The Two-Body Problem: What I Learned

A few weekends ago I came home from commencement, hung up my silly robe for another year, cleaned my fridge, packed my car, and left town for the city where I live with my spouse. I won't be back until later in the summer. I've been making that five-hundred-mile round trip nearly every weekend for three of the last four years, with breaks for summers or sabbaticals. But this was the last time. Next time I drive to Cleveland it will be with a moving van and my spouse.  We have been lucky enough to solve the infamous two-body problem, the long-term, long-distance relationships that bedevil so many academic couples.

There was no fanfare. There was no parade. And there are plenty of logistical hassles left, such selling a house and moving our main household. But that phase of my life came to a quiet end. I will simply not do that commute anymore, and gradually I will lose the habit of doing it and the habits that came with it. But, before the perspective of the last few years fades from memory, I'd like to jot down what the experience taught me.

Some things should be obvious. A long-distance domestic partnership or marriage makes demands on your time, your energy, your organizational skills, your finances, and your relationship itself. Some of those things can be traded for one another to a limited degree; spending more money might mean shorter commutes, or ease organizational challenges by allowing you to duplicate, rather than endlessly pack and unpack, more possessions. Or your superior organizing may streamline things enough to buy you a couple extra hours of weekly rest. But the trade-offs only go so far.

The rise of internet and cell phones have made some aspects easier to cope with; there are no more massive long-distance phone bills. And some things are idiosyncratic to each situation. I had an enormously difficult time trying to manage two separate kitchens and keep both properly stocked. Not everyone will have that problem, just as not everyone has the same travel patterns or domestic pressures. And yes, there are first-world problems. But they're widely shared problems in my profession.

1. You will be tired and can't afford to be.

The first part of this is obvious. Travel takes time. Travel takes energy. But just because it's obvious doesn't mean that it won't affect you nearly every day. And it doesn't mean that you will expect how tired you will be. A commuter marriage taxes the time and energy of both partners, even if one doesn't usually do the traveling. My 4+ hour drive was manageable; I always had the energy to do it. But doing it twice a week for weeks on end wore me down more than I was willing to admit to myself. And at a certain point, not admitting to yourself that you're tired is the biggest problem.

But you can't afford to relax and save your energy, which would be my usual advice. Your careers run on that time and energy, and you can only get two jobs in one place by making yourself as employable, and thus working as hard, as you possibly can. The two-body problem takes away exactly the time and energy you need to invest in solving the two-body problem. And you also need to leave some time and energy for, you know, the relationship itself.

My weekly travel was much easier than many people's. I could drive, rather than fly. And it only demanded between eight and nine travel hours on a typical week. But eight or nine hours is most of a workday taken out of your week somewhere. And those are hours when you're awake and alert; below a certain limit of fatigue, you're not safe to drive. If you're trying to set aside one workday a week for your writing, as many people do, that day can get gobbled up by travel time and by tasks that travel pushes into other days.

(If you're flying or taking the train, you might be able to sleep or work as you travel. But you're still not going to use that time efficiently; it's going to be broken up and full of distractions.)

I found that I could drive to Job City from Marriage City at the beginning of the week and jump right into the week's tasks, although I wasn't going to get much done Sunday night after the drive. But one way or another, the drive back to Marriage City extracted a productivity toll. If I drove on Friday, most of that day got burned. If I kept Friday clear of courses and meetings and drove home after my night class on Thursdays, I would typically arrive home sometime between 1 and 3 AM. Then, mysteriously, I would have trouble getting much done the next day. Either way, my Friday-as-writing-day was cooked.

What I began to learn, but never fully mastered, was the art of using partially-fatigued time for tasks that required less concentration. If I tried to write part of an article on Friday, most of that time was going to get wasted. But I could use that time to prepare the next week's classes, rereading the assigned texts and writing classroom handouts. I couldn't write elaborate feedback on student papers just after I got home from teaching my night class, but I could proofread those papers and mark mechanical errors. And then those tasks would not end up taking up hours when my mind was sharper and I could do more complicated things.

You can't always devote your best working hours to the most demanding tasks. Sometimes a pile of meetings eat up some of your most productive time, and compressing the time you spend in the office - which you have to do to commute - means that lots of those meetings get stacked up in the middle of the week. But you can try to husband the less-productive time carefully to get through less-demanding tasks, and salvage as much of your high-productivity time as you can. Even more importantly, you have to learn when even low-level work is counterproductive, and make yourself rest when you can't work. If it's midnight, or even 10:30, and you've just driven two or three hundred miles, you should go right to bed.

2. You cannot divide the challenges evenly, but you can be fair.

Any couple with the two-body problem is concerned with equity; that's why one partner doesn't just sacrifice his or her career for the other. But there is almost no practical way for most couples to divide all of the different kinds of work that two-location marriage or domestic partnership requires equally. It doesn't even make sense to do it that way.

Even if you each do half the traveling during the semester, which is almost never efficient or practical, you aren't going to split summer break or winter holidays evenly between both locations. You probably can't afford to buy permanent homes in both places, but you might have good financial reasons to buy a home in one place. If you have children, they have to go to school somewhere. Inevitably, one location will become home base, and the partner who works in the other location will do more of the traveling.

What this means is that, one way or another, the practical challenges of the two-body relationship get distributed asymmetrically. This doesn't have to be unfair. But you can't split every task down the middle. You can share the hardships, but you're each going to cope with a different set of hardships.

Even when you think that you're taking on the tougher job, you are inevitably leaving other difficulties to your partner. I chose to be the primary commuter (although my spouse gave me a break once or twice a semester by coming to Job City for a weekend), thinking that I was taking a major burden from my spouse's shoulders. And to some degree, I was. But I was also, without realizing it, sticking my spouse with the responsibility for upkeep and repair of our 90-year-old house. After all, she was there, and I couldn't be around on most weekdays. Trying to relieve her of one burden, I saddled her with another. But that's how long-distance partnerships work; each partner ends up taking on different roles.

(The one part of the main household I did oversee was the kitchen, because I'm the primary family cook and therefore the primary grocery shopper. Before I left for the week, I would stock up the home-front kitchen with low-maintenance meals that I knew my spouse enjoyed. That particular division of labor was idiosyncratic, driven by our particular skill sets. Every long-distance partnership will have odd details like that.)

The thing you need to remember, for your relationship's sake, is that both of you have taken on the harder half of the job. Each one of you wrestles with problems the other doesn't have to deal with, and both can legitimately say they have it tougher than the other. Always remember in moments of stress that your spouse or partner is dealing with many challenges that s/he has taken on alone.

3. You must really live in both places.

One of your two locations will inevitably end up being primary, but you can't psychologically disconnect from the second place. It may be secondary in practical terms, because you can only handle one mortgage and because you leave during summer break. But you can't treat it as simply a place where you show up, do your job, and leave. You can't treat your home in the secondary location as a motel. One of you is going to spend the lion's share of every work week in that place; if it doesn't feel like home at all, you're going to be miserable.

The dumbest smart thing I ever did in the commuter phase of my marriage was to downsize my apartment in Work City to a smaller, fairly anonymous bachelor pad close to my office. On paper, it was a perfectly sensible idea; it was cheaper and more efficient. But over time it wore on me terribly, and I eventually came to hate being there, not because the place itself was so bad but because I had never managed to make it feel like home. Worse, I thought of it as Not-Home, as an extension of my workplace. And that meant that psychologically I never came home from the office at all unless I got in a car and crossed two state lines.

The only time that apartment felt like home was when my spouse visited for the weekend. Those weekends often became extended date nights, as we got to enjoy Job City's amenities. (If you spend your time in two places, you will discover unique pleasures in each place. Try to enjoy both when you can.) And when she visited, even my grimly convenient apartment became a place where I found comfort. Later, when my spouse moved to Job City for a sabbatical year, we found a more home-like apartment in my old residential neighborhood, and I began to reconnect more fully with the city around me.

You can't afford to be alienated from a place where you spend at least twenty days a month. And you can't let your social life wither in either place, no matter how easy that is to do. You need to bond with both places. You need friends in both places. And you need to keep working on those things.

4. Mood. 

A commuter marriage is, by its nature, something you're not happy doing, and it fills your daily life with things that aren't especially happy-making. Most of us don't get married so we can wake up alone. You have to spend a lot of your time putting on your happy face and powering through. Everyone learns to do that getting through grad school, just like you learn to power through a lot of work when you're tired. But, just as pushing on with work after you're tired eventually becomes counter-productive, ignoring your mood will eventually burn you. You need to monitor your frame of mind just as you monitor your energy level, and plan around your own low points.

Most of my problems with mood were cumulative: things that weren't so difficult in themselves but, through repetition, slowly eroded my inner resources. I don't fall apart if I spend a day or two without my spouse. Waking up alone for a day or two is not a problem. But as the number of days spent apart from her stacked up, week after week, I eventually had to admit that I was finding it increasingly hard to stay positive, becoming frustrated more quickly, having a harder time shaking off minor problems. In my case this was complicated, and temporarily masked, by the fact that while I was adjusting to the weekly commute I was also taking on a number of new quasi-administrative responsibilities at work, so there were genuinely new workplace headaches. But it's harder to roll with the punches on the sixtieth or eightieth work day you wake up without your spouse. I eventually accepted that my mood declined over the course of each week, and that every week's low point got a little lower.

Driving at night was another cumulative problem. I find driving at night relaxing. But when you're driving 250 miles twice a week, almost always after dark,  you are basically spending eight or nine hours a week sitting alone in the darkness. That turns out to affect your mood. Driving through the night for four hours won't meaningfully affect you. Sitting in your darkened car, mile by mile, for more than 100 hours a semester will gradually start to darken your outlook. I eventually had to take active steps to ensure that I did at least some of each week's driving in the sunlight, and noticed an immediate improvement.

Mood is obviously related to energy level and fatigue, and the same problems with academic culture apply. We're all trained to suck it up and grind it out. That's how you get through orals, that's how you finish your diss, that's how you do all the end-of-term grading in four days, that's how you got through the gauntlet of the job market. It's the right thing to do, up to a point. But after that point, or when the thing your pushing past stretches beyond weeks and months and becomes indefinite, it becomes very much the wrong thing to do. It's like distance running: you need to run through some discomfort and fatigue. That's the normal state of things. But if you push it beyond a certain point, you will hurt yourself. Sometimes the pain is warning you that you will injure yourself if you keep running; the fatigue is telling you that you are dehydrated, and getting worse with every step. If you keep pushing after that point, you will put yourself far, far behind.

I learned, or began to learn, two basic strategies for coping with my declining mood. One, as with the drive-in-the-sunshine trick, was to look for small things to build into my schedule that improved the day: lunch at a favorite place instead of at my desk, coffee with a friend. The big things, like not seeing your spouse every day, are part of the problem, and big attempts at compensation are often dysfunctional, but you can get some decent mileage out of small things.

The second trick is to be aware of your moods and step back a little from what you're feeling in the moment. For the first year of weekly commuting, it seemed that every Thursday afternoon between 4 and 6 something outrageous and messed-up would happen at work, usually involving some quasi-administrative stuff. Then I would teach my night class, which put whatever it was out of my mind for two hours but left it waiting for me when I got out of class, and then I'd pack my car and drive four and a half  hours through the night, chewing over whatever that week's Thursday Afternoon Outrage was. That was a pretty ugly experience. Eventually I learned to adjust to that, partly because I learned which kinds of nonsense I should expect in my inbox, but mostly because I learned that I was at the absolute lowest trough of the week at 5:30 on Thursday afternoon, and that I should learn to hold all my Thursday-afternoon reactions at arm's length. I learned that things tended to look especially bleak or dysfunctional by that time (and of course, almost every Friday afternoon meeting seemed to be about something utterly insane) and that I should presume that any problems that came to my notice late on Thursday would seem less awful the next day. I couldn't make myself a resilient optimist by the last days of the week, but I could plan around my weekly lack of optimism or resilience and keep my temporarily lowered mood from affecting my actions.

Anyway, that's what is was like for me. Your mileage may vary.

cross-posted from Dagblog

Career Advice from Actors to Academics

It's that cruelest of seasons again for young scholars: job search season. In an annual fall ritual I've discussed in previous years, the list of jobs for new professors beginning next fall has recently been published, and people who want those jobs are now laboring over complicated job applications. As has been the case for many years, and especially since the Great Recession began, there are far fewer jobs than there are talented and qualified applicants. A job in the humanities typically gets more than a hundred or two hundred applications (sometimes more than three or four hundred), while there are only a few dozen job openings across the country in an individual's field. (If I were starting out looking for my first teaching job today, there would be only 22 jobs I could apply to in the US; by the end of November that number might swell to 30.) What this means is that no one, no matter how gifted and deserving, gets an assistant professorship without a whole lot of good luck. Talent isn't enough. Hard work isn't enough. Merit isn't enough. There are many, many more talented, hard-working and meritorious people than there are jobs. You have to be talented AND hard-working AND lucky. In other words, getting a job in the academy has become like getting a job in the theater, and it needs to be approached in the same way.

The best book of career advice I've ever read, hands down, is Robert Cohen's classic Acting Professionally, which I first read in my teens. I still have a copy, because some of its advice it turns out to be applicable to things outside acting. It's especially relevant to the strange little world of academia, which is like the strange world of the theater in that work is incredibly scarce, rejection is pervasive, and success or failure can feel like a judgment of you as a person. And much of the book is devoted to explaining how terribly hard it is, very much in the manner of today's "don't go to grad school unless you know the facts" talk in a faculty office. (In the edition I read in the 1980s, Cohen cautions aspiring actors that they might literally be one of a hundred people up for a single acting job. Oh, Bob. If only it were that easy.) Somewhere along the line, teaching college turned into an arts job, like acting or sculpting. That's not good, but for now it's the reality, and it has to be dealt with.

So, with the indulgence of my fellow Dagbloggers, I'd like to devote this post (and maybe two or three more) to sharing Cohen's lessons with younger academics.

The first thing to make clear is that advice is not enough. You can get the best advice possible, and follow it, and still not get a job. In this way, being an academic job-seeker is exactly like being an actor. Good advice is not always enough, because doing everything right is not always enough. Some career advice to academic job-seekers is offered, or taken, in the spirit of telling job-seekers that they will get a job if they do the right things; but there's no way to promise that. Advice isn't sufficient, but it's still necessary. It keeps you from taking yourself out of the running.

If you want to be in movies, you basically have to move to Los Angeles, where the casting happens. Moving to LA won't get you a job in movies; far from it. But if you don't move to LA, you won't have a Hollywood career. If you don't move to New York, you won't be on Broadway. If you want to be a working actor, you need a set of recent, professional headshots. The best set of headshots in the world won't get you work on its own. But not having those photos to give casting directors will ENSURE that you don't get work. So will getting amateur headshots that one of your friends took with a smartphone, or using old photos that show you with a hairline or waistline that you haven't had for five years. In the same way, the most immaculately prepared job materials won't get you a job, but careless or unprofessional job materials will make sure that you never get one. Having an article, or even two articles, accepted for publication in good journals won't guarantee you a job, because most applicants for most jobs will also have a publication or two. But if all the serious applicants for a job have those publications and you don't, you are not a serious applicant for that job. 

The most important piece of advice Cohen gives, which has stayed with me for decades, is this:

Children are rewarded for being good. Adults are rewarded for being useful.

Children are (or should be) rewarded because they deserve rewards. Learn your algebra, get your A. But adults are hired because they are useful to their employers. The question is not what the job-seeker deserves. It is what the employer needs. Abstract merit is less important than how an applicant fits the needs of a particular job. For "children" we could read "students" and "adults" we could read "professionals." What you do as a student is about you. What other people hire you to do is ultimately about them.

If the two best actors who show up at an audition are both competing for the same role, only one of those actors is likely to get hired, because they can't necessarily fit other parts. Say three brilliant twenty-something actresses all try out for the romantic lead, and any one of them would be great. In fact, all three are better actors, in terms of overall talent and skill, than anyone who tries out for any of the other roles. You can't cast the runner-up for the female romantic lead as the seventy-year-old grandfather, even if she's a much "better" actor than all of the older men who've auditioned. The producers will cast the best grandfather-type as the grandfather, and the best ingenue as the ingenue. Likewise, if three brilliant old stage veterans turn up to read for the grandfather, and the best actress reading for the ingenue role is just okay, the just-okay actress will get hired and two of the silver-haired virtuosos won't. The actors who don't get hired deserve jobs. The show just can't use them.

In the same way, there are brilliant character actors who make a living as supporting players in big Hollywood movies. (And there are many other brilliant character actors who don't make a living at all.) You can often see those brilliant actors playing opposite leading actors who are less talented .... sometimes much less talented. The actor playing the villain or the sidekick may be a far better actor, as an actor, than the leading man. But the film would almost certainly be a flop if the character actor were put in the lead. ("Stanley Tucci is ... Batman.") Yes, there are always exception. But they're exceptions. And while I might pay good money to see Nathan Lane as The Mighty Thor, most people wouldn't. Some actors are more useful in supporting roles. Others are playing the lead role or not getting a part at all.

In the same way, academic jobs are about a variety of different needs, and something that helps your chances for one job might hurt your chances for another. This is not because those things are good or bad, but because they make you more or less useful for that specific job. Jobs require different balances of teaching and research. They require different kinds of teaching. Some jobs want to hire someone to cover an entire specialty by her- or himself, and prize breadth. Some are hiring someone to join an existing group of specialists, and may be looking for people who complement the existing faculty members, or for people who would be especially good collaborators with them. (Some departments want the new person to bring something new to the table. Some are trying to build up a critical mass of people doing overlapping work.) And here's the thing: all of these questions can work for or against you no matter what you do. Teaching lots of beginning classes might help you get a job where you'll teach those classes, but not to get a job where you'd only teach advanced courses. Doing research that overlaps a potential colleagues can sink your application ("Do we need another person doing Shakespeare and Renaissance science?") or move it to the top of the pile ("We want to become a center for studying Renaissance literature and science."). This is about their needs, not your merit.

Many small liberal-arts colleges favor applicants who went to small liberal-arts colleges themselves. The thinking is that alumni of small colleges have a feel for the kind of community experience that those schools work to provide, and that it sometimes takes people who were undergrads at big research universities a longer time to grasp what a place like Williams or Carleton is about. They don't think that people who went to small colleges are better or smarter than people who went to big universities. Arguing that Yale is harder to get into than Williams is beside the point. Small-college graduates aren't necessarily better than Ivy League graduates, but they bring something to the table that hiring committees see as useful.

So what to do with this lesson? Two things. The first is only psychological, but it's crucial: do NOT read the academic job market as a reflection of your professional worth. It is not that. It cannot be that. It does not judge your merit, but only your usefulness, and your usefulness to any particular employer is highly circumstantial.

When hiring committees talk about "fit" this is what they mean: your usefulness within the idiosyncratic terms of a given job. Some job seekers have taken a great dislike to the term "fit," which they see as not helpful. But what "fit" means is: it's not about you. Instead of being angry with that, take it as permission not to beat yourself up.

The second application of the rewarded-for-being-useful lesson is to the job market itself. As far as is within your power, you should craft your job materials to appeal to the demands of the particular job. And as far as is within your power, you should direct your professional energies toward the activities that qualify you for the kind of job you want.

There are limits to this. You should never say explicitly, "I think I meet your needs in X and Y way." They know their needs better than you do, and don't need to be told. And, as Flavia points out, the academic job letter is a fairly constrained genre whose limits you should definitely not break. But what you emphasize should generally be things that suit you for THAT job. If you are applying for a job teaching English literature at a place where you won't be expected to teach composition, that one 200-level literature section you once taught is at least as important as the fifteen sections of composition you've taught over the past four years. If you're applying for a job where half your teaching load would be comp, you should give your composition experience more play. If you were an actor going on auditions, you'd bring a prepared monologue that fit your skills, but also fit the part you were auditioning for. If you're auditioning for the funny best friend in a Wendy Wasserstein play, you don't give them your all-time-most-favorite monologue from Miss Julie. You don't give them a Neil Simon monologue if you're auditioning for Iago. Apply to the job they're offering.

In the longer term, if you want to get a certain kind of job, you should work to qualify yourself for those jobs in specific ways. This is easier said than done early in your career, when you don't necessarily get to choose teaching assignments and when you need to keep the wolf from the door. And qualifying for a job that already has a flood of qualified and over-qualified applicants doesn't guarantee you that job. It just allows you to get your application in past the first round of review, so that luck, fit, and other unpredictable forces can come into play. (If you can act but you can't sing or dance, no amount of luck will get you cast in a musical. If you're a great teacher with no publications, no amount of luck will get you a job at a research university.)

If you've taught a lot of intro-level courses, look for a chance to teach a more advanced class. That is a meaningful improvement to your CV. If you want a job in a department with a doctoral program, you should try to publish something in one of the top journals in your subfield; those departments will eventually evaluate you on your scholarly reputation as well as your productivity, so you need to show the hiring committee that you can publish in the influential, highly competitive venues. For those schools two or three things published in less selective journals do not add up to one article published in a flagship. If you'd be happier with a job where research is a smaller part of the mix, and where your scholarship will be counted more quantitatively, then two articles add up to more than one fancy article. The strategy there would be to focus on places where you can have your article accepted more quickly, and journals with higher acceptance rates. None of this guarantees you anything. (It goes both ways; if the stress of submitting to a journal with a tiny acceptance rate and inscrutable requests for revision makes you too crazy, then a research-intensive job will also bring miserable stress.) None of these things are easy to do. And none guarantee you anything. But you are not completely powerless. You have useful skills, and there are ways to increase your odds.

 cross-posted from, and comments welcome at, Dagblog.

Blogging Like Chaucer

cross-posted from Dagblog

I love academic bloggers. Academic bloggers worry me sick. And the bloggers who keep me up at night are the ones who have adjunct or alt-ac jobs but are trying to move to the tenure track. Some of those people are using blogs and social media to advance their careers in ingenious ways which I would never have foreseen. But others seem, at least from my vantage, to expect or hope that their online work will help their career in specific ways that it will not and cannot. Being online can help an academic career. But it's important to be clear about what it can help and what it can't.

Last week a blogger at Inside Higher Ed, a person who has a prominent and well-established online platform but teaches off the tenure track, wrote a post about her frustrations on the job market and her sense that no amount of professional achievement would be enough to get her a tenure-ladder job. There was a brief kerfuffle, with various unhelpful comments on her original post and one great and insightful response post by John Warner. But the issue I would like to highlight is that what she calls her "rather high-profile blog," a gig writing for Inside Higher Ed two or three times every week, did not tilt the job market in her favor. There, I think is the key lesson. Even blogging from terrific, high-profile platform was not enough.

[A few important caveats here: 1. The IHE blogger's larger point that in this market you can do everything right and still not get a job is absolutely true. There are far more qualified people than there are jobs, and so qualified people go without. Everything else I say should be read with that larger problem in mind. 2. I have no intention of commenting on the IHE blogger's specific case except for the fact that blogging seems not to have served her as a job credential. She's not asking my advice.]

But here's the big takeaway:

You can't blog your way to a tenure-track professorship.You simply can't. Even a gig at IHE or The Chronicle for Higher Education is not enough. That doesn't mean blogging is not professionally useful to you. It means you need to be clear about what it's useful for.

Blogging and other social media serve academics by bringing you to other people's attention and building your professional network. It works largely as publicity for your other work, and it widens your potential audience while strengthening your connections. (I, like many bloggers, mainly do this for non-professional reasons, but this is a fair assessment of blogging's professional benefits. And because academia is a small world, you can get most of those benefits even with a pseudonymous blog.) The most successful academic bloggers I can think of, such as Tenured Radical and Historiann, are productive bloggers who've built up a strong community of readers and commenters on one hand while also maintaining a steady output of strong scholarly writing on the other. Their blogging works as what military types call a "force multiplier" for their other work, making their scholarship more effective by drawing more audience attention to it.

What blogging never does is substitute for other academic writing. It doesn't get counted as scholarship. It does not serve as an employment credential. (If you wish to argue that it should, I can't help you. I'm interested in describing what is, not what ought to be. If you wish to argue that someday your blog will be recognized as cutting-edge scholarship, I would point out that "someday" will be too late.) This distinction doesn't pose a problem to science bloggers, or to most social scientists or historians, where the difference between a journal article and a blog essay is usually self-evident. But it can be tricky for people who work in literature or cultural studies, who can be tempted to blur the distinction between writing scholarship about new media and doing other writing on new media platforms.

Blogging functions for today's academics much the way that poetry functioned for poets like Chaucer or Spenser, which is to say that you can't actually make a living at it but it can help you make connections for other jobs. Chaucer's poetry only served him economically or professionally by building his reputation at court while he looked for various civil-service gigs. Writing The Canterbury Tales was a good way to get a customs or weights-and-measures gig. Spenser's Shepherd's Calendar led him to a career as personal secretary to important noblemen. Making a living off the books themselves was out of the question for both men. Poetry might have been their true vocation, but it wasn't their actual career. It was simply grease for their career. If you are an academic blogger, the same is true of your blog. You write it for personal satisfaction and to express various interests and for the pure joy of making something. The exposure it brings might also help your career. But it won't be the main driver of your career. The exposure only helps if you have other credentials to bring to the table.

Consider, for example, the Chaucer blogger himself, who writes "Geoffrey Chaucer Hath a Blog," and tweets as "LeVostreGC." He's an inventive, sophisticated, and hilarious user of social media who also holds down a junior-professor job as a medievalist. He's even published a selection from his blog as a book. But that book isn't going to be his main source of income. It didn't get him his job, and it won't get him tenure. What is has gotten him is attention from other literary scholars, whom he has impressed and made laugh. (He is very, very funny.) And people in our strange little profession know who he is, sooner than they likely would have otherwise. So being Chaucer the blogger is a bit like being Geoffrey Chaucer the Ricardian poet: it's not a living, but it does help you in your day job.

For an academic, blogging is the writing you do to get attention for your other writing. Blogging, even with my open-secret secret-identity, means that I'm more likely to be on some people's minds, and that they're more likely to come to one of my conference papers, glance at one of my articles if they see my byline, or read a review of my book. And I have professional friendships that are largely kept up through the blog and other social media. Blogging helps to get and keep you on people's radar. It's a good thing to do. But it only serves to assist your other work.