SIVACRACY.NET

Since the Cherminsky controversy about academic freedom involves my home institution, I feel compelled to say something about the fiasco and faculty reactions to it as it unfolded, although I was in Europe during the worst of the blowback after Chancellor Michael Drake withdrew Cherminsky's appointment as Dean of UC Irvine's new law school, citing Cherminsky's liberal political opinions as a factor that would make him an unpalatable choice both in conservative Orange County and with the UC Regents who might be allies of the state's Republican governor. As we all know now, eventually the offer was restored so Cherminisky could move forward with his work as dean.

Of course, this isn't UCI's first scandal, and I often joke about teaching what could be a very entertaining course on institutional local politics that would include the fertility clinic scandal, the liver transplant scandal, and a host of other public embarrassments. Furthermore, despite his apparent bungling of the situation, I'll admit to being somewhat sympathetic to potential pressures from donors on Drake, but perhaps it's just because I sat next to him at a dinner in honor of Maxine Hong Kingston one time, and we made delightfully genial small talk over our nouvelle cuisine. In any case, I thought that Vice Provost Michael Clark (my former boss and current co-author) came off remarkably well in his pragmatic statement to the press.

"I think if we can put this back on track and Chemerinsky arrives and does what he needs to do — pull together an ideologically diverse and quality faculty — then this will all blow over and be behind us," Clark said on Saturday. "If not, I think there will be a lot of questions in people's minds about the university and we will just have to work hard to answer them."

As a rhetorician, I've been looking at Drake's official electronic communications, which are reproduced on his website, and at the faculty e-mails that filled the inboxes of individual departments. What's interesting to note is that many faculty members were often using mailing lists just to forward articles from the mainstream media rather than editorializing about the matter in their own voices in a virtual public forum. Through back-channels, I'm sure that people were much more direct about the gross violation of academic decorum that took place, but it seemed that the front channel was largely used for disseminating news and opinion pieces from print newspapers like the Washington Post, New York Times, and Los Angeles Times. Blogs such as Brian Leiter's Law School Reports and Hugh Hewitt were cited occasionally, as was a PDF of a letter from SoCal attorney Dan Stormer declaring "I would not give a dime to this law school" and calling the university's actions "despicable" and characteristic of a "jellyfish," but print media that could be assumed to be more authoritative and credible seemed to have a greater role in these intradepartmental electronic communications.