Carole Goldberg
        Law

            Unlike most her colleagues, the preeminence of UCLA Law professor Carole Goldberg within her academic field has not yielded the law school a merely numerical bump in the U.S. News and World Report rankings.  While she is indeed a nationally recognized expert in Indian affairs, it was Goldberg’s extracurricular involvement with Native American politics that netted UCLA a handsome donation of $4.05 million from the San Manuel Band of Mission Indians. 

            Carole Goldberg has spent most of her career deeply involved in Indian issues.  She currently directs the Joint Degree Program in Law and American Indian Studies, serves as the Faculty Advisory Committee Chair of the Law School’s Native Nations Law and Policy Center, and at two points in past years, was interim director of the American Indian Studies Center.  However, it was in 1998 when Goldberg first stepped out of her academic shell and into direct political advocacy on behalf of Indian tribes.  The impetus was Proposition 5, a bitterly fought measure that would have allowed Nevada-style gambling operations at California Indian reservations.  Goldberg appeared in the Indian-sponsored “Yes on 5” television advertising, and told the Los Angeles Times on October 2, 1998, “The ads show that gaming provides an opportunity to redress some of the terrible harm and hardship Indian people have suffered.  It’s a matter of simple justice.”  Simple as the initiative may have been, the tribes spared no expense in ensuring its victory.  Expenditures totaled $26 million from the Nevada gambling industry, matched by $25.5 million alone from the San Manuel tribe (an amount about which we will learn more shortly).  While the measure passed in the November 1998 election, it was subsequently struck down the California Supreme Court.

             Like a child’s bop-bag toy, the Indian gaming industry quickly bounced back from this setback.  The March 2000 ballot carried the same basic proposition, slightly retooled and carrying the new numerical designation 1A.  According to a March 2, 2000 Riverside Press-Enterprise article, “Prop. 1A would amend the state constitution and give tribes a monopoly on Nevada-style slot machines in California.”  This time, the fight was very much uneven, as the Indian tribes raised $22.1 million to support their initiative, while the Nevada gaming industry was entirely absent.  As a result, Proposition 1A opponents tallied a mere $100,000 and ran a minimal, fruitless campaign.  The San Manuel Indians were again top donors with $7.7 million in donations, an investment rewarded by a massive margin of victory, nearly 65% to 35%.  Again, as in 1998, Goldberg was heavily involved in the initiative, even appearing as one of the three featured signatories to arguments contained in the official California state ballot handbook.  The choice emphasizes Goldberg’s increasing importance to the Indian gaming lobby.  Ballot argument signatories are typically chosen from the ranks of top elected officials or presidents of major organizations like the AARP, labor unions, or trade associations. 

            Goldberg’s questionable practice of combining work and politics did not end with those two propositions.  If anything, her hand-in-glove connection to the powerful Indian gambling tribes became increasingly tight.  In July of 2003, it was Goldberg who sparked UCLA’s investigation into technical research violations which occurred during a joint UCLA Institute for Industrial Relations/HERE (Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees International Union) study of labor practices at the Agua Caliente band of Cahuilla Indians casino properties.  The dispute was a textbook case of ugly vs. ugly, one power-hungry interest group (a deep-pocketed Indian gambling tribe) fending off the advances of another (an expansionist labor union).  In light of this, most academics would have steered clear of the issue.  But Goldberg, despite her well-documented radical sympathies, sided against the labor union’s study, the findings of which were very unflattering for the tribe.  And, after investigating Goldberg’s complaint, the UCLA Office for Protection of Research Subjects confirmed that researchers had failed to submit for OPRS review certain research procedures that involved personal interviews.  Thus, though the OPRS had no comment on the content of the study, the IIR was enjoined from releasing the damaging study.  Following this success, the Indian tribes mentally added another gold star next to Goldberg's name.  Here was a friend indeed!

            Goldberg's years of advocacy, her personal involvement in two successful, high-stakes California initiatives, her pick-and-roll on the unionization fight: all these were favors that begged to be repaid.  In 2004, the San Manuel Indian tribe (as we saw, one of the top gambling tribes in the state and a massive donor to the two initiative campaigns) reached out to their old friend Carole Goldberg and donated over $4 million to the UCLA Law School.  The money served “to establish a Tribal Learning Community and Educational Exchange in support of Native American study, which will be administered by the UCLA Native Nations Law and Policy Center.”  And as the tribe noted, the gift was a first for an Indian nation to an educational institution. 

            Besides being a welcome show of gratitude for Goldberg’s relentless volunteer work, the donation was also a statement that Indian tribes had arrived as a political force in the state.  Indian gambling tribes could now set up academic units operating their own benefit, much as the California Legislature had done for labor unions in 2001.  While the Law School’s Interim Dean Norman Abrams praised the “hard work of UCLA School of Law faculty Carole Goldberg…for making this gift possible,” Goldberg pooh-poohed the idea that the San Manuel Indians would demand any accountability following their donation: “It’s not as if those [Indian] topics are taught now and the tribes want them taught differently.  It’s more like they are not taught at all.”

             With the apparently sole exception of the Agua Caliente/HERE dispute, Goldberg’s political views are reflexively liberal, trending in many spots toward radical.  In a 1999 UCLA Today opinion article, Goldberg argued that Indian legal systems aren’t worse than American systems, just different.  In the dulcet tones of PC-speak, Goldberg portrayed Indian law as “a defense against [the] imposition of American laws.”  For example, in a hypothetical breach of contract case, the Navajo system is concerned with “reflect[ing] Navajo values of respect and caring for one’s intimate relations,” while an American court would have been “preoccupied with enforcing the insurance contract.”  And while Goldberg is all about non-judgmentalism when it comes to Indian legal philosophy, the white man gets no such deference.  California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger ran for office in the 2003 recall campaign on, among other issues, the outsize influence that an Indian band of a few hundred have on California politics.  Goldberg flayed this rather pedestrian concern as “false and inflammatory rhetoric” and “thinly veiled appeals to the worst sort of prejudices.”  Goldberg is also not too proud to wave the bloody shirt of broken treaties.  Acting as if it were 1850 all over again and Indians were still politically and financially helpless, Goldberg keened that Schwarzenegger’s attempt to renegotiate gambling compacts “echoes another abhorrent practice from times past…treaty promises [which] counted for nothing.”

Goldberg’s concern for minority groups extends, unsurprisingly, to her own gender.  At a January 31, 2001 hearing of the California State Senate’s Select Committee on Government Oversight, Goldberg made a number of charges about the state of women in university faculty.  The ideas will sound familiar to anyone who has followed the intellectual diversity wars.  To wit:

“Faculty control hiring and often focus on the growing specialization within academic disciplines.  This narrow focus, combined with continuing favoritism and cronyism among senior faculty at feeder schools, mostly men, encourages faculty to hire people most like themselves.  Cognitive biases shared by both men and women lead to overvaluing the accomplishments of men and undervaluing the accomplishments of women. More importantly, individual schools and departments are not held accountable for their failure to hire women.”

Change the word “women” in Goldberg’s testimony to “conservatives,” and you’d have a pretty solid understanding of why conservatives have been locked out of academic work so effectively.  Liberals hire liberals, and liberals undervalue (or outright dismiss) the intellectual ideas of conservatives.  Oh, and problems of “narrow focus”?  The growing mania for the academic cubbyholes of race, gender and sexuality are all antithetical to the individualistic outlook of conservatives.  As devotion to identity politics becomes more and more a requirement for many academic fields, fewer and fewer opportunities remain for conservative scholars.

It’s ironic, then, to read the report (“Unprecedented Urgency: Gender Discrimination In Faculty Hiring at the University of California”) which contains Goldberg’s testimony before the Senate committee.  It notes that just before the first round of hearings were held in late January, “President Atkinson confirmed an agreement with the UC chancellors to designate a number of faculty positions for hires of “outstanding” scholars in research fields dealing with issues of “race, ethnicity, gender and multiculturalism” or examination of “disadvantaged” groups.  The Office of the President set aside $2 million over three years to help provide start-up research funds for these positions.”  Apparently when radicals scream about bias, things happen.  Unfortunately for UCLA and its students, conservatives are not a cosseted minority group within the politically-correct academic rubric.  The University of California and its faculty conduct no self-examining studies on this topic, and the legislature is rarely, if ever, roused to pay attention to the issue.  Not that, even if it were, there would be any chance of assembling a political majority to take action.

            Ironically enough, Goldberg was involved in a major UC controversy that would have provided her an ideal soapbox to complain about the university’s intellectual apartheid.  The only problem is that Goldberg simply didn’t care about the issue.  As Chair of the Task Force on Course Descriptions (serving under the UC-wide Academic Senate), Goldberg dealt with the case of the Fall 2002 UC Berkeley course, “The Politics and Poetics of Palestinian Resistance,” taught by notorious radical (and teaching assistant) Snehal Shingavi. 

            The course was infamous for its catalog description, which laid out its extreme pro-Palestinian ideological precepts and then cautioned, “Conservative thinkers are encouraged to seek other sections.”  The course was not unusual in content, or even in its spittle-soaked claims of a “brutal Israeli military occupation of Palestine” that has “systematically displaced, killed and maimed millions of Palestinian people.”  Rather, it was unusual only in its forthright declaration of its overwhelming bias; most professors couch their classroom bias in generic language.

            A May 9, 2002 Wall Street Journal opinion article by Roger Kimball first publicized the course description, and in particular, that pithy, sound-bite friendly declaration, “conservative thinkers should seek other sections.”  What ensued was no less than an epic political shit-storm, which was matched by an equally epic cover-up on the part of Berkeley Chancellor Robert Berdahl.  In the end, Shingavi was neither fired nor even removed from the course.  Instead, the course description was bowdlerized, an English department faculty member was assigned to monitor the class, and the English department chair met with students on the first day of class to reaffirm their right to open discussion and fair grading.  On a broader level, there was a flurry of task force formations, the imposition of new bureaucratic rules, and much voting to express and reaffirm concern of various types, ad infinitum.  Untouched in the entire controversy was the underlying issue of why Shingavi (a fifth-year graduate student and a leader in the violent Berkeley group Students for Justice in Palestine) could get approval to teach such a biased course, particularly on a topic to which his political activism proved he could bring no objectivity.  Instead, the report ended with a host of cheerful comments from 11 of the 14 final participants.  The forced conclusion: “See?  Berkeley doesn’t have any problems.  This was all a big conservative overreaction.”

            If only that were the truth.  While any number of committees looked into this issue on various levels, it would have taken a truly dedicated leader to overcome the bureaucratic inertia and extract any lasting changes.  But that leader was not going to be Carole Goldberg.  By all appearances, ghetto-izing conservative students and conservative thought might well get her thumbs up.  This is, after all, someone who signed seven petitions, including protests against Bush’s judicial nominees (Alberto Gonzales and William G. Myers, III), against a robust American anti-terrorist response, and against the UC Regents’ approval of SP-1 and SP-2 (the policies which ended affirmative action).  As we’ve already seen, there’s no consistency to Goldberg’s record.  She singles out the academic backwaters of ethnic studies as a praise-worthy means of defying Proposition 209, and approves of their role in “provid[ing] a welcoming face and place for students of color.”  Yet in leading a task force that dealt with a clear case of anti-conservative bias, Goldberg was happy to let the campus in question make a few cosmetic alterations to a course description, give the teaching assistant a brief semester of scrutiny, and move on.  One imagines that if Snehal Shingavi had been teaching a section on British literature whose course description warned, “African-Americans are encouraged to seek other sections,” we would have seen an altogether different reaction from Goldberg.  Then again, expecting intellectual consistency from radicals will get us nowhere.  That’s just the way things are.  And acceptance, as they say in therapy, is the first step toward healing.