I was interested to have happened upon the Professors Who Blog list today and browsed around them a bit. One observation that I made was that a startling number of them seemed to be in the field of arts (a somewhat nebulous grouping which, for me, includes economics, political science, linguistics, etc etc.) Now, maybe this is to be expected when the list is hosted on a site about rhetoric, but, dammit, it does say ‘Professors Who Blog’, not ‘Professors Who Blog About Rhetoric.’
Anyway, I thought the list would be a nice way to make a few sweeping statements about arts professors, so I took a sample of ten blogs on the list and tried to figure out what field each professor was in. The results are:
1. Religion
2. PolSci/eco
3. Can’t tell
4. Can’t tell. Probably PolSci
5. Philosophy of Education
6. PolSci
7. Techie/Linguistics
8. Cultural studies
9. Law
10. History
As you can see, there’s an overwhelming majority of arts professors, and not a single science professor to be found. Assuming that my sample is representative of the population of blogging professors*, what does this imply? Either the science professors are blogging undercover, or arts professors simply have way too much free time. I find the latter explanation far more compelling.
*which it probably isn’t
mssv 
Arts? Arts!? ARTS!?!?
C(o)[exp{-(lambda)(t)}] to you then!
🙂
Hmm, I know at least one of the people on the list is not a professor, though they do talk about academic matters.
Oh:
http://www.steelypips.org/principles/
Anyone who has actually made an ultra-low-temperature Bose-Einstein condensate is certainly not an artist…
OK, some of them are clearly not all humanities people. I suppose I should have called them humanities instead of arts; just put it down to my indoctrination at a member of the Cool Gang (aka biological scientists who get lots of government funding, hahaha!).
But seriously, exactly what’s going on here? Is the academic job market really that much better for scientists?