Berkeley the TOWN is disgusting. The campus is quite beautiful. And yeah, they let me in. :p I had to hold my tongue a lot though, and sometimes force a laugh in class or hide my disgust at a Prof's out-of-place comment. It's not as bad as you think. I spoke with Angelo Codevilla at the Hoover Institute before I chose between Stanford and Berkeley (and now I live in MA, man, go figure, I must be a masochist), and he STRONGLY urged me to go to Berkeley, said Stanford was *way* more entrenched dreary liberal ("If you want to coast and get a B, come here, if you want to work hard for an A, go to Berkeley -- but here you can take on the liberals in their true bastion of strength, Berkeley is truly more open"). At least Berkeley liberals had senses of humor (I know, seems like a contradiction, but they did), and believe it or not, I even managed to take a course on free market capitalism (day one starts with an overhead projection with tallies of the death tolls of citizenry under Commie regimes -- chilling). I even moved some opinions. People listened to me. There's hope.
I also lived in the Elmwood district, which is nicer, kinda a little haven, you might know if you were out there...South Berkeley.
Later experience showed me first-hand that real entrenched dangerous liberalism is in the Ivy League schools. People like to say "Berkeley!" cuz it has that instant name recognition from the '60s, but those hippies are dying off -- the stuffy, snotty liberals of Today & Tomorrow are much more at Columbia, Yale, Harvard, *trust me*. I strongly advocate sending your kid to UC Berkeley if you want; it really has some of the best departments in the country, no joke. The *trick* is to walk out on the Profs who make their politics part of the course. You can spot them quickly. And I wouldn't want to come out of Berkeley with a poly sci major, but I had a friend who worked his *butt* off for a history major -- who was also a major conservative.