Opinion: Conservative attack on UC Berkeley isn’t based on reality

To the editor: Heather Mac Donald attacks a caricature. She would provide a service if she would enter into a discussion of how individuals and institutions should engage those whose rhetoric effectively denies others the right to exist, as Milo Yiannopoulos’ does. (“UC Berkeley’s descent from place of learning to victimology hothouse,” Opinion, Feb. 6)

UC Berkeley is actually one of the most intellectually and culturally diverse centers in California. It hosts students whose beliefs reflect this diversity, with conservatives and liberals organized, vocal and active.

Mac Donald might visit the campus and gain the opportunity to build an argument from observation and experience. That would, however, make her attempt to categorically condemn a great university and its students difficult, since reality would undermine her preconceived and tired assertions.

Daniel Lewis, Highland

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To the editor: Is it possible to be a “victim” if you are attending or teaching at a university like UC Berkeley? You would have to exclude 90% of the world’s population to say yes.

At Cal State Northridge’s engineering school, most of my son’s graduating class were Asian students. If white males were a privileged class, why weren’t there more of them?

At most of the nation’s campuses, the number of women students exceeds that of men. There’s no male privilege there.

Victimology clearly is just another term for brainwashing.

Daniel Dreblow, Big Bear City, Calif.

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To the editor: Sure, things have gotten a little bit careful at many institutions of higher learning. Sure, you can be busted for using the wrong personal pronoun on somebody at Smith or Mount Holyoke.

But Mac Donald is like a critic who comes in at intermission and then writes a scathing review because Act II makes no sense. She’s decided to skip any attempt to understand how it got like this.

Apparently she believes that the left should have been able to control pendulum physics and stop the natural swing, from extreme unfairness to extreme fairness, at dead center.

Cynthia Carle, Los Angeles

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