A Real Berkeley Leftie
John Yoo and the Spying memo

You often hear how Berkeley is a hot-bed of liberalism, in fact, so is all of academia. Well, somehow John Yoo slipped by the Righto Rejector Machine used to weed out all conservative applicants to faculty positions. In the WP article, Scholar Stands by Post-9/11 Writings , John Yoo's controversial advice to the White House is discussed:

Yoo wrote a memo that said the White House was not bound by a federal law prohibiting warrantless eavesdropping on communications that originated or ended in the United States. When news of the program broke, members of both parties called for hearings.

Yoo believes he was correct, even if critics say the U.S. response to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks "threatens the very idea of America," as one editorial said. "It would be inappropriate for a lawyer to say, 'The law means A, but I'm going to say B because to interpret it as A would violate American values,'" Yoo said. "A lawyer's job is if the law says A, the law says A."

I post this because of my long-term connections with higher education in the US. I don't know what other universities do, but at the three institutions to which I had connections, I don't recall any talk of someone's political opinions in hiring discussions. Rather than us lefties establishing a stranglehold on universities, could it be that education makes one more aware of the complexities of life and more wary of simplisitic explanations? Conservative organizations have begun giving scholarships and other enticements to cultivate conservative scholars. Liberals don't have to do this--the very process of advanced learning seems to liberalize.