Apparently, Chancellor Drake flew out to see Chemerinsky at Duke this weekend, and the men successfully hashed out their problems. In a joint statement published at the UC Irvine website this morning, Drake and Chemerinsky write:
We resolved to put recent events behind us and immediately begin to focus on our shared vision of creating a law school dedicated to providing the best education for future lawyers, to producing the finest legal scholarship, and to helping to address the legal needs of Orange County and the nation. The law school, like all great educational institutions, will be a place of great diversity, where differing viewpoints are nurtured, debated and cherished. Our goal is to create nothing less than one of the finest law schools in the country. We believe that together, and with the many talented faculty and staff at the University of California, Irvine, we will succeed.I'm happy for Professor Chemernisky, and I'm glad to see that reason (and academic freedom) has triumphed over ideology.
As this case has closed, I'd like people to recall that the the media frenzy surrounding this situation was not due solely to liberal academics and reporters (as the Orange County Business Journal claims). Yes, Chemerinsky's case was fought in the press, but numerous conservative legal scholars and media figures joined in the fray to support Erwin Chemerinsky. The media fight over Chemerinsky's deanship can't be reduced to the cartoonishly polarized "liberal" vs. "conservative" positions. Sadly, the American public has been well trained to see the world in this simplistic binary. Too many people fail to detect shades of grey where the positions overlap, and where human concerns override ideological ones.
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