Erwin Chemerinsky – Another professor sacked
“We live in strange times.”
Just days after he signed a contract to become the first dean of UC Irvine’s new law school, Erwin Chemerinsky was told this week that the deal was off because he was too “politically controversial.”
Chemerinsky said in an interview today that UC Irvine Chancellor Michael V. Drake had flown to North Carolina on Tuesday and told him at a hotel near the airport that that he did not realize the extent to which there were “conservatives out to get me.”
Chemerinsky, one of the nation’s best known constitutional scholars and a liberal professor at Duke University in Durham, N.C., said he signed a contract last week after being offered the job Aug. 16. He said he had lined up a board of advisors for the new school, including the deans of the UC Berkeley and University of Virginia law schools and three federal judges, including Andrew Guilford, a Bush appointee from Orange County.
Chemerinsky said he was saddened by the decision. “It would have been an exciting opportunity to start a new law school. We live in strange times.”
LINK [Via The Left Coaster]
He was critical of the Religious Right and interestingly, Erwin Chemerinsky was one of Rachel Corrie’s family lawyers.
Related material:
“The biggest violation of academic freedom in the history of UCI”
Erwin Chemerinsky and the Post-9/11 Attack on Academic Freedom
From ‘Muzzle Watch’
Cross-posted @ The Cylinder
“Another” liberal professor sacked? That’s what- two- out of 500,000? You’ve got to be kidding me. You act as though persecution and exclusion of liberal professors is a major problem on college campuses today, when it’s exactly the opposite. According to a major recent poll, over 90% of tenured educators self-identify as liberal. College campuses have become one of the most leftist-dominated, anti-conservative, anti-christioan, and thought/speech-controlled environments this side of North Korea. Conservatives, republicans, and christians are persecuted, silenced, excluded, black-balled, denied tenure, and fired for expressing their viewpoints every day here in America. “Diversity” and “Tolerance” on campus only applies to people with leftist, anti-american and anti-christan viewpoints. Since your conscern for this poor, opressed liberal seems to indicate a rather selective view of academic exlusion, I thought you might enjoy this link to another example of academic exclusion that is MUCH more representative of what actually goes on in terms of political and religious persecution MOST of the time…You’ll forgive me if I don’t feel sorry for Chemerinsky. How does it feel when you get to walk a mile in our shoes for a change?
http://www.discovery.org/scripts/viewDB/index.php?command=view&id=532
That is indeed an interesting link! I read through the article and found it hard to understand why Professor Dembski has been so ill-treated. I must admit that the debate about intelligent design is outside my purview. I therefore discussed the case with my partner who is a biologist. He could not understand the “lynching” either. He finds the research ideas of Professor Dembski quite intriguing. As he told me, we do not know what happened at the split second when Space-Time began. Neither quantum mechanics nor general relativity can account for that first moment of “creation”. Both theories are needed to understand what happened then but, to quote Brian Greene in The Fabric of the Cosmos , “in combination the laws break down. [...] Because of the conflict between general relativity and quantum mechanics, we remain ignorant about what happened at the beginning [...].” Professor Dembski’s work would have surely been of great interest. What a pity!