Ambrose H. Bierce, III, Pseudonymity and A Tale of Three Bloggers

by Cliopatria

Some things just need to be said. Take, for example, the fact that a well-known historian, Richard L."Dick" McCormick, is the president of Rutgers and that he's presiding over a gross distortion of its academic purpose. The distortion is symbolized in the companion fact that its football coach, Greg Schiano, now rakes in New Jersey's largest public salary. That's on top of the interest-free $800,000 loan on his house, the gift of an SUV, the free use of a helicopter and a jet, etc. I can count on Margaret Soltan to tell me those things, but she's been too gracious to hold President/historian"Dick" McCormick directly responsible for them and you'd never learn them from his bio at Wikipedia, which is a piece of public relations if ever there was one.

Not everything that needs to be said is directed at individuals. There are privileged classes of academics who are improved by periodic criticism. Several years ago, for example, I admitted that one of my occasional callings was"to tweak a Yalie's nose." Do they need it? Not all of them. Not always. Occasionally. Some Yalie noses need tweaking when they look down on the rest of us laboring in less pretentious and privileged academic vineyards and make supercilious judgments from on high.

That's a not-altogether-obvious preface to some comments about Ambrose Hofstadter Bierce, III's The Broad-Gauged Gossip. He's (she's?) put in a blue mood and ponders whether to do what Ambrose Bierces do (i.e., slip down to Mexico and disappear from history) by a couple of other history bloggers' comments. Directly, Bierce responds toTenured Radical's comments about pseudonymity. Indirectly, Bierce may be responding to Tim Lacy's scorn at History and Education. Bierce reduces"the profession to a soap opera," says Tim,"a waste of time of everyone's time." Behind Tim's criticism may lie his skepticism about all pseudonymous blogging.

Before I generalize about pseudonymity, I recall three pseudonymous bloggers who have slipped down to Mexico and disappeared from history: Chun the Unavoidable, PhDFraud, and Invisible Adjunct. Chun was a gadfly, whose blog and comments elsewhere on the net were often ill-informed and obnoxious. In comments, Chun gave definition to the word, Troll. Few of us missed him when Chun"disappeared from history." PhDFraud, bless his heart, was a very different character. He was a graduate student at a large state university and, in a short time, did some of the stupid things one might imagine a naive male history blogger might do: speculated about the adequacy of his -- ah -- his male organ, complained bitterly about the lack of direction from his graduate school professors, and confessed to indiscretions with privileged information about his fellow graduate students. In doing so, he gave enough clues about his identity that fellow graduate students identified him and his blog"disappeared from history." Chun and PhDFraud represent pseudonymous blogging at its worst.

Invisible Adjunct, on the other hand, represented pseudonymous blogging at its very best. Smart, gracious, funny, and tough, IA was what all of us might aspire to be. She simply valued her privacy and chose to go on-line under a pseudonym. The lesson I draw from all that is that pseudonymity is just one way of blogging – in and of itself neither positive nor negative. How one uses one's pseudonymity is a measure of character.

Has Bierce misused it? I don't think so. Some things need to be said. McCormick needs to be told that he's misdirecting Rutgers from its central purpose. Occasionally, some Yalie noses need to be tweaked. In a distinctive and amusing voice, he's (she's?) informing us about what's going on in history departments around the country and that's a good thing.

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More Comments:

Ralph E. Luker - 9/10/2008

You're quite right. Thanks for the correction. I've corrected the spelling in the text.

David Silbey - 9/10/2008

I think it's Greg Schiano.

/nitpick

Tim Lacy - 9/9/2008

Ralph,

As I said, there's absolutely nothing wrong with putting people on the spot that deserve it. And you're right that a segment of our profession deserves it. I don't know enough about the Princeton scene to object or cheer.

I just fear gossip in general. I admit that my first post, the one cited by you, qualifies as a knee-jerk reaction against AHBIII. But there are knee-jerk reactions built on ignorance, and those built on wisdom. I think most wise folks (a group that doesn't always include me) caution against gossip. I believe they're right about 90 percent of the time. AHBIII is probably a part of that other 10 percent.

But Ralph, keep up your good work. Feel free to ignore the musings of this perhaps too-cautious historian.

- TL

Ralph E. Luker - 9/9/2008

Thanks for the extended comment here, Tim. I hadn't necessarily intended to put you on the spot -- at least, not in anything like the same sense that I intended to put Dick McCormick on the spot.
I think we all know that there's gossip and there's gossip. Some of what passes for gossip is false, libelous, and malicious. I haven't seen any of that kind of thing on AHB's site. If I had, I wouldn't be recommending it. Princeton's chair objected to some of what he said; he called attention to Princeton's rebuttal. What's unfair about that?

Tim Lacy - 9/9/2008

I begin by acknowledging that I’m not without flaws in terms of gossip. I was firmly reprimanded---in a timely way---as a teenager for gossiping. At the time I had been caught, at the very least, making assertions on a situation about which I had no empirical evidence. The stern correction I received kept me from error for a number of years. But again, as a graduate student with complaints about departmental funding, I “speculated” unnecessarily about a colleague. The person was hurt, and I lost a friend. I had temporarily forgotten the lesson from my teen years. In both instances I was either wholly or partially wrong. And even if I had not been wrong, the people I discussed did not need their lives complicated by me.

I have also been the object of pernicious gossip---from friends, colleagues, and family. After a long period as a twenty-something single, some members of my family speculated about my sexual preference to other family members. All of them were eventually set on the right track, but only after I answered a set of extremely uncomfortable questions from loved ones. As a graduate student, my dating and sex life were the objects of speculation by colleagues. This might have fed my loose tongue with regard to others, as mentioned above, during the same period of my life. Finally, recently a few of my so-called Catholic-Christian “brothers” openly speculated with others about my commitment to my faith because of my political positions.

There can be little doubt that I have first-hand experience with the dangers of gossip. It is with these confessions in mind that I want to preface my response to Ralph’s post. Life has taught me that gossip is not always harmless prattle, and real people are sometimes unnecessarily hurt.

In a related but separate vein, I concede that anonymity and the passing of inside information have their place. Anonymity in the weblog world of history professionals is in part the product of unbalanced power relations. Ralph rightly cited the painful, ground-level observations of “Invisible Adjunct.” As someone perpetually on the full-time job market and employed at-will, she couldn’t risk, or justly feared, exposing herself. But she used her pseudonymity to expose the consequences of injustice. But I never felt like, in my admittedly fading memory of reading IA’s posts, that her discussions dipped into tit-for-tat. She spoke from her experience and direct observations of others. She had a goal that coincided with the interests of the history profession at large.

Ralph mentioned Tenured Radical, aka Claire Potter. In the beginning of her weblog, TR used her insider status as a tenured faculty member to anonymously vent about power relations at her institution. I appreciated her effort to expose injustices, minor and major, in her department and school. I felt, and still feel, that she had the right intentions. But TR eventually had the tables turned---rightly or wrongly. Some at her institution felt that her anonymous “gossip” (their feeling, not mine) was hurtful. TR went to great pains to alleviate a few situations, and eventually decided that her anonymity hurt the legitimacy of what she wanted from blogging. She gave up anonymity (if not the fun pseudonym), and has since limited her topics of discussion. Anonymity got too complicated, and Claire---being a loving soul---decided that the potential to unnecessarily hurt others wasn’t worth it.

So how does all of this matter in relation to the writings of Ambrose Hofstadter Bierce III---aka the mystery man/woman authoring the weblog Broad-Gauged Gossip?

I don’t know for sure. AHB is a gifted writer---much better than me. I read a few posts and was thoroughly entertained. I had no experience, however, with the situations about which she/he wrote. Still, I had to tear myself away at one point. Vice aside, I was having fun. And if fun is all you’re looking for, then Broad-Gauged Gossip is a place to be.

And AHB seems congenial. Like TR, I was “friended” by AHB through Facebook. I have not accepted, and I’m not sure I will. I’m not an overly private person---or I wouldn’t be writing this comment and keeping up an internet presence through two weblogs. But Facebook, and the invitation from AHB, gave me pause. My Facebook account is not a place where, in juvenile fashion, I expose my deepest fears and desires. But it does reveal a few elements about which I’m not sure I want all my colleagues to know. I keep my Facebook account as private as I can more out of fear than any juiciness about me (it really is decidedly bland and certainly apolitical---TR and Ralph can back me up here).

But the fact that AHB is not accountable to anyone I know gives her/him the power to say anything they want about me. I would have no recourse. So why does AHB want to “friend” me? What are her/his motives? How can I trust her/him? And how can I trust anyone, for that matter, whose stated purpose is to gossip? What’s the point?

These are the reasons I gave an eighteenth-century “shot across the bow” to AHB. The metaphor is apt, as we don’t fully understand the capriciousness of the internet seas. Is AHB a pirate or a friendly vessel? He or she may be an honorable, upright person who is motivated by injustice. But like any historian, I would like a little more context.

All the best,

Tim Lacy
http://history-and-education.blogspot.com
http://us-intellectual-history.blogspot.com