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Fighting Back: Blogging Back at the Right
In a new feature, Academe highlights local success stories— initiatives in support of academic freedom on a campus near you. Send us your own stories.
By Michael Bérubé
My first personal Web site, created for me in 2002 by a former student, Kurt Nelson, was an online archive of my published work, with hyperlinks to available essays. (It was not linked to my faculty listing on the English department’s Web site at Penn State.) About twenty or thirty people a month stopped by, according to Kurt’s record keeping. The site had a front page on which I could post notices and direct readers to other materials online.
When I began reading blogs regularly in early 2003, I tried every once in a while to treat my bulletin board as a blog. But it didn’t have the two things every blog needs: permalinks, which enable other bloggers to cite specific blog entries, or the capacity to embed hyperlinks in a block of written text.
Things changed, however, after December 2003, when I published an essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education that quickly made the rounds of right-wing blogs. The essay was about dealing with an outspoken conservative student, whom I did not want to silence in class but whose tendency to take over classroom discussions had become grating to many of his peers. I concluded the essay by suggesting that although all students should be reasonably accommodated in classroom discussion, this principle is difficult to observe when a student’s sense of what’s reasonable differs so dramatically from one’s own. I drew the phrase “reasonably accommodated” from disability law, which I considered to be appropriate because it involves a universal principle for taking into account individual idiosyncrasy. In response, a conservative blogger read my essay as evidence that I consider conservatives to be mentally disabled—an interpretation that I cannot credit as “reasonable.”
I soon learned how the worst of the blogosphere works: snippets of text are taken out of context and batted around the Internet like beach balls in football stadiums. Before you know it, you can find yourself the object of a national campaign of outrage and denunciation. In 2004, conservative history professor Robert David “KC” Johnson of Brooklyn College upped the ante yet again, writing on the right-wing site Campus Watch that “the nation’s leading academic journal, the Chronicle of Higher Education, published an essay by Penn State English professor Michael Bérubé advising professors to treat conservative students as they would students with learning disabilities or who exhibited aberrant behavior.” (Emphasis added.) So I suggested to Kurt that I needed to convert my Web site into a blog, if only for self-defense; Kurt responded by creating a new domain name (www.michaelberube.com) and setting up an account with a software company that develops products and hosting services for online publishers.
On my second day of blogging in 2004, Nation columnist and online media critic Eric Alterman linked to one of my postings. Suddenly, I found myself with five hundred readers on a daily basis. Later, I added a comment section to the blog, allowing readers to post responses to me and to each other. By election day, I had a monthly readership of a hundred thousand. After my blog wound up as a finalist for three different “Koufax Awards” in early 2005 (a competition among liberal bloggers, named after the greatest lefty of them all), my daily readership soared to over five thousand.
Now, whenever someone takes extraordinary liberties with my work, I have what amounts to a rapid-response device. When FrontPage, the online magazine of conservative activist David Horowitz, ran an “exchange” with me in which it dropped fifteen paragraphs from my reply to Horowitz and then berated me for my “intellectual laziness,” I promptly reproduced all fifteen paragraphs on my own site and accused Horowitz of rigging the debate. Horowitz’s assistant, Jamie Glazov, assured me that the error was inadvertent, and I believe him—but I also believe that if I had not had a blog, FrontPage would never have bothered to correct the error in the first place.
I don’t mean to suggest that blogs are useful only, or even primarily, as a means of self-defense. Mine is also an outlet for all kinds of whimsical, satirical, and occasional writing—from musings on the paradoxical status of autonomy in disability-studies debates to parodies of contemporary political events to discussions of popular music and film—that I simply can’t or won’t do anywhere else. (Though occasionally the blog has become a vehicle for writing elsewhere: one of my posts on disability was noticed by the Boston Globe, which then invited me to comment on the case of Terri Schiavo, the severely brain damaged Florida woman who died in March after removal of her feeding tube.) I don’t blog about my department, my university, or (except on rare occasions) my discipline, partly because I think of blogging as the kind of writing I do when I’m not doing my day job, and partly because my service on departmental, college, and disciplinary committees usually prevents me from commenting on such matters without violating committee confidentiality.
Although my blog can be quite personal in its politics, there’s no reason to think of blogs as atomized, individualized affairs. Blogs can also be used as clearinghouses or news aggregators about matters that pertain to contemporary assaults on academic freedom. I sometimes think that if academic bloggers had pool-ed their resources more effectively in 2003, we wouldn’t have had to wait two years for a print journalist to debunk David Horowitz’s claim that a student from an unnamed “Colorado college” had been flunked by her leftist professor for refusing to write an essay on why George Bush is a war criminal.
To date, conservatives have been far more effective at using “aggregator” blogs, like Instapundit and Powerline, to generate political groundswells and feed mainstream media. There are no intrinsic politics to blogging, however, and liberal academics can—and should—make far more extensive use of the form than we’ve yet attempted. It’s not an ideal form for scholarly exchange, to be sure, but it is exceptionally versatile (I have already come to think of hyperlinks as far more substantive modes of citation than traditional footnotes). So far, only a few of us have even begun to explore its versatility—for self-defense, for the popularization of academic work, for new forms of collaborative scholarship and communication, and for those most venerable of pedagogical goals, delight and instruction.
Michael Bérubé is Paterno Family Professor in Literature at Pennsylvania State University.
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