{"id":3344,"date":"2011-04-03T18:54:20","date_gmt":"2011-04-03T22:54:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/shermandorn.com\/wordpress\/?p=3344"},"modified":"2011-04-03T18:59:23","modified_gmt":"2011-04-03T22:59:23","slug":"bill-cronon-a-quick-note","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/?p=3344","title":{"rendered":"Bill Cronon: a quick note"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Like thousands of other historians, I have admired Bill Cronon&#39;s scholarship for years and think the Wisconsin GOP was nuts to go after his emails through a public-records request of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the epitome of the solid scholar and far from the evangelizing radical I bet the Wisconsin GOP was hoping to find evidence of. But that attempt is continuing: Somehow, the Washington Post thought the right person to comment this weekend was Naomi Schaefer Riley, who <a href=\"http:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/opinions\/should-professors-be-political\/2011\/03\/31\/AF1RwXIC_story.html\">appears to be trying to slime Cronon<\/a> in an attempt to sell a book. Well, I guess we all have to make a buck somehow.&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>Was the public-records request a fishing expedition? Absolutely. An attempt to intimidate other faculty? Possibly. A close relative of the Virginia attorney general&#39;s attempt to look for wrongdoing in Michael Mann&#39;s research when he was at the University of Virginia? Definitely. But I was less horrified than others, probably because I live in a state with a much broader public-records law. The university can remove emails that are about individual student matters, but I suspect that our general counsel&#39;s office wouldn&#39;t have the same leeway that the lawyers in Madison do to exclude emails because there is no balancing test in the Florida public-records statute.&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>I suspect that the majority of public-records requests made of my university have come from reporters and others with clearly public need, but I have also known requests (including from some faculty around the state) appeared to be fishing expeditions.&nbsp;I&#39;m pretty tepid on university email, I have personal email, and like Cronon I know the difference.&nbsp;It&#39;s disturbing the first time a public-records request happens that requires you divert time from what your main job is, and I am not sure if my desensitization at this point is something to be proud of or worried about. But I haven&#39;t blogged about this because I&#39;m still mulling the larger issues over.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Like thousands of other historians, I have admired Bill Cronon&#39;s scholarship for years and think the Wisconsin GOP was nuts to go after his emails through a public-records request of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the epitome of the solid scholar and far from the evangelizing radical I bet the Wisconsin GOP was hoping [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[8,12,18,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3344","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academic-freedom","category-higher-education","category-the-academic-life","category-union"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pag0MB-RW","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3344","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3344"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3344\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3348,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3344\/revisions\/3348"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3344"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3344"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3344"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}