I went to grad school there in the '70s. If you don't come out of there a hardcore marxist you come out a conservative. Actually, there are alot of conservatives in the hard sciences, they just keep mum about it. While the quality of a Berkeley educaton has gone done over that last twenty years, especially in the liberal arts, the science curriculia are first rate and
hard. When I was there Berkeley had 38 Nobel Prize winners on the faculty. Science and Engineering majors had little spare time for politics.
To be fair, many of these Berkeley types are really just hangers on from the '70 and '80. Apart from the politics, Berkeley is a quite pleasant place to live. It is so insular that it does not suprise me to find that delusions of granduer come easily to these yoyos.