Richard Jeffrey Newman

You really need to read the blog posts – there are sev­eral; start here–that Pro­fes­sor William Cronon of the Uni­ver­sity of Wis­con­sin has writ­ten on his blog, Scholar as Cit­i­zen, about what has hap­pened since he pub­lished a post called Who’s Really Behind Recent Repub­li­can Leg­is­la­tion in Wis­con­sin and Else­where? (Hint: It Didn’t Start Here), which deals with The Amer­i­can Leg­isla­tive Exchange Coun­cil (ALEC) and the role it has played in Amer­i­can pol­i­tics since its found­ing in 1973. ALEC is a con­ser­v­a­tive orga­ni­za­tion, and Cronon is up front about the fact that he is not con­ser­v­a­tive, but Cronon’s post about ALEC does not read to me as polit­i­cally par­ti­san. Indeed, in all the posts I have read on the blog, he seems to be going out of his way to write as a his­to­rian and a scholar, by which I mean not that his polit­i­cal per­spec­tive can’t be gleaned from what he writes, but rather that he tries to be fair to dif­fer­ent per­spec­tives, espe­cially those that dif­fer from his. Even if he were more obvi­ously par­ti­san in his posts than he is, though, the Repub­li­can Party’s tac­tics are, while entirely legal, pretty deplorable, and they should give us all pause, espe­cially those of us who research and pub­lish in higher edu­ca­tion.

Tagged academics, Politics

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