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 universit

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.