The graduate student government diversity committee presented a draft of a resolution Wednesday calling for UCLA to improve campus racial climate.
The Graduate Students Association formed a diversity committee in January to collect graduate student opinions about racial discrimination at UCLA and draft a resolution based on their responses.
GSA formed the committee after an internal report found UCLA’s policies and procedures for addressing racial discrimination claims among faculty to be inadequate, said Nicole Robinson, the GSA president. Former California Supreme Court Justice Carlos Moreno led the investigative committee that created the report, which was released in October.
Vice President of Academic Affairs Cody Trojan proposed the resolution at GSA’s last forum and now leads the diversity committee, which consists of representatives from 13 graduate departments.
In its current draft form, the resolution states that GSA condemns any and all racist conduct, including racist speech, committed by UCLA students, staff, faculty and administrators.
The resolution calls for the UCLA Academic Senate to create a referendum to institute a diversity-related general education requirement.
Additionally, the resolution calls for the UCLA Office of Instructional Development to create a diversity-related training component for all graduate student teaching assistants. The training would take place at an annual conference to help teaching assistants “create a racially tolerant climate in their classrooms,” according to the resolution draft.
Trojan wrote the resolution draft and Edwin Everhart, the president of the GSA Social Sciences Council and member of the diversity committee, plans to edit it before the next forum meeting.
The resolution draft referenced several recent controversial incidents involving racial discrimination claims on campus, including an event held earlier this week to advocate against microaggressions experienced by students of color at the UCLA School of Law.
The resolution also mentioned an Asian Pacific Coalition rally held on Monday to protest a racist and sexist flier sent to UCLA’s Asian American Studies Center and a sit-in held by graduate students of UCLA’s Graduate School of Education and Information Studies in November 2013.
GSA members also suggested that they should have input in the selection of UCLA’s new Vice Chancellor for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion – a position established by Block in response to the Moreno report.
“We want to see what role graduate students could have … in terms of defining the role for this person,” Everhart said.
Some forum members said at the meeting that they wanted the resolution to present more specific goals and ways of implementing them, but others said the resolution should just state the initiatives GSA wants to see UCLA implement.
“It is good to come up with well-drafted resolutions but if we get too specific it becomes an unfeasible act,” Robinson said.
Trojan and Everhart plan to share the drafted resolution to the graduate student body for feedback before editing the resolution for the next GSA forum.
“We’ll seek out the next action to take if it gets shot down, but it seems to me we have a lot of support,” Everhart said. “All that might happen is it will be edited.”
GSA plans to vote on a final draft of the resolution at its week nine forum.