This seems crazy. How do you recruit a constitutional law professor to be your dean without being aware that he's very liberal? And it seems like a twink move to fire him because he'll be "a target for conservatives". Either his legal scholarship and administrative skill will make him a good dean, or not. There's obviously much more to the story, likely involving either powerful donors, or powerful politicians, or both. At any rate, this doesn't seem likely to do good things for a fledgling law school trying to recruit high-caliber faculty. In the long run, that will matter a great deal more than a few donors.
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Huh?
12 Sep 2007 01:54 pm
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Comments (29)
Do you think this is a move just to generate controversy around its founding?
Please fix the link... clicking on it takes me to the wikipedia page for "HTTP"!
Donald Bren School of Law. There's at least part of the answer.
And its not like they picked an obscure one, that required reading his articles. A google search would have caught this one in about 7 seconds.
Anyone who doesn't know Erwin's reputation without doing any research should be prohibited from hiring law faculty. It's that simple.
So, alright, here's the thing: You may have very good reason to believe that this is crazy. Unfortunately, we don't have access to the information that leads you to believe this. Are you saying that the act itself is crazy or that the chancellor is crazy? (I don't know, perhaps someone smarter than me can tell me if a non-crazy person can perform a crazy act.)
And as much as you may be correct, and you may have good reason for believing that you are correct (and I hate to sound like a CD on perpetual replay), we (your readers) have no reason to believe that what you are saying is true beyond your assertion that it's the case.
I don't mean to suggest that you are always obligated to demonstrate sound logical basis for your claims. In this instance, though, I think it really behooves you to demonstrate evidence beyond your own assertion. And surely you understand that the fact that you really think something isn't really a compelling reason for anyone else to think that way.
Also, even if the previous is correct, I don't believe that this logically follows. Perhaps it's crazy or perhaps it's sane. How is one to know. I agree that it seems stupid to have hired someone to be dean without knowing something about them but does that necessarily make it crazy? Or the chancellor crazy for doing so? People make mistakes. Personally, I think it would be nice to have more conservative people in academia. It might keep them out of public office, where they are the ones who often act crazy.
What is comes down to is that you are trying to say that liberals are crazy and that's just not right, and it certainly hasn't been my experience. Many liberals are extremely rational and logical, it just that the actions of conservatives (or sometime just the perceived action of them) can incense them to the point that they don't always seem so.
Wait. What were we talking about?
(For amusement purposes only. This is not an ad hominem attack. Please file this under parody.)
Yes, your instinct is likely correct- there is more here than is being told. There is literally no way one could have hired this particular man without knowing exactly what he is. No doubt, he was hired and donors then objected more strongly (if they even knew beforehand that he was to be the dean). The man doing the hiring and firing should be ashamed of himself for telling such an obvious untruth.
Donald Bren School of Law. There's at least part of the answer.
Yeah, this doesn't seem that complicated. A conservative donor gives $20 million to found a new law school, the university goes out and tries to make a splash by recruiting the biggest name available, regardless of politics. The school finds a prominent moderately liberal professor with southern California ties, and offers him the job. The conservative donor find out that the inaugural dean is going to be - horrors! - a liberal, and threatens to withdraw his sizable donation. The school decides to cut its losses. End of story.
"I believe that the greatest threat to liberty in the United States is posed by the religious right, largely comprised of Christian fundamentalists."-Erwin Chemerinsky
A man who would write that lacks the requisite wisdom to be a Law School Dean. If the donors don't want their law school turning in to a left-wing ideological factory, then they are fully justified in vetoing this guy.
Freddie (Not), you certainly had me fooled until the "Not."
Like most pieces in the popular press, this is not the real story.
The real story is whether or not there should be another PUBLIC LAW SCHOOL in California.
The California Post-Secondary Commission determined that there were enough lawyers being educated in the state...but who trusts government commissars anyway?
A University loves to have Law and Medical Schools, as it raises its profile as a "prominent" school in US News. So they all fight to obtain these schools whether there is a need or not. This folly is just going to continue and continue...
Lawyers and Physicians make money--lots of it--so why should their educations be offset somewhat by publicly-funded law schools. Why should a grocery bagger, auto mechanic, school teacher, zookeeper get knicked in taxes to pay for a lawyer to go to school? At least we can agree that this is a travesty, putting aside for a moment whether bachelor level students should have grants and subsidized loans.
There is hope that the professional schools of the UC may be privatized. Berkeley's law school has explored it as has UCLA's:
http://www.dailybruin.ucla.edu/news/2005/jan/06/uc-law-schools-rely-on-donors/
I do not object to UC Irvine creating a new law school, as long as it is privatized (no public funds) from the outset.
"I believe that the greatest threat to liberty in the United States is posed by the religious right, largely comprised of Christian fundamentalists."-Erwin ChemerinskyA man who would write that lacks the requisite wisdom to be a Law School Dean. If the donors don't want their law school turning in to a left-wing ideological factory, then they are fully justified in vetoing this guy.
I have to agree although from what I’ve read, the new law school was set up to be rather left-wing in which case Chemerinsky might have been a good fit ideologically. Ordinarily I’d be reticent about denying someone a job in academia based on their political beliefs (some of my favorite profs have been leftists) but given Chemerinsky’s despicable behavior during the Roberts hearing and the petition he and other radical law professors signed opposing Roberts based on his clients and an utter distortion of his record as an appellate judge*, I’d say he’s reaping what he has sown.
* Law professors should particularly refrain from using their status as law professors to send their students the message that they think it’s okay to go after an attorney because of who he represented as a client.
A more recent link discussing "privatization" of public law and professional schools in California:
http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20070118/news_1n18regents.html
Maybe they could hire John Yoo.
Wait. What were we talking about?
(For amusement purposes only. This is not an ad hominem attack. Please file this under parody.)
Posted by Freddie (Not) | September 12, 2007 3:03 PM
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Touche! Hehe
The real story is whether or not there should be another PUBLIC LAW SCHOOL in California.
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Agreed. Another law school is about the last thing California needs.
It could be that Bren successfully objected to a leftist being the first dean. Some other scenarios:
This is the second time Erwin has nearly ended up as dean of a law school isn't it? Maybe he has some condition of employment (as dean anyway) that employers find unacceptable. Maybe somebody objected to hiring anyone associated with Duke (justice at last). Finally, let's be honest - students getting a law degree at UCI, at least intially, aren't headed for the Supreme Court or Sullivan & Cromwell; they're learning a technical skill that will hopefully enable them to make more money. I doubt UCI is delusional enough to think otherwise, and it's entirely possible the regents ripped the president a new one for blowing the budget on a celebrity, and the political stuff was his excuse to back out of the deal.
"At any rate, this doesn't seem likely to do good things for a fledgling law school trying to recruit high-caliber faculty. In the long run, that will matter a great deal more than a few donors"
Again, that assumes they're interested in leading legal scholars and such. Are you sure that's the case? IIRC, you don't need to graduate from an accredited law school to take the bar in CA. I'll bet they end up with a lot of part time faculty, of varying quality. If the min wasn't good enough, it wouldn't be the min.
Oops! Meant Chancellor, not president.
Thorley Winston is right as usual. Chemerinsky's attacks on Roberts were pretty shameful. Here is an example:
"The more that is learned about John Roberts the more troubling he is as a nominee for the Supreme Court. The memos released this week by the White House show an individual who was openly hostile to civil liberties and civil rights... The key question for the Senate, and especially Senate Democrats, is whether Roberts will vote to radically change the law in a conservative direction, overruling long-standing precedents protecting reproductive choice, allowing campaign finance regulations, permitting affirmative action, and preserving a wall separating church and state."
Saying that John Roberts is "openly hostile to civil liberties and civil rights" and implying that he has little respect for precedent is quite despicable. These are the usual tactics of a left-wing thug--call your opponent a racist and a fascist rather than addressing his arguments honestly.
And the substance of what Chemerinsky said is so far from reality that Richard Epstein "of the University of Chicago's Law School" said Chemerinsky lives in "a parallel universe." And Ms. McCardle sticks up for this guy?
Isocrates quotes and writes: ""I believe that the greatest threat to liberty in the United States is posed by the religious right, largely comprised of Christian fundamentalists."-Erwin Chemerinsky
A man who would write that lacks the requisite wisdom to be a Law School Dean. If the donors don't want their law school turning in to a left-wing ideological factory, then they are fully justified in vetoing this guy. "
Oh, right, I forgot. You people think Third World cranks are a much bigger threat, and that we'd be "speaking Arabic by now" if Kerry had been elected.
You may want to live in the dreamworld Robertson and Dobson and the unlamented Falwell pray and prayed for, chuckles, but no one with any respect for the Constitution does. Chemerinsky is correct. The greatest threat to America is internal, and you're leading cheers for it.
"You may want to live in the dreamworld Robertson and Dobson and the unlamented Falwell pray and prayed for, chuckles, but no one with any respect for the Constitution does. Chemerinsky is correct. The greatest threat to America is internal, and you're leading cheers for it."-ML&J
I'm not a Christian, I don't go to religious services, and I don't think highly of Robertson, Dobson and Falwell. So you're wrong on all counts.
But, even though I myself am not particularly religious in any conventional sense, I object to religious bigotry. And that's really what Chemerinsky was exhibiting.
You may want to live in the dreamworld Robertson and Dobson and the unlamented Falwell pray and prayed for, chuckles, but no one with any respect for the Constitution does. Chemerinsky is correct. The greatest threat to America is internal, and you're leading cheers for it.
What's interesting about religion-hating Constitution fetishists is not that they reject natural law, but rather they embrace it to a greater degree. But it's their natural law, so it's different.
I've listened to Erwin Chemerinsky on the radio and he's a mixed bag. The statements quoted above are over the top, though. The country is hardly in any danger of being taken over by fundamentalist Christians.
His campaign finance stance is a little weird given what how campaign finance laws have been infringing on the First Amendment. His stance on affirmative action is the typical liberal contradictory view that racism is okay against white males.
But to the original point, he's not exactly an obscure legal scholar. Someone was pretty stupid to hire him in the first place and the explanations given so far are pretty stupid. Better that they had not explained than given an obviously false explanation.
EI
Eugene Volok just posted an update at the Volokh Conspiracy that contrary to the original story that so many people jumped on, apparently the issue wasn’t that the regents or the donors objected to Erwin Chemerinsky but that when he was originally hired he was asked specifically to focus less on writing op ed pieces and more on developing legal education. You know the sort of thing that a dean at a law school is expected to do.
Chemerinsky apparently went back on the agreement by jumping into the death penalty case before he was even approved by the Regents and chancellor who offered the job, apparently without regard to the content of the op ed, saw this as a preview of things to come and rescinded the offer. If he couldn’t even control himself until he had the job for sure (which doesn’t happen until the Regents approve it), how could they expect him to start behaving when the job was secure?
Basically they knew he was a liberal law professor but didn’t care that he was a liberal. What they did care about was that he apparently didn’t realize that when you take on the additional responsibility of being a dean and serving as the public face of an institution rather than just a professor, you’re expected to carry yourself a certain way rather than freely jump into whatever cause strikes your fancy.
IMO this incident suggests that Erwin Chemerinsky may be a decent professor and a respected academic but that doesn’t mean he has the skills and temperament to serve as the leader of a law school.
Thorley Winston -
So does this mean that Pepperdine shouldn't have hired Ken Starr?
god, how many law schools does California have.
and as someone else noted, there must be 10 law schools in the California public system.
Pepperdine is very bluntly interested in getting nutcase conservative donations. Ken Starr is exactly the person they should have hired.
Pity. He was such a wonderfull independent investigator for the Presidency. Too bad for the Republicans that they don't have Democrat equivalents keeping their side honest. There would be many, many, many, fewer Republican scandals if Ken Starr had Democratic clones.
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Fix your link! I'm too lazy to remove the extraneous http.
Posted by JasonC | September 12, 2007 2:09 PM