When you work for an organization and are identified with it, then what you say or do in public reflects on that organization and gives them the right to fire you if you do bring unacceptable attention or consequences to that organization–in this case, with a big ultra-liberal mouth, but it could be anything. Trust me, a lot more conservatives are ostracized by liberal college administrations than the other way around.

Academic freedom is a made up term by educators that only fools people stupid enough to believe that school employees should be only ones exempt from being held responsible for what they say in and out of work. Don’t give me the so-called advantages of “outside the box” thinking to help the students, because I’ve seen and heard it all. It’s phony rhetoric to cover smothering students with left-wing propaganda. Teach the damn subjects and keep your personal politics out of it.

In this case, I think that Chemerinsky hacked off a big money donor, and that donor had the right to ask the school to choose between his cash and the professor’s lip.

The school will find a suitable or, likely, better replacement, so I don’t worry about it.

Not that I’m sure Cher would have been suitable. He has done some good work and earned respect, but also is dogmatic vs. anything Christian, and tried to get Guantanamo declared unconstitutional. He’s very much a leftist activist. Still, Drake and the UCI Regents come across as illiterates who made an offer without doing basic research.

Erwin Chemerinsky, unhired as UC Irvine’s founding law school dean, says his ordeal is a lesson in academic freedom.

By Erwin Chemerinsky
September 14, 2007

After so many years of commenting on the news, it is strange to be the news. But, in a sense, this story isn’t really about me, it’s about academic freedom in our deeply polarized times.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-chemerinsky14sep14,0,1499542.story?

I made a management decision — not an ideological or political one — to rescind the job offer, says the UC Irvine chancellor.

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-oe-drake14sep14,0,2647867.story?

Maybe Chemerinsky stepped on someone’s toes and maybe that was in the airport men’s room.

Now thanks to Drake the image is trashed before it begins. Who will he get to be Dean now? Think it will be anyone as well known and thought of as Erwin (Note he turned down the North Carolina Deanship and was a finalist at Duke – that’s how well thought of he is)? Doubtful. And the same will go for faculty. First raters will steer wide. A school that bends this way is no place to hang your hat. And what will perspective students think? I understand that the tuition there will be quite high as this is the school’s brainchild and not a Regent approved project. So it won’t attract on cost.

And the other sad thing is the fear of antagonizing conservative donors was probably overblown. Today Donald Bren said he’d never heard of Chemerinsky and had no input and I think that is right. What Bren and th others want is an institution that is world class. That is what the Biological Sciences Division and the Engineering School have become and the donors there don’t ask about politics. But Drake has screwed the pooch. I think he’s dead meat. Watch for the faculty Senate there to scold him. And watch the professional journals like CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION in the days ahead. He’s given his University a big black eye.

Even though I rarely agree with Chemerinsky, I think he deserves better than to be hired and then fired before even setting up his office in Irvine and without a hearing before the regents.

Michael Drake gets the award for Incompetent Impotence, for the way he handled this major hiring decision. What I find especially troubling is that Dr. Drake did not have the spine to stand behind his decision or was to afraid of losing his $350,000 a year position at UCI which he just received in July 2005.

Maybe it was the fact that the $120 million in private gifts and grants from conservatives in Orange County for 2007 might be rescinded which made Dr. Drake change his mind about Chimerinsky. In any case Drake should have thought of that a long time ago. Either he is just plan incompetent or just too ignorant to be making important administrative decisions that have political overtones.

Hurry up and write to Chancellor Drake at UCI, the future iberals lawyers need to learn about the threat of Christian fundamentalists to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

He can be reached at chancellor@uci.edu

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/erwin-chemerinsky/time-to-fight-the-religio_b_8048.html
‘

I WAS surprised (and pleased) when the story came out a couple weeks ago that Chemerinsky was a contender -and I worried then what that early story meant -and feared the worst.

For what it is worth, I’ll be encouraging our academic senate (I teach at the nearby community college in Irvine) to consider a resolution condemning this chilling violation of academic freedom. On our blog, we’re also encouraging folks to write Chancellor Drake.

He can be reached at chancellor@uci.edu

We can dismiss fundamentalists as fools insofar as they take creationism literally, and in some school districts give kids the false notion that their views are just as valid as mainstream evolutionary theory, and their views on abortion strike me as reactionary. (But they’re no different from what the Pope has been saying, and it would be absurd, for all its faults, to claim we think the Catholic Church is a bigger threat to our freedoms than other forms of tyranny.)

The Regents’ handling of the matter was inept, at best. If they objected to Chem’s so politicizing the law school before he even got there, they should have said so. While many noted legal scholars, Dershowitz at Harvard being oneof the more prominent, have very distinct views and speak out about them, they are operating from established schools where one can assume there is greater diversity in the views of the faculty. There’s no doubt that educ. institutions tend to be dominated by the (extreme) left in general.

I agree, Celeste, that the Regents should have done their full homework on the guy before offering him the job — it’s not like his views have been a secret, since he’s writing editorials all over the place.

The biggest concern any law faculty might have in working in that environment is answered to a Board of Regents which seems to be more controlling than in control.