Jonathan S. Tobin: Krugman’s Fantasy: Liberals Are Being Persecuted on Campus
[Jonathan S. Tobin is executive editor of Commentary magazine.]
The New York Times’s Paul Krugman has won a Nobel Prize for Economics but anyone reading his column today, which alleges that liberals are being persecuted on American college campuses, must think that his next award will be for science fiction. Krugman writes about William Cronon, a liberal professor at the University of Wisconsin who is getting some heat from people who didn’t care for his using his academic perch as a launching point for partisan invective at his state’s Republican governor. Some think that Cronon, a state employee, ought to be called to account for possibly conducting partisan political activity while being paid by the state, a violation of law in Wisconsin as well as most other places. Republicans are using the state’s Open Records Law to try and find out whether he used his university email to send out an op-ed published by the Times last week.
Are the Republicans nit-picking about Cronon’s use of his e-mail account? Sure. But none of us should be in any doubt as to whether the left would give the same treatment to a right-winger who attacked Democrats in the same manner as Cronon did. Liberals who have used freedom of information laws whenever it served their interests should not be crying foul over the Republicans doing so....
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The New York Times’s Paul Krugman has won a Nobel Prize for Economics but anyone reading his column today, which alleges that liberals are being persecuted on American college campuses, must think that his next award will be for science fiction. Krugman writes about William Cronon, a liberal professor at the University of Wisconsin who is getting some heat from people who didn’t care for his using his academic perch as a launching point for partisan invective at his state’s Republican governor. Some think that Cronon, a state employee, ought to be called to account for possibly conducting partisan political activity while being paid by the state, a violation of law in Wisconsin as well as most other places. Republicans are using the state’s Open Records Law to try and find out whether he used his university email to send out an op-ed published by the Times last week.
Are the Republicans nit-picking about Cronon’s use of his e-mail account? Sure. But none of us should be in any doubt as to whether the left would give the same treatment to a right-winger who attacked Democrats in the same manner as Cronon did. Liberals who have used freedom of information laws whenever it served their interests should not be crying foul over the Republicans doing so....