Long Time No See

The start of a new calendar year as well as a new academic term provides an opportunity to return to writing for The Mexican Intellectual.  The obvious question to emerge, however, is why I was missing in action in the first place.  There are a few inter-related reasons that I wish to share with you now.

Mental fatigue: One aim of this blog has been to comment on the issues of the day in a timely and relevant fashion.  Among some of the news dominating public attention during the last quarter of 2014: 1/ events and protests borne from racial tensions between civil authorities and the communities they are sworn to protect resulting in the loss of life and ongoing tensions, 2/ airline disasters resulting in the massive loss of life, with at least one still unresolved and another with international geopolitical implications, 3/ the spread of a deadly disease with international geopolitical implications resulting in the massive loss of life and paranoid reactions to those committed to stemming the spread of disease and loss of life, 4/Charges and counter-charges of sexual abuse involving college students, university administrators, and a legendary celebrity.  At times, it was too much for me to take in, let alone to think of anything novel to say about any of it without thinking that I was adding to the cacophony of voices rather than providing any clarity.

Insecurity: Part of this stems from my observation of mental fatigue, namely that I could not or would not have anything new to say about the state of the world or the human condition that would be worth saying without it adding to the numerous voices already speaking.  Further, I thought that no one would read what I wrote anyway.  This spring will mark three years since my colleague and I launched The Mexican Intellectual, and while I touted the number of page views on the first anniversary, I admit that I have become discouraged with the numbers since then, which has prompted me to question the point of the entire endeavor.

Fear of writing: This is borne of my insecurity.  To put it plainly, I discourage myself from writing; convinced that what I write will not be very good or that no one would read what I have written even if it has any merit to it.  My fear of writing obviously is an irrational one, and I recognize it as such.  Nevertheless, it exists.

So what am I to do?

Several years ago, I was a contributor to a short-lived alumni blog for my alma mater (which unfortunately is no longer available.)  I devoted one entry to confronting the challenges of writing a weekly blog.  At the time, I found inspiration in George Orwell’s essay, “Why I Write,” in which he outlined “four great motives for writing.”  These are,

(1) Sheer egoism.  Desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death…
(2) Esthetic enthusiasm.  Perception of beauty in the external world, or … in the words and their right arrangement….
(3) Historical impulse.  Desire to see things as they are, to find out true facts and store them up for the use of posterity.
(4) Political purpose… Desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other people’s idea of the kind of society that they should strive after.

These four, Orwell states, “exist in different degrees in every writer, and in any one writer the proportions will vary from time to time, according to the atmosphere in which he is living.”

These are worthwhile motivations for writing and, to some extent, were the bases for starting The Mexican Intellectual in the first place.  While I struggle to accept the fact that not everything I write will  be brilliantly perfect or perfectly brilliant, I hope at the very least that some of the things I have written already or have yet to write provide readers the opportunity to contemplate and discuss ideas from a different perspective.

One Year and Counting

My, how time flies!

Last week marked the one-year anniversary of The Mexican Intellectual.  Our blog launched on Friday, March 23rd 2012 with the very first post.  It seems as an appropriate time as any to reflect on what has happened on this site over the previous 12 months.

Celebrating one year of The Mexican Intellectual
March 22, 2013
Source: Author's private collection

Growing Popularity:  As of this writing, we have more than 3,100 total page views.  This figure may not seem like a lot when compared to Google, Amazon, or YouTube cat videos, but we think it is not too shabby for a two-man operation, especially considering we have full-time jobs and our own familial and other personal obligations.  Of these page views, 2,000 occurred during the first 11 months of the site.  More than 1,100 page views have come since the end of February.  We hope to keep up this pace and reach at least 5,000 page views by mid-summer.

More Production: Part of this growing popularity may be due to the fact that Dr. Gaytán and I are writing more.  We published only 15 posts from March to October 2012, with production declining first during the summer months and again beginning with the Fall semester’s mid-terms, which than ran through finals week, and spilled into the holidays.  Yet, we have published 17 posts during the first three months of 2013!  We hope to maintain this level of production from here-on-out.

What’s Popular: Of the Top Ten most viewed blog posts, Dr. Gaytán is the author of eight of them.  He also authored the most read post to date, “Why Does Everyone Hate Ruben Navarette?”  “Is the Unexamined Life Worth Hiring?” is my most popularly read piece in the Top Ten.  My other Top Ten entry is my more recent post about Pope Francis.  I really do not mind that Dr. Gaytán’s popular posts outnumber mine at a five-to-one ratio, since more people have viewed my “About Us” profile than his!

What’s Next:  We look forward to continue blogging our thoughts and opinions on a myriad of subjects.  We will continue to appreciate the support of all of you who read, comment about, and share The Mexican Intellectual.  In the coming months, you may see some changes to the site.  We expect these to be seamless and not to interfere with your enjoyment of the site.  We will be sure to keep you updated as we implement these changes.

Until then, thank you for your ongoing interest in and support of The Mexican Intellectual!

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.