The Republicans want to know about any emails containing certain key words, including Republican, Scott Walker and collective bargaining. They are entitled to make this request under the Open Records law, and the request concerns only Cronon’s university account, i.e. not any personal accounts he might have. But the implications of the request are quite worrying, because they show how Republicans – famously opposed to ‘big government’ – are actually very keen on big government and, in particular, on controlling people.

Plus, like the hypocrites that they are, Republicans are busy fighting against Open Records legislation when they perceive it as a threat. In Texas, for example, they claim it’s a violation of their First Amendment rights.

Perhaps we should all just give up and let them have whatever they want, whenever they want it. No rights for workers. No dissent. No regulation of business. No social security. No help for people who need it. No medical care for those who can’t afford it. For what it’s worth in this case, William Cronon says he has no reason to worry about the release of his emails under the terms of the request. His concern is purely related to the hyper-politicisation of debate.

Source:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/28/opinion/28krugman.html

Wisconsin Gets Weirder

March 28, 2011

Just when it seemed that the political conflict and intrigue over public higher education in Wisconsin could not get any more intense or convoluted, it did. Thrust into the tangled mix of controversy over employee union policies and potential governance restructuring that roiled the University of Wisconsin System this winter came word late Thursday of a Republican operative’s perceived attack on academic freedom and on one of the university’s most visible scholars, which promises to complicate an already combustible situation.

via News: Wisconsin Gets Weirder – Inside Higher Ed.

The article points to the Wisconsin GOP’s response to Cronon’s recent NY Times Op-Ed as one of the ways that the GOP is now attacking academic freedom.  In the Op-Ed, Cronon argued that the way in which the Wisconsin GOP are steamrolling over collective bargaining and Wisconsin law breaks with Wisconsin traditions in ways that recall that notorious Wisconsin Senator from the 1950s, Joe McCarthy.  Cronon wrote:

But Mr. Walker’s assault on collective bargaining rights breaks with Wisconsin history in two much deeper ways as well. Among the state’s proudest traditions is a passion for transparent government that often strikes outsiders as extreme. Its open meetings law, open records law and public comment procedures are among the strongest in the nation. Indeed, the basis for the restraining order blocking the collective bargaining law is that Republicans may have violated open meetings rules in passing it. The legislation they have enacted turns out to be radical not just in its content, but in its blunt ends-justify-the-means disregard for openness and transparency.

This in turn points to what is perhaps Mr. Walker’s greatest break from the political traditions of his state. Wisconsinites have long believed that common problems deserve common solutions, and that when something needs fixing, we should roll up our sleeves and work together — no matter what our politics — to achieve the common good.

Mr. Walker’s conduct has provoked a level of divisiveness and bitter partisan hostility the likes of which have not been seen in this state since at least the Vietnam War. Many citizens are furious at their governor and his party, not only because of profound policy differences, but because these particular Republicans have exercised power in abusively nontransparent ways that represent such a radical break from the state’s tradition of open government.

Cronon’s case is important because is indicates the length to which this new breed of Republican will go to ensure compliance and squash dissent.  One more reason these folks are going after tenure.  After all, the original purpose of tenure was to ensure that the government or an institution could not silence unpopular arguments.  It was a protection against the kind of tyranny we are seeing in Wisconsin.

Bill Cronon has already received a lot of support from the academic community and beyond.  But I thought this might be a nice opportunity to reflect on what is so remarkable about his work, which speaks to his outstanding integrity as a scholar.  I’m going to focus on Nature’s Metropolis (1991), which is an exemplar of good history-writing — certainly in my personal top-5 — but one could also profitably read Changes in the Land (1983), which only rises to the level of very good.

I think the weakest aspect of Nature’s Metropolis is in its theoretical framework, which places the book in the intellectual context of the Frederick Jackson Turner’s “frontier thesis”, the Marxist notion of “second nature”, and models of urban development.  It’s not that these are inappropriate contexts, so much as it seems unfortunate to rope the book’s content into a limited dialogue with relatively arcane ideas, when its own ideas are so well developed, and the subject matter speaks so well for itself.  So let us detain ourselves with those dialogues no further.  Very simply: Nature’s Metropolis is a great book about technology; it is a great book about the land and the city; and foremost, it is a great book about Chicago, the Midwest, and America.

It behooves us, then, to meditate on the writing strategies that allow this book to function as a seminal work of historiographical greatness, so that we can learn from it.  Nature’s Metropolis is by no means a complete history.  Like the vast grid of streets on which Chicago was built, and the Mies van der Rohe buildings that define modern Chicago architecture, Cronon’s book is a testament to the possibilities inherent in simplicity.  It is little more than an account of the commodities and the innovations that allowed a small outpost at the edge of settled America to become an enormous city, which in turn allowed the preternaturally rapid expansion of settled America into the vast plains to the west.

Cronon has never dodged the moral issues that lodge themselves uncomfortably at the heart of American history, but his writing tends to be about understanding the roots of the tragedies of the past rather than moralizing about them — an approach that is especially evident in Changes in the Land.  Chicago, though, like the rest of America, was made possible as white settlers displaced native tribes in fits of trade, conflicting interest, diplomacy, betrayal, war, and atrocity.   Cronon is clear about these origins and is equally blunt about what drove the history of the region thereafter: grain and livestock.

Cronon establishes the key components the history of the grain and livestock trade: transport, processing, storage, trade, supplies, and finance.  These areas were subjected to successive innovations that augmented Chicago’s ability to serve as a hub between farms to the west and consumers to the east.  Most importantly, Chicago was built at the southern tip of Lake Michigan, which allowed it to take advantage of the Great Lakes as a transportation route, but when the railroads came through, it was Chicago’s location that made it a hub for traffic looking to go around the Great Lakes (as those of us who have tried to drive east from the Upper Midwest can testify).  As a consequence, Chicago became a place of switchyards, stockhouses, grain elevators, farm equipment manufacturers, mail-order suppliers, and, of course, the Chicago Board of Trade.

Cronon’s account of the rationales underlying the foundation and evolution of the Chicago Board of Trade and the innovation of the futures contract is surely the highlight of the book.  It is a masterpiece of how practices (signing trade contracts) build on top of specific innovations (the standardization of grain quality), which then develop pathologies (market cornering), which need to be tightly regulated to prevent the system from collapsing in on itself.  It is a depiction that few can match of the intellect struggle to keep pace with ingenuity — a tension that should be the staple of any history of ideas tied to histories of practice.

I think the core strength of Nature’s Metropolis is that Cronon is content to, and comfortable with dividing his history into different subjects (refrigerating and transporting beef, sorting grain, trading futures…), and then providing an explanation of the key activities comprising those subjects, the problems arising in the course of those activities, and, crucially, a sense of the changing scale and scope of those activities with time, illustrated using numbers, maps, examples, and photographs — and then moving on to the next subject.  These distinct histories are interrelated, and together they provide a basic accounting of the resources and practices that made possible not just the advent, but the scale and stability of Chicago and its reach into its hinterland. 

Nature’s Metropolis is thus a skeletal, yet synthetic framework into which other histories can be fit, and which can be easily complemented with any of a number of other histories tangential to its geography, time frame, and subject matters.  It is long, but never belabored, because the constituent arguments within it are packed so tightly and coherently together.  This level of explanatory depth can only be achieved by a scholar willing to explore a variety of developments until they make sense, and willing to forgo any need to tie particular histories to a single cohering argument.

Finally, I would like to praise this book’s strange ability to be sentimental, in spite of the fact that the book’s skeletal contents remain at all times far-removed from material reflecting directly on individual experience.  Cronon is from rural Wisconsin, and writes in his introduction about how he originally came to think of Chicago as an urban abomination.  The book is part of his attempt to understand how closely his rural life was connected to the business of that city.

I am also a Midwesterner, having grown up in the suburbs of Minneapolis in Minnesota, just to the west of Wisconsin.  I first went to Chicago on a field trip in sixth grade, and vividly remember loving the place instantly.  I later did my undergraduate work at Northwestern on Chicago’s outskirts, and I still feel the pull to stay whenever I visit.  When you go to Chicago, the city’s history makes itself apparent.  But it’s not like my current city of London, where the history is directly visible.  Pieces of nineteenth-century Chicago still survive in places, but it is much more about a tradition of practical living reflected in modest urban bars with neon beer signs in the windows, the Vienna beef hot dog joints, semi-trucks in traffic jams on the interstates running around and through the city, the naked visibility of the El train, as well as in the aforementioned street grid and even in that boxy Mies van der Rohe architecture — the “city of broad shoulders” indeed.  Nature’s Metropolis gives me a much deeper sense of what that weirdly coherent aesthetic is all about and where it came from.

Nature’s Metropolis also helps me think about my native Minneapolis: the remnants of the grain trade and flour milling on the Mississippi River, the big “Grain Belt Beer” sign nearby, the commodity prices that were still relayed on WCCO radio in the early mornings when I was growing up in the 1980s, the trains running behind the minor league baseball stadium in St. Paul, my job after college with a Cargill offshoot, the “Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party” label attached to the state branch of the Democratic Party.  At the end of his book, Cronon discusses how cities like Minneapolis took away some of the centrality of Chicago from Midwestern life, and I always feel pride when I read that part that my own neck of the woods could manage to steal even a little bit of the thunder of the behemoth city 400 miles southeast.  Bill Cronon somehow has this wonderful ability to make it clear that the history of land, technology, and economy is human history.

Bill Cronon is a jolly good fellow, and so say all of us who can appreciate that only a thoughtful, careful, conscientious mind can write history like this.

Not suprisingly, the news coming from the frontlines of the corporate battle against ordinary citizens is not much better. Let’s remember, the battle cry of global corporations boils down to three things only: less government regulation (preferably none that threatens their bottom line), lower taxes (especially for big business and the wealthy) and less government spending (chiefly at the expense of lower and middle-income citizens). If citizens are to slow down and resist the relentless advance of corporate interests into all spheres of public life, then we have to keep our eye on the corporate ball.

Take, for example, the case of Elizabeth Warren, a law professor and bankruptcy expert in the US who was tasked with setting up the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau following the 2008 financial crisis. Since nothing must be alllowed to challenge conservative anti-regulation orthodoxy, Ms. Warren was recently subjected to sustained grilling and attack by conservative politicians at a House hearing on financial institutions and consumer credit. And since nothing is more threatening and abhorrent to conservative and corporate interests than someone with the clout and credibility of Ms. Warren, these attacks were transparently aimed at derailing her chances of eventually being appointed to head the agency and fight on behalf of ordinary citizens.

Consider also what is happening to Professor Willian Cronon at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, since he dared publicly to criticize Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, who has been engaged in an all-out legislative assault against the collective bargaining rights and benefits of public sector employees. Since speaking out, Professor Cronon has had his sent and received emails for the period 01 January 2011 to the present requested by the Wisconsin Republic Party under the state’s Open Records Law. Is anybody else concerned about abuse of power, freedom of speech and especially academic freedom?

As if the battle lines were not already clearly drawn, the Governor of Maine, Paul LePage, decided last week to order the removal of a 36-foot-wide mural from the Department of Labor Department building in Augusta:

QUOTE: The three-year-old mural has 11 panels showing scenes of Maine workers, including colonial-era shoemaking apprentices, lumberjacks, a “Rosie the Riveter” in a shipyard and a 1986 paper mill strike. Taken together, his administration deems these scenes too one-sided in favor of unions.

A spokeswoman said Mr. LePage, a Republican, ordered the mural removed after several business officials complained about it and after the governor received an anonymous fax saying it was reminiscent of “communist North Korea where they use these murals to brainwash the masses.” END QUOTE

Finally, let’s consider recent news about General Electric and the wildly successful results of its aggressive tax avoidance strategies, innovative accounting and clever lobbying:

QUOTE: The company reported worldwide profits of $14.2 billion, and said $5.1 billion of the total came from its operations in the United States.

Its American tax bill? None. In fact, G.E. claimed a tax benefit of $3.2 billion. END QUOTE

Remember, the corporate agenda is really very simple and unchanging: less regulation and less tax (for them) and less spending (for citizens).

Read more. Think more. Buy less.

William Cronon, Frederick Jackson Turner Professor of History, University of Wisconsin - University of Wisconsin photo

My reading suggests that, since professors are not specifically exempted, Prof. Cronon, at the University of Wisconsin, is specifically protected.

If the University of Wisconsin gives that answer to the Wisconsin Republican Party, however, the Party will argue that it is not a government official prevented from retaliating against a government employee.  That would be ample reason for the state to deny the FOIA request of the Party flatly and completely.

There is another, potentially more pernicious angle here:  The Republican Party in Wisconsin is, in this case, an agent of the Republicans in the state legislature, those whose tails are on the line for violating Wisconsin law, and as Prof. Cronon outlines it, Wisconsin tradition and historical norms.  It’s likely that the Party is acting at the direction of legislators.

In short, it’s kind of an organized crime action.  I think that the federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization Act (RICO) would cover this sort of action — any retaliation for hire, or by an agent, which creates a pattern or practice of organized crime activities.  Worse for the Wisconsin Republicans, if there were an ambitious U.S. attorney out there somewhere, there is no scienter requirement on RICO actions — that is, there need not be a clear formation of criminal intent.  The mere actions of an organized crime group, even with no intent to break the law, can be a RICO violation.

Even worse for the Republicans, RICO is available for anyone to use.  Were I Prof. Cronon, and were the Republicans to press their FOIA request to court, I’d counterclaim in federal court with the RICO statute.

That’s a nasty escalation.  But in these days, in this case, where a state party organization has gone to the employer of a university professor to get his job after he merely reported history, I wouldn’t take chances that the Republicans would later play fair or nice.

Every step against Cronon, every press release, every statement from a legislator or party apparatchik, provides more evidence of the coordinated effort, and establishes further the “pattern and practice” of organized crime activity.

Maybe cool heads will soon prevail, maybe patriotism and love of the First Amendment will break out among Wisconsin Republicans, and they will retract their demand that Prof. Cronon deliver them all of his e-mails as a professor at  the University of Wisconsin.

Maybe badgers will fly.

“Badger” is supposed to be the mascot of Wisconsin’s top-flight university, not a tool of partisan politics.

Hmmm… Commie University of Wisconsin history Professor William Cronon looks pretty John the Baptist-y to me…

The Repugnican Tea Party long has has been on a jihad against university professors. It’s that these professors are anything from “liberal” to “Commie,” you see.

Actually, these professors’ “crime” is that they don’t support the political agenda of the far right. These professors, being professors, don’t embrace the utter ignorance and the outright lies — and the pro-corporate, pro-militaristic, misogynistic, white supremacist/racist, homophobic, xenophobic, nationalistic/jingoistic, pro-stupid-white-male propaganda – that the right wing expects them to.

The wingnuts scream that public dollars should not be spent on university professors who (allegedly) promote some political agenda. Of course, these very same wingnutty hypocrites don’t argue that right-wing professors also should go for the very same reason.

Nor do the wingnuts who scream against the alleged politicization of our public universities make a fucking peep about the blatant, illegal politicization of our tax-exempt churches, such as the Catholick Church and the Mormon cult, which blatantly participate in politics, even telling their members whom and what to vote for and whom and what not to vote for and more or less commanding them to give campaign contributions to specific candidates and ballot propositions and to volunteer in political campaigns.

Because that political activity, you see, benefits the right wing. Therefore, it’s perfectly acceptable.

What it comes down to when the wingnuts attack left-wing or perceived left-wing university professors — and such intellectual entities as National Public Radio — more often than not is not a case of left versus right; it usually comes down right (as in correct) versus not right (as in incorrect) and right versus wrong.

(The Nazi Party also hated, persecuted and even murdered intellectuals, but perhaps that’s a separate blog piece for another day.)

So far gone is the treasonous Repugnican Tea Party in Wisconsin that the party is attacking an individual university professor. Never mind that for a state’s party to attack an individual is a gross abuse of power and is a gross dereliction of duty – the Repugnican Tea Party in Wisconsin should be busy at work fulfilling its (bullshit) campaign promises to improve the lives of all Wisconsinites instead of engaging in vindictive political vendettas against certain individuals.

But the Repugnican Tea Party traitors in Wisconsin want the head of William Cronon, a University of Wisconsin history professor who has been publicly critical of Repugnican Tea Party Gov. Scott “Dead Man” Walker and his henchpeople’s attempts to destroy the state’s long-standing labor unions.

Cronon, you see, has a blog titled “Scholar as Citizen” and he wrote an op-ed piece not flattering of the Walkerites for The New York Times.

Therefore, the Repugnican Tea Party traitors in Wisconsin have demanded to see any and all e-mails in Cronon’s university e-mail account that contain certain words indicative that Cronon used his e-mail account for any political activity. Apparently their end game is that they want Cronon fired for alleged university ethics violations — so that they can claim the scalp of a liberal/“liberal”* university professor.

They can’t just murder Cronon (they would if they could), so they’ll do the next best thing, if they can: see to it that he loses his job. That’s one of the Repugnican Tea Party traitors’ favorite hobbies: to try to make people unemployed, even though they claim to care about our longstanding problem of unemployment.

Professor Cronon, correctly claiming academic freedom, has resisted the Repugnican Tea Party traitors’ public records request to see his e-mails. One Repugnican Tea Party traitor called Cronon’s resistance “chilling,” but what actually is quite chilling is that we have Joseph McCarthy-like thugs in public office anywhere in the nation who think that it’s perfectly acceptable to politically gang-bang a university professor whose political views diverge from theirs.

The New York Times yesterday ran an editorial on this issue titled “A Shabby Crusade in Wisconsin.” Here it is, in full:

The latest technique used by conservatives to silence liberal academics is to demand copies of e-mails and other documents. Attorney General Kenneth Cuccinelli of Virginia tried it last year with a climate-change scientist, and now the Wisconsin Republican Party is doing it to a distinguished historian who dared to criticize the state’s new union-busting law.

These demands not only abuse academic freedom, but make the instigators look like petty and medieval inquisitors.

The historian, William Cronon, is the Frederick Jackson Turner and Vilas research professor of history, geography and environmental studies at the University of Wisconsin, and was recently elected president of the American Historical Association. Earlier this month, he was asked to write an op-ed article for The Times on the historical context of Gov. Scott Walker’s effort to strip public-employee unions of bargaining rights. While researching the subject, he posted on his blog several critical observations about the powerful network of conservatives working to undermine union rights and disenfranchise Democratic voters in many states.

In particular, he pointed to the American Legislative Exchange Council, a conservative group backed by business interests that circulates draft legislation in every state capital, much of it similar to the Wisconsin law, and all of it unmatched by the left.

Two days later, the state Republican Party filed a freedom-of-information request with the university, demanding all of his e-mails containing the words “Republican,” “Scott Walker,” “union,” “rally,” and other such incendiary [um, “incendiary”? Really?] terms. (The op-ed article appeared five days after that.)

The party refuses to say why it wants the messages; Mr. Cronon believes it is hoping to find that he is supporting the recall of Republican state senators, which would be against university policy and which he denies. This is a clear attempt to punish a critic and make other academics think twice before using the freedom of the American university to conduct legitimate research.

Professors are not just ordinary state employees. As J. Harvie Wilkinson III, a conservative federal judge on the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, noted in a similar case, state university faculty members are “employed professionally to test ideas and propose solutions, to deepen knowledge and refresh perspectives.”

A political fishing expedition through a professor’s files would make it substantially harder to conduct research and communicate openly with colleagues. And it makes the Republican Party appear both vengeful and ridiculous.

Further, the effect of the Repugnican Tea Party traitors’ McCarthyesque attempt to make public university professors fear for their livelihoods is to deprive the professors of their First Amendment rights as citizens of the United States of America.

University professors are not some special class of individuals who don’t get First Amendment rights. As the name of Cronon’s blog states, public university professors are also citizens; they are not stripped of their citizenship rights because their paychecks are paid for by taxpayers — and they pay taxes, too, which so many fucking morons forget or ignore.

It’s bad enough that in the private sector, employees are treated like property with no First Amendment rights — or any other rights whatsofuckingever. (Property, after all, has no rights.) To extend this right-wing abuse of human rights to the public sector is illegal, immoral and unfuckingacceptable.

And for a political party to attack an individual is such a gross abuse of power that that party deserves to be voted out of office. The recall of Repugnican Tea Party traitor politicians in Wisconsin has my full support — and I’ve donated money towards it. Hopefully, the Repugnican Tea Party scum who have hijacked the great state of Wisconsin, most notably Scott “Dead Man” Walker, will be swept to sea by a political tsunami no later than in November 2014.

The good people of Germany did not nip fascism in the bud when they had the chance to do so. If we, the good people of the United States of America, don’t nip this fascistic shit in the bud in Wisconsin and in the other states where the Repugnican Tea Party traitors fervently are trying to plant the seeds of fascism, we will find ourselves as the Germans did: in a hellish nation in which evils abound – and in which it is too late, because we did not do enough when we had the chance.

I live in California, not in Wisconsin, and I do not know Professor William Cronon.

But I am not so stupid and so blind as to believe that what happens in Wisconsin never could become my problem in California, or that whatever happens to Professor Cronon never could have any bearing on my own life.

The states indeed are laboratories, and the mad scientists on the right are seeing just how far they can take their evil experiments.

We allow them to succeed at our own peril.

–

*Cronon describes himself as “a centrist and a lifelong independent,” but to the far right, a centrist is a left-winger. The far right’s motto, after all, is the McCarthyesque “You’re with us or you’re against us,” and if you’re against them, you are, by their definition, a left-winger.

Hopefully, this offensive wingnutty overreach will serve to turn more centrists into actual left-wingers.

You remember Wisconsin?  Remember the teachers, cops, firefighters and other public employee unions?

Of course.  And it’s still a mess.  Gov. Scott  “Ahab” Walker signed into law a bill that would have the effect of abrogating union contracts without any bargaining, but the skullduggery used to sneak the bill through the Wisconsin legislature opened the door to charges that Wisconsin open meetings laws were violated, and a judge has stayed the implementation of the law.

In the meantime, a Wisconsin historian stepped up to lend historical perspective to the whole affair.  He thought he was turning on some lights, but Wisconsin Republicans have treated it like great heat.

[Off-topic note:  Some creatures are negatively photo-tropic, which means they avoid light.  You know, like the way the cockroaches in your first New York apartment scattered when you'd turn on the light.]

So, just as Virginia Attorney General and Chief Inquisitor and Witch Hunter Ken Cucinelli tried with those pesky scientists who keep finding the global temperature rising, Wisconsin Republican legislators have turned on the historian.  Here’s how the  New York Times‘ editorial, “A Shabby Crusade in Wisconsin,”  described it:

The historian, William Cronon, is the Frederick Jackson Turner and Vilas research professor of history, geography and environmental studies at the University of Wisconsin, and was recently elected president of the American Historical Association. Earlier this month, he was asked to write an Op-Ed article for The Times on the historical context of Gov. Scott Walker’s effort to strip public-employee unions of bargaining rights. While researching the subject, he posted on his blog several critical observations about the powerful network of conservatives working to undermine union rights and disenfranchise Democratic voters in many states.

In particular, he pointed to the American Legislative Exchange Council, a conservative group backed by business interests that circulates draft legislation in every state capital, much of it similar to the Wisconsin law, and all of it unmatched by the left. Two days later, the state Republican Party filed a freedom-of-information request with the university, demanding all of his e-mails containing the words “Republican,” “Scott Walker,” “union,” “rally,” and other such incendiary terms. (The Op-Ed article appeared five days after that.)

American Legislative Exchange Council.  ALEC, in K Street lobbyist parlance.

But, Dear Reader, do you see the potential problem here for Republicans in Wisconsin?  They have based their request on a Wisconsin law that prohibits private use of state-supplied e-mail — no politicking, no religious proselytizing.

What about all those ALEC e-mails to Wisconsin Republican legislators?  Sure, they’re more than fair-game for such a witch hunt, too.  And, since it’s the state Republican Party, and not a state or other public official making the FOIA request, surely that means the Republicans would not mind a similar request to cover contacts legislators had with the Wisconsin Republican Party, to the National Republican Party, or even ALEC itself.

Fair is fair, right?

ALEC generally has better lawyers than state legislators, and so we’d expect a group like that to recognize they could be in trouble.

Of course, purging of e-mails now would be a crime, a Watergate-style cover-up, destruction of evidence and obstruction of justice — after it’s become clear that there could be court action and claims of violation of law.

Jean Detjen provided links to the stories of the attacks on the distinguished Prof. Cronon over the last couple of days.  In a Facebook exchange, I noted that ALEC is fair game for such a witch hunt fishing expedition FOIA inquiry, too.

Don’t look now, Ms. Detjen said — but the ALEC site is down.

Server Error

The server encountered an internal error and was unable to complete your request.

JRun closed connection.

[Here's a general link -- try it, and let me know when the site is back up, if Paul Weyrich and the other ALEC-ians don't skip to Brazil.]

Surely ALEC wouldn’t be illegally purging e-mails to Wisconsin, New York, Ohio, Texas, Idaho, Washington, California, Arizona, Florida, Kentucky, Louisiana and Florida legislators, would it?

Update:  As of this evening, March 26, 2011, the ALEC site is back up.  Why was it down?

The NYT editorial closed with this:

The party refuses to say why it wants the messages; Mr. Cronon believes it is hoping to find that he is supporting the recall of Republican state senators, which would be against university policy and which he denies. This is a clear attempt to punish a critic and make other academics think twice before using the freedom of the American university to conduct legitimate research.

Professors are not just ordinary state employees. As J. Harvie Wilkinson III, a conservative federal judge on the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, noted in a similar case, state university faculty members are “employed professionally to test ideas and propose solutions, to deepen knowledge and refresh perspectives.” A political fishing expedition through a professor’s files would make it substantially harder to conduct research and communicate openly with colleagues. And it makes the Republican Party appear both vengeful and ridiculous.

Well, yeah, Wisconsin’s Republicans wouldn’t want to be caught stifling discussion, nor taking revenge on a whistle-blower — because certainly if Cronon’s e-mails are discoverable with an FOIA request, he is a Wisconsin state employee.  “Whew,” the Wisconsin Republicans might wheeze:  Wisconsin has no specific whistleblower protection.  Ah, the plot thickens:  There are general laws that would appear, to me, a no-longer-practicing-in-that-area lawyer, to offer some protections for any employee engaged in general political speech, or in speech protecting the employee’s rights, or in speech designed to shed light on a wrongful or wrongfully executed official act — that is, Cronon’s evidence showing the unsavory and potentially illegal links of legislators to businessmen and business groups, and the potential conspiracy issues of ALEC’s nationally-directed efforts to use state legislators to gut union laws.

I wish Ahab would just get Jesus and quit thickening the plot.

More, resources, links from Jean Detjen and others:

• Milwaukee’s papers, Journal Sentinal Online, “More on Prof. Cronon and ALEC”
• One of Cronon’s blogs, Scholarcitizen:  “Who’s really behind recent Republican legislation in Wisconsin and elsewhere?  (Hint:  It didn’t start here)
• ALECWatch’s 2002 newsletter, “A Big Business Agenda”
• Salon on March 25:  “Wisconsin’s most dangerous professor — Why are Republicans desperate to see Bill Cronon’s emails? Because ideas and history matter”

Obviously, big tip of the old scrub brush to Jean Detjen, in Wisconsin.

William Cronon whom I know very slightly, is as good as the American academic establishment can now produce. He is president of the American Historical Association; he is the Frederick Jackson Turner professor of history at the University of Wisconsin; his Nature’s Metropolis and Changes in the Land are books any writer would be proud to claim.

Because Cronon dared write an op-ed piece in the New York Times* pointing to Wisconsin’s long tradition of bi-partisan, “good government”-minded support of collective bargaining rights, and criticizing Gov. Scott Walker for his campaign against organized labor and collective bargaining, the Wisconsin Republican Party is launching a legal effort to look through his email archives to see if he has been involved in the recent protests in the state. The putative rationale is that Cronon’s messages were sent on the University of Wisconsin’s email system and therefore are covered by the state’s open-records law.

Hey, maybe I spoke too soon. Perhaps Fallows has a point. Actions that have the appearance of bullying a respected college professor is quite troubling. You know what else is quite troubling? Death threats.

MADISON – The State Department of Justice confirms that it is investigating several death threats against a number of lawmakers in response to the legislature’s move to strip employees of many collective bargaining rights.

Among the threats the Justice Department is investigationg is one that was emailed to Republican Senators Wednesday night. Newsradio 620 WTMJ has obtained that email.

The following is the unedited email:

Please put your things in order because you will be killed and your familes will also be killed due to your actions in the last 8 weeks. Please explain to them that this is because if we get rid of you and your families then it will save the rights of 300,000 people and also be able to close the deficit that you have created. I hope you have a good time in hell. Read below for more information on possible scenarios in which you will die.

Where was James Fallows when this came to light? You’d think a dude who was so concerned about an investigation into one professor having a chilling effect on academia would be just as interested in a threat to kill GOP politicians having a chilling effect on those people’s lives.

Oh yeah, it’s only intimidation when a Republican does it.

Yep, this is a Memeorandum thread.

UW-Madison history professor William Cronon in June 2007. CRAIG SCHREINER – Wisconsin State Journal\

Related Links

• Related: Madison360: Professors of history get today just right

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• Chalkboard: GOP won’t withdraw records request

The Wisconsin Republican Party, apparently stung by a blog post written by UW-Madison history professor William Cronon, has responded by asking the University of Wisconsin-Madison for copies of all of Cronon’s office e-mails that mention prominent Republicans or public employee unions.

Cronon revealed the GOP’s Freedom of Information Act request in his Scholar as Citizen blog post late Thursday evening along with a lengthy, and typically scholarly, defense. He requested that the GOP withdraw its request in that post. On Friday, the Republican Party angrily denounced that request and denied it. For more, go here.

In his inaugural blog post on March 15, Cronon, one of the UW’s academic stars, had sketched the apparent influence of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a shadow conservative policy group that works with Republican state legislators, on Gov. Scott Walker’s legislative agenda. It was the first time the respected professor had used a blog format and he was, to put it mildly, surprised by the response. The blog generated more than half a million hits. For many of his readers, it was the first time they were aware of the organization and its involvement with conservative legislators around the country…READ MORE

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So, Professor Bill Cronon writes an Op-Ed for the New York Times about the several ways in which he believes that Scott Walker and the current leadership of the Republican Party in Wisconsin have departed not just from the longstanding culture of civility and good government in this state, but in fact from important traditions of their own party.

In his first-ever blog post — Professor Cronon is a strong believer in the concept of the citizen scholar, the notion that academics should  share and converse with the broader public to further the national debate — he published what he terms “a study guide” exploring the question “Who’s Really Behind Recent Republican Legislation in Wisconsin and Elsewhere?”

The post was the first I had ever heard of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), and I do not think I was alone: according to the professor, within two days, the blog had received over half a million hits, had been read by tens of thousands of people, had been linked by newspapers all over the United States, and had been visited by people from more than two dozen foreign countries.

So, two days after his post, the University of Wisconsin-Madison gets this FOI request:

From: Stephan Thompson
Sent: Thursday, March 17, 2011 2:37 PM
To: Dowling, John
Subject: Open Records Request

Dear Mr. Dowling,

Under Wisconsin open records law, we are requesting copies of the following items:

Copies of all emails into and out of Prof. William Cronon’s state email account from January 1, 2011 to present which reference any of the following terms: Republican, Scott Walker, recall, collective bargaining, AFSCME, WEAC, rally, union, Alberta Darling, Randy Hopper, Dan Kapanke, Rob Cowles, Scott Fitzgerald, Sheila Harsdorf, Luther Olsen, Glenn Grothman, Mary Lazich, Jeff Fitzgerald, Marty Beil, or Mary Bell.

We are making this request under Chapter 19.32 of the Wisconsin state statutes, through the Open Records law. Specifically, we would like to cite the following section of Wis. Stat. 19.32 (2) that defines a public record as “anything recorded or preserved that has been created or is being kept by the agency. This includes tapes, films, charts, photographs, computer printouts, etc.”

Thank you for your prompt attention, and please make us aware of any costs in advance of preparation of this request.

Sincerely,

Stephan Thompson

Republican Party of Wisconsin

OK. So here we are. First, let me state that this is a perfectly legitimate, legal request under Wisconsin law, one that should be complied with post haste. It’s FOI law at its essence, what is good for the goose is good for the gander, etc., etc.

That said, I find this request, and others like it made by groups of other political persuasions, deeply troubling in the university setting, because, unlike the mayor or the city councilperson, Professor Cronon enjoys a First Amendment right to some measure of academic freedom, the quite crystalline if constantly threatened notion that unless the nation’s professoriate can say what it wishes and thinks as it likes, all intellectual activity in the United States is threatened.

The AAUP puts it this way:

Freedom in research is fundamental to the advancement of truth. Academic freedom in its teaching aspect is fundamental for the protection of the rights of the teacher in teaching and of the student to freedom in learning. It carries with it duties correlative with rights.

Professor Cronon sees it this way when it comes to FOI requests:

When should FOIA and Wisconsin’s Open Records Law apply to universities?

Answer: When there is good reason to believe that wrongdoing has occurred.  When formal academic governance proceedings are making important decisions that the public has a right to know about.  When teachers engage in abusive relationships with their students.  When the documents being requested have to do with official university business. And so on.

When should we be more cautious about applying such laws to universities?

Answer: When FOIA is used to harass individual faculty members for asking awkward questions, researching unpopular topics, making uncomfortable arguments, or pursuing lines of inquiry that powerful people would prefer to suppress.  If that happens, FOIA and the Open Records Law can too easily become tools for silencing legitimate intellectual inquiries and voices of dissent—whether these emanate from the left or the right or (as in my case) the center. It is precisely this fear of intellectual inquiry being stifled by the abuse of state power that has long led scholars and scientists to cherish the phrase “academic freedom” as passionately as most Americans cherish such phrases as “free speech” and “the First Amendment.”

I fall somewhere to the undefined FOI side of the equation, perhaps not surprisingly to those who know me. Professor Cronon’s answer to “When should FOIA and Wisconsin’s Open Records Law apply to universities?” seems, to me, too narrowly answered. I certainly would not subject FOI to some probable cause test, where “there is good reason to believe that wrongdoing has occurred.” That’s not a filter I want to install in FOI law. Heck, I see people use FOI laws all the time to show government effectiveness, or even ineffectiveness, and those things fall short of “wrongdoing.” I doubt Professor Cronon, as harried as he must be right now, really thinks so, either.

His response to “When should we be more cautious about applying such laws to universities?” really shook my world this morning. For it is here that he really hit on something: the nexus between transparency (needed) and academic freedom (needed). I have not done any research on the topic, but will. In the meantime, I can only say that it raises absolutely fascinating issues, that I certainly don’t think that the request itself is any way beyond the scope of the law….

Finally, requests of this nature worry me, not for partisan reasons, but for structural ones. For FOI to function, it must, must, must remain a BIPARTISAN value, a shared belief in good governance. I’ve said this in speaking to Rotary Clubs and League of Women Voters and VFWs. I fear any political party using FOI as a blatantly partisan tool, all the while recognizing that people have, and will continue to, use it for just those reasons. That said, every such highly personal, partisan FOI request worries me, for I am constantly working with requesters who are after much more important things — system failure at the macro-level, versus partisanship at the individual level.

Whew! Sorry for the length, but this is really interesting stuff to think about.

Related articles

• Katy S: Abusing Open Records to Attack Academic Freedom | Scholar as Citizen (scholarcitizen.williamcronon.net)
• Scott Walker’s Office Seeks Access to Critical Professor’s Email (blogs.forbes.com)

Yesterday, March 17 [edited to correct time order of events], the Republican party filed an Open Records request with University legal counsel asking for “Copies of all emails into and out of Prof. William Cronon’s state email account from January 1, 2011 to present which reference any of the following terms: Republican, Scott Walker, recall, collective bargaining, AFSCME, WEAC, rally, union, Alberta Darling, Randy Hopper, Dan Kapanke, Rob Cowles, Scott Fitzgerald, Sheila Harsdorf, Luther Olsen, Glenn Grothman, Mary Lazich, Jeff Fitzgerald, Marty Beil, or Mary Bell.”  Read his extensive blog post for details about the problem with this.

The Republicans have suffered a number of hits lately from the content of Scott Walker’s email, so it is at one level not surprising that they are trying to turn tables. But the target is an academic analysis of recent US political history by a political moderate that led to a well-regarded editorial, not a “to the barricades” political call.  Academics who work at public institutions take note. This fight is escalating.

I have only marginally been keeping my eye on the unfolding drama in Wisconsin, where the Tea Party Republican governor, Scott Walker, is attempting to strip state workers of the right to collective bargain. Just when you think Republicans* can’t possibly sink any lower, someone puts them in power and, WHAM!

I’ve been trying not to get too worked up about the Tea Party, as I have more interesting things to work on and think about. But a note on James Fallows’ Atlantic Monthly blog informed me of yet another abuse of power by Republicans in Wisconsin. William Cronon, an historian whom I admire, is being targeted for intimidation by Republicans for having the temerity to criticize Walker and his henchmen. The hypocrisy of these so-called anti-government people trying to use the power of their position in government to get-even with a private citizen speaks for itself. Apparently, they care more about maintaining their influence than they do about their supposed principals. It’s that kind of thinking that is the fertile soil for totalitarian regimes. I can only hope that more moderate Republicans begin to fight back, to regain control of their party — I guess, what I am saying is that I hope “moderate Republican” hasn’t become an oxymoron.

Here’s a link to Professor Cronon’s account of the whole affair and his response to it.

*The reason I put “Republican” in quotes in the heading to the post is that I don’t intend this as an attack on all or necessarily even most of the people affiliated with that party. We can have reasonable debates about policies, as long as we work together to solve our problems. Increasingly, the right-wing of the Republican Party has been controlling the agenda for that “half” of our political spectrum. This group, the far right, is driven by self-righteousness and ignorance, a dangerous mixture only when they are given power. While it is not my intention to say that all Republicans are friends to fascism, if they stand by idly for the abuses of the extremists in their party, then they are complicit in those abuses.

Update: The New York Times is publishing an editorial about this affair on Monday, March 28, supporting William Cronon. They conclude the editorial with these comments:

A political fishing expedition through a professor’s files would make it substantially harder to conduct research and communicate openly with colleagues. And it makes the Republican Party appear both vengeful and ridiculous.

I would have to make one correction to this statement. It doesn’t make the Republican Party “appear” vengeful and ridiculous — It demonstrates that, in fact, the Republican Party IS vengeful and ridiculous.