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Actually, as the wikipedia entry states, he has been on Berkeley's faculty since 1993. His return to Berkeley after being seconded to Bush's DoJ was met with he

Actually, as the wikipedia entry states, he has been on Berkeley's faculty since 1993. His return to Berkeley after being seconded to Bush's DoJ was met with heated resistance and continual protest (e.g. waterboarding enactments outside the law school). As a tenured professor, though, he couldn't be tossed out.

Joeri 13y ago
I don't believe this argument of impotence. If they wanted to throw him out, they would have. Tenure is not written down in the constitution. These 'we want to but we can't' arguments bother me more and more as i grow older. It's usually a pretty transparent excuse for not doing the right thing, by scared old men or ambitious young men.
- declan 13y ago
  I suspect you may not know the way tenure works, especially at a public institution.
- potatolicious 13y ago
  Tenure doesn't work this way. The whole idea about tenure is to give academics the freedom to pursue things that are controversial to the public - i.e., you can research controversial things without being tossed out by the angry mob. You can afford to go full-bore on your research rather than play politics and PR with the public. Tossing one tenured professor out is a simple thing. After all like you said, it's not written down in the constitution. The problem with removing tenure is that it destroys trust in the tenure system. If one professor is stripped of tenure for being controversial, then no one is safe. For this reason the only way to lose tenure is to do something illegal, since that's really the only line you can draw that doesn't move very much. Tenure is an all or nothing deal. The entire effect of protecting your faculty is completely nullified as soon as you violate your principle for one guy. The floodgates open and suddenly every prof that's doing something controversial becomes a target.
  - RyanMcGreal 13y ago
    Violating international law against torture is not "controversial", it's criminal.
    - Djehngo 13y ago
      He will be classified as a criminal when and if the courts convict him as one. Until then what he did is irrelevant to his tenure due to the concerns raised by potatolicious.
    - potatolicious 13y ago
      So charge him with a crime already and we can get on with this removing-tenure business. Except you can't - because he didn't violate international nor domestic law. He never waterboarded anyone, nor did he order the waterboarding of anyone. He worked on legal justifications for the use of torture, which is not an area of international law that's well defined. He didn't make policy nor law, he spun law so that it fit existing policy. I won't disagree that what he has done is despicable, but what exactly would you charge him with that would actually stick?
  - gbhn 13y ago
    I think that's the whole point: professors as a body should fear that if they go off and work to normalize a torture regime, they'll be fired by their universities. Hopefully that encourages them to not do such things. What's certain is that treating such conduct as "controversial" instead of just firing the person is exactly the same kind of DoS attack on tenure as these characters mounted on the legal system -- using the strengths of such systems against themselves. We haven't invested much energy recently in creating institutions that have adequate defenses against this kind of threat model. Our assumption has been that the socialization structure either produces people who are pathologically criminal or are socially responsible. The emergence of a class of social behavior which is "respectable" and despicable at the same time is a threat we need to deal with.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- pacdavidson 13y ago
  And the unspeakably repulsive irony is that Woo enjoys these protections while the Gitmo inmates do not receive due process.

Joeri 13y ago

I don't believe this argument of impotence. If they wanted to throw him out, they would have. Tenure is not written down in the constitution. These 'we want to but we can't' arguments bother me more and more as i grow older. It's usually a pretty transparent excuse for not doing the right thing, by scared old men or ambitious young men.

declan 13y ago
I suspect you may not know the way tenure works, especially at a public institution.
potatolicious 13y ago
Tenure doesn't work this way. The whole idea about tenure is to give academics the freedom to pursue things that are controversial to the public - i.e., you can research controversial things without being tossed out by the angry mob. You can afford to go full-bore on your research rather than play politics and PR with the public. Tossing one tenured professor out is a simple thing. After all like you said, it's not written down in the constitution. The problem with removing tenure is that it destroys trust in the tenure system. If one professor is stripped of tenure for being controversial, then no one is safe. For this reason the only way to lose tenure is to do something illegal, since that's really the only line you can draw that doesn't move very much. Tenure is an all or nothing deal. The entire effect of protecting your faculty is completely nullified as soon as you violate your principle for one guy. The floodgates open and suddenly every prof that's doing something controversial becomes a target.
- RyanMcGreal 13y ago
  Violating international law against torture is not "controversial", it's criminal.
  - Djehngo 13y ago
    He will be classified as a criminal when and if the courts convict him as one. Until then what he did is irrelevant to his tenure due to the concerns raised by potatolicious.
  - potatolicious 13y ago
    So charge him with a crime already and we can get on with this removing-tenure business. Except you can't - because he didn't violate international nor domestic law. He never waterboarded anyone, nor did he order the waterboarding of anyone. He worked on legal justifications for the use of torture, which is not an area of international law that's well defined. He didn't make policy nor law, he spun law so that it fit existing policy. I won't disagree that what he has done is despicable, but what exactly would you charge him with that would actually stick?
- gbhn 13y ago
  I think that's the whole point: professors as a body should fear that if they go off and work to normalize a torture regime, they'll be fired by their universities. Hopefully that encourages them to not do such things. What's certain is that treating such conduct as "controversial" instead of just firing the person is exactly the same kind of DoS attack on tenure as these characters mounted on the legal system -- using the strengths of such systems against themselves. We haven't invested much energy recently in creating institutions that have adequate defenses against this kind of threat model. Our assumption has been that the socialization structure either produces people who are pathologically criminal or are socially responsible. The emergence of a class of social behavior which is "respectable" and despicable at the same time is a threat we need to deal with.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
pacdavidson 13y ago
And the unspeakably repulsive irony is that Woo enjoys these protections while the Gitmo inmates do not receive due process.