Another Harvard Blogger!
Posted on February 17th, 2009 in Uncategorized | 19 Comments »
Thanks to the poster who pointed out Stephen Walt’s very fine blog for Foreign Policy. (Check out his very clever post on the connections between international relations theory and Valentine’s Day.)
This brings the number of Harvard profs who blog to, oh, three—Greg Mankiw, Harry Lewis, and Walt. (Harry Lewis, by the way, gives Mark Zuckerberg too much credit in this post about Facebook’s ownership of your data.) Tim McCarthy was going strong for a while, but alas, his blog has petered out.
Okay, I’m probably missing a couple of bloggers. But still—six or seven hundred professors, and the handful who blog can be counted on the fingers of one, maybe two hands?
I know I’ll get hammered for this, but I suspect this paucity of blogging has something to do with the culture of pedagogy at Harvard—or lack thereof. And maybe the strength of the hierarchical relationship between professor and student at Harvard, which blogs blur by making the professor’s work more accessible and, in a curious way, more intimate.
Yale, by the way, just announced that it will be putting some of its lectures on YouTube.
19 Responses
2/17/2009 7:51 am
Richard,
Do you really think that the Facebook wizards suddenly realized that they might be able to make a few bucks in the future selling photos of congressional candidates that had been posted on defunct Facebook pages — that by not seizing that intellectual property they were passing up a golden business opportunity?
I suspect this came about through a combination of aggressive lawyering by Facebook’s attorneys (hopefully not the ones who screwed up the process of redacting the court documents in the ConnectU case) and youthful insensitivity to privacy issues (which had been the source of the Beacon fiasco). The problem is likely not bad intentions, but that the legal space this creates will make someone not at the table today too relaxed in the future.
As for blogging, that’s so yesterday. Everyone twitters now. Don’t you?
2/17/2009 7:56 am
I suppose that my trust level regarding Zuckerberg is zero; I just assume he’s lying about pretty much everything he says. And yes, I do think it’s possible that they thought of this as a way to make money some time ago and decided against it then, but now that the pressure is on, particularly with online ad revenue in freefall….
I’m a Twitter skeptic. The value-added for time spent is unclear to me.
2/17/2009 8:46 am
Whereas for blogging, it’s obvious?
2/17/2009 8:52 am
Well, Harry, you blog, and you are highly intelligent and far savvier about these things than I, so if it’s good enough for you….
Seriously, though, the differences between blogging and twittering would probably make a good post, and maybe I’ll get to that some day. But maybe your point is that I should consider Twitter more seriously. I’m loathe to; the blog requires substantial time as is.
2/17/2009 9:00 am
Precisely. I think there is a serious question about whether professors’ best use of their time is blogging, rather than doing the kind of writing that demands few interruptions and intense struggles with ideas. Not that these activities are mutually exclusive, but in a world of finite time, etc., etc. I suspect the reason you don’t see more Harvard professors blogging has less to do with pedagogical culture than with what it takes to produce good scholarship and the writing that goes with it. By the way, do you really know that Yale and Princeton have more faculty bloggers than Harvard?
For those who missed my late-arriving comment on a previous post: It’s a cheap thrill and only takes a few seconds to uncover for yourself the $65M figure from the poorly redacted Facebook court documents.
2/17/2009 9:26 am
Richard - You are missing a fantastic number of Harvard faculty bloggers, plus numerous post-docs and fellows, affiliated with Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society. Tisk-tisk, Mr. Reporter Man. Berkman is a state-of-the-art leader in all-things-cyberspace - Harry Lewis is an affiliate, as are a number of fine HLS faculty.
2/17/2009 9:30 am
I don’t know, Harry, but Yale does offer this service to help profs set up their own blogs:
http://blogs.yale.edu/
Note the stated purpose:
“ITS’ web publishing services are provided for Yale academic, instructional and professional purposes. Use of these services is encouraged for Yale *academic and professional purposes*; personal web publishing should be conducted on any of a widely available set of commercial personal blog or web spaces.”
I note that you don’t address the point of pedagogy—as Yale puts it, “instructional purposes”—which is to say, the role that blogs could have in expanding what happens in the classroom. Which would help Harvard students more—greater communication between prof and student, or professors who churn out yet another book but don’t have time for their students?
2/17/2009 9:33 am
Princeton, meanwhile, has this:
http://blogs.princeton.edu/main/
Granted, I don’t know how many professors use either the Yale or Princeton services….
2/17/2009 9:34 am
There appears, by the way, to be no Harvard equivalent, except at the law school. Coincidence? I think not.
2/17/2009 10:53 am
Delighted to hear it, J. How would one find these blogs?
2/17/2009 11:16 am
Harry-Here’s an interesting quote from Yale law professor and blogger Jack Balkin, who argues that the reason many professors don’t blog is not because of choices over time allocation, it’s because of generational resistance to change.
YLR: Some of the YLS faculty blog on your site, right?
Balkin: Ian Ayres is a regular contributor. I invite all YLS faculty to write on the blog, and several have, including Bruce Ackerman, Bob Gordon, Oona Hathaway, Dan Kahan and Peter Schuck. Every year I send out a note to the Yale Law School faculty reminding them that the blog is available to them and inviting them to write for it. Most of our colleagues still prefer to express themselves through forms of traditional scholarship: law reviews and books. A smaller number have adapted to the world of the op-ed. Most faculty don’t yet see how their work could usefully be articulated in a blog. That will take some time. My suspicion is that the younger you are, the easier it will be for you to adapt yourself to this format. There are many exceptions to the rule, of course. Basically, I think people stick with what they know how to do well, and people who have succeeded very well at traditional scholarship will continue to want to do that.
http://google.yale.edu/search?access=p&entqr=0&entsp=0&sort=date%3AD%3AL%3Ad1&output=xml_no_dtd&ie=UTF-8&client=bluesite_frontend&q=blogs&numgm=5&ud=1&site=Yale_University&y=0&oe=UTF-8&proxystylesheet=bluesite_frontend&ip=130.132.35.8&proxyreload=1&x=0&start=10
2/17/2009 11:43 am
Lots to respond to here.
1) Can’t argue with what Balkin says. But it sounds like he thinks Yale professors don’t blog enough. Why are you picking on Harvard? (just teasing 😉
2) Harvard FAS uses Course iSites. I don’t love the platform, but a blogging facility is built into it. See this help page. A lot of courses use it, and the other discussion tool it supports, though most of these will not be visible to the general public. Because I find iSites too heavyweight, for class discussions I use a commercial product that’s free for educational use.
3) Here’s a link to some active Berkman Center blogs. This page just culls what’s new and reposts.
4) Can’t see how you can idealize blogging and dismiss twittering simultaneously. (I’m skeptical about both.)
Gotta go back to work. Over and out.
2/17/2009 11:56 am
I reject the premise that I “idealize” blogging…but accept that I should give Twitter more thought.
2/17/2009 12:44 pm
I don’t know the full set of Harvard faculty who have blogs, but it’s clearly more than three. I know my colleagues Dani Rodrik, Jeff Frankel, and
Rob Stavins all have blogs of their own, and I’d be shocked if the number wasn’t much higher than that.
2/17/2009 2:29 pm
Sounds like these blogs should be linked somewhere-how about on Harvard.edu?
2/18/2009 8:39 am
Richard, you seem to associate blogging with pedagogy, and yet you don’t yet seem to have fully absorbed the fact that the Harvard course websites have dialogue boxes and other ways of communicating between students and teacher (see Harry Lewis’s post of 11:43 a.m.). The night before the final exam is a fun time in my courses: students write in to get clarifications, I write back, and things move very rapidly until I finally turn into a pumpkin shortly before midnight.
I’m not sure how public blogging would be helpful for the courses I teach. Contributions from the public at large, even if the pecture outlines I post were accessible to the public, could well end up sowing confusion. Just think of all those people who get onto this blog writing French or German with varying degrees of correctness. If random people were to post their ideas while my class is trying to work out the meaning of a word in a poem, I might well react the way eayny did a while ago: with a short French expletive beginning with “m.”
2/18/2009 4:13 pm
Judith,
As one of those people on this blog writing French and German with varying degrees of correctness, I will try not to take offense!
Seriously, though, I’m glad to hear of your online interaction, which clearly I wasn’t aware of. But I didn’t necessarily mean that public blogging would help specifically for the courses you teach. I did mean that blogging would help introduce students both within and outside the university to your work and your ideas, as well as your self. At a time when the humanities are struggling to insist upon their relevance, this strikes me as important, and I think that it’s incumbent upon academics to help the cause by building bridges to the non-academic (or at least non-university) world. Blogs do this.
Also, why would it be so bad for random people to post their ideas? You never know, the students might actually learn from some of them. And the bad ones would probably fall aside…..
I really have trouble seeing the downside of this, and all the objections strike me ultimately as a discomfort with change. After all, how can so many objections be raised by people who haven’t even tried?
2/18/2009 10:48 pm
Surely that last question is disingenuous. None of us has tried writing comic books, but that alone doesn’t constitute an argument for using our finite temporal resources in an attempt to improve our pedagogy by writing comics. We all make judgments about what is and what is not, if not a waste of time, a less useful way to spend our limited time than other things we need to do. Especially as most blogs have very small readership, so to reach a lot of people, you can’t blog casually. If we are to do something excellent, and most professors have an ambition to do things really well, we have to pick and choose among the ways we could spend our time. It’s quite unfair to suggest that all the non-blogging professors are old fuddy-duddies.
2/19/2009 12:26 am
That’s quite right, Harry. I’m on here while watching Charlie Rose and inter al. Larry Summers, and generally come onto this blog while taking minutes out from working on scholarship or teaching preparation. SITD is therefore a good outlet and to the extent it brings up interesting issues, I chip in. But I wouldn’t dream of running a blog myself, since that would take me away from the things that I care about/am paid to do.
Btw, Prof. Mankiw’s blog, which, advised by Sam, I look at and enjoy, has no comment capability, right? So is that a blog or a pulpit? Today for instance he suggested there are two solutions to the student-faculty crunch in Harvard’s Econ. dept., add more faculty or turn away majors. If there were a comment function one could ask how many courses colleagues in Econ. teach, and I mean teach and not “teach”, i.e. put in 2-3 contact hours per week twice a semester or so.