<p>How liberal is Berkeley? How frequently will I be walking to class with protest signs in my face? How many of the people there are hardcore liberals?</p>
<p>I doubt you’ll be walking to class with protest signs shoved into your face unless most of your classes are extremely close to Sproul or Wheeler</p>
<p>The student body is not nearly as liberal as you might think. There are quite a few conservatives and a very large number of politically apathetic people.</p>
<p>Much more likely that you’ll have people from clubs shoving fliers in your face. There’s only a couple of major protests a semester and it’s easy to avoid Sproul Plaza during those days.</p>
<p>There’s a lot more hardcore-liberal wannabes than actual hardcore liberals.</p>
<p>^So true 10char</p>
<p>Numerically, most of the student body is left-of-center to some level. Only a small fraction is politically active enough to do anything.</p>
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<p>Most people of college student age, and most people in California, are left-of-center relative to the US “median”.</p>
<p>Not sure what exactly you’re afraid of. With “Occupy” protests all over the country, having a couple of signs in your face when you walk through one part of a very large campus should hardly give pause. Let me put it this way: when I arrived at Cal many years ago, I was considered a wild radical in my home town. After seeing the excesses of overzealous radicalism in Berkeley, I retuned myself back toward the center slightly. And today’s students are less radical.</p>
<p>With a crappy job situation and with more kids going to more professionally oriented majors which which are generally very time consuming and requiring a decent amount of studying, I’m guessing that plays a role in today’s students being less “poltically active”. “The man” has done it. With our fears of not being able to pay our college loans and being shackled in debt, many our confined to becoming more professionally oriented. We can’t let this form of institutionalized bondage go any further! FOLLOW STUDENTS PICK UP ARMS AND REBEL!!!</p>
<p>lolololol. I’m completely kidding btw. Have fun in college and if you want to protest then go ahead. But make sure all those tuition dollars you and maybe your parents are giving you to help don’t go to waste. Have fun but make sure you actually learn some useful skills while you’re here.</p>
<p>But yeah, there’s nothing to be afraid of. We aren’t the hippy school of the 60s.</p>
<p>PS: I"m not a liberal at all, and I"m definitely not a protester. I just laugh so hard inside when people make speeches like that.</p>
<p>Berkeley is so big that if you don’t want to mix with liberals too much and have protests “shoved down your face” (I’m liberal and this made me chuckle … I’m MODERATE though. Not hard-core.) then you won’t. There’s EVERYBODY there – conservatives, liberals, independents of all different shades. Oh, and don’t be surprised that some (perhaps more than you think) are apathetic to politics and don’t care at all/know at all what’s going on. There are all types on campus.</p>
<p>I see quote “how liberal is x college” posts like this about colleges all over College Confidential, but rarely is the poster explicit about exactly what is or her concerns are. If you want to unthinkingly regurgitate the latest meme from Faux News or want to rail against gay marriage because your reading of the Bible says so, you’re going to have someone in your face in almost any college in the country outside of the deep South or in a Bible college. On the other hand, if you want to point out that the latest diatribe by Rachel Maddow is overlooking a few facts, I think that even in Berkeley you will get a reasonable hearing if you are not caustic about it.</p>
<p>^It depends on the crowd though. </p>
<p>You’ll get a reasonable hearing if you’re generally with a group of kids who are critical in their analysis of politics and social issues.</p>
<p>But the human of the average mind who is either Conservative or Liberal tends to not be so critical since it’s much easier to pick a radical extreme than to realize that the “correct” or “rational” answer to a problem is generally somewhere in the middle, but finding that middle requires being well informed which takes too much effort.</p>
<p>And at Berkeley there is a wide spectrum of intellectual levels. In fact it’s not just intelligence but also a willingness to keep up with current events, and sadly I know many engineering kids who know close to nothing about current events not related to math or science, or they also know what they hear from their favorite show or news agency (which isn’t always accurate)</p>
<p>We elected a Republican for president of the student government, if that says anything…</p>