Berkeley: We don't practice what we preach

Everyone knows that "Berzerkely" AKA Berkeley is a very liberal, very wacko university.

They actually have departments in Buddhist Studies, Celtic Studies, Folklore, and Gay Studies aka Queer Studies (honestly!), among other things.

Berkeley is all things liberal. Take this article from 2002, for example.

SINCE 9-11 the American public – and not just long suffering conservative college students -- has increasingly aware of the oppressive presence of the academic left. Recently attention was drawn to one of the basic freshmen reading courses required at UC Berkeley, which is titled "The Politics and Poetics of Palestinian Resistance" and is taught by English instructor Snehal Shingavi. The course description concludes with the following caveat: "Conservative thinkers are encouraged to seek other sections." The conversion of the once liberal university into a political base for the radical left has been proceeding apace for many years. Recently, voices have arisen to challenge the campus totalitarians, both from within the academy and without. Hoping to quash the voices of dissent inside, the left has become both bolder and heavier handed.

U.C. Berkeley postures as a haven of free speech and tolerance, but like other so-called liberal campuses across the nation, it is far from that. The unstated rule in effect on the campus is that one is free to speak and to be as extreme as one wishes, but only so long as one speaks from the left. When the student newspaper, the Daily Californian, endorsed Ward Connerly’s statewide Proposition 209, which banned racial preferences in California, the entire press run of over 23,000 copies was stolen. Nobody was punished for the criminal act. More recently, the Daily Cal had its press run stolen twice—once for running David Horowitz’s advertisement "10 Reasons why Reparations for Slavery Are A Bad Idea -- And Racist Too," and again for running an ad by the Ayn Rand Institute calling for a United States attack on Iran.

This year, the California Patriot, a monthly conservative magazine, had all 4,000 issues stolen due to an article critical of the separatist Chicano group MEChA, whose radical agenda is "self-determination" for La Raza (the "race") meaning that Mexico should reclaim the Southwest. This was the agenda of Germany, exposed in the famous Zimmerman memorandum that provoked America’s entry into the First World War. MEChA which is funded by university fees and poses as a "civil rights" group.

Those are just a few examples of liberal activism at Berkeley.

The biggest issue, though, is that Berkeley doesn't practice what it preaches. This is evidenced by the fact that the student newspapers mentioned above, conservative newspapers, are stolen. What happened to free speech?

Now we have an article from the AP entitled Blacks Still a Minority at UC Berkeley.

BERKELEY, Calif. - This fall's incoming class of 4,000 students at the University of California, Berkeley is expected to include just 129 black freshmen, a disturbing trend to leaders of the socially progressive and academically elite school.

"There are very talented people out there, I believe, who for a whole variety of reasons end up not coming to Berkeley, or to another of the flagship campuses in the UC system," said Chancellor Robert Birgeneau.

Perhaps those reasons include the fact that black students don't want to attend a college where they are only seen and valued for the fact that they are black. Perhaps they prefer to attend universities where they are valued for their personalities and their abilities. Perhaps Liberals should stop equating being black with being liberal.

But Ward Connerly, the former UC regent who chaired the Proposition 209 campaign, bristled at the idea that there's a problem with race-blind policies.

"I just don't understand why certain people have gotten themselves all worked up about who gets to go to Berkeley and UCLA as if that's the only path to a successful life in California, because it is not and the evidence is abundant that it is not," he said.

Frankly, a university that seems to espouse rights to every freedom but being Conservative ought not be so uptight about where students decide to go or not to go. What about freedom of choice?