Should Blogs Count for Tenure?

One of Julie Klein's students at Wayne State University asked me to fill out a survey on blogging as part of her project for "Integration," the great project for the In|Formation Year sponsored by WSU that brought together a distance-format class, WSU, libraries, museums, and other civic institutions in Detroit. Here is her question and my answer. I have kept her anonymous but have invited her to respond publicly to this blog entry.

BLOG SURVEY QUESTION: Is it possible that online publications such as blogs could be used in developing a new metric in determining tenure for assistant professors and promotion -- which include higher ranks as well-- at university?

MY RESPONSE: I agree with someone I read recently on this subject who notes that blogging should count for tenure and promotion in the same way that service counts. That is, if the point of a blog is to make knowledge available to others quickly and informally and efficiently, then that is a great service to the university, to students, to the community beyond the university, and fulfills part of university’s commitment to knowledge in service of society. Tenure and promotion are typically based on three pillars: teaching, research, service. Blogging, I would argue, contributes substantively to service (and, as with all contributions, it must be judged just how much and how well in each specific instance.)

Blogging might also count towards the teaching component of tenure and promotion. A blog could also have a pedagogical function (if so designed) and could thus also contribute to teaching.

Is it research? Depends entirely on the nature of what is blogged. And since the whole point of blogging is to avoid refereeing, to be able to get out one’s ideas unmediated, the scholarly definition of research as a peer-reviewed, refereed contribution to knowledge is not fulfilled by blogging. Definitionally these are opposites.

In fact, it makes me suspicious when someone protests that their blog gets so many hits while their scholarly articles receive so many fewer and therefore they don't need to publish in order to get tenure. That fails logically. Tenure is an agreed upon system of accountability and reward, as fallible as any such system and as susceptible to abuse. But it is not an objective or stand-alone system. It is agreed upon and a community agrees what counts. If the community were to decide blogging counts, it would. Until then, by definition, it is refereed monographs and articles, in different measure and worth depending on the field, the institution, the precedents of others, and so forth. It is a closed system of peer review and peers establish the standards.

So, yes, blogging should count for tenure (and be evaluated as such) in the categories that apply to what blogging is and does. Is it refereed? No. Is it peer reviewed? In a Web 2.0 way it is, but not in the community-standards way currently applied to tenure.