‘Plainly Wrong’: Berkeley Law Dean Accused of Violating Settlement Agreement Over Anti-Semitic Discrimination
Plus, Columbia's socialist students vow to 'liaise' with banned 'death to America' group, and Nicholas Eberstadt assesses the legacy of Paul Ehrlich
The dean of Berkeley Law is facing blowback from a Jewish advocacy group that says he is undermining a newly finalized legal settlement, reports the Free Beacon‘s Jessica Schwalb. The Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law announced the agreement on Thursday that supposedly resolved its lawsuit against Berkeley Law over student organizations that banned Zionist speakers. The settlement stipulates that student groups cannot include “prohibitions on speakers” in their bylaws, including those with a Zionist viewpoint.
Shortly after the settlement announcement, however, law school dean Erwin Chemerinsky told students in an email obtained by the Free Beacon that while bylaws must change, student groups can nonetheless maintain restrictions on speakers. “Simply put,” Chemerinsky wrote, “student organizations may continue to have the same policies that they have adopted restricting who they will invite to speak, but those policies cannot be contained within their Bylaws.”
Chemerinsky’s interpretation drew a sharp rebuke from the Brandeis Center. Attorney Paul Eckles, who led the case, told the Free Beacon the dean’s guidance is “plainly wrong” and inconsistent with the language and intent of the agreement. “The whole purpose of the agreement is to make clear that anti-Zionism can be and is often used as a pretext for discrimination,” Eckles said. “Dean Chemerinsky’s email is wrong, and we will be addressing the issue with the university.”
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Columbia University’s Young Democratic Socialists of America chapter says it’s working “to plan actions and liaise with Columbia University Apartheid Divest,” the student group banned by the university in 2024 and that most recently popped up to wish “death to America” after President Donald Trump decapitated the Iranian regime late last month. That’s notable, our Jessica Costescu reports, because Columbia has a “zero tolerance” policy against university-recognized student groups like YDSA from working with CUAD. The school has also said that no student groups are in violation of the policy.
YDSA’s official Columbia webpage contradicts that claim. It includes a link to an interest form that says the group coordinates with banned “leftist groups” like Students for Justice in Palestine to “plan actions and liaise with Columbia University Apartheid Divest.” Though the form says it’s for the 2024-2025 school year, YDSA included a link to it in a more recent Instagram post from August, after that school year had concluded.
“Any banned groups YDSA works with can reap the benefits of YDSA’s status as a recognized student group, such as access to campus space and funding,” Costescu notes. The socialist group’s affiliations with CUAD and SJP, then, could result in the loss of those benefits, as Columbia acknowledged in a statement to the Free Beacon, indicating that it is “investigating reports that this student group violated our policy.”
“Violations of the Zero Tolerance policy may result in derecognition, loss of funding or access to University resources, or other consequences consistent with University policies,” a Columbia spokesman said.
Paul Ehrlich, the apostle of population control, died earlier this month at the age of 93. His 1968 bestseller The Population Bomb made him a household name at the age of 36, and he was showered with awards from the likes of the left-wing MacArthur Foundation thereafter. “No less noteworthy than the fame and fortune he achieved,” the American Enterprise Institute’s Nicholas Eberstadt writes in the Free Beacon, “was how shockingly, profoundly, and consistently wrong biologist Ehrlich was in predictions he made about human beings.” Take The Population Bomb‘s opening prophecy, which asserted that “hundreds of millions of people” were going to “starve to death” in the 1970s, prompting a “substantial increase in the world death rate.” Eberstadt writes:
All these predictions were not just wrong: They were laugh-out-loud wrong, almost the precise opposite of what would actually occur over the following decades and generations.
There were no mass famines in the 1970s, nor have there been any since. Deadly hunger crises in our era are caused by killer governments (Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge; Ethiopia’s Derg; North Korea’s “Dear Leader”), never by Ehrlich’s “population overshoot.” But that is just a foretaste of how completely and utterly wrong Ehrlich got humanity’s future.
In the decades since The Population Bomb, human numbers have more than doubled—from about 3.6 billion in 1968 to around 8.2 billion today. Yet in spite of the scale and the tempo of this unprecedented surge of humanity, the world and all its regions are dramatically, incontestably more affluent today. And despite decidedly more rapid population growth in poorer countries over the interim, global per capita GDP was over two-and-a-half times higher in 2024 than in 1968, according to World Bank estimates.
As the post-Cold War world grew ever more obviously prosperous, as birth rates around the globe steadily declined, and as depopulation began to emerge in one country after another, the moral panic about “overpopulation” subsided. Opinion about the “population crisis” changed. Some former enthusiasts for “population control” had second thoughts. Some even had regrets about the human harm the moral panic had caused its victims.
Not so Paul Ehrlich. To the very end, the insect man regarded human beings as an infestation on the face of the earth.
READ MORE: Insect-ifying Humanity: The Paul Ehrlich Legacy
Elsewhere:
Donald Trump delivered an ultimatum to Iran on Saturday: Open the Strait of Hormuz within 48 hours or the United States will “obliterate” Iranian power plants, “STARTING WITH THE BIGGEST ONE FIRST.”
Trump’s threat followed an Iranian missile that targeted the U.S.-U.K. Diego Garcia military base located 2,500 miles away from Tehran—a distance Iran’s leaders swore they could not reach before Trump launched Operation Epic Fury. The attack, though unsuccessful, “was Iran’s first-ever use of intermediate-range ballistic missiles, ones that fly far enough to hit much of Europe,” the Wall Street Journal reported. “The Trump administration had cited Iran’s work on missiles that could one day carry nuclear weapons to the U.S. among its reasons for going to war.”
The Trump administration is building hundreds of miles of fresh border wall, and the Washington Post is concerned that the construction could “threaten endangered species” and “cut off access to sacred Indigenous and archaeological sites.”
A cadre of left-wing radicals like streamer Hasan Piker and Ilhan Omar’s daughter, Isra Hirsi, are on a voyage to communist Cuba, where they’re reportedly staying in a 5-star hotel, the Gran Hotel Bristol Meliá, which has maintained power as the rest of the country suffers from a blackout.
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