Lots of people. Horowitz and the Academic Bill of Rights crowd say it is wrong because it infringes on academic freedom. Eugene Volokh (who is as pointy-headed as pointy-headed gets, a genius computer geek turned legal super-geek) and Hewitt say that the state of California cannot legally discriminate in hiring based on an applicant's politics. Beyond the principles involved, in practice those arguments are typically used to benefit academic conservatives. If conservatives as a group have to choose between abandoning those arguments and tolerating Chemerinsky, maybe we help ourselves more in the long run by taking one for the team.
... California cannot legally discriminate in hiring based on an applicant's politics....
But California schools -- schools across the nation -- DO and have done so for decades, leaving us with schools, including law schools, that are dominated by the left. Horowitz and Volokh are like Dubya and his "new tone." It sounds really nice and pretty and noble and "taking one for the team" in the name of a falsley applied "principle." This is not a game, it's war, and the enemy (liberals) fight dirty. All Hewitt et al have done is to help place a very twisted political mind, Chemerinsky, in a place of even greater power and influence in a context of those institutions already being dominated by twisted minds.
Did you read on one of these threads the comments of a guy who's taken many of Chemerinsky's classes? Apparently Chemerinsky's lectures are filled with anti-Bush comments, even moreso than most of the liberal profs. This is a case of very misguided "princple" in that now Chemerinsky is even more powerful than before, and guess what? No matter how much we make nice, he is the enemy of our freedom.
I would say to Hewitt and Eastman and all those who came to Chemerinsky's aid in the name of that incomplete, uneven, feel-good "principle" -- SMOOTH MOVE, EX-LAX.