A Remembrance of Tribbles Past

Scott McLemee,"A Dogged Pursuit," Inside Higher Ed, 29 September, notes that publishers have begun to use blogs as a means of getting the word out about their books, but the quick summary does no justice to Scott's column. At University Diaries, Margaret Soltan likes this passage:

The rather hysterical tone prevailing in some quarters calls to mind what sociologists call"moral panic." But the iron cage of bureaucracy is, after all, a strange thing: Today, there are timid souls who worry that a prospective colleague's blog might be a record of torrid threesomes indulged while plotting to assassinate the dean. Tomorrow they will be retired, or laughed off campus — whereupon blogging might well become mandatory, rather than forbidden.

There's a substantiating bit of evidence in the fact that the Law School faculty at the University of Chicago now has its own The Faculty Blog.