UW professor Bill Cronon stands next to the “sifting and winnowing” tribute to academic freedom plaque on a wall at Bascom Hall. Credit: Joe Koshollek / For the Journal Sentinel

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Madison — The historian lives up the hill from Camp Randall Stadium, in a Tudor Revival home where the antique Arts and Crafts rockers creak on the hardwood floor and where the small clock keeps time, ringing on the half-hour.

It's a calm place, cocooned from the noise and the passion of the crowds, whether gathered in the fall at the football stadium or in the long winter and cold spring of Madison politics.

But even here, in his living room, the historian must confront what lies beyond his front door.

"I'm used to being in the public realm," he says. "I write for the public realm. I have never written just for the academy."

William Cronon, a second-generation University of Wisconsin-Madison historian, has become something of a footnote in the struggle over Gov. Scott Walker's budget-repair law.

In seeking to analyze what he saw as the political roots of Walker's legislation, and the political trends that buffeted Wisconsin, Cronon became, willingly or not, a player on a political stage.

Wisconsin Republicans were apparently so incensed by his writings on a blog post that they filed an open records request to see his emails.

Cronon still seems stunned by it all.

"I am both by politics and by personality relentlessly a centrist," he says.

"My job in the world is to take people who have extraordinarily different points of view and try to understand those points of view and then put those points of view in an historical context."

Cronon, 56, president-elect of the American Historical Association, helped create the discipline of environmental history. His two major works, "Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists and the Ecology of New England" and "Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West," are considered classics in the field.

In the Ken Burns documentary, "The National Parks: America's Best Idea," Cronon was among the historians whose interviews helped guide the viewers on an epic journey. Fit and bearded, he spun stories that brought to life the creation of the parks.

"He's a superstar," UW history professor David Sorkin says of Cronon. "Bill is one of the most earnest people I know. You couldn't find a person of greater integrity."

Cronon describes himself as "an academic brat," a reference to the circuitous route of an academic's life. In this case, it was his father's life. Historian E. David Cronon took his family from New Haven to Washington, D.C., and finally, to Madison, where he worked for more than four decades. From 1974 to 1988, he was the dean of the College of Letters and Sciences. He died in 2006.

These days, Cronon says he thinks often of his father. He pictures standing alongside him at the entrance to Bascom Hall in front a plaque with a quotation that is a call to academic freedom:

"Whatever may be the limitations which trammel inquiry elsewhere, we believe that the great state University of Wisconsin should ever encourage that continual and fearless sifting and winnowing by which alone the truth can be found."

The declaration comes from an 1894 report by the Board of Regents. That board fended off attacks against an economist named Richard T. Ely.

Thrust into limelight

Last month, Cronon became mired in a modern-day controversy.

On March 15, on his personal blog, Cronon wrote a post headlined, "Who's Really Behind Recent Republican Legislation in Wisconsin and Elsewhere? (Hint: It Didn't Start Here)."

Cronon suggested that a group called the American Legislative Exchange Council should be studied further. That group works on model legislation of interest to conservative legislators around the country.

Two days later, Stephan Thompson, deputy executive director of the state Republican Party, requested Cronon's emails from his university email account dating back to Jan. 1.

In his request, Thompson asked for emails that "reference any of the following 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."

It was a who's who of politicians, labor leaders and big issues that were center stage in Wisconsin.

That request ignited a firestorm that roared within the academic community.

Fuel was added when The New York Times published an opinion piece by Cronon titled "Wisconsin's Radical Break." In that piece, Cronon sought to provide historical context about the current debate and made the case that "Republicans in Wisconsin are seeking to reverse civic traditions that for more than a century have been among the most celebrated achievements not just of their state, but of their own party as well."

Although he explicitly stated, "Scott Walker is not Joe McCarthy," he added: "There is something about the style of the two men - their aggressiveness, their self-certainty, their seeming indifference to contrary views - that may help explain the extreme partisan reactions they triggered."

Eventually, the controversy was quelled. UW-Madison and Chancellor Biddy Martin said they would comply with the GOP's request, but, citing privacy issues and academic freedom, some emails were withheld.

If the Republican Party was hoping to find evidence that Cronon was electioneering or advocating recalls of Republican or Democratic candidates in the emails they obtained, they would have been sorely disappointed.

Emails reveal little

A review of the emails released to the GOP found Cronon immersed in the mundane details of academia. They included correspondence with UW housing officials who were thinking about renaming some campus buildings after prominent Wisconsin women, as well as a copious collection of emails about a proposal for an undergraduate major in environmental studies.

In one email to the Office of the Board of Regents at UW, Cronon provided strong support for Martin. Without mentioning the governor, he took stock of Walker's budget proposals.

"The waters we are now sailing (and that Biddy Martin has sought as best she can to navigate) could become more treacherous," he wrote. "A newly elected governor with majority control of both houses of the Legislature is responding to economic crisis with drastic cuts in state spending that will leave no community, no government agency, and no part of the Wisconsin community untouched."

Cronon says the battle over his emails exposes "a tension between privacy and free inquiry and the way the open records law is being used in this purpose. And I'm trying to figure out a way to navigate that tension between two social goods."

Throughout his career, he says, he has followed a strict rule with emails: "Don't put anything in an email that you wouldn't be willing to see on the front page of The New York Times."

"There is actually very little in my emails that I would be embarrassed to have people read," he says. "Although there are certainly candid comments about human beings, colleagues or students, that I would feel badly to have in full public view, not because they're inappropriate - they're very much part of who I am and what I do. But they were never meant for full public scrutiny."

Ultimately, he says, the request for the emails was made by those "to try to get evidence to delegitimate me and delegitimate what I said by proving I had misused government property to do illegal electioneering using a state email account. I think that's a McCarthyite tactic."

Mark Jefferson, the Republican Party's executive director, says the records request was "narrowly constructed to be minimally invasive." Such requests are routine in Wisconsin, he says.

Jefferson says that he had never heard of Cronon before the controversy and was surprised by the intense media interest.

"I found it very unusual and I still find it inappropriate that someone who claims to respect our open records and openness would think he should have some type of exemption from that," Jefferson says of Cronon.

Cronon says he has experienced stress in coping with the controversy. He has received more than 7,000 emails in the past month alone. The controversy has also forced him to think long and hard about his life as a historian.

"I was raised in the values of the Wisconsin idea by a father who believed deeply in the Wisconsin idea," which is the principle that education should improve people's lives, he says.

"I have always believed scholarship should serve the public realm. And this is one of the paradoxes of what's political and what's not when you're doing history and one of your subjects is political history. How do I draw a boundary of what is and is not appropriate?"

And yet, he can't ponder for very long. He is a working historian. There are books to write. For more than a decade, he has worked on a history of epic scope about a seemingly modest place, Portage.

"It's the text in which I'm pouring everything I know about Wisconsin, everything I love about Wisconsin," he says.

He is inspired by the outdoors. As a 16-year-old, he and a friend cycled 2,000 miles around Lake Superior. He has visited 49 states, enjoying especially the splendors of the Grand Canyon and the Rockies.

"When I'm standing before a beautiful wild place, I feel a sense of awe at the creation," he says. "That is for me one of the many faces of the sacred of the world as I experience it. But I also know my emotion in the place has a history that is a human history, not just a natural expression of God in that place."