[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.