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 Remember the uproar over Marquette University’s rescinded deanship offer last year?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.]
No comments:
Post a Comment