Submission: Opposition to undergraduate diversity requirement is justified

In a recent editorial, the Daily Bruin Editorial Board condemned the actions of 59 professors who urged a revote on the College of Letters and Sciences diversity requirement proposal. This condemnation is a mischaracterization.

First, the board criticizes any expansion of the vote beyond Letters and Sciences professors as illegitimate. What the Daily Bruin fails to mention, is that only an expansion of the vote can make the requirement decision legitimate. A review of the Academic Senate bylaws outlines that only the full faculty or its representatives are empowered to decide graduation requirements.

So the first vote of Letters and Science faculty was nothing more than an advisory straw poll. The vote of the Legislative Assembly could have decided it, but the bylaws again allow for “written petition by voting members equal to one-third of the members of the Legislative Assembly” to ask for a vote of the entire faculty. This comes out to 51 given the current membership numbers, and the petition received a total of 59. The petitioners are doing this because a graduation requirement is a serious issue and they are following legitimate procedures.

Second, there is a serious concern that the proponents of the requirement leveraged a conflict of interest of certain professors to win the College of Letters and Sciences vote (that went 332-303 for the requirement). Professors were invited to submit courses that could fulfill the diversity requirement, but the diversity proposal that is publicly available does not specify which of the 157 courses that were submitted will receive a distinction.

By not deciding which courses would fulfill the requirement, the supporters were able to generate an inflated margin of support. Professors with a course submitted would have every reason to vote in favor, lest they vote against their own course.

The scheduled full vote helps to remedy several problems. First, it forces the requirement to stand on its own merit against objective academic observers from other schools within UCLA, like the professors in the engineering and medical schools. This minimizes the conflict of interest presented beforehand, where faculty supporting the requirement could potentially be personally benefiting from it if their course was chosen to fulfill the requirement.

It also serves to balance the scales for hard science and other south campus professors, who are unlikely to have many courses that could qualify for the requirement, by bringing in medical, engineering and architectural faculty. These professors were previously not allowed to vote. Because making any course part of a school-wide graduation requirement will naturally raise enrollment numbers of courses that satisfy the requirement, and therefore the prestige and possibly the salary of the professor, this is important.

In the second part of the article, the Editorial Board attempts to make its case more robust by spinning a straw man argument. They state that the “timing” of the petition must be “called into question.” The Board is looking for a conspiracy that does not exist. The bylaws ask the petitioners to submit the petition to the chair of the Academic Senate, and the chair or his or her representative is required to announce the full vote to the media, not the petitioners. The petitioners actually moved the document to the Academic Senate Chair quickly after the Legislative Assembly Meeting even though the bylaws give them months to do so. The rest was out of their control.

In the final passages of the article, the Editorial Board switches gears from just attacking the petition to attacking anyone against the diversity requirement. The phrase “falls behind” is cleverly repeated in a rhythmic way to insinuate that any debate on a graduation requirement is a waste of time. Such an assumption shows that the Board is willing to overlook valid points from the opposition in pursuit of social engineering.

This is manifest in that the Daily Bruin did not cover the letter detailing the opposition’s well-reasoned opinion against the requirement. If it had covered such a letter, the student body would know that the petitioners and the opposition are mainly concerned with three problems.

One is the academic merit of such a requirement. At a university, and especially within an academic senate, priority must be given to academic concerns, not social issues. A university’s purpose is academic learning, not making value judgments regarding which viewpoints students need exposure to.

Another is the very real possibility that the requirement will cause graduation backlog and budget problems, as an already overburdened system tries to enforce one more requirement. The opposition has even estimated a deficit of several thousand students every year.

Finally, there is the concern that such classes will reduce a very crucial type of diversity, intellectual diversity. The experience of many students, myself included, is that classes that would fulfill such a diversity requirement would digress into advocating a certain set of political stances on issues. They would go beyond teaching experience, and instead teach political conformity.

Kohlhepp is a third-year economics and political science student.