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Gary Blasi
By 1991, Los
Angeles attorney Gary Blasi had compiled an enviable record. He
was a 20-year veteran of the activist left,
was deeply engaged in questions of public policy, and, despite his lack
of
formal schooling in law, had risen to a top legal position. The
world looked at Blasi and saw all these things.
But when UCLA squinted just so, they saw something different: golden
material for a new law professor. That year, UCLA finally consummated its academic crush and hired Blasi away from his preeminent position with the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles. While it’s inevitable that almost any large organization will eventually hire a train-wreck candidate by accident, UCLA’s employment offer was no mistake. A thorough review of Blasi’s record, both before and after his arrival, confirms that UCLA’s hiring committee knew exactly what they were getting. Which was, of course, the entire activist radical package. Blasi is a hardcore partisan for affirmative action, an ACLU stalwart, a union-studies apologist, and a long-time opponent of foreign military engagements in virtually any form. Arising in particular from his work with the Legal Aid Society, Blasi is a fierce advocate for the welfare state and ever-increasing rights for the homeless. Looking at Gary Blasi’s history helps in large part to explain UCLA Law’s perverse desire to hire Blasi. Part of the evident attraction was the naughty thrill of employing as a professor someone who had never taken a single class in a law school himself. Blasi had in fact “studied the law,” a term for self-directed legal study, overseen by an accredited attorney, in preparation for his state bar exam. This rarely-utilized method of preparation is allowed in a handful of states, including California. In its own way, that Blasi still passed the California bar exam is arguably more remarkable than doing so after three years in a normal law school. While Blasi’s hire presented a serious question of credibility, the relevant decision-makers evidently felt that his twenty years in political advocacy was sufficient asphalt to fill his potholed resume.
There is a certain amount of irony to be found in Blasi’s self-contradictory statements, some of which occur within the same speech. At a November 2003 Berkeley Law conference, Blasi delivered the sweeping warning: “Beware of people who appear to have it all figured out.” Blasi then immediately contradicted his warning by presenting an all-encompassing theory on the supposed troubles that beset left-wing jurisprudence. “The wealthy and the right wing have captured the initiative in this country,” Blasi moaned, because “they have cleverly figured out how to convert being against something into a positive vision.” In Blasi’s view, this masquerade means only “freedom for the wealthy and freedom for the lucky.” Expanding on this dark vision, Blasi appealed to the sainted memory of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, urging a restoration of FDR’s “four freedoms.” Apparently unaware of the vision of the Founding Fathers or a plain reading of the Constitution, Blasi asked, “Isn’t there more freedom than freedom from the government?” Blasi then closed his remarks with the self-righteous (and, considering his preliminary disclaimer, self-contradictory) statement, “We have one advantage I think in this dialogue, and that is that the message that we have is the truth” [sic]. Disregarding his flaky views and misread history, one notes in particular Blasi’s use of a conspiratorial “we.” Assuming that Blasi is not using ‘we’ in the royal sense, one can only conclude that he viewed his audience as a politically monolithic shoulder on which to cry. Such an academic conference, characterized by Blasi’s odious preaching to the choir, is neither educational, nor worthy of a UCLA professor. But it’s also an entirely typical occurrence, at Berkeley or elsewhere. Despite appearances to the contrary, Blasi did not cease his career of legal and political advocacy at the time that he became a UCLA professor. During his 20 years in the deceptively named field of public interest, Blasi had earned for himself a preeminent role in media and in activist circles. While it would have taken a concerted effort to set that work aside, Blasi did not even make an attempt. In truth, there was little pushing him to do so. His new UCLA position virtually begged him to use UCLA’s good name, and the labor of idealistic young students, to his own partisan ends – all under the banner of ‘public interest’ law, of course. While his early history at UCLA is not immediately available, current sources indicate that Blasi now exclusively teaches clinical and public interest courses. Clinical courses, which involve students doing real legal work under the professor’s supervision, give Blasi the greatest latitude for directing research and advocacy at targets of his choosing. In 1999, Blasi and twelve students from his “Law 406: Public Policy Advocacy” course undertook five long months of research that culminated in the well-known report, “Who is Accountable to Our Schoolchildren?: Conditions in California Public Schools at the Beginning of the Millennium.” The report painted a distressingly portrait of the crumbling physical plant of many California K-12 schools. The report also revealed legal research confirming that few if any laws specifically protected the students attending these substandard schools. There is no doubt that most if not all of the charges were true. But Blasi, par for his politics, was quick to blame those heartless government-questioning conservatives for the historical decline in per-capita student spending. Setting aside the debate of who to blame, or how to solve the problem, there is another important question. Out of California’s myriad problems, why did Blasi choose the issue of educational access? One clue comes in identifying what group or individual got the greatest mileage out of the report. As it turns out, the report was the catalyst for a major ACLU lawsuit, Williams vs. State of California, which resulted in a new set of processes for reporting and correcting problems at state schools. For producing such rich grist for the ACLU’s mills, the group honored Blasi and his students at the ACLU’s 39th Annual Garden Party on June 10, 2001. Several months later, Blasi won the ACLU’s 2002 “Distinguished Professor Award” at an awards ceremony in the Millennium Biltmore Hotel. Unreported through all this hoopla (at least until later) was that Blasi was spurred into this investigation by an ACLU attorney looking for legal advice on the case of a Northern California school that was not properly heated. This raises an ethical question: should a state employee (like a UCLA professor) be acting as an unpaid researcher for a partisan organization with its own multi-million dollar budget? And another important question: why was an ACLU lawyer calling Blasi in the first place? The answer, at least in part, is that Blasi, during his time with the Legal Aid Society, had engineered a coalition of six public-interest law groups under the name “The Homeless Litigation Team.” One of the six participating organizations was none other than the ACLU. In light of these revelations, Blasi’s choice of topics, and the subsequent manner in which the research was used, takes on the appearance of ACLU custom ordering research courtesy of the student workforce commanded by an old progressive crony. Best of all, from the perspective of the ACLU is that the research report cost them nothing, and carried the seemingly independent academic imprimatur of UCLA. Another relevant question for UCLA is whether Blasi’s clinical program actually encourages, or even tolerates, advocacy work on issues outside of his narrow radical agenda. Given Blasi’s history, there are serious questions whether students could muster his support or even approval for working on issues like land rights, reverse racism, or 2nd Amendment policy. A look at Blasi’s publicly-recorded support for Rooseveltian statism, and his sweeping claim that only liberal views are backed by truth, does nothing to dispel such reasonable concerns. In his specific clinical work, Blasi’s conception of ‘public interest’ appears to be limited to legal action that preserves, expands, or creates (via judicial fiat) welfare-state programs. While a few other schools have adopted this narrow conception of the field, one wonders whether this is the kind of “leadership” for which Chancellor Albert Carnesale would like UCLA to be known.
As Blasi’s
questionable work would suggest, he is no stranger to politicized
academics. Besides operating his UCLA
Law class as a de facto research arm of radical legal groups like the
ACLU,
Blasi is also the associate director of the UCLA Institute
for Industrial
Relations. Founded after World War II
at a time when unions
were still a major
political and economic force, the Institute oversees, among other
entitites,
Kent Wong’s Center for Labor Research and Education.
In 2001, the California Legislature completed
a rather convoluted bureaucratic restructuring that resulted in a new
beast
known as the UC Institute for Labor and Employment.
Not three years later however, the ILE was
under fire for its direct, vociferous, and unrelenting promotion of
pro-union
ideology and research. In December 2003, Schwarzenegger finally pulled the trigger and eliminated the ILE’s budget (though it was saved for a time by a frantic reshuffling of UC funds). Much keening and wailing ensued, not the least of which was Gary Blasi’s. Defending the entire enterprise – the IIR, the ILE, and the CLRE, Blasi wrote of the “amazing work” being done despite the budgetary uncertainty. Blasi trumpeted “an undergraduate interdisciplinary program in labor and workplace studies, course offerings like “Work, Labor and Social Justice in the United States,” and best yet, advertised the ILE’s scheduled October “gathering of immigrant workers and labor unions.” All this and Blasi hadn’t even mentioned the labor center’s Summer Internship Program, which in the past had helped unionize janitorial workers and campaigned for a proposition that would have imposed a ‘living-wage’ ordinance in nearby Santa Monica. Admittedly, the piece was written for the readers of UCLA Today, a reliably sympathetic audience. Nevertheless, one wonders how Blasi figured he would win any favor with Sacramento decision-makers when the all the achievements he trumpeted were politically extremist. Academic courses pushing the totalitarian “Social Justice” philosophy, or modern-day cotillions bringing together ‘immigrants’ (read, illegal immigrants) with the labor organizers trying to unionize them, were not activities which would take any heat off the ILE. Many of Blasi’s other public comments during the fight indicated a complete inability to understand his opponents’ arguments; that, or a complete confidence that his side would prevail. In a long article in the May 23, 2005 Daily Bruin, Blasi claimed that any cuts in the labor center’s budget would be a disaster for Chancellor Carnesale’s vaunted “UCLA in LA” initiative. To Blasi’s way of thinking, “here [at the UCLA Downtown Labor Center], next to MacArthur Park, the university looks a lot more like UCLA and less like UC Westwood.” It’s a silly statement, of course. If all of UCLA were located near MacArthur Park (in Blasi’s apparent view, a much more autentico location), then Westwood residents could just as easily mock the campus as UC MacArthur Park. Certain ignorant people will always perceive geographic distance as a personal affront; trying to fight this is a fool’s errand. Then again, Blasi’s statement doesn’t make a logical complaint, only a clumsy dig at Westwood’s perceived wealth. If UCLA doesn’t want to be perceived as floating in a wealthy bubble, Blasi essentially says, it must venture into the comunidad and be among the working people. If awkwardly coded ethnic and economic appeals weren’t enough, Blasi also issued a number of unintentionally hilarious defenses of the Labor Center. Blasi complained to the Contra Costa Times on August 7, 2005 that the center “had adopted what I thought was a lower profile,” and claimed, “A lot of the work we do has nothing to do with unions.” In his defense to the Daily Bruin, Blasi stated, “We’re not really in the business of supporting or opposing unions; we're in the business of researching and doing education about what the truth is. [The labor center has] been incorrectly portrayed as just a part of the university that provides a service to unions. The reality is that we do research and education on issues that affect working people, including people in unions, of course, but also including other people.” If the Bruin article were being written for a sitcom, the notation “Cue laugh track” would have followed Blasi’s quote. Clearly flailing, Blasi blasted the budgetary elimination as an “attack,” and noted gloomily that if it succeeded, it would “establish a precedent wherein any politician, whether Democrat or Republican, can decide that they don’t like a whole area of research at the university and take steps to end it. Today it may be labor studies, next time it may AIDS research or Chicano studies.” Blasi here is clearly trying to evoke the famous declamation of Pastor Martin Niemuller: “First they came for Communists, and I did not speak up because I was not a Communist…”. Unfortunately, the fact that the ILE was targeted for elimination didn’t actually make it a martyr. Moreover, it wouldn’t exactly be a shame if Chicano Studies were eliminated, along with a few other rubbish multi-cult majors. Along with his narrow conception of public interest law and labor studies, Blasi is predictably narrow-minded on the concept of race and diversity. Participating in 1999 UCLA Law school protests (which involved, per UCLA standard, a walkout by both students and professors), Blasi was virtually a one-man quote machine. Blasi complained to the Los Angeles Times, “The real world has people of color in it. You can’t teach in a segregated atmosphere – it just can’t be done.” Worse yet, he claimed, was UCLA’s slavish devotion to the Law School Admissions Test. While conceding in the October 22, 1999 Times that the LSAT “predicts first-year grades,” Blasi complained that it fails to tell an admissions director “whether you’ll be a good trial lawyer like Johnnie Cochran.” Sigh. If only there were such a test to identify the future Johnny Cochrans. But on a more serious note, what would Blasi have the law school use for making its admissions decisions? No doubt it would involve vastly greater numbers of minority entrants (you know, to ward off the phantasm of ‘resegregation’), which in turn would require not only junking the LSAT, but essentially every other standardized test. Of course, that’s a small price to pay if in so doing we save the world. Blasi complained to the Daily Bruin (also covering the 1999 protest), “The lack of diversity certainly harms the people who applied to the law school but did not get in. But it also harms every white or Asian American student who is here because their education is without the benefit of the perspectives of those now absent students once brought to classroom discussions.” Blasi’s view, bemoaning the drop in Latino and black admissions that followed the long-delayed elimination of affirmative action, is simply a regurgitation of the same ridiculous argument made by so many UCLA professors and students. In their view, black and Latino UCLA students brought something valuable to the classroom, a something that white or Asian students were genetically unable to contribute. This je ne sais quoi is never actually quantified, mainly because it would either devolve into nasty racial stereotyping (uniformly poor black students could teach uniformly rich whites about what it’s like to be poor) or into vague absurdity (black students can tell white students what it “feels like” to be black). As it happens, Blasi agrees with the former idea. Blacks are uniformly poor, poorly educated, and poorly treated. Proof of this comes in a quick review of the website JustSchoolsComplaints.org (a recent project of Blasi and his students). The website provides, among other things, a standardized complaint form for parents and other concerned parties to use in enforcing (drum roll please) the reforms secured by the ACLU in the Williams case. That’s right, the very case that the research by Blasi and his students helped spark in the first place. The complaint form (and by extension, Blasi himself) lays out a narrow us vs. them, victims-and-oppressors conception of race relations. One section titled “What can you complain about?” states, “discrimination may be shown if students in schools serving mostly Latino students have many fewer learning opportunities than schools serving mostly White students.” Those blasted Whites! Always with the better schools! That slam on whites (as if black and Latino students don’t attend those same white-majority schools) is repeated almost verbatim in the “Questions and Answers about Discrimination” section. In response to the common question, “Can you give an example of discrimination about things other than “Williams Complaints?” the form notes, “One example might be if a student in a school with mostly African American students has fewer chances to enroll in advanced courses than students in a school where most of the students are White.” Apparently Blasi didn’t trust the form’s users to get his ideological message if it was only given once. So he was happy to say it again: whites have it better than you. Is UCLA better for having brought Gary Blasi on board in 1991? The answer, most assuredly, is no. If UCLA wanted a reflexive liberal or radical view on every political issue under the sun, if UCLA wanted to politicize its content and strive for new extremes in ideology, it didn’t need to hire Gary Blasi. It already had plenty of problem professors as it was; professors who, for whatever it’s worth, had at least graduated from a law school. |
