Two conservative groups that have stirred controversy by demanding that public colleges in Michigan and Wisconsin hand over professors’ e-mails related to labor controversies have failed to produce any evidence of wrongdoing by the scholars from the documents obtained.
One of the two groups, the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, has blamed its investigation’s lack of findings on the paucity of e-mails relinquished by the universities in response to its open-records requests.
Officials of the other group, the Republican Party of Wisconsin, have not issued any statement on their findings and recently refused to discuss their investigation of a professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. The institution handed e-mail records over to them in early April. “We are not commenting on it at all. That is just where we are at,” a party spokeswoman, Katie McCallum, said Friday.
In an interview Friday, William Cronon, the professor whose e-mails were the target of the open-records request, expressed confidence that the Wisconsin Republicans’ investigation had come up empty, saying he had been scrupulous about never using his college e-mail account for personal or political communications and has “maintained a firewall between my university address and activities that would have been inappropriate on that address.” When the university responded to the Wisconsin GOP’s request six months ago, Carolyn A. (Biddy) Martin, then the campus’s chancellor, said a university review of Mr. Cronon’s records had not uncovered any legal or policy violations such as improper uses of state or university resources for partisan political activity.
Both the Wisconsin Republican Party and the Mackinac Center, which is based in Midland, Mich., had sent their open-records requests at a time when many college faculty members around the nation were closely watching a fierce debate over state labor law taking place in Wisconsin. That state’s governor, Scott Walker, a Republican, ended up succeeding in his effort to push through legislation that stripped the University of Wisconsin system’s faculty and academic staff members of their collective-bargaining rights and curtailed the bargaining rights and benefits of many of the state’s other public employees.
The Wisconsin GOP’s open-records request asked for e-mails dealing with labor or state politics sent by Mr. Cronon, a prominent professor of history, geography, and environmental studies who had publicly criticized Governor Walker. Among the search terms it listed as covered under the request were “Republican,” “Scott Walker,” “recall,” “collective bargaining,” “rally,” “union,” the names of 10 Republican lawmakers, the acronyms of two state public-employee unions, and the names of those two unions’ leaders.
The Mackinac Center’s requests were directed at employees and contractors of the labor-studies centers at Michigan State University, the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, and Wayne State University. They asked for e-mails sent from January 1 through March 25 “dealing with the collective-bargaining situation in Wisconsin” and e-mails containing the words “Scott Walker,” “Wisconsin,” “Madison,” or “Maddow” (in reference to Rachel Maddow, the liberal commentator on MSNBC.)
Holes in the Net?
Of the three Michigan public universities that the Mackinac Center had sent open-records requests, one, Michigan State, ended up not having to produce any records because the Mackinac Center balked at its proposed processing fee, estimated to exceed $5,600, according to Ken Braun, who had led the center’s investigation as an editor of its Michigan Capitol Confidential newsletter.
Response letters from the other two institutions show that the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor produced four documents, arguing that it had withheld others as exempt under that state’s open-records law because they referred to confidential research or because disclosing them “would constitute an unwarranted invasion of an individual’s privacy.”
Wayne State University produced 32 e-mails but said it had withheld others it held to be covered under a state appeals-court decision exempting the internal communications of labor unions from the open-records laws.
Mr. Braun said the center is considering going to court to try to get more documents from the University of Michigan and Wayne State, based on its belief that they interpreted the state’s open-records law too narrowly. “We are exploring our options,” he said. “The spirit of the Freedom of Information Act is not to keep citizens from investigating where they think there is wrongdoing.” As grounds for his group’s suspicion, he cited news reports that Wayne State’s labor-studies center had removed parts of its Web site that might be breaking laws prohibiting the use of state resources for political advocacy, apparently at the behest of university lawyers acting in response to the center’s open-records request.
Academic-Freedom Concerns
The Republican Party of Wisconsin has not publicly questioned how the University of Wisconsin responded to its open-records request. It has, however, up to three years from receipt of the documents to bring a legal challenge against the institution if it concludes university officials wrongfully withheld documents covered under the state’s open-records law.
In releasing documents to the group in early April, Chancellor Martin said the university had withheld three sets of records: communications that “fall outside the realm of the faculty member’s job responsibilities” and could be considered personal under Wisconsin Supreme Court case law; documents involving students, whose communications are exempt from public disclosure under the federal Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act; and “private e-mail exchanges among scholars that fall within the orbit of academic freedom and all that is entailed by it.”
The Wisconsin GOP’s efforts to obtain Mr. Cronon’s e-mails were denounced as an attempt to chill academic freedom by other faculty members on the Madison campus and by scholarly organizations such as the American Association of University Professors. A Chronicle analysis of state open-records laws determined, however, that they contain no blanket exemptions for college faculty members or explicit references to the desire to protect academic freedom as grounds to withhold records from the public.
