{"id":1603,"date":"2008-02-20T20:50:49","date_gmt":"2008-02-21T01:50:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/cosmicvariance\/2008\/02\/20\/blogging-without-tenure\/"},"modified":"2008-02-20T20:50:49","modified_gmt":"2008-02-21T01:50:49","slug":"blogging-without-tenure","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/2008\/02\/20\/blogging-without-tenure\/","title":{"rendered":"Blogging Without Tenure"},"content":{"rendered":"

Alice Pawley at On Being a Scientist and a Woman<\/a> writes about her decision to blog under her own name as an untenured professor.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Blogging didn’t have anything to do with my own case<\/a>, 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?<\/p>\n

Thus ends your Sermon to the Converted for the day.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 – […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[47],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1603","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-internet"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1603","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1603"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1603\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1603"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1603"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1603"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}