Public Intellectual

by emptywheel

Kudos to Hugh Hewitt and Douglas Kmiec, who criticized Michael Drake's decision to "un-hire" Erwin Chemerinsky.

"Even though I agree with him on only about one out of 100 issues, I believe he is one of the top legal minds in the United States," said Hugh Hewitt, a law professor at Chapman University and host of a daily radio talk show. "This is clearly a boneheaded move, and how do you resurrect a situation like this?"

Douglas W. Kmiec, a conservative Constitutional scholar and law professor at Pepperdine University who has often debated Chemerinsky called him "a gentle soul, a splendid scholar and a person with a fine legal mind. . . . And I say this as someone who generally disagrees with where his mind is coming from." Kmiec wrote in a Los Angeles Times editorial on Thursday that the withdrawal of the job offer "is a betrayal of everything a great institution like the University of California represents."

Meanwhile, Drake is still searching for a legitimate reason to explain why he fired Chemerinsky.

My decision -- and the motivation for it -- have been the subject of extensive media coverage over the last few days, much of which has been characterized by assumption, conjecture and hearsay.

Let me set the record straight. I made a management decision -- not an ideological or political one -- to rescind the offer to Professor Chemerinsky. The decision was mine and mine alone. It was not based on pressure from donors, politicians or the University of California Board of Regents. It was a culmination of discussions -- with many people over a period of time -- that convinced me that Professor Chemerinsky and I would not be able to partner effectively to build a world-class law school at UC Irvine. That is my overarching priority.

It appears that Drake didn't realize that Chemerinsky might go to the press with the comments Drake made in un-hiring him.

Chemerinsky said Drake told him during a meeting Tuesday at the Sheraton Hotel near the Raleigh-Durham airport that "concerns" had emerged from the University of California Regents, which would have had to approve the appointment. The professor said Drake told him that he thought there would have been a "bloody battle" over the appointment.

Then again, that's now the explanation Drake is giving for un-hiring Chemerinsky--he broke the rules about talking to the press.

Chemerinsky and Drake agreed the new dean's dismissal was motivated in part by an Aug. 16 opinion article in the Los Angeles Times, the same day the job offer was made. In it, Chemerinsky asserted that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales was "about to adopt an unnecessary and mean-spirited regulation that will make it harder for those on death row to have their cases reviewed in federal court."

But Drake and Chemerinsky split sharply on what role the article played in the decision to fire the incoming dean and whether academic freedom was at stake.

"Shouldn't we as academics be able to stand up for people on death row?" Chemerinsky said.

Drake said "we had talked to him in June about writing op-ed pieces and that he would have to focus on things like legal education in this new role, and then here comes another political piece. It wasn't the subject, it was its existence. What he said doesn't matter."

Put aside all the other questions--about whether Drake had been getting pressure from the Regents or not, about whether Chemerinsky's politics were the cause for his un-hiring. Isn't a law school Dean kind of a key public intellectual in our society? I mean, for the professors working on their little corner of reality, they may or may not have the ability to share their expertise with the outside world. Juan Cole does it, Mark Lynch does it, Paul Krugman does it, Brad DeLong does it. But by and large we leave our university intellect locked inside the Ivory Tower either because of a lack of immediate application or cultural issues.

But Deans?!?!? Wouldn't you want your Dean to weigh in on issues that share the riches of the academy with the outside world?

Comments

[Captain USA]

John Yoo does it.

[P J Evans]

It's interesting that in http://www.ocregister.com/news/chemerinsk href="y-law-eastman-1844112-dean-school">this article in the Orange County Register, the opposition seems to be from Republicans, particularly the Attila-the-Hun clone Mike Antonovich, LA county supervisor (I've been voting against him for years). The Regents themselves are saying that they weren't going to vote against the appointment. (Amusement moment: one of the people involved (as quoted in the LA Times story on this) is Elizabeth Loftus, psychologist: isn't she the non-expert on memory that Fitz shredded?)

[Steve]

This is off subject, but Veco CEO Bill Allen testified this morning in Anchorage that he paid for Veco employees to work on the Girdwood house for a couple of months. Here's my unofficial transcript from the court which is on break after the testimony. Also that he paid Ben Stevens to do very little. The rest of the morning is at my blog.

I had my laptop in the court today and here is my rough transcript of that exchange:

Q: One allegation, you helped Sen. Ted Stevens remodel his Girdwood house. You and Veco paid a number of bills for remodeling that house. Isn’t that correct?
A: You know, if you say material. I gave Ted some old furniture, but I don’t think a lot of material, some labor.
Q: So you paid some labor bills for Stevens house.
A: Yes.
Q: For contractors working on the house?
A: For Veco Employees?
Q: How many involved?
A: I don’t know, I didn’t see it ...I had to run Veco. Probably 1-4?
Q: For how long? Weeks or Months?
A: Probably a couple of months?
Q: In addition to supplying Veco employees working, did you supply any other assistance?
A: I told you about old furniture. That’s all I can, you know, remember. Uh...I hadn’t, I went by maybe a month or two, to see what they were doing. Most I was gone.
Q: You would go by every month or two to check?
A: yes.
Q: How long to complete from beginning to end? 6 months, a year?
A: I don’t know. Probably, maybe as much as six months.
Q: We’ve already talked about payments to Ben Stevens - as much as $200,000?
A: Can’t count time before he was in the senate. How long was he in the Senate?
Q: Do you know?
A: .....4 years.
Q: During that time did you pay him $200,000?\
A: $4000 a month.

Later in cross examination:

Q: We’ve already talked about payments to Ben Stevens - as much as $200,000?
A: Can’t count time before he was in the senate. How long was he in the Senate?
Q: Do you know?
A: .....4 years.
Q: During that time did you pay him $200,000?\
A: $4000 a month.: Some questions about Ben Stevens, what did he do for Veco?
A: Not a lot. But I did talk to him about a marina in Sakhalin Island. Ben really good about ships. He was gonna go over with me. About the time, the valley trash stuff happened and he was battling that. And when he was done, I couldn’t go. I did do a little bit with him about the marian.
Q: Is it fair to say most of what he did was work on the pipeline.
A: Yes, I talked a lot to him about that. He studied PPT a lot. People would ask him about it. Cause Ben, he studied and a lot of those guys , a lot of your legislators, really didn’t study PPT and the gas pipeline, but he did.

[Mimikatz]

Yoo is not a dean. That eternal embarrasment is a tenured professor at UC Berkeley's Boalt Hall, but he seems to have taught specialized courses, probably without many students, and isn't teaching any courses this fall.

I think, however, that firing for political opinions is a violation of the Labor Code in California. Maybe like so much that doesn't apply to the government, however.

This is reminiscent of the Angela Davis case in the mid-'70s.

[Mimikatz]

Angela Davis was fired from a non-tenured teaching position at UCLA in 1969 for her politics and was rehired after a huge outcry. She (much) later got tenure at UC Santa Cruz and is evidently still there. She is quite a bit more controversial than Erwin Chemerinsky. Having met both, I'd concur with Kmiec's description.

[bmaz]

PJ - Damn, Liz Loftus is a Regent? I didn't even see that the first time through. I used to know her a bit from hiring her as an expert witness (that is another story altogether); but I cannot believe she would have been against Chemerinski on her own because she has a relatively controversial history in the public eye herself and, furthermore, just doesn't strike me as that intolerant. She was, however, part of Team Libby and Chemerinski did assist the Plame-Wilsons. I concur with Mimikatz's statements 100% and further, i have been around the law and law schools, and the Deans are always doing op-eds and making public statements. Like wanting your professors to publish, it is kind of expected.

[whenwego]

Per LA Times, there was NOT any pushback from the Regents, cause they did not even know about this appointment.

[Alison]

I think that in many universities, deans are classed as administrators, not tenured faculty. They have no right to voice any particular opinion in the classroom.

Is an opposition to the death penalty so outrageous that it would cause a termination without cause? That seems exceeding strange. Would I be extra careful in firing a noted legal mind without cause?? You bet. Is Drake wasting truckloads of California taxpayers' money on this? Almost certainly. Will anyone with integrity take the job now? I doubt it. Will the law school emerge from this as a vibrant and growing presence in the education of great US lawyers? It makes me cry.

[bmaz]

By the way, back to the purpose of this post. I also rarely agree with Kmiec or Hewitt on the issues, but my hat is off to them and I appreciate and respect their staements made in relation to the heinous decision to "unhire" Erwin Chemerinski. Really, if you have seen the three of them interact over the years, it is not shocking that they would come out in support; but it is still commendable. And therein lies part of the conundrum. Chemerinski is well enough liked and respected by even his opponents that this is an absolutely disasterous move that UCI has made. They went, in one fell swoop, from gathering a reputation and credibility they had not yet really earned, from Chemerinski and the talent he would bring and recruit, to being a black eye for the UCal system and a pariah among law schools. All before they ever opened a single classroom door. Heckuva job Drakey!

[P J Evans]

bmaz

Not a Regent, but apparently a professor at Irvine, and definitely on the selection committee. The LA Times story was quoting her, and the name rang a bell. They also quoted Parsky, as well as some of the other Regents, who are publicly (if not privately) upset about this. You can gauge Antonovich's power by the fact that the LA Times didn't bring up his involvement.

[bmaz]

PJ - thanks. I feel better now, because I went through that list yesterday or day before, whenever, and didn't see her name; and I was looking for ones I knew. This guy Drake should be fired. Whatever his motivations, he has created a first rate clusterfuck that has caused serious damage to the effort to get the law school off the ground. My guess from the start has been Donald Bren was behind all this; after all, he has the juice since he is footing the bill for the administration and first 12 professors for the new law school.

[Neil]

Presume the process that brought the parties to terms with a signed agreement was reasonably lengthy and detail-oriented, that there was plenty of time for negotiating details and vetting the candidate to the Regents. After the contract was signed, the Chancellor wants to back out. Why… because the new dean wrote an op-ed or because the new dean wrote an op-ed that one of the regents objected to on ideological grounds?

Drake made a decision to hire Erwin Chemerinsky, and a second one to breach the agreement. Either Drake's administrative process is a train wreck or subsequent pressures convinced Drake to back out and take the hit on his professional reputation to avoid some other consequence. That he didn't fight for his choice, tells me he has no backbone. That he’d trade his reputation as a good administrator for something else - probably his job and Drake’s - tells me he’s finished anyway. Drake appears to be a poor administrator, poor decision-maker, spineless leader, and now a liar.

This brings me back to EW’s point. The way the Regents operate work in California deserves some serious scrutiny. They don’t appear to operate as a policy and strategic advisory board but as powerful individuals who can insert themselves into hiring processes.

Left with facts that make him and others look bad, such as the regent who pressured him and his own choice to succumb to the pressure, Drake spins.

As usual, EW follows the talking points to the pointed question. The answer to which reveals the situation for what it is, and not for what Drake would have you believe.

[emptywheel]

PJ

As the LAT does more reporting on this, it gets weirder and weirder. Right now, we've got Parsky with knowledge of the appoint, and Blum. Parsky doesn't reveal whether he thinks Chemerinsky is a hippie. Which leaves Mr. Senator DiFi.

Or Drake is lying about Bren.

Or there's something even fishier with this hire.

[emptypockets]

It's worth putting this in context with an example of a job done right (so far):

Nadia Abu El-Haj is up for tenure at Barnard and has been the subject of a petition calling on the school to fire her (and a counter-petition supporting her) because she is an anthropology prof who has written a book questioning some of Israel's claims and criticizing its practices regarding ancient Jewish settlements in Israel (and its disregard for some ancient non-Jewish sites).

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/10/education/10barnard.html?ex=1347163200&en=c23dc4091aeac6fa&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink>The proper response?

Judith R. Shapiro, Barnard’s president, who is also an anthropologist, said in a statement that the tenure process was “one of the linchpins of academic freedom and liberal arts education,” and that despite the passions, it must be conducted “thoughtfully, comprehensively, systematically and confidentially.” She added, “This case will be no different, both in its rigor and its freedom from outside lobbying.”

That said, I disagree with emptywheel here that administrators are the seat of public intellectualism (unless by "seat" you mean "butt"). Administrators are there primarily to keep things running, and more and more lately that has become unabashedly about fund-raising. The privilege of public intellectualism in academia rests with tenured faculty. An administrator's job is $, a faculty member's job is to learn new things and communicate them to the public.

[bmaz]

Drake is full of shit. The op-ed he now claims as a basis for firing was published on August 16, which means it was submitted by Chemerinsky no later than the 15th, if not earlier than that. Drake met with Erwin and executed the contract on August 16. So, he is firing Erwin for an act done prior to his actual hiring? EW is right this thing stinks more every day. I will say this, I don't think it was Parsky. Also, it it hard to find an angle from which Drake has any honor whatsoever.

[emptywheel]

~pockets

Once again, I think you're misunderstanding what I said.

I'm saying most tenured academics 1) can't speak coherently to non-academics and 2) work on topics so narrow--and translate to larger issues so poorly--that try as they want to, they don't function as public intellectuals. If they want to be a public intellectual, they should try, by all means. This is not an exclusive thing.

But Deans (as opposed to Provosts, say) do play that role. If they--and their university--are worth their salt. Perhaps I was spoiled by folks like Lee Bollinger (who has turned to the dark side, at least on labor). But it is not only doable, but ought to be done, IMO.

[richard locicero]

You have to understand this in the context of UCI's history. For the past ten plus years the med school has been embroiled in one scandal after another. The Chemerinsky appt was a way to bestow instant status on the new school. Now Irvine is once again a laughing stock and the big donors - like Bren - I suspect, don't like that one bit. Look for Drake to decide to spend more time with his family.

[MarkH]

Usually this would call for a reaction of hiring someone EVEN MORE Liberal or more vocal to make up for the sleight. But, in this case, wasn't Chemerinsky already to the Left Wing and quite vocal? Who can they hire now that would trust them and would salve the wound they've created?

They're in a pickle.

[P J Evans]

Bmaz

I noticed that too. The timing is all wrong for that to have been the cause. I'd think that the editorial had been in the queue for a couple of days at least, since the printing alone would have started the evening before to hit the stands before the morning commute.

[dalloway]

Arggh. Am I the only one who imagines how this would have played out if the ideological shoe were on the other foot -- if a conservative, say Kenneth Starr, had been told they couldn't be dean of a law school because of their POLITICS? The right wing noise machine would be screeching like a million stuck pigs.

[bmaz]

MarkH - Chemerinsky is liberal but far from a radical. To be honest, I am not sure what a "radical" liberal is these days; but i assure you from what I have seen, heard, read and known of Erwin over the last couple of decades, he is no radical. He also has a LOT of friends; they are in between Iraq and a hard place at UCI right about now.

[Ishmael]

Well, now that Chemerinsky is out, maybe they could offer it to Alberto Gonzales? He never saw a death penalty he didn't like, and he has lots of time on his hands now. They may as well, no academic of any standing would take the job now.

[emptypockets]

emptywheel, not sure I've had enough to drink yet to get into this in detail, but we may understand each other and just disagree. It sounds like, in your ideal world, faculty would be specialists and research the details while deans and presidents would be the generalists and synthesizers who pull it all together and make it relevant for the public. (But I get that this isn't meant as a hard and fast rule, just the most likely general trend.)

I can appreciate the appeal of that hierarchy. But, in my ideal world, the faculty would all speak for themselves (as the ones on your list do, not to mention the giants like Noam Chomsky or Stephen Jay Gould), especially now that it's so easy to directly engage the public through the democraticization of media. I like the populist idealism of getting news right from the source, and of having a faculty directly engaged with the public interest.

As I think we both appreciate, neither of our ideals is very close to reality... with few exceptions, schools are being run more like businesses, and administrators are becoming less like intellectual synthesizers and more like upper management. Meanwhile, as you note, very few faculty go to the trouble to engage the public, and of the few who do it, many seem (at least to me) to be self-aggrandizers looking to stir up controversy rather than those interested in genuinely teaching and learning through public debate.

So when I said "I disagree... that adminstrators are the seat of public intellectualism," I really should have said I diagree that they should be... because I think we more or less agree on how the world is, and just differ on what we'd like it to be.

(All that being said, it seems to me that I can think of a lot more public intellectuals who came from the faculty rank and file than from administrations, at least off the top of my head: both in the categories of social philosophers like John Dewey and Arthur Schlesinger, and popularizers of their specialized fields like Oliver Sacks and Steven Pinker...)

[JohnLopresti]

I continue to see the extrusion push as abetted from on high where whales like Rove et cie. beach; Chemerinsky signed on to respondent's brief in Rumsfeld v FAIR, a fracas which began in 2004 and which in one way of considering it represented an antiEducation culmination of RonReagan's UC strategy. It is a storeyed history beyond that point, and the southland has had a difficult go of aggregating a firstrate campus there. The reader who mentioned the medicalSchool blotch probably is right, if the calculus is an even balancing of +/- performance ratings on the dean's various endeavors. I have worked in an allied field for some years, and would be inclined to discount that scandal at UCI itself as a fairly isolated incident in a field in which other academic institutions also on closer scrutiny might be candidates for more rigorous JHACO oversight in the very confined subspecialty in which that occurred.

Although FAIR was an obscure and amorphously designed case, it represented a perennial clash of titans, which is why I think it drew national leadership attention from folks who were dismayed about the presidential decision to end conscriptive composition of the military. For the rest, I trust the perspicacity of the resident writers hereabouts, who seem to have detected an interesting tale still unfolding.

Sometimes deans have to address difficult societal issues; I thought unusual some of the news a few years ago about major institutions' deans public remarks about why a new major in intelligent design was appropriate, though that has passed and become like one more tangent of divinity school methodology very quickly. There is ideologue interest in the mystery of why law schools seem to provide more liberal graduates than conservative grads, though the explanation for that is very simple and need not be elaborated here. There was a charming debut of a uclaBlog of lawProfs last year, or so; and after a few months online it published an informal survey of profs whose classes included conservative students as 'auditors', as there began to be a 'list of names' of profs heard to utter unconservative statements in class. No report, though, whether the 'auditors' actually had developed a way to scrutinize the actual thoughts of such risky profs. Maybe there is some branch of biometrics which will provide an iridological way to assess thoughts.

[William Ockham]

emptypockets,

My impression is that law school deans (as a class) are a little different than other academic administrators. In my limited experience, law schools like to get respected scholars (especially con law scholars) as deans.