Layoffs should not target one field
In response to Negar Tehrani’s column on Oct. 16, “Lecturer layoffs sacrifice education quality,” I’m writing in opposition to the notification by UCLA administration to 67 lecturers in the UCLA College about termination of employment at the end of this academic year.
Specifically, I want to address the topic of the selection of instructors targeted.
UCLA administration is apparently protecting South Campus academics while giving North Campus the boot.
By doing this, they’re insinuating that the departments of humanities, social sciences and others that encourage students to think creatively and clearly express their ideas are not as important as the departments of math, engineering, etc.
My argument here is: What future use can this “more concrete” knowledge have without the proper education in communicating it?
I believe that students need to be well-versed in all aspects of education, as all knowledge operates interdependently. A great deal of value is lost when students are confined to only one branch of learning.
For example, a chemist that conducts a revolutionary experiment cannot explain its results or significance well without proper writing skills.
For this reason, I don’t understand how UCLA administration can target lecturers of the College and overlook its effect on every student on campus.
Although I understand that budget cuts are inevitable and funding is low, I am highly opposed to the administration’s choice to favor certain departments over others.
Sara Chen
Fourth-year communication studies
Alternative medicine requires scrutiny
Call it “curiosity.” Call it “willingness to try new ideas.” Call it “filling a void.” I call it forgetting what matters most.
Proponents of alternative medicine, homeopathy and cultural traditional medicines often emphasize the “wholeness” of the person, such as Mary Hardy’s statement quoted in Emily Tice’s recent article, “Wellness remedies can work best in tandem” (Oct. 21).
She said, “I see my work as addressing the entire person, the largest piece of that person I can possibly encompass.” Instead of sniping a particular symptom with a specific solution, proponents of alternative medicine offer treatments that are allegedly greater than the sum of their parts, which they claim so-called “Western” medicine cannot provide.
This approach ignores the most critical purpose of medicine. All the good intentions, tradition and conventional wisdom mean absolutely nothing if the remedies don’t work.
People visit the doctor because they are sick and need treatment, not to have their egos stroked. If these alternative treatments do work, that will be determined by medical researchers and concluded in medical journals.
Some ideas mentioned in Alexandra Mathieu’s article, “UCLA Center for East-West Medicine fuses integrates alternative, conventional medicine for better treatment” (Oct. 21), may have some merit.
Researchers could utilize concepts from “sociology and anthropology in order to provide, assess and blend information useful to medicine,” but that is for researchers to decide, not practitioners.
Practitioners may have difficulty isolating variables and don’t have the funding or time to perform double-blind, controlled research studies. Such rigor is absolutely necessary to identifying both the source and effectiveness of a treatment. Hawking these unconventional, untested treatments and calling them medicine in all but name is a waste of time, money and effort at best, and life-threatening at worst.
Clouding this dispute by claiming it is a conflict between “Western” and “Eastern” medicine (as a great many of these treatments are traditional East Asian folk medicines) is little more than an appeal to cultural relativism.
If we can support traditional Eastern medicine because anecdotal evidence has attested to its success over many years, we can advocate the traditional Western medicines of leeches and bloodletting for the same reason.
Just because many conventional treatments have failed does not mean the entire discipline is a failure.
The success of each treatment must rest on the evidence. Thalidomide was pulled from the market because of its disastrous side effects, and the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine is still in use because the claims of its dangerous side effects did not stand up to scrutiny.
In the end, rigorous testing by professional researchers should determine whether treatments live or die. The continued use or abandonment of this criterion will determine whether patients live or die.
Daniel Ben-Zvi
Third-year chemistry and materials science