Monday, January 06, 2003

The LA Times has an article about Jennifer Reisch's demands against the Berkeley law school. She is the one who went drinking with the Dean, and then complained about it a couple of years later. Her spokesman is Laura Stevens.
Could Boalt Hall be as bad as Stevens claims? More than 50% of its students these days are women, the female law students have their own lounge (the men don't), and UC Berkeley has a Title IX officer whose job it is to handle complaints exactly like the one that Stevens' client alleges. The officer also deals with administrative follow-up procedures, which is how it came about that Dwyer resigned.

Stevens, however, wants more: for the law school to set up a comprehensive sexual-harassment training program to teach students, professors and administrators how to create an "environment" in which no female student would ever have to suffer from unwanted male attention. The program would entail not only re-education, but a law-school speech code that would forbid even the cracking of jokes that "make women into meat," as Stevens puts it. It seems that Dwyer had a reputation for "frequently staring at women's bodies" and making them "feel uncomfortable" (Stevens' words), and that once, at least according to Stevens, his hand brushed against a young woman's thigh while he paid her a personal compliment.

"He's a sexual predator," charges Stevens. More evidence of his alleged predation: Dwyer, who had taught environmental law at Boalt for 16 years before becoming dean in July 2000, had dated students and even married a former student. Stevens contends that if Boalt's faculty and administrators had had the kind of training that she now demands, they would never have hired him as dean in the first place.

I think that Reisch is a nutcase.

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