As a group of prospective students look up to gaze upon the
towering red-brick building, their campus tour guide informs them
about Royce Hall’s architectural history. Its asymmetrical
features are a replication of a famous Italian structure, the tour
guide says.
Another group of prospective students gazes up to see the same
asymmetrical music hall, but this time the tour guide informs the
group about a different kind of history. In the 1980s, students
built a tent city on Royce Quad and demanded the University of
California divest from South Africa, eventually leading to the end
of apartheid, the tour guide says.
This unconventional and unofficial tour offers information
particularly to underrepresented minority high school students that
the traditional campus tours do not.
The tour’s main objective is to encourage working-class
prospective students that it is possible to make it to UCLA and
make a difference, said Eligio Martinez Jr., a fourth-year history
and Chicana/o studies student, who has been giving the unofficially
titled “progressive student tour” for the past three
years.
It has been given “practically forever,” said Anica
McKesey, the current president of the Undergraduate Students
Association Council.
As long as there has been a history of progressive students at
UCLA, the tour has been given; the history keeps accumulating, she
added.
McKesey first took the tour when she was a senior in high
school.
“It impressed upon me the need to come to UCLA. … It was
really motivating,” she said.
The information provided by the progressive tour supplements the
practical information offered through traditional campus tours.
While the university campus tour guides potential students and
their inquisitive parents through the UC application process, meal
plan options and the course registration process, the progressive
student tour highlights the “working-class roots” of
the UCLA campus.
“It is important to point out in this day and age of a
multi-racial, multi-cultural California that we understand the
origins of the UC,” McKesey tells her tour group as she leads
them to the first stop, the former Men’s Gym and soon-to-be
Student Activities Center.
McKesey proceeds to inform the students about taxes collected
from Mexican and Chinese immigrants in the 1850s, which were used,
in part, to fund the building of the UC.
When completed, the center will house student-initiated outreach
and retention programs that McKesey said were essential to
continuing a legacy that student activists from generations past
have created.
The tour continues to Bruin Walk and ends in front of Campbell
Hall, never shying away from controversy in the process.
The guide explains that on the steps of Campbell Hall, two
students were shot and killed in 1969. It was first believed that
John Higgins and Bunchy Carter, two leaders of the black militant
group on campus, the Black Panthers, were killed by rivals from the
black nationalist United Slaves group.
Later it was reported that members of the Federal Bureau of
Investigations and the Central Intelligence Agency had infiltrated
both groups and exacerbated the tensions between the two
groups.
The guide proceeds to tell the younger students that not only
did federal agents actually commit the murders of the two UCLA
students, but that they also assassinated prominent African
American leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X and
Medgar Evers.
Though the agents themselves may have not committed all the
murders, tour leaders believe they were a direct result of the
infiltration, McKesey said.
These theories are not widely accepted. And, according to
Martinez, not all students are responsive to the information
provided on the tour.
“There is usually a mixed response. While some students
aren’t receptive, others it has inspired,” he said.
When Eric Barba, a second-year political science and history
student, took the tour as a high school student, he was inspired to
become involved on campus.
Not many of his peers made it to a college, Barba said.
Its important to make use of the opportunities available to
students of color to express themselves so they do not fall into
the stereotype of being “lazy imbeciles,” he added.
Some of Barba’s many involvements include the Student
Initiated Outreach Center and the Academic Affairs Committee.
Guides and participants alike maintain that the tour ““
given as often as once a week ““ is unique from others on
campus.
“This is a tour that can’t be duplicated by the
administration because it’s facilitated by students who have
inherited a legacy and have a responsibility to share (campus)
history,” McKesey said.