Every quarter I get an e-mail telling me that the chancellor
will be holding office hours, and every quarter I delete that
e-mail.
It’s not that I don’t care or that I don’t
have any concerns to voice. Maybe it comes down to the fact that I
have just never taken an interest in university politics.
But I’ve often asked myself, “Who is this chancellor
guy anyway, and what could he possibly do that would affect these
final months of my college career?”
Well, the current chancellor is Albert Carnesale, and he has, in
fact, done much to influence the college careers of most UCLA
students.
During his tenure, Carnesale raised $3 million for graduate
student support with his “Ensuring Academic Excellence”
initiative, and he also raised funds for and supported the UCLA
Stem Cell Institute. He also initiated the Fiat Lux program, giving
freshman a chance to interact with faculty in small, interesting
classes, and giving me the one final unit I needed to graduate this
quarter.
So maybe the chancellor does have an influence, and maybe I
should take more of an interest in university politics, but
Carnesale’s office hours certainly don’t offer much
hope for students actually interested in speaking their mind.
According to the e-mail, students are only offered a one hour
meeting period, once or twice per quarter, with the 60 available
minutes divvied up between the 6 students who would get to have
their voices heard ““ briefly. Furthermore, all applicants are
entered into a “random lottery-style drawing” to see
who wins the chance to speak with him.
This process certainly isn’t an ideal way to form a
functional bond between student and chancellor. The university
system should function with the students’ interests in mind,
so who better to give constructive feedback to the administration
than the students themselves? Under Carnesale, it doesn’t
seem that the students have had much of a chance to and so I
wonder, “What could Carnesale have done better?”
This is certainly an important question, considering the fact
that Chancellor Carnesale has announced that he will be stepping
down at the end of the school year, and a panel is currently
reviewing applicants for his replacement.
What things will this replacement change? How do we go about
selecting this replacement? How should the new chancellor be
different or similar to Carnesale?
Anthony Dunbar, a fourth-year information studies graduate
student and director of communications for the Graduate Students
Association has been asking these same questions.
He wants to know what other graduate students would like to see
in their new chancellor and has been putting together a video
compilation, featuring interviews with UCLA graduate students
voicing their concerns and opinions regarding chancellor
selection.
When I first met Dunbar, he was sitting at his GSA booth in
front of Lu Valle Commons with his video camera poised on a tripod,
ready to interview any grad students with concerns for the new
chancellor.
Dunbar said that the idea is to show the video to the selection
committee and hopefully, “the newly elected chancellor will
be able to see it and see what issues are important to graduate
students, as articulated by graduate students.”
That day, not many students took the time to stop and talk to
Dunbar. Later, in a phone interview, he referred to that first week
as his “learning curve week,” adding that for most
students, “time is a valuable commodity ““ so there were
some challenges.”
But since that first day, Dunbar has recorded many responses in
which graduate students expressed issues that they would hope a new
chancellor would address. While he hasn’t completed his
research yet, he said it seems that the top two concerns have to do
with campus diversity and graduate student funding.
So I have to ask again: What could Carnesale have done better?
That’s a tough question, and while I’m not exactly
sure, it seems that there was some room for improvement.
I do think that even with the office hours (office hour,
really), the chancellor always seemed strangely inaccessible to me.
In some ways, Dunbar supports my feelings, noting that while he
knows the chancellor “can’t shake everybody’s
hand,” he still felt “he could have been more connected
to the student population.”
A connection between the students and the faculty is important,
but it can’t function if students don’t take an
interest. Dunbar’s “speak out” video campaign
represents a way for the chancellor to be more connected to the
students.
With opportunities like this available from groups like the GSA,
interested students now have an outlet for their concerns.
It’s good to see students expressing their views in a
constructive manner, and it’s even better to see students
like Dunbar who take the initiative to actually get those voices
heard.
In this way, the committee knows what the students want, and can
consider this in their selection. Furthermore, when the new
chancellor wants to know what students are concerned about, maybe
he can just watch a video instead of reading the picket signs of
angry protestors.