[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.

[courtesy of California Progress Report]

Academic Freedom and What the UC Regents Should Do

By Susan R. Estrich
Professor of Law and Political Science
University of Southern California

That is what happened to my friend Erwin Chemerinsky. He signed a contract to become the first dean of the new law school at the University of California, Irvine (UCI) last week. Then, days later, he was fired because the UCI chancellor decided his liberal opinions made Erwin, one of the most respected, quoted, cited and beloved constitutional law scholars in the country, "too politically controversial" for the job.

Hogwash.

This column isn't about Erwin. In the world of law professors, everyone who knows Erwin — liberal and conservative — respects him. The outpouring of support for him and the disgust at what was done to him have been overwhelming. It's about the cowardly fool who is leading his university down the tubes, the one who should be fired by the Board of Regents when it meets next week.

"Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men."