But why was it not likely to be recognized? I think the answer that will spring to the lips — or rather to the fingers — of people like us, habituates of the blogosphere, is that there are too many Ivan Tribbles around for a fine, intellectually serious blog like Drezner’s to be taken seriously by a high-level institution. And that’s true, but it’s not the whole story. We also need to recognize that the *architecture* (as Larry Lessig would put it) of blogs is far better suited to the dissemination of news than the pursuit of intellectually serious questions. The standard blog format — newest posts on top, comments (if there are any) visible only when you click on the permalink, uncertain or nonexistent means of citation — makes it easy for people to scan the recent entries and then move on. An extra effort is required to see the actual conversation. A far greater effort is necessary to pursue conversations that are more than a day or two old.

Of course all of these problems can be overcome, and there are various technologies out there that address some of them — for instance, the ability on many sites (like this one) to subscribe via RSS to comments — but they are imperfectly and infrequently implemented. What we need is for fans of the blogosphere — people who know that conversations on certain blogs are far more valuable than the ones we’re likely to have at the faculty club or at a conference — to realize that the architecture is deficient, and to press for remedies. The Ivan Tribbles of the world may be uneducable, but there are a lot of people out there whose suspicions about the value of blogs are not fixed, and could be assuaged if intellectual/academic websites employed an architecture that was more amenable to sustained, intellectually serious debate, based on claims substantiated with real evidence (as appropriate for the topic, and linkable when possible).

With some architectural changes, blogs could come to be recognized as real contributions to the scholarly conversation; at the very least they could cease to be potentially damaging, at least insofar as they are blogs. You could never stop people from using such a venue in order to shoot themselves in the foot; but maybe serious and thoughtful people like Drezner wouldn’t have the very fact of their writing blogs held against them.

One analogy that occurred to me in thinking about being denied tenure is that it is like not being made partner at a law firm. There’s a professional qualification, a lengthy journeyman stage, and an intransparent process resulting in a lifetime offer (or not) at the end. As you point out, there’s a general model with lots of local variation; law firms quite clearly have their cultures as universities do.

But for Dan in particular, and for people on the tenure track in general, there’s an important difference: A lawyer who doesn’t make partner can hang out his or her own shingle. (Likewise doctors and investment professionals, whose career trajectories are broadly similar.) Political scientists generally can’t. Why not? Or more to the point, what would have to happen to make that option more available?

I’m reading, at time permits, your sketch of a 21st century college, and I think there might be a connection, but the dough has not risen enough on those ideas to even call them half-baked, so I’ll just posit a connection. (Tangentially, in the sketch have you given much thought to skills that are use-them-or-lose them? I’m thinking in particular of foreign languages and mathematics. I remember that doing a semester of statistics between calculus and multi-dimensional calculus really set me back; I was simply out of practice. That seems to me a danger of the first-year program you’ve sketched. There are skills that students will have coming out of high school that college hones, and if they are left unused for a year then a real dead-weight loss will follow.)

Spousal hiring is a pretty deep and complex issue in its own right, and tends to raise ambivalent feelings. On one hand, it seems a good response to the problems that academic couples face in coordinating their careers, when one spouse has been hired and his/her institution is happy with that person. Especially in a more remote place like Williams. On the other, as you note, it may raise questions about whether standards are the same for both people. Without getting into specific cases, I think it’s fair to say that it hasn’t always worked to the advantage of people in that situation here–that at the least, both partners are evaluated separately and distinctively. Which I think means whatever its advantages and disadvantages, it’s not, as you say, cronyism.

I don’t know the answers, but I suspect that Swarthmore, like all large organizations, looks out for its own. I don’t consider this a problem necessarily, but it surely is a type of cronyism.

At Williams, at least, there are many faculty members married to other faculty members and staff. The results are not always pretty.