Nutty Republicans dig into Wisconsin professor's emails!

Just when I thought the Republicans had sunk low enough and had hit rock bottom, they provide more evidence for "it ain't over till it is over." (Oh, the Dems are screwed up in their own ways, as if it is all a variation of Tolstoy's famous line that "all happy families are all alike, every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way")

What is the latest?  The Republicans in Wisconsin want to get their dirty political hands on a University of Wisconsin history professor's emails:

the Republican Party of Wisconsin has filed an open records request demanding access to any emails Cronon has sent or received since Jan. 1 containing the search terms "Republican, Scott Walker, recall, collective bargaining, AFSCME, WEAC, rally, union, Alberta Darling, Randy Hopper, Dan Kapanke, Rob Cowles, Scott Fitzgerald, Sheila Harsdorf, Luther Olsen, Glenn Grothman, Mary Lazich, Jeff Fitzgerald, Marty Beil, or Mary Bell."
The obvious goal is  to find something damaging or embarrassing to Cronon -- although judging by Cronon's account, smoking guns seem unlikely to be lying around in plain sight. (Eight of the names referenced in the request belong to the eight Republican state senators targeted by Democrats for recall.)

Is the request legal?  Sure it is.  I have always operated under the understanding that emails received at, or sent from, my work address is "public property" because I work at a public university.  But, this Republican tactic appears to be be for all the wrong reasons. 

How much ever I find this Republican approach reprehensible, I agree with Jack Shafer, who points out that, well, this is allowed under the Freedom of Information Act:

Cronon's beef isn't with the Republican who filed for his emails but with the law. If he thinks that exposing university emails to the scrutiny of FOIA laws is an abomination, he should spend less time crying wolf about how the university's precious academic freedom is under assault and more time getting the law changed.
Professor Cronon also betrays a bit of naiveté in railing against "highly politicized" open records requests. Has he never inspected the FOIA docket? Many requesters have "highly politicized" motivations, and those motivations don't nullify their petition. Nor should they.

Yes, we have academic freedom.  But, academics in public universities ought to have known that academic freedom doesn't trump the laws of the land.  For some reason, even Paul Krugman argues that the law doesn't apply:

nobody, and I mean nobody, considers such academic email addresses something specially reserved for university business. Actually, according to Cronon he has been especially careful, maintaining a separate personal account — but nobody would have considered it out of the ordinary if he mingled personal correspondence with official business on the dot edu address. And no, the fact that he’s at a public university doesn’t change that: when my students take jobs at Berkeley or SUNY, they don’t imagine that they’re entering into a special fishbowl environment that they wouldn’t encounter at Georgetown or Haverford.

Uh, hello?  Really?  We might want to adopt a Dickensian stand that "the law is a ass, a idiot," but the law is the law, even if we are academics.

Andrew Leonard writes that perhaps this is the best time to pick up books by Cronon:

I just bought two of Cronon's books. We can't shape the future without understanding the past. The potency of Cronon's current involvement in the hottest political struggle of the day is all the proof I need that my own understanding of how the world works will benefit from more exposure to his work -- whether manifested in a blog post, New York Times Op-Ed, or book. What better response could there be to an attack on academic freedom than to spread that academic's ideas as widely as possible?