WISCONSIN: THE CRONON AFFAIR -- GOP WITCH HUNTERS GO AFTER PROFESSOR

WISCONSIN: THE CRONON AFFAIR

by Anthony Grafton, The New Yorker, March 28, 2011

Once upon a time, professors led quiet lives, walking slowly from seminars to tea in panelled rooms. Nowadays they wake up in the middle of media storms. The latest scholar to whom this has happened is William Cronon, who teaches environmental and Western history at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He was famous, as scholars go, before the storm, for complex, vivid books about how Americans have shaped the land. A Rhodes Scholar and a MacArthur Fellow, he had also won university-wide teaching prizes, both at Yale and at Madison. He will be the next president of the American Historical Association. But now he’s become a national figure in a whole new way.

Environmental historians worry about the world around them, as well as the past: it comes with the intellectual territory. To scratch this itch Cronon started a blog, entitled Scholar as Citizen, where he planned to use his scholarly expertise to shed light on present politics. His first post, on March 15th, examined the American Legislative Exchange Council, an organization founded by Paul Weyrich and others, which writes model bills for use by conservative legislators around the country. Cronon argued from indirect evidence that ALEC had played a major role behind the scenes in Governor Walker’s attack on public employee unions in Wisconsin. He also argued that this sort of political work, though legitimate, should be done in the open.

The Wisconsin Republican Party could have issued a statement taking issue with Cronon’s arguments, or delegated a pundit to debate him. Instead, a party operative used Wisconsin’s Open Documents Law to demand all messages to or from Cronon’s University of Wisconsin e-mail address since January 1st that mentioned “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”—all people and issues involved in the recent struggles over public-service unions in the state. The university is now considering how to balance academic freedom against the public right to information in this case.

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.

The discussion has exploded: Cronon’s blog has received two million hits, and provoked press reports and posts across the blogosphere. Even some sites not especially known for sympathy to liberals, such as the Volokh Conspiracy, have sided with Cronon. Rather than rethink or justify their request, Wisconsin Republicans have doubled down. The executive director of the state party has denounced Cronon and his allies for “a concerted effort to intimidate” them.

Two points are striking. First of all, Cronon is not only a political moderate, he’s a passionate Wisconsin patriot. He moved to Madison as a child, did his B.A. at the University, and learned his environmentalism as an explorer of the Wisconsin landscape and a reader of a local hero, the naturalist Aldo Leopold. In 1992, at a time when academic stars had begun to flee strapped public universities for richer private ones, Cronon, by then a professor at Yale, left to go back to Madison. An independent, he has expressed his respect for the past traditions of the Wisconsin Republican Party. If the current officers of the party were really acting in the interest of their state, they wouldn’t be going after Cronon, who is one of its treasures. (Given that they misspelled his name in their complaint about his response, they may not know or care about any of this.)

Second, the Republicans seem remarkably fragile. A professor writing a blog post gives them the shivers. 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.