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CityBeat columnist Alan Mittelstaedt FOI'd the chancellor of UC Irvine trying to find out who pressured him to un-hire Erwin Chemerinsky as dean of the new law school, before eventually doing the re-hire thing. The result: 430 pages of email and letters that shows Chancellor Michael Drake did hear from several judges and others in Orange County objecting to the Chemerinsky appointment. The upshot, other than Drake's sullied image: Chemerinsky gets the highest salary ($350,000) of any law school dean in the University of California.
Also: Mittelstaedt says a story in the Times last Saturday that claimed there is a "radical shift" being considered in the route of the Wilshire subway "exposes a deeply rooted institutional problem with the Times’ transportation coverage." He writes:
The newspaper doesn’t get the big picture. It’s too tied up in the traditional constructs of news stories driven by conflict, tension, or wrongdoing and is missing a richly textured cultural, way-of-life story. Get the heck out of the building and show us how the system works, what riders say about it, and what needs to be done to improve it. This means more than tracking down NIMBYs in Hancock Park.
The route leg through West Hollywood is one of several alternatives that have been under discussion for awhile, he says.