40 Years Have Passed...

...since this graduation speaker refused to be cowed at Berkeley-lite:

Saturday will be graduation day at UC Davis Law School (as well as many other law schools). Congratulations to all the graduates!

I don't know who the Davis graduation speaker will be this year, but forty years ago, it was Justice Stanley Mosk of the California Supreme Court. This raised a hullaballoo. Although students had voted Mosk one of their preferred speakers back in the autumn, he was Public Enemy No. 1 to some students. Calling themselves the "Third World Coalition," a group of them demanded him to withdraw.

He was almost as liberal as they came, but he committed an unforgivable crime:

But Mosk had the audacity to take his commitment to equality seriously. He had been fighting for decades for equal treatment, and he was not able to turn around on a dime and approve the preferential treatment based on race practiced by colleges and universities in the name of "affirmative action." When the case of Bakke v. University of California Regents reached the California Supreme Court he wrote an extremely eloquent opinion for the majority condemning the UC-Davis Medical School's race-preferential admissions policy as unconstitutional.

So the lefties had to picket and try for a heckler's veto:

At the Davis Commencement, about 50 to 75 picketers—mostly students, but also some from outside groups--greeted those who entered the building. When Mosk was introduced at the ceremony, about 34 of the 139 graduates, along with about 150 guests, walked out. But Mosk was undaunted. "Judges," he told the crowd, "cannot be intimidated," and "Lawsuits are won and lost in the courtrooms, not in the streets."

Not always true, but you have to admire his principles.

And 40 years later, we're still dealing with race-based admissions to universities:

Weirdly, it is U.S. Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell, a mild-mannered Nixon appointee, who ended up being beloved by the Left. Powell's fence-sitting opinion in Bakke effectively overturned Mosk's opinion and opened the door to ever-greater preferential treatment based on race.