Well, the University is a state of California institution and is an innocent party here.

Very true. It’s the aged “hippies” who run the city. The University is very much a separate institution, although, like any university, town and gown influence one another. My favorite story about just how separate the two are is that of the closing of the California Schools for the Deaf and Blind in 1980, when it was declared seismically unsafe. Cal eventually took it over and used it for student housing, allegedly without any retrofitting, which they were able to do as a state institution. That’s closer to Huey Long than Huey Newton.

By the way, anyone visiting S.F. should stroll outside Harry Aleo’s storefront in Noe Valley. “Most 24th Street habitués know him only from his storefront window, where for years they have viewed his collection of Republican memorabilia, American flags, and anti-Clinton political cartoons with a mixture of curiosity and disdain.” There’s even a welcome sign for conservatives flummoxed with the excessiveness of the “kooks” and “liberals.” He doesn’t sell anything out of it, but it’s nice to see.

calbear on February 1, 2008 at 3:09 PM

Your stance is like saying the New York Times is perfectly unbiased and innocent and it’s all the fault of the writers.

No, it’s like saying that the businessmen who walk past 620 Eighth Avenue every day are not responsible for its content. Because they’re not.

U.C. Berkeley is well known for the ideology that it represents and students are there for that very reason.

No, they’re there because it’s affordable, and because it is among the best teaching schools and perhaps the best research school in the nation, if not the world. Either it or Stanford (I forget which — they’re pretty close) has more highly-ranked departments than any other school. Many people go to a school to reflect their educational goals, not to reinforce some silly notion of “identity” or “ideology.”

Care to take a guess at who made this statement?

I really don’t think it’s a “wacko” statement. But I’m probably more pro-immigration than you are. Every generation, nativists worry about how the immigrant threat is going to fundamentally change America’s WASP heritage, but I think we’re better for the Irish, Jewish, Scottish, German, and Russian migrants, and we’ll likely be better – in the long run – for the Mexicans, too, if we handle the situation correctly (increasing legal immigration and clamping down on illegal immigration). Birgeneau merely wants those who never decided to break a law (who were involuntarily smuggled by their parents) to be able to realize the American dream rather than be stuck between being unable to do anything legally in America and being unable to do anything culturally/linguistically in Mexico. To you, that’s amnesty. However, even outside of Berkeley, there’s a lot of sympathy for this particular view.

Birgeneau, incidentally, is also an immigrant.

calbear on February 1, 2008 at 5:42 PM

Go ahead and conveniently leave out the “illegal” portion of that phrase

Um, if you had read what I wrote, I called for “increasing legal immigration and clamping down on illegal immigration.” You can pretend that I didn’t say that, but it won’t make it so.

I did not call you a nativist. I said that every generation has nativists who fret about immigration in general, whether legal or illegal. But I think there’s plenty of middle ground between “deport ‘em all” and “anyone with $5000 gets to stay.”

Anyway, as Congress showed, there are plenty of people who are conservative on most issues that don’t fall in line with the base on this topic, so showing that the head of Cal agreed with one small part of immigrant reform really doesn’t show that the school as a whole is all that liberal, let alone that it “is a giant socialist indoctrination program.” (Besides, don’t socialists generally prefer the tightest borders possible?)

calbear on February 1, 2008 at 6:38 PM