UW-Madison History professor William Cronon wrote a blog posting about the rise of the right in Wisconsin, received worldwide attention for it (I posted it, as I did his subsequent New York Times op-ed)- - and also an Open Records request from the Republican Party of Wisconsin for his emails.
Joe McCarthy lives.
An editorial in today's New York Times put this into persepctive: The latest technique used by conservatives to silence liberal academics is to demand copies of e-mails and other documents. Attorney General Kenneth Cuccinelli of Virginia tried it last year with a climate-change scientist, and now the Wisconsin Republican Party is doing it to a distinguished historian who dared to criticize the state’s new union-busting law. These demands not only abuse academic freedom, but make the instigators look like petty and medieval inquisitors.
ReplyDelete(The link: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/28/opinion/28mon3.html?ref=opinion&pagewanted=print)