(from Minding the Campus):

By Marc Joffe

Scholars from the University of California at Berkeley have played a pivotal role in making income inequality a major political issue. But while they decry the inequities of the American capitalist system, Berkeley professors are near the top of a very lopsided income distribution prevailing at the nation’s leading public university.

Among the most prominent of these scholars is Robert Reich, Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley. Reich’s 2013 film, Inequality for All, is an indictment of a rigged U.S. economy that makes a select few richer while consigning the middle class to stagnation. A review of the film and Reich’s other work suggests that the economist and former Clinton-era Labor Secretary provided numerous talking points for Bernie Sanders’ high-profile – though ultimately unsuccessful – presidential campaign.

While Reich helped popularize the income inequality theme, much of the intellectual heavy lifting has been done by UC Berkeley economist Edward Saez and his colleagues at the university’s Center for Equitable Growth (CEG).  Saez has been researching income inequality since 2003, when he co-authored a paper on the topic with Thomas Piketty, the French economist whose book Capital in the Twenty-First Century also played a key role in popularizing the income inequality issue. The pair continue to collaborate.

Since these Berkeley academics preaches, we wondered whether the university community also practices greater equality. To answer this question, we examined distributional equity at the university, relying on publicly available data. CONTINUE READING HERE