What’s the big news at your job today? Birthday cake for Connie in accounting during the afternoon break? TPS Reports now due on Friday instead of next Monday? Boss out sick today and everyone’s a little loose?
At my job, the big news is that one of the most accomplished members of our profession has become the target of major league political intimidation.
You’ve probably never heard of William Cronon before this week, but just about every American historian has known who he is for a very long time.
A professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Cronon is indisputably one of the most important historians of the past thirty years. His first book, Changes in the Land (Hill and Wang, 1983), was an instant classic that charted the environmental history of New England before and after English settlement. Nearly thirty years later, it is still a standard. In 1991, he published his magnum opus, Nature’s Metropolis (W.W. Norton, 1991), a mammoth tome that explored the environmental relationship between Chicago and the resource-extraction economy of the American West.
Currently, Cronon is president-elect of the American Historical Association. AHA is the premier professional organization not just for Americanists, but all historians who reside in America, regardless of their area of study. In other words, virtually every professional 
historian in the United States is either currently, or has been at some point during their career, a member.
Oh, and one more thing worth noting about Cronon. He’s not an asshole. You see, academia in some ways is no different than any other profession; there’s no shortage of ambitious, power-hungry, insecure, selfish, pompous wretches at the top. But I’ve been in the field as a graduate student and a professor for almost twenty years now, and I’ve never heard anyone say anything bad about Cronon. I don’t know him personally, but we move in similar circles, attend some of the same conferences, and have numerous mutual acquaintances. Academia’s a very small world, and so far as I can tell, Cronon doesn’t just look the way you’d expect a professor would, with his beard, glasses, and underwhelming physique, but he also behaves the way you’d hope a professor would: with professionalism, patience, and kindness.
So how and why has this eminent and well-respected historian become a political target?
It’s yet another storyline in Wisconsin’s little civil war between Republicans led by Governor Scott Walker and minority Democrats in the state legislature. As a long time Wisconsin resident, Cronon decided to enter the fray, creating a blog called Scholar as Citizen. His first step seems to have been the most important, exposing a group called The American 
Legislative Exchange Council. Founded in 1973, ALEC’s membership is composed exclusively of corporations and right-wing politicians. Among other things, the organization crafts model legislation for conservative politicians to introduce.
Cronon’s sin? He merely shined a light on an important right-wing organization that has been in the shadows for nearly forty years. Because of this, and because his finding went viral, Stephen Thompson of the Wisconsin Republican Party initiated an open-records request for Cronon’s university emails. It is a clear act of political intimidation and also an obvious fishing trip, as his opponents hope to find something incriminating or at least embarrassing that they can use to undermine Cronon’s credibility.
On his blog, Cronon has recently said that he is “rapidly gaining an unhappy education about what hardball politics in the United States now looks like.” If I may be blunt, this sounds incredibly naïve. It’s true. Those who study politics often have little understanding of how it actually works in the day to day, and if you’re the kind of person who’s prone to mock college professors for living in ivory towers instead of the real world, then this is your cue to sneer and chuckle.
However, if you’re also the kind of person who dismisses professorial tenure as a needless and unjustifiable perk, then you’re the one who now sounds incredibly naïve, and this is my cue to get you up to speed. Here’s a quick primer.
An assistant professor, depending on the institution, typically goes up for tenure 5-7 years after being hired. The tenure application process takes roughly a year and requires approval from both your peers and the university’s administration. The successful applicant shows excellence in research and teaching. The unsuccessful candidate is fired.
In other words, professors walk the plank. Going up for tenure is not an option. You either get tenure or you get canned. If you are awarded tenure, you get a raise, a promotion, and the type of job security that is actually typical for many public servants in America. You cannot be fired for frivolous reasons, rather only for very serious causes. But even at that, we are only on a series of one-year contracts for the rest of our professional lives.
Why tenure? First, to prove that we are worthy of the job we hold. Second, to protect us from those who may not like what we end up doing.
For the job of a university professor is not merely to educate your adult children. We are also charged with discovering, building, and advancing human knowledge. That might sound pompous, and of course it doesn’t make us any more important than anyone else, but it really is part of our job description. And the things we discover, build, and advance don’t always sit well with people in power.
Intellectuals generally, and teachers and professors specifically, are often the target of political attacks, most of them far less pointed than the one currently being aimed at Cronon. But they can be quite serious as this case reminds us. Let us not forget, too many professors to count were fired or suspended from their jobs for purely political reasons during McCarthy’s Red 
Scare of the 1950s.
A healthy democracy requires an environment in which any and all ideas can be exchanged freely. And so at a university, where exchanging ideas is the whole point, tenure is there to provide professors with political cover from powerful interests who may not like some of the things we say. Because ruffling feathers is absolutely unavoidable when it is your job to delve deeply and unapologetically into the nature of human affairs. God forbid you also speak your mind on the issues of the day on your own time while you’re at it.
Don’t think for a second that some politicians in Wisconsin wouldn’t fire Cronon tomorrow if they could. And do not fall for the lie that says tenure grants professors an unparalleled degree of job security, or that it is the superfluous perk of a pampered class of workers detached from the real world. Cronon is a political target precisely because he is a widely respected scholar who dared to write about the real world.
While the good professor may not have known what he was getting himself into, as an American he had every right to get himself into it regardless. But because he’s a university professor, Cronon has scared many politicians every bit as much as they are now seeking to scare him.
It’s okay. He’ll dish it out, he’ll take his lumps, and he’ll “learn something”, which is what every professor loves to do anyway. And when it’s all over, he’ll be all right because he has tenure.
You don’t have to agree with William Cronon’s politics. But accept that his position as an important, professional historian and public intellectual makes him more politically vulnerable than most people, and because of that, tenure helps afford him the same protections that most people take for granted.