William J. Cronon, who assumes the presidency of the American Historical Association at its annual meeting this week, has long been a prominent scholar in environmental history. He was thrust into the national spotlight last year when the Republican Party of Wisconsin used that state’s open-records law to try to scour his e-mails. Its record request asked Mr. Cronon’s employer, the University of Wisconsin at Madison, for any e-mails he might have written about the state’s Republican politicians, whom he had publicly criticized, and about their battle against public-employee unions.
The American Historical Association and other scholarly groups denounced the records request as an attempt to chill academic freedom. None of the e-mails handed over by the public university, where Mr. Cronon is a tenured professor of history, geography, and environmental studies, offered any evidence to confirm the state Republicans’ suspicions that he had misused state resources for partisan political purposes.
The Chronicle interviewed Mr. Cronon via e-mail to ask about last year’s controversy and his future plans. Here is an edited version of the exchange:
Q. Besides your not being implicated in any wrongdoing, what was the outcome of the e-mail controversy for you?
A. It was certainly one of the most troubling and distracting experiences of my professional life, but I’m proud and grateful for the way that the University of Wisconsin at Madison did what it could within the limits of the law to defend academic freedom. And I’ve gained a new awareness of the ways open-records laws can be abused for the purpose of intimidation.
Q. Has the experience changed how you view your job or go about it?
A. As I explained at the time, I’ve always been very careful—probably because my father was a dean—to make sure I never use institutional e-mail for personal or political purposes. What surprised me in this case was the intrusion of the open-records law process into professional communications I’ve always regarded as private, such as my dialogues with authors critiquing their manuscripts or my work for nongovernmental organizations like the American Historical Association, whose private communications would never ordinarily be subject to [Freedom of Information Act] requests. I now use my university e-mail address only for communicating with students and for doing administrative work for the university.
Q. At the height of the controversy, you described yourself as a “relentless centrist” in terms of your political views. Has that changed?
A. The word “centrist” has come under quite a lot of criticism in the past year, but I remain deeply committed to being nonpartisan in my professional work as an academic and in my political work as someone engaged with environmental issues and interested in perspectives from across the political spectrum. A more accurate description might be to say that I aspire to be relentlessly fair-minded in the way I engage and seek to understand other people’s ideas.
Q. Back in 2003, as head of AHA’s professional division, you played a lead role in your organization’s decision to no longer investigate complaints of plagiarism and other forms of professional misconduct. At the time, you argued that the AHA’s lack of any power to impose sanctions rendered such rulings largely meaningless, and that when it comes to promoting ethical scholarly conduct, the association’s resources would be better spent on education than adjudication. Looking back, do you feel that this was a wise move?
A. Yes, I have no regrets about this change. It has certainly liberated the AHA’s professional division to devote its attention to many other issues for which its contributions will likely be more consequential—including questions like the one you just asked. The adjudication process was enormously time-consuming and had little public impact on the problem it sought to address.
Q. You are the first environmental historian ever elected to lead the AHA. What does this say about environmental history and the AHA itself?
A. I think it says that history remains an endlessly creative discipline in which new generations of scholars perennially ask new questions that yield new understandings of the past. I’m of course proud and delighted that environmental history is receiving this recognition, but the even better news is that historians in general now regard environmental questions—which few bothered to ask 40 years ago—as valuable tools of historical practice.
Q. At last year’s AHA meeting, some historians discussed a need for their field to take into account both humankind’s impact on the earth’s climate and the impact of climate change on humanity. Do you endorse such an undertaking? If so, how should historians deal with doubts raised about the science asserting that human-induced climate change exists?
A. Certainly the history of climate change—both how it has affected people and how people have affected it—is a valid and important domain of historical and scientific inquiry. Indeed, the struggle to understand climate change—although inevitably focused on the future in terms of our present concerns—has been profoundly dependent on historical evidence. Legitimate questions about how best to interpret such evidence are essential to all historical and scientific inquiry and should always be welcomed. On the other hand, we also need to be on guard against polemical efforts to undermine critical inquiry, amplify doubt beyond reasonable limits, or to twist evidence in misleading ways toward preferred political positions—whatever those positions might be.
Q. In October, Anthony T. Grafton, your predecessor as AHA president, co-authored an essay arguing that, given changes in the job market for historians in higher education, graduate programs in your field need to do a better job of exposing students to career paths off the tenure track and stop characterizing careers outside academe as “alternative.” Do you have any plans as president to promote such a change in graduate education?
A. I don’t have a precise program to offer for reforming graduate education in history, but I completely support the notion that master’s and doctoral programs should broaden their sense of the employment possibilities students can pursue with their training. I agree with Tony that characterizing nonacademic career paths as “alternative” narrows everyone’s sense of what the practice of history can contribute to the wider world. If we took this insight seriously, we would almost certainly also want to broaden the kinds of skills our students acquire—competence in digital communication being among the most obvious. I’ll have much to say about these issues in the presidential columns I’ll be writing for the AHA [Perspectives on History magazine] over the next year.
