Today's Daily Journal (subscribers only) reports that Berkeley's Chancellor Berdahl gave the Boalt Hall law faculty a "talking-to about sexual harassment and gender parity" in a private meeting held on December 6. The meeting was closed, but those members of the faculty who were willing to speak to the Daily Journal's reporter about it agreed that Berdahl's subject was gender imbalance at Boalt, and that his talk centered around the premise that those in power tend to perpetuate social injustice by hiring those who are like themselves. The message was not lost on the Boalt faculty, eleven of whose fifty-three members are women. According to one Boalt professor, "It was the subtle academic equivalent of reading the riot act. ... He was nicely telling us we're a bunch of chowderheads. The male faculty was quite taken aback. They did see it as pointed at them."

Berdahl's appearance at Boalt is part of a larger effort to contain and control the fallout from Jennifer Reisch's allegation that former dean John Dwyer sexually harassed her. Berdahl also intends to be personally involved in the search for a new dean (usually the Chancellor just rubberstamps a decision made by the law school) and has hired employment law expert Stephen Hirschfeld, who has co-authored the books Stopping Sexual Harassment In The Workplace: An Employer's Guide and Conducting An Effective Internal Investigation, to review Boalt's policies on sexual harassment.

Subjecting an elite law faculty to an impromptu seminar on gender discrimination may seem to be a strangely excessive and off-topic response to a single set of highly problematic and belated allegations. But when one considers Berdahl's own career history, it makes more sense. Berdahl has served on the American Council on Education's Commission on Women in Higher Education. He has also been a staunch defender of race preferences and "diversity." Since coming to Berkeley in 1997, he has promoted attempts to work around Proposition 209 by expanding admissions criteria. Berdahl was President of UT Austin before he came to Berkeley. There, he was the defendant in the now famous Hopwood v. Texas case in which rejected white law school applicants successfully challenged the law school's affirmative action policies. Berdahl, in other words, has been burned by discrimination lawsuits before. He's an expert on the academic glass ceiling. And he is not about to let another badly behaved law school drag his university's name through the mud--particularly when this time he appears to agree with the contention that the school is a hotbed of discrimination.

In leaping from allegation to policy review and revision, Berdahl is doing all the things Jennifer Reish wants him to do. The Daily Journal reports that Reisch and her lawyer, Laura Stevens, "applaud" his actions. Stevens, who has a tendency to reveal just a little bit too much to an inquisitive media, freely acknowledges that Reisch "hopes to force changes at the school." When a lawyer feels comfortable coming right out and saying that her client's harassment accusation is part of a larger political campaign, we know she thinks she's got the system in her pocket. Certainly she seems to have Berdahl where she wants him.

UPDATE: A reader writes:

Interesting at Boalt how fast it has all moved past the guilt or innocence of a single faculty member (who was never actually charged with anything) to the collective guilt of the entire male faculty, none of whom have (presumably) done anything. Nevertheless, in true Stalinist fashion, this is going to be used as a pretext for punitive measures against them as a group, including the now-usual re-reducation and a de facto hiring and promotion freeze of male faculty. What's even worse is the supine way this is all being accepted as inevitable.