John Yoo, Glenn Reynolds, Law and Academic Freedom
Friday, September 12th, 2008Downblog commenter Jaybird asks:
Can we link to more people who write to [Glenn Reynolds'] employer [the University of Tennessee Law School] to have him silenced?
I’m kinda hoping to give him something to blog about how “They said that if Bush were elected, bloggers with unpopular political opinions would be silenced through force” or thereabouts.
Maybe we’d finally have a blogosphere the way we should have one, once all of the bad opinionators are no longer writing on it.
The reference here is to this post from a few weeks ago by a definite non-Instafan, who after some acrimonious email exchanges with Reynolds decided to write to the UT Law dean in an effort to have Reynolds sanctioned somehow, and have his blog removed from UT hosting and perhaps shut down outright. Now, the reason I linked to the post is that it documents Reynolds’ self-description as “quirky leftist” who would be regarded as such were it not for his preference for, inter alia, raining mass-destruction from above on the captive civilian populations of intransigent states, assassinating physicists, embracing a despicable Dolchstoß mythology to demonize domestic political opposition and explain away the manifest failures of a foreign policy of bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb whomever (and then drill, drill, drill!!!?), promoting said policy by doctoring news reports, and wistfully pondering what flowering democracies might have sprung up in the Levant if only it we didn’t lack the political will and moral clarity to resort to Einsatzgruppen tactics in our occupied territories (see previous link) — and all of it expressed in passive, laconic pseudo-aphorisms and quick links that provide him with a patina of deniability by which he can avoid ever owning his evident beliefs or demonstrating minimal courage of his convictions. The fact that Reynolds believes — or at least, is willing to claim to believe — that all this is consistent with his being some sort of idiosyncratic left-libertarian, and that it’s just a teensy matter obscuring his substantive leftism is fairly hilarious and revealing. Let’s just say that Reynolds needs the word “quirky” to do an awful lot of work in order for him to avoid coming off as a total shit to anyone familiar with his sorry record.
However, in linking to that post, I was not — in distinct contrast to Reynolds’ MO — trying to lend any support, tacit or otherwise, to any campaign to have Instapundit Dot Com sanctioned or shut down by the University of Tennessee. On the contrary, I find the effort at best an extraordinary misunderstanding of the affront it is to academic freedom. If it happened to be the case that Reynolds’ blogging work led to a dereliction of his professional duties severe enough to warrant a review of his tenure aegis, that would be a different story; but there is no evidence to back that story at all. Otherwise, Reynolds’ decision to be a total shit and express views that accompany that quality in his non-academic life is his Constitutional, natural, and yes, academic right. And here’s a word of practical warning to anyone on the left who might be inclined to get behind a campaign to shut down Instapundit Dot Com: if the door is open to professional action against tenured professors for political speech, it won’t be right-wing academics who bear the lionshare of the burden thereby created. (more…)