From Rachel Toor, writing at the Chronicle of Higher Education:

The Internet has brought us so many good things that it's impossible to think of life without it. (Can you imagine dating without Google?) But one aspect of the Web I could easily forgo is anonymous online reviews or blog posts. They are the refuge of cowardly, craven, dastardly, lily-livered, faint-hearted, gutless wimps who are unwilling to stick their necks out like those whose work they so readily, facilely, easily, and often nastily critique. (There: I bet that's going to get me a slew of anonymous trashing.)

Amazon.com has given voices to those who have been bashed and battered by the traditional means of access. Now, instead of working hard to get published, you can spend your time and energy dumping on those who have. Blogs and Internet chat groups allow everyone a chance to be heard. But if you write a review you're proud of, why wouldn't you want to sign your name?

Wanting to write anonymously about the personal or professional details of your own life is one thing. I understand the reasons for that. But carping about other people from behind the curtain? That's the sign of a very bad wizard. It saddens and depresses me to see the tone and nature of so many of the anonymous responses to articles in The Chronicle. As academics, we are paid to have thoughts, to hold opinions. But Internet forums, great venues for the exchange of ideas, often turn into mudslinging of the most petty and mean-spirited kind.

I'm OK having mud slung at me. Maybe sometimes I deserve it. But I like to see who's pitching it, to know the background and qualifications of the person who is expending energy to take me down. Is that too much to ask? When I do a review, either for publication or as an anonymous peer reviewer, I ask myself if I would I be able to speak what I've written directly to the author. Were we to meet, would I feel bad or guilty? Would I try to avoid her at a cocktail party? If so, I know I need to revise. It is possible to be critical without being nasty, funny without being mean. If you must be negative, have the nerve to stand by what you think and sign your name to it. Live with the consequences. The rest of us have to.

Toor touches briefly on the academic convention of anonymous peer review -- but does not consider whether that convention might prime scholars to behave in certain ways online. Similar questions could be raised about the academic tradition of keeping tenure and promotion reviews so swathed in secrecy that abuses are easy to commit -- and accountability is nearly impossible to impose.

And one might wonder, too, whether academics' tolerance for online nastiness in their own electronic circles (one thinks of the comment threads at CHE, IHE, and at certain academic blogs) might in turn render both peer review and the tenure process that much more subject to the kinds of vigilante nastiness that are so common in electronic fora -- even when the subject is education, and the participants are themselves scholars and teachers.