Orange County GOP Narrowly Avoids Horrible Embarrassment

Well, faced with losing his job, Michael Drake found a way to un-un-hire Erwin Chemerinsky.

UC Irvine Chancellor Michael V. Drake and Erwin Chemerinsky havereached an agreement that will return the liberal legal scholar to thedean’s post at the university’s new law school, the universityannounced this morning.

With the deal, they hope to end the controversy that erupted whenChemerinsky was dropped as the first dean of the Donald Bren School ofLaw.

Drake traveled over the weekend to Durham, N.C., where Chemerinskyis a professor at Duke University, and the two reached an agreementabout midnight Sunday, sources told The Times.

And Donald Bren narrowly avoided having the UCI law school named the Donald Bren Is an Intolerant Wingnut Law School.

Note to self–those crazy Republicans in Orange County respond quite well to public pressure and embarrassment.

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  1. mighty mouse says:

    Anybody know what is the deal, the agreement, reached at midnight? Academic freedom in the guise of midnight negotiations? Did Chemerinsky give up/change anything? Why would he still want the job?

  2. Anonymous says:

    mighty mouse – my guess is they went hat in hand. No conditions other than â€we’ll all try to do this right and make this a good schoolâ€. They needed Chemerinsky several tons more than he needed them at this point.

  3. William Ockham says:

    I joked about this before, but now I’m serious. Michael Antonovich said that hiring Chemerinsky would be like â€putting Al Qaeda in charge of homeland securityâ€. On Sept. 27th, Antonovich will be co-chairing a fundraiser for Rudy Giuliani [http://www.dailynews.com/news/ci_6857130]. I think it is entirely fair to ask Mr. Giuliani if he agrees with Mr. Antonovich. If not, why hasn’t he disassociated himself from Mr. Antonovich?

  4. celdd says:

    Mighty mouse: — Why would he still want the job?

    He taught at USC for 21 years. Maybe he wanted to move back to Southern California.

  5. Richard locicero says:

    I think at the time he left USC he said his wife grew tired of living in a big city like and preferred a smaller place like Durham. Well maybe she lkes the Irvine/Newport Beach area. A lot of ex-Angelenos do.

  6. lysias says:

    Before delivering to Chemerinsky the original bad news that the deal was off, Drake was in D.C. He flew from D.C. to Durham.

    We know Chemerinsky’s op ed criticizing Gonzales played a large role in Drake’s initial decision to call the deal with Chemerinsky off. What was Drake doing in D.C.? Who did he talk to?

  7. JohnLopresti says:

    Although Chemerinsky evidently was amenable with settling back in at the NorthCarolina diggs, likely some folks in OrangeCounty fretted about the kinds of conflicts experts were reporting in the media, as ably and understatedly reflected in a prior thread on the topic, namely, Loftus and Cohn’s observations combined in refutation of the formal press releases like the material Wildermuth had echoed, see final paragraph in notice about mysterious speaker substitution for next UCRegent meeting ancillary social, all in the realpolitik spirit of avoiding controversy in times when UC has done admirably well reconstituting demographic balance without toeing the chalked boundaries the Roberts court has established to rollback societal engineering. At least, that was part of the message I read; that the UC mission was at stake, as well as the tourismworthiness of venerable OC. Cohn’s column was syndicated on the national professional website, as well; little sense running afoul of a state’s explicit strictures in its constitution. That’s where LA money politics passions exceeded the territory of what is legal. Controls like those passages in the education code segment in the state constitution are part of what has fostered excellence in CA universities.