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Siva Vaidhyanathan,"Google Block," Slate, 23 March, and Vaidhyanathan,"Thank you, Judge Chin," CHE, 24 March, find reason for hope in Judge Denny Chin's decision against Google's digitization project. Robert Darnton,"A Digital Library Better Than Google's," NYT, 23 March, follows Chin's decision with Darnton's own proposal.
Alan Hirshfield,"An Engine of Perpetual Revolution," WSJ, 26 February, Tom Chatfield,"Early Men of Science," more intelligent life, Spring, and Michael Dirda for the Washington Post, 23 March, review Laura Snyder's The Philosophical Breakfast Club: Four Remarkable Friends Who Transformed Science and Changed the World.
George Steiner,"Philosophers at War," TLS, 23 March, reviews Pierre Bouretz's study in 20th century philosophy, D'un Ton Guerrier En Philosophie.
Finally, the struggle in Wisconsin has taken a particularly ugly turn for Bill Cronon, who is president-elect of the American Historical Association. Josh Marshall's"My World's Collide," TPM, 24 March, has the sequence of events. Other important sources: Cronon's new blog, Scholar as Citizen, launched on 15 March; his"Wisconsin's Radical Break," NYT, 21 March; and the Wisconsin Republican Party's FOIA request for access to Cronon's e-mail account for his sources of information. Thanks to Alan Baumler for the notice.
I'm edging toward a four-figure salary -- how cool is that?
Jonathan Dresner -
3/27/2011
Would it be worse, or better, if he only had a 5-figure salary. Like most of us?
Chris Bray -
3/27/2011
I don't disagree at all -- it's turtles all the way down. My interest is in the party that claims refuge as a scholar. I stipulate, and have stipulated, that the Republicans are behaving like idiots. I've tried to make that clear, and I'm sorry if I haven't.
David Silbey -
3/26/2011
What I've said is that Cronon engaged in a political attack, and was subsequently the target of a political attack.
And he responded by claiming that that attack was illegitimate; his response, too, was a political one, and the Republicans responded by claiming his response was illegitimate. That, too, was a political response. It's turtles all the way down, but Chris Bray is only outraged at certain points.
You have a very odd sense of what is political and what is not, and what to have vapors over and what not.
Chris Bray -
3/26/2011
Who made you the arbiter of the appropriateness of other people's political attacks? For the ten thousandth time, Cronon engaged in a political attack and was attacked, weakly, in return. David Silbey hereby declares that Republicans may not engage in politics, for he feels it to be inappropriate.
The attack, btw, was precisely a response: Cronon argued that ALEC was behind the Wisconsin union legislation, explaining a political event by looking for alliances and connections. In response, the Wisconsin GOP tried to find out who he was talking to, trying to explain his stance by looking for his alliances and connections.
I haven't said that he doesn't have a right to keep those alliances and connections private -- I've said that the appropriate way for him to do that is to have private discussions on private accounts, which he appears to have done. I haven't said the he doesn't have the right, or didn't have the right, to attack Walker and ALEC and anybody else. I haven't said that the Wisconsin GOP is waging a righteous campaign to properly expose a critic, although I don't challenge their politically foolish right to do so. And I have cheerfully conceded that the Wisconsin GOP's whining in response to Cronon's whining is laughable.
What I've said is that Cronon engaged in a political attack, and was subsequently the target of a political attack. It is not inappropriate for people engaged in politics to attack one another -- it's the thing itself, the normal operating condition.
If the Wisconsin GOP was, to pick a scenario, attacking an assistant professor, ahead of his tenure hearing, over his scholarship, I'd be outraged and horrified. That's not close to what's happening here; what's happening here is a political attack in response to a political attack, and one that Cronon and his university can easily defeat.
I do not intend to dismiss the importance of academic freedom. I mean to say that it is not at stake, here.
David Silbey -
3/26/2011
You're defending a prominent and comfortable person who's under weak attack by clumsy fools, and nothing is at stake.
So, wait, illegitimate attacks are okay if they are against people who don't deserve our sympathy?
Chris Bray -
3/26/2011
BTW, no one is attacking a departmental secretary. They're attacking a person with lifetime job tenure and a six-figure salary, and doing so in a hapless and clumsy way that will cause him precisely no harm at all. No doubt you imagine yourself at the barricades, fighting in a matter of "substantive public interest." You're defending a prominent and comfortable person who's under weak attack by clumsy fools, and nothing is at stake.
Chris Bray -
3/26/2011
"I get the feeling that you're more interested in trying to score points than have a conversation, so I think I'll end it here."
I've come to recognize that as your standard line.
Alan Allport -
3/26/2011
We're not some mere set of ordinary government employees ... [etc.]
I get the feeling that you're more interested in trying to score points than have a conversation, so I think I'll end it here. But for the record, whilst I do think that academic jobs have certain characteristics that set them apart from other kinds of employment - and so, apparently, does the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals - I'd be just as keen to defend the departmental secretary or the mailboy if the FOIA request lodged against them was clearly a matter of petty harrassment rather than substantive public interest.
So, Mr. Bray - speaking as someone who was one of those secretaries long before I ever became an academic - you can take your smug populism and stick it up your arse. With the greatest respect.
Chris Bray -
3/26/2011
If the distinction isn't in the law, then it's only in your head, and funnier for being found only there: we're not some mere set of ordinary government employees, sniff sniff -- we're academics, and that's special. Precious.
Alan Allport -
3/26/2011
I challenge you to show evidence that the Wisconsin public records law broadly distinguishes state university employees from other state employees.
Did I say that there was an explicitly defined difference in law? No, I didn't. In fact, I never suggested that the GOP's request was technically impermissable at all - that's a question I'll leave to the lawyers to decide (Cronon himself hasn't disputed it, so far as I understand).
Something can be perfectly legal and still stink. The GOP have every right to pursue this request if they wish; and we have every right to draw conclusions about them as a result.
No one can believe that William Cronon was ever in serious danger of losing his job.
Did I say he was?
Just because Cronon is unlikely to get fired as a result of this move doesn't dampen its ability to intimidate. The GOP is not trying to get him sacked. It's trying to punish him - either by revealing private correspondence that could be personally embarrassing, or, at the very least, by wasting his time and whittling away at his peace of mind. It's less aimed at him than at other university employees who might also have the audacity to speak out against the governor's office.
My goodness, politicians trying to embarrass and intimidate a political opponent -- nothing like that has ever happened before!
All this leaden sarcasm seems a bit beside the point. I'm hardly shocked by the fact that something like this has been attempted: but that doesn't mean it should be accepted with a yawn either.
Chris Bray -
3/26/2011
Also, about this: "A faculty member at a state university is not a public employee in the same sense that a member of, say, the governor's staff is."
Is that a distinction in the law, or did you invent it? I challenge you to show evidence that the Wisconsin public records law broadly distinguishes state university employees from other state employees.
Chris Bray -
3/26/2011
My goodness, politicians trying to embarrass and intimidate a political opponent -- nothing like that has ever happened before! Well, except for what Joe McCarthy did.
No one can believe that William Cronon was ever in serious danger of losing his job. No one can believe that UW-Madison's lawyers wouldn't have been able to find exemptions, under FERPA if not under the state public records law, for Cronon's emails with students. The politics are so intense because nothing was ever at stake.
By the way, ALEC has a website. The right-wing struck back because Cronon exposed ALEC's role in crafting right-wing legislation! Yeah, that was a secret, and he blew the lid off it. He googles -- that kind of powerful skill is gonna make you some terrifying enemies.
Snore.
Alan Allport -
3/26/2011
He's a public employee. The whole question is about what he did with public resources.
A faculty member at a state university is not a public employee in the same sense that a member of, say, the governor's staff is (how much of Cronon's paycheck actually comes from the public purse these days anyway?) The question is not 'what he did with public resources' - because to even dignify that as a legitimate question is absurd. The cost that the state's taxpayers might have theoretically incurred by Cronin using his email account for non-university business (quelle horreur!) is vanishingly small. The purpose of this FOIA request is transparently not to discover any information of genuine public interest, but to embarrass and intimidate a political enemy. It's a perversion of the intent of the original law, and the men behind this stunt would be ashamed of their behavior if shame was still a psychological response they were capable of expressing.
Chris Bray -
3/25/2011
I didn't care all that much about this thing, but now I'm getting temporarily interested. I've just taken few moments to read Cronon's original blog post. One overarching response: are you kidding me?
"One obvious conclusion I draw is that my study guide about the role of ALEC in Wisconsin politics must come pretty close to hitting a bull’s-eye. Why else would the Republican Party of Wisconsin feel the need to single out a lone university professor for such uncomfortable attention?"
Yes, why would they single out a lone university professor, a humble scholar quietly going about his business and scratching out obscure essays for the NEW YORK TIMES?
"In the op-ed I published in the New York Times on March 22, I drew a carefully delimited analogy between what is happening in Wisconsin today and the partisan turmoil that Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy worked so hard to create in the early 1950s. "
All I did, reader, was carefully and in a limited way write in the New York Times that Scott Walker is like Joe McCarthy. And for some unaccountable reason, Wisconsin Republicans felt that my humble effort merited attention.
"I’d be willing to bet quite a lot of money that Mr. Thompson and the State Republican Party are hoping that I’ve been violating this policy so they can use my own emails to prove that I’m a liberal activist who is using my state email account to engage in illegal lobbying and efforts to influence elections. By releasing emails to demonstrate this, they’re hoping they can embarrass me enough to silence me as a critic."
Well, yes. Politics. If you don't wish to be silenced, keep speaking. You can compare someone to Joe McCarthy, but it's inappropriate for your critics to attempt to embarrass you? Why? This is merely politics.
"McCarthy, of course, thought nothing of trying to have university faculty members fired from their jobs because he believed they held objectionable political views—and many were indeed fired as a result. The kind of intervention happening in this case isn’t so overt: Mr. Thompson hasn’t yet issued a demand for me to be disciplined or fired. But it’s hard not to draw an analogy between this effort to seek of evidence of wrongdoing on my part (because I asked awkward but legitimate questions about an organization with close ties to the Republican Party) and the legal and professional consequences that might follow the discovery of such evidence."
I love the "hasn't yet. But..." William Cronon hasn't yet broken into my house and urinated on my pillow, ladies and gentlemen, but oh, dear readers, will we stand for this kind of behavior when it comes to pass?
That's going to just about do it for me and the Wisconsin saga. People with lifetime job tenure and six-figure salaries as the downtrodden proletariat; people who are victims of McCarthyite political assaults because someone asked if they used a government work account to attack the governor: victims all.
Chris Bray -
3/25/2011
And had someone used FOIA to request email messages from my government account, i would have shrugged, rolled my eyes, and turned them over. Government account: not mine, not private.
David Silbey -
3/25/2011
"behaved" not "believed."
David Silbey -
3/25/2011
You and Cronon, then, seem to have believed with similar discretion.
Chris Bray -
3/25/2011
BTW, when I was in the army, I corresponded with several newspaper reporters about the institution I worked for. I didn't use my army email account, for crying out loud. Problem solved.
Chris Bray -
3/25/2011
The Wisconsin GOP is being pathetic, though, and it'll be fun to laugh at them.
Chris Bray -
3/25/2011
He's a public employee. The whole question is about what he did with public resources. It's not a FOIA request on his existence; it's a FOIA request on a public account. He can hide whatever he wants by using a private account for private business, and I'll cheer for him to do so.
David Silbey -
3/25/2011
The entertainment value of the Cronon situation has just gone up; the state GOP has responded, crying out about the "chilling" nature of the "concerted effort to intimidate" them out of their FOIA request.
Said "concerted effort" seems to be largely Cronon's own blog poston the subject. Next up in the "concerted effort"? Cronon could write a letter to the editor of the Wisconsin State Journal, though that might be a bridge too far.
Jonathan Dresner -
3/25/2011
If you enter a political fight, then fight and don't whine about it.
You might want to tell the Wisconsin Republican party about that, as they've been whining loudly about the negative publicity their Records Request has gotten.
If he didn't, there's no problem: he has no documents germane to the FOIA request.
"If you've got nothing to hide, then you have nothing to fear." Seriously? That's not your usual line of argument.
Chris Bray -
3/25/2011
William Cronon wrote and published an op-ed in a newspaper attacking a politician and a political initiative. This wasn't a scholarly work -- it was a distinctly political piece in a general public forum. It was appropriate and reasonable for him to do all of that. Politicians are fair game.
So then the governor's political party undertook an effort to attack the guy who attacked their guy. BFD. You engage in politics, you're engaged in politics.
No one is attacking Cronon's scholarship, or his right to do scholarship, or his ability to do research, or even his ability to engage in political writing in the public press. They're responding to his political engagement with more political engagement. It looks to me like they're trying to show the provenance of his argument, and to place his engagement in a political context by trying to discover who his allies are. To cry "academic freedom" in response to that is pathetic, and a distortion of what academic freedom is for.
When you attack people in politics, they respond. William Cronon has a right to attack Scott Walker, but it's "ugly" for the tables to turn? Absolute bullshit. If you enter a political fight, then fight and don't whine about it.
And finally, if you're a state employee attacking your governor, be smart enough to use your effing gmail account to talk to people about it. If Cronon used his state-owned computer and his state-issued email account to engage in a political effort against the head of the state's executive branch, he made a mistake. If he didn't, there's no problem: he has no documents germane to the FOIA request. I'm missing the part where any of this forces Cronon to fall silent.
Do politics. Attack Scott Walker as aggressively and persistently as you want. Be smart and tough about it, and don't hide behind "oh my god I'm an academic, don't hit me back."
