I've been reading a few things about blogging and tenure, so as a somewhat recently tenured guy I'll chime in with a little perspective.

• Weblogs are a tiny portion of the academic experience. I'm at a fairly progressive liberal arts university where we promote technology to our faculty, and there is just me and one other fellow that I know of who are doing the weblogging thing. Maybe there are bunches doing it anonymously, but that wouldn't count for tenure anyway unless the reviewers are all psychic—so that's all of 2 in about 140 faculty. This is very much a minority habit; and if you actually talk to faculty, you quickly discover that every one is unique, with their own set of avocations. We don't anguish over the scientist who makes fine ceramics in her spare time, or the one who plays banjo at folk festivals, and weblogging is similarly only one facet of an individual.

• 

  Have you ever seen a tenure review file? Here's mine.

  It's six inches thick. It contains lists of publications and meetings and classes committees, with letters and comments from external and internal reviewers, tables of student evaluation scores, student comments, etc., etc., etc. It was a major pain in the butt to assemble.

  I think my website might have gotten two sentences in there. A couple of the reviewers also mentioned it. But it was a miniscule part of the whole story.

  That will probably change a little bit when I update it. I've gotten enough complimentary letters from my peers about Pharyngula that I might add a whole page, maybe two on weblogging to it. Oooh.

• As you might guess, I'm rather positive about the whole weblogging trend—I think it's a marvelous way to engage the public and make us academics a little more visible. Yet when I review my colleague's tenure files (which I have to remember to do this weekend…it's that time of year), weblogs would be but one optional, minor feature of their work. It would be like finding out that someone serves on the Student Academic Integrity Committee—good for them, they get a little gold star in my checklist of useful things a faculty member could do, but it isn't going to get them tenure, and if they aren't on that particular committee, no big deal. At the tenure review itself, to make a fuss over a weblog would trivialize all the other important stuff in their file. Similarly, any review committee member who tried to scuttle someone over a weblog in spite of all the other details in their file would only succeed in making himself look like a dotty old crank with an irrational grudge. (Yeah, Ivan Tribble, I'm talking about you.)

• Maybe I've got an unusual point of view because I'm at a small, collegial place with a very pleasant group of people, but tenure review is not about dissecting an applicant to find excuses to rip them apart. It's about evaluating the whole person and determining whether they are a good fit to the university and its mission. A lot of that is subjective, unfortunately, and sometimes there are painful criteria (like, whether you've brought in an expected amount of grant money—at least at some universities, there is a boiler-room aspect to the whole process), but maintaining a weblog is such a small drop in the bucket that it's not going to be a major factor in a review.

  Unless, of course, you've done something interesting like sneer hatefully at all of the members of the review committee, admitted to having sex with your students, and bragged about your desire to leave and move up to a bigger, more prestigious institution…but then, people like that find ways to alienate their colleagues and screw up their careers without a weblog.