Posted By:
MorrieI had this conversation with Leon a while back. I choose privacy for a few reasons. One is that I'm shy, but the main one is that I feel like, as a professor, there's too much my students can find out about me already. You google me, and what comes up isn't baseball cards -- it's that I've written for roleplaying games in the past. I'd like to be able to retain some level of privacy about what I do in my free time, to help keep the boundaries between myself and my students as clear as possible.
On those occasions where I've felt the need to participate in a thread that was "controversial," I've used my real last name, but applied formatting that (I hope) would keep it from showing up in search engines (put a space between the last two letters or the first two letters, put the last letter in parentheses, whatever). I just want to keep this a part of my life that obsessed students won't ever have access to. No good reason why... I just do.
And if you don't think professors come across some real head-cases, you've never had someone sit in your office and fake "recovering memories" of being molested by an uncle when they were 8.
I don't mind being known by members of the Net54 community. Heck, I wish I were better known, so that I could ask some of you to serve as references for me so I could bid in the REA auction. But given the choice between doing full disclosure all the time and maintaining general "lurker" status, I'm going to revert to the shyness that's natural for me. I've got no problems with the policy, and no problems with the enforcement... I've just been given a choice, and I've chosen. Easy enough. 
Morrie