Where Did Berkeley Get Its Reputation
(posted by Jim Henley)
Professor J. Bradford DeLong writes to the Chair of Berkeley’s academic senate to request that a special committee, comprising
members of the faculty with expertise in moral philosophy, the role of the university, international relations, human rights, and constitutional law. I ask you to instruct this committee to write of a public report to the Academic Senate no later than this Labor Day, advising the Senate of the pros and cons of actions that the Academic Senate might or might not take in the matter of Professor John Yoo . . .
Because, as the Professor puts it, “I am enough of a liberal and enough of an academic to believe that discussion of these issues will help.”
But there are problems!
One is, according to said Chair of said senate, even convening a committee to take up the question of Yoo’s alleged misfeasance would be “defamatory.” That’s curious. But the other objection makes one wonder what Berkeley is doing with all that tax and tuition money they rake in:
Besides that, there’s the practical problem of finding committee members with the expertise you outline.
Professor Drummond, excuse me, sir. My name is Jim Henley, blogging at Unqualified Offerings and The Art of the Possible, and I was just wondering - are you shitting me?!
Let me rephrase that. No, on second thought, let me retype that question in all caps with an even larger count of fissiparous interrobangs: ARE YOU SHITTING ME?!?!?!?!?!?!
Yeah, I bolded it too.
UC Berkeley, jewel in the crown of the California University system can’t fill a committee with “faculty with expertise in moral philosophy, the role of the university, international relations, human rights, and constitutional law?” I mean, ARE YOU - ahem. Point made.
May 7th, 2008 at 11:58 pm
Berkeley’s over-rated. All the really good scientists go to UCSB.
Not that I’m biased, or anything.
May 8th, 2008 at 7:24 am
I’m stuck on the part where the mere drawing up of the committee to investigate the question is “defamatory”.
Yoo’s actions are actions with horrific real world consequences, not random speech. I remain convinced that war crimes trials are far better than handling this in the university — and would spare its apparently scarce expertise in international relations, human rights, and moral philosophy. But this is bullshvt.
May 8th, 2008 at 12:40 pm
Jim this is a jewel among Henley posts. As you’ve said before: “Sometimes ya gotta work blue.” This is one of those times.
And yes, they are shitting you.
May 8th, 2008 at 5:16 pm
Oddly enough, the Justice Department just filed criminal charges against an attorney in Miami who was Al Gore’s counselor in the 2000 run off for issuing a legal opinion. A good summary of the story is here: http://www.law.com/jsp/PubArticle.jsp?id=900005634208
This is a precedent that USC, Berkeley should consider. If the Justice Department considers it a criminal offense to issue a legal opinion in violation of the law, surely John Yoo will be indicted any day. Unless this is another law applied exclusively to Democrats.
May 8th, 2008 at 6:23 pm
In virtually every jurisdiction, it violates the Rules of Professional Responsibility for an attorney to counsel a client on how to commit a future crime (and is itself a crime).
May 9th, 2008 at 6:46 am
I’ve now read DeLong’s letter, and I start hating it almost immediately. Sounds as if he’d be fine with Yoo if he’d only authorized “ticking bomb” torture.
Feh. Just like DeLong: huffy outrage, but selective.
Let’s prosecute instead.
May 9th, 2008 at 7:58 am
No. I would not be fine with Yoo if he had authorized only “ticking bomb” torture, for a lot of reasons. But we don’t need to go into the “ticking bomb” debate, because that’s not what he authorized. What he did was to tell everyone in America’s armed forces that they have a duty to torture anyone, anytime the president tells them to.
It is bad to use the rack in ticking-bomb situations–to make the rack, in Blackstone’s words, an “engine of state.” It is much worse to make it a routine engine of the law…
May 10th, 2008 at 8:07 am
Then why preface your description of Yoo’s actions this way at all?
the role played by John Yoo in the Bush administration’s policy of subjecting to torture not high-ranking Al Qaeda members with information about ticking bombs but low-level prisoners irrespective of their guilt or innocence or of any information suggesting their guilt or innocence.
If you’re committed to the legally sound principle that all torture is criminal, then just get right to it: …policy of subjecting prisoners to torture.
It’s just as criminal to torture the guilty as the innocent. It requires just as much disregard for responsible, professional legal reasoning as Yoo showed.
Save your arguments about high-level al-Qaeda operatives vs. Afghan farmers for the one-on-one hallway persuasion.
May 10th, 2008 at 12:22 pm
Yoo turned it up to 11. He took it even further than the level where many people (rightly or wrongly) saw it as “debatable.” The point is that even those who (however wrongly) might support torture in some particular context should still condemn Yoo’s stand, because it goes further.
The “ticking time bomb” crowd is to Yoo as a common thief is to a child molester. The thief and child molester are both in prison, but the child molester is at the bottom of the prison hierarchy. Yoo’s stance is so bad that even the “ticking time bomb” crowd should condemn him.
May 11th, 2008 at 12:26 pm
Thanks for the interpretation, Thoreau.
But arguments that grant legitimacy to exceptions allowing torture are always wrong — much less when they form part of a formal petition asking the university to examine the question of sanctioning a tenured faculty member for his actions outside the university.
What Yoo did is so reprehensible because it was wilfully criminal — designed to “legalize” something Yoo knows cannot be legalized. Period. Not because it was the worst of the worst, although it was that, too.