The Drezner tenure denial

The dustup concerning whether Dan Drezner’s tenure denial could be attributed to his blog is covered nicely in the NY Sun (tipped by Bashman and Kerr).

I wrote on this issue last summer. The bottom line is that it’s impossible for a tenure committee to credibly ignore a candidate’s blog. So, as I said, “blogging may provide a whole new category of wrong reasons for granting or denying tenure.” I added:

The best antidote to relying on the wrong evidence is more objective standards of evidence, better peer review, norms of careful attention to quality of writing.  In other words, blogging will force us to come up not only with standards for judging blogging that is scholarship, but also better standards for judging scholarship that is not blogging.

In the meantime, while these standards are being developed, what should a non-tenured blogger do? Exactly what a tenured blogger would do – be careful, don’t recklessly spout, check your points, verify your statements.   Both tenured and non-tenured bloggers have reputations to protect. 

More specifically, should a non-tenured blogger be anonymous?  I don't know.  But it's worth observing that while anonymity mitigates the tenure constraint, it does not mitigate the reputational constraint, since the non-tenured anonymous blogger still wants to be read.

These constraints should remind us that academic blogging has matured into a responsible source of news and views. When I argued that bloggers should check the "prior literature" I was universally condemned as advocating inhibiting the spontaneity of blogs.  Hopefully now people can see that there are many different kinds of blogs, and that academic blogs are not, in fact, a "spontaneous" medium, just less formal and more immediate than conventional articles.