Monday, September 24, 2007

UCI Law School Saga continues: Unanswered Questions


Irvine -- While the UCI community seems happy that the UCI Chancellor has rehired (last Monday) as law school dean Erwin Chemerinsky, and then apologized to the academic senate for making a mistake in earlier rescinding the job offer, some faculty remain unconvinced that Chancellor Michael V. Drake has provided all the answers about the law school hiring/firing/rehiring debacle.

We talk with one such doubter, Sociology Prof. David S. Meyer, a specialist on social and political protest. We discuss how faculty protest at UCI quickly fizzled out after Chancellor Drake made an apology to the faculty senate last Thursday.

We also air highlights from the emergency session of the faculty senate, which passed a resolution reminding the UCI administration of the need to uphold academic freedom, but tabled any resolution that hinted at any criticism of the Chancellor. The body did adopt a motion, put forth by a founding law school faculty member, Prof. Joseph F. Dimento, to create a committee to investigate the Chancellor's actions.

Despite the "love fest", others outside UCI have continued their criticism of the Chancellor's action earlier this month, which brought national attention to UCI, amidst allegations of the university caving in to outside pressures.

A Los Angeles Times editorial writer continued to call on the Chancellor to " 'Fess Up" while one commentator called him "The Most Corrupt Man in California". See also:

L'affaire Chemerinsky:href="http://www.berkeley.edu/news/berkeleyan/2007/09/19_opinion.shtml" www.berkeley.edu/news/berkeleyan/2007/09/19_opinion.$
OC Register on last week's show:Google News

To listen to the entire show, click here:

Monday, September 17, 2007

Political Pressure and UCI Law Deanship Hiring/Firing

The developments over the hiring and firing of a liberal new law school dean at UCI threatens to derail not only the opening of the law school, but endangers UCI's reputation as a site of renowned scholarship free from political interference.

Faculty and newspapers, such as the New York Times, have already called for the UCI Chancellor, Michael Drake, to reverse his decision and say he made a mistake. Subversity has learned the chancellor may already be flying to North Carolina to meet with the hired and fired dean, Duke University Prof. Erwin Chemerinsky and renew negotiations with the latter. We are seeking confirmation of that unconfirmed account.

In our next show, slated for Monday, 17 September 2007, at 9-10 a.m., we talk with two key faculty members about this sad saga.

We talk with a founding faculty member at the forthcoming law school, Distinguished Prof. Elizabeth Loftus, who talks about one way out of this impasse.

We also talk with Prof. David Theo Goldberg, who heads the UC-system's Humanities Research Institute headquartered at UCI, and who drafted the "open letter" in the form of an online petition, calling for the Chancellor to re-offer the dean's position to Prof. Erwin Chemerinsky.


To listen to the entire show, click here:

Recent Articles linked on Google News:

http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ned=us&q=UCI+law+school&btnG=Search+News

Monday, September 10, 2007

Looking at Iraq War


On the same day as Gen. David Petraeus was slated to present the latest Bush administration spin to Congress on the disaster in Iraq, we looked back at the grassroots commission to investigate war crimes of the Bush regime and air highlights from the testimony, including those of former Abu Graib commander Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinsky, and independent journalist Dahr Jamail, who has reported extensively from Iraq about the impact the war on the people there. The show aired from 9-10 a.m. on Monday, 10 September, 2007.


To listen to the entire show, click here:

Monday, September 3, 2007

Labor Day Show: Moral Panics & Vietnam Labor Struggles

For our Labor Day show, KUCI's Subversity show had two parts.

Part 1: Moral panics in Boise, Part 1 (9:00 am) takes a look back at some historical antecedents for the travails of U.S. Senator Larry Craig (R-Idaho), who has now announced his resignation in the wake of a tearoom conviction disclosure. We chat with writer/director/producer Seth Randal about his documentary, The Fall of '55, that documented the witchhunt against homosexuals caught in sex with teenagers.

His op ed (co-written with an archivist, Alan Virta, also on the show) appears in Saturday's New York Times, which also ran a separate op ed on the late sociologist Laud Humphrey's Tearoom Trade book that analyzed the folks who engage in tearoom sex.

Part 2 focuses on Vietnam with Prof. Angie Ngoc Tran Part 2 (9:30 am) focuses on labor in Vietnam, as the forces of globalization converge on changing work and working conditions in that country. We chat with Prof. Angie Ngoc Tran, of CSU Monterey Bay, whose field is political economy. See press release.

To listen to the entire show, click here:

http://kuci.org/~dtsang/subversity/Sv070903b.mp3