Inside Higher Ed: Torture and Tenure
A civil liberties group that is working to curb what it sees as abuses by the Bush administration has mounted an e-mail campaign to push for the firing of John Yoo, a tenured professor of law at the University of California at Berkeley.
While Yoo’s views on torture have been widely condemned in the academic legal world, many are objecting to the campaign as an infringement on academic freedom — ironically coming from a group formed to protect civil liberties. His controversial writing — justifying forms of interrogation many view as torture and in violation of the Constitution and international conventions — came while he worked in the Bush administration’s Justice Department. While Yoo did not respond to an e-mail request to comment on the campaign against his continued employment at Berkeley, he has written elsewhere defending his views.
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