labor at the table - Rivera Court by dfb, on Flickr
At what point does your work make you a target for political harassment? As a blogger I get a small amount of hate mail and a moderate amount of harassing mail (the two are different, one you can see the person foaming at the mouth, the other you can see their grin at wasting your time), but that is kind of par for the course.
However a troubling trend has started from the Right with regards to State University professors. They are nominally State employees, so the Right as begun to use Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to look at all of the e-mails of professors.
It all started with Ken “the Cooch” Cuccinelli, the Attorney General of Virginia, talking about going after a climate science researcher in the totally discredited “climate gate” incident. Since then there have been FOIA requests of a William Cronon of University of Wisconsin in connection with the illegal and unethical actions of the Republicans and Gov. Walker in that state.
Now it is spreading. Talking Points Memo first reported and now the New York Times is picking up the story of several conservative groups in Michigan who are asking for a wide swath of e-mails from three professors from the University of Michigan, Michigan State University and Wayne State University.
The group is called the Mackinac Center for Public Policy. It is one of a network of state based conservative groups that is associated with the uber conservative Heritage Foundation, with donors like the Koch Brothers and the Walton family of the Wal-Mart fortune.
From the TMP article:
But where those requests were relatively narrow — looking for emails surrounding a specific incident or specific plans for a strike — the FOIAs sent to state university labor studies faculty are quite broad. The parameters for the request, from a version of the FOIA obtained by TPM and confirmed by Mackinac, cover emails that mention:
“Scott Walker”; “Wisconsin”; “Madison”; “Maddow”; Any other emails dealing with the collective bargaining situation in Wisconsin.
The request covers all faculty emails from “January 1, 2011 to March 25, 2011.”
That covers a hell of a lot of ground and it is unclear exactly what this fishing expedition in the Labor Studies departments of three large universities is really looking for. One thing to be aware of is that professors are not allowed to use university resources for partisan political activities. So if they slipped up and said something to a colleague that could be interpreted as partisan, they could be embarrassed.
What is more troubling to me is the notion that this is being done to intimidate not just the profs who are subject to the request but all labor studies professors. The battle to retain hard won collective bargaining rights is one that anyone who studies labor and the labor movement would be fascinated by. As they should be, it would be like astronomers seeing a super nova on 300 light years from Earth.
To make them the target of political attacks or intimidation for interest in their chosen field of study merely because Conservatives and the Koch Brothers want to bust all unions is plainly an abuse of the intent of the FOIA. I am all in favor of the public being able to know what is done with the money it pays in taxes, yet there has to be some boundary.
Professor Cornon made himself a public figure by blogging about the union busting fight in Madison. He raised his profile and as such has a lower expectation of privacy in his writing and speaking. It just goes with the territory. But Professor Douglas Fraser of Wayne State and the entire Labor Studies Center at U of M did not.
They have been targeted in this matter merely from the perception of the anti-labor forces that they are pro-labor. I don’t know one way or the other if they are or are not, but that is hardly the point. They are academics studying a field that touches the entire nation.
One of the reasons that tenure is granted to professors is so that they can study and write about anything they want. It is supposed to give them freedom to be controversial in the hopes that they will use it wisely to push the boundaries of human knowledge. Since this is an unfettered right to speak and investigate, of course the Right hates it and wants to quell the voices that come from this system.
Another problem with this tactic is that Universities are not places where there is tons of extra money laying around. If this becomes the de rigor method of trying to keep voices the Right does not like silent, then the cost to schools could sky-rocket. This combined with the stifling affect that making academics at State schools worry about all of their e-mail communication is dangerous for a society that is already devaluing expertise in favor of politically motivated positions.
It remains to be seen what the Mackinac Center will do with this giant pile of e-mails. If past is prolog for the future, I would expect there will be a lot of smoke, but no fire about abuse of e-mail combined with a lot of outrage over selectively edited experts designed to discredit anyone who study’s labor or who is willing to say that what is being done to unions across the upper Midwest is wrong.
Sadly this seem like the start, not the end. I know that we have a lot of areas where we must push back against the Conservative tide trying to unravel our rights, but the area of academic freedom is an important one.
The floor is yours.