College Withdraws Job Offer to Liberal Professor

If the chancellor of the University of California, Irvine, was too worried about taking heat from conservatives to hire liberal constitutional scholar Erwin Chemerinsky as the head of the college's new law school (as Chemerinsky says) ... well, it backfired. Chancellor Michael V. Drake, who decided to rescind his offer to Chemerinsky, is taking lots of heat from conservatives — and liberals, too — for the decision.

The Washington Post reports that Drake told Chemerinsky, who has criticized the Bush administration, that he was too politically risky.

According to Chemerinsky, the UC-Irvine chancellor told him on Tuesday that he "knew I was liberal but didn't know how controversial I would be." The chancellor also said "some conservative opposition was developing," and the University of California regents would have "a bloody fight" over approving him, Chemerinsky said.

Hugh Hewitt, the prominent conservative columnist and law professor, called the decision "clearly a boneheaded move." "Even though I agree with him on only about one out of 100 issues, I believe he is one of the top legal minds in the United States," he said.

Douglas W. Kmiec, a conservative constitutional scholar and law professor at Pepperdine University, wrote in an opinion piece in the Los Angeles Times that it was "a betrayal of everything a great institution like the University of California represents."

In his own op-ed piece in the Times, Drake denied he withdrew his offer because Chemerinsky was too liberal. He wrote that it was "a management decision — not an ideological or political one."

One of the best lines came from John Jeffries, dean of the University of Virginia Law School. "It seems late in the day to notice [that] Erwin Chemerinsky is a prominent liberal. ... It's rather like discovering that Wilt Chamberlain was tall. How could you not know?"

3:04 PM ET | 09-14-2007 | permalink