By Gray Brechin
2008-04-15
Berkeley Daily Planet
The recent disclosure of a memo by Boalt Law School faculty member John
Yoo has given that school and the University of California itself a
long overdue public relations nightmare. “Overdue” because quite enough
was known about Yoo’s role in justifying the Bush regime’s claims to
the dictatorial powers it has taken that a small group of concerned
citizens held a weekly vigil outside his class several years ago. That
vigil was almost entirely ignored by faculty and students too hurried
or plugged in to their iPods to pause or take a leaflet let alone join.
When Fernando Botero’s horrific paintings of torture came to Doe
Library, few faculty members on panels organized to discuss them
mentioned that the man largely responsible for the atrocities Botero
depicted is a campus colleague. But when the New York Times published
an editorial (reprinted in the International Herald Tribune on April 5)
with the clause “Yoo, who inexplicably teaches law at the University of
California,” mud finally stuck to Alma Mater’s teflon robes, and the
administration had to act
Boalt Dean Christopher Edley, Jr. wrote a position paper
posted prominently on the University’s home page that I consider a
masterpiece of judicious temporizing, concluding that “Absent
[commission of a criminal act which has led to conviction in a court of
law and which clearly demonstrates unfitness to continue as a member of
the faculty] no university worthy of distinction should even
contemplate dismissing a faculty member. That standard has not been
met.”
I am no expert on the Nuremberg Tribunals and the
international criminal laws formulated to ensure that atrocities
perpetrated by the Nazis and Japanese would never happen again, but
surely there must be someone on the besmirched Boalt Hall faculty or
one of its sister institutions who could pass such judgment. That
Professor Yoo has not yet been convicted of criminal acts is no reason
to remain silent on the possibility of his having done so. Academic
freedom cuts both ways: faculty bloggers may debate among themselves
what should be done about their infamous colleague, but they have been
impressively discrete about publicly criticizing him until the latest
memo and a clause in the New York Times forced the point.
That succinct clause bears more consideration than Dean
Edley’s voluminous rationale for letting sleeping dogs lie: why is a
person whose legal opinions have subverted the U.S. Constitution
teaching constitutional law at the University of California? Do his
colleagues share culpability? In her April 11 editorial, Becky O’malley
asks the kind of question that Edley and other faculty need to answer:
“who saddled their institution with this infamous character in the
first place?” Furthermore, how did he get tenure? Is a university with
such a professor “worthy of distinction?”
I understand the reluctance of faculty to wake the mastiff of
the California Loyalty Oath once used by reactionaries to maul
liberals, but John Yoo presumably signed it to obtain his job. The
signers of that oath vow to “support and defend the Constitution of the
United States and the Constitution of the State of California against
all enemies, foreign and domestic.” Such enemies include those in the
executive branch, including themselves. To recommend or teach the
Constitution’s subversion in the name of a “unitary executive” violates
that oath.
Gray Brechin received his bachelor’s, master’s degree and Ph.D.
from UC Berkeley and is a visiting scholar in the Geography Department.