For UCLA students, the value of inclusion speaks loudly. In recent years, students have echoed concerns about a hostile campus climate; they have lobbied for an environment on campus in which any individual can feel respected regardless of background or circumstance.
The General Education requirement has been a central focus of student efforts, and the rhetoric around that topic both at UCLA and elsewhere should reflect that fact.
A recent editorial from the Los Angeles Register framed UCLA’s attempt to pass a new requirement as “administrators’ diversity obsession,” when in fact it would not be in motion without student demand.
For more than two decades now, students have organized around a diversity-related requirement. They have expressed repeatedly that they believe such a requirement would be a salient step toward improving community relations at UCLA.
In 2011, 62.9 percent of students voting in the undergraduate student government election expressed that they wanted a diversity-related General Education requirement through an advisory vote.
This past March, the Muslim Student Association issued a statement, which was endorsed by 15 other student organizations and various student government offices and councilmembers, again calling for the institution of such a requirement.
And in a show of support for the move across slate lines, all three Academic Affairs commissioner candidates in last week’s Undergraduate Students Association Council election included advocating for the diversity requirement as a main part of their platforms.
While UCLA faculty voted down similar requirements on three occasions, passage of the requirement was hindered in part by faculty’s ambivalence, with a faculty voter turnout of less than 30 percent in 2012. But when combating a poor campus climate, it is student concerns and interests that should be the primary focus. Ultimately, General Education requirements apply to students and affect their experiences the most. When students consistently ask for the adoption of a requirement, the faculty should respond with support.
Nobody is proposing that establishing a course requirement will singularly solve tensions and ills in campus community relations. But it remains a concrete step in the right direction, and downplaying the requirement as a public relations stunt is ignorant and unfair.
A diversity-related requirement is not about being politically correct or creating a facade that conceals division and conflicts on campus. It’s about promoting knowledge, as a university should, of the diversity of cultures that continues to shape our identities and experiences.
This board believes that while enrolling in a single course is not an end-all and be-all solution, institutionalizing a requirement that specifically frames such classes as related to diversity, equity and inclusion can help raise real consciousness about these topics.
The requirement provides an outlet for students to critically think about issues of diversity and equity and to respectfully discuss them with their peers in a classroom setting. It shows students who have said they do not feel welcomed that the university values their diversity.
With either the willfully blind approval or the willful ignorance of the judiciary the right has killed & stolen several of my pets and routinely shoot energy weaponry at me and my pets. Recent harm to animals include: two kittens from a pregnant stray i took in were killed a few days ago. The remaining two, just 3 weeks old, shake their head as government operatives shoot them with energy weaponry. They shot the eye out or removed the eye of a large really good natured stray at the port, hobbled another cat at the port, shooting it with energy weaponry, and routinely kill and leave dead animals in my path. A few years ago one of them threatened, prophetic, ‘we’ll just kill a cat every so often’, in so many words. This has continued despite my calls to the police, the FBI, Congress, and my petitions in court. In the usual case, it appears that the right goes to a judicial crony for a ruling permitting them to harm animals to retaliate against me for my free speech. There’s no serious argument but that they interfered with my personal life and economic options for 3 decades, so their solution to my noting it is to kill animals. Makes perfect sense right? It does if you’re a sociopathic criminal, criminally stupid, and hawkish. Invariably their lies are exposed and the wrongfulness of the harm is clear to everyone, though not until the animals have been maimed or killed. There is really only one solution, and that’s to disempower them politically.
Typically operating through Puppets–including puppets in the judiciary–the right wing has for decades been committing crimes and trying to classify them to cover them up, a move explicitly forbidden by the Code of Federal Regulations. The right has accomplished its political objectives by presenting a fraction of the evidence to judicial officials who, having seen the pattern dozens of times before, could not help but realize that they were being presented with incomplete and inaccurate information.
If you repeat a lie often enough, it becomes the truth, right? the Democrats’ great accomplishment is producing the political equivalent of a Rodney King video, clearly demonstrating the lies of the right, the right Hilary Clinton correctly identified as a vast conspiracy. Confirm by examining Central District of California Cases, 01-4340, 03-9097, 08-5515, 10-5193, US Tax Court 12000-07L –though I think you want to view my US Tax Court Appeal to the 9th Circuit for a good account of their day to day assaults, a few month time slice indicative of a decade of assault, and 9th Circuit case 11-56043.
To impose a GE requirement for diversity is equivalent to imposing an undue burden on all students. There are other means for spreading information and awareness for diversity. If such a class is a requirement, then what’s not to say that a GE requirement for a class on the persecutions of a specific religious group be permitted as well? Certainly then we should embrace the struggles of every single struggle that people from various walks of life experience. It is not feasible to have regard for all minorities, and taking a class on diversity should make it acceptable to have multiple GE requirements for the other neglected groups.