I doubt that they were afraid of anything. This is just another example of the full-court press of the right wing against anyone and everyone who isn’t a winger and who may move into a position of influence. Witness the non-hiring of Juan Cole by Yale, for example.

bmaz

I’m not ruling that out–but I think that’d be more plausible if Chemerinsky had actually WON that lawsuit–or had a chance to on appeal.

But it’s clear that whoever ordered the kill, they implemented it not through the Regents (which as Parsky points out, they couldn’t do), but through GOP pressure directly on Drake, who owes his career to the GOP.

Btw, I am wondering if the chain of information went something like this:

Drake tells only two people on the Board: Parsky, and Mr. DiFi. Parsky knows he doesn’t want Chemerinsky (or knows enough to ask) and he lets the OC network know. They organize an email campaign to make it clear that it’s in Drake’s best interest to can Chemerinsky, which he does.

As to OC GOP’s competence … I don’t buy it. Witness Malcolm’s thoroughly incompetent attempt to manufacture some way to make it appear that Chemerinsky was trying to blow off UCI and not vice versa. (And if you click through to the OC Weekly article, it suggests Drake tried to get Chemerinsky to pretend that they had parted amicably.)

this is an interesting case.
thanks for the detailed informative reporting.

let’s see

chermensky attacked

juan cole attacked

walt and mearsheimer attacked

john yoo tenured and promoted

goldsmith tenured and promoted

ken starr not hired.

what others?

with starr we know where the money was coming from

with these others there must have been some money threats coming from somewhere.

earned or inherited corporate money is the most destabilizing force in american democracy today.

again with the â€partisan gunslinger†language! interesting to watch that phrase take hold.

doesn’t MTpockets’ comment cinch it for bmaz’s case?

â€partisan gunslingerâ€, can only be a calling card from darth cheney.

Ah, now I see your Bren update. Still maintain he had to have known prior; what caused the worm to turn?

eyes

I don’t think this is connected. Same culture of incomptent hackery, but a different incarnation of it.

WRT the Parsky Commission–I think it possible that the reason they went around Parsky is because Parsky is in some way tied to Lewis (which wouldn’t be a stretch at all) and they didn’t want him to nominate the guy who would investigate him.

That’s what happened in AK, after all: BushCo ignored the two Republican Senators and appointed an outsider to be USA. And voila, that USA proceeded to oversee the rolling up of the GOP party. That wouldn’t have happened if Ted Stevens had had a say in the USA position.

eyes

This is all just a suggestion–that if the model in AK were true, then maybe DOJ had a reason to bypass PArsky. That said, if he was suspected of something, and it was tied to Lewis, then it’d be USA MDCA, not SD. But then it may well be all connected. I think Parsky has a house in Rancho Santa Fe, the rich digs Cunnigham was trying to get into.

I read the LAT article earlier today (along with each of the 350+ comments at that point). Someone at fdl commented that s/he was disturbed by the comments but I found most?many of them to be spot-on…….there were even self-identified conservatives who decried the â€unhiringâ€. Yes, Virginia, there is some evidence of sanity even among conservatives.

I taught in higher ed for three decades and served on a number of search committees for candidates (faculty and administrative) at various levels of the university. Speaking from personal experience, such searches go on forevaaaaaaar with the final decision engraved in stone (unless the selected candidate withdraws his/her name). Until the UCI debacle I would have said there is NO WAY something like this could happen; now, just another illustration of the power the goopers have acquired in this country.

I can only hope Drake gets what he so obviously deserves……..a job at some appropriate reich wing institute of nonexistent learning.

pockets – those are all post Novakula though; how much did it get around before his Plame column?

WO

I was trying to think of a new name for Godwin’s law, now that we seem to need one for OBL. But thanks for mentioning it, bc I had intended to.

Q: What does a unanimous vote in the MI Senate have in common with today’s Michigan-Notre Dame football game?

A: Both are decided 38-0.

bmaz, I’d assumed Novak had coined â€partisan gunslinger†but what’s interesting is that it is now growing legs as a phrase applied to someone other than Armitage. But it would be interesting to know if Novak really coined it, or if it had circulated in Washington circles before his column.

UC Regents trip up again:

â€Former Harvard head Summers nixed as UC regents dinner speakerâ€

â€The decision to dump Summers as the speaker at the dinner was abrupt. His name was on the dinner invitation that went out Aug. 31…â€

link: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/…..#038;tsp=1

Apparently stains are not the only things emanating from you posterior; you have also produced this comment. FYI, I was fairly ambivilent about Summers; some of him was commendable, some not so much. I was, however, appalled at the manner in which he was ousted. Irrespective of whether you considered his remarks at issue to be impolitic, they were supported by some data and did constitute a legitimate discussion point scientifically from my understanding. If I have this wrong, I am sure that emptypockets will set the facts right. I see no basis for your idiotic statement and, in fact, it is needlessly provocative asinine statements like that which result in people loathing your presence.

EW, thinking of your comment earlier today, â€culture of incomptent hackeryâ€, read this over at Harpers:

The Remarkable ‘Recusal’ of Leura Canary
DEPARTMENTNo Comment
BYScott Horton
PUBLISHEDSeptember 14, 2007

http://www.harpers.org/archive…..c-90001209

there’s probably some clever thing to say using â€canary,†but its late….

bmaz,

Harvard was an institutional power play that worked. It was those who favored the status quo against the designated champion for change. Faculty against Administration. When an opening was seen, when the seam in the defense opened up they struck and scored. Nothing wrong with the replacement though not as esteemed as President Summers.

But my point stands! The same people outraged about this Law Dean were happy about the Harvard President.

Therein is the real problem, the real paradox.

… and if the truth rankles, then so be it.

Neil — Jodi the minder whines about Summers’ release from Harvard being equivalent to that of Chereminsky’s non-hire/unhire.

Wrong. Summers had already been doing damage, on the job, at a school that receives federal monies; he also wasn’t advocating or supporting an ideology in doing so, but exercising his management of the school with a bias against women.

Jodi apparently forgets that there are women across the entire political spectrum; maybe she ought to look under her skirts for a reminder.

bmaz, I would urge you to look up the commentary by Ben Barres published in Nature (vol. 442, July 13, 2006, p. 133-136) for an excellent discussion about the legitimacy of the data you cite. I would be willing to bet that you would be uncomfortable referring to any discussion of the inherently limited intellectual abilities of a particular race versus that of whites as a legitimate discussion. Unfortunately, women are subjected to this second class intellectual status all of the time. And the unequal treatment of women in our universities is backed up by data (lower pay, fewer tenured positions, fewer administrative positions, etc.).

oldtree, i am a relic of the OC, too.
an odd, odd place with a history of the john birch
society made up of USC dentists from the day when
SC had no general ed. req’s…narrow minded wackos.
with loads of money and then you add karl karcher,
grandpa knott et al. yikes!
but back to the regents: i went to school during reagan’s
fights with UC. i’m indifferent now, even tho colleges
are my livelihood. the top is so bloviated with $$ in
an effort to attract good managers, it is a system WAY
out of control. and so FU’s like this happen when money,
not rational thought, is the currency of higher ed.

A must read article, IMO, in connection with this discussion, is the latest diary by Marjorie Cohn at marjoriecohn.com. She sees the un-hiring of Chemerinsky as the latest post-9/11 assault on academic freedom. However, she also provides some history, including the formation of ACTA in 1995 by Lynne Cheney and Joe Lieberman (grayslady’s read: an organization formed to use trustees and alumni to force Cheney and Lieberman’s ideological purity on the universities), and ACTA’s spinoff, Campus Watch, which, as far as I can tell, is designed to monitor any university courses or literature that might be critical of Israel (Campus Watch lists William Kristol as one of its Middle East experts–puhleeease!). Seems like those of you who suspected a Cheney connection here might be on to something.

Phred – Jeebus. Don’t exprapolate me out into areas I wasn’t going in the least. When I said I was ambivilent about summers, I meant it. I was not happy about the way he left looked; as it looked very much like a lynch mob mentality was after him. Regardless of which side of the political spectrum such shouts come from, they have always made me uneasy in academic settings. That is my main beef, I just didn’t like the feel of it. I asked for correction/clarification from epockets on the role of scientific data in the mess and, thankfully, that was provided. Summers may not have been doing it from the perspective of the clinician/scientist/whatever doing those studies, but the fact is the question he raised (inartfully as it may have been) is one actually being investigated, and legitimately so. So, back to where I started, I am fine with Summers being gone; but the way it played out gave the feel of something a little distasteful. And I was mindful of groups like Campus Watch and ACTA, which grayslady has just mentioned, when I said so. I also carry with me for life the tale of a pretty good friend of my mother, Dr. Morris Starsky. I had the pleasure of assisting at the tail end of his legal travails. Morris was a wonderful chap who was persecuted by just the kind of efforts we have been discussing here. If you have a minute to review it, you will find this fairly brief wiki pretty explanatory of why I am a little hinky about any of these types of ousters.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morris_Starsky

OT
Bill Kristol claims to have learned that George Bush will nominate former federal Judge Michael Mukasey on Monday to be the next Attorney General. CNN now has a similar, though less definitive, report. – Glenn Greenwald link

I spent the better part of my professional life defending criminals and representing plaintiffs in civil rights cases and other difficult civil cases. I am quite used to people thinking that what i am defending is what I believe when, in fact, that is not necessarily the case. There are too many extremely bright women in science (my mother was one) that I have come across for me to bite off on the underlying premise. My point was not that the studies, in their various forms, were valid or had produce valid conclusions; simply that the correct explanation for clear demographic data was still being formed. Summers stepped in it, the toxic deep end as you put it, and you would hope he would be brighter than to do that, if nothing else. Like I said from the get go, I really don’t care that much; its just that any mob mentality action against an academic raises my hair a little, even if they are definitely controversial as Morris Starsky was. And once it is exhibited that a well defined or armed (so to speak) mob cna corner or oust academics, it becomes easier and easier the next time and so on down the road. That is a road I don’t necessarily want to see travelled.

bmaz — I never for a moment thought that your own views were in line with what Summers said. My intention was only to clarify that Summers statement was invalid. Period. Many years ago a friend thought I was a bit tone deaf to sexist comments and she recommended that whenever someone said something potentially sexist, to change the comment from one about gender to one about race. If it then read like a racist statement, the original version should be treated as equally sexist and invalid. It’s a rule of thumb that has served me well.

One other thing to think about is why would Summers be inclined to hold this view or even to raise it as hypothetical? Why disenfranchise a large group of people so cavalierly? My own take on this is that such a view would be very appealing to a university administrator as absolving them from doing a better job of training, recruiting, and promoting women in science and math. If you decide they simply aren’t good enough, that solves the problem. It always seemed to me that his remark was entirely self-serving in that way.

Finally, I know we are talking at some cross purposes here, since your objection was to thought police stepping in and chucking someone out for not exhibiting â€right thinkingâ€. However, my recollection of events is in line with emptypockets. Summers had a lot of enemies even before saying something so brainless. In the end, it was NOT his comment that got him the heave ho, that was just the slant given to the situation in the press and it is the way it is remembered now.

bmaz
Rayne

I am a woman, and what President Summers said for the most part is true.
Woman do have more oppositionally opposed choices than men and many times they choose things that don’t lead to stellar careers in the Technical fields.

I have never seen a man yet bear a child. I haven’t yet had the priviledge myself, but I know that it will take me out of the mainstream more than the man that is the father. It will however affect us both somewhat.

I can tell you that in science, math and engineering, late at night into the morning hours, in school, and at work, there aren’t very many women, even single women without chilcren who are striving hard. Yes there are a few, but mostly it is men.
And this occurs both graduate and undergraduate.
I have been there and I have raised my tired head and blinked to clear my eyes, and then looked around and that is what I saw.

This was President Summers point. But he was cleverly caught up in a false accusation about something called innate ability and whatever that means.

Now Chemerinsky doesn’t work out to be an exact opposite case but still my point that the same people that were happy about President Summers getting blasted out of Harvard, are outraged at Chemerinsky being shut out of the Deanship.

I think that is proven by the comments made here.

phred,

I had a Dean that had a standing statement that usually a single male 21 to 28 could do the best work in Grad school because he had the stamina, the health, and could devote his life, his waking hours to it. The Dean told me later, that I was the exception that proved his point.
Now looking back with hindsight, I have to agree.

It isn’t that women can’t do it. It is because generally they don’t do it. You can argue all day the reasons, but still they don’t do it as much as the men.

And I don’t have a problem with that in any way. As long as they have a choice, and they do as far as I saw.

I have a cousin. She played BB in High School and started, but she wasn’t as good as I, and she didn’t play college ball. She was a honors student but she didn’t do as well as I. She has a BA, not in a technial subject, and never thought more than once about Grad School. She has 2 children, and a nice husband who will never be rich but who comes home every night.

I have a lot more money, and my parents can brag on the things I have done and achieved, and where I have traveled, and my positions, but when we get together for those family things, though both of us are happy with our choices, I think I feel a little more envious of my cousin than she of me. I play with my darling little nieces and dream of a time, I hope not too far away, where it is my children I play with. But we each made our choice, and at this point at least, neither would change those decisions.

I send presents a lot, mostly little stuff, because I don’t get to see my relatives very much, and I can tell you most of what I send is to the children.
I think my biological clock is sounding an alarm and I am not 30 yet.

That is part of being female, and I think it is a good thing.

Jodi, the issues you raise are relevant to the real reasons women are underrepresented in the sciences. Summers also raised these points, but they are not the ones for which he came under fire. You may want to read his speech (it’s not long).

If you just want the summary, here’s his own summary from the speech of what he wants to say:

There are three broad hypotheses about the sources of the very substantial disparities that this conference’s papers document and have been documented before with respect to the presence of women in high-end scientific professions. One is what I would call the-I’ll explain each of these in a few moments and comment on how important I think they are-the first is what I call the high-powered job hypothesis. The second is what I would call different availability of aptitude at the high end, and the third is what I would call different socialization and patterns of discrimination in a search. And in my own view, their importance probably ranks in exactly the order that I just described.

The ones you’re discussing are Hypothesis #1, the reasons he recognizes are the most important. But that wasn’t what got him in trouble. The problem was his Hypothesis #2, and the very sketchy evidence he used to support it.

I’d also mention, in light of earlier discussions, that he specifically tries to speak NOT as the Harvard President because he knows that what he’s going to say shouldn’t come from that office (His first words in the speech are, â€I asked Richard, when he invited me to come here and speak, whether he wanted an institutional talk about Harvard’s policies toward diversity or whether he wanted some questions asked and some attempts at provocation, because I was willing to do the second and didn’t feel like doing the first. And so we have agreed that I am speaking unofficially…â€) and you see how well that worked out. That problem of being unable to speak any way other than ex cathedra is why I was saying deans and other administrators don’t make good public intellectuals; on the other hand, emptywheel makes a good point that that kind of non-rigorous provacateurism is not really what we look for in public intellectuals anyway.

Jodi — you’re an idiot and so apparently was your dean. You really need to get out more. Really please, and leave all your connections to the internet at home so that we don’t have to continue reading your insufferable drivel. I have no idea what graduate school you were in, but I’m certain you were not in the hard sciences. Your analytical skills are abysmal and your reading comprehension from what I have seen here is nil. I hope to God you do not reproduce, but I suppose it is inevitable. Do us all a favor, find the nearest hammer and smash your biological clock to smithereens.

Yeah well, I haven’t seen freepatriot around recently and somebody had to say it. Don’t fret about whether or not they are snappy, you don’t seem to possess any judgment.

Jodi you sound like some of the people over at JOM, unable or not willing to weigh the pros and cons of an issue.

PJE, way to go. Ancient by now is this Duke law prof’s supportive and calm analysis in guest mode hosted at blackprof blog. Naturlich, some byzantine Jingoist parsers blast each syntactic turn in her melifluous prose attempting reductio ad absurdam, but the integrity of the piece seems to withstand the kibbitzing. A little to the north, is this archived text of the LawProfThought Scrutinizers, authored by the vice dean and prof at UCLA January 2006, pity, though: that the original woodcut graphic of 3-1/2 ’fists’ was scrapped when their web archiver stored the articles from their first year online.