Have I ever mentioned that, way back in late 2000, long before Heather Armstrong lost her job for blogging, my cousin, Ian Lind, resigned his job as a reporter when he was threatened with job termination for trying to make transparent on his blog the process of a newspaper being bought out by a larger company? (The archives of his blog should be required reading for reporters.)

I think about Ian a lot when I blog about university life. When I was a "pure" academic, meaning I was teaching and was a grad student, I knew I was taking a risk when I linked my name with my personal blog and wrote frequently about teaching and research. I might have put myself in jeopardy of not finding a tenure-track job (such positions are only a remote possibility for a Ph.D. in the humanities, anyway!). But there wasn't really a chance of me being fired for blogging because, hey, there's this thing called academic freedom. Since moving over to the staff side of the academic endeavor, however, I've been more careful about writing about my work as an academic technologist.