June 2, 2003
I came across this article via Henry Farrow over at Gallowglass about professors who blog. It is a quick scan about the rise of scholarly blogging in the US.
Very little can be said about scholarly blogging in Australia. Apart from the excellent Ken Parish, (currently down) John Quiggin and Kim Weatherall it does not exist. Despite the weblog helping to realize the promise of the Internet as a place for wide-ranging public discussion, academics see the weblog medium is still seen to be faddish, ephemeral, and too much a part of popular culture.
In this culture is not okay for academics to blog about topics outside their academic expertise. They see themselves as experts in an academic field and that expertise is disconnected from their lives as citizens in a democracy. It does not inform it. You have to get down from your high horse in the blogging world and that old expert comportment is dificult to change.
So why mention the article? To suggest that most Australian academics have retreated into a walled and narrow professionalism in academia. In doing so they have turned their back on contributing to the ongoing conversation in the public sphere in Australian liberal democracy. This retreat into academic professionalism suits them amidst the current turmoil in the universities:--the 'I'm doing my 9-5 job with my head down' comportment is seen as a sort of protection; a way of dealing with both the discontents of academia and coping with the depression of the job.
This inward turn to professionalism is happening at a time when we have calls for lefty humanities intellectuals to do more "public" writing and become public intellectuals confronting an authoritarian populism by writing a few essays here and there for the little magazines in civil society. The inward turn indicates the way our universities have retreated from the public domain as the old rationale for contributing to the nation's culture and identity fades, and the liberal state transforms them into economic growth engines for the new knowledge economy.
So we have this whole field of academic and popular knowledges, the university in the public sphere, the university as an ethical institution in civil society, and different kinds of writing that is covered over by the myth of selling out. This means abandoning one's scholarly and oppositional principles and caving in to the demands of the market. On the academic left side the old avant garde tradition holds that the intellectual is generally a male who transcends all political affiliations and speaks for the people in general. This (mostly) literary intellectual engages with the literary public sphere is in a state of almost permanent opposition to the status quo and is engaged in a war of position against Australian values. They have a big disdain for public policy and a hearty contempt for the institutionalized machinery of politics.
What we do have in Australia is a flourishing academic cultural studies, which has shifted from reading literary to popular texts,. This new-style humanities has a vigorous cultural politics that makes popular culture a proper location for political struggle (ie., race, ethnicity, clothing, cuisine, music, science, and technology have political content). But this concern with the cultural wars and political correcteness does not engage with, or make connection, to public policy concerns. Public policy concerns are quickly dismissed as practical politics and machine control of electoral politics.
There is a big difference between the literary public sphere and the public policy sphere centred around bureaucracies, politicians and think tanks. In the academic left discourse of cultural studies in the university we have the assumption that the literary public sphere is good whilst the public policy sphere is bad. Those who work in the public policy are bad because, in selling out the ethos of critical thinking, they have become an instrument of the political and economic system. There can be no compromise or negotiation with the public policy sphere.
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As an current blogger, and a legal academic "between contracts", I see the weblog medium as rather *less* ephemeral than the existence of academic positions for anyone under 40.
Otherwise, I query your comment about Oz academics not tending to blog about topics outside their academic expertise. Within the tiny sample of the three blogs you cite, I would hold that this is only true of Kim Weatherall's blog.
Interestingly, Kim seems to follow the model of many US academic bloggers, by making her blog semi-curricular. Proving my more general point, perhaps, this content-narrow strategy is no doubt good for Kim's academic career, but otherwise makes for a less satisfying read than, say, Ken Parish's. (I am speaking here as a peer of Ken and Kim's; it would be interestingly to know whether their respective student-groups have roughly the same opinions).
For what it's worth, John Quiggin's academic blogging, like mine is currently, is apparently unconstrained by anything to do with students or curriculum. The clear difference in the tone of the two blogs may have something to do with his base salary (~$250k) being about twenty-five times mine.