It’s hard to argue that campus climate is not a problem at UCLA.
A growing list of incidents on campus this year proves that point: student protests denouncing Proposition 209, which bans affirmative action in the state of California; a student video criticizing the university’s lack of black students; racist and sexist fliers directed at the Asian American population on campus; and an Undergraduate Students Association Council meeting that ran more than 11 hours and included several hateful public comments toward the Palestinian and Jewish communities on campus.
But from their places in offices or labs, the school’s professors may be unaware of these realities or of the way they affect student life.
Nowhere is this more evident at UCLA than in the continued failure of the professors in the College of Letters and Science to implement a diversity-related general education requirement.
The College has considered different forms of the requirement three times in the past 13 years, and each time it has failed at some point onthe long, winding road to its realization.
In order to pass, a requirement must be approved through several rounds of voting – first by the Faculty Executive Committee, a governing body of the college faculty, then by the faculty of the college as a whole, and lastly by the Academic Senate. And this whole process only happensafter the proposal is painstakingly drafted and planned out in a subcommittee of the FEC.
In an email to the entire university on Feb. 24, Chancellor Gene Block pressed faculty to again consider implementing a requirement, stressing the importance of fostering diversity at the University of California in light of recent incidents that highlight racial tensions on campus.
The long process a requirement must go through before it is actually implemented at UCLA leaves little hope for the chancellor’s goalto “make this happen in 2014.” But students and faculty owe it to the university to heed Block’s call to action and bring another proposal to the table, this time with significantly more involvement on the part of professors.
The failure of the last proposal was largely the result of faculty indifference to the issue. The turnout to the vote was about 30 percent of eligible faculty members, which was higher than it is for most measures, but not nearly high enough to actually ascertain a consensus of the College’s professors.
While students must certainly have an active role in lobbying professors about this issue, faculty has a responsibility to actively engage in conversation with students and be receptive to hearing about issues of campus climate that they may not be aware of.
Professors, who are dedicated to their academic subjects and may have limited interaction with students, are secluded from the pressing need students feel for measures that address campus climate and racial tensions. Faculty members don’t feel tensions on campus in the same way as students, who are much more finely in tune with the opinions, feelings and goings-on of their peers.
While professors have a long-term view of the university by virtue of spending more time here, students have a closer look at the day-to-day happenings on campus.
The divide between professors and campus life gives rise to the belief among some professors that the diversity requirement is either unnecessary or will not solve any problems.
Joseph Manson, a professor of anthropology, said in an email statement to the Daily Bruin that “Assuming that a small minority of UCLA students harbors racist attitudes, there is, unfortunately, no evidence that a required diversity course would change them.”
A diversity requirement is not, however, meant to catapult UCLA into a post-racial world.It’s meant to foster greater understanding among communities on campus and enrich our undergraduate education, hopefully making better citizens out of the people who go here.
Moreover, professors who suggest that a GE requirement would be little more than a tokenist move need to understand that the push to pass a proposal is a strong effort by students and faculty to build a better university.
“Some faculty said we were indulging in political correctness,” said William Newman, a professor of earth and space sciences who was on the subcommittee that drafted the 2012 proposal. “But doing the right thing isn’t political correctness. It’s just doing the right thing.”
The roadblocks facing the implementation of a GE requirement are many: issues with funding, existing requirements in the College of Letters and Science and a process of implementation that threatens the measure at every step. But unfounded opposition from professors should not have a place on that list of obstacles.
In the end, the solution is a simple one: Professors have to be willing to recognize their own limitations in understanding student life and turn to students to fill that gap.
Email Delgadillo at ndelgadillo@media.ucla.edu or tweet her @ndelgadillo07. Send general comments to opinion@media.ucla.edu or tweet us @DBOpinion.
My gosh. Give it a rest. Both sides need to. For all you pro-Israel people, move on. You won.
For all you anti-Israel loons, stop crying. You will get your little resolution passed one year I’m sure. I think you guys know that it will, but the only thing you want is to say that you were the one who finally got the anti-Israel resolution passed. So you guys are in it for yourselves. Also, so what if you get the resolution passed??? HP, Catepillar, Cemex, and General Electric are gigantic companies that provide services to millions of people in the real world (not the crybaby liberal university campuses) and will feel nothing. Furthermore, if you pay even a little bit of attention to politics, you would know that the pro-Israel lobby in the U.S Government is losing strength (as shown by AIPAC having to bow to Obama) and Israel is cognizant of this fact and is increasingly not giving a jack about what the United States has to stay. It also has nukes and a very powerful military.
GEs are pointless, and a diversity GE would be even more pointless
Either the GE is pointless or its indoctrination into the prejudiced views of the hysterical “white privilege” race hucksters and their white guilt enablers (and mushy pansies like Chancelor GENE BLOCK who is too afraid of the intimidation tactics of the radical identity-politics group or worse yet — being labeled as a racist). Inevitably, this means more money and students for the useless cultural “studies” departments, which are generally just a way for students to get easy A’s, while playing the victimization card, and without having to have their views or intellects challenged in actual academics classes. These classes will just be another way to give grades to students based on their ability to toe the party line, as opposed to actually educating students about the world or each other.