"Abusing Open Records to Attack Academic Freedom" the case of Professor Cronon

"Ideas are Bulletproof"

- V for Vendetta.

Renowned historian William (Bill) Cronon at University of Wisconsin published an Op-Ed in the New York Times about the anti-union legislation in Wisconsin. Since then, he launched a blog discussing the issue. Two days later the state government is demanding access to his emails.

He posted a lengthy response to the investigation and Salon.com posted a shorter summary and opinion of it here.

Among the many paragraphs that make up Cronon's response he lays out why this is so important:

I want to close by repeating that I support the Open Records Law and the freedom of information traditions of the United States. They are precious guardians of our democratic liberties.

But this particular request demonstrates that they also have the potential to be abused in ways that discourage dissent and undermine democracy.

Here, it’s not too much of a stretch to draw an analogy to the abuse of the subpoena power that was one of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s most dangerous tactics during the 1950s. The subpoena power too is crucial to our democracy: the criminal justice system could not work without the power to compel witnesses to testify, and Congress needs a similar power to compel testimony if its deliberations are to be properly informed. As with open records, our democracy would be far less effective if the subpoena power did not exist. The same can be said of the Fifth Amendment, which exists to protect individuals from having to give self-incriminating testimony in response to the subpoena power—but McCarthy was skilled at undermining that bulwark of American liberty as well.

When such tools are turned toward purely partisan ends, and when they are used with the express purpose of intimidating or punishing those with whom powerful people disagree, then precious institutions of democracy are deployed to subvert the very liberties we all cherish. It is for this reason that I have spent so much time trying to articulate why I don’t believe the Wisconsin Republican Party should be invoking the Open Records Law to single me out for scrutiny—and implicitly for punishment—in this way.

The consequences of this highly politicized Open Records Law request, in other words, in which one of Wisconsin’s two great political parties seeks to punish a faculty member at its state university by seeking access to that professor’s emails, seem potentially so damaging to the University, the State, and even to the Republican Party itself that my idealistic self hopes even Mr. Thompson and his Republican colleagues will see the dangers in the tactic they have deployed.

This is very different from asking an elected official or a government agency to turn over emails relating to their formal duties and their formal exercise of state power. It asks a university professor to turn over personal emails relating to the day-to-day life of an intellectual community in its “sifting and winnowing” in pursuit of truth. This would not happen at private universities like Harvard or Stanford, and I would like to think it shouldn’t happen at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, which has played a more central role in defining and defending academic freedom than most other institutions in the United States.

If the University cannot avoid turning over my emails, then so be it. But I truly do hope that wiser heads in the Republican Party will prevail, and that this Open Records Law request will be seen for what it is: an ill-advised political intervention into traditions of academic freedom that are among the proudest legacies of this state.

This is why I support teacher tenure. Okay, I admit it, perhaps there will be some lazy teachers who are all "I GOT TENURE, NOW SUCK IT BITCHES!" (actually, I think I've had that teacher before) but, there will also be teachers who can be frank and honest and not have to censor themselves at the cost of giving students a real education and won't have to worry so much about end of semester evaluations.

What's also hilarious to me is the censorship and coddling of students, particularly K-12. A former coworker of mine was complaining that the school wanted to give her eight year old daughter a lesson on HIV and AIDS. She yanked her from it, not because she wanted to teach her herself, but because she was "too young" to know about AIDS. I said, "You do realize that there are eight year olds that have AIDS, right?" And yes, even in the United States.

One of the most defining moments in my life occurred when I saw the academic freedom of the elite. It happened in high school debate.

It is still amazing to me that I went to a school with a debate team. It is still amazing to me that we spent most of our time competing against the good schools. Perhaps if the neanderthal principal actually paid attention to debate and what was being discussed it would have disappeared, but since no one gave a shit, there was a surprising amount of freedom. Contrary to popular belief, cross-ex debate is not some unstructured free for all about any topic you wish, and it's not about how eloquent you are either. It requires thousands of pages of evidence (which you lug around on carts to every tournament) and you get to speak as fast as the micromachine man. It's kind of ridiculous to watch, but I learned more there than I ever did in any classroom.

Anyway, we always came in a bus or a tiny old car and so I saw wealth of others in the way that we're taught to recognize it by shows like MTV's Cribs. It was the cars I noticed. The suits. All the overt signs of wealth. But what I learned by competing against and talking to these people was that all that was irrelevant. It wasn't the cars I wanted, it was their intelligence. Their freedom. I was competing against kids from preparatory academies or public schools that were supported by a community with a high concentration of wealth. They had a support system and a freedom that I had never seen before. A lot of the things we discussed (like Marx, for example) would have been banned in my school. In a lot of schools. In many public schools the debate about Intelligent Design rages on. Sex ed is taboo. But there we discussed everything, Marx, Kant, Hegel, Nuclear War, overpopulation, feminism, imperialism, gay rights, critical queer studies, critical race studies, the failures of the drug war, military = bad, military = good, all these things people at my school had never heard of and would never hear of if their parents learned of it. These were teams who had major budgets to support their pursuits. It was so different from anything I had ever seen. These students were going to the ivy league. They will be the future leaders of the nation. Some of them probably don't even appreciate what they have because they don't know what it's like on the outside.

. . . meanwhile, those of us on the outside are still arguing about condoms and Catcher in the Rye (Or The Butterfly Effect, although I really can't defend unleashing Asthon Kutcher).

. . . In debate, after we learned so much from debating these competitive schools, we had to go on to districts and states with entirely different schools. With one major exception, every other small backwoods school SUCKED. But they sucked in a different way, in that difficult to argue with kind of way, because they all argued like Fox News commentators. Of course, the men were too geeky to ever actually become News Anchors, and frankly, none of the women had the Barbie Doll potential Fox News looks for. I still remember several surreal moments, like where someone tried to argue a piece of evidence I read (that discussed the Gulf War) was written in the 60's based on a quote from a historical figure at the top of the article. I had to actually respond to an attack during cross examination with, "So, are you saying my author is a psychic or a time traveler?"

And this is the sad reality of dumbing down the education system through censorship, of restraining academic freedom, and of allowing the educational process be constrained by biblical and conservative morality. Conservative politicians and strategists may pander to this demographic but it's only because it's the best way to ensure the security of their cozy positions and the forever lining of their pockets.

Forget the plight of professors, as a STUDENT I am offended and threatened by an obvious political agenda to curb academic freedom.   This is an insult to my education.  This is theft.    

I support you William Cronon, not just for your sake, but for us all.

William Cronon is the author of several books, including Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England and Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature