Schrag: Why Does the University of California Keep Shooting Itself in the Foot?

[courtesy of California Progress Report]

By Peter Schrag

The University of California is a big, complex operation, so maybe you shouldn't be surprised at the regularity with which one or another part shoots itself in the foot.

No sooner had the Board of Regents, following reports of extensive administrative disarray, nudged UC President Robert Dynes into an early semiretirement than came the on-off-on appointment of Erwin Chemerinsky as dean of a new law school at the University of California, Irvine.

Was Chemerinsky's contract abrogated because he was a well-known liberal and had drawn opposition from conservatives, or because, as a future dean, he was writing Op-Ed pieces on controversial subjects? Or was it all, in fact, one and the same?

At almost the same time came the regents' even more embarrassing disinvitation of Larry Summers as a speaker at their dinner last week. Summers, who had been President Clinton's treasury secretary and president of Harvard, had been forced to resign from Harvard following faculty pressure prompted by his remarks suggesting that women might be underrepresented in the sciences because of some genetic insufficiency.

Summers also had a famous spat at Harvard with the celebrated Cornel West, a black professor who in Summers' view had been devoting too much time to pop projects and not enough to serious scholarship. West quit and went to Princeton.

The announcement that Summers was to speak to the regents' private dinner, like the decision not to hire Chemerinsky, was predictably accompanied by loud complaints from the faculty. At UC Irvine the professoriate, joined by other legal scholars, rallied around Chemerinsky. At the University of California, Davis, where the regents were to have their dinner, faculty members erupted in protest when plans for the Summers talk became public.

In the end, UC Irvine Chancellor Michael Drake, having flown cross-country to Duke, where Chemerinsky now teaches, reappointed Chemerinsky. The reappointment was accompanied by a joint kiss-and-make-up statement, followed a few days later by a Drake apology and mea culpa to a meeting of the Irvine academic senate.

But the tellingly symbolic cancellation of the Summers talk stuck. That prompted justifiable complaints from such conservatives as David Horowitz, a frequent critic of political correctness in higher education, that academic freedom was once again shown to be for liberal speech only.