The Faculty Lounge

Workplace Prof Blog Books Millionth

Congratulations to Paul Secunda, Rick Bales and Jeff Hirsch as Workplace Prof Blog hits the notable Site Meter achievement of one million page views. 

In its three-plus years of existence, these folks have labored to produce a prodigious amount of content.  I thought only Co-op had figured out how the best way to bring in crowds, but based on Paul's announcement, apparently even Workplace it's own back catalog of sexy google material. 

Here's hoping that three years from now, The Faculty Lounge will be as vibrant as Workplace Prof!

Amusing Comments to Blog Entries

In keeping with my theme of stupid things that bloggers do to mess up our careers (with apologies to Dr. Laura Schlesinger--haven't heard her in years, but what entertainment I'm missing) I thought that I'd post a couple of links to comments that I've found amusing.  Actually, I like these comments, but this is part of my theme that people are likely to read what you write on a blog--and remember it, for good or bad, long after you've forgotten about it.  (Just like students who come up to me and recite a conversation I had with them in class a dozen years ago.  Sometimes I can't even remember them, let alone the conversation.)  And here are a couple that I've enjoyed.  I'm most interested in hearing ones you've liked....

We've worked most of the "x is like Hilter" stuff out of our national character (more or less).  But the Hitler analogy keeps cropping up every now and then--and the Stalin analogy as well.  So here's to you Mr. Diablo, whoever you are, for calling out the commentators to one of Orin Kerr's posts a couple years back on whether academics have a politically based grading system:

If liberal professors are so bad and so biased and so detrimental to education, then don't go to those schools. The reality is people don't actually believe this crap, they just want to use it as yet another GOP red herring -- this time to try to pass bills as reckless as that of the Arizona legislature. It's another card in the "every environment must have two giant yelling heads who disagree" school of thought. It's so anti-academic freedom it's absurd.

And while I feel bad for whoever got a C on here, the anecdote proves nothing. And time and time again these silly arguments about the bias in universities are nothing more than that: Anecdotes that are less than completely unverifiable.

...

Are we really using the word 'Leninist' and expecting to be taken seriously? That too easily bandied word should be thrown into the 'Nazi' pile.

Blogger's Disease

There's lots of talk about addictions people get to blogging and the ways that can be harmful (embarrassing pictures, stories, the whole deal).  Then there's the impulse to blog instead of interacting with humans.  I realized I might have this problem a few years ago when I was visiting at the University of Hawaii.  Why was I ever blogging when I could have been sitting here?  I guess this is the adult version of imaginary friends.

I want to focus on something that I've noticed among law bloggers in particular, something I've taken to calling "blogger's disease."  First, though, a story about how I first began to realize the problems law bloggers get ourselves into.  I was talking with a non-blogging friend about a mutual friend, who's a blogger.  (Got to be really vague here to preserve everyone else's anonymity.)  Non-blogger says to me, "wow, been reading blogger's posts.  I had no idea how extreme he is."  (I thought about making the blogger's gender ambiguous, but gave up when I remembered that the majority of bloggers are men.  That gender imbalance needs some serious scrutiny at some point.) 

I rarely read the blogger's posts, so I didn't have a good sense of how his personality was coming across--but I realized in that conversation that other people were reading his stuff and finding it like nails on a chalk board.  Yet, when I spoke with the blogger about this, he didn't even understand the problem.  Looking at him, he had the appearance of someone who couldn't even understand what I was talking about--not the look of someone who said, "Sure, I'm controversial and I know it and am willing to take the negatives that inevitably come along with the controversy."  He had the look of someone who couldn't understand that people found him controversial.  Spoke with some other bloggers about this and they also couldn't understand the problem--not just didn't think the critique applied to them, really didn't see this as a problem.

So that set me to thinking.  These law bloggers--they're clueless.  And thus I began thinking about defining blogger's disease.

The Faculty Lounge Opens Its Doors

A little over six months ago I took a break from blogging, leaving Concurring Opinions and focusing on my job as an associate dean of Drexel University's new law school.  We've had a hectic fall, working relentlessly on hiring while remaining focused on the essential task of earning provisional accreditation from the ABA.  Neither task is yet complete, but the intensity has a eased a bit.  And to be honest, I missed blogging.  So I set out to find a new space for myself in the blogosphere.  In the course of that search I came upon friends and fellow travelers with the same urge.  We imagined a blog that shamelessly embraced  both high theory and pop culture.   A blog that accepted the all-too-true reality that everyone is too damn busy to read anything that isn't engaging.  A blog with multiple voices, some newer and some older. 

It seemed to me that we wanted to recreate the experience of a faculty lounge.   Where sometimes people are talking about a great new paper on SSRN, other times they're lamenting the loss of a wonderful colleague to a competitor school, and once in a while they're just amused by a funny bumper sticker they saw on the way to work.  Where the senior colleague adds  non-dairy creamer to his java while his youthful colleague steeps her organic hemp tea.  And where you never know where the conversations will go next.  Welcome to the Lounge.  We hope you'll poke your head in sometimes to see what's up.