RE: The Erwin Chemerinsky Affair

To all the outraged people emailing me:

I'm aware of it.  I've read what's been written about it.  However:

I'm a graduate student. 

Do you really think I'll be able to do anything about it?  I could lodge a complaint.  I could get those conservatives who listen to me to write something about how they wouldn't have opposed Chemerinsky's appointment because he had sought to create an ideologically diverse department.  However:

I'm a graduate student. 

Do you really think anyone in administration will listen to me?

UPDATE: Tomemos tells us exactly how we should response.

UPDATE II: Rich nails it in the comments:

I would bet that conservatives would have ginned up some kind of outrage campaign, at least locally, if he had been hired. They are just as happy to attack academia for him being fired, and use it to reinforce the trope of "academics are improperly making decisions because of politics." Basically, I don't trust anything they write about this.

Comments

[AMac]

SEK --

Thanks for the link to Johnson's interview of Chemerinsky. I had missed or forgotten that, and didn't see it in the named Google search. As some of Johnson's commenters noted, Cherminisky's remarks were remarkably tepid. But at least they were on the correct side of the affair--and thus superior to most of his peers'. If I could, I would soften para 1 of my 4:55pm comment accordingly. And note that this adds to the shame of the UCI administration's withdrawal of their offer.

Rich --

Quite the gatekeeper, you are. Primed to employ the vilest insults in your lexicon in the performance of your duties. Perhaps your own turns of phrase are a reliable indication of the merits of the ideas you profess. I've nothing to add.

[Karl Steel]

Patterico's a reasonable person of the right

Say what? Do a search for Patterico at Tbogg's place.

You might also want to emphasize Patterico's happy association with Michelle Malkin before you describe him as "reasonable." Sheesh.

[Rich Puchalsky]

Amac, in addition to your other faults, you are mind-bogglingly dull, spouting cliche instead of thought. Your latest characteristic nosedive onto the fainting couch refers to me as "Primed to employ the vilest insults in [my] lexicon". Do you know what that last word means, other than your vague feeling that you see it used in that context a lot? Suffice it to say that this phrasing implies that I'm primed to employ insulting, vile single words, not insulting phrases or sentences. Can you find any such about you in my comments above? It's true that I asked you to imagine a bad, bad word; maybe that's what you mean. In that case, no wonder I'm doing so badly in my nonexistent gatekeeping -- the baddest word in my lexicon is "bad".

[AMac]

G'night Rich, you tsicar.

[Antenna Clasis]

The reference made earlier to earlier scandals at UCI is worth picking up. Consider that this newest scandal may have a very real, material connection with earlier ones.

The fertility clinic scandal had just broken when I arrived at UCI. The willed body program scandal broke shortly after I got there.

The most memorable detail from the latter for me was not that a computer virus supposedly ate the program's records, making it impossible to return (cremated) bodies to families after their use as med school cadavers. It was that the bodies were being dismantled to sell the parts, most notably spinal columns, to research labs across the country, with the manager receiving the profits.

It follows that one theory on the current UCI Law scandal is that Michael Drake was mistaken for a cadaver back in 1996, and his spine was sold to a lab in Arizona. Who knows, maybe the real reason that he came to UCI was to get it back. It clearly wasn't to prevent further scandals from occurring....