A little dinner at Irvine
By 
I realize the following doesn’t add up to a hill of beans in this crazy mixed-up world, but we must all cultivate our own hydroponic gardens:
My email in-box is getting blasted with announcements that Erwin Chemerinsky has been named the new dean of UC-Berkeley’s law school.
Chemerinsky has spent the last ten years as the dean of UC-Irvine’s new law school, which admitted its first class in 2009. His avowed goal was to create a “top 20” law school from scratch, since apparently what the world needs now is not a new Frank Sinatra, but another top 20 law school (I would have thought 20 top 20 law schools were enough, but I am apparently not a sufficiently disruptive and innovative thinker in the fast-moving world of contemporary higher education).
Chemerinsky didn’t achieve this essentially pointless goal (UC-Irvine was ranked 30th in 2015 and 28th this year), but he did manage to hire an impressive faculty, with perhaps its most impressive feature being its stupendous salaries: a quick skim of the public records indicates that a bunch of legal Anteaters are pulling in north of $300,000 in compensation, not counting benefits, which tack on another 30% to the payroll.
Long story short: a back of the envelope calculation indicates the law school is probably spending around $30 million per year in direct operating costs, which is a lot, given that this year the school’s total net tuition revenue is going to be around $9 million, and of course it has no alumni network yet from which to extract donations (The school got a $20 million founding gift from an Orange County real estate mogul but that money is likely long gone, given that the first entering class paid no tuition and the next two got very heavy discounts).
Long story shorter: UC-Irvine’s law school is costing the parent university a fortune, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. Of course it’s hard to quantify the inchoate benefits in ACADEMIC PRESTIGE accruing to the larger university from its hosting the third-highest ranked law school in the greater Los Angeles area. Oh wait, it really isn’t: those benefits add up to approximately zero dollars per year, more or less.
None of this touches on the fact that the dumpster fire that is the hiring market for entry level lawyers in California needs another top 28 law school like Donald Trump needs two scoops of ice cream and a suitcase full of crystal meth.
For these fantastic achievements in the field of lighting mountains of money on fire for no good reason, Chemerinksy got rewarded with the deanship of something UC-Irvine will never be in a million years, i.e., a genuinely elite law school. Hopefully EC at least improves Berkeley’s recent .333 batting average in regard to hiring law school deans who don’t sexually harass or assault students and/or staff. (In light of the institution’s recent history I can’t help but note that one of the two other finalists Chem beat out was Laura Gomez, a Latina woman who is an extremely impressive person in every way, but who has yet to light enough money on fire to sufficiently impress university administrators).