The Republican Party of Wisconsin wants to see what William Cronon has been e-mailing about. Through an open-records request, the state GOP is asking to see correspondence from Cronon, a professor of history, geography and environmental studies at the University of Wisconsin, that includes the terms “Republican,” “Scott Walker” and “collective bargaining,” among many other keywords and names.
Such fishing expeditions seem to be growing in popularity: The free-market folks at the Mackinac Center in Michigan have made a request to see e-mails from people in the labor studies departments at that state’s public universities. They’re looking for some of the same terms as the Wisconsin GOP but have added “Maddow” to the list.
What exactly they’re expecting to find is hard to say. Presumably, and at the very least, the Republicans are hoping to catch Cronon advocating for a particular candidate or political platform while using his university e-mail account, which would be against school policy.
It’s possible that these nosy politicians will strike public relations gold: something that confirms their suspicions that these professors are instrumental in the political opposition. They could even find something particularly damaging — an ill-advised comment that could upend a safely tenured career. Remember former University of Colorado ethnic studies professor Ward Churchill’s reference to the “little Eichmanns” who died in the World Trade Center attack, or the statement by Lincoln University’s Kaukab Siddiquethat the Holocaust was “a hoax”? (On second thought, Siddique kept his job, so maybe even those kinds of remarks won’t do the trick.)
More likely, though, these e-mails will contain just run-of-the-mill examples of political activism and partisanship. One needn’t look at personal correspondence to find that, though. Cronon’s March 21 New York Times article comparing Gov. Scott Walker and Joseph McCarthy made it plain. The professor is also on the board of the Wilderness Society, currently working to stop mining in the New Mexico desert. The society’s Web site instructs readers: “Ask Interior Secretary Ken Salazar to close Otero Mesa to mining immediately!” Whether Cronon engages in these activities while he is “on the job” seems trivial. Academics, like most other professionals, don’t clock in and out.
A significant portion of the professoriate sees engagement in politics as part of the job description. And, unfortunately, they are right. It is becoming harder and harder to find professors devoted to teaching traditional academic subjects for their own sake, to undergraduates who lack the basics in the humanities and the social and natural sciences. The academy has not become politicized because of a few radical professors. Rather, entire departments and university administrations see the goal of higher education as political. At a time when the percentage of students needing remedial education is at an all-time high, when the need for job training beyond high school is pressing and when we worry about how even our top students will compete with their peers around the world, political activism should be at the bottom of any university’s list of priorities.
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