Before long Drezner's blog rose to blogosphere prominence, averaging 5,000 visitors daily to his blog on international political economy. But last week, Drezner's first blog posting came back to haunt him as he heard the news that he had been denied tenure.
Sean Carroll, assistant professor in the physics department, started his science-themed blog about a year and a half ago. He, too, found out recently that he was denied tenure at the University.
Faculty blogging, a trend that started gaining momentum about a year ago, has once again become a hot topic for debate. Questions arise as to whether blogs are academic or personal, and if they can play into an academic's tenure decision.
The popularity of blogging has reached the academic community as a communication tool. Academic bloggers usually use their blog for academic outreach and working ideas. Drezner's paper “The Outsourcing Bogeyman,” published in the academic journal Foreign Affairs was actually inspired from a discussion from his blog. But the recent events have put academic bloggers on their toes about what they might have thought was harmless traffic of exchanging ideas.
Nobel laureate Gary Becker and federal judge Richard Posner, both law professors, launched the high-profile Becker-Posner blog less than a year ago. With two such distinguished academics aboard the blog bandwagon, the question of whether blogging is legitimate academic work and outreach becomes unclear.
Perhaps blogging is a luxury only for the tenured. Recently, the Law School launched its own faculty blog geared toward high-end legal and intellectual content, which is meant as an interactive page rather than a standard blog.
The question of academic blogging really depends on what kind of blog you keep. “Our blog is not gossipy or informal,” Becker said. Rather, the Becker-Posner blog is an attempt at serious dialogue on important current issues.
Tenured professor and Freakanomics author Steven Levitt recently started a blog, which takes a slightly different tone.
“I started blogging because my co-author on my book Freakonomics made me!” Levitt said. While the Freakanomics blog is mainly devoted to the promotion of his best-selling book, Levitt, winner of the John Bates Clark Medal and widely considered to be one of the nation's brightest economists, likes keeping the casual blog.
This is cache, read story here