I have been following Erin O'Connor's blog, Critical Mass, for many years. She is a perceptive writer on a variety of educational topics. Today, she drew my attention to the subject of a spat in Wisconsin. The deputy executive director of the Wisconsin Republican Party filed a request, under Wisconsin's state-level open records law for any emails a particular University of Wisconsin-Madison historian sent on the subject of the recent spat at the Wisconsin state capital. Not surprisingly, a number of organizations including the American Historical Association and the American Association of University Professors are publicly condemning the records request as targeted intimidation. It's an interesting case which, to me, turns on the extent to which university faculty are subject to the state law.
What struck me was O'Connor's advice, which seems uncharacteristically unwise. She advises that professors "should stop using their .edu addresses and start using gmail" or other unofficial e-mail services.
In my particular government (i.e., the federal one), using a private e-mail account for official business would be a big, big no-no. One's official e-mails as a government employee are part of the government's official correspondence. To the extent that a university, and its faculty, are subject to state-level open records/FOIA laws (and I make no representations to that effect, either way), to conduct business off the network in order to conceal one's actions from records requests is ethically compromising, and potentially illegal. (Remember the fuss about whether Sarah Palin used her Yahoo account for business as the governor? Same thing.)
Of course, this gets very complicated in the University context (compared to a more generic state executive agency), and depends a great deal on how the relevant laws apply to the universities. What is the official business of the university, and what is not? Are all, or most, correspondences between professor and student privileged, as official educational records? If so, then how can you justify storing a student's records on your GMail account? This would, I think, likely constitute an educational privacy violation in itself.
The next issue is whether, and how, any of the targeted parties were using their official positions to influence the political environment. Naturally, we can surmise that some of them were doing so. In so doing, were they abusing their positions or doing something unethical? By the prevailing standards of the day, perhaps not. I don't see any self-evident system which would enable the condemnation of a labor studies professors for advocating in support of labor unions, but would still protect a political science professor on his hobby horse for a proportional representation parliamentary system, for example. That conduct fits neatly under an expansive definition of academic freedom.
But it is not surprising that some parties would want to challenge whether those prevailing standards reflect the needs of the governments sponsoring the universities. Is it in the best interests of the citizens of a state to subsidize a protected class of lobbyists provided with the government's imprimatur, and at the people's expense? Is the best solution the creation of a framework of official activity that excludes some activities? Or is the best solution the targeted reduction or elimination of the subsidy (i.e., the university budget)?
Regardless, as a state university employee, before you abandon your .edu address and take your correspondence to a private system you should carefully examine your institution's records management policies. I know from experience that everyone in government thinks their own correspondence should be protected from prying eyes. But if you are doing the people's business, and doing it on the people's dime, the people have a right to know what you are doing, within certain bounds established under the law. (I.e., exceptions for the Privacy Act, HIPAA, FERPA, national security, etc.)
Speaking as a historian, it's frankly pathetic to see the AHA making a special (and ex post facto) pleading for an academic exception from FOIA, when historians' own work is so dependent on the intact preservation of record systems. Here's a short, partial fisking.
Says the AHA press release:
Historians vigorously support the freedom of information act [sic] traditions of the United States of which this law is a part.
Freedom of Information Act traditions? They carefully avoided the obvious wording there. I think it would have been easier to say that 'historians support the American tradition of open government records.' But that would have undermined their argument from the start.
In this case, however, the law has been invoked to do the opposite: to find a pretext for discrediting a scholar who has taken a public position.
Scholars, especially historians, who take public positions should expect to face such attempts. In fact, it is the primary tool of the entire profession. You present a thesis for public scrutiny, and others test the thesis critically. If you don't like that, then I don't recommend the profession. I certainly don't recommend getting elected president of the AHA itself, as the professor in question recently did.
This inquiry will damage, rather than promote, public conversation.
Poppycock. It will take the public conversation somewhere they would rather it did not go, and with a party (or Party) that they would rather not converse with. The conversation will go to their responsibilities, perks, and privileges as public employees. It will damage their conversation, because they will lose control of their constructed narrative.
It will discourage other historians (and scholars in other disciplines) employed by public institutions from speaking out as citizen-scholars in their blogs, op-ed pieces, articles, books, and other writings.
Oh, that's quite possible. I should hope that scholars employed by public institutions would be careful about what they say and do in their official capacities. But this will not exactly discourage them to speak out--only to be more circumspect about what they do in their official capacity, and what they do on their own time, using their own resources rather than the people's. For my part, again, I am an historian, and the thought of a FOIA request will not discourage me in my work because my official correspondence is already subject to (somewhat frequent) FOIA requests. I know that I do my work in the public eye (at least nominally) and for the public benefit. Clearly some "citizen-scholars" have forgotten that.
