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Megan has a list of rationalizations folks at Berkeley can make as to why torturer-in-chief John Yoo should be kept as faculty at Boalt Law School. One of her options is:
You know what is important to me? Technicalities and protecting the privileged. I love an abstract idea about scholarship way more than I care about torturing brown people. I don't even have to watch the torturing, so it practically doesn't exist! Now see, I can talk how tenure works and if I think about it long enough, it totally balances out practically non-existent things.Talking about Yoo with a friend the other day, the tenure defense came up. What is tenure for, he asked, if not the protection of unpopular ideas? But tenure doesn't protect those with unpopular ideas, it just makes them harder to fire, and thus raises how unpopular an idea has to be before it merits termination. So on the one hand, firing someone with crackpot notions about tax cuts paying for themselves isn't really worth the trouble. On the other hand, if, say, Greg Mankiw called for the extermination of the Jews tomorrow, Harvard and MIT would direct their physics departments to come together and create a time machine in order to help them fire Mankiw last week. The question with Yoo isn't whether he's protected by tenure, but whether his claims are so self-evidently unconstitutional, and so morally odious, as to make firing him worth the trouble.