Wow – this is quite the interesting article isn’t it? I think it’s really great that we decided to start off our summer diablogging series with this article! (You like what I did there?!) Anyways, I am going to post my response to the article here and then try to answer some of your questions and then pose a couple of my own.

One of the issues that I see with this article right off the bat is that Hutcheson seems to create some idea of academic freedom by equating “freedom” with authority and also seems to create a false dichotomy of academic knowledge vs. internet internet knowledge (should we add this to our list of busting binaries?). On the first point I think this is really dangerous. When we think about freedom, I don’t necessarily believe this should be equated with “authority” and Hutcheson seems to be doing this with statements like:

And if society no longer believes professors have special expertise, it may no longer grant them the ability to pursue controversial ideas that grow from it.

Related to some of your ideas you bring up in your diablog questions this seems troublesome to me and if we think about the ways that we have posited that the internet enables us (ourselves + students) to access our authentic selves, I don’t think this automatically equates to authority then in order to retain our academic freedom. I also think think that in regards to your first question, it seems like those who have the most to lose in terms of their authority (read: freedom) might be the most upset about the easy reachability of “knowledge” on the interwebs. I say this because perhaps this is new for the “traditional” disciplines but let me tell you – frankly – from the position of “lowly” women’s studies and ethnic studies assistant professor I don’t really have much authority or knowlege to give in the eyes of many of my entitled, millennial, white students. So coming from a classroom situation where much of what I share is interpreted as “opinion” and not knowledge anyways I guess it’s a pretty moot point as to whether I access the internet for my information or the Routledge Published Feminist Academic Book when most of my students (who don’t want to hear what I have to say) consider what I’m saying already as “biased” and not based on any academic authority.

So – to jump off your your question about privilege – is it possible to present ourselves as experts in the disciplines we emerge from? And as feminists should we be concerned with being expert knowers instead of expert sharers? Let me tell you – this is coming from someone who is perpetually referred to as Ms. or Miss Creel Falcón and NOT Dr. or Professor! This is a serious epidemic, I’m thinking about making a digital story about it to share with my students! I tell my students they can call me Kandace but when the insist on addressing me vocally and in email with a Ms or Miss before my name it’s like they perpetually undermine any sort of authority I thought I might have had a slight grasp on with surviving grad school and completing that whole dissertation thingy…

Also, did you happen to see this article in April about how academics are caught in a really rough position in relation to wikipedia? This article “Wikipedia Wants More Contributions from Academics” traces the difficult position academics are in when they rely on the information from wikipedia but are not rewarded for contributing to it. Interesting questions this article raises – what do you think about this? Also, thinking about how many women contribute to wikipedia is even more alarming, what type of feminist or anti-racist work is being done on wikipedia in the grand scheme of things?

I want to answer more of your questions – but I’ll do that in a comment on your blog post tomorrow sometime, gotta get back to working on that online class and packing. So, I’m going to leave this here for you to think about! I’m glad we’re diablogging, let’s do at least five this summer together how does that sound? I need to get back into the writing groove. And let’s plan our writing retreat friend!