So today is the first day of the rest of the New York Times paywall’s life. To celebrate, as someone who’s paying for the news there, I thought I’d provide a link you can follow (free!) to a fascinating column from Paul Krugman today, “William Cronon and the American Thought Police.” Here’s the start:

Recently William Cronon, a historian who teaches at the University of Wisconsin, decided to weigh in on his state’s political turmoil. He started a blog, “Scholar as Citizen,” devoting his first post to the role of the shadowy American Legislative Exchange Council in pushing hard-line conservative legislation at the state level. Then he published an opinion piece in The Times, suggesting that Wisconsin’s Republican governor has turned his back on the state’s long tradition of “neighborliness, decency and mutual respect.”

So what was the G.O.P.’s response? A demand for copies of all e-mails sent to or from Mr. Cronon’s university mail account containing any of a wide range of terms, including the word “Republican” and the names of a number of Republican politicians.

He goes on to point out that the revelation of correspondence is a tactic being used to intimidate those who might speak out, and he draws a fairly convincing parallel to “Climategate.” In that tempest in a solar-heated teapot, thousands of e-mails between climatologists and other scientists were published and showed, as Krugman says, mostly “that scientists are human beings, who occasionally say snide things about people they dislike.”

Krugman’s other major point seems to be that this is something Republicans engage in and Democrats don’t: “The Cronon affair, then, is one more indicator of just how reflexively vindictive, how un-American, one of our two great political parties has become.”

I disagree — I think there are many people of Democratic affiliation who would gleefully publish and mock the correspondence between, say, the governor of Florida and the former Governor of Alaska, given half a chance, and make suppositions from that language that have far reaching policy implications.

What I see as the lesson from Professor Cronon’s tale is one that I hope fellow academics will take to heart — and a lesson I should have paid more attention to myself, over the years. Institutional e-mail addresses and institutionally-provided computers have opened a new and troubling front in the privacy wars, one that is bound to have increasing and negative impacts upon those who work at publicly-funded universities. What you write at work is no longer so certainly your own, or so certainly private.

This wasn’t a problem, so much, in the days of hand-written manuscripts or type-written letters. If you sent correspondence through the mail, it acquired the privacy of the sealed envelope and the federal laws protecting mail tampering — whether you wrote it sitting at your desk in your university office or not. Now, most academics I know maintain multiple e-mail addresses — work and personal — but some often funnel all or most communication to one common address for the sake of simplicity. If I’m sitting in my office, I’m likely to have both my school-sponsored e-mail account and my personal e-mail account up at any time, but there have been days when I’ve used one to send messages for the other, lacking time or patience or, sometimes, technological resources to access the “proper” account. Some of those messages, like Paul Krugman admits, are very banal — “What do you want to do for dinner?” “Can I borrow your copy of X book?”

Sometimes, though, my conversations with fellow teachers have strayed into, well, conversational territory. E-mail is an increasingly casual medium; it lends itself well to the tangential. Tangents, for me, often veer political or personal. This was particularly true when I was a graduate student, when my school mail doubled both as the easiest point of access for other graduate teaching fellows and for the students I taught. Could those messages — often gossipy, late-night, ill-considered, and full of odds and ends — have been revealed by a state audit?

It is extraordinarily intimidating, then, to think that what some tired professor has written in confidence, perhaps thoughtlessly and casually, perhaps on a cranky day, might be revealed to the world if that professor makes the wrong person or party angry. It is even more frightening to think that there are news outlets and readers who would seek only the worst from those revelations, and who could use those off-the-cuff remarks to case aspersions upon an entire history of scholarly application for the public good.

The American Historical Association, of which Professor Cronon is about to be the president, released a strong statement about this today, which is worth a read. Yet I’m not at all sure this is a problem with an easy solution except for the type of strict self-policing that is destined to stifle conversation among academics.

Professor Cronon, it seems, has already done that work. He says he has scrupulously kept his university mail free from political and personal statements:

Ever since moving to Wisconsin from Yale in the early 1990s, I have been careful to maintain a separation between my public @wisc.edu email address and my personal email address. I use the latter for all communications with family members and friends, and I use it too for any activities of mine that might be construed as political rather than scholarly (though the boundaries between these two categories is harder to draw for a scholar of the modern United States than non-scholars might imagine). I have always owned my own computers, because I haven’t wanted to worry about whether my personal and professional emails are mingling on a state-owned machine in ways that would violate Wisconsin’s rules about using state property for personal or political communication.

(It’s worth noting that the maintenance of separate computers and separate addresses is actually a bit beyond the technical and financial abilities of some academics, and so Cronon is doubly fortunate in his choices and position).

Cronon makes other excellent points about the difficulty of the request — it would require revealing communications with students and other academics about ongoing scholarly work — and his posts on the matter are well worth reading.

His private e-mails, however, probably are not.