From concerns like being “vague” or “not
necessary at all,” faculty members of the UCLA College had
numerous misgivings about the current diversity requirement
proposal.
Student leaders, proponents of the proposal and even some
opponents believed the proposal would finally pass in
December’s faculty-wide vote, bringing it even closer to
implementation by the fall of 2005.
Surviving 17 years of opposition and endless proposal revisions,
proponents of the requirement were left with a low voter turnout as
only 249 faculty members voted out of an eligible pool of 1,262
members.
“A majority of faculty voted implicitly by not
voting,” said Stan Trimble, a geography professor.
“Most faculty did not consider it important enough to vote
on.”
Though voter turnout was extremely low, Eric Sundquist, a
professor of English, said this is not an unusual occurrence.
According to Sundquist, many faculty members also might have
overlooked e-mails concerning information about the diversity
requirement.
Consequently, many faculty members were perhaps not as informed
about the requirement as they could have been.
The requirement, which proposes that students take one course
that thoroughly addresses diversity issues as part of their
existing General Education requirement in any of the three
foundation areas, was accompanied with a possible list of courses
that would satisfy the requirement.
But this list, giving an expected 30 to 40 percent of the
existing courses in the foundation areas of arts and humanities and
society and culture a diversity credit, was a concern amongst
faculty members who voted against the proposal.
“(There was) not clear rationale on why some classes would
count and others wouldn’t ““ the Academic Senate did not
present that information very well,” Sundquist said.
Trimble, who said a diversity requirement is not necessary,
believes the current GE curriculum provides a more than adequate
exposure to the concepts proposed.
“This thing is written in a very confusing way. (It is)
confusing what classes qualify,” he said.
Matt Malkan, a professor of physics and astronomy who voted
against the proposal, was specifically puzzled as to why some
courses on the potential list were granted diversity credit, such
as the History of Rock and Roll, while courses such as Greek
Civilization and Roman Civilization were not.
The inconsistency of what classes qualify for diversity credit
exemplifies the ambiguousness of the requirement’s
intentions, and more importantly where the requirement will stand
5-10 years from now, Malkan said.
With students already under pressure to fulfill an endless
amount of requirements, faculty members who voted against the
proposal questioned the importance of a diversity requirement over
other potential issues.
“(It) wasn’t evident why this requirement rather
than others, like (for example) globalization, is more important at
this time,” Sundquist said, adding that the generality of the
proposal made it almost pointless.
Though numerous proposals had been put forth in previous years
and turned down due to being excessively specific, Sundquist
thought the generality of the current proposal would encourage
faculty members to vote in favor, he said.
Instead it did the opposite, as the generality of the proposal
made it seem to lack a concise purpose, many faculty members
said.
“I think what that reflects is that whenever you want to
make a substantial change you need proof to show something needs to
be fixed. The faculty wasn’t strongly convinced that
something was broken,” Malkan said.
Though the requirement provides no extra burden on students and
seems to be more of a cosmetic change in the structure of the GE
curriculum, Malkan strongly emphasized that it is still not
something that can be handled lightly.
“(It’s) not like changing a name on a
building,” Malkan said. “This really isn’t as
trivial a change as we wished.”
Malkan also said that the proponents of the proposal downplayed
the significance of the change by circulating e-mails implying that
adding a diversity requirement would be a very minor change.
“If they didn’t do this, there would probably have
been more votes on either side,” he said.
Examples of ways to give the requirement more substance and a
more coherent direction would be to require students to take
comparative courses which discuss several different cultures in one
class or to add a global dimension to the proposal, Sundquist
said.
With the currently diverse GE curriculum, it is very possible
that a majority of students are taking more than one course which
deals with diversity. Sundquist said that knowing these statistics
will help further assess the necessity for this requirement.
Sundquist also said that because the vote on the new requirement
was so close, the proposal probably could have passed if only it
was backed up by a better explanation, adding that his concerns and
those of his colleagues, though “heavy,” could be
answered.
Professor Raymond Knapp, head of the GE Governance Committee
housed under the Academic Senate, believes the result of the vote
was due to the spread of misinformation.
“As we got closer to the vote, much misinformation about
the requirement, and to my mind spurious arguments against it,
circulated through e-mails sent to a large number of potentially
voting faculty,” Knapp wrote in an e-mail.
Knapp also stated that another possibility for the
“shameful” turnout could have been that those in favor
were “overconfident” and didn’t see the need to
vote.
Now with yet another setback to deal with, student leaders and
advocates for the proposal will start to concentrate on addressing
the faculty’s concerns in a well thought-out manner.
“We want to make the (course) list as solid as
possible,” said Allende Palmo/Saracho, the Undergraduate
Student Association Council president.
“Our goal is to work with faculty allies (and) revise the
diversity requirement (to) where it needs to be,” he
said.
Knapp stated that currently the next step could be to put the
proposal to a vote in the other schools this quarter as
“there is no obvious basis for revising the
proposal.”