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Berkeley Law professor explains how to ‘secretly enact racial discrimination’, says he’ll deny it if caught: video

June 30, 2023 | | Print Article

A video has emerged of a California university dean admitting to perpetrating racial discrimination in faculty hiring despite that being illegal.

It’s not clear when the video was recorded, but what’s known is it features U.C. Berkeley School of Law dean Erwin Chemerinsky speaking to students about what he describes as “unstated affirmative action.”

Listen:

“What I mean by unstated affirmative action is what if the college or university doesn’t tell anybody, doesn’t make any public statements. I’ll give you an example from our law school, but if ever I’m deposed, I’m going to deny I said this to you. When we do faculty hiring, we’re quite conscious that diversity is important to us,” he says in the video.

“But I’m very careful when we have a faculty appointments meeting, anytime somebody says we should really prefer this candidate or this candidate because this person would add diversity, I say don’t say that. You can think it, you can vote it, but our discussions are not privileged, so don’t ever articulate that that’s what you’re doing,” he continues.

He concludes by admitting that this illegal trick “works more easily with regard to faculty hiring” than it does “with regard to student admissions.”

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The video has gone viral amid the Supreme Court’s ruling Thursday to gut affirmative action. In going viral, it’s prompted massive outrage, with critics accusing Chemerinsky of being a rabid racist and demanding he is fired and deposed.

Look:

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Chemerinsky is no stranger to controversy. Back in 2021, he penned an op-ed accusing the Supreme Court’s conservative justices of being “partisan hacks.”

“Chemerinsky was responding to Justice Amy Coney Barrett recently saying that ‘Judicial philosophies are not the same as political parties’ and insist[ing] that the Court ‘is not comprised of a bunch of partisan hacks,'” legal scholar Jonathan Turley reported at the time.

In the op-ed, he wrote the following: “Barrett’s protest against the justices being seen as ‘partisan hacks’ rings hollow when that is what they have become. And it is risible to say that ‘judicial philosophies are not the same as political parties.’ I would challenge her to give a single instance where the conservative justices on the court took positions that were at odds with the views of the Republican Party.”

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The irony is that the court’s conservative justices have repeatedly sided against the Republican Party. NPR admitted as much in 2020.

“The recently concluded Supreme Court term was remarkable for many reasons. But for SCOTUS geeks who love numbers, it’s worth looking at how the conservatives often split among themselves, while the liberal justices, understanding that they are playing defense, stuck together far more often, refusing to dilute the outcome of their victories by disagreeing with one another,” the site reported.

Conservatives say this happens because conservative justices make decisions based on constitutional principles, whereas leftist judges make decisions based on politics.

Dovetailing back to Chemerinsky, he dropped a new column this week bemoaning the high court’s decision to gut affirmative action.

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The piece was ratioed as angrily as his remarks about faculty hiring.

Look:

Vivek Saxena
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