So I've doomed myself to academic oblivion by blogging?

This week’s Chronicle of Higher Education includes a column by Ivan Tribble:  “Bloggers Need Not Apply: Job seekers need to eliminate as many negatives as possible, and in most cases a blog turns out to be a negative.”

Tribble (“the pseudonym of a humanities professor at a small liberal-arts college in the Midwest”) discusses his college’s recent hiring process and concludes that blogging can only hurt one’s chances of being hired as a faculty member.

A few choice excerpts:

"The pertinent question for bloggers is simply, Why? What is the purpose of broadcasting one's unfiltered thoughts to the whole wired world? It's not hard to imagine legitimate, constructive applications for such a forum. But it's also not hard to find examples of the worst kinds of uses.

A blog easily becomes a therapeutic outlet, a place to vent petty gripes and frustrations stemming from congested traffic, rude sales clerks, or unpleasant national news. It becomes an open diary or confessional booth, where inward thoughts are publicly aired.

Worst of all, for professional academics, it's a publishing medium with no vetting process, no review board, and no editor. The author is the sole judge of what constitutes publishable material, and the medium allows for instantaneous distribution. After wrapping up a juicy rant at 3 a.m., it only takes a few clicks to put it into global circulation."

He goes on to offer a doomsday scenario for bloggers:

Our blogger applicants came off reasonably well at the initial interviews, but once we hung up the phone and called up their blogs, we got to know ‘the real them’ -- better than we wanted, enough to conclude we didn't want to know more.

Okay, I agree with “Tribble” that if you are a professor blogging away about the most intimate details of your life, this obviously calls into question your personal and professional judgment.

But outside of these extreme cases, why does Tribble assume that expressing one’s academic and/or personal views without the formal benefit of “peer review” or some other "vetting process" is necessarily a bad thing? One of the obvious benefits of (sensible) blogging is that it forces you in some respects to silence the internal censor (as Daniel Solove has noted) which is the bane of writers and very likely the cause of many brilliant ideas going to the grave with their (would-be) author.

Second, a hiring committee certainly doesn’t want to know every detail of a candidate’s life. But I would hope that hiring committees would want to get to know the “real” candidate -- not just a suited-up, watered down version.

Indeed, I think that most successful people -- while certainly utilizing the various and necessary masks one must maintain in society – are successful in part because they bring themselves (the “real” person) to their vocation. They don’t leave their personality at the door.

And finally, a rhetorical question for Orin Kerr: has blogging ruined your career?