Today's San Francisco Chronicle prints a letter to the editor written by five women who graduated from Boalt in 1996. They categorically dispute the portrait of Boalt that Linda Hamilton Krieger is painting with the help of former Boalt student Jennifer Reisch's harassment allegation:

Editor -- We are members of the Boalt Hall Class of 1996. In response to Boalt professor Linda Hamilton Krieger's op-ed (Open Forum, Dec. 13), we dispute her claim that the environment at Boalt Hall is "gender-stratified." In fact, we are not sure what she means. When we attended the law school, Boalt had a female dean, Herma Hill Kay, and we were proud and excited that our class was the first at Boalt Hall in which the women outnumbered the men. Our years at Boalt were a positive, empowering experience and we did not feel harassed, discriminated against, intimidated or in any way impeded because of our gender.

We also question Krieger's suggestion that the university needs to protect graduate students from having relationships with their professors. The women who attend Boalt are not helpless potential victims.

Boalt's student body is comprised of some of the most capable and assertive women -- and men -- of their peer group; they are well-equipped to make their own decisions about their personal lives.

JEANINE LARREA
KYLA HARRIEL OH
IRENE SONG SHARKANSKY
ALLA ZAPRUDSKY
NANCY LEE

And so the pattern continues: in leveraging Reisch's accusations to decry the sexist atmosphere of Boalt, Linda Hamilton Krieger has not only generalized from a single disputed incident to an entire culture, but in so doing she has also falsely set herself out as the Voice of Boalt women. There is a fine irony to this: her arguments about gender discrimination at Boalt are, as the authors of the letter above indicate, sexist in the extreme. They cast women as helpless victims who cannot manage their own lives without the paternalistic (and prurient) intrusions of university administrators. And as such, they could be construed by some as a kind of harassment in their own right.

Two additional details:

These are not the only Boalt women to object to Berkeley's handling of the Dwyer case. Kate Gordon, a 2002 grad who knows Dwyer well, has published a letter of protest in several California papers.

One of the signers of the letter above is the wife of blogger Stefan Sharkansky, who also has some interesting things to say about Krieger's op-ed, about the media's complicity with Reisch and Krieger, and about today's letter.

UPDATE: There are many ways to read the cognitive dissonance that surrounds the Boalt case as it has been spun in the press. Here is one reader's take on the wounded dove rhetoric that Linda Krieger and Reisch's lawyer, Laura Stevens, have made the centerpiece of their case against Dwyer:

The C.V. of the alleged accuser provides, on paper at least, a picture of a strong, intelligent, assertive young woman. Admission to both Yale undergraduate and Boalt Law school is no easy task and I can imagine that the young lady is both bright and ambitious. While at Yale the accuser didn't just join associations supporting abortion rights and women's' issues but attained a leadership role in those groups. You have to be pretty strong-willed to rise to leadership positions in student activist groups. My experience of activist groups (no matter what political persuasion) is that while they are easy to join they are difficult to lead. One needs to be strong-willed, assertive, have a healthy ego, and be prepared to engage in fierce internecine (if petty) battles with those similarly situated. Not the sort of person likely (one would think) to wilt into a passive, helpless wallflower after one clumsy pass or brief sexual encounter by an older professor known to be a flirt. Based solely upon the information you provided about here background, I would have thought that she would have been more likely to respond in anger than suffer a delayed relapse into 1890 Nervous Nellie mode. This thought led me conclude that perhaps Professor's Krieger's description of the accuser's emotional state might be, how should I put it, somewhat exaggerated and intended to promote her own agenda rather than a fair and open investigation into the conduct at issue. Just a possibility I suppose but it would explain the desire to keep the woman away from the press - where an investigation into her personality might reveal not a history of sexual conduct but, rather, a history of establishing a strength of character that would belie the intimation that she wilted at the first sign of male sexual predator conduct. The worst thing that could happen would be for the accuser to come to the forefront and be exposed as a strong assertive person - because that could lead people to conclude she was not nearly as damaged as Professor Krieger contends. Portraying the 'victim' as a helpless emotional wreck - who must be left alone (and free from scrutiny) allows the Professor to keep her eye on the political prize/agenda - but not necessarily on the facts.