Ivan Tribble: Do Not Apply
Max Barry has a wonderful little read called Jennifer Government that takes place in the near future where people's individual identities have been consumed by the corporations they work for. John Smith, then, becomes John Nike when he works for the Nike corporation. As those who live and work in Academia know, our work is becoming more and more corporatized; the age of globalization has led to the corporatization (and cooptation) of everything from life-saving drugs to formerly "public" education. Yet even within the midst of our changing workplace, faculty and student rights to freedom of expression continues to form the basis for a free and unfettered exchange of ideas.
Many people have already written in to comment on Ivan Tribble's piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education, "Bloggers Need Not Apply." Mr. Tribble, hiding behind the safety of a pseudonym, sets out to inform job seekers of the trouble their blogs cause. Tribble objects to blogs for a variety of reasons, some of which include:
Worst of all, for professional academics, it's a publishing medium with no vetting process, no review board, and no editor. The author is the sole judge of what constitutes publishable material, and the medium allows for instantaneous distribution. After wrapping up a juicy rant at 3 a.m., it only takes a few clicks to put it into global circulation.
We've all done it -- expressed that way-out-there opinion in a lecture we're giving, in cocktail party conversation, or in an e-mail message to a friend. There is a slight risk that the opinion might find its way to the wrong person's attention and embarrass us. Words said and e-mail messages sent cannot be retracted, but usually have a limited range. When placed on prominent display in a blog, however, all bets are off.
I don't know where Mr. Tribble works, or what his institution privileges in its promotion and tenure process. However, I'd like to suggest that Mr. Tribble seems to live in a universe where he believes himself to be the gatekeeper of the worst kind; he holds the keys to a job where future employees must demonstrate their worthiness (on top of vitaes, publications, graduate school credentials) by demonstrating their "employability" through acceptable presentations of all spoken and published work. The job market in higher education continues to be tough; many more Ph.D.s earn their degrees each year than jobs for them to fill. Accordingly, many of today's new assistant professors already have vitaes that challenge the vitae of an associate professor 15 or 20 years ago. Now, Mr. Tribble wants to add to this requirement a new level of academic censorship. So, the president of Harvard can publicly deride women's intelligence, but bloggers need not apply for a job or have an opinion.
To take Mr. Tribble's argument to the extreme, he seems to suggest that faculty words, ideas and publications must be vetted by the university in order to be published. And so, we might find ourselves quite close to a Jennifer Government world where instead of having our own nomenclatures, we will now take on the names of our colleges and universities, embodying them in our own names and our own thoughts. What's the next step? Burning books whose ideas and opinions we don't like? Banning books if we don't like the publisher?
Mr. Tribble's analysis also overlooks the way in which blogging serves as a powerful democratic exchange of ideas; to label it 3 a.m. whining is to seriously misunderstand the power and meaning of blogs in our contemporary society. Do some people use blogging as a therapeutic forum? Yes. Do other people use blogging to share ideas? Yes. Blogs are a changing and malleable form; blogs offer an interesting challenge to our uni-focal media.
I agree that bloggers shouldn't publish things they don't want to be the source of public debate, comment and discussion. And, when advisable, some bloggers--myself included--may decide to write without using their names, but that should be a choice, not a job requirement. I don't want to teach at a college with colleagues like Mr. Tribble. Instead, I am interested in working, teaching, and collaborating with faculty who value the power of democratic ideas shared in an unfettered forum.
And The People Say:
Bring Me the Head of Ivan Tribble
Either You Have a Job or a Blog
Coffee Grounds on Ivan Tribble
David Glen's "Scholars Who Blog"
Culture Cat's entry on blogging
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