Tuesday, 5/27/97 Diversity requirement needed at UCLA EDUCATION:
Making curriculum part of general education would ease tensions
between groups
Diversity is relative. Consider, for example, the difference
between Harvard and UCLA. Strolling down Bruin Walk, who would
imagine that our diversity might even be a point of contention?
Chancellor-designate Albert Carnesale boasts proudly that he and
his colleagues have improved diversity in the Ivy League by
increasing minority enrollment at Harvard to around 33 percent.
Compare that to UCLA’s undergraduate student body, wherein no
single ethnic group comprises a majority. But these numbers pose an
imminent danger. It is far too easy to allow that stroll down Bruin
Walk to convince us that we are living and studying in a
sufficiently diverse community. We are not. Despite our location in
one of the most ethnically diverse cities in the world and despite
the leadership of an administration which has championed
affirmative action, we face the reality that our varied backgrounds
serve to divide rather than unite many of us. Call it the "Higher
Learning" syndrome. And with the passage of Propositions 187 and
209, even our statistical diversity has been endangered. True
diversity does not come from an equal number of African Americans,
whites, Latinos and Asian Americans, but from a mutual
understanding of each of those cultures. Such is the aim of a
diversity requirement. Racial divisions form due to a lack of
contact, a lack of understanding and therefore a lack of empathy
between groups. We distrust and often fear what we do not know. If
we are going to function and succeed in the world after we
graduate, we had better gain at least a minimal understanding of
the people with whom we will associate. UCLA does not serve this
need. It needs to implement a diversity requirement as part of its
general education curriculum. The College of Letters and Science’s
general education requirement includes 12 classes. It is basically
comprised of what educators have historically seen as essential to
any student’s success – reading, writing and arithmetic. Foreign
language and history are also interspersed. These are considered so
essential to a complete education that no student should finish
four years at this university without having been exposed to each
of them. An understanding of the cultures which comprise our
society seems to The Bruin’s editors such an essential part of
everyone’s success that it is ridiculous not to include it in the
general education requirement. Perhaps this did not used to be the
case. But times change, and Carnesale is taking the helm of a much
larger university in a much smaller world than Chancellor Charles
E. Young did 29 years ago. It is time for UCLA’s general education
curriculum to include a diversity requirement. Every other UC
campus seems to agree. From Berkeley to San Diego, we are the only
UC without one, despite the fact that we have the most ethnically
diverse student body. It is unclear exactly what form the diversity
requirement will take, and the requirements vary widely from UC to
UC. While The Bruin is hesitant to endorse a plan which lacks
specifics, it does so because any diversity requirement would be
better than what we have now – that is, nothing. An understanding
of the people with whom we live is as vital to our success as an
understanding of Romeo and Juliet, if not more. UCLA is negligent
in not having already devised and implemented a diversity
requirement.