We academics really haven't figured out this blogging thing. It's a welter of confusing, conflicting drives, and everyone has a different (sometimes radically different) take on it. Last night, I was threading my way through a twisty maze of links that really made that clear.

I started here. Steven Krause is on one end of the academic blogger spectrum: he's written several articles on the theme of the "happy academic." I'm also fortunate enough to have a position I like at a university I respect with a good class of students, so I sympathize. I'm also a mostly "happy academic" (although the situation with my wife having to work 165 miles away is straining that appellation a bit). He raises several interesting points about anonymity and academic freedom and just what the heck we're doing with blogs that I'll return to, andhe also links to another academic site that led me elsewhere.

There's a whole world of weblogs by academics out there that might be better called the "stressed academic", to varying degrees. There's Playing School, Irreverently, Just Tenured, Barely Tenured, and Bitch. Ph.D., to list just a few. I suspect that they more accurately reflect the reality of academia than us rarer, more contented types. This is a difficult business. The hours are long, the expectations are high, and you are expected to be your position. I think happiness is a function of how thoroughly you identify yourself with your work, and how closely that value meets the expectations of the university. Universities, like any other institution or business, regard their employees as vehicles to further their ends. Unfortunately, universities also regard the professoriate as being "on" 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 12 months a year (even if they only pay us for 10), and that generates conflict with all those other activities we normal humans regard as important, like a social life and parenting and sitting on the deck watching the clouds roll by. There is an awkward lack of boundaries here.

Making Contact nails it:

Professor B. writes that, “I think this whole blog is one long project in talking myself out of letting academia scare me.” The pressure in academia is indeed to let one’s life be defined by the job. Read any of the newer blogs by academics which have sprung up lately and you’ll hear about fears of colleagues discovering their blogs and their identities and judging them not serious enough, not hardworking enough, not dedicated enough. What is this about? Why is it that those of us who choose JOBS in higher education aren’t entitled to lives of our own off campus, away from the library, out of scholarly journals? I look at friends and family who earn their livings in a wide range of professions other than academia, both blue and white collar, and I don’t see any of them thinking their jobs define them or that when they are not at work they should feel guilty about the free time or how they spend it.

To return to Krause's article, his writing was prompted by this worrisome story about an academic employee who was chastised for political blogging on company time. He muses a bit on the discomfort of keeping the public and private distinct, and mentions that he maintains an "'official and academic' blog and an 'unofficial and rant 'n rave' blog" and briefly touches on the issue of anonymity in weblogs. Although I can see validity in his points, I disagree with him on both.

I refuse to partition myself. I don't want to be just a biology blogger. I've got a family, I have a cat, I find some things funny, I have strongly held political opinions—that's me just as much as the fact that I'm interested in developmental biology and evolution. Weblogs are not reference works. They are social interaction tools made manifest on the internet. I'm not a fan of the idea of transplanting the narrow artificial compartments we build for ourselves in our work into a new medium that has the opportunity to widen the scope of communication. It does mean that this site is something of a hodge-podge (which has incited some criticism), but that's what I am, and that's what we all are: a mess of different ideas that change all the time.

The lack of boundaries in my weblog may not fit well with my complaint that academia has an awkward lack of boundaries, but the advantage here is that I get to assert those other aspects of my life. I can't go to class or to a faculty seminar and announce that today, I'm going to talk about my kids…but I can here. Maybe it bores readers, but one of my self-appointed missions is to let everyone know that professors are people, too. Boring, weird people, maybe, but at least that's better than being known as the robot who gives dry lectures on gene interactions.

As for anonymity, I've obviously rejected that here in my personal case, but I actually think that it would have some strong virtues in many situations. One reason I'm not anonymous is that I thought it would be futile. I like tinkering with computers, I'm doing all of this on my own personal server in my physical space, with an IP address assigned by my university, with a domain name registered to me—I'd be trivial to trace. Another is more significant: I write about biology and current research here, and one of the things I dun into my students is that they can't use web sources that have anonymous authorship in matters of science. I just couldn't bring myself to make the effort to write up a summary of Hox genes, for instance, that I'd have to tell my own students wasn't credible because it was unsigned. It was simply selfishness and arrogance.

Otherwise, though, I have a lot of respect for anonymity on the web. Anonymous bloggers are doing something very pure, building a reputation on the strength of their words alone, and not trading on the false authority of their employing institution or their degree. What I read I read because I like the sense of the words, not because I know the author has a Ph.D. from Ivy League U, so I have no objection to anonymous authors, other than that it takes a lot of time and effort to build credibility from scratch.