Professor Bainbridge...on law, politics, religion, culture & food

Chemerinsky and Summers

While PB.com was down over the last week preparing for the rollout of the new format, there were some interesting developments in le affaire Chemerinsky. Like anybody with a dollop of common sense, I thought UC Irvine had screwed the proverbial pooch by hiring and then firing Erwin as the dean of their new law school. Many of my colleagues at UCLAW were so outraged that they signed a group letter to the Regents objecting to how the matter had been handled, filling my email inbox for days with countless missives on the incident. All ended up well on that front, as the UC Irvine Chancellor rehired Erwin.

Meanwhile, a group of UC Davis faculty got bent out of shape because the UC Regents invited former Harvard President Larry Summers to speak at a Regents function. Curiously, this hasn’t prompted a peep from my colleagues - or from most of the left-leaning academics who instantly rallied to Chemerinsky’s defense. Let’s let UC Davis history professor Eric Rauchway take it from here:

Chemerinsky lost a deanship for expressing expert opinions that rubbed someone the wrong way. His case tells UC professors we should watch what we say in the newspapers, which is bad enough. Yet the proscription of Summers represents, in principle, a more serious limit to academic freedom on UC campuses: Lawrence Summers and his ideas are apparently unhearable 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.

Do go read the whole thing.