There's no Sex Diversity in the Boalt Hall Classroom (Tell Tale Stats, pt 2)
I apologize for the delay in posting, but one sober post is worth a 1000 drunk Armen pictures. I don't want to start a whole Chris Rock/Sean Penn thing here, so I will let my earlier post and Warren's retort to speak for themselves, with the one following exception. I want to thank Warren for pointing out another potential base rate for measure: rate of Democrats v. Republicans (if that's what you really want to use) among graduating Ph.Ds. Better yet, how about we survey the unemployed Ph.Ds to see what their ideologies lean to. Wouldn't THAT be a more accurate way of ferreting out discrimination, if any?
Moving on, I've wanted to opine on the issue of (liberal) bias at Boalt and Berkeley in general for quite some time. I think the best way to do this is by dividing the law school discussion among the students and faculty/admin, and then separately discussing the campus as a whole.
BOALTIES OF ALL COUNTRIES, UNITE
I want to premise this with a dicussion we had with my next-door neighboor, who is a MPP student here at Berkeley where he described the only non-liberal in his class as an independent center-lefist. To quote, "I mean our discussions are whether civil unions or marriages are best for homosexual couples. How much tax-breaks should we give them? I suggested that we recruit like the Berkeley Republicans to come tell us what God thinks on these issues."
That in a nutshell gives the general perception of Boalt. A perception that is for all intents and purposes, false. It's not false becasue he have 135 members of the Republican party, but it's false because we have a very large number of independent thinkers. When speaking of the lofty goals of ideological diversity, I can't imagine that the purpose behind such a goal is to get people to yell down each other's throats, or to have each group selectively use material to support their previously held beliefs and not look at the other side. Are there people who do that here? Hell yes. Are they challenged when they do that in class? Yep. Thanks to your independent thinkers. And what I mean by independent thinker is those who do not take their beliefs and biases for granted. They challenge their beliefs and refine them whenever they realize it is untennable. Those are the independent thinkers.
To give an example in Crim Law last semester, when the discussion turned to Capital punishment, the entire class was pretty much against it by a hand vote, but there were quite a few people who made eloquent arguments for its presence in the American legal system.
As for myself, I no where near an independent thinker. But I do enjoy being challenged by classmates. To the extent this happens quite a bit, I think the perception that we're all pot smoking Deanheads is off, way off.
FACULTY
The above applies to the faculty as well (I think). I have not had the experience of a 2L, 3L, or grad, therefore I'm not going to spend much time on this, but suffice it to say from what little experience I do have, ideology is either presented from the center, or if it glares through it's more of a function of a professor's research interest/professional position on issues. How this relates to personal ideology is beyond me to discuss. Again, as an example I think Prof. Contracts and Prof. Int'l Trade (who are quite similar to each other on various measures) do not take any liberal beliefs/arguments for granted.
BERKELEY OVERALL
This is a different story. Since I have not had as a close an interaction, I cannot really discuss detailed examples, but from my general readings of the Campus Newspaper and what have you, I think there are plenty of examples of knee-jerk liberal reactions that are not occasions to sound off independent thought alarms.
Case in point: Protest against military recruiters.
During the main campus career fair people protested the military's presence because the Solomon Amendment forces schools to allow them access despite the military's don't ask don't tell policy with respect to homosexuals. Let me put this bluntly, (AND ANY HIRING PARTNER AT ANY FIRM PAY CLOSE ATTENTION), I am curious how many firms have a de facto don't ask don't tell policy. Hmmm? What I am certain of is that there is no discussion of our society's effective imposition of don't ask don't tell almost everywhere. Good luck getting hired at Walmart in Nashville if you're gay. Are these discussed? Nope. Knee-jerk protest against the military. "We don't want them here." "War bad." How about a discussion of who you want to be in the military? A Berkeley grad or an enlisted kid enfatuated by guns since the age of 5? Nope, war is not the anser, case closed.
I think the best example was when a counsel for the 9/11 Commission spoke at the law school and a nut began yelling, accusing the speaker of conspiracy, etc., which was met with almost uniform scorn from the law students and faculty in the audience.
But as they say, first impressions are hard to break. For all I know, Marx was just a typical union rep.
Moving on, I've wanted to opine on the issue of (liberal) bias at Boalt and Berkeley in general for quite some time. I think the best way to do this is by dividing the law school discussion among the students and faculty/admin, and then separately discussing the campus as a whole.
BOALTIES OF ALL COUNTRIES, UNITE
I want to premise this with a dicussion we had with my next-door neighboor, who is a MPP student here at Berkeley where he described the only non-liberal in his class as an independent center-lefist. To quote, "I mean our discussions are whether civil unions or marriages are best for homosexual couples. How much tax-breaks should we give them? I suggested that we recruit like the Berkeley Republicans to come tell us what God thinks on these issues."
That in a nutshell gives the general perception of Boalt. A perception that is for all intents and purposes, false. It's not false becasue he have 135 members of the Republican party, but it's false because we have a very large number of independent thinkers. When speaking of the lofty goals of ideological diversity, I can't imagine that the purpose behind such a goal is to get people to yell down each other's throats, or to have each group selectively use material to support their previously held beliefs and not look at the other side. Are there people who do that here? Hell yes. Are they challenged when they do that in class? Yep. Thanks to your independent thinkers. And what I mean by independent thinker is those who do not take their beliefs and biases for granted. They challenge their beliefs and refine them whenever they realize it is untennable. Those are the independent thinkers.
To give an example in Crim Law last semester, when the discussion turned to Capital punishment, the entire class was pretty much against it by a hand vote, but there were quite a few people who made eloquent arguments for its presence in the American legal system.
As for myself, I no where near an independent thinker. But I do enjoy being challenged by classmates. To the extent this happens quite a bit, I think the perception that we're all pot smoking Deanheads is off, way off.
FACULTY
The above applies to the faculty as well (I think). I have not had the experience of a 2L, 3L, or grad, therefore I'm not going to spend much time on this, but suffice it to say from what little experience I do have, ideology is either presented from the center, or if it glares through it's more of a function of a professor's research interest/professional position on issues. How this relates to personal ideology is beyond me to discuss. Again, as an example I think Prof. Contracts and Prof. Int'l Trade (who are quite similar to each other on various measures) do not take any liberal beliefs/arguments for granted.
BERKELEY OVERALL
This is a different story. Since I have not had as a close an interaction, I cannot really discuss detailed examples, but from my general readings of the Campus Newspaper and what have you, I think there are plenty of examples of knee-jerk liberal reactions that are not occasions to sound off independent thought alarms.
Case in point: Protest against military recruiters.
During the main campus career fair people protested the military's presence because the Solomon Amendment forces schools to allow them access despite the military's don't ask don't tell policy with respect to homosexuals. Let me put this bluntly, (AND ANY HIRING PARTNER AT ANY FIRM PAY CLOSE ATTENTION), I am curious how many firms have a de facto don't ask don't tell policy. Hmmm? What I am certain of is that there is no discussion of our society's effective imposition of don't ask don't tell almost everywhere. Good luck getting hired at Walmart in Nashville if you're gay. Are these discussed? Nope. Knee-jerk protest against the military. "We don't want them here." "War bad." How about a discussion of who you want to be in the military? A Berkeley grad or an enlisted kid enfatuated by guns since the age of 5? Nope, war is not the anser, case closed.
I think the best example was when a counsel for the 9/11 Commission spoke at the law school and a nut began yelling, accusing the speaker of conspiracy, etc., which was met with almost uniform scorn from the law students and faculty in the audience.
But as they say, first impressions are hard to break. For all I know, Marx was just a typical union rep.
Labels: 0L/1L Advice, Law School, Only In Berkeley, Rabid Liberals
posted by Armen Adzhemyan at 11:09 PM
2 Comments:
The Berkeley undergrad campus is MUCH more "diverse" than Boalt ... but first, if you're going to call everyone "liberals," you have to examine what that means -- this blog's analysis of the issue seems to presume a standard "white liberal" viewpoint which may be very "conservative" from the perspectives of nonwhites. By calling Boalt "liberal" and "non-diverse" on that basis, you reveal your own blindness to what's going on around you. In short, consider the possibility that you're not seeing the diversity that does exist.
(Take the first amendment class and talk about hate speech or porn if you want to see your liberal monolith crumble before your eyes.)
Second, there are like a billion kids attending Berkeley undergrad. It's home to one of the biggest BCR chapters around, and it's the birthplace of BAMN (as far as I know). It has hippies, communists, fascists, and plain ol' pro-business folks chomping at the bits to get a gig at McKinsey or Goldman. It boggles my mind that you'd form your judgment based on a couple of stories in the Daily Cal ...
I'm assuming the comment is based on a gloss over of the post above and not any actual reading. Otherwise it should be PAINFULLY clear that I'm only discussing POLITICAL diversity.
If you want to see the liberal monolith rise up, watch people's reactions to the libertarian sayings on the walls of Top Dog.
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