WI GOP Demands Professor's Emails

The New York Times reports:

As Wisconsin’s capital continued to echo with debate over the controversial legislation that strips public unions of collective bargaining rights, a history professor at the University of Wisconsinin Madison publicly joined the conversation last week with his first post on a new blog.

It was a lengthy and speculative examination of a national organization for conservative lawmakers that the professor,  William Cronon, believed was partly responsible for what he described as “this explosion of radical conservative legislation.” The post soon received more than a half million hits, he said.

Two days later, on March 17, while attending a conference of historians, Professor Cronon learned that a public records request had been filed by a state Republican Partyofficial demanding access to months of messages on his university e-mail account that referred to certain politicized words and names, including the governor and a number of legislators.

Professor Cronon, who describes himself as a political independent, said his initial nervousness had turned to anger over what he described as an attempt at harassment and intimidation. He said he had never engaged in any nonscholarly political work on university computers or time, which is prohibited, but was still concerned about the release of the e-mails.

“There is an academic freedom issue here,” he said in an interview.

Professor Cronon, who wrote an Op-Ed article in The New York Times this week criticizing the actions of Wisconsin Republicans, discussed the records request on his blog on Friday.

Mark Jefferson, executive director of the Republican Party of Wisconsin, said that he would not detail why the records request was filed and said it was inappropriate for Professor Cronon to question his motives. “I find this troubling,” Mr. Jefferson said. “Like anyone else filing a public records request, I don’t have to give a reason.”

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