Monday, September 22, 1997 Basketball team, ice-blendeds
shouldn’t keep us from reality COLUMN: We must focus on changing
the world despite the distractions
By Hannah Miller
Daily Bruin News Editor
Basketball is a very popular sport in mental hospitals. The
movement, the speed, the scuffle, the kinetic energy – they all
distract from the suffocation of mental illness. They are body, not
mind; they are movement, not thought. It is hard to think in
diseased directions when you are trying with every fiber in your
body to attain a goal without breaking any rules. This is important
for mental patients because they are not supposed to think.
Basketball is also the most popular sport at UCLA.
I feel comfortable stating this as social fact. Basketball is
what we cheer for, scream for, drink for. We make noise, throw
goodies at the players, gather like once-a-week tribes to watch the
games. The only civil unrest to ever hit Westwood was in response
to a basketball game. Basketball distracts the UCLA community more
than it ever has any mental patient anywhere. So just what is it
that we are being distracted from?
First, before you answer. We attend, teach at or scrub the
toilets of one of the most prestigious universities in the world.
Men in suits give us grants and applaud our work and U.S. News and
World Report publishes their official agreement. We pump out
patents like crazy, and over lunch our chancellor successfully
schmoozes Michael Eisner into giving us $25 million.
But UCLA is not amazing simply because of its prestige. The Ivy
Leagues beat us on that one a while back. UCLA is amazing because
it, theoretically, is also made of the common people. The hoi
polloi. The unwashed masses. Californian higher education is,
whether you like it or not, a very revolutionary idea. It offers
education to anyone, regardless of race, religion, gender, class,
sexual orientation, age or any of the other categories that usually
allow people to ignore each other.
Combine this phenomenon with the historical role of the
university – to produce those that structure, analyze and run
society – and you have a pretty heady concept. Could this really be
happening? Could this really be the opening up of education,
research, the professions, the language, to anybody who proves
capable? Is our school really about such a wonderful idea? Or is it
mainly about basketball?
As a general rule, it is very hard to avoid distractions. We
shouldn’t avoid distractions. For those of us who work and worry
too much, they are good. But our ‘distraction’ has grown beyond the
bounds of leisure into the realm of reality. The UCLA basketball
logo is emblazoned on every soda cup sold in campus eateries. Our
student union is financially dependent on UCLA making the Final
Four every year. And if you combine basketball with movies, music,
sex, working out, ice-blended mochas and the Clinique counter in
the student store, you can very easily forget that this is a
university built to change the world.
And as a newspaper, that goal holds even more strongly for the
Daily Bruin. UCLA is a powerful organization that has largely given
up on receiving nonsectarian funds from the state, and depends more
every year on private donations and corporate management
techniques.
By definition, we are the opposite: we are the First
Amendmenters here. We spread the word. We are the public record. It
is our job to make sure that UCLA never strays from the means, and
the end, of being a public university. It is up to you, our
readers, to act on what we tell you.
Being the public record is a big job, but I have hope. After
all, I have some inspiration. Like this one photograph, in a
Marshall McLuhan book, that encapsulates the potential of higher
education. It is a picture of a 1964 graduating class. They are
walking out on their commencement speech, because it is given by
then-Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, and he is largely
responsible for the Vietnam War.
No matter how you feel about the Vietnam War, no matter how you
feel about the 1960s or politics or the United States, those
seniors should set a standard for you as they do for me. Because
they were able to separate themselves from the institution, from
the distractions, from the kitsch of being a college student. And
focus their powers of critique on the ideas handed down to them.
They questioned what they were told, and how they were told it.
That, to me, is what a college newspaper has the possibility to
be. It can, and should, look skeptically and sharply at the
university that is in its caretaking. The Los Angeles Times is
never going to scrutinize UCLA at this level of detail. It’s up to
us.
And from that mission, we will try our best not to be
distracted.
Hannah Miller