Author Archives: Menaka Fernando

During a ceremony in the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library in the early 1970s, former UCLA student and freedom rider Steve McNichols felt like his journey for civil rights had come full circle. McNichols, an undergraduate student from 1958 to 1966 who had been arrested and beaten on a freedom ride to Houston, Texas, had an […]

Correction appended Camping out on the university lawn for three days proved worthwhile for students calling for the implementation of a diversity requirement when the executive board of the Academic Senate made a commitment to implement a requirement by fall 2005 during a rally Thursday. Clifford Brunk, chairman of the Academic Senate, and vice chairwoman […]

With proposed cuts to outreach, drops in the underrepresented minority enrollment and the call from several students for a diversity requirement, promoting the issue of diversity is a priority for many of the candidates running for seats on the undergraduate student government next term. Most candidates running for offices of the Undergraduate Students Association Council […]

The inherent structure of the Students First! slate is barely visible to the naked eye, but with its support group of more than 20 organizations, extensive recruitment strategies and decades of progressive history behind them, this structure is significant. And as several opposition slates have discovered, the structure is hard to crack. Since the creation […]

To say that undergraduate student government presidential candidate Arash Mozayan Isfahani is an outsider is an understatement. With no previous involvement in the Undergraduate Students Association Council, Mozayan Isfahani is also an out-of-state student who transferred to UCLA from Arizona State University at the beginning of this school year. And until about five years ago, […]

Election results of the Graduate Student Association were released Thursday night to reveal that doctoral student Jared Fox took the presidency in what was the highest voter turnout in known GSA history. With 17 percent of the graduate student body voting, Fox won the presidency by a large margin of 24 percent. More contested was […]

Michelle Layne, a first-year community college student, feels a connection with a San Francisco transgender teen who was assaulted and killed in San Francisco in 2002. The victim was 17-year-old Eddie “Gwen” Araujo, who was confronted and harassed by four men. The men then punched, choked, hit with a skillet, kneed in the face, tied […]