An anonymous academic, identifying herself only as “Eduwonkette” and with a picture of a masked female superhero, has a blog that is getting considerable attention in New York.

The blog, notes the New York Sun, summarizes research on schools for a broader audience but is anything but dull: At one point Eduwonkette zoomed to the aid of a parent distressed about not being able to get her child enrolled in a public school and, on a different issue, “she” lampooned Schools Chancellor Joel Klein as a villain by calling him “Darth Klein.”

Eduwonkette’s insistence on guarding anonymity could possibly be linked to wariness of retribution by higher educators, for blogging or for expressing views sometimes at odds with the status quo — or at least that could be one implication of “her” following remark:

Universities expect us to devote our time exclusively to research, and blogging is a hard sell in that environment … It’s still a new enough activity that universities don’t quite know how to appraise its value.