Enemies of academic freedom watch: Michael Berube edition

Professor Berube is a partner-in-crime with another serial enemy of academic freedom, Jennifer Ruth (we noted awhile back a critical discussion of their terrible [indeed, incompetent] book putatively on academic freedom).   A mutual friend on Facebook alerted me a few days ago to the fact that at a recent talk at Smith College, Professors Berube and Ruth took issue with some comments of mine back in 2009 about calls to fire John Yoo at Berkeley (longer discussion here).  Professor Berube, who teaches English at Penn State, assured his friends that this was "a colossally bad argument by philosopher Brian Leiter."   Do read what I wrote then, which was and is still correct, at least if you're not an enemy of academic freedom.

Here is Professor Berube's contribution to the Dunning-Kruger Effect literature (I intersperse some comments):

[Leiter's] argument is one of those blog-standard and now-ubiquitous conflations of academic freedom and free speech, under which academic freedom covers work that is "implausible, badly argued and morally odious" so long as that work does not involve research misconduct or intellectual dishonesty.

This is itself an absurd conflation of two separate issues:  one concerns what academic freedom protects; the second concerns the grounds on which Berkeley will sanction a faculty member.  Regarding the latter, Berkeley is explicit that it can  sanction a faculty member based on a finding of research misconduct or dishonesty (e.g., plagiarism), as well as a court judgment involving certain kinds of criminal misconduct.  There were no such findings against Yoo:  he engaged in no plagiarism, research misconduct, or legally adjudicated criminal misconduct.  The calls to fire him were calls for Berkeley to adjudicate the question whether he violated any laws, which universities are not equipped to do (thankfully).

Yoo is a professor at a public university, so his expression  of odious views is protected by the First Amendment on free speech grounds (does Berube really not understand this?), but it is also protected by academic freedom, insofar as the views about executive power he defended are well within the bounds of professional competence as a constitutional law scholar.  Berube is obviously clueless about the latter.   He continues: 

In other words, a professor who devotes his or her research or teaching to reviving phrenology or uncovering the truth about the lizard people or the false flag operation known to the sheeple as "Sandy Hook" is not calling into question his or her fitness to be a professor, so long as they're not being dishonest about their beliefs.

I think what Mr. Dunning-Kruger is trying to suggest is that Professor Yoo's view about executive power under the Constitution (the basis on which he rationalized torture) are equivalent to incompetence in his discipline constitutional law.  They are not.  One would have to know something about constitutional law to know that, but Berube does not; but since this is a Dunning-Kruger display, he doesn't know he does not know that.  The sad fact is that, as someone said, "implausible, badly argued and morally odious" views can be defended by competent constitutional law scholars.   Berube continues:

For extra badness: no, there is no slippery slope on which "every disagreement on the merits of a position, especially a minority position in the scholarly community, could be turned into a 'research misconduct' charge that would lead to disciplinary proceedings and possible termination"-- at least not if people have some kind of intellectual standard for what counts as a plausible belief or an implausible belief that should plausibly be taken seriously (hey, we in the humanities have a very high tolerance for these)...

Perhaps there is no slippery slope, but Berube's idiotic and ignorant intervention confirms the risk that there is:   he knows nothing about constitutional law, nothing about the law of executive power, so thinks that Yoo's arguments for executive power to torture are evidence of scholarly/professional incompetence.  They are not.  All of this is only evidence that Berube is an ignoramus and that Yoo is a "morally odious" person.  The First Amendment and academic freedom protects Yoo from sanction (vide Ira Glasser about why that's a good thing); it also protects Berube, since he is opining about a matter of public interest, even though he is utterly clueless about the legal questions (fortunately, he is a professor of English, not law).

Is Professor Berube stupid or lazy, or a bit of both?  I really don't know.  But people like him, and Jennifer Ruth, are a real threat to academic freedom from within the academy.   (Isn't Viktor DeSantis enough of a threat?  Apparently not!)  Their stupidity, or laziness, is not a firing offense, by the way, but it is a reason for actual scholars committed to academic freedom to resist their nonsense and point out that they are clueless pontificators, who do not speak for the academy or academic freedom.