For the last couple of weeks, I’ve been spinning my metaphorical wheels trying to draft a blog post about the current mess at the University of Wisconsin, Stevens Point, where they’re eliminating a number of “liberal arts” majors. This is a story that’s generated some panic in higher ed circles, though not as much as I might’ve expected. It’s also something with a very direct connection to some discussions that are taking place locally.

And that last bit is why I haven’t actually written anything about it, because my thinking on the Stevens Point situation gets so wrapped up in my thoughts about my day job that anything I might write comes out as a thousand-word subtweet at best. So I’ll just point to the “Dean Dad” piece on the matter, which is as balanced a take as you’ll find anywhere.

Of course, there’s no small irony in the fact that I shy away from this kind of thing more now than I did back in the early 2000’s, when I didn’t have tenure. I was a lot more willing to pick fights back then, and made some much more specific comments about campus issues than I’d be willing to do now.

There are a bunch of reasons for that. Part of it is just a function of getting older, and having more time-consuming responsibilities (mostly the kids, also book writing) that reduce my willingness to spend time and mental energy picking fights on the Internet. Another piece is a holdover from my time as department chair, when I felt it was important to be more circumspect about stuff, lest it somehow be taken as an official position. Once that habit of caution gets established, it’s hard to shake.

Mostly, though, is a matter of nerd fame and polarization. Back in the early 2000’s, hardly anybody knew what a blog was, let alone that I wrote one. When Dave Munger and I hit the front page of one of of the big aggregators with the “Blogger SAT Challenge” in the early days of ScienceBlogs, I think there was only one person on campus who noticed. These days, if I write a post about academia, I get comments on it not only from people I work with, but from colleagues at other institutions, including people I’ve never met. My platform has gotten bigger, and as a result, I feel a need to be a little more careful about what I say from it.

There’s also been a change in the general atmosphere that’s part and parcel of the polarization afflicting everything in politics and media, which raises the stakes for everything. People on the Internet and in academia are less willing than ever to accept anything less than total agreement with their positions, and even relatively minor deviations draw extreme responses, and sometimes blow up into massive shitstorms.

That’s a big problem for me, because I’m rarely in total agreement with anything. Or total disagreement, for that matter– I’m not that quick to write off people or groups as wholly irredeemable, either. I’m a squishy moderate at heart, and even when I agree more with one side than the other, there are almost always areas where I find fault with “my side,” or see a valid point on the other.

That necessarily means that almost anything I write on a contentious issue is almost guaranteed to be found wanting by people at both political poles. And the way things work on the modern Internet, that’s a damn minefield, particularly now that I have enough reach to actually get noticed. So I end up feeling that expressing any unfiltered opinion is a high-risk proposition, unless I ring it round with so many caveats and qualifiers that nobody will comment on it at all (in which case, it’s a frustrating waste of time to type it up).

The ironic end result of all this is that I’m actually more gun-shy now than I was in the days when I had no real job security. Which isn’t a particularly healthy state of affairs, but I don’t really see a good way out of it at the moment…