The Top 100 Liberal Arts Professor Blogs

Online University Reviews has posted an entry guaranteed to generate some in-bound link traffic. There are many sites I’d never heard of before.

Academics are flocking to the Internet like never before,
particularly to start a blog. Faculty members in colleges across the
world are connecting with people on a whole new level. Let’s face it –
academia can actually be very lonely at times. Not only can a blog be
cathartic for professors, it can allow for valuable feedback from
students and/or colleagues.

Liberal arts subjects are wildly varied. From art to science, the
major disciplines have long been considered part of the liberal arts.
Below are 100 of the most interesting and popular blogs written by
liberal arts professors. They have been divided into subject and
alphabetized, as it would be virtually impossible to arrange them
according to importance.

I’m flattered to be included on the list (along with my colleague Mike Arnzen, who writes Pedablogue). Nevertheless, I’d say it’s about five years too late for the “gosh, lots of academics are starting
to blog” story, but it’s always interesting to look at someone else’s
summaries of sites that I read on a regularly basis.

Well, it’s usually interesting, if the summaries reflect a particular perspective or world view.  Unfortunately, I didn’t always find the summaries
particularly insightful or informative.

• Matthew G. Kirschenbaum – The author is an associate professor of English the University of Maryland.
• Pedablogue – This blog is described as a “personal inquiry into the scholarship of teaching.”
• (In the “History” category) Scattered & Random – This is a – you guessed it – scattered and random blog written by a history professor.

As for the list itself, what were the criteria for
inclusion? Erin O’Connor’s Critical Mass
is a great blog, but O’Connor recently left academia.  Why does the
list include 30 blogs grouped under “English,” with no dual-language or
ESL categories? Why is Cronaca
identified as the lone art blog (when its content is so eclectic)? There’s a 2005 in the URL — is this list three years old? Why did I just get an e-mail about it?

BoingBoing offers a cruel fisking of a similarly sketchy article on a different topic: “GRADED: The Worst ’10 Worst Consoles’ List of All Time.” 

I’ve certainly posted blog entries that I’ve tossed out quickly, without much forethought or analysis, but I do think this Top 100 list would have benefited from a clear statement of selection criteria and a bit more proofreading — there are two blogs listed under #73, so this is actually a Top 101 list.  It would serve me right if my blog were cut to make it 100, but I’m just doing what Online University Reviews says is my thing — “Jerz’s Literacy Weblog – Learn plenty of useful writing tips from this professor’s blog.”)