ע Blogging and Tenure. Professor Bainbridge has a very good post on today on how a university should evaluate blogging as part of a professor's performance, a letter to him from Dean Mark Sargent of Villanova's law school. I excerpt it below, but it is worth reading in full. I'll put my own musings at the end.
...
4. Blogging or, more precisely, interaction among bloggers and their
readers, strikes me as something very useful to people doing more
conventional scholarship. Most realize, I think that scholarship is not
done in a vacuum, and that the ability to test one's ideas, and to get
ideas from others, would help in writing articles and books. Blogging
helps with all that tremendously and in novel ways. In fact, I'm
advising my junior colleagues to start following the blogs in their
fields, and to think about contributing where appropriate.
...
7. I always tell tenure candidates this about their articles: the
fact that an article has been written is good; the fact that others are
reading it is better; the fact that others are writing about is best!
Good blogging fits into that equation nicely.
8. Bottom line: While no replacement for writing articles and books,
and no one is going to get tenured or promoted through blogging (at
least not today); but what I've called a serious blogger would get a big
plus on the positive side on the ledger from me when it gets to merit
review time! Failing to reward it would be failing to recognize that
blogging is not just another new communication medium; it is a new way
to do scholarship.
3. One of the traditional objections to self-publication on the net from
a tenure or merit raise standpoint was that it didn't go through the
filter of peer review or editorial review (such as it is in student-run
law reviews). Thus there is no sort of imprimatur on it from
theoretically competent, independant reviewers, which of course ways
heavily with tenure committees and deans. Self publication on the net
thus looks like hard copy publishing in a vanity press. Not blogposts!
If they are at all interesting, ther are immediately siezed upon,
dissected and assessed. That process gives an evaluator a sense of the
quality of the bloggerr's thinking. As a reader, I'm impressed when a
blogger is taken seriously by serious people. As a dean, I would be
impressed if that blogger were one of my faculty.
In economics, "working papers"-- self-published mimeos
that will go to a journal but have not yet been accepted-- are important. If
it takes two years from submission to publication, as is typical, then often a paper
will be cold by the time it appears in a journal. Thus, if everybody already knows the
author is worth reading, or if they hear that the paper is good, they will read the
working papers.
Weblogs could well be like that in some fields. Law is less technical, so there isn't as much serious revision as in economics (the referees are students at law reviews!). Empirical work in the sciences often has announcement as its main feature-- when the work is read to announce, it's also ready to publish. In economics, the author starts with an idea, but the paper usually changes a lot from first draft to last, and it is usually too technical to be suitable for weblog reading, so a weblog is not as appropriate.
What a weblog is potentially good for, however, is (a) to jot down ideas for papers and get feedback on them and (b) to conduct discussion on working papers or published papers Lawrence Solum's postings on presentations at conferences are a good example of this in law. I might start doing that with the notes I usually take at conferences and seminars---presenters be warned! It has long been my custom to take notes and give the speaker copies, sending them also to others in attendance if I wrote them on my computer and think they might be interested. My notes mostly note typos or improvements to the paper, rather than the more destructive kind of analysis that it is more fun to read, but they are at the first-draft level of weblogs and can be skipped or read as desired.
Will I get more raises because of my weblog? Given the heat my Dean has taken, I guess I'll be happy if it has no direct effect at all. It helps with "public service" and "teaching", since weblogs are a great way for me to use my expertise to inform outsiders--similar to op-ed pieces-- and a good way to file away examples that I can use in class. My own weblog, though, is not a direct research contribution. Not only are most of the topics outside of the areas I am currently working on, but even when they are relevant, weblog postings are analogous, for me, to a box of notecards with ideas and examples, material for publications but not publications themselves. Thus, I expect many of my postings on judges and on bureaucracies will be useful for future research-- and it is worthwhile for me to write them even if nobody else wants to read them--- but they are not scholarly contributions in themselves. Suppose someone read one of my weblog postings with an idea on judicial behavior and then developed the idea into a journal article and cited me as inspiration. Then, my university should take note. But just my claim that somebody might someday pick up on one of my ideas and run with it should not be given much credence.
This weblog's first purpose is to serve as my commonplace book, for the recording of ideas, facts, and sources that I might want to look back at. Only its second purpose is to convey those things to other people. That's why my topic selection is so heterogeneous--- it is designed to appeal to people just like Eric Rasmusen, a one- element set. (Why not keep it secret, then? (a) Other people might read it anyway, and I can thus benefit them (and society, if they learn from me) at no cost to myself; (b) Having readers looking over my shoulder forces me to write more clearly, to avoid embarassment; and (c) Occasionally I get useful comments.)
[ http://php.indiana.edu/~erasmuse/w/04.01.08a.htm . erasmusen@yahoo.com. ]
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