UPDATE: Sorry, no InstaDean for UC Irvine. An agreement has been reached, But the point made below stands.
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The University of California prides itself on being at the educational cutting edge; and it is, if by ‘curring edge’ what you mean is ‘in the vanguard of the new conservative reich’.
Not content with resting on its laurels after producing such horrors as UC Berkeley’s Boalt Professor of Law John “Torture Memo” Yoo, now via Lawyers, Guns and Money comes the story of the university’s politically-motivated dismissal of eminent legal scholar Erwin Chemerinsky:
IRVINE, Calif. — In a showdown over academic freedom, a prominent legal scholar said Wednesday that the University of California, Irvine’s chancellor had succumbed to conservative political pressure in rescinding his contract to head the university’s new law school, a charge the chancellor vehemently denied.
Erwin Chemerinsky, a well-known liberal expert on constitutional law, said he had signed a contract Sept. 4, only to be told Tuesday by Chancellor Michael V. Drake that he was voiding their deal because Chemerinsky was too liberal and the university had underestimated “conservatives out to get me.”
Later Wednesday, however, Drake said there had been no outside pressure and that he had decided to reject Chemerinsky, now of Duke University and formerly of the University of Southern California, because he felt the law professor’s commentaries were “polarizing” and would not serve the interests of California’s first new public law school in 40 years.
Oh, give me a break. No outside pressure? My ass. This kind of political censorship and pressure is not new to the university; it has quite a history of political repression and coercion.
In 1949, during the Cold War, the Board of Regents of the University of California imposed a requirement that all University employees sign an oath affirming not only loyalty to the state constitution, but a denial of membership or belief in organizations (including Communist organizations) advocating overthrow of the United States government. Many faculty, students, and employees resisted the oath for violating principles of shared governance, academic freedom, and tenure. In the summer of 1950, thirty-one “non-signer” professors–including internationally distinguished scholars, not one of whom had been charged of professional unfitness or personal disloyalty–and many other UC employees were dismissed. The controversy raised critical questions for American higher education.
The same critical questions – questions of freedom of speech and of conscience, questions that go directly to the root of the US whole reason for existence – are raised by Chemerinsky v UC Irvine:
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.”
So Drake is admitting, on the record, to having attempted to place restraint on Chenerinsky’s First Amendment right to express his political opinion in public?
Ooops, I’m not sure he wanted to do that.
So where is this political pressure coming from? it’s alleged to be coming from the Unoversity’s board of regents, but Drake denies it:
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.
Drake disagreed with the account. “No one said we can’t hire him,” he said. “No one said don’t take this to the regents. I consulted with no regents about this. I told a couple people that I was worried and that this might be controversial, but no one called me and said I should do anything.”
So Drake is calling Chemerinsky a liar now too? Double oops.
But back to those ellegedly meddling regents, the chair of whom is one Richard C Blum:
Richard C. Blum is an investment banker and the husband of United States Senator from California Dianne Feinstein. He is the Chairman and President of Blum Capital Partners, L.P., an equity investment management firm that acts as general partner for various investment partnerships and provides investment advisory services. He founded the firm in 1975. He also owns 75% of the voting stock in Perini. Blum is also chair of the University of California Board of Regents and a Director of several companies, including CB Richard Ellis.
[…]
Blum’s wife, Senator Dianne Feinstein, has received scrutiny due to husband Richard Blum’s government contracts and extensive business dealings with China and her past votes on trade issues with the country.[citation needed] Blum has denied any wrongdoing, however. [1] Critics have argued that business contracts with the US government awarded to a company (Perini) controlled by Blum may raise a potential conflict of issue with the voting and policy activities of his wife. [2] However, these charges have never been substantiated.
Oh, I see, slimy, hedgefund greedhead, is he? But wait… no, he’s actually a fully-paid-up liberal weenie:
Blum has a strong interest in Tibet and Tibetan Buddhism. In 1981 he attempted to climb Mount Everest from the Tibetan side with Sir Edmund Hillary. He is the Chairman and founder of the American Himalayan Foundation, which has given millions of dollars to build hospitals and schools in Tibet and Nepal.
In addition to the AHF, Blum’s not-for-profit endeavors include service as Trustee of The Carter Center; member of the Board of Trustees of The Brookings Institution; Co-Chairman of the The World Conference of Religions for Peace; Director at the World Wildlife Fund; Member of Governing Council of the Wilderness Society; and Member of the Board of Trustees of the American Cancer Society Foundation.
Ok, I get it. Blum’s one of the US’ own equivalent of the ‘great and the good’ – for which read ‘soft-liberal biddable idiot’.
They’re usually the spouse of some MP or senator or congressperson who’s prepared to make a few bucks by being an aforesaid useful idiot. These parasites infest quangos worldwide, claiming lots of nice little honorariums and per diems for doing so, which all mount up to quite an income.
However, not wanting to rock the political boat for one’s own personal profit, while reprehensible, doesn’t quite equate to putting direct pressure on or censoring an academic. So, if the anti-liberal pressure isn’t coming from Blum, where is it coming from?
Here’s a list of all the regents – take your pick. There’s any number of big money types and political apparatchiks to choose from. It’s a roll-call of the Californian private equity iand political donor ndustry. I wonder what the results ould be if you ran those names through a database of Republican/AIPAC donors?
If only this were an isolated incident. But there is and has been a concerted effort to purge liberal thought from America academia in train for some time. It’s hardly been hidden, indeed it’s been going on out in the open for years, encouraged by the mass media’s post-911 smearing of any non-jingoistic academic analysis as treason.
Why, in 2003 a bill which would have officially applied a loyalty oath to academics very nearly made it into federal law:
On Oct. 21, the House of Representatives unanimously passed a bill that could require university international studies departments to show more support for American foreign policy or risk their federal funding.
Its approval followed hearings this summer in which members of Congress listened to testimony about the pernicious influence of the late Edward Said in Middle Eastern studies departments, described as enclaves of debased anti-Americanism. Stanley Kurtz, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, a right-wing think tank, testified, “Title VI-funded programs in Middle Eastern Studies (and other area studies) tend to purvey extreme and one-sided criticisms of American foreign policy.” Evidently, the House agreed and decided to intervene.
Emboldened by its dominance of Washington, the right is trying to enlist government on its side in the campus culture wars. “Since they are the mainstream in Washington think tanks and the right-wing corridors of Congress, they figure, ‘Let’s translate that political capital to education,'” says Rashid Khalidi, who was recently appointed to the Edward Said Chair of Arab studies at Columbia University.
It’s not surprising that they started with Middle Eastern studies. There’s a particular enmity between hard-line supporters of Israel –who, with the extraordinary ascension of neoconservatives in the Bush administration, now dominate the American right — and academics who specialize in studying the Arab and Muslim world.
That enmity burst into open conflict after Sept. 11, when conservatives saw an opportunity to accuse Middle East academics not just of biased scholarship but of representing a kind of intellectual fifth column. Soon after the World Trade Center fell, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, a Washington-based group co-founded by Lynne Cheney, wife of the vice president, and Sen. Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., published a report called “Defending Civilization: How Our Universities Are Failing America and What Can Be Done About It, which listed examples of insufficiently patriotic behavior of the part of the professoriate and called universities the “weak link” in the war on terror.
This is all strongly reminiscent of another period of political turmoil. Not only is the current fashion in clothes vintage, so is the fashion in repression.
William L. Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich documented the many ways in which the Mational Socialist government censored academics and coerced (though many were willing, as so many are now) German teachers to its political line:
“The Civil Service Act of 1937 required teachers to be ‘the executors of the will of the party-supported State’ and to be ready ‘at any time to defend without reservation the National Socialist State.’ An earlier decree had classified them as civil servants and thus subject to the racial laws. Jews, of course, were forbidden to teach. All teachers took an oath to ‘be loyal and obedient to Adolf Hitler.’…
“As early as the autumn of 1933 some 960 of them, led by such luminaries as Professor Sauerbruch, the surgeon, Heidegger, the existentialist philosopher, and Pinder, the art historian, took a public vow to support Hitler and the National Socialist regime.”
The academic legal community is up in arms about this latest scandal.
But then it was up in arms too, allegedly, about the theft of the presidency and about the Deibolding of Kerry and about Iraq and torture, and about the appointment of Gonzales, and about the political stacking of the Justice department, and about the subversion of the constitution, and on and on and on….
But what did that legal community actually do, other than wail and gnash their teeth and blog? Sweet FA, just like they will about this.
I await the appointment of Glenn Reynolds as Insta-Dean of UC Irvine law school with interest.
Heh. Indeed.
