A very interesting story from Inside Higher Ed: “Wisconsin Gets Weirder.” It is really “must reading” for those amongst readers who wonder what the “big deal” is about academic freedom, the potential for political witch-hunts from this odd Republican agenda against education, and the reasons why it’s important for everyone to have an email address that isn’t tied to the institution.
To quote at length:
William Cronon, the Frederick Jackson Turner and Vilas Research Professor of History, Geography and Environmental Studies at Madison, is among the university’s most visible and highly respected scholars. Like many of his colleagues, he has been greatly disturbed by Walker’s approach to public employee unions, and he has taken advantage of his prominence to take his critique public, in high-profile ways.
Most visibly, he published an op-ed last week in The New York Times in which he sought to show that the Republican governor’s “assault on collective bargaining rights” represents a break with his state’s (and his party’s own) history, and drew a parallel between Walker and one of his forebears in Wisconsin’s Republican Party, Joseph McCarthy.
But Cronon has done other writings that are less historical. He created a new blog this month, called Scholar as Citizen, and its first post, on March 15, sought to lay out “who’s really behind” the anti-union legislation in Wisconsin and elsewhere. The blog post discusses the role that national groups like the American Legislative Exchange Council play in spreading conservative ideas and seeding conservative policies at the state and local level, and suggests — while acknowledging that direct evidence is hard to find — that the groups have helped engineer Walker’s agenda.
“One conclusion seems clear: what we’ve witnessed in Wisconsin during the opening months of 2011 did not originate in this state, even though we’ve been at the center of the political storm in terms of how it’s being implemented,” Cronon wrote. “This is a well-planned and well-coordinated national campaign, and it would be helpful to know a lot more about it.”
Unhappy Republicans
Apparently not everyone thinks so. Two days after that blog post, Cronon revealed in another blog entry late Thursday, an employee of the state Republican party, Stephan Thompson, filed an open-records request asking lawyers at Wisconsin-Madison for all e-mail messages into and out of Cronon’s university e-mail account that mentioned Walker and other Republican legislative leaders or used the terms “Republican,” “collective bargaining,” and “recall,” among others.
“The timing of Mr. Thompson’s request surely means that it is a response to my blog posting about the American Legislative Exchange Council, since I have never before been the subject of an Open Records request, and nothing in my prior professional life has ever attracted this kind of attention from the Republican Party,” wrote Cronon, who surmised that the open-records request was designed to show that he had violated Wisconsin’s prohibition on use of state resources for “partisan political purposes.” He called on the party to withdraw its request.
“Mr. Thompson obviously read my blog post as an all-out attack on the interests of his party, and his open records request seems designed to give him what he hopes will be ammunition he can use to embarrass, undermine, and ultimately silence me,” he continued. “I’d be willing to bet quite a lot of money that Mr. Thompson and the State Republican Party are hoping that I’ve been violating this policy so they can use my own emails to prove that I’m a liberal activist who is using my state email account to engage in illegal lobbying and efforts to influence elections. By releasing emails to demonstrate this, they’re hoping they can embarrass me enough to silence me as a critic.”
The perceived effort to use state law to crack down on a high-profile and well-connected scholar’s criticism of a Republican governor’s policies quickly lit up the liberal blogosphere on Friday, followed promptly by a blizzard of news articles.
I visited Cronon’s blog this morning, and it appears that this has indeed “gone viral” and could turn into a much bigger deal before it goes away. Cronon said he’s had 2 million visitors in the last 24 hours, and there will be a New York Times Op-Ed on this whole issue on Monday. And I guess the thing that is a little concerning for the likes of me, a simple professor at a simple university who also happens to run this web site as a hobby, is the clear effort to silence any sort of dissent and the highly agressive fight against academic freedom.
As far as I can tell, William Cronon is no Ward Churchill: that is, his views–while liberal– are not “out there” on the fringe, and he has not been accused of plagiarism or some other kind of academic crime. Here’s a guy who happens to be a prominent professor who started a blog criticizing the government, and the government decided they needed to after him. That’s chilling and scary.
Which is one of the reasons why, btw, you can reach me at emutalk at gmail dot com
