DEI Claims Another Victim

The Free Beacon reports on the replacement of standards at the law review at the once-elite University of California, Berkeley School of Law with a requirement of anti-racist life experience instead of traditional study and legal writing skills. One law review member speaks approvingly of the displacement of “seemingly objective” standards like mastery of legal reasoning and knowledge as typically reflected in good grades and writing skills. One wonders whether a BIPOC defendant charged with serious crimes would rather have an attorney with a strong anti-racist life narrative or one with “seemingly objective” legal skills.

The University of California at Berkeley Law School may be marching rapidly towards irrelevance like many other institutional victims of DEI, a march that was probably already long underway. Until 2023 it had been called Hastings School of Law, but founder and inaugural dean Serranus Clinton Hastings (1814-1893) was accused of being complicit in attacks on the Yuki tribe by local militia in 1859 after they resisted being forcibly moved onto an inadequate small federal reservation.

The law school's nickname was Boalt Hall, named for John Henry Boalt (1837-1901), a very successful lawyer whose widow contributed the money to erect the building that housed the law school. A Union Army veteran, Boalt held highly prejudicial views of Chinese immigrants and supported efforts to block further Chinese immigration. This offense (presumably a common view in California at the time) cancelled out any credit for fighting to end slavery, and so his name was dropped in 2020.

It seems only a matter of time before the city itself is renamed. The name "Berkeley" was recommended by a lawyer, Frederick H. Billings, who moved to California during the gold rush and made his fortune not by digging or panning but by initially specializing in land claims before taking on other ventures. The man who started the gold rush (John Sutter) was one of his first clients. We have no direct evidence of racism (he was from Vermont and worked to keep California in the Union), but he was known to be a white cis-male Republican.

Billings was moved by one line in the well-known 1726 poem Verses on the Prospect of planting ARTS and LEARNING in AMERICA by the famous philosopher George Berkeley:

Westward the course of empire takes its way

And thus the city was named for the author of that poem, one that sounds pretty colonialist and supremacyish to anyone who does not read it and thus does not realize it refers to an eventual empire of art, progress and reason. The last three verses:

There shall be sung another golden age, The rise of empire and of arts, The good and great inspiring epic rage, The wisest heads and noblest hearts. Not such as Europe breeds in her decay; Such as she bred when fresh and young, When heav'nly flame did animate her clay, By future poets shall be sung. Westward the course of empire takes its way; The four first acts already past, A fifth shall close the drama with the day; Time’s noblest offspring is the last.

But in an idiocracy, no one knows how to read an actual text. So clearly there is a problem here. And besides, the whole empire metaphor is problematic if not expressly patriarchal. Plus there is overt whiteness in the reference to Europe and the implicit genocide against Native Americans.

It may be fitting that George Berkeley was also the philosopher whose working premise was that the material world does not exist—that only thoughts and ideals are real. Things that are not perceived don’t exist. That is a perfect starting point for a rich post-modernist fantasy life filled with micro-aggressions, systemic (but largely invisible) injustices, and the happy delusion that physical and economic realities have no real purchase on our thoughts or policies and thus we can dispense with "seemingly objective" standards and skills.