One For The Chief, or Academia at its Worst, Part III

I wasn't planning to comment on the recent decision of UC-Irvine Chancellor Michael Drake to rescind an offer to prominent liberal law professor Erwin Chemerinsky to become the founding Dean of the campus' new law school. But then I saw that The Chief started a blog post on Chemerinsky with this sentence: "Here's a story I give Tony Palmeri about a 100% chance of saying something about in the next few days." I guess by saying something we have a win-win: I get to alert T2T readers to yet another example of academia at its worst while The Chief gets to be correct in the prediction.

The Chemerinsky case is similar to Norman Finkelstein's in that outside influence was the key factor in determining the chancellor's hesitation to side with a leftish public intellectual no matter how outstanding his credentials. An article in Saturday's LA Times quotes an Orange County Republican party leader as saying that the GOP had organized 20 prominent Republicans against Chemerinsky, calling him a "longtime partisan gunslinger" and "too polarizing" for the job. Chancellor Drake also received pressure from conservative justices on the California Supreme Court.

Chemerinsky has been opposed by conservatives for much of his legal career, but he gained the ire of the most vile elements of the wingnut faction when he acted on behalf of Guantanamo detainees. Read his account here. In an effort to pacify his right wing critics, Chemerinsky actually asked Viet Dinh to sit on his UC-Irvine Law School Board of Advisors. Mr. Dinh is the chief (not to be confused with The Chief) architect of the USA PATRIOT Act.

The Saturday article in the LA Times says that negotiations are ongoing to restore the job offer to Chemerinsky, but it appears as if he will be offered the position only if he agrees to silence himself: "Drake has insisted that Chemerinsky didn't lose the dean's position because of his politics, saying that it was only because he expressed himself in a polarizing way. Any deal would therefore require Chemerinsky to 'successfully transition from being a very outspoken advocate on many causes to being a dean of the stature that we expect in a start-up law school,' said [attorney Tom] Malcom, a prominent Orange County Republican who was going to be a member of Chemerinsky's advisory board." (Malcom has been a participant in the talks to bring back Chemerinsky.).