Last week in this space we heard from Christopher Newfield about the deliberate unmaking of public higher education through increasingly drastic budget cuts. As many of you who follow academia are surely already aware, there’s a troubling assault on public education proceeding right now on a different front, in the form of the Wisconsin Republican Party’s attempted intimidation of University of Wisconsin–Madison professor William Cronon.
On March 21st a Cronon-penned op-ed ran in the New York Times. In the piece, titled “Wisconsin’s Radical Break,” Cronon brought a historical perspective to bear on the effort to strip public employees in Wisconsin of their right to collectively bargain. As Cronon explained, the push is at odds with the past of the Wisconsin Republican Party, which was the force behind many of the state’s 20th century advances:
“Wisconsin was at the forefront of the progressive reform movement in the early 20th century, when the policies of Gov. Robert M. La Follette prompted a fellow Republican, Theodore Roosevelt, to call the state a ‘laboratory of democracy.’ The state pioneered many social reforms: It was the first to introduce workers’ compensation, in 1911; unemployment insurance, in 1932; and public employee bargaining, in 1959.”
Cronon contrasted that past with the actions of Governor Scott Walker:
“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.”
Cronon’s denunciation of the Wisconsin Republican Party’s “abusively nontransparent” exercise of power is scathing, to be sure, but it was built on a fair-minded account of the state’s past. In other words, William Cronon’s op-ed is exactly what we need public historians to do. His was a call for a return to openness in a state that has long valued it.
Cronon’s op-ed wasn’t from out of the blue, as a week prior he’d written similarly on his blog, aptly titled Scholar as Citizen. In response to Cronon’s increasingly public writing, the Wisconsin Republican Party has made their own push towards openness: they want to open Cronon’s email. Specifically, under Wisconsin’s open records law, they have demanded “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.”
As explained over at Daily Kos:
“It's hard to conceptualize this as anything but an attempt by the Republican Party of Wisconsin to discredit all of their critics by looking for a couple of questionable emails in the personal files of one of their critics. Further, the request cuts against the spirit of transparency laws, which are intended to help relatively powerless individuals learn about the activities of very powerful organizations. In this case, a very powerful organization, the Republican Party of Wisconsin, is using the law to go after one of it's [sic] relatively powerless critics.”
In his NYT column dated March 28th, Paul Krugman also denounced the move:
“The hard right — which these days is more or less synonymous with the Republican Party — has a modus operandi when it comes to scholars expressing views it dislikes: never mind the substance, go for the smear…. What’s at stake here, in other words, is whether we’re going to have an open national discourse in which scholars feel free to go wherever the evidence takes them, and to contribute to public understanding.”
In a statement released on March 27th, the American Historical Association, of which Cronon is President-Elect, made clear that it deplores the effort to intimidate Cronon. And, in a piece for the New Yorker, current AHA president Anthony Grafton echoed Krugman’s concern:
“Taken literally, this is a politically motivated fishing expedition: an effort to show that Cronon has engaged in political activity using a state university e-mail. In fact, though, it’s something nastier and more wide-ranging: an effort to intimidate Cronon, and any other state employee, by making clear that it can be dangerous to take a position that Republicans don’t like on the issues of the day. After all, Cronon’s mails, like those of most professors, include materials meant to be confidential: messages to and about students or colleagues. The only reason to compromise the protection these materials enjoy would be evidence of wrongdoing on his part, and there is none.”
Despite efforts to cast it as such, Cronon’s detailing of Walker’s break with the history of his party was not a partisan act. That’s surely what scares people about it. The whole ordeal has become a public relations nightmare for Wisconsin’s Republicans—and not their first of this season, as we know. In response to the public outcry against their moves on Cronon, Wisconsin Republicans have lashed out at what they characterize as efforts to intimidate them. What’s still apparently missing is any serious response to the substantive issues that Cronon has raised. For public officials to disagree with public employees on the course of governmental matters would be one thing. For officials to utilize backdoor antics in a push to discredit employees with the courage to speak out is quite another. And to do so in a way that broadly threatens academic freedom is shameful.
As Grafton noted, the whole ordeal highlights a distinction between a stalwart of public education like Cronon, and the elected public officials on his tail:
“It’s a good thing they chose politics, and not the kind of career where the going can really get rough. Professors, for example, teach their hearts out to surly adolescents who call them boring in course evaluations and write their hearts out for colleagues who trash their books in snarky reviews. These Wisconsin Republicans may never have survived ordeals like that. Happily, Cronon has been toughened by decades of academic life. He’ll be blogging—and teaching and writing—long after Wisconsin voters have sent these Republicans back to obscurity.”
