Assembly Speaker John Pérez a Cal dropout, not grad

[alp227]

When Rep. Hilda Solis inserted remarks in the Congressional Record praising Los Angeles activist John Pérez as "an asset to the labor movement," she was recounting the life story of a man who would later become California's Assembly speaker.

"After graduating from the University of California Berkeley, John began working on designing and organizing education programs," Solis, then a Los Angeles congresswoman and now U.S. secretary of labor, wrote in 2004.

But the record is wrong: Pérez dropped out of UC Berkeley and never returned.

For a decade, Pérez's designation as a UC Berkeley graduate went unchallenged in newspaper articles, biographies and public pronouncements - until after he won his first Assembly race in 2008.

(...)

Pérez enrolled at UC Berkeley in 1987. He pursued a Chicano studies major, a university spokeswoman said.

University records show Pérez left UC Berkeley in May 1990 without graduating, the spokeswoman said. A 2007 profile on the social-networking site LinkedIn said he was at UC Berkeley from 1987 to 1991 - four years. Pérez, who is gay, told Capitol Weekly last year that he came out at a campus meeting in 1991.

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/05/18/BAKE1JI06P.DTL

Setting the record straight. But there are state governors who didn't complete the four-year college route; for example, Jan Brewer (Arizona) only has an associate degree, and Scott Walker (Wisconsin) dropped out of Marquette. So why would Perez think that it'd tarnish his image by honestly disclosing that he did not have a college degree?

[99 Percent Sure]

1. Well, his 1st cousin, Los Angeles Mayor Villaraigosa, never

passed the Bar, either, despite taking the exam 4 times.

Their other close relative who swore in Perez at his Los Angeles speaker inauguration is a judge of some sort.

His election to the assembly, IIRC, was by a very small margin. Prior to being elected speaker, he had a wonderful assistant, Rich, in his LA office, who's no longer there.

Since his election as speaker, his constituency representation is frankly biased toward Latinos, and he has surrounded himself with his Latino peeps. This is a fact.

But whatever.