Blog Them Out of the Stone Age

Since I truly discovered blogging a couple of months ago, I’ve tackled it with the zeal of a convert. I suspect that, like many converts, I’ve become Johnny One Note to some of my colleagues and friends. But the missionary zeal stems from a conviction that in blogging we have a tool of great power and flexibility.

Obviously I am far from the first to hold this conviction, and many others are far better qualified than I to evangelize on its behalf. Eugene Volokh , a professor of law at UCLA who is perhaps even better known as the chief conspirator at The Volokh Conspiracy, recently published a very good brief for blogging in the New Orleans Times-Picayune. But some mission fields are notoriously difficult, and I suspect the academy is likely to be among them. Here blogging will need all the evangelical zeal it can get.

Academics are not the tenured radicals the far right seems hell-bent on believing, but neither are they as open-minded as academics, in their less-reflective or more embattled moments, like to assert. Academics are in a profession. Like any other profession, it has certain rules of the game. We have a concept of the traits that constitute a good professional and those which do not. We need such a concept, because we have to have some standard by which to assess merit. But we ourselves have been the ones to most rigorously demonstrate how criteria having nothing to do with merit can get smuggled into our standard of what makes a good professional.

Once upon a time the profession was the near-exclusive preserve of white males who fathomed themselves fair-minded and cosmopolitan. In reality they often judged those suited to join their guild in ways that walled out women and persons of color. Even when they began to see their errors and tried to amend them consciously, a bundle of unexamined assumptions remained embedded in the choices they made. It took political action as well as sweet reason to get significant numbers of white women into the academy, and persons of color are still underrepresented.

If it can happen in the realm of gender and race, it can also happen in other realms. Class. Sexuality. Political values. (Yes, now that I’ve consciously chosen to detach the substance of the David Horowitz critique from a rhetoric that is, at best, off-putting, I begin to see that politics does get smuggled in–though I doubt Horowitz has any real clue how this occurs or would care that much if he did. To me his real agenda feels different.)

And choice of medium. Now that’s an odd one. We’re in the business of sharing ideas, yet we have a strongly-entrenched bias in favor of media that have been around since the Gutenberg Bible. There is no doubt in my mind that many people in my profession believe, with utter sincerity, that the time I spend typing this is as irresponsibly wasted as if I were playing a video game.

I’m a little chagrined myself, because I often feel as if I am playing a video game. This is fun.

But will it get me anywhere?

This ought to be of concern to military historians as much as to anyone else. Thirteen years ago this department hired me after a two-year national search. I hadn’t even completed my dissertation yet, and I was chosen over some very good people, many of whom have gone on to have distinguished careers. I’d like to think I’ve distinguished myself as well. In my early years I published a steady stream of books, edited volumes, and essays. I damn near epitomized the norms of the profession. And since there really aren’t very many military historians in the academy who were actually hired to teach military history, I hold a privileged position. I think it’s reasonable to expect that I should not rest on my laurels but rather continue to earn the privilege.

Yet nowadays I pour myself into this blog, and military historians who have to teach their courses as a sideline have more right than anyone to ask if this is a good use of the opportunity I’ve been given.

More prosaically, one might ask: This is all very well, but where’s the next monograph? It’s a fair question. Employers have a right to get from their employees the sort of productivity for which they contracted. Professions are no different.

I want to emphasize that no one, as yet, has taken me aside and asked me what the hell I think I’m doing. People have actually been pretty indulgent. My department chair has let me delay filing my annual activities report for weeks while I figure out the implications of what I’ve been doing in this medium. No, the questions come from within. I find that over the years I have nicely internalized the norms of my profession.

I’d go even further and say that, by and large, I would defend the norms of my profession. Those norms are effective. My generation is, on the whole, producing an incredible wealth of scholarship. We’re not as good as we might be at transmitting it to a lay audience, but that’s a post for another time.

Okay, you say, but where’s this headed, and why haven’t I seen so much as a glimmer of George Armstrong Custer? Well, Custer is about to educate me–and, I hope, you–in the art of the blog.

Stay tuned.

Part 1 – Part 2 – Part 3 – Part 4 – Part 5 – Part 6 – Part 7 – Part 8