Blogging profs find useful tool, trouble

Since blogging began, outrageous claims and personal dramas have made their way onto the Internet for all to read.

But when university faculty members are the bloggers, they're sometimes finding themselves in hot water.

At a number of schools around the country, personal Web logs are getting professors - and the administrators they write about - into trouble, raising questions of exactly how much freedom of speech the Internet allows.

While it is impossible to track how many Penn professors keep blogs, many are eagerly entering the blogosphere, opining on topics ranging from nursing to the Bush administration.

Penn bloggers should rest assured that their academic standing won't be affected by their online rants, University President Amy Gutmann said.

But professors at other universities haven't been so lucky.

For example, Juan Cole, a professor at the University of Michigan, was denied an appointment this summer as a contemporary Middle Eastern scholar at Yale University by the school's appointments committee.

Cole has a blog that expresses anti-Bush and anti-Iraq war sentiments. Alumni and staff had sent letters to the appointment committee expressing concerns about his blog, and committee members said the deluge was hard to ignore.

But the authors of blogs aren't always the ones who get into trouble.

The University of Colorado System President Elizabeth Hoffman resigned in March 2005 after a host of criticism of her performance as president surfaced on blogs.

Though her resignation did not come as a direct result of the blogs, she made a public statement saying the online criticisms created an atmosphere in which it was impossible for her administration to function properly.

And at the State University of New York College of Technology at Alfred, the school's president resigned after an anonymous faculty member started a blog last year harshly criticizing the president with comments as extreme as: "The woman is suffering from borderline personality disorder."

But at least at Penn, nobody seems to have lost a job over the contents of an online journal.

"The essence of academic freedom is that faculty may write or say outside the classroom what they wish, and it doesn't affect their job," Gutmann said.

Some bloggers on the Penn faculty are taking that to heart.

Dick Polman is a writer for The Philadelphia Inquirer who teaches a class at Penn on political blogs. He also maintains a political blog for the Inquirer.

"I've been a professional writer for a long time, and one thing I've learned is you can't worry about who might be looking over your shoulder," he said.

But that doesn't mean Polman will write anything and everything on his blog.

"They're expecting me to adhere to professional journalistic standards," Polman said. "Those restrict me from going off on wild and crazy personal tangents."

Other faculty members see their blogs as less of a personal space and more of an open forum.

Afaf Meleis, dean of the Nursing School, started two blogs last year on nursing-related subjects.

She sees the blogosphere as a place in which faculty and students can "contribute as peers to each other's thinking and knowledge about different topics."

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