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Friday, October 14, 2005

Not law but interesting - "Did blogging doom prof's shot at tenure?"

"Did blogging doom prof's shot at tenure?" is the headline to a column by Steve Johnson in today's Chicago Tribune. It begins:

There will likely be no way of ever knowing whether Daniel Drezner was being prophetic or irrelevant when he began his blog by saying, "I shouldn't be doing this. I'll be going up for tenure soon."

But it is true that three years later Drezner has been denied, for all practical purposes, the lifetime posting that is academic tenure at an American university.

The 37-year-old University of Chicago assistant professor of political science said he's not sure whether to blame last week's decision on his international relations Web log, serious minded, widely accessible and popular enough to have earned plaudits from New York gossip site Gawker.com and well-known blogger Andrew Sullivan.

"Who the hell knows," he wrote at DanielDrezner.com, in a rare personal item linking the Red Sox playoff elimination and his tenure denial after more than six years at Chicago in one "pretty bad day."

His department chairman, Dali Yang, pointed out that Chicago intellectuals Gary Becker and Richard Posner (together) and Steven Levitt have blogs. (All, however, were tenured professors first, bloggers afterward. Moreover, Becker has a Nobel Prize, Posner a seat on the 7th U.S. Court of Appeals, and Levitt both an endowed chair and the best seller "Freakonomics.")

"Blogging per se is not considered either good or bad at the University of Chicago," said Yang, adding that, in Drezner's case, "We did not consider the blog. I can say that."

The blog is available here.

Posted by Marcia Oddi on October 14, 2005 07:57 AM
Posted to General News