Jason Kuznicki ponders why historians, and by extension other academics, blog anonymously or pseudonymously:

I am driven to wonder, though, about why anonymity would be needed in the first place. The short, ugly answer is that the history profession can often afford to be a fairly exclusive clique, and any deviation from orthodoxy, whether in ideology or in one’s extracurriculars, can be grounds for exclusion. Yes, there are exceptions. The rule, though, is that if as a graduate student you stick out in any way, you aren’t likely to find a job. The massive oversupply of grad students — driven by the academy’s desire to cut costs by using cheap grad student labor — is a breeding ground for a discreet, clubby form of discrimination.

In my little corner of academe, the costs of sticking out aren’t quite so bad, in part because of supply issues (the oversupply of quantitatively-oriented Americanist political scientists is much smaller than the oversupply of historians of any stripe), and in part because there is a tad more intellectual diversity among political scientists—that said, one would sooner admit membership in the Libertarian Party than the Republican Party in most circles.

Of course, an oft-posited theory for my lack of progress in finding a tenure-track job is this blog. That theory discounts my relatively short publication record, the relative lack of placements from my program, and the choice I’ve made to focus on finding positions at schools (primarily liberal arts colleges) that are least likely to hire someone who lacks a “name” undergraduate or graduate degree to put in their catalog. It also discounts the fact that much of my social network of fellow political scientists stems from blogging for the past 4 ½ years, and that there’s no way in hell that I’d have gotten my second job without the blog (and the second had a good deal to do with me getting my third and probably my fourth too).