Coastalong to engage wider community as it cycles, recycles for its 7th year

Students can power a popcorn maker and a concert’s speakers with bikes at Coastalong Festival.

The 100% bike- and solar-powered concert and sustainability fair will move into its seventh year Saturday at the Sunset Canyon Recreation Center. Attendees can listen to live music, browse vendor booths and create art at the student-run event. This year, Coastalong focused on expanding to showcase sustainable organizations and involve students in a more engaging way, said Jacob Zazzeron, the festival’s executive producer.

“As a sustainable organization here, it’s important for us to give other sustainable organizations a space to share what they do for the campus as well, and at the same time it enhances our event by having different interactive things,” said Zazzeron, a fourth-year economics student.

Coastalong will feature booths and installations from 21 UCLA groups like Bruins for Animals and the Farmers Market at UCLA, and food and clothing vendors will be in attendance as well, Zazzeron said. The festival chose locally sourced food vendors that limit meat and offer more sustainable options, said Daniella Kelley, the event’s co-sustainability director and a third-year environmental science student. Kye’s, a Santa Monica-based restaurant, will sell vegan wraps and black bean brownies, while Daydrinkers, a recently opened food truck, will supply juice and lemonade.

[RELATED: Student-founded vegan ranch company presents sustainable sauce]

This is Coastalong’s first year emphasizing off-campus organizations aside from food vendors. The organizers hope to raise awareness about companies making strides in the environmental movement, Kelley said. One company planning to set up at the event is For Days, a closed-loop apparel company through which members can trade in their old shirts when they buy new ones. Another featured company is FinalStraw, which sells collapsible metal straws to eliminate plastic waste, she said.

“We tried to get a diverse group of organizations that embody sustainability in everyday life. A lot of the clothing companies integrate sustainability in a unique way and incorporate it into fashion,” Kelley said. “We’re trying to show that, within our community outside of UCLA, there’s a lot going on as well.”

However, Kelley said UCLA clubs remain the heart of Coastalong. The on-campus organizations present at the event two years ago first exposed her to the diversity of environmental organizations on campus, she said. She hopes to maintain that same educational component this year by giving environmental clubs a space to share their work with the UCLA community. By having spaces for people to hang out in hammocks, make flower crowns and ride stationary bikes to power the stage, Coastalong creates an involved atmosphere in which people can learn about sustainability without having it feel forced, Kelley said.

Coastalong – which used to be called Ecochella – takes inspiration from the vibe and activities of other arts and music festivals, but distinguishes itself by basing the event around eco-friendliness, said Marissa Bennett, Coastalong’s art and design director. In addition to the bike-generated electricity aspect, Coastalong uses entirely compostable utensils to minimize the wasteful use of plastic that can occur at mainstream festivals like Coachella, Kelley said.

Bennett, a third-year design media arts student, spearheaded the creative process for coming up with interactive art installations. As in years past, the festival plans to incorporate a traditional paint-by-numbers station in which participants can contribute to a large mural, she said. Bennett’s committee members created the sustainability-focused designs for festivalgoers to paint in. Inspired by environmentalism, the designs feature trees, flowers and hummingbirds, Bennett said.

Drawing inspiration from Coastalong’s theme of sustainability, Bennett said she and her team used environmental materials and other recyclables in their art installations. They picked and pressed flowers from The Original Los Angeles Flower Market downtown to decorate clear cubes in order to put the Earth’s natural beauty on display, Bennett said. They also repurposed CDs that a Coastalong engineering director had lying around her lab, turning them into a hazardous electronic-waste photo backdrop to give would-be trash a second life, she said.

“I think the art installations add an interactive element. Not only can you go and listen to music, but you can also kind of leave your mark on the festival, which I think is pretty cool,” Bennett said.

[RELATED: Art show seeks to highlight diverse roles in the environmental justice movement]

Coastalong representatives said the festival’s mission is to disseminate information not only on the current state of the environment, but also on concrete ways to combat climate change by implementing sustainability. Bennett said Coastalong encourages attendees to make change so that they can take their individual sustainable practices – like bringing their own reusable straws or carrying their own water – to festivals like Coachella.

“I think that a huge goal of Coastalong is to try and make the festival as much like any other festival as possible so it almost doesn’t even feel sustainable,” Kelley said. “That way, sustainability becomes normalized and people learn that it can be easy.”

Predictive policing algorithm perpetuates racial profiling by LAPD

Los Angeles Police Department officers have done such a poor job of making our streets safer that they are now relying on an algorithm to tell them how to do their jobs.

A racist, culturally ignorant algorithm, that is.

LAPD has a history of using and abandoning predictive policing algorithms. One of the only ones still in use is PredPol, which generates 500-square-foot hot spots on maps predicting where crime is likely to happen within the next 12 hours. It uses three factors to determine where officers should patrol: crime type, crime location and crime time.

This technology was created by one of UCLA’s very own: Jeffrey Brantingham, an anthropology professor. Brantingham developed the program with statisticians and the help of National Science Foundation funding to solve public safety concerns in LA.

Yet, the public doesn’t feel any safer.

Sixty-eight UCLA students and faculty sent a letter to the LAPD commissioner April 2 denouncing the research for its ethical implications and because it naturalizes policies and practices that disparately impact black and brown communities.

And it’s not like the algorithm is even remotely successful. The Office of the Inspector General released a report in March stating that, after eight years, it could draw no conclusions on the software’s ability to reduce or prevent crime due to major inconsistencies in its oversight, implementation and criteria.

LAPD has a long record of racially disproportionate arrests, stops and searches, according to a study by the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California. Its use of PredPol shows the troubling reality about policing in Los Angeles: Modernization has only amplified the department’s discriminatory tendencies.

Brantingham said he built the algorithm as a crime-fighting machine to serve a federal responsibility to make the public safer.

“Some places have more crime than others, and the police have a responsibility to deal with that crime,” Brantingham said.

While machines may not see color, LAPD does. PredPol’s algorithm intends to exclude personal information about people, like socioeconomic status or race, but this method isn’t foolproof. Algorithms are often heralded as objective because they’re impersonal and data-driven, but that’s not true when the data driving them has roots in the historic overpolicing of black and brown communities.

“This data was being taken from existing records of policing, which is fraught with racial biases,” said Casey Dalager, a graduate student in public policy.

In a perfect world, crime data would be objective. But when African Americans make up only 9% of the population yet 46% of arrests from metropolitan police in LA, as Million Dollar Hoods’ report demonstrates, it is evident that objectivity has never been a part of the justice system. PredPol normalizes the perception that anyone in the designated hot spot is a potential criminal.

Alveena Shah, a UCLA law student and editor in chief of the UCLA Law Review who signed the letter, said the algorithm’s criteria for determining hot spots itself is racist.

“The type of crimes coded into the database are already based on overpolicing of communities of color,” she said.

Brantingham disagrees, though, that PredPol contributes to overpolicing of certain communities.

“The presence of the algorithm doesn’t, in any way, change the number of officers designated to patrol the community that day,” he said.

Yet, the review released by the Office of the Inspector General states that patrol officers are given missions to “respond to a PredPol hotspot to provide high police visibility.”

That disconnect is just one example of the mixed messaging LA is falling for with regard to this algorithm. Brantingham is clearly in the business of promoting his product, which serves to benefit him more than it does Angelenos.

After all, PredPol is implemented by more than 50 police offices, with each contract running between $30,000 to more than $100,000 apiece. Considering Brantingham is both the co-founder of PredPol and the researcher behind the algorithm, it’s obvious he is biased toward his own work.

However, the algorithm perpetuates stereotypes about crime and race when the police go to these hot spots, justifies suspicion based on unreasonable geographic cues, and further contributes to the larger pattern of minorities being hypercriminalized.

“It has the potential to lead more black and brown faces into mass incarceration because it creates a narrative that these communities are just more volatile and need more policing,” said Taylore Thomas, a third-year African American studies student and a student researcher for Million Dollar Hoods.

Crime prevention to improve public safety is obviously a goal that any large, urban city like LA would strive toward. After all, this is PredPol’s mission statement and sole purpose.

But predictive policing suggests some people commit more crimes than others just because they fall into a hot spot. Refusal to acknowledge LAPD’s problematic history of racism makes PredPol racially charged too, regardless of whether it intended to be.

LAPD shouldn’t have wasted thousands on problematic and ineffective software that tells its officers how to do their jobs – especially since they weren’t doing them right in the first place.

UCLA’s lax vaccination requirements put students at risk for future diseases

UCLA dodged a bullet – or a plague, to be more precise.

The university was rocked by news of a measles case last week after a student infected with the disease attended classes in Franz and Boelter halls April 2, 4 and 9. And 11 days, at least 46 quarantines and countless worried phone calls later, it seems like the university has gotten by without too much issue.

But it can’t be stated enough how bad this could have been. A disease as contagious as measles could tear through a school like UCLA, with the largest undergraduate student body packed onto the second-smallest campus in the University of California system.

This issue could have been avoided with stricter vaccination requirements. It seems the UC knew this, but didn’t act fast or go far enough. The University agreed to impose a policy in 2015 requiring two doses of vaccinations or a blood test proving immunity to the disease, but only started enforcing it in 2018, according to the Los Angeles Times. Unfortunately, this policy only applies to incoming students and not students who enrolled prior to this school year.

By delaying stricter vaccination requirements, the UC has indirectly endangered students who can’t be vaccinated. By not enacting this policy earlier, the University has allowed three classes of students to slip through the cracks and placed them at a greater risk of infection.

All students from these classes who can be vaccinated should now be required to in order to reduce the risk of infection and spread of measles in the future.

Delaying vaccination requirements is a risk we can’t afford for a disease as serious as measles, said Deborah Lehman, a professor in pediatrics at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and a specialist in pediatric infectious diseases.

“You might not think that one person with the disease would pose a threat to a university of our size, but it is highly infectious – one of the most infectious that we have,” Lehman said. “It spreads like wildfire. You just need to be in the same classroom, unlike other diseases, such as influenza or tuberculosis, where you need prolonged contact – it finds pockets of vulnerable people.”

She added that nine out of every 10 unvaccinated people will get the disease if they come in contact.

Clearly this is no common cold. Of the 704 cases of measles reported to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in 2019 as of April 26, 66 patients were hospitalized and 24 developed pneumonia as a complication from the disease. Though there have been no recorded deaths as a result of measles this year, about one or two out of 1,000 people who are infected will die and about one for every 1,000 will develop encephalitis, an infection that can lead to the swelling of the brain that can result in permanent damage.

The risks are high, and UCLA’s procrastination doesn’t help. A student who is not vaccinated or is undervaccinated may still attend classes and carry on with general student life, theoretically being exposed to and exposing others to the disease as long as they enrolled before the 2018-2019 school year.

UCLA spokesperson Ricardo Vazquez said new students who don’t comply with the vaccination requirements before the enrollment period ends risk having a hold placed on their account.

“UC’s vaccination policy was approved with the knowledge that it would not be fully implemented until the campuses could manage the complexity of the task of making the requirement fully operational,” Vazquez said. “Beginning this past fall, UCLA began to enforce enrollment holds for students who are not compliant.”

But this task is not complex enough to merit a three-year implementation period. All the university had to do was require students to show proof of vaccination or immunity before signing up for classes. Any delay only allows more time for an outbreak.

This is a disease the UC cannot afford to drag its toes and take half measures to stop. In order to ensure the protection of its students in the wake of the explosion of measles cases, vaccinations must be mandated for all students, even those who enrolled prior to the 2018-2019 school year.

And even if the vaccine might seem to pose a financial burden to some, the Arthur Ashe Student Health & Wellness Center offers immunizations for $100. The cost of subsidizing this for the minority of students not vaccinated for measles would be trivial for a university with a $7.5 billion budget that recently launched a $35 million dollar fundraising campaign for a new academic center for student-athletes. The money to protect students is clearly there.

There are two courses of action for the university: Either take action now to protect its students or cross its fingers and pray that another incident like last week’s does not happen again for another two years.

Next time, we might not be so lucky.

UCPD looking for four men involved in burglary at Venice Boulevard apartments

This post was updated May 2 at 11:18 p.m.

University police are searching for four men involved in a burglary Wednesday morning.

Four men were seen breaking into multiple vehicles in the Venice-Barry Apartments parking garage from 1 a.m. to 7:30 a.m., according to a UCPD crime alert. The men entered at least two unlocked vehicles and smashed the windows of at least 12 locked vehicles.

The 14 cars reported to UCPD all belonged to UCLA students or staff.

UCPD Lt. Kevin Kilgore described two of the men as black and between the ages of 18 and 25, and two of the men as Hispanic and between the ages of 18 and 25.

The case is still under investigation. Anyone with information about the case can call UCPD at 310-825-1491.

 

 

Throwback Thursday: Criticism about fraternity policies not a new phenomenon

After last year, it shouldn’t be a surprise that UCLA fraternities have been at the center of campus controversy since their early days.

On May 12, 1969, the Daily Bruin published an article outlining how Greek row was responding to campus criticism toward pledging procedures and what fraternities were doing to institute higher standards. The main goal of these changes was to redefine the “stereotyped image of fraternity members” that was receiving criticism from inside and outside the Greek system.

“Several fraternity leaders here are beginning to voice the opinion that their Greek system will die unless fraternity men respond swiftly and sufficiently to a changing social climate on campus,” the article read.

Fraternities planned to solve their campus “image” problems with individualized solutions instituted by each house, with a focus on community service. Harold Moskovits, the Interfraternity Council President at the time, guided Greek Week that year with this theme of outreach in hope that fraternities would take initiative in the effort to change their campus identity.

The then-Interfraternity Council advisor, Steve Davis, indicated that the primary push for these changes came from economic necessity due to low numbers of pledges, discouraged by pledging practices. However, fraternities that were not experiencing financial issues notably instituted changes as well.

Several fraternities that were identified in the article, some of which remain on the row today, outlined steps they would take to make new students feel comfortable joining Greek life.

In the ’60s, Zeta Beta Tau began to implement what they deemed “sensitivity training,” performed as an encounter group, a small group interaction where participants are encouraged to react to statements or situations provided by an unbiased moderator, as a large part of their pledging process. Unfortunately, the specifics of this coaching were left out of the article. The president of the fraternity, Jeff Jens, even went so far as to criticize other fraternities that were not quickly adapting to the new age.

Similarly, Sigma Nu utilized an “honor system” for their pledging procedures. This arrangement allowed new members of the fraternity to discuss behavior and ethics in the evenings during Hell Week – a common term used to describe the week leading up to initiation.

Finally, Bill Sitz, the president of Phi Kappa Sigma, at the time said sensitivity programs may work for some fraternities, but not all of them. However, despite not including tailored trainings, his fraternity planned to treat their pledges better as a whole.

Considering the general political climate of the 1960s in the United States, many of the alterations instituted by fraternities served as legitimate improvements to the fraternity system and may have acted as preliminary guidelines for the increasingly influential Interfraternity Council.

However, the social climate surrounding Greek life has continued to change, and the UCLA student body is taking action once again.

Now dealing with far more complex problems involving sexual assault and harassment, Greek life at UCLA is under fire once again.

 

[RELATED: Campaign responding to fraternity sexual assault allegations urges for reform]

The Phi Kappa Psi fraternity is currently facing criticism for their handling of sexual assault allegations. Daphne Sinclaire, a second-year anthropology and geography student, organized a letter writing campaign encouraging college-age women to share their stories and experiences of sexual assault with Phi Kappa Psi.

Sinclaire told the Daily Bruin that she hopes the hundreds of letters sent to Phi Kappa Psi will encourage both the fraternity and the Interfraternity Council to make amends to their policies and develop ways to support survivors better.

Daphne Sinclaire’s letter writing campaign reflects a student reaction to changing times, similar to the actions taken by the fraternities years ago.

Unlike the actions taken in the 1960s, Daphne Sinclaire’s letter writing campaign is calling for accountability and expands the scope of student calls to action, now including the voices of college women. Additionally her choice to take letters from other colleges reflects a greater cultural shift in the way college students are able to discuss topics like sexual assault.

It is clear that students, from the 60s to the centennial, have not hesitated to share their grievances toward their peers or institutions that perpetuate archaic stereotypes and cultural norms. While only time will tell the future of the IFC’s role on campus, we can all be assured that students’ voices are strong enough to tackle convention.

In the Know: Quarters, dimes and semesters

Quarters or semesters? The age-old debate has once again made its way on campus, this time thanks to Chancellor Gene Block. This week on “In the Know,” assistant Opinion editor Omar Said talks to Opinion editor Keshav Tadimeti about why this year’s iteration of the debate came about, and what it tells us about Block, UCLA and the future of education in Los Angeles.

Omar Said: From the Daily Bruin, this is “In the Know.” I’m Omar Said. This week, we take a look at the schedule that dictates our very lives as UCLA students: the quarter system.

The quarter system is among UCLA’s most polarizing issues. Rather than spacing their academic school years into semesters, as most universities do, UCLA and the other UCs, excluding UC Berkeley and UC Merced, have opted to use the quarter system – a system that UCLA’s chancellor, Gene Block, recently told the Daily Bruin Editorial Board he was open to changing. I have with me today Keshav Tadimeti, the Daily Bruin’s Opinion editor and a standing member of the editorial board.

So Keshav, how did this happen?

Keshav Tadimeti: So it kind of happened in a way that none of us really expected. This conversation usually comes up seasonally, but this time it came up from an administrator, which typically it doesn’t. So, back on March 11, the Daily Bruin Editorial Board met with Chancellor Block. The board meets quarterly with the chancellor for an hour to ask him about important issues on campus. And in this meeting, we didn’t have anything about the quarter system or the semester system on the docket – I was actually, in fact, questioning the chancellor about the state of mental health resources on campus and what UCLA was doing to address its counseling crisis.

Specifically, I was asking the chancellor about UCLA’s commitment to addressing things like the huge student demand for mental health resources, how the Counseling and Psychological Services center is understaffed, doesn’t have adequate space to house enough counselors to help students.

Chancellor Block, as most administrators, was sort of politely fighting back, talking about new strategies the university needed to do and how it was committed and whatnot, and he was talking, you know, about how one-on-one counseling, in his eyes, isn’t a sustainable solution for addressing mental health needs, and that counselors and universities would need to employ things like artificial intelligence to, you know, adapt to the growing demand for mental health resources. He brought up how the university owes each student the ability to seek out mental health treatment.

And then, he leaned back, and almost out of nowhere, he said it: UCLA should leave the quarter system because it’s a failed system.

Gene Block: I think there’s ways of limiting stress where we can, and I urge you all to support changing to semesters, by the way, if you want to limit stress. Keep that in mind, we need a lot of support for changing to semesters, but I am quite serious about it. There are ways of reducing stress and I think changing the changing our schedule could be very helpful. That’s my belief.

OS: So why is it what he just said is so important?

KT: The quarter system versus semester system debate has sort of been rehashed a lot. It happens nearly every time a student decides to choose between going to UC Berkeley versus UCLA. I’m not sure if it necessarily happens when you’re choosing between UC Merced and UCLA, but you know, don’t want to pound on UC Merced – sorry all you Merced people.

It happens every time when students are upset about finals week coming up just a few days after their instruction. It happens on the UCLA Memes for Sick AF Tweens page. Students are obviously very riled up about this.

And the arguments are pretty predictable at this point. One side is saying that 10 weeks are too short, that it’s not enough for classes to go in depth into the subject matter. That it rushes professors and it causes a lot of undue stress to students. They argue that if you give students 15 weeks, they would have more time to digest the course material and also get the added benefit of a dead week – or a week where there are no classes before the final exam, which is what Berkeley has.

People on the other side argue that the quarter system allows students who don’t like the courses they’re taking to get over them in 10 weeks, instead of stewing for 15. It also allows for students who don’t know what their field of study they want to pursue, what that is, it allows them to take basically 12 courses each year, minus in the summer, compared to eight in the semester system. Those are four extra classes that can help determine determine whether you want to pursue computer science versus – I don’t know – music or something.

OS: And what kind of reasons did Chancellor Block offer for the transition to the semester system?

KT: So he talked about how the stress that students face is largely a “west coast phenomenon,” and how it’s a different way of teaching and learning, and how it’s basically this wonderful solution that’s going to ease up the stress that students face. He said that students face, you know, almost something like midterms around every corner and how that helps rack up stress.

GB: You know, I think we should offer every student the opportunity for the best possible experience here. And that means both educationally and in terms of social support, you know, psychological support. So I think, we have an obligation to provide as much as we possibly can, within limits of what we can demand that we have. So, you know, I don’t have the answer other than, obviously, we have an obligation we want students to productive, happy lives. And that involves more than just having good classroom experience. So I think we’re committed to do everything we can.

KT: It was obvious that he was been thinking about this for some time, since he used to teach at UCLA. He did during the recession and he did research into certain things like circadian rhythms. He knows this system from a faculty and researcher perspective, and obviously from an administrative one too. So the fact that he brought this up made it kind of clear that he’s been mulling over this for some time. But the thing is that he can only really propose this as a solution because faculty have to approve it. It was intriguing that he brought this up in a context that didn’t really necessitate it. This was a conversation about mental health resources on campus and about UCLA’s commitment to it. It seems like he’s been thinking about this institutionally, which it’s interesting – it gives you insight into what this aging chancellor of the top public university is thinking regarding campus issues.

OS: What kind of changes might UCLA students experience if we were to switch to the semester system?

KT: I mean, the first one of the things is that, obviously, it’ll be five weeks longer. Midterms probably wouldn’t happen every week, but that also means they’re more spaced out. And that means final exams would also be spaced out too, so you might be tested on content you may not even remember. That’s sort of just the tip of the iceberg.

You’ll see changes in terms of research opportunities, in terms of internships as well. A lot of companies and organizations tend to recruit for internships during around May or April time, and semester system schools tend to end earlier too. Berkeley ends, I believe, middle of May or end of May, and that means that quarter system students who end in the middle of June lose out on those opportunities or have to adjust their spring quarter schedules to get those jobs. And you might see more students being able to land those opportunities, more companies coming over because UCLA would have been on the semester system and probably also see differences in terms of the units. Each course would have to reevaluated, you might have some courses condensing into others, because you can go into more depth about something – you don’t need two quarters for something that only takes one semester.

OS: Of course, despite all these benefits to students, there’s a reason we’re not on the semester system – professors. Can you walk us through why it is that the quarter system works so well for professors?

KT: Basically, there’s a norm of what they call two-plus-one system, where professors teach for two quarters and they do research for one. And also the quarter system allows more flexibility for adjunct professors, or sort of non-traditional professors. I actually had a professor in my freshman year whose name is Carey Nachenberg. He teaches for only one quarter, winter quarter, of the year, and he works at Google for the other two quarters. So it allows for that kind of flexibility because 10 weeks is an easier ask from employers or from researchers than fifteen weeks is.

Ten weeks also means that you don’t have huge breaks in between your courses. You can imagine that in sort of the spring semester, or second semester of semester system schools, you have spring break in between. That’s a week in between your classes. You don’t really experience that in the quarter system. At best, you experience maybe about three days for Thanksgiving break in fall quarter. And these breaks obviously disrupt instruction, so you can see where like 10 weeks can be seen as sort of like a healthy balance between enough time for teaching but also no need for breaks.

And these are also a lot of the concerns that faculty brought up 2003, which was the last time they voted on whether to switch to the semester system. In fact, UCLA Newsroom, there’s an opinion column published Feb. 11, 2003, titled “Why Returning to Semesters is a Bad Idea” and it starts out saying that this was actually the sixth time in 30 years UCLA considered switching to the semester system, so this debate has been really really really longrunning. And a lot of the issues brought up were that students don’t have time to explore different majors, that faculty like doing research and that they want to go on sabbaticals and what not, and the quarter system lends itself to that.

There’s also the thing that it costs a lot of money to switch to the semester system because courses need to be reevaluated, you probably need to get re-accredited as a university, you’d have to change the calendar, you imagine working big time with the registrar’s office. Faculty don’t like change, institutions don’t like change, so it’s kind of clear why there would be sort of a lot of backlash against this.

OS: Does it really matter that faculty are against this proposal though? As chancellor, can’t Gene Block just do it himself?

KT: That’s not how universities work. Basically, they operate on a system that’s called shared governance. Universities sort of like to pride themselves on intellectual independence – that you take everybody’s viewpoints into account before you make a decision, because we’re all rational, intellectual beings is the assumption. And so how it works is that you have an administration, you allow faculty to determine academic policy and administrators typically handle things like staff employment or student affairs. And so what you have at UCLA is a system where you have the administrative offices in Murphy Hall, where the chancellor may sit at the top, but what really controls academic policy is a body called the Academic Senate. It’s a body of senior faculty who determine majors and minor requirements. Sometimes they determine things like when the university can pause instruction during an emergency – they control almost everything about academic policy. So it’s not just Gene Block is sort of passionate about switching to the semester system – it’s that faculty would have to sign on to this and vote, and it’s been voted on several times and shot down each time.

GB: You know, it’d have to take over several years because faculty would have to prepare for it, obviously, and it’s a challenge. I think Cal State is doing it. I think by a certain time I’ve heard I think they’ve actually by fiat I think they’re going to be changing all their schools to semesters. But I’m really quite serious, I think that semesters offer advantage to building reading days before exams to lower stress levels, you’re not taking midterms every time you turn around. It’s a different way to teach – it’s a different way to learn. The quarter system, in my view, is a failed system. I mean, most schools have moved away from it. It’s really mostly a West Coast phenomenon now, and time to change.

OS: If the quarter system is so great, then why have other universities, like the Cal States, which recently switched off the quarter system, switched to the semester system?

KT: So according to an EdSource article published in 2016, a couple of the Cal State campuses were joining the semester system. They were on the quarter system. I believe it was Cal State Los Angeles was considering switching to the semester system, and in the article it said that San Luis Obispo was also considering switching to the semester system. Cal Poly Pomona and Cal State East Bay were set to convert in 2018, and San Bernardino and San Luis Obispo later – not too sure about whether those other campuses have switched.

But one of the things that was brought up was the sort of cost associated with the quarter system. When you do class registration, you have to make sure MyUCLA is running, you have to coordinate with many different departments, pay for registrars and course cataloging and stuff. And that happens three times for quarter systems, whereas it happens only twice for semesters. There’s also a lot of logistical things involved. The departments have to make sure course offerings are there, they have to deal with more appointments, put on more workshops – so quarter system is sort of a three-peat when the semester system only happens twice and that can seem appealing to universities that are looking to cut costs and also compete against other universities.

The quarter system does have a bad rap of being very rigorous and the reasons for maybe switching to the semester system is students wouldn’t choose between UCLA and a private university, or UCLA and UC Berkeley, just purely based on education system but rather on the merits of it. And especially now that UCLA has raised more than $4.2 billion in philanthropy as part of its Centennial Campaign, it’s really looking to bring in more students. Applications to UCLA – the number of them dipped this year compared to in previous years. The quarter system does show signs of cracking. Obviously, all the things being considered, there are a lot of other factors, but one of the things to consider really is the institutional costs associated with running a quarter system.

The Cal States probably shifted to be more uniform, because they have 17 campuses, many of which operate on a semester system. The University of California, on the other hand, has 10 campuses – nine undergraduate campuses – two of which operate on the quarter system. And so you can see where just to be uniform with the other UCs, the majority of other UCs, UCLA might be more inclined to stay on the quarter system, and also Berkeley does its own thing, so we can’t look at it as much of a standard.

OS: So what do you think? Is UCLA better off siding with faculty on this one, or should it move to the semester system to try and help students?

KT: I think a big thing that’s not really considered is the immediate aftermath of switching. There’ve been a couple of studies about how switching from the quarter system to the semester system immediately affects things like first-year GPAs, graduation rates and whatnot because people are probably in that immediate space where they have to adjust from a quarter system to a semester system. And one of the things to consider is that your first year at university is probably not going to be your best. Many people who are straight-A students in high school come to UCLA or these competitive universities and basically have a wakeup call, where they realize that the guardrails are off – that college is sort of you fend for yourself. I have a bit of apprehension to think that I would have done better at UCLA, at least my first year in a semester, and these considerations are something UCLA has to take into account because there are going to be a couple classes of students who are going to be collateral damage in this shift. And it’s not going to happen overnight – there’s going to be a lot of institutional inertia.

But I do think that semester system schools offer more benefits to students. And while the quarter system is fast-paced, for me specifically as a computer science student, a quarter system wasn’t really that great for educational purposes. By the time I figured out what was going on, I already had final exams. And especially for computer science classes that are very much project heavy, and you have to give a lot of theoretical background to backup whatever you’re teaching, it’s just not enough time to learn. Just the fact that as engineers, many of us have a lot of requirements that the department doesn’t really give us a lot of classes that cover the same subject, it’s that topic and that’s it. And that really makes departments and majors like computer science or engineering sort of a scattershot. You just get a sneak peak at some kind of topics and you have to pursue a masters degree to really go into depth, whereas I have friends who go to other universities that learn a lot of the mathematical backing behind things, and that makes them more competitive candidates for internships and what not.

Personally, I would say switch to the semester system, but I wouldn’t want to be any one of the students who’s in the immediate aftermath of that switch.

GB: In terms of what we owe students, we owe students with the best possible environment and I think that probably the semester system could provide a better environment.

OS: That’s all for this week. We’ll be here again in two weeks with a new episode of In the Know, looking at yet another issue here at UCLA. Have any ideas for topics In the Know should cover? Send them to opinion@dailybruin.com.

From the Daily Bruin, I’m Omar Said. This is “In the Know.”