According to an article in today’s Contra Costa Times, the University of California at Berkeley has created a new institute, under the leadership of Boalt Hall (the UC Berkeley law school) Dean Christopher Edley.
Run by the Boalt Hall law school, the Chief Justice Earl Warren Institute on Race, Ethnicity and Diversity will take on one of the most contentious issues in higher education: whether race should be used as a factor in college admissions.
The institute, to be announced Monday, also will study a broad range of other subjects, including the upcoming reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act and civil rights in K-12 schools. It will be funded mainly through alumni donations and grants.
A written description of the new institute provided to the Times by the law school says the center will research “the legal limits on aggressive efforts to promote inclusion in higher education” and an “agenda to inform future public consideration of revisions or repeal” of Prop. 209.
Dean Edley, as I wrote here, is a former Harvard law school professor,
former White House aide, co-author of President Clinton’s “mend it, don’t end it” review of affirmative action policies, advisor to Clinton’s race commission, fervent advocate of racial preferences (he described Stephan and Abigail Thernstrom’s America in Black and White as “a crime against humanity”), and advisor to the Gore campaign.
It is worth noting, as Ward Connerly is quoted observing, that Proposition 209 “is no longer a proposition, this is the Constitution.”
Constitutions, of course, can be challenged and changed, as the enactment of Proposition 209 proved. Dean Edley’s new project suggests that George Wallace would have been smarter to set up a similar Institute to challenge Brown rather than flamboyantly vowing to stand in the schoolhouse door, although I suspect such an effort would have no more successful than Dean Edley’s will be. As Sharon Browne, an attorney with the Pacific Legal Foundation who has successfully defended Proposition 209 against past challenges, put it, UC Berkeley is “blowing smoke.”
Boalt Hall’s rallying cry:
“Constitution? We don’t need no stinkin’ Constitution!”