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Politics, courts and the ‘single French fry’

BY AJAY SINGH
Today Staff Writer

Photo by Scott James

Karen Orren has seen some sweeping changes on campus in the 37 years that she has taught at UCLA.

There’s construction, of course, which wasn’t so widespread in the late ’60s and ’70s, the political science professor recalled. Diversity on campus is much greater — back then Orren had the distinction of being the first female assistant professor in the political science department. And there’s far more focus on off-campus academic activities.

“People didn’t attend scholarly conferences away from campus as often as they do today,” Orren recalled in her office at Bunche Hall. “In general, academic life was far less professionalized.”

It’s not clear whether — or how — that will influence the turnout at the 100th Faculty Research Lecture that Orren will deliver May 11 to the campus community, but the prestigious occasion is bound to be interesting from more than just a scholarly point of view.

It’s something of a happy coincidence that Orren’s lecture, intriguingly titled, “A Single French Fry: The Supreme Court and the Depletion of Constitutional Law,” comes at a time when the nation’s courts are much in the news, whether the issue is government-sanctioned wiretapping or impending legislation on immigration.

And it’s clearly fortuitous that the speaker will be a professor who not only studies how social groups connect with government structures, but one who scans the political and social landscape and identifies all manner of problems.

Although Orren’s talk, at 3 p.m. in the Freud Playhouse, will revolve around the doctrinal dilemmas confronting the judges of this nation’s highest court, she is likely to present some of those quandaries in humanistic terms — as the words “single French fry” in her lecture’s title suggest. The curious need to go to Orren’s lecture to find out what that means.

Orren is one of the founding scholars of a subfield in political science known as “American political development.” For the past 20 years, scholars in this discipline have been studying the national past, often coming up with intriguing findings that shed light on our current institutions as well as our very lives.

While majoring in anthropology and political science at Stanford University, Orren often found herself on the UC Berkeley campus, the hub of the civil rights movement. In those days, she recalled, Stanford was so conservative that just two people in her dormitory supported John F. Kennedy’s 1960 presidential campaign against Richard Nixon.

When Orren isn’t pursuing scholarly issues, she indulges in a bit of backyard astronomy. An avid reader of both fiction and nonfiction, she also plays the flute “when I get a chance, which hasn’t been much lately,” she said. Never married, she’s a private person who lives with her partner of 37 years — a professor on campus — and their third dog in 35 years, a border terrier.

Given the nation’s growing problems, what does Orren think about the future of the country? “Ulti- mately, I am optimistic,” she said.