Jackies Pro Sports News - Rumors - & Scandals: William Cronon and academic freedom

The attempt by Wisconsin Republicans to bully a moderate history professor into silence is shocking. Have they no shame?

On 10 March, the day after Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker's legislation to kill the state's public service unions, the New York Times asked University of Wisconsin history professor William Cronon to explain the state's background of public service collective bargaining laws. As Wisconsin's homegrown and most prominent historian, it was a logical choice.

Cronon established a prominent reputation early from environmental histories that described the interaction of peoples and ecologies in colonial and nineteenth century America. With the 1991 publication of Nature's Metropolis, a history of Chicago's distinctive role as nexus between rural agrarian and urban industrial worlds, he became a star, both widely read and academically admired.

For most of his career, Cronon has been attacked from the left for celebrating competitive capitalism, and from the right for his distinctive brand of eco-history. A mild, moderate man, he describes himself as spending lots of time defending conservative contributions to liberal friends. In his research for the Times op-ed piece, he uncovered a strong connection between Walker's anti-union initiative and a national, conservative, overwhelmingly Republican state legislation advocacy organisation called the American Legislative Exchange Council, or Alec. On his own time, computer and email, he posted his first blog as, appropriately enough, Scholar as Citizen. Scholar-like, the post drew no conclusions and made no accusations; it simply offered a study guide and lesson plan-length curriculum by which students and citizens could investigate the connections on their own.

On 15 March, the Wisconsin Republican party filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to view the contents of "Professor William Cronon's state email account from 1 January 2011 to present which reference any of the following terms: Republican, Scott Walker, recall, collective bargaining, AFSCME, WEAC, rally, union [and 12 prominent Republican state senators who supported Walker's bill]".

Like the Wisconsin Republicans' final vote to kill public service unions, which arguably broke Wisconsin open records and public notice laws, the FOIA request for Cronon's emails may not be legal. Wisconsin open records law states that, "all persons are entitled to the greatest possible information regarding the affairs of government and the official acts of those officers and employees who represent them." Cronon, by contrast, is neither an "employee who represent(s) them" nor engaged in an "official act". His op-ed piece was written and submitted as a private citizen, and neither in university employment nor representing any university department.

The Times published Cronon's op-ed piece on 22 March. As if to corroborate his hypothesis about a coordinated conservative strategy behind Walker's initiative, on 24 March, the rightwing, Michigan-based Mackinac Institute thinktank issued its own FOIA request for university emails of professors at the University of Michigan, Michigan State University and Wayne State University in Detroit. The request asked for all emails referring to "Scott Walker", "Wisconsin", "Madison", collective bargaining in Wisconsin, and "Maddow" ? presumably, in reference to the pro-labour MSNBC television commentator.

In his second blog, Cronon politely asked the Republican party of Wisconsin to withdraw its request. He pointed out that Wisconsin and its university has a long-established tradition of non-partisan academic freedom, established for more than a century. In 1894, Wisconsin economics Professor Richard Ely was accused of espousing anarchist and socialist views. The Wisconsin Regents, the university's governing body, appointed a committee, whose special report concluded in words that established American academic freedom:

"Whatever may be the limitations which trammel inquiry elsewhere, we believe that the great state university of Wisconsin should ever encourage that continual and fearless sifting and winnowing by which alone the truth can be found."

Those words, carved on a plaque of Wisconsin bronze embedded in a Wisconsin granite stone, stand at the entrance of the University's Bascom Hall. Frederick Jackson Turner, the famous American historian honoured in Cronon's endowed chair, helped establish what eventually became the American doctrine of academic freedom.

Even Wisconsin's Joe McCarthy, who famously went after professors at Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Hopkins, Chicago and virtually every other great American university, went easy on his home state's and his own alma mater. Perhaps the wily McCarthy, whose name is synonymous with the practice of reputational decimation by accusation and innuendo, knew something that today's Wisconsin Republicans don't understand: even the most conservative Wisconsinites have an inveterate, as well as historical, sense of fair play.