What would you do about Yoo at UC?
Brad deLong contemplates a moral issue - can a colleague's tenure be challenged for his actions outside academia, and if so in what circumstances.
At issue is Prof Yoo's long classified memo from the Department of Justice offering legal rationale for torture based on a theory of unitary executive.
The memo is, by all accounts, shoddy at best, profoundly dishonest at worst.
It also appears, to a non-lawyer, to subvert the Constitution of the United States and to act to actively undermine the Federal Government.
It is not against academic principles to argue that the interpretation or implementation of US Constitutional principles is wrong or misguided.
It may be against the oath UC faculty swear to do so.
It is not consistent with academic principles to offer a dishonest or knowingly misleading analysis, particularly a real world one with real world implications.
Given the now known sequence of events - with Yoo issuing the opinion as a deputy AAG in the Office of Legal Counsel, after the AAG quit, on a weekend, bypassing the chain of command, and the prompt revocation of some or all of the memo after later AAGs discovered its existence, a serious case can probably be made that Yoo's actions are unprofessional and intellectually grossly inconsistent.
But, academia offers very broad latitude to its members, including the right to be wrong, or even deluded.
It would be interesting to see Yoo called on the question - have him defend his position in public, see if he can offer a scholarly and consistent rationale.
But courts of opinion are against academic principles also.
Now, if what he was doing subverted or attacked the US Constitution... then he violated his oath of allegiance and that has, in the recent past, been cause for termination.
Of course if Yoo is a good lawyer, he could show the oath of allegiance to be invalid.
- Log in to post comments
Yes, Universities should be able to pull tenure. Example - Professor Butz at Northwestern, who is a Holocaust denier.
Anybody this stupid deserves to be fired.
Michael Behe at Lehigh might be another tenured prof in need of "tenure re-examination". Big ID nut, but tenured. Lehigh was forced to put a "Behe's Views Denial" post on their website.
Referencing your case: Yoo is due! If tenure is recognition for good work, then bad work should result in revocation of tenure.
My $.02 and worth every penny.
According to some of the comments over at Brad's blog, "moral turpitude" is apparently grounds for revocation of tenure by the UC system. Publishing a memo that is intended to legalize war crimes ought to qualify as moral turpitude.
Unfortunately, this is the US, where "moral turpitude" (at least as applied to people as powerful as Yoo) is usually interpreted as "being caught in bed with a dead girl or a live boy."
Forget tenure revocation. Too many sticky academic freedom issues and opportunities for him to claim martyrdom. Take away his parking permit and give him the basement office next to the loading dock (uh, is there a loading dock at the law school? Next to the elevator mechanical room, then). That'll hit him where it hurts.
What I don't really understand is why Berkeley hired him in the first place. Sure, the depth of the torture memos was not known at the time, but was he really such a brilliant legal mind that Berkeley had to snatch him up?
By the way, I don't think it does much good to attempt to de-tenure Holocaust deniers or Michael Behe, if they are still capable of teaching without being crackpot. It just feeds their persecution complexes. A chem professor at Rutgers was de-tenured because he had his Chinese postdocs painting his house and doing his yard work (this was shortly after Tiananmen Square and if he stopped funding them, they would have had to go back). That was entirely appropriate, but it still took several years before he lost his last court case for reinstatement.
On further research, I find that Yoo started at Berkeley in 1993 and became Professor (tenured probably) in 1999, so Berkeley didn't hire him after his distinguished service to the Bush administration, but long before.
Much more info about this here (a book is coming out too)
http://www.democracynow.org/2008/4/3/the_green_light_attorney_philippe_…
The evidence strongly suggests to me that Yoo is, properly speaking, a traitor. There are ways to deal with that.
"being caught in bed with a dead girl..." -- that happened at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, in the on-campus hotel run by the Hotel Management department. "Rogue" students in that department had been running a prostitution ring for some time, appropriately paying off the Boston mob. Everything was fine until the incident with the dead -- and under-aged -- girl, and that the John was in the State Assembly.
UMass -- where the college president had a brother who was a mafia hit-man. My first graduate school, long may she wave.