I grew up on the UC Irvine campus, so it's not only an outrage, but a personal disappointment, that the chancellor flew to North Carolina to personally fire Erwin Chemerinsky, the Duke Constitutional Law scholar recruited to head the university's new law school, because his liberal views were "too politically controversial." Brian Leiter adds:
Some colleagues speculate that Irvine hoped to get more donations from Donald Bren, the real estate developer who endowed the Law School and who is also a major donor to the Republican Party . Whether Mr. Bren played any role in this is something that perhaps the newspapers which investigate this story may unearth. Even if financial gain was the motive, the University, I suspect, has miscalculated the costs and benefits of its misconduct, since the reputational damage the school will now incur is likely to be quite substantial.
Chemerinsky, incidentally, helped write the charter of the city of Los Angeles and was named "one of the top 20 legal thinkers in America" by Legal Affairs. Loyola Laurie Levenson, who UCI was trying to recruit as a professor, said, "For a new law school to start infringing on academic freedom even before it opens its door does not bode well for this institution. I have talked to Erwin quite a bit about his plans for the new law school. He did not have a political agenda. He had an excellence agenda."
This was a very bad move.
Update: Dilan Esper, a former student of Chemerinsky's, has some illuminating thoughts in the comments section. Read them.
