For various reasons, now seems like a good time to write a meta-post about the editorial policies and practices of this blog. Most of the time, I hope, if anyone senses an editorial hand at work, that hand rests on the discourse here with a very light touch. Sometimes, though, the work of our editors and the weight of our editorial guidelines is readily apparent.
A little background: The first thing I did when I became the official blog editor last October was to ask two of my colleagues, Andrew Seal and Sara Georgini, to serve as assistant editors. This decision was a result of my experience as the chair of the 2017 conference committee. As those of us who have planned a conference for USIH know, that decision-making process involves several choices that each come with a price tag in the tens of thousands of dollars. It’s a very stressful job, and I didn’t want to make any major decisions without full buy-in from my whole committee. When it was time to put my name on the dotted line, it helped to know that the choices I made seemed sensible to somebody besides me.
I have taken a similar approach with the blog. In the past, our blog editor Ben Alpers had relied on the advice and consultation of one or another of us bloggers in making various editorial decisions, but I wanted to formalize that structure so that, should I ever be hit by the proverbial bus, there would be at least two people who were not only fully aware of all the choices and commitments we have made regarding current and future content, but who are fully prepared to offer sage advice regarding the sorts of editorial dilemmas that crop up on a regular basis here.
Thanks to Ben’s leadership during his tenure as editor, we developed written blogger guidelines that cover most of the everyday workings of the blog. These are the procedures all our writers follow regarding things like who posts on what day, how we determine when to run a guest post, what we do if one of us is taking a short-term or long-term leave of absence, how to handle unique requests, etc. It’s an internal document that codified some of our regular practices and that helps orient new bloggers – and we’re always looking for new bloggers – to the logistical details of how the sausage is made here.
Our newest editorial intern, Scout, says, “I did *not* sign up for this.”
One of those guidelines, a longstanding policy at the blog, includes this provision: once a post goes up, it will not be altered beyond the correction of minor typos and omission or duplication of words. If a post is altered in a substantive way, the alterations will be indicated with strikethroughs. Unfortunately, due to a miscommunication between myself and the three guest authors of our most recent post, I ran the post with the prefatory note (cleared, I thought, with all three of them) that they have since requested I remove. It was difficult to say “no” to that request, but our policies are in place to make sure that we are consistent in how we treat all our contributors and readers. I’m sorry for the miscommunication, but I’m glad that it has occasioned an opportunity to explain to some degree the inner workings of this space.
Additionally, at our recent conference, a few attendees had questions, concerns, complaints, or profound misconceptions about “the rules” here at the blog. So let me take a moment to clear up a few things.
First, we have never banned a contributor. The editorial decision-making process regarding a guest post is the responsibility of each individual blogger. A scholar who wishes to run a guest post approaches one or the other of us with the proposed guest post, and each of us as individual bloggers can decide whether or not to run the post. In cases where one of us doesn’t need the break on our own blogging day, we will offer the guest post to any interested blogger to run on their day. To my knowledge, we have never received a coherent contribution that has been rejected by every single blogger. (We receive and reject lot of spam from PR departments offering to write a post about, say, search engine optimization or parasailing or whatever.)
So no one has been banned from contributing to this blog, and if anyone tells you otherwise, they’re either misinformed or disinforming.
However, we did find it necessary at some point within the past year to institute a formal comment policy. The immediate occasion for instituting this policy was a particularly ugly display of egregious behavior from a senior scholar who felt free to use the space in the comments to swear at, attack, insult, belittle, and otherwise demean his interlocutors, including junior scholars. That’s not how we roll here, and enough of us bloggers had had enough of that destructive behavior to discuss the need for some sort of policy to prevent our conversations here from degenerating into such a morass.
That decision – to institute a formal comment policy – was a very difficult one for our blogging collective. This blog functioned well for a long time without any such policy, and those of us who lean close to the free-speech-absolutist end of the spectrum of public discourse were very hesitant to codify anything.
However, this blog is the public face of a professional organization and is often the means by which emerging historians and established scholars in other fields are introduced to the discourse of our discipline. So it seemed wise to most of us to establish some minimal standards for the caliber of the conversation here. We had a couple of bloggers who disagreed with that idea, considering it the first step on a slippery slope towards banning contributors, and so they decided that this was a good time for them to step back from blogging here.
It is worthwhile to note that this comment policy applies not just to our readers, but also to our bloggers. If there is any concern that one of the regular bloggers (including me!), has violated the comment policy since its institution, please do contact any or all of the blog editors – or, if you don’t feel comfortable doing that, contact the Publications Committee Chair, Richard Cándida Smith. We want everyone to feel welcome to make substantive contributions to discussion here. On the other hand, vague backchannel assertions that “bullying” is happening or is allowed in our comment space are both inaccurate and unhelpful.
Other things that are unhelpful (here I am clearly editorializing): using other S-USIH-sponsored social media platforms to engage in ad hominem attacks against bloggers or commenters here. We don’t have a formalized policy for our social media spaces – the USIH Facebook page and the USIH twitter feed. But we have recently dealt with a few issues that, frankly, we could do without: members of the USIH Facebook group asking for people’s opinions on a recent higher ed declension narrative, and then calling those who critiqued the book “Nazis,” or members of the USIH Facebook group taking our editors to task for belatedness in reviewing a book and then turning around and emailing a member of the editorial staff about their own guest post. Sure, there’s no rule against acting that way — but, really?
Are these the kinds of things that really need a policy? Honestly, I don’t think so. I think “Don’t be a jerk” should cover almost every interaction – and that applies to yours truly as well as to anyone else. If you think I or another blogger is being a jerk, it’s okay to say so, and it’s okay to say so on one of our public forums. We welcome any feedback designed to make the blog a better, more inclusive, more thought-provoking and thought-fostering space for everyone.
Speaking of which…
If you have an idea for a guest post, or you wish to respond to any of the posts or comments on this blog via a standalone post, please contact any of our bloggers or editors (link is in the sidebar).
Thanks, as always, for reading. Comments are open. And, for the record, we have yet to encounter a blog comment that violates our comment policy, and we really don’t expect to. This is a community, and I think all of us – writers and readers and commenters – are invested in its health and growth, and that means working through our growing pains together.
7 Thoughts on this Post
S-USIH Comment Policy
We ask that those who participate in the discussions generated in the Comments section do so with the same decorum as they would in any other academic setting or context. Since the USIH bloggers write under our real names, we would prefer that our commenters also identify themselves by their real name. As our primary goal is to stimulate and engage in fruitful and productive discussion, ad hominem attacks (personal or professional), unnecessary insults, and/or mean-spiritedness have no place in the USIH Blog’s Comments section. Therefore, we reserve the right to remove any comments that contain any of the above and/or are not intended to further the discussion of the topic of the post. We welcome suggestions for corrections to any of our posts. As the official blog of the Society of US Intellectual History, we hope to foster a diverse community of scholars and readers who engage with one another in discussions of US intellectual history, broadly understood.
Thanks very much for this. As one of the last few places that uphold the utopian spirit of the blogs and LiveJournal Internet, it is very important that this site remain comparatively unpoliced. Speaking personally, I was hurt by some comments (mentioned above) made on Facebook, and confess that I remain worried that Alt Right types will see our (friendly and collegial) space as an inviting terrain. I suppose that my wish is that we will all recognize that contemporary reactionaries, funded by Koch money, are pursuing a long march through the institutions (another reason that Nancy MacLean’s work is so valuable, and, now having triggered the red alarm bells resting atop busts of Ludwig Von Mises in various Delmarva colonial mansions: hello, boys), and that this institution ought to brace itself. I suppose, further, that we might demand that any question about “Intellectual Dark Web” stuff be framed as an intellectual-historical inquiry. (That is, after all what this site is about). As such, a thick description of the intellectual trajectory of any given hot-button reactionary author would be standard (and not an Ad Hominem attack) and contextualization within relevant ideological currents would be de rigeur (and, thus, to describe, say, Jonathan Haidt as a “reactionary,” as I did, would be non-controversial–this, after all, is an intellectual who came to his current project by realizing that Fox News was kind of right about a lot of things https://www.radionz.co.nz/national/programmes/ninetonoon/audio/2018674210/jonathan-haidt-call-out-culture-and-the-new-prestige-economy). We must maintain that no topic is off-limits, but ruthlessly insist on invoking the protocols of our discipline when considering intellectual production that clearly panders to base prejudice.
Exactly how does the “newest editorial intern” express his displeasure with a prospective post, is it with a “Number One” or a “Number Two?”
Heh. He is a Very Good Boy. His main job is to be adorable, adored, and adoring, and about 24 hours in to his duties, he is doing great. No unfortunate incidents so far. (He is *not* here, however, for ad hominem comments!) However, he is also on the sleep/eat/potty schedule of, oh, a three-month-old infant human, so the grownups at Chez Burnett are a little groggy today. The cat, on the other hand, has been remarkably civil, all things considered. But I’m sure she’ll find something to pee on in protest sooner or later.
I’m grateful for the thoughtful approach you and your team have taken toward creating these policies. However, I want to register my dissent regarding the policy that text, including both posts and comments, cannot be changed or edited once published. Respectfully, I think this is a wrongheaded approach that not only misapprehends what academic blogging is about, but lays out a more draconian position than one finds on many less-ephemeral platforms.
The value of academic blogging, in my view, lies largely in its being an ephemeral format in which scholars can workshop half-baked ideas without having them carved in granite. All of us regularly write blog posts with only a fraction of the forethought we’d apply to a scholarly article or even a conference paper; blog comments may only involve a few minutes’ thought. These are essentially works in draft or fragmentary form, and scholars shouldn’t be blocked from rephrasing their hasty thoughts or deleting content that, with a half-second’s reflection, they’ve thought better of. Yes, changing posts or comments after responses have been published can leave the written record a bit confusing, but again, blog comment threads aren’t intended to be polished works like an edited collection of essays. It’s more important, in my opinion, to give scholars more control over their own words, and to give everyone the ability to remove wrong assumptions or interpretations they no longer want to be associated with. It’s a conversation, not a stone tablet.
Even if one disagrees with me about the ephemeral nature of blogging — and the majority of academic bloggers do disagree with me on this — even much more permanent media allow for changes and corrections or, in extreme cases, for the withdrawal of content. Newspapers regularly make corrections regarding errors of fact or interpretation, though, as Craig Silverman has argued for years, they should note the correction at the end of the piece. Journals, less frequently, do the same. Online breaking news articles, perhaps a good comparison in their rushed and ephemeral nature, are regularly updated with new or corrected content, with only an updated date and time to indicate the changes. Finally, to take an extreme example, if I decided I could no longer stand by the arguments I made in my book, I could demand that my press pulp all remaining copies and withdraw it from print, and they’d probably do it, though they’d grumble and I’d probably have to pay some hefty production fees. The idea that a comment I write on the S-USIH blog is more permanent than my peer-reviewed book strikes me as wrongheaded.
I believe this policy grows out of noble intentions. The editors want people to stand behind what they write, they want to preserve the integrity of scholarly conversations, and they want transparency behind what’s published on their site. But in my view, giving scholars the ability to edit or delete their own content, to control their own words and ideas outside of a peer-reviewed setting, is a more important objective. These days, when I read a S-USIH post, I’m more likely to comment on Facebook, where I can edit or delete it if necessary, than I am on the blog itself. The idea that I might say something inartful in a blog comment and have it baked into the permanent public record is, frankly, rather terrifying to me.
Well, maybe that’s something we’ll revisit, since it has been a couple of years since we revised our blogging guidelines. That’s an internal document, and it allows for consistency and fairness, as well as a fair amount of freedom to bloggers and commenters. In the case when someone won’t accept a “no, that’s not our policy for an answer,” we just kick the request up the food chain to our Publications Committee chair or to the organization’s executive committee.
But I believe it is particularly important for our readers and commenters to know that we have policies and apply them consistently, and that in cases where a statement of our policies is insufficiently satisfactory, we seek a resolution with leadership higher up in the organization.
The blog is not any single person’s proprietary domain, nor is it the domain of the bloggers collectively — it is a space that is designed to serve the needs of our organization’s members, and it’s important for our members to know that. As whimsical as our writing can be, we don’t do anything here on a whim.
In terms of your last point, about the horrifying permanence of the internet…I don’t see how we could or should operate in any other way. We are intellectual historians who focus on texts that represent past discourses; we privilege those traces of thought and conversation. If the texts we use as evidence have been altered, that significantly affects the reliability of our interpretations of their broader context.
It seems clear enough that this blog, and academic blogs in general, are not flukes or aberrations or some kind of forgettable backchannel in today’s academic discourse. They are important documents that can be situated chronologically and contextually alongside other documents — Facebook posts, Twitter feeds — that form our complicated public discourse. Our sense has been that it would be a disservice to future historians to retroactively change the evidence of that discourse.
Every half-assed off-the-cuff comment I have ever made at this blog is still here for all to read, as long as the grid and the google algorithms are still operational. That’s not the greatest feeling in the world, because I’ve put a lot of verbiage of very uneven quality and merit in the comments here. But it would be historical malpractice and a break of faith with our readers for our bloggers to quietly (or even not so quietly) “clean up” our comment histories on this site. And if I can’t clean up my own hot mess of verbiage on here, I don’t want to be spending time scrubbing anybody else’s internet history!
However, as I said, all our internal policies have been revised and updated periodically as our blogging staff / organizational size/reach has grown. So perhaps this is something we’ll revisit.
I will be posting a link to a survey for all our blog readers that will run for a few weeks after the first of the year (and after AHA, etc.) That would be a good place for comments / suggestions / questions about how we do what we do.
Quick and dirty: there’s a lot of logistical, editorial, and conciliar work that goes on on the backchannel, all the time, to keep the content here fresh, relevant, interesting, and as fair and inviting as possible to all.
Excellent points, LD, with a lot of food for thought. I’d make just one rejoinder: if we’re thinking of this as an archival source, aren’t the absences, the edits, an equally important a part of the source? When we read letters people write to one another, or diaries they write for themselves, the words and ideas they cross out give us invaluable information about their thought processes and values — even when we can’t read the part they’ve scribbled through. To me, a blog post or comment is like a draft of a letter completed, but not yet mailed; it’s potentially in it’s finished form, but also still in the process of creation.
I’m not suggesting unlimited editability, really; after a day or two has gone by, I stand by everything I’ve written. But in my view, clicking “Post” on a blog comment isn’t like sealing and mailing a letter. It’s more like setting one’s pen down after writing the letter — and if the author is prevented from returning a few minutes or hours later to edit and refine their thoughts, we aren’t really getting the full measure of what they’re trying to tell us.
Jeremy, I think our sense in developing the policy was that it is unfair to readers who are engaging in a good faith dialogue / argument with what has been written at the blog if the text of the post is subsequently changed. It can be amended / corrected / have a postscript added to clarify things. But to change the wording itself without any marker of what was changed and how it was changed is to disorient the entire conversation. Then would we have to allow all the participants in the discussion to post revised versions of their comments? It’s just not tenable or advisable, I think, for a blog — at the very least, it’s a question of the amount of labor required post-publication.
Honestly, it’s a damn good thing we have the post and comment policy that we do. One of the outraged accusations leveled against this blog at the conference was that “Scholar So-and-So was once called a bigot in the blog comments.” This was alleged as an example of bullying at the blog.
Well, I went back to my hotel room and searched all the comments at the blog for any form of the word “bigot,” “bigoted,” or “bigotry.” You will never guess what I found! As it turns out, Scholar So-and-So introduced both the word and the idea of “bigotry” in comments on his own post. He summarized others’ response to his argument as concluding that his views were “bigoted,” and then, he said, “in a sense” he agreed with that conclusion that such views are bigoted. That was the first mention of the word in that discussion, and somehow that has gotten turned into, “The USIH bloggers called Scholar So-and-So a bigot!”
Now, imagine that Scholar So-and-So had had the opportunity to edit his comments after posting and had rephrased that comment, either to make it clearer or to obfuscate the common rhetorical tactic of conservative polemicists whose intention in any argument is simply to prove the “liberal bias” of their interlocutors. (The “innocent question” at the Facebook page seeking opinions about a book, followed by the denunciation of all its critics as “Nazis” is a similar sort of behavior.) If Scholar So-and-So had had the opportunity to erase/eliminate his own first mention of the concept/terminology of “bigotry” and “bigoted” views to the discussion, then he would have been able to point to subsequent mentions of the word in the thread by discussants who took up his challenge as ad hominem attacks or as “misstatements” of his views.
It’s precisely because we frequently contest ideas in this space that we need to keep the substance of the conversation unaltered, because that is the only way to be fair to all discussants. It would be nigh impossible to encourage robust discussion if people felt that their carefully crafted arguments would be made to appear careless or cruel or worse because someone changed a key term here or there.
And I’m happy to run a well-argued guest post from anybody who thinks differently about our approach or our history or our prospects as a welcoming and inclusive conversation space that reflects well (and accurately) the breadth of our field and the ethos of our society.
Thanks for the discussion.
Oh, and after I followed our standard procedures for resolving an issue when a referral to policy isn’t sufficient to settle the matter, I ended up gaining approval to remove the contents of the header text that were the subject of crossed communication signals between me and the three co-authors of the post.
Don’t know what the rest of y’all are doing for Christmas break, but Scout and I are editing a blog. 🙂