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Politics : View from the Center and Left

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To: Ilaine who wrote (25137)7/25/2006 4:13:30 PM
From: JohnM   of 541605
 
I recommended the comments on Cole because I thought they are fair and much, much to the point.

The lesson I saw was that an academic who wishes to take her/his views public via a blog has to learn to live with the consequences of such. No one knows for certain whether it's hard on a career. Drezner and Cole can talk the most specifically but will not do so publicly. The rumours were strong that Drezner was denied tenure at Chicago because of his blog (reasonably conservative on international policy) and Cole was denied a move to Yale because of his blog.

I liked the accumulation of comments that said (a) there is absolutely no way to know whether the blogs played a role or not but (b), and this point is from Drezner, the most likely reason is the sheer risk aversion, traditionalistic embeddedness of senior faculty at major institutions.

Take the Yale case with Cole. The two departments--history and sociology--voted to accept him. I know the latter is a mix of younger and older faculty and by and large is not traditional old Yale. I don't know about history.

But, the next level is a senior faculty committee, which rules on all tenure judgments including hiring tenured in from the outside. I know it's membership is/was almost a caricature of the paragraph above.

So I doubt it's blogs per se, or even Cole's politics per se. And I seriously doubt that group would think twice about the various campaigns to keep Cole from getting job offer. More likely to do so because of the campaigns.

It's more that it's all just so unseemly.
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