Saturday, March 26, 2011

Wisconsin Professor’s E-Mails Are Target of G.O.P. Records Request

March 26, 2011

Wisconsin Professor’s E-Mails Are Target of G.O.P. Records Request

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 Wisconsin in 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 Party official 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.”
As a state that prides itself on encouraging government transparency, Wisconsin has a far-reaching open records law that provides journalists and others with a means to pull back the curtain of government to ensure that it is working properly.
Indeed, this week local news organizations have combed through about 50,000 e-mails sent to Gov. Scott Walker to evaluate the truthfulness of his assertions that, despite the tens of thousands of protesters outside his office, a majority of people who wrote to him were supportive. 
(Governor Walker fought to keep the e-mails secret before eventually agreeing to turn them over and pay the news organizations’ legal costs.)
These open records rules can also be applied to those residing much farther down the hierarchy of state government, like a tenured professor at a publicly financed university.
“I’m pleased to see the Republicans making use of the open records law because they are as entitled to it as everyone else in the state,” said Bill Lueders, the president of the Wisconsin Freedom of Information Council, a nonprofit group that supports open records and open meeting laws.
Professor Cronon, whose original blog post focused on the American Legislative Exchange Council, said he was a supporter of open records laws but felt that this was an abuse.  “Yes, my e-mail address is paid for by taxpayers, but does that mean that nothing confidential can ever happen on that e-mail address?” he asked. “That strikes me as a really unfortunate precedent to set.”
The university is in the process of responding to the request, a process that includes removing documents that are exempt, like communications with students and discussions of unpublished research. “This is not unusual,” said Lisa Rutherford, director of the university’s legal office. “We get hundreds of requests a year in all different varieties.”
Emma G. Fitzsimmons contributed reporting.

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