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."
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.
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