Unless you are in law school, are planning to go to law school or are from Southern California, you probably don’t know or care about the controversy that erupted last week at the University of California, Irvine.

But you should know and care about it because it concerns academic freedom. And, you should know and care about it because of its similarity to a certain controversy that occurred on The Hill just a few short years ago.

Here are the facts: U.C. Irvine is planning on opening a new law school within the next few years. Last month, Chancellor Michael V. Drake hired the school’s first dean, a professor named Erwin Chemerinsky who teaches Constitutional Law, among other topics, at Duke University. Last week, Drake decided to rescind the offer, after Prof. Chemerinsky had signed a contract and spent the better part of a month collecting advisors and preparing for his new job.

Why he rescinded the offer is the matter of some controversy, but it seems that Prof. Chemerinsky’s political views (he leans to the left, although not radically so) seem to have had an effect on some members of California’s Board of Regents, leading Drake to believe that Prof. Chemerinsky would not get confirmed as the school’s new dean. In addition, according to the Associated Press, a conservative Los Angeles politician named Michael Antonovich sent an e-mail to some colleagues last month asking how to stop Prof. Chemerinsky from being named dean and left a voice mail with the A.P. at the end of last week saying that appointing Prof. Chemerinsky “would be like appointing al-Qaeda in charge of homeland security.”

So, naturally, instead of fighting for his new colleague, Drake fired him. And then all hell broke loose.

Law professors and other commentators from the left and right alike ran to Prof. Chemerinsky’s aid, saying that what Drake did was not only incomprehensible, but incomprehensibly foolish, as it casts a dark cloud over the fledgling law school.

As Cornellians, don’t we know it.

It took a good year or so for Cornell to recover from the controversy surrounding President Lehman’s departure in 2005. For me, it wasn’t until President Skorton was inaugurated that the “evil spirit,” as one professor called the secrecy surrounding Lehman’s departure, was truly exorcised.

The amount of distrust that existed — and maybe still exists — between Cornell’s faculty and the Board of Trustees stemming from Lehman’s departure seems pretty similar to the relationship between Drake and the U.C. Irvine faculty right now. One can easily see this in the “open letter” that the U.C. Irvine faculty wrote last week.

Let’s compare some excerpts from that letter to comments made by Cornell faculty members during a meeting with some members of the Board of Trustees in Fall 2005:

U.C. Irvine: “We are disturbed because of the deep violation both of the integrity of the university and of the intrusion of outrageously one-sided politics and unacceptable ideological considerations into a hiring process that should be driven by academic excellence, administrative expertise, leadership capacity and personal integrity.”

Cornell: “I am stupefied that you seem unable to examine yourselves. You should ask to what extent you have a flawed method of operation,” and “I have been here since 1979 and I have never seen the community as destabilized as it is now.”

U.C. Irvine: “We are deeply concerned because this action places U.C. Irvine once more in the spotlight for the most negative and debilitating of reasons. One commentator has ridiculed your action as rank amateurism, and we cannot help but agree. It makes attracting to U.C. Irvine administrators, faculty and students of the highest quality so much more difficult, and will all but torpedo the appointment of a dean of the new Law School of Chemerinsky’s quality.”

Cornell: “Cornell is very much in trouble. The next president is going to be presiding over a much-diminished Cornell.” Said others, “There is a serious loss of morale in the University because a popular president was apparently fired for reasons unknown. We are paying a price for secrecy,” and “coming into this job there will be a cloud.”

Now, everything has turned out fine here at Cornell. Last year was relatively quiet, President Skorton’s presidency has been a success and morale is high.

But I have to say I’m not optimistic that U.C. Irvine’s situation will turn out quite the same way. We, as Cornellians, were able to push away the cloud that existed over The Hill because of our sense of community and our school spirit. The law school at U.C. Irvine doesn’t have any school spirit at all — because it doesn’t yet exist.

The U.C. Irvine faculty members who signed the open letter are right. What student, faculty member or deanship candidate will go there now? Academia is supposed to be devoid of political considerations. For goodness sake, Kenneth Starr is the dean of the law school at Pepperdine University.

Academic freedom is one of the reasons that the tenure concept exists. Without tenure, faculty members might be apprehensive about publishing, teaching or speaking about issues that some may deem controversial. With tenure, they can do their best work.

How can we expect a brand new school to grow and prosper when its main components (students and faculty) already can’t trust it to be the academic institution that it aspires to be? Drake’s only option, really, is to attempt to reinstate Prof. Chemerinsky. If he doesn’t, he might as well close and latch the new school’s doors before they even open.

Cornell, I’m proud to say, was strong enough to endure a controversy like this and come out well on the other side. The Donald Bren School of Law at U.C. Irvine is likely not to be so lucky.

Eric Finkelstein ’06 is a former Sun managing editor and is currently a second-year student in the Law School. He can be contacted at efinkelstein@cornellsun.com. Saturdays Excepted appears alternate Mondays.