Food options have lost their flavor
I just wanted to say I appreciated Rashmi Joshi’s column about the changing restaurants on campus (“New Carl’s Jr. compromises individuality of the Cooperage,” Jan. 23). I would love for ASUCLA to wake up and stop its long slow slide into corporate mediocrity, but I’m not very hopeful. When I was a student here in the early 1990s, the only fast food on campus was a Taco Bell cart located on Bruin Walk. Where the Sbarro’s is there was a grill with the best corn dogs (among other high-calorie options), where the Panda Express is there was a sandwich bar with soft, fresh white bread that made for tasty turkey sandwiches, and where the Taco Bell is there was my very favorite UCLA restaurant, Two Bears From Italy ““ a pizza place that made an individual-sized, deep-dish pepperoni pizza to die for.
On the other hand, the dorm food you have today is way better, so I guess maybe it all evens out!
Victoria Wang
Class of 1992
GEs have their perks
Michael Bromberg ended his column (“UCLA can learn from USC’s path to prestige,” Jan. 26) by asking the UCLA administrators to make “our curriculum more applicable to the real world,” by which he meant add business classes. He seems to think that the purpose of college is to make us all future CEO’s of our own start-up companies, making piles of money and living comfortably after retiring at 35.
I’m sorry, but that’s not what I think of as the real world.
It is true that USC is probably better than UCLA at preparing undergraduate students to immediately enter the workforce and ascend the ladder of corporate America. They learn the tools of the trade, get experience with the types of tasks they’re going to face in their job, and then have a good reference and alumni association that gets alumni to hire fresh graduates. But wait, where have I heard that before? Oh, that’s right, it sounds very akin to a vocational school, which is what I hold USC to be.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I don’t want to bash people who want to be on a board of directors or who dream of being a CFO, but I do assert entering the world of business management is not the dream of many fresh college graduates.
For example, I want to be a Japanese teacher. Learning the ins and outs of middle management has no purpose for me. My friend, an artist, isn’t going to enter a Fortune 500 company, the future-doctor roommate of mine won’t need accounting experience, and the engineer I know already has a job lined up because she’s gotten one of the best educations she can in her field. Do you get what I’m saying?
Sure, it’s great that USC has a “wonderful” business program that gets graduates a job. But we are better than them in pretty much everything else. It’s like sports: Sure, they’re better at football, which makes them piles of money, but we’re better at so many other sports, which has gotten us our 103 NCAA championships. I feel that our GE classes help Bruins achieve a similar well-roundedness. If stuck on a desert island, I think I’ll want the history student that has some understanding of physics and biology rather than the accountant who spent his coursework getting easy A’s with “History of the Horror Film 101.”
So if you want to go into business without having to get your MBA, then it might be worth your time to pay $130,000 and get a degree from USC. But if your passion lies outside of business, if you want to be an expert in your field, or if you want to do something meaningful with your life instead of just “managing” all the amazing researchers, engineers, teachers, doctors and lawyers that come from UCLA, then I think our current curriculum is just hunky-dory. It may be true that our administration could help our future business leaders with a couple more accounting classes, but forcing our graduates into the job market like USC does is just not how we do things here at UCLA.
Kurtis Hanlon
Fourth-year, Japanese
Vietnamese protest justified
In her article (“Censorship of exhibit more offensive than art itself,” Jan. 30), Nam-Giao Do mentioned the pain felt by millions of refugees, including her parents, when they fled Vietnam; however, it is doubtful that she truly understood their experience. Many of these refugees risked their lives in the process of fleeing, facing incidents of rape and murder by pirates, a fate many were not lucky enough to escape.
Others have been forced to witness such acts on their friends and family. Furthermore, upon entering the United States, the government has actively separated families by dispersing them across the country. Even in Orange County today, 20 percent of the Vietnamese population live in poverty and only one out of every three Vietnamese adults holds a high school diploma.
When I speak of healing the community, I think we need to provide the resources and support that they need, not to cause further pain by reminding them of what they lost. To show the images of that oppressive regime in the heart of a Vietnamese community is to marginalize the experiences of refugees such as our parents. Our parents still remember, even if we choose not to.
Besides, the protestors are just exercising their own freedom of speech.
Chrysanthy Ha
Class of 2008, biochemistry
Everyone must share budget burden
In response to the submission, “Education must remain a priority” (Jan. 20): California’s budget gives a priority to education and in particular to higher education. The government spent $11,264 per K-12 student and $20,321 per UC student (on average, in the 2006-2007 year). Forty percent of our budget is dedicated to education, of which 25 percent is dedicated to higher education. That comes out to about $13 billion for higher education. If there are to be budget cuts, everyone must share the burden, including students. Other parts of our budget, including infrastructure development and aid to the poor, are no less deserving than our educational system.
The authors of “Education must remain a priority” believe education cuts are intolerable but do not propose any alternatives. Education is such a large part of our budget that not cutting education and trying to balance the budget would be unrealistic.
But perhaps the authors of the submission I am responding to would prefer for California to tax its way out of our budget crisis. But as the authors noted, “California is expected to face a significant shortage of an educated workforce. It is projected that by the year 2025 there will be a 68 percent increase in jobs requiring a graduate degree.” The reason why California will have such shortages is because of the flight of wealthier citizens and businesses away from California because of the confiscatory tax rates in our state tax code. The short answer to a difficult problem is that there are no easy solutions to our budget crisis, and putting a barrier around education cuts is shortsighted.
Pooya Hajibagheri
Third-year, political science and molecular, cell, and developmental biology