Hullabaloo

Wednesday, July 08, 2009

 
Tenured Torturer

by digby

The University of Colorado doesn't owe former professor Ward Churchill his old job even though a jury found regents improperly terminated him, a judge ruled Tuesday.

Denver District Judge Larry Naves vacated the jury's finding, ruling that CU's Board of Regents is a "quasi-judicial" panel that cannot be sued.

[...]

CU began investigating Churchill after an essay surfaced in which he had called some victims of the 2001 terrorist attacks "little Eichmanns."

The statement triggered outrage and led to calls for his dismissal.

Subsequently, the university launched an investigation of his scholarly writing and found that he engaged in repeated acts of plagiarism over a period of years.

CU said he was fired, in 2007, for academic misconduct. Churchill and his supporters said that the university manufactured a case against him to appease his critics, among whom was then-Gov. Bill Owens.

"This shows that if you step out of line and do something considered unpalatable by people with power, you are in danger of losing your job," said retired CU faculty member Tom Mayer.

Well, let's not go crazy, here. After all:

What do you do when a guy high in the running for most hated man in the world teaches at your law school? If you're Christopher Edley Jr., dean of UC Berkeley's Boalt Hall law school, you half-heartedly defend the professor while highlighting your powerlessness to do anything -- as he did last week did for his embattled faculty member John C. Yoo.

Yoo, of course, is the Berkeley law professor best known as the former Bush administration lawyer who authored the infamous "torture memo" of 2003. Besides laying out a legal argument he thought could protect practitioners of almost certainly illegal "enhanced interrogation" methods from prosecution, Yoo exhibited in his writings a stunning disregard for international law and a creepy nonchalance about expanding the president's terrorism-fighting authority. That much Edley denounces, just as the administration did when the public got wind of the memo. Edley's criticism of Yoo's work in the Bush administration isn't surprising.

More intriguing is how Edley approaches the question he set out to answer: Why is Yoo a professor at such a prestigious university when his legal advice to the most powerful man in the world has come under such resounding criticism by his colleagues?

That's an excellent question.

The difference between Churchill and Yoo probably comes down to the different stature of the two professors and the two Universities, which makes it much easier to scapegoat Churchill than Yoo. But it's still amazing that a tenured professor can be hounded out of the academy for writing an obscure literary tract that nobody would have read if the right hadn't made it a cause and the legal architect of a torture policy that will have reverberations for generations is untouchable. Amazing.

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digby 7/08/2009 12:00:00 PM |