Scholarship and Protest in the Age of Trump

A panel examining the Supreme Court’s approach to administrative law is typical fare for a political-science conference, and hardly most people’s idea of a battleground over democratic values. Yet last Thursday, about a dozen people in an audience of 40 stood in orchestrated protest as one speaker took the podium in a San Francisco conference room. The protesters held signs reading “STAND AGAINST TORTURE”; some faced the podium, while others faced the audience. By the doorway, a man stood silently in a bright-orange Guantánamo-style jumpsuit with a black hood over his head.

The silent protest took place at the 113th annual meeting of the American Political Science Association. There were some 6,000 names in the APSA program (including, full disclosure, my own), but as the conference neared, one in particular began to draw attention: John Yoo.

Yoo is a professor of law at the University of California at Berkeley who, while serving in President George W. Bush’s Justice Department, helped author the so-called “torture memos,” which provided the administration’s legal justification for its treatment of detainees in the war on terror. As Jeffrey Rosen summarized in The New York Times Magazine in 2005, “Yoo is most famous for his contributions to memos arguing that the Geneva Conventions — as well as criminal laws prohibiting torture — don’t apply to enemy combatants.”

As word of Yoo’s forthcoming appearance on two panels spread on social media, the political theorist Corey Robin encouraged his Facebook followers to take a stand, casting the political stakes in stark terms: “I think it’s safe to say that whoever is unwilling to protest the rehabilitation of John Yoo should also keep silent about Donald Trump.”

Those are potent words, coming on the eve of the APSA’s first annual meeting during the Trump presidency. The association’s forays into public debate tend to be circumscribed — mentioning the president only when, for example, opposing his proposed cuts in federal funding for the humanities and social sciences.

But among members, there is a growing willingness to speak out as scholars. Just before the 2016 election, a joint letter signed by hundreds of political scientists warned that “a Trump presidency would pose a grave threat to American democracy and to other democratic governments around the world.” Although the letter was not sent by the organization, and emphasized that “political scientists seek to understand politics, not engage in politics,” it expressed a growing sense of alarm among scholars whose research has made them acutely aware of the fragility of democratic institutions and sensitive to the warning signs of their deterioration.

The theme of this year’s meeting was “The Quest for Legitimacy: Actors, Audiences and Aspirations.” The conference statement posed a range of related questions, from the definition of abstract concepts (“What is legitimacy?”) to the social processes that render one thing legitimate and another illegitimate (“Who bestows legitimacy? What are the processes underlying the legitimation of actors, institutions, aspirations, and political goals?”).

Given the political context, the most trenchant question may have been: “What role do political scientists play in the legitimation process?” In the age of Trump, many in the discipline are taking a hard look at their chosen object of study — and at themselves.

As I walked into the hallway after Yoo’s panel, I was handed a leaflet. On one side, under the heading “John Yoo is a War Criminal,” there were objections not only to the torture memos but also to Yoo’s views on the war in Iraq, government surveillance, Iran, the drone program, and executive power. On the other side, the leaflet quoted a blog post from Robin linking Yoo’s memos to what political scientists call “norm erosion” — a pattern of decay (much discussed amid the rise of Donald Trump) that portends democratic decline. The leaflet called for APSA to allow the filing of complaints against “scholars like Yoo, who regularly appear at the annual meeting.” And it featured, in large print at the top, a nod to the conference theme: “Stop ‘Legitimating’ Torture.”

At first, it seemed that the Friday-afternoon panel with Yoo — “Checks on Executive Power in the Age of Obama and Trump” — would be the same story, except in a larger room. There were roughly twice as many people in the audience as the day before, almost filling an opulent ballroom. But there was a tension that had been absent the previous day. This time, as the protesters (now numbering about two dozen) stood up with their signs, John Eastman, a law professor at Chapman University and senior fellow at the Claremont Institute who had chaired the Thursday panel, objected. “We can’t see the panel!” he called out to the people who had risen in front of him. “Please sit down — you’re being very disruptive.” As murmurs circulated through the room, the sign-holders remained standing. “Can I get someone from the APSA?” asked Eastman. “I can’t see the conference I paid to see … By APSA’s own definition, this is unprofessional conduct.”

The sign-holders replied: “Why don’t you just move?” A woman sitting near me called out, “Why don’t they move?” In the end, nobody moved.

PoliSci Professors #StandUpAgainstTorture and John Yoo reacts at #APSA2017 @Jodi7768 @ciccmaher #FireJohnYoo #warcriminal pic.twitter.com/5HEBUgaC4b

— Charlie vs Goliath (@CharlievGoliath) September 2, 2017

So things stood, for a while. Yoo began his remarks, the protesters stood in silence, and some audience members smirked or rolled their eyes. After the initial confrontation, things were proceeding more or less as they had on Thursday.

Then, a few minutes into Yoo’s talk, I heard rustling a few feet behind me, and I turned to see a side door crashing open. A woman, arms outstretched, was trying futilely to hold back two people from entering the room. “Wait, no! You can’t go in there.” A man and a woman, who both seemed to be around 60 and weren’t wearing conference badges, began shouting and urged the crowd to chant: “Fire John Yoo! Prosecute him for war crimes! Fire John Yoo!” A man next to me attempted to start a counterchant: “Everybody — free speech! Free speech!” Nobody followed his lead, or the protesters’.

The man made it to the front of the room, shouting all the time. An audience member stood and walked toward him, telling him to get out — and as they came face to face, actually pushed him backward slightly. “If you touch me again, you’ll get in trouble,” the protester responded icily. He then resumed his shout: “Fire and disbar and prosecute this man for war crimes!” Eventually the protesters were led out of the room by staffers. The man who had attempted to start a counterchant shouted, “You got what you deserved!” Another attendee, standing across the room where the protesters had just exited, shook his head in disagreement. In a low voice, he declared to nobody in particular, “Punch him in the nose is what he deserves.”

Protests against John Yoo are no uncommon occurrence. In videos available online, Yoo is unfailingly unflappable, often waiting quietly while a protester rises in objection, and in some cases offering to answer questions during the scheduled time at the end of a panel. At APSA’s annual meeting in 2011 in Seattle, a lone woman rose to object to Yoo’s appearance. After speaking directly to him, she turned to face the audience and said, “You people in this room have a moral responsibility to speak out against torture.” “You’re torturing us!” replied a voice, to scattered laughter. (When I asked Yoo about the 2011 protester, who remains unidentified in a video of the incident, he told me, “My recollection is that the ‘protest’ was one confused lady, so festooned with ribbons and buttons that I could have safely assumed that she was a greeter who had followed me from Applebee’s.”)

That protest was not the only objection raised at the time. Seventy-six members of APSA signed a letter saying they were “shocked and profoundly dismayed” by the invitation to Yoo. “The record establishes that Mr. Yoo bears major responsibility for implementing a policy of torture, that he did so based on the purposeful manipulation of law, and that he proceeded on this course in violation of international treaties prohibiting torture and other war crimes,” they wrote. “As political scientists and as Association members, we declare our support for open and free debate and discussion, we affirm our opposition to torture, and we protest the decision to invite John Yoo to speak at the APSA conference as an affront to the standards of our profession and of humanity.”

Given that history, what made this recent appearance at APSA different? “I think we are at a different place from in the Bush years,” said Jodi Dean, a professor at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, and one of the informal organizers of last week’s protest. “I suspect it’s the fear of everything being completely off the rails because of the Trump administration. Folks will be more reflective about the role of our discipline in enabling some policies, in letting some futures be realized, and letting some options be on the table that shouldn’t be.”

Dean and many of the other protesters at this year’s conference argued that Yoo’s participation would enlist the authority of APSA in bestowing undeserved legitimacy on him — just as the imprimatur of the Office of Legal Counsel, where he had been a deputy assistant attorney general, bestowed undeserved legitimacy on his controversial legal advice. “He used normalized processes to produce a situation of horror, a kind of anti-law,” Dean argued. “It seems to me that what’s crucial here is refusing to let the institution, in all its professionalism, be the vehicle for torture. If we do nothing, the trappings of institutionality themselves authorize John Yoo — his is just another opinion within the realm of the permissible.” The result, she said, would be “an endorsement of extremism in the name of its opposite, and that’s beyond the pale.”

Before the conference, I spoke with Eastman, the law professor who had chaired the Thursday panel on the future of the Supreme Court. When we discussed the possibility of protests, he told me, “These folks need to get over it.” He continued: “They seem to be still processing something that happened 15 years ago, at a panel that has nothing to do with the subject.” I asked if the specific problem in protesting (at least at his panel) was the complaint’s staleness or its irrelevance. Eastman paused and allowed that at Yoo’s other appearance, “it might be a fair question: People could ask him to distinguish his Trump/Obama executive-power views from the ones of the Bush era. But not by shouting him down.”

From APSA’s perspective, Yoo’s appearance doesn’t send any kind of signal — especially since the association technically didn’t invite him or approve his appearance. Rather, Yoo was invited by one of APSA’s “related groups” — entities formed by members that put on their own events during the conference and have them listed in the program. APSA recognizes about 100 related groups, from the British Politics Group to the Campaign Finance Research Group to the Society for Romanian Studies. This year, as in 2011, Yoo’s host was the Claremont Institute, which promotes itself as providing “the philosophical foundations that justify conservative policies.”

After being given a certain number of panels and assigned rooms based on recent attendance numbers, related groups determine their agenda and the participants outside the supervision or input of anyone at APSA. “It really opens up the possibility for a whole range of groups to use the venue to have particular roundtables and panels that might not otherwise be represented,” explained the Wellesley professor Roxanne Euben, who serves on APSA’s Governing Council. “But the difficulty is that it’s held under the rubric of the APSA annual meeting, and the APSA is going to be understood as responsible for whatever panels are held at its own conference.”

As Euben suggested, the policy does seem to cause some confusion: Much of the commentary about Yoo’s appearance did not distinguish the related groups’ events from the other sessions at the conference. This issue also came up in relation to Yoo’s appearance at APSA in 2011. When the APSA council responded to the 76 signers of the 2011 protest letter, it emphasized the association’s hands-off approach to the panels organized by the related groups: “Invitations to participate in these panels are not reviewed by any APSA body. Like all of our panels, these panels are framed by our commitments to academic freedom and our general ethical guidelines on civil and truthful scholarly behavior.”

That response, which can be viewed on the APSA website, was sent in January 2012. But in September 2011, just days after the protest, APSA’s executive director at the time, Michael Brintall, sent a letter to Yoo with the other panel attendees copied. That letter, which was shared with me but does not appear on APSA’s website, reads in part: “I am writing to thank you for joining us at the American Political Science Association annual meeting and for presenting on one of the panels at the meeting. I want to express our sincere regret that your presentation was disrupted during the panel, including with a personal verbal attack.”

It concludes: “I hope this disruption will not deter you from participating in future APSA annual meetings.”

As the audience was filing out of Friday’s event, arguments broke out among Yoo’s critics and his supporters. One attendee stopped Dean to tell her how strongly she disapproved of the protest, and Eastman asked to see Dean’s badge. He said a formal complaint to APSA would be forthcoming: “I hope your credentials are revoked.”

In an email, Dean told me she didn’t know the two people who had burst into the conference hall during the sign-holders’ silent protest, or that a more disruptive protest was in the works. “I was glad our group remained silent,” she said.

As I spoke with scholars, I found a range of reactions. Some regarded the protest as a distraction, or even an exercise in self-aggrandizement: It simply is not that important whether one person speaks at a political-science conference, and the discipline has no special authority or obligation to defend what (some of its members take to be) democratic norms. Others were more sympathetic: Even if they agreed that the presence of one speaker was not the most important issue facing the discipline (to say nothing of the wider world), they saw the controversy as emblematic of larger political convulsions over free speech, democratic norms, state power, and, yes, legitimation.

After the conference, Dean told me that the silent protests had succeeded in “forcing people to ask themselves some hard questions.” Political scientists can only study the larger world of politics, but they have a greater power to act within the boundaries of their own profession.

The question for the discipline, as these debates spread beyond the conference and unfold in the months to come, is what scholars of politics — struggling with the complexities of legitimation that this year’s annual meeting addressed — will do next. When I put the issue of norm erosion to R.J. Pestritto, who organizes the Claremont Institute’s APSA panels, he responded skeptically, “It’s not clear to me how promoting free exchange, how bringing in people with whom you may not agree, is somehow harmful to democratic values.”

After the weekend, Yoo told me in an email, “I find it remarkable how much more freedom of thought and speech exists on the conservative end of the ideological spectrum. You do not see conservative scholars protesting Marxist speakers, even though Marxism (in my view) is responsible for the deaths of tens of millions of people.” Noting the many disagreements among conservative panelists at the conference’s events, he concluded, “I ask you, where is freedom of thought more robust, on the left or the right, in today’s academy?”

Suffice it to say, not all scholars of politics see the issue in those terms. Some, like Corey Robin, insist on a distinction between debating ideas and normalizing certain figures. In an email, he expressed his concern by emphasizing actions, not opinions. “John Yoo is not merely a purveyor of controversial or even loathsome views,” he wrote, but rather one of the “architects” of “the Bush torture regime.” Many other academics have defended torture, he noted, but they don’t share Yoo’s policy record. “I would not voice the same criticism of their speaking at APSA as I did of Yoo’s speaking at APSA.”

And while a few claimed that the stakes would hardly be different if Trump had lost and Hillary Clinton had won, others seem to be more taken aback by the singularity of this moment — and as they try to understand how we arrived here, they are simply figuring out what to do next.

“I think there’s a sense,” said Roxanne Euben, “that one can’t afford to sit and just let things pass.”

Nathan Pippenger is a Ph.D. candidate in political theory at the University of California at Berkeley and a contributing editor at Democracy: A Journal of Ideas.