Religion

Being an atheist doesn’t mean being anti-religious. This recent letter in the local newspaper (scroll down to the Ten Commandments header) prompts me to write about something that has bothered me for a long time. Some of us are both definitely atheists and actively religious at the same time.

Most Americans will not recognize the intelligibility of this position. The most common definition of religion that Americans seem to carry around in their heads is that religion is a definite system of belief that describes a person’s views on God and the afterlife. If a group offers no commonly accepted description or definition of God and no position on the possibility of life after death, then it’s not a religion. This kind of definition matters—there was a court case in Texas about a decade ago about whether a religious group that held no position about a Supreme Being counted as a religion or not, and therefore whether it was entitled to a tax exemption under state law.

Definitions of religion that depend on the idea of a deity at the center have always bothered me. I am a third generation Unitarian Universalist, the granddaughter of a humanist and the child of UU ministers with different views of theism. I am sure based on my experience that Unitarian Universalism is a religion; but I am equally sure that there are atheists among us (including me). As a UU youth, I often encountered people who did not believe that my church was a religious group. How could it be, if there was no God? This is a hard question for a kid to answer, and is perhaps only harder (if less frequently encountered) for an adult.

It seems to me that defining one group as a religion and another not based on its position on God is an approach that takes Christianity as a platonic ideal and extrapolates based on Christian elements alone. It is not clear to me, for example, that Buddhism, one of the world’s oldest and most clearly “religious” religions, does not meet this test.

So, for today, here is my definition of a religion:

A religion is a set of beliefs and practice, cultivated in a communal context, that allow people across the lifespan to frame and answer transcendent questions.

Circle Swimming

On Monday morning, I arrived at the pool later than I like to. If I can get up by 5:40, I can get to the Jewish Community Center when it opens at 6:00, swim and shower, and be back home to get the morning crew going by around 7:30. If I’m thrown off by more than 15 or 20 minutes, I have to give up the prospect of a swim for the day.

Because I arrived at the pool at around 6:20, it was already full this morning. A couple people hung around the edges, waiting for a lane to open up, but I didn’t. I started a circle swim in one lane, and one of the waiters asked the lifeguard to help him start one in the center lane. The policy at the J is that when three or more people need a lane, everyone needs to circle swim. Circle swimming isn’t too difficult, especially if people swim at around the same speed, but it does take coordination among the swimmers. I’ve seen people stubbornly pretend they don’t understand the request (even though the rules are posted also in Russian, the dominant second language at the J) or get out of the pool altogether, but I have rarely seen a swimmer get as angry about it as I did this morning.

When the lifeguard asked Mr. Angry if he minded circle swimming, he angrily replied “I do mind” and got out of the pool to berate the lifeguard about what a stupid policy circle swimming was. His tone was not softened to account for the power differential between Mr. Angry and the kid who was lifeguarding; maybe it is easier to speak angrily to someone who is a third your age and makes a poor hourly rate. He pretended that I was not getting into the next lane over, looking right through me and suggesting that it was empty, that everyone else who wanted to swim could wait five or ten minutes and have a private half-lane to themselves. Among his reasons for not circle swimming was that he had paid to be at the pool (to which, the lifeguard responded reasonably, so had everyone else, since it’s pretty much only members who swim early in the morning; and, contradictorily but also rightly, that it was a public pool). He also pointed out that the other swimmers in the lane might get angry about their speed differential, since he was faster than the other swimmers in the lane and would have to pass them. Never mind that his belligerent tone was poisoning the atmosphere in the entire room.

What Mr. Angry seemed to miss altogether was that the J is also a religious and community center, and not just a place where you buy the right to exercise in private. When we are in community together, we do not just atomistically go about our business without regard for the people around us. We say hello to them in a civil fashion. We ask if we can help each other. We ask for help we need. And we share our space, deriving both the benefits and troubles of community life from the interaction.

In this light, circle swimming suddenly came to be a metaphor for the larger business of living in community together. No, it’s not ideal to have to share a lane with another person whose stroke is at a different speed (or who thinks that doing the butterfly in a shared lane is a good idea). But there are larger benefits of sharing the space, which we can appreciate only if we accommodate ourselves at least a little bit to the needs of our fellows.

Amy Winehouse

Since singer Amy Winehouse’s shocking but not surprising death last week, I have been puzzling over why I mourn her so much.

Given only surface considerations, I should not have been so affected by her. We had little in common, other than gender, etymologically close first names, western culture, and, I learned today, Jewish roots. I rarely listen to music recreationally. I am a middle-aged mother and professor. I no longer drink alcohol; have never tried an illegal drug. My talents and my arts overlap only a bit, and none of them will bring me the kind of acclaim that was rightly hers. She was none of those things.

But she caught my attention. About two years ago, I asked my husband about who this Amy Winehouse was, the one who I kept reading about in the newspaper (see how old fashioned and square I am? The actual newspaper!). He explained about her music. I remember vividly that he said that people were wondering “how all that soul got into a tiny little white girl.”

So, off I ran to Youtube to watch her music. Rehab caught me completely. I watched it over and over again, mystified by its appeal but stuck on it nonetheless. Content-wise, there is nothing in it that I can relate to. But musically, I had to keep coming back to it. I even bought Back to Black, which is remarkable given that in any given year I buy only one or two CDs (yes, CDs; forget about downloading music onto some portable machine).

Here is where I have come to this week: I can’t get over Rehab because it is great art. My experience of listening brings to mind the chills I got the first time I heard Bobbie Gentry’s Ode to Billie Joe or how I can hear Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah over and over again without getting tired of it (and, in fact, once again picking through its meaning and arguing in my head with the minister who got it mostly wrong). Or why Mozart’s Dies Irae is my all-time favorite piece of music. Great music, I think today, transcends the meaning of its words and makes the audience pay attention whatever the mismatch of values between musician and auditor.

Thank you, Amy Winehouse, for giving me the opportunity to understand this. I regret the rest of the music you will never create.

Living the Dream

Every summer, my husband and I go to see the financial planner. I hate it. For me, it's like going to the dentist. Except for in my life as a busy mother, going to the dentist is a nice little vacation--I get to sit still with my eyes closed and no expectations that I say or produce anything for half an hour.

One thing I particularly loathe at the financial planner's office is the "Dream Wall," a cloud painted wall decorated with clients' dreams for themselves and their futures. It's the kind of thing that you would expect...early retirement, open a bed and breakfast, sail around the world. I've always reacted viscerally against the Dream Wall, and every year the financial planner asks me again if I'd like to share my dream on the wall.

As I anticipate with dread our next visit to the planner this summer, I am starting to discern why I hate the Dream Wall so much. I'm not opposed to dreams. But, there are two problems.

1. I am already living my dream life. I really can't ask for more than I already have: meaningful work, a solid, fascinating, and basically happy family, a good church community, and, most days, the chance to swim.

2. Money, which is what the financial planner is positioned to work on, can't buy me what I dream of. I want more rest, more time each day to read novels, more time to do the work of my soul, more time to get exercise, more time to enjoy my children.

My problem is that I can't always remember that I am already living out my dreams. I get so wound up in the daily problems that I forget--as a friend was kind enough to remind me this morning--that my joy resides in my daily activities, the intriguing and confused comment of my child, her excitement about a new idea, the chance to go to sleep in a house that has so much space I can't possibly keep up with the labor of tidying, much less cleaning it.


The financial planner would probably say that the purpose of the Dream Wall is to help me realize how much of my dream I already have, and how to put aside money for the other things I might want in the future, like retirement, or a college education for my kids. But those things aren't dreams for me. They are icing. My dream is the day, not the night.

letter to Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

I commend your editorial team for advocating the repeal of Wisconsin’s constitutional amendment prohibition on the recognition of gay marriage. I would like to point out, however, that gay marriages exist whether or not the state acknowledges them. The marriages of gay and lesbian couples across the Wisconsin and the US are sanctified by virtue of their mutual commitment and the ceremonies in which their religious institutions, families, and friends bless their unions. It is time for the state of Wisconsin to step up and provide legal protections to gay and lesbian married couples on the same basis they are provided to heterosexuals.

In which I agree (somewhat) with Jonah Goldberg

It’s not every day that I even bother to read Jonah Goldberg’s column, much less agree with the basic sentiments in it. But today is a different day.

Goldberg recounts the story of Lena Reppert, a wheelchair-bound, dying nonagenarian being escorted by her daughter to a nursing home out of state. The staff of the Transportation Security Administration searched Ms. Reppert in a way that made her daughter conclude that she had to remove her mother’s adult diaper, humiliating enough in itself, and then rush to catch her plane, lacking a second diaper with which to protect her mother’s dignity. Goldberg calls for a rebellion against this suspicion of passengers by TSA.

I don’t follow Goldberg’s railing all the way back to ethnic profiling, which he would clearly prefer to the current approach taken by the TSA—that everyone is a suspect. A mother who brings water or juice boxes for her children through security (yes, this happened to me). A baby, inspected out of the sightline of his mother. Lena Reppert. But I do agree with Goldberg’s basic sense that TSA staff often act like machines, at the expense of their discretionary, human judgment.

Although I have traveled by plane only infrequently in the years since 9/11, when I have flown, I have often wondered about what working for TSA must do to a person’s soul. What does it mean to a person to be trained by his employer—the federal government, no less—that all other human beings must be regarded as possible terrorists and treated accordingly, with no milk of human kindness to ameliorate what most rational Americans recognize is a sadly necessary level of screening? If you work for TSA, do you carry your work attitude home with you? Do you fear the children in the playground and treat them with the same distance and disdain you do at work? How many people quit their jobs at TSA because of what it does to them, inside?

I am fortunate enough to have work that I love to do. I realize that this is a privilege that I should not take lightly, a product of my class, educational, and generational contexts. Most humans in the present, as well as in the past, have had to labor under bad conditions for goals that they may not value personally. I wish that everyone had the opportunity to do the kind of work that I have. Not that everyone should be a professor, but that everyone should enjoy the chance to do work that they believe makes a substantive contribution to bettering the human condition and receive adequate compensation for their labors. This is the dignity of work, to my mind. I wish for everyone the chance to do work that elevates them personally, rather than degrades them.

Declaration of Mutual Dependence

The baby has to learn to sleep independently, to sleep through the night by herself.. It’s developmental.

Yup, that’s what most parenting advice would have you believe. The baby has to learn to sleep by herself in order to develop her independence as a human being.

Some advice even tells you to let the baby cry and cry by herself for long stretches of time until she learns that you won’t come to her in the night. At night, she has to be independent.

Of all the parenting advice I’ve read in the past few years, that’s the biggest bunch of crap I encountered. The baby doesn’t need to learn to be independent. The baby needs to learn that she is secure, that her parents (i.e. mothers with milk and breasts) will come to her during the night to bring her food and comfort if that’s what she needs.

And this is the parenting advice that taught me just how ideologically loaded most formal parenting advice is. There isn’t just an agenda in most parenting books, there is an ideology. Back when I was up with my babies multiple times during the night (last week?) I often wondered what the parenting advice in the Soviet Union or Red China said about a baby’s sleep and independence. Perhaps that they need to sleep through the night for the good of the collective?

But it also strikes me this morning that urging a person to grow up to be independent is dysfunctional in another way. When I became a mother, I lost so much of the independence that being an American has conditioned me to treasure. I can’t set my schedule, do the work my soul burns for at the moment I need to do it, take a shower, get dressed, or even sleep unless all my other ducks are in a row. Is my husband available to watch the children? How many minutes are left on that DVD? Is the school open? Will they please, please, please settle down and go to sleep so I too can get the rest I desperately need?

And I also desperately need those children, the ones who are carrying around my heart.

Raising children to be independent does not prepare them to be parents themselves. It trains them to resent the ways in which parenting (or at least mothering?) curtails their independence.

Maybe this week we should celebrate our mutual dependence, rather than our individual and national independence.

How’s Your Water?

I’ve never been much of a fan of the balance metaphor as a way of describing our lives and our work as being in competition with each other. When I picture “work-life balance,” I imagine a woman holding up heavy burdens, maybe bowling balls, up in the air while she walks around trying not to fall over. The only time I felt that the metaphor really worked was in the introduction to Mama, PhD, where the editors remind us that when a dancer’s body is in balance, every muscle is working. That, at least, felt validating and true.

Perusing Samantha Parent Walravens’ Torn: True Stories of Kids, Career & the Conflict of Modern Motherhood, I was struck by the observation of my college classmate Alexander Bradner. Bradner writes, “Children need their mothers—not nannies or daycare workers—to narrate the mundane, introduce so many joys, and assist with so many pains…But women need a public voice, external affirmation, internal feelings of triumph, money of their own, and a mental life beyond worry and logistics. Only those free to fulfill their early promise have a chance of living through their fifties and sixties without debilitating regret. So we should be able to work as well.” (“Muthering Heights,” p. 110).

For me, Bradner’s observation triggered something. We need our families, or, writ more broadly, our lives. We need our work—something satisfying that makes a contribution somewhere beyond our selfish inner pleasures. We need life, and we need work. They are not burdens; they nourish us. Granted, they nourish us in different ways, and it usually is hard to cultivate them simultaneously.

I have not fully worked this out, but it also seems to me that work and life usually interpenetrate. Show me a mother who does not think about her children when she is working. Show me a worker who never does any “work” while off the job. I acknowledge that you can’t drive your bus while you’re at home. But I have loaded the dishwasher mentally while trying to go to sleep often enough to suspect that downtime nourishes our ability to do our jobs in important ways.

So now I am in search of a different metaphor, a metaphor that acknowledges that work and life are not just burdens, but needs. And that projects the notion that work and life are mutually reinforcing, not undermining.

Today I am trying out the metaphor of water instead of work-life balance. Water consists of hydrogen and oxygen. We need them both individually, and we need them together. We need them to be connected correctly, in the right proportions, at the correct angles. Let’s try it out. Instead of asking your friend, “How is your work-life balance?” ask them “How is your water today?” and see what you learn.

I Should Have Made the Tag "Mothering," Not "Parenting"

My favorite magazine, Brain, Child: The Magazine for Thinking Mothers runs a debate in each issue. Usually I am intrigued by the topic but frustrated by the actual “debate,” because the authors tend to construe the question so differently that they talk past each other rather than with each other. But the debate in the current issue comes out of a long-standing colloquy between the co-editors and for once offers a true binary: should they change the subtitle to include “parents” more broadly, or should they stick with “mothers”?

            I am a longstanding equality feminist, rather than a difference feminist, so I was surprised to find myself coming down on the side of keeping mothers in the title.

            As I thought it through, however, I realized that in recent years I have often told myself that it is motherhood, rather than my experience as a woman in American society, that is the source of my mid-life radicalism. Before I had children, I could function socially as a man. I was the ideal worker (granted, in a profession I love and feel privileged to participate in). With a few notable exceptions that ended up mostly harmless (and which I was privileged to be able to see as exceptions), I have been able to dodge sexual harassment and sexual violence. I benefited from the changes in laws and social norms in the last quarter of the twentieth century that enabled me to be taken seriously for what my hard work and talents produced.

            Motherhood, however, reminded me of my deep animal nature. I put my body on the line—twice—with pregnancy and childbirth (and in another era would not have survived the effort to bear a baby who weighed almost 11 pounds). My thinking brain went on a short hiatus as I coped with the demands of a sleepless child. My schedule revolves around the needs of my children. The topics I think about—personally and professionally—are deeply different from what they used to be. People who don’t know me—and some who do—call me “mom,” though they never would have called me “babe” (not that I was ever a babe). I struggle to remain even a good worker while I aspire to be a good mother, hitting neither target most days. My husband, who is involved with the children, has not appeared to have his fundamental relationships in the world changed, as I have. I am unconvinced that American fathers do experience the sorts of transformations that American mothers do. My experience of gender, in short, has broken over the lines of motherhood. Biology did not make me a woman, but motherhood has.

            One of science fiction writer Sheri Tepper’s novels, The Gate to Women’s Country, is set in a post-apocalyptic United States (spoiler alert!). Women and young children live in gated forts, cultivating art and science. Men live in warrior groups outside the forts, doing what they do best (in Tepper’s jaded view)—fighting with other groups of men. Men and women “hook up” (to use a horrible term that actually fits this situation too well) at regular intervals to allow for reproduction. Boys live with their mothers for a while after birth, then they go live with the men. As they hit puberty, they choose: run the gauntlet back to their mothers’ homes in Women’s Country, or stay with the men? Most stay with the men. But increasing numbers return to Women’s Country, scorned by most men but enjoying the company of a heterosocial society that the women are cultivating. The kicker? The spoiler—it turns out that the men who live outside Women’s Country are not actually the fathers of the boys they welcome to Men’s Country, nor of the girls who stay with their mothers. The women have preserved reproductive science and technology, and while they allow the warriors to believe that they continue to father children, only those men who have returned to Women’s Country are enabled to become fathers—either through trickery on the women who foolishly fall for the warrior men, or the old fashioned way with women in on the secret. In a bit of nastiness that is classic Tepper, the women in fact periodically provoke wars with other forts of women, in order to cull the numbers of aggressive men. The leaders of Women’s Country are carefully breeding violence out of humans, cultivating a society in which womanhood is the norm, and cherishing the men who are willing to prioritize art, science, and community life over patriarchal manhood.

            This turns out to be how I feel about changing Brain, Child’s subtitle. They are doing some really important work at that magazine, excavating with care, honesty, and wicked funny humor what motherhood implies in the twenty-first century US. Some men are brave enough to cross through the gauntlet, read the magazine, and even write for it. Even though the title seems to set it aside as Women’s Country. We want those men, and we need to hear from them. But let them preserve the space where motherhood—which remains a different experience from fatherhood—sets the norm.

Mother's Day

The preschool teachers at my three-year-old's school have put up a marvelously simple and moving display this week, in celebration of Mother's Day.

Each child was asked to bring in a picture of a special woman. The teachers put those pictures into the middle of a circle. Around the edge of the circle, like petals on a rose, are a series of statements by the children about why the woman is special.

I stood, stunned and smiling so broadly, when I read the statements. "My mommy is special because she takes me to the grocery store." "My mommy is special because I love her." "My mommy is special because she holds me." My daughter's said, "My mommy is special because she plays with me (and she takes me to the JCC)." They were all like that. Nothing remarkable--just the day-to-day things that mothers do routinely, often just to keep afloat, sometimes to hang out with their kids.

The kids didn't talk about the "special" things that mothers do, like take them on outings or buying them fancy toys (OK, one did, but that kid was in the other class!). Or having fancy educational pedigrees or prestigious jobs or clean houses.

I have been a mother now for almost seven years, and it was never so clear to me what makes a great parent. It's not anything extraordinary that we do. It's just living our lives carefully and lovingly with our children.

Thank you, preschool teachers, for teaching me that lesson.

Amy Chua’s Dogs

The last line of Amy Chua’s notorious Battle Cry of the Tiger Mother is “I’ve just told Jed that I want to get another dog” (229) This will be the third dog acquired in her family over the course of her children’s childhoods, as narrated in the memoir.

For anyone who was under a rock in January or has forgotten because of the revolutions in the Middle East, politics in Wisconsin, or the tsunami in Japan, Battle Hymn recounts Chua’s struggles with her younger daughter Lulu over playing the violin. Her book launch included the publication of a stomach-turning, unrepentant excerpt of the introduction to Battle Cry in The Wall Street Journal. In the excerpt, and in the book as well, Chua contrasts “Chinese parenting” and “Western parenting.” Chinese parenting—which Chua actually takes care to acknowledge is neither universally Chinese nor exclusively the province of Asians—demands from children obedience, focus on academics and the high arts, never coming in second, and the repudiation of a wide range of leisure activities. Western parenting, by contrast, fosters children’s self esteem, encourages them to find their passions, permits less than stellar achievement in school, and celebrates athletics. In Chua’s version of Chinese parenting, excellent participation is insufficient—her children must win their music competitions, earn the chance to take lessons with the most exclusive teachers, and play at Carnegie Hall (which they do).

I have to admit that from the start I have felt a certain amount of sympathy for Chua. Not because of her professed parenting style—which I do not share—but because it was clear to me that she was writing in a confessional mode. I don’t know why, but Americans seem to have a blind spot when it comes to confessional writing. I got a taste of this myself when I published an editorial on civility that kicked off with the tale of my shouting at my husband for eating my daughter’s breakfast of salami. Why on earth would any self-aware person write doing something she knows other people will criticize roundly, if not to make a point about it? But some of my readers missed this nuance and took me to task for a behavior I had already privately apologized to my husband about.

Chua’s MO is similar—she spends scores of pages building up her self-portrait as a tyrannical mother bent on making her child into a violin prodigy in order to show her moment of conversion and new outlook on parenting. The unpaginated epigraph for the book declares, “instead, it’s about a bitter clash of cultures, a fleeting taste of glory, and how I was humbled by a thirteen-year-old.” By the end of the book, Chua has lost her battle with Lulu over the violin and permitted her daughter to choose her own activities. Lulu chooses tennis. Although she does not win every match, her daughter understands that her losses are in service of her learning the game—which she is determined eventually to win. Chua reconciles herself to her daughter’s putting away of the violin in favor of a mere athletic competition by celebrating her instinct to win. If Lulu will no longer win all those violin competitions that she was pushing her into, at least she can make herself into a tennis champion.

Chua’s overt message is that she has learned that her daughter will not be a failure if she chooses her own activities. Using Chinese parenting on a Western, rebellious second child ended up driving her away; Lulu, she realized, was on the brink of replicating Chua’s immigrant father’s past, alienating himself (in every sense of the word) from his own Chinese parents. But Chua swells with pride to see that Lulu has internalized the drive to win, even if it is in tennis. This is where Chua loses me. The major shortcoming with Chua’s conversion is that she does not let go of her basic tenet that the purpose of parenting is to raise successful children. If the arena can’t be high culture, she will find a way to live with it (and even subtly try to give her daughter tips for winning). She does not question whether “Western parenting” has the same goal as Chinese parenting—to raise children to succeed.

Parenting—even in the ambitious “West”—does not have to have the children’s success as a goal. As I raise my own children, I hope I am leaving their ultimate success up to their own desires. Instead, my focus is to raise children who 1) are decent human beings and 2) use their talents to bless the world. Indeed, I feel so strongly about this second point that I had Rebecca Parker’s poem “Choose to Bless the World” read at each of their dedications. I want them to love themselves and their neighbors to make the world a better place. I think they will probably need certain tools (like a solid education) to accomplish some of their goals in this complex world of ours, but no one needs wealth, status, or a wall of trophies to do either one.

Which brings me back to Amy Chua’s dogs. Why does she include the dogs in the memoir? They are right there in that opening epigraph—“a story about a mother, two daughters, and two dogs”—and the introduction of each new pet into the family opens parts two and three, a counterpoint to chapter one, “The Chinese Mother.” Coco, Samoyed #1, she learns is very bright but stubborn as all get out, like Lulu refusing to cooperate in Chua’s plans for her to walk. Pushkin, also a purebred, starts out ugly, turns into a swan, but remains stupid. Chua realizes that she simply cannot make the dogs succeed the way she has pushed her daughters (why it does not occur to her to raise show dogs, I am not certain). With her husband’s help, she laughs at herself for asking in the heat of a fight about the girls, “What are your dreams for Coco?” She concludes, “My dogs can’t do anything—and what a relief. I don’t make any demands of them, and I don’t try to shape them or their future. For the most part, I trust them to make the right choices for themselves. I always look forward to seeing them, and I love just watching them sleep. What a great relationship.” (166)

Those dogs, I think, embody the third layer of Battle Hymn, the one that argues for parenting as an act of love and decency rather than success. Chua would love to parent her children the way she does Coco and Pushkin, but even after her conversion, she cannot shake the idea that the job of the parent is to make her child a success. It’s hard to tell whether Chua knows that this is what she wants to do. The dogs appear at key moments of the book, but she exhibits no other self-awareness that would suggest she knows that other reasons for parenting exist.

I can’t tell if Amy Chua has written the most brilliant self-satire I’ve ever read or if Battle Hymn is a desperate (and wildly successful) cry for help broadcast to the world at large. But I do know what those dogs are doing there.

*All page numbers refer to Amy Chua, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother (New York: The Penguin Press, 2011).

Open Records, Privacy, and the Public University

Friday was a mandatory furlough day at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where I am a professor, so I stayed home to work on my taxes. Between jousting with my 1040 booklet and the accumulated laundry, I had the chance to watch updates about the open records request for Madison professor William Cronon’s email spiral out in the blogosphere in real time.

What did William Cronon do to merit an open records request? On March 15, he posted a long entry on his “Scholar as Citizen” blog giving context to the budget debate in Wisconsin. Two days later, Stephan Thompson of the Republican Party of Wisconsin filed an open records request with UW-Madison, requesting any emails that might be connected to current state politics.

What does Thompson hope to accomplish by requesting Cronon’s emails? Probably his first goal is to discover whether Cronon used his @wisc.edu address for “political activities,” an abuse of state resources. “Political activities” according to guidance we at UWM have received, include advocating for the election or recall of public officials. Cronon’s blog post clearly does not cross that line.

What results fall out from this request? Cronon himself might be embarrassed, and his time diverted from scholarship to self-defense. I am not worried about Cronon, who is a sophisticated and principled scholar. He uses a personal email account for non-academic purposes. I am more concerned about the effects of this request on other UW faculty, who now operate in a climate where we might be subject to partisan investigation if we do our jobs: creating and disseminating ideas.

Academics might like to image ourselves as fearless investigators, but we too are sensitive to the political climate in which we teach and write. Remember the uproar over Marquette University’s rescinded deanship offer last year? That resulted in the cancellation of at least one research project whose lead scholar believed was not tenable in a gay-unfriendly environment. The UW editor of a listserv crucial to my research wrote yesterday that he feared his list “may be taken off the air at any time.” What if in a lecture on Wisconsin history I connect the dots between Senator Joseph McCarthy and the effort to intimidate Wisconsin’s professors through the request to Cronon? Will my email records be next? Will I be brave enough to tell the truth despite the implicit threat?

Scholars write to publish, but much of our writing is and should remain private in order to best serve purposes of the university. We answer students’ queries about their academic progress. We correspond with our professional organizations about their actions. We write reviews of scholarly manuscripts for publishers. We evaluate other scholars’ promotion and tenure portfolios. We circulate drafts of our own work to trusted colleagues, drafts where we try to work out half-formed ideas that we know are not ready for the light of day. If any of these materials can subjected to public scrutiny at will, then it follows that we might hold back from the full internal discussion needed to produce excellent scholarship and teaching.

No one is arguing that this open records request is illegal. The request, however, threatens to undermine the processes that have produced a world-class university in Wisconsin. The UW System employs scholars to generate new knowledge about how the world works, using their academic training and the full force of their intellects to that end. This open records request certainly teaches us something important about how the world works. But it may end up deterring us from achieving the public good that public universities are charged with pursuing.

[Composed Saturday March 26; UW-Madison has since released a very limited selection of Cronon's emails to the requester.]

Inside the Rotunda

You won’t see pictures of the Family Space inside the Rotunda of the Wisconsin statehouse, where signs and greeters ask photographers to respect children’s privacy.            

For much of the afternoon that my family joined the occupation of the People’s House last Saturday, my husband and I took turns taking our younger daughter to the bathroom, begging her to overcome her fear of flushing. When I had a few moments to look around, I was dazzled. Not by chaos, but by community. Away from the slogans of the marchers outside and the microphones, drums, and musicians on the ground floor, a few good folks created a space where parents can bring their children to participate in the struggle for Wisconsin’s future.

            Beyond the makeshift “Family Space” signs was an improvised children’s play area, complete with toys, paper and markers, books, snacks, drinks, and, most astonishingly, a chair for nursing mothers. We arrived in time for the 4 p.m. story hour. My older daughter threw herself into coloring, while my younger daughter sampled crackers and an apple. I was treated as though I had as much right to make decisions about the space as those already there. Should we, my fellow parents asked me, request people to take their shoes off when they arrived? When I came back, would I bring a lesson about the history of the labor movement?

While my husband took a turn with our daughter’s recalcitrant bladder, I chatted with the woman who seemed most at home. When I asked her who had donated the snacks, she said simply that she had brought them; she accepted money from me only reluctantly, though graciously. She told me, “we are teachers, librarians, professors,” as if that explained everything.

The spirit of the beloved community swept me up. I intuited that the women waiting in a never-ending line for the restroom would let the potty emergency jump the queue. When I saw a spill, I found the paper towel stash and cleaned it up. When my daughter returned, underwear and pants soaked, I found a diaper for her in the community supply. A delivery person from Ian’s now world-famous pizza sated my children’s hunger. On our way out, I was proud to tell another mother feeding her children in a dark, cold corner that she would find welcome upstairs.

            When I first reflected on my time in the Rotunda, I thought there was probably a metaphor in my daughter’s reluctance to use the bathroom, something about the mess we make when we reject public facilities. But the most important metaphor is the character of the occupation itself. Amidst the protest signs plastered on the wall were posters from the public creating community there. The “Medic Staff” reminded us to please wash our hands and watch our steps on the hard marble stairs. I learned where I could get an ID bracelet for my children, in case they got lost. A “free store” offered a host of useful supplies. A timetable listed the upcoming workshops in civil disobedience.

The people in the Family Space and in the Rotunda embodied our basic values of democracy and decency. All comers are equal participants, no matter when we arrive. We should gladly share with our neighbors. Together, we can educate, clothe, feed, and shelter our children. When we combine our money and our talents for collective enterprises, in the name of what we value, we are more than we can be alone. I do not know their names or if that space can be recreated under the new restrictions placed on those entering the capitol. But I do know that the women and men and children in the Rotunda demonstrated what the public good can be—precisely the point under debate in the “budget repair bill” and now the proposed state budget.

[note: I wrote this in February, 2011]