UC Berkeley law dean Erwin Chemerinsky at it again

Erwin Chemerinsky, the dean of the UC-Berkeley law school, has made some ridiculous statements, including once uttering “the worst analogy in the long and storied history of analogies.”  But it’s not just that some of his statements are goofy—most people slip up from time to time, and the more a person talks the more opportunities he will have to make nonsensical gaffs.  The problem is that, in the Dean’s case, he often utters nonsense when advancing an agenda.  And when there’s an agenda driving the statements, we should be less tolerant of the nonsense. 

For example, the Dean’s professional life was, until very recently, arguably driven by the US News (USN) law school rankings system.  He made a lot of money launching a brand-new law school, UC Irvine, that “seemed to have the express purpose of gaming the U.S. News methodology and jump-starting a ‘top’ law school.”  And when the school debuted at USN #30 instead of USN #20 as planned, the Dean said, “We will be constantly working on moving up.”  But he then left UC Irvine to go to his current job at UC Berkeley, with the goal of getting that school back into the USN top 10 and, hopefully, into the USN top 5.

All is well and good with that; you can measure success by the USN rankings, if you want.  But then, a mere five years after plotting Berkeley’s ascension to USN glory, the political winds toward USN had shifted.  In the law school world, that means that Yale criticized the USN’s methodology.  When Yale sneezes, Yale wannabes like Berkeley catch a cold, so Dean Chemerinsky did an about-face.  Suddenly, he proclaimed that the USN ranking system, which was the very foundation of his recent professional life, is “profoundly inconsistent with our values and public mission.”

What?!  If you are really serious, then how did you not realize that when you were collecting huge salaries for the specific purpose of climbing the USN rankings at two different schools?  You can’t just utter nonsense and expect people to unquestioningly swallow it.

Now, the Dean is in the hot seat again.  This time, as the College Fix and others have reported, when lecturing to a law school class about “diversity,” he told the students about “unstated affirmative action.”  The clip seems to show him explaining that a school can do affirmative action, but you just can’t say that you’re doing affirmative action.  (Watch the clip for yourself and decide.)  He then told the students that, if he’s ever deposed, he would deny that he said these things.

His claim that he would lie under oath has created quite an uproar, which often masks the troubling, underlying claim that he said he would deny.  In any case, the Dean has since said he was joking about the lying part, and I, for one, believe him.  Many law school professors live for that joke-affirming chuckle from their captive audience, the students.  I believe that’s what this goofball was going for when he said he’d lie at a deposition if questioned about what he just said.

The problem, from UC Berkeley’s perspective, is not the joke about lying.  The problem is that he just said the quiet part out loud.  Someone should explain to the Dean that, even if no one had been recording his lecture, talking about the “unstated” part of your employer’s affirmative action policy in a full lecture hall means that it’s no longer “unstated.”  Or, when you say the quiet part out loud, it’s no longer quiet. 

Maybe it’s time that UC Berkeley puts a lid on this guy, for the school’s sake.  Maybe the school could hire Dean Martin from Grand Lakes University to replace him.  Or, to take it a step further, maybe it could use its “unstated affirmative action” practices when selecting his replacement.  The school will have to decide which course is consistent with its recently discovered “values and public mission.”