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Wisconsin Republican Party Seeks E-Mails of UW-Madison History Professor Critical of Governor Walker

Brian Leiter

Many readers have sent this story.  Unfortunately, I'm quite busy today, but I will try to say more next week.  Very briefly, it's clear that this is an attempt to harass Professor Cronon and probably constitutes an abuse of process; it's much less clear that it violates academic freedom, though it arguably impinges upon Professor Cronon's First Amendment rights.  It calls to mind the events at UVA, which were successfully challenged last year.  (That case involved a climate scientist's e-mail relating to his research, which is why it was quite clearly an academic freedom issue.  Professor Cronon, by contrast, is writing about issues outside his area of academic research.)   There's also a statutory interpretation issue about the meaning of "private" e-mails under the Wisconsin FOIA.   I'll open comments for more links and information, and I will try to weigh in with more substantive analysis by Monday.  Comments will take awhile to appear, so please only submit once.  Thanks.

UPDATE:  This is informative as to Wisconsin law governing FOIA requests.

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6 responses to “Wisconsin Republican Party Seeks E-Mails of UW-Madison History Professor Critical of Governor Walker”

  1. Evan Riley

    Dear Prof. Leiter,

    On your view, if a professor, in her role as educator, writes e-mails to her students discussing actual politics, then that would be clearly protected under a norm of academic freedom only if this topic was also internal to her area of professional expertise? That seems excessively narrow.

    BL REPLY: I didn't address that case. A professor responding to student inquiries via e-mail arguably does fall within the scope of academic freedom, which is freedom in teaching and research. It's worth bearing in mind, however, that the moral ideal of academic freedom on which we often rely finds almost no support in American constitutional law (it fares somewhat better as a matter of the contractual commitment universities make to faculty).

    Reply
  2. Dave Spindle

    The Oklahoma Legislature pulled the exact same stunt in 2009 when the University of Oklahoma hosted Richard Dawkins.

    Reply
  3. Michael Kremer

    With regard to student e-mails, Cronon maintains that they are protected under FERPA and can't be disclosed without the student's permission.

    Reply
  4. Roger Albin

    Whether or not this is outside Prof. Cronon's area of research is potentially arguable. His specialty is "environmental history" but this is construed very broadly. His best known book, Nature's Metropolis, is an outstanding analysis of American economic development and the key role of Chicago in the industrialization of the USA. He is a specialist in American history, and his blog post was a historical analysis. Its a matter of legal interpretation as to whether Prof. Cronon's blog post constitutes part of his academic research but a recognized leader (he is the President-Elect of the American Historical Society) in American history writing about the history of the American conservative movement is not like a specialist in Tang China writing about 20th century Africa.

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  5. Jim Nichols

    Paul Krugman's op-ed yesterday was on this: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/28/opinion/28krugman.html?_r=1

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  6. Harry Brighouse

    This has made me uneasy (as a fairly vocal and public critic of the collective bargaining law), and I even thought twice about blogging about it (both times I thought "yes, I will", but still). Like Cronon I have nothing to hide, but unlike him I am visibly closely associated with the Democrat in the Assembly whose public standing has been elevated the most by this whole thing.

    It's worth noting that the University gets requests like this reasonably often, and that recently some left wing groups did exactly the same thing to a political science professor who had released a poll they didn't like. In this case, frankly, it is a relief that they have gone after Cronon. It is already a huge embarrassment, but even if they get the emails there will be nothing even slightly damning, and if they, then, go after others it will be politically even worse for them. Despite the fact that any one of us could name numerous colleagues (not in my department, and I won't name them) whose emails would almost certainly contain embarrassing things (and whose public appearances and classes do). My guess is that they really didn't know who Cronon is, and were too dumb to interpret the tone of that first post and thought "Oh, this is some radical professor with whose emails we can embarrass the university". 5 minutes on google, or just the ability to read properly, would have saved them the trouble.

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