Decades of student advocacy came to fruition Friday morning when the results were finally announced after weeks of hype. The diversity requirement proposal passed with a 332-303 vote.
If the proposal passes through the Undergraduate Students Association Council and the Committee of Rules and Jurisdiction, first-year students will need to take a course with a focus on inequalities based on race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation and religion, among others, starting next year. Transfer students will be required to do the same starting in 2017.
Although it took the UCLA College faculty more than 25 years to pass a diversity requirement, faculty members did their part to foster diversity in the curriculum; now it’s up to the professors actually teaching these classes, their teaching assistants and undergraduates to make UCLA’s new venture a successful one.
The measure faces the risk of failure. If the classes aren’t taken seriously by students, or if those teaching them do so in a way that will decrease student engagement, students could wind up resenting the project. The requirement shouldn’t feel forced upon students; it should give students a number of options to learn about something new that interests them. A joint effort between students and faculty members can make a successful implementation a reality.
The administrators developing the courses have to form a partnership with students, because student organizers know what they want to see in these classes. Student input is essential, and the administration needs to seek it out and take it seriously.
Weak implementation by the administration or unengaging teaching by professors could result in apathy from students and make the education students are supposed to receive ring hollow, rendering the classes ineffective.
Earlier this quarter, USAC General Representative 1 Manjot Singh drafted a popular petition to create a Sikh studies class at UCLA with the goal of educating people about the often-ignored and misunderstood Sikh community. The diversity requirement should work in a similar fashion: Student suggestions about the focus of the classes should be taken seriously by the administration and become a reality through a collaborative effort between students and faculty.
Students, too, have a part to play in the effectiveness of the requirement. Students have the largest impact on campus climate, and the negative campus climate has been a topic of conversation for a while now. Students taking these classes need to apply their education outside of the classroom to make our campus more inclusive. It’s not to get credit. It’s not for an easy A; it’s to allay a major problem that UCLA faces as an institution.
Our campus has a diversity problem, and it goes beyond demographics. The student body often displays its ignorance in a predictable fashion. For example, on Friday several students dressed up for Halloween in stereotypical Native American headdresses and face paint. We’ve also experienced alleged racial profiling by our own campus police and attacks on people’s identities during last year’s divestment hearing. Even campus publications haven’t been exempt from this kind of behavior.
This alienating campus environment could fester even with the diversity requirement in place. That’s why the requirement’s success is so essential.
Improper implementation of the diversity requirement will make the efforts of students and faculty members all for naught. The administration needs to make sure it gets it right the first time; teachers need to make the experience interactive and create constructive dialogue between themselves and their students as well as between the students in general. In this case, students can learn just as much from their classmates as they can from their instructors.
A shift in perspective is massively important, but the students taking the classes and the people facilitating them need to put it on themselves to be open to learn and teach about unfamiliar histories and cultural practices. We can’t shy away from addressing diversity issues that may be considered difficult topics to cover.
With any luck, we’ll be able to look back to Oct. 31 as a turning point toward a more holistic education that allows UCLA to live up to its massive reputation as an elite academic institution. And it’s about time.
“The requirement shouldn’t feel forced upon students…”
Well that happens to be the nature of REQUIREMENTS, they’re things that are forced upon students, for better or worse. The people currently enrolled won’t have to put up with it, but the ones that do have my sympathy. Diversity is a great thing, and I enjoy working with different people and talking to them about their cultures, and while I consider myself a liberal I would be very upset about having to incorporate a silly course into my already heavy course load.
So yes, the article is right about the students and faculty having the responsibility of making this work, but making it work doesn’t mean it’s doing anything useful or positive. It’s just another obstacle getting in the way of students trying to major in something unrelated to diversity/sociology. The new students who come in that will have to do this will most likely put up with it and not complain too much, to them it’ll just be another GE, but really it’s just something to make their life unnecessarily harder.