A Los Angeles interfaith organization donated $8,000 to student groups pursuing interfaith work after a meeting Tuesday with seven undergraduates. The students discussed UCLA’s need to generate more rapport between students of different religious faiths.
The student representatives attended the Interfaith Leadership Institute conference in August, a two-day conference organized by the Interfaith Youth Core and intended to help college campuses generate supportive conversation between different religious groups. The University Religious Conference invited the undergraduate representatives to discuss how their experiences at the conference could inform implementation of interfaith dialogue on campus.
The Interfaith Youth Core, an organization based in Chicago, defines interfaith as the cooperation and mutual acceptance among youth of different religious backgrounds.
Janet Doak, president of URC, helped organize this year’s group of representatives. She said she hoped the students could help URC learn more about how to foster constructive interfaith dialogue at UCLA.
“We want to establish a presence on campus to support student spirituality, not just religion,” Doak said. “We want to help them answer bigger life questions like ‘Who am I?’ and ‘Why am I here?’”
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Representative Ruchit Majmudar, an undergraduate student government general representative and a second-year business economics student, said he thinks the conference addressed one of UCLA’s weaknesses – its lack of effective interfaith dialogue.
“There are no structured interfaith programs at UCLA and religious organizations mostly keep to themselves,” Majmudar said. “There’s not even a group for Hindus, when there are thousands of us on campus.”
Majmudar said he attended the conference to fulfill his USAC platform, which aims to bring alienated student groups on campus together.
Neemat Abdusemed, a second-year business economics student and one of the student representatives, said she thinks the conference was necessary because she felt that members of the campus community often undervalued religion while glorifying other aspects of identity.
“At UCLA, my race identity is considered more important than my religion,” Abdusemed said. “My religion was often ignored and unacknowledged, even by my peers.”
Inan Chowdhury, USAC general representative and another member of the representative group, agreed, saying he thinks that a lack of conversation about religion boxed in students’ identities.
“There’s not much faith representation on campus, so we tend to stray away from our faith and focus on other parts of our identity,” the fourth-year environmental science student said.
Chowdhury said he thinks many faiths are underrepresented on campus, making spaces and opportunities for interfaith connection is all the more the more important. Chowdhury said the nondenominational prayer space located in Ackerman Union in 2016 is an example of an on-campus resource that can foster student spirituality.
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Representative Justin Shieh, a fourth-year biology student, said he was especially pleased that the conference encouraged rapport between non-believers and religious groups.
“As someone who is nonreligious, I wanted to learn how to engage (atheist and agnostic) communities in interfaith conversation,” Shieh said.
Representative Arielle Mokhtarzadeh, co-chief of staff in the USAC external vice president office and a third-year political science and communications student, said she thinks UCLA still needs to overcome many of the obstacles that bar effective interfaith dialogue on campus.
Mokhtarzadeh said she thinks interfaith dialogue is often hindered by a skepticism that there is always a hidden agenda behind any interfaith collaboration.
“It’s difficult to overcome all these barriers to interfaith dialogue – the idea of bringing what we learned back to campus is going to be a lot more complicated,” she said.
Mokhtarzadeh said that instead of bringing the conversation immediately back to campus, religious and spiritual groups should first be taken off campus to build interfaith rapport. That way, students are unburdened from many of the pressures of the campus climate, and can more effectively engage in collaborative dialogue, she said.
At the end of the meeting, the URC unanimously elected Majmudar to its board. He is the first student to be represented on the board.
“Now that we got the $8,000 and have a student on the board, there’s the chance that we can have thousands more dollars (for interfaith work),” Majmudar said. “I’m going to push for it.”