OK, somebody explain this to me. News came out a while back that the reliabley lefty UC-Irvine was starting a left-tilting law school, with “public interest” law being the mainstay. So they hire very liberal Duke law professor Erwin Chemerinsky as their dean. That much makes sense.
But hardly had he been told he had the job when UC-Irvine’s chancellor flew into Durham to tell him he didn’t have the job. The purported reason? That the chancellor never anticipated how much conservative opposition there would be to the choice of Chemerinsky. No actual conservative opposition has been pointed to, but hints are being put out by UC-Irvine libs that a conservative donor, Donald Bren, is to blame.
This brings up two questions: 1) How did the UC-Irvine chancellor not know that Chemerinsky was a very public and out-spoken (and well-respected as fair even by the right) legal scholar?, and 2) What is a conservative billionaire doing funding a left-wing law school?