When are you political, when are you not?

Just imagine that everything you posted on Facebook were evaluated on the standard of a public official.  Can you post pictures of your kids, talk to your old school friends, upload Led Zeppelin videos, without having these judged by some political correctness standard, left or right-wing?  In the blurring age of social media, email is already outdated for its clunky administrative functionality.  The difficulty separating nostalgic photos from politics are only going to get more difficult as communication technology pervades our lives.


So now turn to the ongoing discussion of William Cronon, the University of Wisconsin History professor, who criticized conservative lobbies and is now subject to the Republican Party's request to have his emails scanned for political content unbecoming of a public employee,  Milwaukee conservative columnist, Patrick McIlheran, protests that it is wrong for liberals to object to such Freedom of Information Act requests.  Conservatives are merely holding liberals to the same standards they deploy, so runs his argument, and indeed that is fair enough. 

http://www.jsonline.com/blogs/news/118800679.html

The Freedom of Information Act serves to allow citizens insight into the operation of government officials and agencies. 

The question remains was the request intended to intimidate Cronon into silence?  For there is a huge difference between requesting that a secretive, powerful government agency reveal information, and combing through one person's emails.  A similar problem arises when prosecutors try to use RICO statutes, originally intended to investigate secretive organizations like the mob, on other organizations, such as businesses.  Corporations can act like mobsters, but the question remains whether it is fair and appropriate to use mob surveillance on businesses.

As my buddy Matt Grant (link at the sidebar) has argued, the lines dividing legitimate and illegitimate political activity become very unclear when you focus on an individual's opinion expressed in email versus fund-raising by a state legislator.  The boundaries between scholarship, administrative planning and budgeting, conversation between friends, and public statements are often interlocking steps in the formulation of an argument.  The tone of a statement to a friend may sound overtly political but that does not make it illegal under Wisconsin state law. You don't even have to reach for the sixties motto, "The personal is political," to understand that a single person can express many different meanings in a single email.  When is his statement political, when is an expression of administrative worry, when is it an act of friendship between colleagues?  In a government agency, these boundaries have to be respected, in the everyday life of a person they are not separated into administrative functions.  

Whose keyboard are you using now?

The arguments surrounding William Cronon, distinguished University of Wisconsin History professor and blogger are important for anyone thinking out loud today.

At the moment the controversy swirls around the request by the Republican party for access to his emails to see if he violated state law and made political statements using his university email account.  Republicans have successfully shifted the focus away from Cronon's original blogs about conservative lobbies.

Cronon's enthusiastic defenders point out that he was very careful in his work and that he did not violate state law because he always used his personal email account to discuss his blogging activities and he wrote the blogs and NY Times essays on his personal computer.

Here is a funny quote to that end:  " Fortunately, if you care about freedom of speech, Cronon didn't get off the turnip truck yesterday. He knows the UW policy and used not only his personal e-mail account but, also, his personal computer, to write his essay."

http://www.channel3000.com/news/27337449/detail.html

Fine and good, but there is some maddening legal hairsplitting in this debate:

The arguments pro and contra are like asking whose pen did Thomas Jefferson use to write the Declaration of Independence? on whose envelop did Lincoln jot down the Gettysburg Address? whose typewriter was used when Kennedy prepared his "Ich bin ein Berliner" speech?  Was the envelop personal property or did it belong to the Federal government?  Was it a civilian correspondence or had it been used to send military information?  Kennedy was travelling in Germany when he worked on his speech--did the typewriter belong to the US State department, was it on loan from the Federal Republic of Germany?  Did he receive it from the Berlin mayor's office or was it provided by the hotel? 

These questions are fascinating for archivists and Presidential fetishists, but they are utterly stifling if the author has to first stop writing to make sure he is using the appropriate property.

Anyone working anywhere at a university or business is caught in the following bind:

On the one hand we have forward thinking administrators urging us to use social media and any available technology to communicate with our public, so that at any time and anywhere we can slip another educational data byte past their eyeballs.

On the other extreme are the regulations that limit the manner of thought that can be expressed with what technology.

Before you write down that clever thought, check to see whose pen you are using, what keyboard you have in front of you.

Wisconsin Clamp-Down

Still getting up to speed on the campaigns surrounding University of Wisconsin History professor William Cronon, an eloquent scholar of the American West.  Many of us had not heard of him until this last week, but a quick look around at his work and reading though his essays and blogs shows that he is both passionate and well-balanced in his politics.

Like many in Wisconsin he opposes the governor's law to prevent public-sector workers from engaging in collective bargaining.  But he seems to have broken into his own scandal by publishing a pamphlet on the conservative lobby, American Legislative Exchange Council.  He details the organization and conservative aims of this discreetly powerful lobby .  In response, the Republican Party in Wisconsin made a Freedom of Information Act request for a search of William Cronon's emails.  As a state employee he is prohibited from using his email account for political purposes.  Still, the boundaries of what constitutes an illegitimate use of state offices have hardly been defined.  The fact that he is an historian by trade and there are going to be tons of emails that discuss politics as part of his teaching and research.   From the start, it was clear that this request intended to intimidate and the response has been swift--not to back down.  You can read Cronon's substantial blog:

http://scholarcitizen.williamcronon.net/2011/03/24/open-records-attack-on-academic-freedom/

He starts off giving the link to his compelling op-ed piece in the NY Times,  and the Times has reciprocated with an article on the campaign to squelch academic dissent.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/28/opinion/28mon3.html

This is a story to follow, because the point is not just to watch a top-tier academic face off against the local political machine, the point is that any one of us could be pushed around for expressing our political views.  With all our integration into the internet, there are a dozen different choke points where regular citizens can be pressured into silence.  This campaign against Cronon, to fish around in his email until his political opponents find something "useful"  could easily be the test case for us all.