Opinion: Chancellor Drake speaks! Says nothing! Plus, more Chemerinsky commentary

‘This is certainly something that I bungled and I regret it completely and totally,’ Drake said. ‘I am always trying to do what I can to enhance the institution and have it move forward. It’s awful that all this has blown up like this. I couldn’t regret it more.’ [...] ‘The why of it is straightforward, but I think it’s going to be unsatisfactory,’ he said. ‘It was a personnel issue and there are a lot of things that go into that. We as a university have a policy that we don’t talk about personnel decisions. ‘First, I don’t want to talk about it,’ he added, ‘but second, it wouldn’t be appropriate to do that.’ [...] ‘This has been an awful period,’ Drake said during the interview. ‘I would have wished that I could have avoided it. I’m pleased that we got it back on the right track. The most important thing now really is the school and developing the school going forward. That’s really what it’s all about ultimately.’ [...] Drake declined to comment on allegations that he faced pressure to dump Chemerinsky from well-connected Orange County conservatives and potential donors to the law school. ‘There’s a lot of information out there that doesn’t come from me and I have no comment on that,’ he said. ‘No one pressured me. That’s all I can say.’ [...] ‘It would be easy to say here’s what happened. What we need to do is do it right going forward. We have come to an agreement, and I think it’s an exciting agreement for a really outstanding law school.’ ‘There’s no particular smoking gun,’ he added. ‘I just don’t know what to say.’

While the two cases share some common elements--in both, the officials reneged under pressure on commitments presumably made in good faith and for good reasons--the superficial similarities conceal deep differences. In the Chemerinsky case, UC threatened Chemerinsky’s academic freedom; in the Summers case, UC threatened mine--and that of everyone else who teaches here. [...] By succumbing to a demand that they reject a controversial, though--as a former treasury secretary, university administrator, and respected economist--obviously relevant speaker, the Regents have suddenly made life much more difficult for those of us in the business of presenting controversial, if relevant, ideas and guest speakers on UC campuses. Casting someone as utterly outside the university’s conversation is the severest penalty we as scholars can impose--appropriate perhaps to Holocaust deniers and such ilk as exhibit a chronic impenetrability to reason. Lawrence Summers, though he said some things well worth objecting to, falls well short of that standard. By applying this ban to him, the Regents suggest an impossibly low tolerance for controversy at the University of California.

In 1900, the Stanford economist-turned-sociologist Edward Ross said he opposed immigration because it threatened Anglo-Saxon racial purity. Jane Stanford, widow of railroad tycoon Leland Stanford and benefactor of the university (as well as beneficiary of immigrant labor) insisted Ross be fired. Ross countered, ‘It is my duty as an economist to impart ... in a scientific spirit, my conclusions on subjects with which I am expert.’ Mrs. Stanford won. The Ross case inspired what became the American Association of University Professors’ 1915 ‘General Declaration of Principles.’ In it, the AAUP explained universities must act so it is clear that ‘what purport to be the conclusions of men [sic] trained for, and dedicated to, the quest for truth, shall in fact be the conclusions of such men, and not echoes of the opinion of the lay public, or the individuals who manage or endow universities.’ Otherwise the truth is imperiled.

So why isn’t the professoriat rallying around Condoleezza Rice? [...] The initial salvo was fired in May, when the Stanford student newspaper ran an article discussing Rice’s possible return when President Bush leaves office. A political science professor and former Stanford provost, Rice hasn’t committed to any job past January 2009. But it seems likely she could return to campus in some capacity, as the paper reported. That was too much for many readers. ‘Condoleezza Rice serves an administration that has trashed the basic values of academia: reason, science, expertise and honesty,’ an emeritus math professor wrote in a letter published several days later. ‘Stanford should not welcome her back.’ The blogosphere was even harsher, of course. On the newspaper’s Web site, one reader compared Rice to the Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels; another called her a war criminal. ‘Would Stanford harbor a serial killer just because she previously worked at the university?’ one alumna asked. ‘She’s a controversial figure.... Now is the time for the [university] administration to quietly encourage Ms. Rice to go elsewhere.’

Drake, 57, is a prominent African American medical scientist, who became UCI’s chancellor in 2005. His tenure has been marred by strained relations with parts of the Jewish community in Orange County that claim he has not responded effectively to the harassment of Jewish students by Muslim campus groups. These groups also have sponsored outside speakers, who, critics allege, virulently espouse anti-Israel and anti-Semitic viewpoints. Two years ago, the Zionist Organization of America filed a federal civil rights complaint against the university on behalf of Jewish students. Recently, however, Drake, 57, spoke out publicly and forcefully against the British boycott of Israeli universities, terming it ‘misguided, outrageous and wrong.’ [...] Chemerinsky was raised in a ‘fairly traditional’ Jewish family on Chicago’s South Side, co-founded the Progressive Jewish Alliance and served as president of Beverly Hills’ Temple Emanuel day school. He is a prolific writer and among his numerous extracurricular activities he represented Valerie Plame in the suit by the exposed CIA agent against the government. He also serves as counsel for the family of Rachel Corrie, a 23-year old college student who was killed while confronting an Israeli bulldozer that had been ordered to wreck an Arab house in the Gaza Strip. Her family is suing the Caterpillar company, arguing that the bulldozer manufacturer should have known that its product would be used by the Israeli government for ‘human rights violations.’ [...] [First Amendment lawyer Douglas] Mirell said he had no reason to believe ‘that Chemerinsky’s Jewishness played any role in the controversy,’ but his wife wasn’t as sure. ‘I don’t know if the Jewish aspect had anything to do with the case, but it is absolutely possible,’ said Levenson, a professor at Loyola Law School, former federal prosecutor and frequent media commentator. ‘We may not find out until we know who were the conservatives who did Erwin in.’

By Lord Acton’s standard, Dr. Michael Drake, Chancellor of the University of California at Irvine, is the most corrupt man in California. His job is, or should be, to protect the ‘liberty’ of both students and faculty, the academic freedom that is the cornerstone of great universities. But Dr. Drake has a twisted view of academic freedom, one that allows Muslim students to engage in open anti-Semitism, to hold rallies on campus attacking Zionist control of the media, equating Jewish support for Israel with Hitler’s Nazis, even (according to campus Republicans) displacing previously scheduled Young Republicans meetings with rallies denouncing Israel’s right to exist. But there’s no room for a liberal, Jewish law professor who is routinely the object of bidding wars between top-rated law schools vying for his services. Last February, Hillel of Orange County formed a task force to investigate what it viewed as a troubling number of anti-Semitic speeches and incidents on the UCI campus, including complaints by Jewish students that they were being followed and harassed by their Muslim classmates. That was before UCI’s Intifada week this past spring, which included speakers supporting the terrorist group Hamas and a speech entitled ‘Zio-Nazis.’ That was before the infamous Ward Churchill, defender of the 9/11 attacks, was invited to speak on campus.

I wonder whether UC-Irvine got cold feet after someone pointed out to them that Chemerinsky represented the Corrie family in its suit against Caterpillar, the company that made the armored bulldozer that crushed young Rachel Corrie in Gaza in ’03...

I spoke with Chancellor Drake at several points during the weeks he was in discussions with Erwin Chemerinsky about the Irvine deanship, and often this past week. It is crystal-clear to me that this controversy was not about Erwin’s politics nor potential controversy over his appointment. (Chancellor Drake does not shrink from controversy, but he did sugar-coat his reasoning when talking with Erwin — a mistake.) This was about Chancellor Drake’s loss of confidence that Erwin fully appreciated a central truth about becoming a university official: One must subordinate a significant measure of autonomy in favor of the interests of the institution. [...] It is this simple: Our internal and external constituencies are complex and diverse. A dean must lead and represent all of them. It’s not a total reinvention of yourself, but it does require a willingness to be circumspect — to think in advance about whether your actions will advance the mission you have agreed to make your central purpose for this limited portion of your career. Every week I make choices about media interviews, public appearances, and political activity that are different from the choices I would make if I were an autonomous professor and public intellectual. Faced with a media or schedule request, my first and very most important question is, ‘What’s in it for Berkeley Law?’ That’s the job. [...] This important discussion is ill-informed by the media. Dean-designate Chemerinsky will soon learn that at UC there are enough here-and-now, real threats to academic freedom to focus on without the distraction of invented ones.

Despite what you’ve read, the law school dean issue at the University of California, Irvine, wasn’t about academic freedom. It was about finding the right dean to head a law school. At issue was a disagreement over responsibilities and leadership style. It was a shame it was spun into a morality play by a holy alliance of politically correct journalists and liberal academics. It was another example of a rush to judgment, reminiscent of the rape charges against lacrosse players at Duke University, where, like here, unfounded guilt was assumed without knowledge of the facts. [...] The ensuing crusade, led locally by the Los Angeles Times, disserved Drake and UCI by casting the issue as one of squashing academic freedom and succumbing to political pressure.

It’s impossible to even imagine saying Donald Bren School of Law without provoking the wrath of every ethical force in the universe. All this attention on Erwin Chemerinsky’s on-off-back-on deanship at UC Irvine is a distraction from one of the troubling facts of life in higher education. For a mere $20 million, this fat cat from Orange County who values legal principles as far as he can piss into a hurricane, can buy his name on a building dedicated to instilling the highest standards in generations of law students. He doesn’t deserve to have a bathroom stall in the gymnasium named for him. If his name must remain, can’t the Board of Regents stick an asterisk on the building? Or better yet, a dollar sign or an elephant? All who enter its halls must be told each year at convocation that the school wasn’t named for a legendary voice for legal rights, but for a big heavy in the Republican Party who games the legal system in his wars with his children fighting for their fair share of his wealth.