Last Friday, I was minding my own business, on spring break recovering from the bruising labors of academic life, living the life of the modern-type tenured intellectual lumpenproletariat, sitting on a cruise ship and debating whether to order lobster or the Tournedos Rossini for dinner.
Unbeknownst to me, I became slightly embroiled that day in the current Wisconsin academic/political controversies, courtesy of Paul Krugman, the Nobel laureate in economics who has apparently decided to spend his declining years writing polemical screeds as a columnist at The New York Times.
Writing last Friday for the Times, Krugman lamented the efforts of a Republican party operative to get a hold of the e-mail records of U. of Wisconsin professor William Cronon. Cronon has been highly critical of the Wisconsin governor’s initiatives, including restricting public employee collective bargaining. Krugman gratuitously added that “we can be sure that people like, say, Richard Vedder of Ohio University wouldn’t be subject to equivalent scrutiny.”
I laughed reading this, because Krugman shows here a lack of perception that almost equals that shown in his views on the economy. Remarkably, like Cronon, I have been forced, by a public records request, to make available vast numbers of e-mails to a critic. A former student who became a minor Ohio political operative—and a Republican one at that—with whom I publicly disagreed once accused me of being “a slobbering, drunk old fool.” When a newspaper reporter asked me to comment, I replied, “I don’t slobber.” The critic got mad and tried to intimidate me by demanding my e-mail records.
I would agree with Krugman that this sort of tactic is an inappropriate way to deal with critics, and even is inconsistent with academic freedom broadly defined. I certainly agree that Cronon has a right to speak his mind. But Professor Cronon, like me, is subsidized in his speaking and writing by the public, including taxpayers, and they believe that they have a right to know what the people subsidized by them are doing. I don’t like it, Krugman doesn’t like it, and Cronon, no doubt, doesn’t like it, but that happens when public employees start speaking up on policy issues on what some taxpayers perceive to be their dime. The more higher education is dependent upon government support, the more the freedom of expression of those within the academy is likely to be subject to scrutiny.
As to the substantive issues in debate, Cronon thinks Gov. Scott Walker is betraying a bipartisan progressive tradition in Wisconsin. I think Gov. Walker, far from taking away employee “rights,” is trying to end a labor monopoly that leads to public employees on average being paid substantially above market compensation, reducing state services available per dollar spent at a time when we cannot afford that inefficient use of resources. I think that Walker is trying to restore the rights of individuals who choose not to belong to unions and contribute to their political causes to exercise their views.
Moving on to Texas, the firestorm ignited by the appointment of Rick O’Donnell as a special aide to the Texas Board of Regents is far more intense than I anticipated (and I expected a great deal of pushback), and, again, shows the fierce resistance of the higher education academy to any consideration of meaningful change from the existing costly and inefficient model. Mr. O’Donnell is apparently on record as favoring paying workers on the basis of productivity and results, of rewarding somewhat more adjunct professors who teach a lot but currently get paid little, and on demanding that research outcomes be subject to scrutiny. Is that an unreasonable position? I think not.
Angry UT staff and a few regents apparently have written to 200,000 alumni urging their support in dealing with this “assault” on the research eminence of UT. This is before, as far as I can tell, Mr. O’Donnell (who is merely an adviser) had effected an iota of change in the way Texas faculty are paid. This is another reason why I think it will take a scandal of herculean dimensions to arouse the public to force universities to behave more responsibly and show greater respect for those who fund it, including the students.
