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My sister bloggers Historiann (who has spent part of her sabbatical creating a snazzy new design) and
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My sister bloggers Historiann (who has spent part of her sabbatical creating a snazzy new design) and Madwoman with a Laptop, now a fancy executive director, could tell you this farewell has been coming for a while. I’m hangin’ up my template.
It had to come someday. After 1,115 posts (with this one, 1,116), Tenured Radical is coming to an end. Why? you may ask.
Tenured Radical was launched in 2007. It migrated here in 2011 at the invitation of an ambitious young journalist who has since moved on to The Charlie Rose Show. It did its work well for four more years, which is really long in Internet Time. While some writers thrived in this new section and others did not, together we harnessed the power of blogging to address big changes in academic life, political writing and scholarship as they were being experienced. Although I have no way of knowing whether there was a connection, I suspect that we were the first foray into what eventually became the advice and commentary section of Vitae, written by and for younger scholars.
I can think of lots of reasons to end a blog, and age is not one of them. Ironically, however, success is. The event that pushed me across the line to retiring Tenured Radical is this: I have been offered opportunities, here and elsewhere, to write for real money and real editors. It was time, as they say at the House of LaBeija, to be real. (You may wish to open that link in another window and play the song as you read the rest of the post.)
Furthermore, you may have noticed that this section of The Chronicle of Higher Education is, like Sterling/Cooper Partners, more or less kaput. The Chronicle hasn’t done a WordPress update in so long that my CMS is slower than Amtrak’s Vermonter (inserting the .gif below has brought it to almost a complete halt.) Both sides needed to move up or part, and we agreed amicably that me moving to McCann Erickson was the right plan.
Tenured Radical still gets thousands of hits after almost eight years, which I think is a pretty good note to end on. More importantly, the success of the blog has taken me places, places that I need to go without this particular blog if I am to prosper: a terrific job, new publishing opportunities, and projects in the digital humanities, to name a few. There is only so much time in the week. The days when I found myself irritated about putting up a blogpost because there was an article or a book chapter I really wanted to finish, or a pitch I wanted to get out to a print or web publication, or a grant I wanted to write, started to come more frequently.
There is only so much bandwidth.
Although those of you who are avatar savvy know that I have strong psychic connections to Roger Sterling, after all these years I didn’t want Tenured Radical to end like this:
Because this is how I still feel:
Stay tuned for future developments: it will be easier to do if you follow my new Tenured Radical page on Facebook. The Chronicle will be preserving old posts here for the indefinite future, and I am now actively looking for a digital archive where the blog can reside permanently.
Although the blog Tenured Radical will have no more episodes, Tenured Radical the Person will. I continue on, at Twitter, on my own website, in print, and at an as-yet undisclosed site where, with the support and cooperation of The University of North Carolina Press, I will be working on, and crowd refereeing, my new book, Digital U: Social Media, Word Press and Google Hangouts Could Save the Humanities (forthcoming in 2017.) Those of you in the know are also aware there is a second book coming down the pipe, about the radical feminist anti-pornography movement of the 1970s and 1980s, and that book will probably need a social media presence too.
Now it’s time to say goodbye to all our family. To the regulars, to the lurkers, to the friends I have made, and even to the trolls -- thank you for being the best cast ever. Together you brought me a long way.
C? See you real soon.
