Former Bush Administration official John Yoo has temporarily traded his job on the law faculty at the University of California, Berkeley, for a teaching gig in more conservative Orange County, CA.
Yoo, one of the architects of the Bush policy on torture, is spending this semester as a visiting professor at the relatively new Chapman University School of Law, which opened in 1995, reports the Los Angeles Times.
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The Times suggests that one factor in his decision may have been the hostile reception he was getting in ultra-liberal Berkeley, where city leaders branded him a war criminal, and human rights activists erected a billboard to denounce him.
Yoo, a former deputy assistant attorney general in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, was a primary author of memos that argued that the president’s authorization of controversial interrogation tactics did not violate the Geneva Conventions.
The memos, which were later withdrawn by the Justice Department, justified harsh treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere, including the controversial waterboarding technique.
But in an interview in his Chapman office, Yoo denied that Berkeley’s liberal tilt had anything to do with his decision. A tenured faculty member at Berkeley, he said he took the visiting professorship because he wanted to spend on a smaller, newer campus and to experience living in Southern California.
“I certainly don’t get upset about being criticized,” he said. “I would feel I wasn’t doing my job as an academic if I wasn’t writing or saying things that other people disagreed with.”
For the most part, students at Chapman have taken Yoo’s presence in stride, according to the Times.
“I think it’s interesting to have him there,” said Billy Essayli, a second-year law student who heads the campus California Republican Lawyers Association. Still, Essayli conceded that he was surprised there wasn’t a greater public outcry at Yoo’s arrival in January.
A statement encouraging civil debate is posted on the website of Chapman by Dean John C. Eastman.
“It would be simple for academic institutions to ignore views from one end or the other of the political spectrum,” Eastman wrote. “Indeed, all too many law schools have faculties that are much too homogenous with respect to their views on contested matters. We, on the other hand, pride ourselves on having built a law school that is now one of the most ideologically diverse in the nation.”
But now, some members of the Berkeley community who organized against him there are mobilizing to come to Orange County.
The anti-war activist group, World Can’t Wait, maintains a website in protest, www.firejohnyoo.org, and said it hopes to stage panels and distribute petitions at Chapman.
Yoo, however, shows no sign of being intimidated.
Last month, he wrote an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal criticizing President Barack Obama, saying that his decisions to close Guantanamo and to terminate the CIA’s authority to interrogate terrorists had opened the door to future terrorist acts in the U.S.
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