Monday, March 3, 2014

So... I've been unmasked

And that unmasking was in spectacular fashion, might I add. Some of you may have caught the tweet, which was poorly phrased but I think got the point across. We have a tradition of a student-faculty roast where the students get a chance to poke fun at the faculty. Well, the students decided it would be hilarious (and it was) to recite all of my tweets, especially the ones about me drinking and writing proposals, or me drinking and grading papers, or me drinking and working on lecture notes. I'm pretty sure the rest of the faculty either thinks that I'm an alcoholic or well on my way to being one.

It turns out that the students found out about my blog almost immediately upon my arrival to SnowU and they all had the intelligence to resort to blog/twitter stalking me without actually following me. The fact that they held off for two years was pretty impressive. But now that I've been unmasked, I've been hesitant to blog more. So this brings up the question: How does a tenure track faculty member express their thoughts/musings/opinions about their current position, but not in the manner to upset their colleagues?

I've been mulling over this question for some time now, hence my reluctance to blog. The pile of work I have to do isn't helping either, but I digress. I know of a couple of  people that blog under psueds and they have managed to keep things under wrap decently well. I guess it is quite timely that I attended a seminar today on Big Data and how all sorts of public repositories for pictures can be used to mine just about everything about a person so I shouldn't be shocked to find out some undergraduates discovered my blog.

I guess going forward I'll have to walk a finer line about what I post and don't post, as well as the type of topics that I broach . For posterity's sake, I'll state again that the opinions expressed here are those of my own and not SnowU, and I'll stay away from singling out individual students and faculty, or particular one-off events.  

3 comments:

  1. OMG nightmare! Did any of the faculty say anything worrisome to you afterwards?

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  2. Nothing worrisome was said. I definitely got some strange looks and I think some of the faculty thought it was actually all made up by the students. I'm not sure too many of them are into the blog-o-sphere so I'm not sure what they made of it.

    That being said, I don't think I've said anything too inflammatory but sometimes I see by the light of my burning bridges so anything can happen.

    (The "seeing by the light of your burning bridges" was stolen from a Terry Prachett novel)

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