Huh?

This seems crazy. How do you recruit a constitutional law professor to be your dean without being aware that he's very liberal? And it seems like a twink move to fire him because he'll be "a target for conservatives". Either his legal scholarship and administrative skill will make him a good dean, or not. There's obviously much more to the story, likely involving either powerful donors, or powerful politicians, or both. At any rate, this doesn't seem likely to do good things for a fledgling law school trying to recruit high-caliber faculty. In the long run, that will matter a great deal more than a few donors.