Academic Blogging

Speaking of Professor Cooper, his recent post on academic blogging looks at the pros and cons of blogging as a law professor. Coming from a different part of the academy (English), I'd say his reflections are correct, as are the comments he quotes from Kieran Healy. In a bit of synchronicity, Scripting News recently explained why academics should blog—and why their institutions should encourage them to do so:

First, know that universities thrive on having their experts visible outside the university. Not just publishing in academic journals, which most alumni don't read, but being called in as experts on radio talk shows, esp NPR. That's how you reach into their wallets, show them why they should be proud of their alma mater. Pride gets the money flowing.

So how do you get your professors on the radar, as acknowledged experts who can communicate to everyday people? With a weblog of course. And then realize that other bloggers (like me!) are consumers of expertise. We need experts to turn to just like the radio guys do. So there's lots of value in staking out the still largely virgin territory of expertise flowing through weblogs.

It makes perfect sense to me. In fact, academics would be the best bloggers for two reasons: First, they're writers. Sure, a lot of them write abstract, hard to read crap, but perhaps blogging would force them to be more clear and concise. (We could hope.) Second, they're experts in something that the rest of the world probably knows very little about. Many of the best blogs come from just such people—people with knowledge and perspectives that would be hard to find anywhere else. But, not surprisingly, I predict academics will be slow to take up blogging—at least academics outside of law. They'll think they're above it, that it's not "serious" enough for them. I tried to encourage a professor of mine—a huge luminary in his field—to take blogging seriously about a year ago, and he just scoffed and said "it's just like a discussion board. It's a fad. Besides, no one will ever read those things." Perhaps he's right, but perhaps he should also consider the increasing cultural, social, and political irrelevance of the humanities before he dismisses an opportunity to reach a wider public. Academia is pointless if the work done inside the "ivory tower" never gets out of its hallowed halls. If academics would work harder to make more than a dozen people care about or understand what they're doing, maybe they wouldn't find themselves panicked about the future of their disciplines.

Yes, that is what you call a tangent. I'll stop now.

Posted 06:58 PM | meta-blogging

Cooped Congratulations

Congratulations to Jeff Cooper at Cooped Up for a great year of blogging. Professor Cooper is a daily read for me (even though he doesn't always update daily), and I would certainly miss his measured and well-written opinions on everything from points of law to the state of contemporary culture. He's also quite fascinated with some sport (baseball, I think), and with wine, but you can just skip those posts if you want—Professor Cooper won't mind. ;-)

Question: What's up w/lawyers and sports? Is it just me, or are a high percentage of lawyers fairly intensely interested in some sport or another? And if it's not just me, then what's the connection between law and sports? Is it just something to talk about to take the mind off of law, or what?

Posted 06:42 PM | Comments (2) | law school meta-blogging

Big Media Trouble

Wow, it's a banner day for bad news about the U.S. media. The FCC has released its plans to deregulate the television industry:

The proposed changes represent the most important rewriting of the ownership rules in decades, permitting the largest media conglomerates to expand into new markets and own more properties in a single city. Analysts expect companies, including Viacom and the News Corporation , to seek to expand their media holdings substantially.

According to The Washington Post:

Two things are certain: On June 2, the five-member FCC will adopt most of the media-ownership recommendations delivered by staffers yesterday. Also, a wave of media deals -- and probably lawsuits -- will follow, as companies jockey to exploit the new rules or seek relief from them.

So what does that mean for you? It means that TV is going to become just like radio. The FCC relaxed radio station ownership limits in the Telecommunications Act of 1996, and a wave of buyouts and mergers followed. Today, most major radio markets are controlled by a handful of companies, and the biggest and baddest is Clear Channel. Why does it matter that one company owns so many radio stations? Well, for one thing, that kind of "freedom of the press" buys you rallies for war. There are more problems, w/massively concentrated media ownership (see, for example, Salon's full coverage of Clear Channel and read anything by Robert McChesney), but really, could it get much worse?

If you agree that allowing one company to control TV markets nationwide is not a good thing, sign the petitions at MoveOn.org and MediaReform.net.

UPDATE: For still more information on media reform, also read the last few posts Larry Lessig made in April, as well as just about everything since then.

Posted 02:07 PM | general politics

Living With Lies

Speaking of lies, a few weeks ago Robert Scheer penned a good meditation on the question I mentioned a while back: What should we think of the fact that our government no longer even pretends to be telling the truth? Scheer argues that there's probably no more frightening development in recent times; further, he calls Yubbledew Inc., a propaganda machine, and denounces Thomas Friedman's idea that we can shrug off as "hype" the lie that Iraq was an imminent threat to the U.S. and world because of its massive stocks of WMDs:

Hype? Is that how we are now to rationalize the ever more obvious truth that the American people and their elected representatives in Congress were deliberately deceived by the president as to the imminent threat that Iraq posed to our security? Is this popular acceptance of such massive deceit exemplary of the representative democracy we are so aggressively exporting -- nay, imposing -- on the world?

It is expected that despots can force the blind allegiance of their people to falsehoods. But it is frightening in the extreme when lying matters not at all to a free people. The only plausible explanation is that the tragedy of 9/11 so traumatized us that we are no longer capable of the outrage expected of a patently deceived citizenry. The case for connecting Saddam Hussein with that tragedy is increasingly revealed as false, but it seems to matter not to a populace numbed by incessant government propaganda.

Is Scheer right? Have we lost the ability to be outraged? Are we so jaded we just can't force ourselves to care anymore? It's easier not to care, easier to believe Jayson Blair and Stephen Glass (see last post) are "bad apples," easier to believe the President was really trying not to lie, or never would have done so knowingly. To confront these lies is to admit the serious degree to which our vaunted "democracy" is broken. It's easier to do the Scarlett O'Hara and just say "I'll think about it tomorrow." As Cipher says:

You know, I know this steak doesn't exist. I know that when I put it in my mouth, the Matrix is telling my brain that it is juicy and delicious. After nine years, you know what I realize? Ignorance is bliss.

Posted 09:33 AM | general politics

Liars

Many of us don't trust what we see, hear, and read in the media, but usually it's not because we think the media is deliberately lying to us. Now that the NY Times has dismissed a reporter who has been doing exactly that since at least last October (possibly for the last four years), we now have more reason than ever to doubt the media—especially the mainstream media, since you don't get any more mainstream than the NY Times. Jayson Blair's list of lies is incredibly long; as the Times admits, he tried just about every form of prevarication known to man:

The reporter, Jayson Blair, 27, misled readers and Times colleagues with dispatches that purported to be from Maryland, Texas and other states, when often he was far away, in New York. He fabricated comments. He concocted scenes. He lifted material from other newspapers and wire services. He selected details from photographs to create the impression he had been somewhere or seen someone, when he had not.

(See also: This Editor's note.)

Meanwhile, if you watched "60 Minutes" last Sunday, know that Blair's trail of deception is nothing new. The show took a look at Stephen Glass, a writer for The New Republic, says he lied for the thrill of being able to give people the stories they wanted to hear. But whereas much of Blair's lying seemed to be plagiarism, Glass mostly just made stuff up out of thin air:

He made up people, places and events. He made up organizations and quotations. Sometimes he made up entire articles. And to back it all up, he created fake notes, fake voicemails, fake faxes, even a fake Web site -- whatever it took to deceive his editors, not to mention hundreds of thousands of readers.

That was five years ago. Glass has since earned a JD from Georgetown but is having trouble gaining admittance to the NY State Bar because of ethical concerns. Go figure. (But note how he turned to law for legitimacy after being utterly discredited on both a professional and personal level. Does law often attract shady characters simply because they're looking for its imprimatur of legitimacy? Damn, am I a shady character!?)

The fact that journalists are lying comes as no surprise to most writing teachers, who have seen an enormous explosion of plagiarism since the Web replaced the library as the source for research. At the major midwestern university where I've spent the last four years, Triple L has tracked down 13 cases of plagiarism among her students in the last year alone. They do exactly what Blair did—steal whole paragraphs and sentences from multiple sources, patch them together, revise a little, and hope no one notices. And the killer is that when you confront students with concrete evidence that they blatantly cheated and lied, they think you're going to believe them when they tell you they didn't realize what they were doing. At many universities, plagiarism is officially cause for expulsion, or at the very least automatic failure for the course in which the student plagiarized. And while it's possible some universities enforce their strict policies forbidding plagiarism, here at my school the customer—meaning the student—is always right; students generally get warnings and slaps on the wrist (failure on the paper in question, for example, or more often, just dropping its grade by a letter). What's more, the university (as far as I've been able tell) keeps no records of these offenses, so serial plagiarizers get a clean slate every semester to try their games again. This is at a major American university. Is it any wonder we've got young college graduates lying in the media?

(And don't get me started on the example set by politicians who "spin" everything to accomplish their goals. Not to mention Triple L's experience grading for an ethics in engineering class, in which she learned that the vast majority of college students seem utterly unable to recognize an ethical dilemma when it slaps them on the face. The there's the infantilization of American college students which leads them to think they'll never be held responsible for.... Like I said, don't get me started.)

Posted 09:20 AM | life generally