Alice Pawley at On Being a Scientist and a Woman writes about her decision to blog under her own name as an untenured professor.
In the end, I decided I couldn’t just sit in fear. Blogging under a pseudonym wasn’t going to save me from a particularly investigative P&T [promotion and tenure] committee anyway – googling two key words brings up my old blog. But, on the more positive side, I decided when I started my current job that my goal was to be the best professor I could be, the one I wanted to see when I was a graduate student, and that I would. not. be. threatened into submission by colleagues wielding the tenure stick. I am committed to student learning, to faculty learning, to developing useful and inclusive learning environments, to the sifting and winnowing of ideas, to making engineering education better both in how I engage in it and what I study. None of that is something I as a faculty member should be scared of saying, and if doing so results in me only getting to do my job for 3 years or 6 years, then there is something undeniably and seriously wrong with our academic system and what we want professors to be/do. Plus having job security for 3 years or 6 years is something that most people don’t get anyway.
Blogging didn’t have anything to do with my own case, but it’s a perfectly legitimate concern for untenured faculty. Many assistant professors, especially women (and including Alice’s coblogger, “ScienceWoman”), are completely justified in blogging under a pseudonym or not at all. We might not like the fact that there exist narrow-minded senior professors who look down on blogging or any sort of public outreach — but our dislike doesn’t will them out of existence. But what a shame. Of all the professions in the world, shouldn’t academics be the most encouraged and rewarded for reaching out to a wider audience?
Thus ends your Sermon to the Converted for the day.
It seems everyone here is generally well intentioned and responsible, but frustrated by the sense that physics seems to be spinning its wheels more than getting traction.
As an outsider, physics reminds me of those Escher drawings of stairs and waterfalls that go around in circles. Every step is completely logical and follows from the proceeding point to the succeeding point, but the whole picture is obvious nonsense.
Yesterday, my twelve year old daughter sent me an email that’s going around among her friends that illustrates what the problem might be. It’s a silhouette of a pirouetting dancer. Apparently, if you use your right brain she appears to rotate clockwise, while the left brain makes her appear to rotate counterclockwise. Being a rightbrained type person, she appears to me to go clockwise, but if I look to the side, she appears in my peripheral vision to go counterclockwise.
While I suspect many people here tend to be left brained, I’m equally sure that many are mentally ambidextrous enough to see both sides of many such issues. The problem is that the methodology of science is profoundly left brained. Every detail must fit, no matter what it all adds up to.
As individuals, we are naturally more insightful then as a group, since we must rely on the common denominator of communication. Eventually though, these fluctuations smooth out, as our cumulative insight eventually builds a better world.
There is an old African saying; If you want to travel fast, go alone, but if you want to travel far, go with a group.
p.s. Being left brained, western civilization tends to view reality in terms of objects and measures, rather then processes and flow.
John Merryman on Feb 24th, 2008 at 10:17 am ….
As an outsider, physics reminds me of those Escher drawings of stairs and waterfalls that go around in circles.
——————-
That happens when you have the wrong holonomy group, on the base manifold or are projecting down from a principal fiber.
Peter Woit on Feb 23rd, 2008 at 4:43 pm
I first started publicly criticizing string theory back in 2001 was that there was a really ugly atmosphere of intimidation surrounding string theory, with many people telling me that while they agreed with me, they were too afraid of retribution to say so publicly. This continues to this day.
———————
This is in part a problem with professionalizing something. Once an endevour becomes a matter of professional status something which was once done for fun becomes something of dreadful seriousness.
String theory, LQG and the rest are not something anyone should ever regard as concrete. These are not really theories, but more hypotheses. They are fun to work with, to compare against each other. Yet it is silly to cling to these things like barnacles on a boat hull, as if any of this is about religious creeds.
When it comes to anonymity on blogs, my sense is that it is best if people did not do this. I remember a Dilbert cartoon where one of the characters grinned manically as they pounded out an email. Then afterwards with a withering look pondered their regrets after hitting “send.” Hiding behind a pseudonym or a shield gives one greater license to “throw barbs.” If anyone really wants to make a point, if your point is well reasoned and you are willing to stand by it then put your real name on it.
Lawrence B. Crowell
Yes, Laurence. But then you have people like me, who are just borderline paranoid.
(I’m in computer science. Paranoia is a survival trait.)
To conclude:
I think it’s clear that untenured people should blog, if at all, only anonymously. I feel that bloggers usually strongly underestimate the degree to which people draw conclusions about their personalities. Whether these conclusions are right or wrong is immaterial. One often hears, in fact, that certain notoriously obnoxious bloggers are in fact charming in person: that the blog persona is not the real one. But almost nobody believes this — in fact, it seems more logical to assume that the “real-life” persona is the phony one and that the true character is revealed on the blog.
Either way, a senior person with whom I have discussed this declared that he would oppose hiring any of the physics bloggers whose blogs he has read, with the exception of SC. So if you are going to blog, particularly non-anonymously, better follow the example of our host…..who, on the rare occasions when he criticizes anyone’s work, [a] does it politely and [b] does it with a technical discussion, ie using physics and not just sneering.
Required,
So, your (anonymous) advice, based on recounting what an (anonymous) senior person says, is that junior people should only blog anonymously.
Blogging anonymously in an academic field like this is not a real possibility. It’s just too small, so I don’t believe anyone in it could write about topics they were expert in or share news they learn without it quickly becoming apparent who they were.
So, it looks like an ugly atmosphere of intimidation mostly carried out from behind internet-enabled anonymity explains why there are so few bloggers in particle physics. In mathematics on the other hand, there’s a thriving culture of good blogs written by young and not-so-young mathematicians, with the people involved behaving professionally and putting their names to what they have to say. Gee, I wonder why people think particle theory is an unhealthy subject in a bad way these days….
Peter Woit on Feb 25th, 2008 at 8:52 am
Gee, I wonder why people think particle theory is an unhealthy subject in a bad way these days….
———
Because it’s running out of money, at least here in the US. 🙂
Lawrence B. Crowell