Minority Academics and Blogging: Why It Should and Does Matter

The Internet is fascinating for several reasons.  For one, it instantaneously conveys information over vast distances.  For another, it becomes this seemingly endless trove of artifacts to be uncovered at a later time, revealing new thoughts or new ideas.

I experienced both of these aspects earlier this week when an organization I “like” on Facebook shared an article from the website of the British newspaper, The Guardian.  More accurately, the shared content was a blog post, bearing the headline “Academic blogging: minority scholars cannot afford to be silent.”  This post by Denise Horn originally was published in July 2012, but only now had come to my attention.

In her post, Horn describes a situation on the blog site hosted by The Chronicle of Higher Education from earlier that Spring, in which another blogger disparaged the academic integrity of recently-completed dissertations among the first cohort of graduate students in Northwestern University’s black studies doctoral program.  That blogger, Naomi Schaefer Riley, questioned the intellectual value of the new work based on “the sidebar [accompanying a news article about the students] explaining some of the dissertations.”  Based on this limited reading, Schaefer Riley called for the elimination of black studies programs.  The fury Schaefer Riley’s diatribe engendered led to her ultimate dismissal from The Chronicle.

Horn uses this event in her own post as a something of a wake-up call to think more deeply about herself as “an academic who blogs,” and more broadly about “minority academics who blog.”  That designation – a minority academic who blogs – resonated with me, to say the least.

When my friend and colleague, Prof. Frank Gaytán, and I started this blog last year, it was for the reasons described on our “About this Blog - FAQs” page – to discuss big ideas in big ways to a big audience from our particular points of view.  In doing so, we have strove to demonstrate the attitude and mindset Horn describes when she writes, “We [academic bloggers] invest a lot of time and effort into what we do.  For many of us, the care and attention we put into each of our blog posts reflects the attentiveness we have within our own research as a whole, and by extension reflects perhaps our training as scholars.”

Nevertheless, I do feel somewhat insecure at times in trying to engage big ideas in big ways with a big audience through this forum.  This mostly is due, I think, to aspects of higher education’s rewards systems.  Granted, I have some security through my tenure-track position, but that is a limited security given my rank as assistant professor.

Only recently I have begun to promote more my work on The Mexican Intellectual among other academics as a professionally-related creative endeavor, while being unsure if it will be perceived as a worthwhile pursuit or a quaint, but ultimately frivolous activity.  And yet, it is to some degree the nature of these higher educational structures that prompted our founding of this blog in the first place.  Fortunately, conversations are beginning at the graduate and professional levels of how to begin thinking about how to incorporate digital scholarship into tenure review processes.  After all, as Horn notes, “Blogging is, to an extent, different from journalism and from academic journals, but it still holds its own as a forum for ideas and for 'civil discourse' among academics."  "The emergence of many minority academic programs and departments," she continues, "is connected to a desire to make visible not just the work but also the culture of certain segments of the population that have been ignored, undervalued, oppressed.”

Admittedly, my graduate training was not in the kind of minority academic program or department Horn discusses; neither was Prof Gaytán’s.  We do, however, teach the courses we teach and conduct the kind of research and writing we do in order to make visible the previously invisible; to lift up the previously overlooked or undervalued.  And I do not think there is anything frivolous about that.