Blogging is not Scholarship

Blogging is not scholarship. This comment has been repeatedly posted by many people in the comments section of articles about academic blogging and scholarship these days. Is it true? Yes and no.

A sizeable portion of higher education and most of what we would describe as academia is all about research. People spend years getting a basket of degrees to conduct research that allows them to get a professorship, tenure, and the freedom to research their specialty. Along the way each and every one of these people publish in a variety of peer-reviewed journals, write books, and speak at conferences; things that bolster academic street cred. It has been this way ever since modern higher education took shape and it will be this way for the foreseeable future.

In addition to traditional scholarship, many people are blogging in higher education; faculty, administration, staff, and students are all writing about higher education topics with varying degrees of quality. Some of the writing is of the highest possible quality available, some matches anything written in peer-reviewed journals, some are very creative, while others are messy, crass, unfocused, and just bad. And this is why so many traditionalists say blogging is not scholarship

Back to the top; I agree that blogging is not traditional scholarship. For tenure-track positions at research university and highly regarded private institution blogging is not a replacement for peer-reviewed scholarship. These positions usually require a doctorate and as much academic street cred that can fit on a CV (CV’s can go on forever).

What about the rest of higher education? In my opinion some truly great writing occurs on blogs and it should be considered ‘scholarship-light’. The only problem with blogs is that you have to actually read the contents to know the quality. If an applicant submits their CV for a position and if most of their writing is on a blog that would require the hiring committee to actually go the blog and start reading while a list of articles published at known journals is a known quantity. What is easier; judging a candidate based on articles published at journals that everyone in your department knows about or reading a blog with hundreds or posts?

For those schools that abide by publish or perish or hire truly renown faculty members scholarship will continue to be traditional. For everyone else, ranging from community colleges to directional schools to other positions at research universities, blogging is a viable option to prove to others that you can communicate through words, have research skills, and have a history of writing and thinking about higher education.

Addendum:

For myself, I have decided to go the blogging route than tradition scholarship ever since I completed by doctorate. Since I do not intend to write articles about Mozart’s bassoon concerto or French salon music I am at a loss; how can I ever publish in a peer-reviewed journal (the gold standard)? The topics that I like to write about are more journalistic than academic since I do not actively participate in my content anymore (unless you include playing the ukulele for my son).

At the end of the day I would rather write ‘general’ higher education articles and get it published at The Chronicle, Inside Higher Ed. or if I am super-lucky, The Atlantic and have thousands of people read my articles then have a few dozen highly specialized people read a peer-reviewed article at the IDRS.