At least one University department likes blogging, then

Janet is about to submit her tenure dossier, a three ring binder which simultaneously manages to look imposingly thick and yet a rather flimsy thing on which to hang your academic destiny. It also has an interesting addition: a section on academic blogging, with her department not only consenting but actively encouraging her to do so:

My department has been quite insistent that the blogging I do here does constitute a kind of scholarly activity that ought to be recognized. They think that communicating philosophy to a wider audience is A Good Thing. So, a colleague wrote an evaluative letter about a selection of posts, and that letter and the posts are included in the dossier.

This is an agreeably enlightened perspective; it’s nice to know that I’m not alone in feeling that for a University, sharing knowledge with the outside world should be just as important as generating it is, if not more so. Perhaps my online activities will be viewed in a similarly positive light in the future. At this juncture, however, my personal experience is mixed: whilst I haven’t gone out of my way to publicise this blog amongst my friends and colleagues, a number have stumbled across it by various means, and their reactions have ranged from enthusiasm to vague bemusement. More tellingly, I have noticed a degree of inverse correlation between age and enthusiasm – in other words, the people most likely to be populating tenure boards are also the ones most likely to see blogging as a distracting waste of time.
Of course, should I ever get to the stage where I’m compiling my own version of Janet’s dossier, it’s a fair number of years down the line, and the situation may change. In the meantime, let’s hope that Janet’s university do the bleedingly obvious thing, and ask her to stay.