| UC
Irvine chancellor's admirers are 'at a loss'
Praised
as thoughtful and ethical, Michael Drake has left colleagues puzzled by his dismissal
of Erwin Chemerinsky. 'There has to be more to the story,' one says.
By
Mike Anton
Los Angeles Times
September
14, 2007 When
Michael V. Drake was plucked from relative obscurity to head UC Irvine two years
ago, some faculty members wondered whether the tenderfoot chancellor was up to
the job of running a sprawling campus with high expectations and a $1.4-billion
budget. Four
months later, they got their answer. Drake
acted quickly when it was revealed that failures in the university hospital's
liver transplant program had led to more than 30 patient deaths. He launched an
investigation, tightened oversight and punished those responsible. Doubters
"were proven wrong," said Meredith Khachigian, a former University of
California regent who served on the committee Drake formed to probe the liver
transplant program. "He's extremely thoughtful and extremely intelligent.
. . . I have nothing but respect and admiration for him." Which
makes Drake's current trial by fire all the more difficult to understand. "I'm
kind of as confused as everybody else," Khachigian said. "What the heck
happened?" On
Thursday, many who know and have worked with Drake were asking that in the wake
of news that he hired -- and then essentially fired -- a prominent legal scholar
as the first dean of UCI's new law school. Erwin
Chemerinsky, an outspoken liberal professor at Duke University who taught at USC
for 21 years, says Drake voided his contract under pressure from conservative
critics. Drake,
a 57-year-old African American, has championed diversity in student recruitment
and helped launch a program to improve Latino healthcare. He is uniformly described
as an extroverted, natural leader with a strong ethical compass. "I
know Michael Drake to be a person of the absolute highest integrity," said
Michael Brown, chair of the UC Academic Senate and a nonvoting member of the UC
Board of Regents. "I cannot believe him to be one to bow to any sort of political
pressure, and I mean that with every fiber of my being. So when I look at this
and it looks like someone has withdrawn an offer for political reasons, there
has to be more to the story." Drake
was raised in Sacramento. His mother was a social worker and teacher, his father
a psychiatrist who ran a neighborhood clinic in the family's living room. His
rise to the top began at a community college. From there, he went on to graduate
from Stanford and earn a medical degree from UC San Francisco. Drake
was UC's vice president for health affairs when he was named chancellor at UCI.
His straightforward, public handling of the liver transplant program scandal earned
him praise -- and set high expectations, which Drake had appeared to meet. He
proved to be an effective fundraiser. He got skeptical regents to approve UCI's
long-desired law school. When Jewish students charged that Muslim students were
sponsoring anti-Semitic events on campus, Drake stood up for constitutionally
protected free speech. The
events that led Drake to dismiss Chemerinsky is "incongruous with his previous
actions," said Martha Mecartney, a UCI professor and former chair of UCI's
Academic Senate. "Drake is a strong advocate of free speech. . . . I'm at
a loss for words." Drake
denies that anyone pressured him to dump Chemerinsky. Instead, he says he thought
the two had an understanding: that to get UCI's law school off the ground, a dean
would have to subordinate political activism for the good of the school. Drake
says he -- and he alone -- made the decision to change course. One
factor, he said, was the opinion piece published in The Times last month in which
Chemerinsky criticized what he called "mean-spirited" government regulations
that would make it harder for death row inmates to have their cases reviewed by
federal courts. "He's
a really good guy. . . . He is extremely thoughtful and extremely careful in making
decisions," said Eva Paterson, a San Francisco civil rights lawyer
who has been Drake's friend for 30 years. "After talking to him, Michael
felt he had legitimate management reasons for doing what he did. In my private
conversation, I told him he made a mistake." Times
staff writer Richard Paddock contributed to this report. Story
on latimes.com
| 