Monday Celebration: The 500 Posts

Today is a very special day: Tenured Radical has hit 500 posts. For those of you who think blogging is an easy-peasy activity that some of us do in our spare time, think again. You make spare time for it, dammit! And if you are really successful, people start asking you to write other things, and all of a sudden you are writing all the time, and .....but wait! That's what academics are supposed to do!

So on the occasion of the 500th post, I would like to honor a few other writers instead.



Historiann posts nearly every day. She is funny, smart, relentless and prolific. And could we have a hand for Margaret Soltan, over at University Diaries? Her posts are short, snappy, and muckraking to boot.

And how woud we know anything without Ralph Luker? If you check your sitemeter by 9 a.m., you will see that Ralph, the managing spirit of Cliopatria has already visited to see of there is anything to link to in his daily roundup. Ralph sees it as his job to link us to all things history, many of which are written by historians and public intellectuals who have published something of interest in the commercial media.

David Remnick is not a blogger, but he produced The Bridge. an over 600 page book about Barack Obama, in two years, while editing and writing for The New Yorker. It's not just that Remnick makes the rest of us look like pikers: admit it, we are pikers.

Finally, in one of the best articles I wish I had been given twenty years ago, Kerry Ann Rockquemore contributes to Inside Higher Ed's "Career Advice" column on how to pick your battles and manage your anger. It's a must-read for untenured faculty in particular. Just a hint to send you over there:

The problem occurs when new faculty members (majority or minority) respond to conflicts in one of two extreme ways: 1) fighting every battle or 2) avoiding conflict altogether. The problem with fighting every battle is that you will quickly alienate yourself from everyone in your environment. The problem with avoiding conflict is that when you push anger down, it grows, deepens, and expands. This can put you at risk of publicly exploding when triggered by a minor incident, developing stress-related illness, and/or sucking up so much of your energy that you have none left for your intellectual work....We often hear the generic advice to "pick your battles." This week, I want to encourage each of us to fundamentally rethink the idea that we have to wait until conflicts reach the stage of "battle"! Instead, let’s recognize that conflict is a normal outcome of people working together in an academic community. As a result, let’s begin to imagine ourselves as professionals who are comfortable, confident, and capable of resolving conflicts in our day-to-day lives.

Oh yes. And here's to the next 500 posts.