Law-School Rot Hits Berkeley Dean Close to Home — Literally

By Tal Fortgang

Tuesday, April 16, 2024

 

The moral and behavioral rot at our elite law schools has hit close to home — literally — for the dean of Berkeley Law, Erwin Chemerinsky. On April 9, about 60 third-year students gathered in the dean’s backyard for a pre-graduation dinner. A few of the students co-opted the occasion to rant about their school’s supposed support for Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza and Chemerinsky’s avowed Zionism. Chemerinsky and his wife, Berkeley law professor Catherine Fisk, repeatedly pleaded with these students to leave. When Fisk tried to wrest a microphone from the student leading the demonstration, the student accused Fisk of assault and refused to move, insisting that she had a First Amendment right to continue.

 

In the days before the dinner, posters had gone up around campus that depicted the dean wielding a bloody knife and fork, with the message, “No dinner with Zionist Chem while Gaza starves.”

 

In his short official statement following the unsettling evening at his home, Chemerinsky used the words “sad” or “sadness” four times. He was “sad to hear” that students wanted him to cancel the dinner, as proclaimed on the posters, and that if he did not acquiesce, they would protest. And he was “enormously sad” that students would be “so rude” as to “use the social occasion for their political agenda.”

 

It’s hard to imagine how such an episode of increasingly common yet despicable behavior could evoke sadness. Was Chemerinsky unaware that students at his top-ranked law school act like petulant children? Six months ago he wrote that he “was stunned when students across the country, including mine, immediately celebrated the Hamas terrorist attack in Israel on Oct. 7.” Yet since then, across the nation, radical anti-Israel students have occupied buildings, disrupted classes, and harassed Jews and Zionists. In most cases, they have received little more than slaps on the wrist, emboldening them to call administrators’ bluff when threatened with consequences. Meanwhile, universities embracing DEI concepts have imbued them with the belief that agitating on behalf of the “oppressed” is more important than basic decency. Those seen as opponents deserve to be fought by any means necessary.

 

In other words, these students know that the ostensible adults in the room aren’t just with them on the issues; they encouraged the zealotry, assertion of moral superiority, and black-and-white thinking that allows students to disrespect anyone — even a dean and eminent scholar — whom they deem morally impure. It’s no wonder that these young activists, feeling no restraint and facing no consequences, behave like spoiled brats.

 

Perhaps the word Chemerinsky is looking for is not “sad” but “betrayed.” After all, he has been the dean of the law school since 2017. He oversees an admissions department that had its pick of the college-graduate litter and chose to allot precious spots in the class of 2024 to the students who now torment him. Under his watch the curriculum has grown to feature dozens of classes conflating legal education with radical anti-Western indoctrination under the guise of “decolonialism” and related theories. Berkeley boasts a vast ecosystem of identity-based student groups that issued horrific statements celebrating October 7. In 2022, many of the same groups barred any self-identified Zionists from participating in their events. The Berkeley Journal of Gender, Law, and Justice even committed to not publishing pieces by Zionist writers. The law school, like its peer institutions, continues to treat these student associations as contributing to the richness and diversity of campus life rather than condemning them as bigots who launder their hatred of certain groups through the language of identity and oppression.

 

Top law schools don’t just tolerate this madness. They reward it. Indeed, like the country’s other elite law schools, Berkeley lavishes scholarships on students who are committed to using their degree for “social justice,” “environmental justice,” “economic justice,” and similar concepts, signaling to students what kind of person these institutions prize: not responsible stewards of the legal profession, or citizens who appreciate American civic traditions, but activists who use their credentials to disrupt “injustice” wherever they see it. One might say the schools are “systemically biased” in favor of admitting, training, and credentialing students who will do exactly what they have done. The monster has turned on its creator. That’s a betrayal, certainly, but one that was built into the monster’s character all along.

 

There is no delight to be found in what has happened to Dean Chemerinsky, or what has happened to his peers in similar confrontations. The dean is by all accounts a decent man who, for all his considerable genius, has allowed his institution to become overrun with the ideas and agents of indecency. This is not about him, or even about Berkeley per se. It’s about the message that leaders at institutions of higher learning across the country should finally heed: When you have used the apparatus of higher education to recruit, coddle, and reward activists and their habits of mind, being on their side will not save you when those activists become the mob. If you don’t like monstrous outbursts, stop inviting monsters into your homes.