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Practical magic
So I’m watching the uproar about the open records requests for professors’ emails, first in Wisconsin, and now in Michigan. The AAUP and AHA and so on are denouncing the requests as abuses of the law and as likely to chill academic freedom. I’m inclined to agree; there’s what you can get away with under the letter of the law, and then there’s what’s wise and right. They are often not the same.
The Mackinac Center has sent records requests covering January 1 to March 25 for all MSU, UM, and Wayne State labor studies centers’ emails containing the words “Scott Walker,” “Wisconsin,” “Madison,” and “Maddow, ” plus “any other e-mails dealing with the collective-bargaining situation in Wisconsin.” I suppose there might be some dispassionate intellectual reason for the request–but I think it’s a bit more likely that the Mackinac Center is looking for targets, and to intimidate. Not cool.
Still, I’m struck by the absence of practical advice on the part of the AAUP and others. Pontificating about threats to academic freedom–especially when those threats can be chalked up to the VRWC and thus score the usual points in the usual places–is all well and good. But it achieves nothing and helps no one.
Here’s what will help. Professors who care about their email privacy should stop using their .edu addresses and start using gmail (which is free) or a private email address they pay for themselves. That’s what I did when I found myself on the hostile end of some nasty academic politics ten years ago, and it brought some nice peace of mind. You can’t do anything about copies of old correspondence that are stored on university servers. But you can erase your own saved and sent mail files (after copying them to your *private, non-university-owned computer*), and start fresh with a new address. You can even put a forward on your .edu address so that incoming mail goes automatically to you at your new email address.
Et voila! You just got that much harder to harass via email records requests, snooping systems administrators, and so on. Of course, you’ve still got to be careful what you send to correspondents with .edu addresses. But increasingly students use gmail rather than their .edu email, and professors could change their culture along similar lines, too, if they wished.
Just saying.
This is good advice. I’d add two points to it:
(a) double-check that any memberships you have don’t use your .edu address–that website, that frequent flier program, that restaurant loyalty program. Port them all over to the private
account, even though you’d really prefer to get the coupon at the office so you can print it out before lunch. [I myself spent part of today correcting those accounts]
(b) keep EVERYTHING you send or receive by email. Even if the folders grow in size. But keep them at home on your personal computer. As K.C. Johnson first pointed out to us historians more than a decade ago (by his own experience), if you archive your own correspondence, you have your own evidence in case someone, years later, wants to come at you with a false claim.
Great point about saving everything. And it can’t be emphasized enough: *everything.* Even one-word emails that say “yes,” or “no,” or “done.” It’s amazing to me how many people don’t do this–and what poor historians of their own lives and careers they are. It’s positively dangerous to delete documentation, however small — and it takes so *very* little space to keep things.
Also, of course, not everything needs to go out via email in the first place. There are certain emails where intead of hitting “reply” it’s best to just pick up the phone or walk down the hall for a little F2F chat. Let the historians guess what was actually said.
Cronon did raise an interesting legal question about whether FOIA can trump FERPA. I’m guessing it can’t, and that if he does wind up turning over the requested emails, he’ll be able to exclude any that include anything that might fairly be deemed a student record.
ES: Good point. The exception would be situations where you are being backed into a corner, and admins are seeking F2F with you as a way of insulating themselves–not protecting you. In such instances, “informal chats” can come back to bite you, precisely because you can’t document who said what or what was agreed upon. Once things got unpleasant for me, I always insisted on doing things in writing–or on having a witness with me if a meeting was necessary and following up in writing afterward. It helped–I was able to prove that people were lying about me on more than one occasion.
Stayed up late for this particular rant……
I have been following Erin O’Connor’s blog, Critical Mass, for many years. She is a perceptive writer on a variety of educational topics. Today, she drew my attention to the subject of a spat in Wisconsin. The deputy executive director……
Erin, last year the university where I adjunct started requiring us to use the university’s clunky webmail system for all university correspondence. (They even disabled the automatic-forwarding option.) They told us it was an image/perception thing, but I strongly suspect they wanted to be able to access the full electronic record of he-said/she-said conflicts between students and profs. Has AAUP, or anyone else, addressed whether a university can require that a prof use only his or her university email account for correspondence with students and colleagues?
Jeff — That’s remarkable. Never heard of such a thing. I don’t think the AAUP has ever said anything about it — would love to know more.
EOC: Yep. It’s highly context-dependent. Often the key is where you are in the relevant hierarchy….