Academic Freedom • Education • Free Speech

Chemerinsky, Part 3: Wheeling, Dealing….and Fact Checking

September 15, 2007
by Celeste Fremon
29 Comments

chemerinsky-and-the-supreme.gif


More comes out about the behind the scenes wheeling and dealing to get Chemerinsky dumped, courtesy of the LA Times and the SF Chron.

Making Chemerinsky the head of the law school “would be like appointing al-Qaida in charge of homeland security,” Michael Antonovich, a longtime Republican member of the county Board of Supervisors, said in a voicemail left with The Associated Press.


Now, as the Times reports, there’s a whole new round of wheeling and dealing to maybe get him back:

UC Irvine officials on Friday were attempting to broker a deal to once again hire liberal scholar Erwin Chemerinsky as dean of its fledging law school, just three days after its chancellor set off a national furor by dumping him….


And, if that wasn’t enough, there’s the strange matter of the fact checking snafu, which may or may not have played a part in some of the above wheeling and dealing.

(This is also in the Times article, and is complicated issue having to do with whether Chemerinsky was correct in writing in his August 16 op ed that California doesn’t pay for lawyers at the habeas stage of…… Oh never mind. Just read it. )

(Heaven knows you certainly don’t want to get behind with this story, as there will clearly be new installments to come. And otherwise you’ll have to focus on other unpleasant issues—like, say, the high cost of health insurance….or when Bush is going to bomb Iran.)

And here, in case you’re curious, is the link to the open letter to Chancellor Drake signed by various members of UCI’s faculty and students.

29 Comments

  • Well, you’re sure burning the after-midnight oil on this. No wonder you’re sleep deprived!

  • would be like appointing al-Qaida in charge of homeland security ?

    Seems likes there’s plenty of hyperbole to go around these days.

  • Anyone wanting to know why the CA GOP is an endangered species need only look at the developer’s best friend – Mike Antonovich.

  • On the thread below Woody says he was never offered the job. Wrong. He was offered it and he accepted with the understanding that it needed formal approval by the Board of Regents. The Board was never informed and Drake took it upon himself to rescind the offer (boy is this a great case for “Contracts” – what a dufus! But then he’s a doctor of Medicine and the Med School has been a sewer for a decade).

    Solmeone asked who? Well I think it was a little band of OC Republicans (Mike Schroeder – former State Chnairman, Scott Baugh – ethically challenged and target of a former DA’s investigation into campoaign shenanagans) plus Antonovich. They made a lot of noise and Drake believed they had influence over donors like Bren. What a putz!

    his was a “poilitically Correct” administrator who was imitating those nitwit school principals who send kids home because they bring an aspirin to school and the place has a “Zero Tolerence” for drugs!

    Well I think Drake will soon announce that he wanbts to spend more time with his family.

  • …CA GOP is an endangered species…

    Is that why they’re trying to muck around with electoral votes? If at first you don’t succeed, move the goal posts. Failing that, change the rules of the game?

  • Listener, I’d just arrived home from a very nice Moroccan dinner with terrific friends (all writers and editors, one an LA Times editor who’d gotten pulled into part of the Chemerinsky reporting/editing at the paper) and was headed straight to bed when I made the mistake of glancing at the news on my computer….and it DRAGGED me back in. So I had to quickly put up the post. Not to do so seemed…you know… wrong. Fortunately I slept really late today.

    The thing several of us are trying to settle today has to do with the issue the California Supreme Court justice brought up, where Chemerinsky purportedly made a crucial mistake in his August 16 op ed, and that the existence of the “mistake” was passed to the Chancellor and that it may or may not have factored into his decision, which seems preposterous. Chemerinsky, says he didn’t make a mistake. Now all this should be very simple issue to settle, since it comes down to the question of whether death row inmates in California are offered lawyers by the state when their state appeals have been exhausted, and they file for habeas corpus petitions…. Anyway… The Times was unable to settled it last night before they went to press, but they will today, and I’m going to make a call or two, because it’s too weird that this thingy is now part of the hiring/firing mix. Anyway, that’s all very inside baseball-ish, but the obsessed among us need to know who’s right on it.

    Woody, Chemerinsky was offered the job. He signed a contract. It was pending the approval by the regents, but according to the folks ON the board of regents, that was merely a formality, that they don’t spike the appointment of law school deans. So RLC’s right. He was offered the job. He was already starting to assemble his team,

  • BTW how long before Maxine Waters and the usual suspects jump in to defend Drake and claim this is all “racism?”

  • Richard …….
    BTW how long before Maxine Waters and the usual suspects jump in to defend Drake and claim this is all “racism?”

    **************

    As soon as the soars throats screaming about the closing of Martin Luther King hospital have recovered.

  • While I believe that Drake messed up big time in offering Chem. the job without fully vetting him and even bothering to read at least some of his many articles published all over (and with respect to Woody, the intent to offer someone a job, if it led to Chem. already planning his move and recruiting faculty, is an implied offer), I also believe that the Dean of faculty should be more balanced in his views. Chem. is a very active leftist.

    It’s desirable for a faculty to consist of a broad spectrum of viewpoints, so someone like him could certainly be a professor of law, one among many. But if some big donors felt Chem. would turn off many others, that is a valid view.
    “Free speech” does not necessarily apply when it goes against the views of the majority employing you. If you had an anti-smoking activist applying fo a job at Philip Morris, for example, no one could blame them for hiring him.

    While there are many ethnics at UCI these days, and in fact it’s called “the Asian” campus or even “the U of India,” for the large Indian population, there are also many who are offended by his anti-Christian activism. Antonovich may be acting strangely activist himself, but extremes beget an extreme reaction, something which would no doubt continue.

    But by now, Chem. should NOT be offered the Dean’s job, because if he went into it now, he’d have a sense of almost unlimited power, and no one would dare challenge him again.

    The situation has been blown by all parties involved.

  • “Law School Deans Differ on Advocacy Roles,” today’s LAT article. Edley, Dean of Berkeley’s Boalt Hall, virtually echoes my views in #10 above, that what is freedom of speech for an activist law professor, becomes a divisive influence in a Dean who is supposed to unite and represent the whole university. Edley, Jr. himself gave up his strong advocacy roles when he accepted his post three years ago. Frankly, Chemenersky’s views to the contrary are, themselves, indicative of his less than mainstream views. He is and would remain a very divisive character, not Dean material.

    AND the guy’s ego suggests he’d be even more out of control as Dean, and might use his position for heightened personal advocacy, not less. Maybe his publishing Op Ed’s AFTER an apparent understanding that he wouldn’t, was a deliberate testing of the waters and statement of future intent.

    Tide seems to be turning against him, when all these aspects are considered.

  • Thanks for the link, Rebel Girl! Memo to Drake: When you find yourself in a hole it is advisable to stop digging. Sort of sounds like Drake could use access to some decent counsel. heh

  • I’m really offended by the way that Harper’s article concludes that while Chemerinsky’s views “are left of center,” they’re not significantly so “by the libertarian standards of California.” Who the hell is some leftist from Washington to tell us that we’re all SUPPOSED TO BE a bunch of leftwing “libertarian” kooks, just because we’ve had more than our share of them, ever since Jerry Brown ran California. UCI and Irvine are not exactly far left of the national center. (Celeste probably being an articulate and needed exception — I stand by my observation in #10, as echoed by the Dean of that “conservative bastion” Berkeley’s Boalt school, that what is “free speech” and even desirable activism in a law professor can become divisiveness in a the Dean, who needs to unite and represent the WHOLE university.

    This condescending perception that we’re a bunch of hippies from Topanga or Echo Park with baggy tie-dyed clothes and mismatched oversized earrings, or Birkenstock sandal-ed and greasy- haired or tattoed men who spout unthinking P C rhetoric, is partly what makes us negligible laughingstocks on the Washington scene.

    But we don’t deserve it anymore, and don’t need some east coast libs who don’t know squat about L A telling us how to think by “our” leftwing, “libertarian” standards.

  • But, damnit, Maggie, we wear UGGs not Birkenstocks!!!!!!!! (Okay, yeah, and cowboy boots. Plus, the tie-dye thing is mostly outre. Now it’s high-end Indian fabrics made into scarves and long flouncy skirts with teensy, weensy sequin thingies embroidered into the weave. Very snazzy with the cowboy boots.)

  • libertarian does not=liberal Democrat
    and, libertarian does not=Conservative
    and, libertarianism does not=reactionary authoritarianism

    Of course there are liberal conservatives, too. But that entails a bit of historical context and is left as a trivial exercise for the reader.

  • Hey, rlc, etc., there was not a valid offer and acceptance. That’s like saying, the buyer (UCI) forwarded as offer on the house (job) through its agent (Drake) that the seller (Chemerinsky) accepted WITH FULL KNOWLEDGE THAT THE OFFER WAS NOT BINDING IF FINANCING AT ACCEPTABLE RATES COULD NOT BE OBTAINED (approved by Regents). rlc, you should know contracts better than I do, so don’t distort what actually happened. There was no binding contract.

    Screw this guy. He’s not a team player.

    Celeste, with all the problems of youth, gangs, crime, education, etc., you sure are wasting a lot of time on a lawyer who still has his job and is financially well off. Let him fight his own battles so you can use your time better to help those who cannot.

  • Oops, hit a nerve with the Topanga/ Echo Park thing, and I don’t know where anyone here lives. Canyon punk, huh? Well, I just said “hippie” because it seems this issue has energized people of that generation, and when I hang around college-aged kids, I’m struck by how they — like the current crop of rock musicians, like Snow Patrol — are really pretty mainstream, and think of that sort of aesthetic as something their parents’ generation used to do. It’s a very preppy/ designer generation, at least the westside/UCLA/USC crowd I know. To whom social justice is a given, but they’re very pragmatic. I feel like they’re a lot more “my” gen that the X’ers or boomers, kind of weird.

    Celeste, those designs are reflected in couture collections and at rack at Neiman’s, but one piece mixed with something classic, and I’d go for that. Or I wear jeans or the short skirt and pumps Hollywood look — glad we women older than college age can do that here in the So-Cal. The way you describe those clothes, sounds so perfect for you — but do you really live in Topanga and go to Irvine to teach?

  • What was Maggie saying when Ken Starr was chosen as dean of Pepperdine? I guess only liberals can be “divisive.”

  • Mavis, Maggie wasn’t saying anything about Starr becoming Dean of Pepperdine Law at the time, since she knew it’s a Christian college with a giant cross on their front lawn — you know, that thing that Cheriminsky was so adamant about having removed from the L A City Seal, on behalf of the ACLU, before he went east to Duke. (Since that has been there since the founding of the city, I think it was arguably a symbol that transcended religious meaning, but the L A City Council and local judiciary are dominated by liberals, even though the Hispanics are presumably Catholic, so he scored another one against the biggest evil of our time.)

    But, now that you ask, I am happy to quote the Vice Dean of Pepperdine Law School, Tim Perrin, who says that “deans must walk a fine line in their public statements and activities. While deans should be expected to present opinions, he said, ‘you don’t want to do things, say things, that are polarizing or alienating to members of the community, large of small.'”

    Since coming to Pepperdine three years ago, “Starr has not been in the forefront of ‘expressing politically charged views,’Perrin said.”

    Times writer Richard Paddock goes on to describe how Starr prosecuted and won a case in which a school principal ripped down a banner saying “Bong Hits 4 Jesus,” and suspended the student, who sued. But he did that as an attorney, not on behalf of the law school — even though it is Christian.

  • Hey, Maggie, Neiman’s copies us. (Classics combined with one out-there crazy-gorgeous piece? Excellent fashion strategy.) And, yes, I do make the nuts drive from Topanga to Irvine, but only once a week as I teach a senior workshop, (and I’m taking the fall quarter off to work on my book, and my Bennington MFA).

    Yet, back to the subject at hand, Mavis, makes an excellent point. Why is poor Erwin Chemerinsky divisive and not Kevin Starr at Pepperdine?

    Double standard, my dears?

  • Why would a conservative like Starr be divisive at a conservative Christian university? (Until recently, the women there happily abided by a dress code that went out in most high schools in the 70’s.) It’s not a double standard, it’s what the majority of faculty and students were comfortable with, and as per Perrin, above, Starr has been able to separate his personal beliefs from the university’s, unlike Chermininsky. Can you imagine the havoc a leftie like Cherminsky would wreak at a university which flaunts a symbol of what he considers the greatest evil of our time? A cross? (Besides, Starr’s name is easier to remember!)

Leave a Comment