Following up on last Sunday’s post, UC-Berkeley Law School Cracks Down on AI: Chronicle of Higher Education, A Dean, a Secret Recording, and Questions That Linger:
Erwin Chemerinsky on AI, DEI, and that video that won’t go away.
Last month, the law school at the University of California at Berkeley released a terse new AI policy prohibiting use of AI for “conceptualizing, outlining, drafting, revising, translating, or editing any work submitted for credit.” It forbids using AI to correct grammar. It permits AI only for “identifying sources, such as cases, statutes, or secondary sources” but goes on to warn: “Citations to sources that do not exist will raise a presumption of prohibited AI use.”
The policy has received an inordinate amount of attention — because of its brevity and severity, because Berkeley is prestigious and proximate to Silicon Valley, and because the strictures struck some observers as impracticable. Joshua Gellers, a dean and AI scholar at the University of North Florida, declared it “the worst AI policy in higher education.” It has also been greeted by some fellow deans as a model. Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the law school, says that he’s heard from several who are leaning on the Berkeley policy to craft their own.
Chemerinsky is the author or co-author of more than 20 books, including Free Speech on Campus (Yale University Press, 2017), and a former president of the Association of American Law Schools. He is a renowned constitutional scholar and prominent liberal commentator. He’s also no stranger to controversy.
A few weeks after the Hamas attacks on Israel in October 2023, Chemerinsky took to the pages of the Los Angeles Times to decry what he described as the most intense antisemitism he’d ever experienced on campus, and chastised college leaders for failing to speak out for fear of sounding Islamophobic. Calls for the elimination of Israel, he wrote, are antisemitic. Over the next year, there were protests at his house and he and his wife received death threats. He believes he was targeted because he’s Jewish.
Chemerinsky has also been a vocal proponent of diversity. In a sharply argued 2023 article co-authored with Sharon Inkelas, a linguist and administrator at Berkeley, Chemerinsky smacked down the idea that diversity statements pose any threat to academic freedom or intellectual diversity, or that they were misused as a political litmus test. So I was surprised when he told me that, while he remains committed to the goals of diversity, equity, and inclusion — indeed, he can’t understand how anyone could be opposed — he’s soured on diversity statements, acknowledging that they were sometimes misused.
The genially disheveled Chemerinsky spoke early in the morning from the law school.
We discussed the Whac-a-Mole feeling of trying to craft an AI policy, his regrets about a surreptitious recording of him in which he seemed to defend the extra-legal use of racial preferences in the faculty hiring process, and how future historians will judge higher ed’s response to Donald Trump. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Editor’s Note: If you would like to receive a daily email with links to legal education posts on TaxProf Blog, email me here.
