call for different kinds of message. Plenty of social scientists publish work in mainstream academic journals AND in policy or professional venues. Publication in the latter neither undermines nor detracts from the former. Sensible academics understand that blog posts, New York Times Op-Eds, and Foreign Affairs articles can and should be interpreted differently than vetted, reviewed work. What they don’t do is rage at a medium that allows unmediated access to the public. The passage above combines a stunning degree of arrogance with an appalling degree of myopia.
I know that there is a difference between a Dan Drezner blog post and a Dan Drezner article in a major political science journal. So does Dan. He sometimes uses the one to complement the other, and sometimes talks about things that would never make it through a peer review process, often because they are too topical or too speculative. If a blogger regularly displayed contempt for co-workers, rage against employers, or demonstrable insanity, that would be one thing. But the passage above doesn’t have anything to do with any of those. It conveys a fear of a forum which bypasses traditional academia, whose practitioners need to be punished through intimidation and exclusion.
Traditional academic journals are wonderful institutions, because however much we may complain about them they DO keep out much of the dreck, they do enforce standards of scholarship and evidence, and they do play on important role in imposing a form of meritocracy on the academic world. Blogs play a much different role, one that is oriented around topical policy debates and a more intimate relationship with the non-academic world. The one does not threaten the other.
I’m curious. I know that a fair number of academics read this blog; have you had experiences similar to the one described by the author?
UPDATE: Dr. B has more. And KF has a lot more.
Drezner has some pieces of advice:
1) To “Ivan Tribble”: Click here before you condemn blogging to the dustbin. But if you still truly believe your assertion that, “Past good behavior is no guarantee against future lapses of professional decorum,” then here’s my advice — do not hire anyone ever again. As you say, “We’ve all… expressed that way-out-there opinion in a lecture we’re giving, in cocktail party conversation, or in an e-mail message to a friend.” Therefore, it doesn’t matter whether potential future colleagues have a blog or not — all it takes is five minutes to set one up. The only foolproof way to “guarantee against future lapses of professional decorum” online is to have no colleagues.
2) To graduate students: The academy has a lot of people who share the Ivan Tribble worldview of the blogosphere. I seriously doubt that any amount of reasoned discourse will alter this worldview. So think very, very, very carefully about the costs and benefits of blogging under one’s own name.
