Has Berkeley – a known bastion of liberalism – become enamored of privatization? A recent Los Angeles Times article about the University of California, Berkeley Law School might have you believe so.

Last Monday it stated that the school’s dean, Christopher Edley Jr., wanted to privatize the school, in part.

The story said Mr. Edley’s plan was “unusual for a liberal law professor who served in the Carter and Clinton administrations.”

But Mr. Edley told The New York Sun that the Times’s headline – “UC Law School Needs to Privatize, Dean Says” – was “terribly misleading.”

“I need private resources to support our public mission, and we cannot afford further cuts in our public funding,” Mr. Edley said. A better headline, he said, might have been “Public mission requires private resources.”

The law school, one of the leading in the nation, has declined in the U.S. News & World Report rankings: In 2002, it was tied for 7th; in 2003, it was tied for 10th; last year Berkeley dropped to 13th. However, its reputation has held steady at 7th or 8th, despite a steep drop in state funding.

State money has declined – making up just 30% of the school’s budget today, compared to 60% in 1994.

“I’m not talking about being liberated from the Legislature or Board of Regents,” Mr. Edley said. “One must distinguish mission, financing, and governance…. The mission is inviolate. The question is how to finance it, if the state won’t pay full freight.”

The word “privatize” in the L.A. Times headline drew disparate reactions on the Web, from people across the political spectrum. University of Texas at Austin philosophy professor Brian Leiter responded on “Leiter Reports” about “evisceration of the public sector” and said “public” schools are already de facto private, like Virginia and Michigan.

Mr. Leiter told the Sun that he is concerned that private universities have been “pricing out the absolute poor.” In fact, 94% of Berkeley’s law students are on financial aid.

“I assume [Edley’s] personal commitment to maximizing access for those who are qualified – regardless of their wealth – is to promote the ethnic and racial diversity in the legal profession. If he privatizes, it will be harder to do that,” Mr. Leiter said.

Mr. Edley said pricing students out of law school “is a huge risk, unless a school like Boalt [Berkeley] considers access fundamental to its mission,” which it does, he said. But he added: “The state cuts are driving tuition up.”

Brian Grayson, 33, a law student at the University of New Mexico who runs what he calls “an unabashed conservative blog” called “Tomfoolery of the Highest Order,” wrote that he found the irony “delicious” that Berkeley appears to be admitting that “the problem with depending on government is that you can’t depend on them.”

Berkeley thinks “government is the answer to every problem until it comes to their running their own school,” Mr. Grayson said.

A professor of law at Chapman University School of Law and director of the Claremont Institute Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence, John Eastman, told the Sun: “I think we’ve gone long past the point where subsidizing law student tuition is necessary for the public good.”

“The entire tax base of the state of California is subsidizing tuition for law students,” Mr. Eastman said – many of whom are going to make six- and seven figure salaries. “Subsidizing the wealthy in society doesn’t seem to fit the model.”

He said publicly funded institutions have a large comparative advantage. “I feel for Berkeley, that it’s losing its comparative advantage.”

Asked about privatization, sociologist Nathan Glazer, who taught at Berkeley from 1963 to 1969,said he had not read the Los Angeles Times article, but “I assume it means he [Edley] wants to raise a lot of money.”

Public institutions everywhere are trying to raise more money, he said. “As public funders become more crimped, public institutions have to look for private sources.”

Berkeley may be eyeing other leading law schools that have models for private funding, such as University of Michigan and University of Virginia. The latter has pursued “financial self-sufficiency,” according to the executive vice president and chief operating officer of the University of Virginia, Leonard Sandridge.

“Because we are a state institution,” he wrote on the UVA Law School Web site, “we believe it is appropriate for the sons and daughters and citizens of Virginia who pay taxes to get a lower tuition than out-of-state students.”

Berkeley has 850 full time J.D. students and it is the only law school in the country that offers a Ph.D. in jurisprudence and social policy.

Its resident tuition is $21,531 – about double what it charged four years ago. Tuition for nonresidents is $33,707.