On academics blogging, writing newspaper columns, stuff like that

Should academics maintain blogs and do newspaper columns? If we decide to do so, should we insist on getting paid?

During a conversation I had with an academic at a top Australian research university he mentioned to me a colleague who he thought had burned-out as a serious researcher and who tended to spend his while writing newspaper columns and blog entries as opposed to doing serious work. He clearly didn't approve of academics spending their valuable and usually well-paid time writing content for blogs such as this one.  So, should we bother?

I got to be honest, academics working in areas that are of interest to the wider public should share their insights with that wider public. Say if you work on climate change in environmental science, or you work on obesity prevention, surely you have an obligation to inform the taxpayers that fund your job about your findings. Hiding your research outputs exclusively in highly specialized academic journals with their few hundred readers per average article output, seems almost irresponsible. It makes sense to maximize the impact of your work,

You'd object and point out that nothing stops you from doing other kinds of media work. Why not talk to journalists and let them repackage your research professionally. After all, unlike us academics they are trained at least in producing readable content. Well, truth be told, that's not exactly a risk-free activity. Often you talk to journalists for 30 min or longer over the phone and their 2 line quote manages to miscommunicate what you have been on about completely, or to a significant extent. Writing your own stuff means taking control of your public messaging.

Some have lamented that too many academics write these days free of charge for sites like the Huffington Post, thereby destroying journalists' jobs. I have got to be honest, I sympathize with this concern. I have, in the past, written free of charge for papers like Toronto's Globe and Mail or The Conversation. I have also written for The Guardian, but being the paper that it is, it paid without me even asking for it. I would probably still write free of charge for non-profit outfits like The Conversation. However, I think it's problematic to write free of charge for commercial outlets. It messes up the market for these sorts of creative outputs. It's also problematic because you subsidize with your freelancing the columns of these papers' staff columnists, some of whom are, well, dreadfully uninformed at the best of times.

I have accepted last year an invitation to write for the Kingston Whig-Standard, the local outlet of a massive conservative Canadian media conglomerate. The that time editor of the paper offered a column on anything I fancied writing on and a smallish fee. To that deal I agreed. It wasn't so much about the money, to be honest, because after paying taxes, it's really more of a token of gratitude than actual pay. The principle though, that you should get paid for such work is right. It's quite ok if the paper at one point tells me to go away and reallocates their limited freelance writing resources to another writer. That that person should then also be paid for their work is only right. Incidentally, that's why I have never written for the Huffington Post. It's also the reason why I hold newspaper subscriptions. People producing original content for your consumption should be paid.

It's funny how that column writing venture panned out. The paper (initially unbeknownst to me) enters my columns into a pool of content produced by any number of other freelancers and on a few occasions my columns ended up being reprinted in other papers owned by said conglomerate. Some probably saw more readers than my piece in the Toronto broadsheet. The paper also puts up the columns on its website. Initially they tweeted my columns but that has since ceased (I do that myself now, big deal). To my surprise, despite the smallish print circulation of the paper, my content also ended up with a reasonably wide reach. Nothing comparable to The Guardian, but still. I discovered that folks in Thailand had once a lively discussion about one of the columns. You never know where this stuff ends up! - The other week I ended up in the cinema. An elderly man sitting right beside me, whom I had never before seen in my life, thanked me for writing the columns. Apparently he is looking forward to reading them every weekend. Well, I'm sure there are also folks that really dislike them. It's inevitable.

Talking about reach. Yes, I tweet links to my columns and share them on google+. My tiny twitter followership is still tiny by Justin Bieber standards. It went from 70 or so to a bit under 300 people these days. Among these people though are a bunch of influential tweeters. If any one of them retweets links to my pieces they quickly attract a significant number of additional readers. The flip side is that there is plenty of sneering and one-line commenting on such occasions that one cannot reasonably and intelligibly respond to. - How a US Member of Congress ended up amongst my followers? Who knows. May be join him to find out whether it's quite worth it :). I'm @schuklenk

Stand up, stand up, against Jesus

Civility has its uses, but we should not be afraid of satire and mockery as weapons against religious power

• Russell Blackford and Udo Schuklenk
• guardian.co.uk, Friday 6 November 2009 10.30 GMT

The question: Is there an atheist schism?

Religious teachings promise us much — eternal life, spiritual salvation, moral direction, and a deeper understanding of reality. It all sounds good, but these teachings are also onerous in their demands. If they can't deliver on what they promise, it would be well to clear that up. Put bluntly, are the teachings of any religion actually true or not? Do they have any rational support? It's hard to see what questions could be more important. Surely the claims of religion — of all religions — merit scrutiny from every angle, whether historical, philosophical, scientific, or any other.

Contrary to many expectations in the 1970s, or even the 1990s, religion has not faded away, even in the Western democracies, and we still see intense activism from religious lobbies. Even now, one religion or another opposes abortion rights, most contraceptive technologies, and therapeutic cloning research. Various churches and sects condemn many harmless, pleasurable sexual activities that adults can reasonably enjoy. As a result, these are frowned upon, if not prohibited outright, in many parts of the world, indeed people lose their lives because of them. Most religious organisations reject dying patients' requests to end their lives as they see fit. Even in relatively secular countries, such as the UK, Canada, and Australia, governments pander blatantly to Christian moral concerns as the protection of religiously motivated refusals to provide medical professional services demonstrates.

In a different world, the merits, or otherwise, of religious teachings might be discussed more dispassionately. In that world, some of us who criticise religion itself might be content to argue that the church (and the mosque, and all the other religious architecture that sprouts across the landscape) should be kept separate from the state. Unfortunately, however, we don't live in that world.

When religion claims authority in the political sphere, it is unsurprising — and totally justifiable — that atheists and skeptics question the source of this authority. If religious organisations or their leaders claim to speak on behalf of a god, it is fair to ask whether the god concerned really makes the claims that are communicated on its behalf. Does this god even exist? Where is the evidence? And even if this being does exist, why, exactly, should its wishes be translated into law?

In many situations, it is better to be civil, as Paul Kurtz has pointed out, but satire and mockery have traditionally had a legitimate place whenever absurd ideas are joined to power and privilege. Enlightenment thinkers such as Voltaire often used mockery to show the absurdity of ideological stances — including religious ones — that were considered sacrosanct. Mockery is one way of saying that a view does not deserve to be taken seriously. Religious views are fair game if one can also show, on a more serious level, why the view in question does indeed not deserve serious respect.

Perhaps some rationalist or humanist organisations, such as Kurtz's venerable Center for Inquiry, do have good reason to maintain a scholarly and dignified brand image. But there is also room for the younger, brasher atheists whom Kurtz inaccurately brands as "fundamentalists", and, in any event, there is a world of difference between appropriate civility and keeping quiet.
In the US, unfortunately, some atheists appear to have concluded that even civil and thoughtful criticism of supposedly "moderate" religion (i.e., almost anything that does not dispute evolutionary theory) should be discouraged.

These "accommodationist" atheists tend to be focused on science advocacy, particularly the teaching of evolution in public schools. In seeking public support for their positions, they think it prudent to take the various American demographics as they are. Since they want to sell evolutionary science to very large numbers of pious Americans, the last thing they want is to see it linked with atheism.

Once you think in that way, from a kind of marketing perspective, it can take over your approach to what you think you ought to say. Sincerity goes out the window, and everything must be "framed" to please the audience. We doubt that this strategy can work.

Religion cannot be eradicated — that is not a realistic goal — but the many problems with religious dogma can and should be highlighted. As atheists, we should state clearly that no religion has any rational warrant, and that many churches and sects promote cruelty, ignorance, and civil rights abuses.

There are harmful consequences to real people in the real world if the views of churches and sects are enshrined in law or given undue social deference - the acceptance even in liberal secular societies of conscientious objection as a legitimate reason for health care professionals and even civil servants to refuse to provide professional services to certain citizens is a case in point. For these reasons it is important that we should speak out and publicly contest the special authority that is accorded, all too often, to pontiffs, imams, priests, and presbyters. Religious leaders are not our moral leaders, much as they clamour to be, and however much the politicians flatter them. These spiritual emperors have no clothes, and we shouldn't flinch from saying so.

Ben Goldacre: 1 - Matthias Rath: 0

Victory for Ben Goldacre, Guardian columnist and regular debunker of bad science. Humiliating defeat for Matthias Rath, the German born vitamin peddler. What happened? At a cost of 500,000 GBP the Guardian defended a libel suit the vitamin salesman had brought against the newspaper for a series of articles Goldacre wrote some time back about his activities. He withdrew the case eventually and the court awarded initial cost of 200,000 GBP to the paper.

Goldacre published a series of three articles in the paper that reported in some detail the disgraceful activities Rath was involved in in South Africa where he tried to convince AIDS patients to use his vitamins instead of AIDS drugs. Rath made claims about the poisonous effects of mainstream AIDS medicines and reportedly conducted unapproved clinical trials with impoverished AIDS patients in South African townships. Here is how he tried to persuade AIDS patients to stop taking life preserving drugs and to use his alternative concoctions instead. Supported covertly and not so covertly by South Africa's incompetent health minister Manta Tshabalala Msimang he managed to go about his business for far too long. You can see him making out on the photo I posted above to the left of Anthony Mbewu, Manto's principal medical research honcho and head of the country's Medical Research Council. But then, hey, don't be too surprised, the country is rapidly becoming a banana republic. No surprised that these sorts of characters find each other quickly.

Reportedly Rath has since begun advertising campaigns in Russia where the incidence of new AIDS cases is increasing quite dramatically. Read here Goldacre's take on the issue. Sarah Boseley, the newspaper's health editor tracks Rath's 'career' here. Here is an analysis of deaths that occurred in his illegal trials in South African townhips.

What is remarkable about this guy is that he has pretty much disregarded all principles of medical professionalism and instead used (uses) his medical degree to convince lay people that his quackery is based on sound science. It is remarkable that he is still permitted to call himself a medical doctor.

Does correct spelling matter?

There's an interesting debate raging in the UK currently, between a 'new' university lecturer, a Dr Smith and an 'old' university professor, a Dr Grayling. It is probably not entirely unfair to say that 'new' universities in the UK are organisations that are traditionally weak on the research side of things and strong on the teaching side of things. Equally, 'new' universities (ie usually ex polytechnics) tend to be less competitive institutions, attracting more often than not academically less gifted students or students coming to universities through less traditional routes (eg they mid attend university mid-career).

Well, the 'raging' (I am exaggerating!) debate is about the question of whether or not we as academics should punish students for spelling errors and such or whether we should accept those as legitimate 'variants' of English as 'new' university Dr Smith suggests. 'Old' university Dr Grayling duly makes a mockery of Dr Smith's views by producing a coherent commentary relying on proper English that rapidly disintegrates into incoherent ramblings and random accumulations of letters that don't make sense at all anymore. His point: proper English matters. In a way you'd say that probably he is a snob, albeit a leftish one (writing for the GUARDIAN). Surely there is a big difference between someone who ignores minor spelling mistakes students make (yes, there's plenty of them in 'new' and 'old' universities alike) and someone who passes essays even though they are incomprehensible because the words can't be made sense of any longer as they do not resemble existing words; or someone who passes essays where the sentence structure is such that the meaning cannot be ascertained any longer.

Mind you, this is not just a problem in English speaking countries. Long suffering colleagues in Germany tell similar tales. German language instruction that focuses these days more on 'interpretation' of poems and 'critical thinking' skills then grammar and spelling seems to have wrecked many students ability to express themselves properly in that language.

Difficult one: I have to be honest, with English not being my first language, it annoys me hugely having to read essays by students whose first language is English, yet whose English is MUCH worse than mine. And yes, I have come across essays by students whose first language is English that were to a large extent incomprehensible, because the English was so terrible. - I have no idea how those folks managed to get through high-school, and indeed how they managed to sail through their undergraduate years, but yes, such students do exist! - My take on this has always been to ignore mistakes that do not impact on content, but I can see that that might be problematic. After all, prospective employers of our graduates have every reason to assume that students we graduate have a proper command of the language of instruction that we use in our teaching, or don't they? On the other hand, should I really give a higher grade to a native English speaker over an English-as-second language speaker just because the latter's English is worse, while the actual critical content of both essays is of fairly comparable quality?

What's your take on this?