Daily Bruin

The first time I heard about the Common Book, I was two midterms into week six and finishing an eight-page essay.

Suffice it to say, I wanted nothing to do with a novel.

Unfortunately, many students will be introduced to the Common Book this way – a process which often involves promptly forgetting about the book’s existence.

The Common Book Program began in 2008 as an effort to foster community between new students. Each year, a book is selected by a committee comprising mainly UCLA Residential Life and First Year Experience staff and provided to the freshman class to incite discussion and present a common theme for the academic year.

The program chooses narratives likely to spark conversation – books such as “Bad Feminist” and “Between the World and Me” have been selections in previous years – as part of a larger attempt to heighten social awareness and foster discussion that might not occur naturally.

In the past, UCLA gave the Common Book to incoming first-year students the summer before they began classes. Now students can get the book if they opt into the program. Katherine Alvarado, a UCLA spokesperson, said the book is also an optional educational program that faculty and staff can incorporate into curricula.

But between ridiculously low engagement rates, lack of discussion attendance and little to no purposeful consultation with students and faculty, the program’s goals are cut short before it can even begin to reach its full potential.

The Common Book would benefit from more student and faculty involvement in the decision-making process. This book sends a message about which voices the university chooses to elevate and making the selection process more inclusive has the potential not only to engage more students, but also to encourage often difficult conversations about topics such as gender or discrimination that can create an increasingly aware and empathetic student body.

This year, the book selected was “The Line Becomes a River” by Francisco Cantú, which details Cantú’s experiences as a U.S. Border Patrol agent. This choice sparked controversy, as many felt the first Common Book about the Latinx experience should not be the story of someone complicit in U.S. border policies such as deportation or family separation.

A group of faculty members wrote an open letter in response to the choice, arguing Cantú was profiting from his involvement at the border with his speaker fees. Ultimately, he donated his speaker fees to the UCLA Undocumented Students Program, as well as to an undocumented man and his family who are mentioned in the book.

Charlene Villaseñor Black, a professor of art history and Chicana and Chicano studies who was involved in writing the open letter, said she thinks this year’s Common Book selection reflects a lack of input from people familiar with its themes.

“This process would have benefited from there being more Latinx people on the selection committee because they would have pointed out the problems with this,” Villaseñor Black said. “There was not enough representation on the committee, and they also didn’t consult with faculty experts on migration.”

This year’s selection made clear how the Common Book Program neglects its responsibility to uplift narratives that represent the university community in an inclusive and accurate manner.

Sean Metzger, a professor of theater and performance studies who also helped author the open letter, said privileging this year’s selection over other narratives about immigration was a significant choice.

“That’s a big thing for me – what’s the style, what kinds of things are being excluded, what kinds of voices are being validated or not,” Metzger said.

With poorly selected narratives come low engagement rates, so it should come as no surprise that the program consistently falls short in promoting discussion, despite its 10-year matriculation.

Yet the controversy of this year’s book speaks to the potential of the program in guiding campus discussion. Although this year’s Common Book was in poor taste, the ensuing conversation was significant given the current political climate. If the program can harness this potential in a more inclusive and representative manner, it could facilitate the kind of meaningful and diverse discussion incoming Bruins deserve.

Michelle Carter, a second-year geology and biology student and one of two students on the 2018-19 Common Book committee, said student participation in the selection process would improve the selection of and discussions surrounding the book.

Moreover, the Common Book should not stay within the confines of the Hill. Incorporating it into curriculum, consulting with faculty and increasing the selection process’ inclusivity is the only way to meaningfully integrate the program into a larger campus dialogue.

Certainly, the Common Book Program faces a difficult task in picking a single story for a student body with 45,000 narratives. And no matter how exceptional the selection, one book can’t change the course of campus culture. But consulting those who will be represented is a good place to start choosing what story to tell each year. No amount of outreach can ensure everyone reads the text, but heightened involvement in the process is likely conducive to increased interest in the book itself.

UCLA might just be surprised by the results if it opens the doors to the program.

After all, you can’t judge a Common Book by its cover.

“It’s not my responsibility to teach you, it’s your responsibility to learn.”

That’s the motto boasted by many in the LGBTQ groups on campus.

The problem is: Who are students expected to learn from?

This is an important question many students are asking at UCLA. The Gender, Sexuality, and Society Living Learning Community on the Hill provides a space for LGBTQ students to dorm together based on a shared interest and community. And outside of the dorms, student-led LGBTQ initiatives on campus focus on creating safe spaces for marginalized communities.

These spaces are meant to help LGBTQ members advocate for their needs and engage in community building. They don’t, however, leave much room for students still learning the ins and outs of LGBTQ activism.

Within the LLC, for example, there is pushback against students who misuse pronouns or terminology in an offensive manner, despite the possibility these students do not understand the context behind their wording. That disconnect creates a hostile environment between those who finally want to be a part of a space where their identities are validated and those looking to be better assets for positive social change within their community.

“You kind of have quite a bit of catching up to do in terms of educating yourself on certain things, like knowledge about LGBTQIA+ culture, among other things,” said Elizabeth Friedman, a first-year art history student who lives in the LLC. “When you make mistakes, you kind of have this ‘problematic’ label that kind of follows you around.”

In other words, there’s a call-out culture that’s prevalent in many of these groups.

This culture may be created from members of the LGBTQ community becoming increasingly frustrated at being expected to educate others on how to respect their identities or why microaggressions are offensive, especially in safe spaces designed for them to not have to. But while students with more extensive backgrounds on social justice feel exhausted from a constant demand to educate, those with less social justice background can feel barred from these communities and feel attacked for what they don’t know.

 

As a result, these spaces built on inclusivity become inherently exclusive.

Nieves Winslow, a second-year art student and the founder of Queer and Trans People of Color, a group created to provide a safe space for students from these marginalized communities, said there are a lot of difficulties in cultivating a space when working with marginalized intersections of identity.

“It can be frustrating to feel as though you have to educate people as a person with marginalized identities,” Winslow said. “It’s often those with the most marginalized identities that become responsible for this.”

Moreover, reconciling these spaces is not an easy task. Promoting community and inclusion as a student on a campus as large as UCLA is a big job with many barriers.

Alejandro Pulido, a co-founder of Queer Peer Counseling at UCLA, an LGBTQ student mentorship program, said it is hard to find mentors who are knowledgeable enough about LGBTQ issues and intersections of race and background within the LGBTQ community to best help these students.

Yet it is important to create these spaces for students who have been constantly forced to defend their own identities, said Maria Hammett, a fourth-year environmental science student and executive director of Queer Alliance, the student-run mother organization in charge of overseeing certain LGBTQ student groups on campus.

“Having an organization dedicated to serving queer students is important – especially for the identities not commonly served and recognized by the campus, such as queer and trans people of color,” Hammett said.

But people from these marginalized groups can struggle in these spaces due to differing levels of background knowledge on social justice. Frustration at constantly being expected to educate is understandable, but it feeds into a culture of making these spaces inaccessible and can create a hostile environment in which members of the LGBTQ community feel excluded from their own spaces. The policing of these spaces means they lose much of the inclusion they preach.

Ian Segler, a third-year sociology student and a resident of the LLC, said while he enjoys living in the community, the call-out culture hurts the sense of community the floor is meant to create.

“I like living in the LLC because, as a queer person, I feel physically safe being on this floor. But the call-out culture is really toxic,” Selger said. “It’s a form of public shaming, and it brands people as a sort of social pariah.”

The LLC was created to be a space for living and learning built upon inclusion and community for LGBTQ students. Yet it – and others like it – have frequently become more divisive than inclusive.

“There’s no room for growth, and open conversations are quickly shut down,” Selger said.

Many might argue there are a plethora of resources on the internet or outside of these groups through which people can educate themselves before attempting to be a part of these communities.

But the problem with this self-education mindset is these groups and resources are an attempt to bolster inclusivity on campus. Creating an inclusive environment means allowing those interested in the social movements the ability to learn and to be a part of a cause they care about.

The irony is the groups created to promote that inclusion at UCLA might have just become exclusionary in the process.

 

Think back to a moment of self-doubt you’ve experienced in university. Perhaps you’re gripping your notes with sweaty palms in seminar, dreading your turn to give a presentation. Or maybe you’re nervously bouncing your leg against your desk as you raise your hand to answer the professor’s question.

In that moment, you may have felt like a fraud on the verge of being caught, pretending to know something you don’t or be something you’re not.

Some students, especially transfer students, are never able to escape these feelings.

Many transfers are first-generation college students who come from historically underrepresented minority communities. The transition from community college to a fast-paced, demanding university like UCLA can be jarring, leaving many students prone to impostor syndrome – the idea they don’t belong on the campuses they’ve earned a place at.

It doesn’t help that the UC doesn’t put in the work to mitigate this concern.

For starters, not all transfer students have access to a dedicated transfer center. UCLA’s transfer program only gained access to rooms on campus in 2017. Transfer centers at UC Irvine and UC Berkeley still share space with other organizations. The resources these centers offer also differ: UCLA’s transfer center hosts a part-time academic adviser 10 hours per week, while UC Santa Barbara’s has two full-time academic advisers.

You can blame these differences on administrative laziness. The UC has shown it prefers to sit back and leave staff and student advocates to design and implement support programs themselves. This reliance on bottom-up advocacy instead of top-down institutionalized support means the burden of providing resources to transfer students falls on individual campus leaders – even on students themselves.

But transfer students have the same fundamental needs regardless of which school they’re attending – needs that aren’t being met. Inclusivity includes a financial commitment, and the UC’s failure to ensure each of its campuses provides the same basic support for transfer students shows a reluctance to fully integrate transfers into the community.

Sam del Castillo, a doctoral student in the department of counseling, clinical, and school psychology at UCSB who also attended the university as a first-generation undergraduate transfer student, began organizing workshops on campus, while completing their doctoral work, to help students with impostor syndrome. These workshops, based on clinical research, help transfer students build a community and develop a healthier, growth-focused mindset.

But it’s not students’ job to ensure the University provides basic support. Students pay tuition to UC campuses assuming the money will fund student resources.

“It is not efficient or sustainable to have students manage these support programs,” del Castillo said. “Universities need to structurally and systemically incorporate these programs so that this support continues.”

While del Castillo has received support for these workshops from the UCSB Transfer Center and the Opening New Doors to Accelerating Success Student Center, they have had to pay for workshop-related expenses from their own savings.

This is a simple, effective program UCSB and other UC campuses should have already had in place.

The failure by system-level administrators to address widespread transfer student issues like impostor syndrome puts additional strain on other campus resources, with students paying the price.

 

“Psychological support on campus, like (Counseling and Psychological Services), is overwhelmed. That is a consequence of not addressing issues like impostor syndrome,” del Castillo said. “If you don’t start with preventative work, you will deal with the more severe consequences like anxiety, depression and suicidality.”

Transfer students are experiencing these issues at each UC.

“When I first arrived at UCLA, feelings of impostor syndrome made me less likely to participate in class and in office hours because I was afraid of sounding stupid,” said Yaffa Yermian, a history student who graduated from UCLA in 2018.

When transfer students feel like impostors on campus, they are less likely to engage in campus discussions, explore opportunities on campus and make use of support programs. This makes our dialogue less diverse, less welcoming and less inclusive, brewing a toxic sense of separation between communities on campus. So long as system-level administrators ignore that reality, they’ll continue to fall short of their commitment to inclusion.

Campus-level administrators realize this is a big issue. Malaphone Phommasa, the director of Academic Success Initiatives at UCSB, said academic performance is connected to the way students feel outside the classroom.

“You blink and you’re graduating,” Yermian said. “I know there are resources for transfer students at UCLA, but it is hard to track down these programs while you’re adjusting to a new environment.”

Existing programs need to be made more visible. The transfer center at UCLA, for example, offers peer mentoring programs that help students build long-lasting support networks.

“We would like to strengthen this model by clarifying what our messaging is to transfers, what our goals are for transfers and by streamlining navigation tools to help transfers connect with existing resources,” said Heather Adams, director of the UCLA Transfer Student Program.

Adams and her team have done incredible work creating support programs for transfers alongside their colleagues at other UCs. But the prevalence of issues like impostor syndrome among transfer students at large proves the UC must expand its commitment by providing permanent funding and ensuring available space for transfer centers with full-time academic advisors and support staff if it hopes to truly include transfer students in its community.

Transfer students deserve to be here. And they deserve an institutionalized support structure that guarantees them the same opportunities across the UC system.

It’s high time administrators delivered on that promise.