There’s been a lot of noise about campus politics the last few days, perhaps to compensate for the thundering silence from voters last week. Voter turnout in this year’s Undergraduate Students Association Council election was a whimpering 26.5 percent, the lowest it’s been in the past 10 years. It’s gotten so bad, some candidates have […]
Author Archives: Austin Pink
Austin Pink: Reliance on nontenured faculty harms teaching environment, education quality
For 14 Nobel laureates, three Pulitzer Prize winners and a Fields Medalist, UCLA is home. For 2,000 nontenured faculty, however, it’s merely temporary housing. The number of nontenure academic faculty at UCLA, including adjunct faculty, lecturers, clinical professors and in-residence faculty, has increased by 46 percent since 2009, according to UCLA Academic Planning and Budget. […]
Austin Pink: UCLA needs more STEM-related minors to prepare students for workforce
Last month, as UCLA graduates bid their farewells, the administration was already looking ahead, making frantic preparations for the incoming class of more than 6,000 freshmen. Per tradition, several hundred of these fresh-faced students will arrive without any intended course of study – the dreaded “undeclared.” Luckily, with the creation of three new minors in […]
Austin Pink: More programs like Assembly Bill 34 cannot replace direct funding for UC
In January, the University of California Board of Regents voted to increase the cost of tuition for the 2017-2018 academic year following a six-year price freeze. One regent called the price hike a “Band-Aid,” but it won’t keep California education from bleeding out. Amid backlash from students, the California State Assembly introduced Assembly Bill 34 […]
Austin Pink: UCLA should require students to take a course on media literacy
Campus protests, executive actions, Steve Harvey. Why are these things happening? What will happen next? Much of the anxiety surrounding the recent election and President Donald Trump’s executive actions has been marked by unprecedented online staging. The information market has officially left the corporeal world for the era of digital, and it’s not going back. […]
Students, faculty work on sustainability report card for LA County
UCLA faculty and students will update the County of Los Angeles’ sustainability grade based on its air quality and use of sustainable energy. The report card is a project led by the Sustainable LA Grand Challenge, a research initiative out of the UCLA Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research, which aims to make Los […]
Researcher challenges the idea of scientific neutrality at UCLA talk
Researchers often seek to gather empirical data to make objective conclusions about their research. But pure scientific objectivity may actually lead to biased results, according to one researcher. Ruha Benjamin, a former postgraduate fellow at the UCLA Institute for Society and Genetics, spoke Thursday about the dangers of removing social context from scientific research. At […]