47 “Scholar as Sitting Duck”: The Cronon Affair and the Buffer Zone in American Public Debate Thomas Medvetz Amid the ongoing struggles over the collective bargaining rights of public employees in the state of Wisconsin, one incident stands out for what it reveals about the current status of intellectuals in the United States. This is the public controversy surrounding University of Wisconsin historian William Cronon, whose March 2011 posting on his blog Scholar as Citizen elicited a swift reprisal from state Republicans. Cronon argued that the Wisconsin budget repair bill should be understood as part of a long historical pattern of state legislative action coordinated by a network of conservative interest groups, particularly the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a free market advocacy group that drafts “model legislation” for conservative legislators. Days later, Wiscon- sin Republican Party officials, citing the historian’s status as a state employee, submitted an open records request for e-mails sent to and from his university account. The incident made national headlines and prompted pointed responses from University of Wisconsin administrators and the American Historical Association. Writers on the Left interpreted the Republican Party’s actions as a “vindic- tive,” McCarthyist smear tactic meant to intimidate Cronon. 1 More broadly, some argued, the move constituted an assault on academic freedom itself. Without dis- missing either of these charges, I would submit that the “Cronon affair” is better understood, not as indicating a pervasive threat to academic freedom per se, but Public Culture 24:1 DOI 10.1215/08992363-1443547 Copyright 2012 by Duke University Press FORUM I thank Eric Klinenberg, Marissa Laham, John Skrentny, and Susan T. Ye for helpful editorial feedback on this article. 1. Paul Krugman, “American Thought Police,” New York Times, March 27, 2011.