UCLA Extension student’s short film emphasizes optimistic outlook on Alzheimer’s

Every three seconds, someone develops Alzheimer’s disease – but Bruna Cabral is trying to find hope despite its negative impacts on millions of families.

The UCLA Extension student’s short film follows an 8-year-old boy named Dylan (Mason Wells) whose 80-year-old best friend begins to lose her memory due to Alzheimer’s. Instead of abandoning her, the little boy sticks by her and tries to maintain their friendship and her memory. “Piece of Me” recently completed filming and is currently in the editing phase, which Cabral said is expected to finish in a month. As it depicts personal relationships impacted by the disease, Cabral said the film emphasizes the importance of being patient with those who have Alzheimer’s.

“Just because someone cannot remember you does not mean you should forget them,” Cabral said. “They can remember more than you think.”

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Many families unjustly abandon their relatives who have the disease, assuming that it is irreversible and irremediable, Cabral said. This message is relayed through the characters who maintain their relationships with the Alzheimer’s patient, Mrs. Brooks (Roberta Sloan), refusing to leave her side until the very end. While conceiving the film, Cabral said she was inspired by cases of Alzheimer’s in her grandfather and aunt. Her own resilient, unyielding attitude toward the condition helped her shape Dylan’s perspective in the film, she said.

“I wanted to show the innocent point of view (of an 8-year-old) to offer a sweet, optimistic perspective of Alzheimer’s,” Cabral said.

The use of a child as the protagonist helped instill the film with a sanguine tone, Cabral said. She chose opposite age groups in order to follow a younger perspective on the topic. Dylan, portrayed by 8-year-old Mason Wells, is initially flustered, confused and depressed by the onset of Alzheimer’s in Mrs. Brooks. However, he slowly learns that not all hope is lost, Wells said.

“My character was so sad at first,” Wells said. “But then (he) learned that when someone has Alzheimer’s it doesn’t mean you should forget them, you still have to love them.”

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Balancing a hopeful message with the often grim realities of Alzheimer’s was difficult, Cabral said. However, she added the dynamic between the characters helps to create a sense of resilience and optimistic willpower, as Dylan would stay by her side indefinitely. The role was also difficult to play, Wells said, because he always had to show true and natural emotions, which he drew from his own life experiences.

To better understand the disease and portray it accurately, Cabral said she enlisted the help of her roommate, UCLA Extension graduate in directing Camila Rizzo. The assistant director and producer of “Piece of Me” said she used her mother’s experience with Alzheimer’s to make the movie as authentic as possible, incorporating elements from her life into the film. It’s a hefty subject to tackle in a short film, Rizzo said, but it came together in the end.

It’s really all about staying with them and loving them, that’s the most important part, Wells said.

“The brain can forget, but the heart can remember,” Wells said. “You just have to believe in miracles.”

Lecture to fuse philosophical ideas with Chaucer’s ‘The Pardoner’s Tale’

This post was updated April 3 at 3:21 p.m.

Leonard Koff turns to Geoffrey Chaucer’s “The Pardoner’s Tale” as a philosophical test case.

The UCLA Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies will host associate Koff’s lecture Thursday. The lecture applies Emmanuel Levinas’ philosophical theories to “The Pardoner’s Tale.” The chapter, part of “The Canterbury Tales,” is narrated by a corrupt pardoner who uses a cautionary tale to trick listeners into giving him money. As an element of the lecture, the tale will be a conduit for exploring Levinas’ theories about how human existence is defined by interactions.

“(Levinas) offers a way to explain aspects of literature where characters are seen to … understand who they are, how they are living,” Koff said.

Levinas, a 20th-century Jewish philosopher, theorized that one is truly alive only while interacting with the “face of the other.” Engaging in such conversations challenges the idea that one is the center of the universe, Koff said. Levinas proposed confronting one’s perceptions of self-totality is critical to living, he added.

“You encounter another and you let the other impinge on you and you acknowledge his existence or her existence,” Koff said. “That’s the moment where you exist.”

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Unlike other philosophers, Koff said Levinas believed people are born into an ethical existence, meaning they must negotiate interactions with others from birth. People who choose to use others for purely selfish ends are not, by Levinas’ definition, alive.

“As you are born … you are already connected to those whom you have moved over so you have a place in the world,” Koff said.

In “The Pardoner’s Tale,” three rioters go out searching for Death, who has killed a close friend and thousands of others, said Henry Kelly, a distinguished research professor of English at UCLA. Ultimately, the three meet their end when an old, immortal man tells them Death is under a nearby tree, where they find a chest of gold and kill each other over it. While the Pardoner is open with his listeners about his corrupt nature, his tale effectively demonstrates through the rioters’ deaths how money causes conflict and sin, Kelly said.

But Koff said this story demonstrates not only Levinas’ theories about interaction and existence but also about art.

Law and philosophy professor emeritus Herbert Morris said by applying philosophy to literary works, people can ask a wider range of questions about the works. As a result, philosophy can lead to alternate interpretations in literature and allow students to be attentive toward their own imagination. Koff said his goal for the lecture is to expand listeners’ previous interpretations of “The Pardoner’s Tale,” using their imagination in conjunction with philosophy.

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For Koff, “The Pardoner’s Tale” raises the question of whether or not an immoral person can tell a moral tale. The Pardoner’s story is meant to make listeners want to part with their money to ensure their moral purity, ultimately coercing listeners into a more moral existence, Koff said. A morally corrupt person can still know the difference between right and wrong, even if he cannot follow the morality he preaches.

“Can a bad person … use language to manipulate people into doing good? There’s that sense that you can speak morally, but can’t do moral things,” Koff said. “A person can have a good influence even if he himself can’t do what he says.”

Koff said his lecture will encourage literary fans to reexamine “The Pardoner’s Tale” as more than a canonical text but as one that can also be used to extract questions of morality. Through Levinas’ theories, Koff hopes to expand listeners’ understanding of art and philosophy.

“(Chaucer is) engaging because he’s a philosophical comedian,” Koff said. “I hope (people) come to recognize the value of Levinas’ understanding of what existence is and that existence is already ethical.”

Op-ed: For students of color, impostor syndrome can add to the challenge of college

It was a crisp fall evening, a month into my third year at UCLA. I was tenaciously studying away in my favorite lounge on campus when an old peer named Brice approached me. He and I took almost every lower division course together and he was someone who was not afraid to share his opinion on any topic.

The topic of medical school came up in our small talk, and Brice said I had the best chance of getting in. When I asked why, he said, “It’s because you are Mexican, right?”

I froze in disbelief, unsure how to respond.

Microaggressions are subtle acts of racism that happen consciously or unconsciously to people of color. At most higher education institutions, it is not uncommon for the racial breakdown to be up to, if not more than, 70% white and Asian, and thus not hard for these comments to find many students of color.

As a Latinx student, I find myself, along with many other students of color, having to conquer more than weekly problem sets and quizzes. We consistently fight for the respect and approval from peers and faculty that we belong on campus. And we fight off discrimination in our everyday lives while also struggling with impostor syndrome – when an individual feels like an intellectual fraud when they have achieved success in rigorous situations.

During my first two years at UCLA, I experienced many preconceived expectations from certain peers and faculty. I heard comments such as, “Nicolas, you are the first smart Mexican I have ever met,” or even had a teaching assistant triple check that I received the correct score because he could not believe that I could have received the second highest grade in the class. These experiences made me feel like an impostor and believe each time I succeeded, it was luck and not the hard work I put in.

As a chemistry Peer Learning Facilitator for the Academic Advancement Program, I learned I was not the only one that shared these insecurities. Many of the students in my sections would come to me in secret, afraid they could not succeed and compete with their white and Asian peers. They clung to the idea that it was a fluke when they succeeded, hearing statistics like how only less than 12% of Latinx and African-Americans combined make up the matriculant pool for medical school. They also notice how the professors teaching science courses rarely share their backgrounds or look like them.

Impostor syndrome is an issue plaguing students of color across college campuses. According to the University of Texas at Austin, impostor syndrome feelings have been found to enhance anxiety and depression in a higher frequency among students of color. In addition, these students are more likely than white students to experience stress resulting from discrimination, microaggressions and financial and family pressure. They are also more likely to experience depression, and if they do, their ability to perform as a student is more likely to be impeded.

Furthermore, people from Latinx and African-American communities also face a toxic machismo and masculinity culture in which asking for help is seen as a sign of weakness. As a result, only about a quarter of Black adults will seek mental care compared to 40% of white students. Many college campuses nationwide also lack adequate mental health services including UCLA’s Counseling and Psychological Services, which only has one mental health professional for every 1,150 students.

Clearly, it is hard for many students of color to feel they can succeed at higher level institutions when they have to face more than just their heavy course loads.

Although policies such as affirmative action can make it seem like the college experience is easier for students of color, that argument fails to account for the day-to-day racism and discrimination experienced by students of color.

As African-American scholar Shelby Steele puts it, affirmative action “nurtures a victim-focused identity in blacks” and increases more feelings of disapproval as “the quality that earns (blacks) preferential treatment is an implied inferiority.” In other words, there is a widespread, fallacious belief that students of color are held to a lower standard and that they are granted acceptance only because of the color of their skin or socioeconomic status.

There needs to be more than just policies. The first step to raise awareness of the issues people of color face is through more ethnic studies courses and students of color justice conferences.

We must advocate for college campuses to hire counselors who are experts in dealing with cases of racism or discrimination and can better accommodate students of color. We also must deconstruct the stigma that does not allow students of color to ask for help.

And we must acknowledge that there is strength in seeking comfort and that students of color are not alone in the journey through higher education – that there is power in knowing where and when to ask for help.

Cevallos is a fourth-year human biology and society student.

EDI office lacks inclusivity necessary to promote diversity throughout UCLA

In the wake of rich, white kids being able to buy their way into college and faculty growing increasingly concerned about the lack of diversity in their leadership, it’s easy to turn to UCLA’s designated solution-maker: the Office of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion.

But cut through the sleek website, carefully crafted copy- and buzzword- filled seminars, and it’s clear the office is mainly just that – and a couple of smart administrators.

It comes down to inclusion, something the EDI office ironically needs to work on.

The office is run by Jerry Kang, the vice chancellor for EDI, and a handful of other administrators. While these individuals have various advisory councils, an office tasked with matters of diversity and inclusion should certainly have a more reflectively diverse leadership team.

The EDI office’s actions seem almost comically narrow with regard to its student initiatives, campus outreach and much touted seven-part video training series on implicit bias.

As the EDI office is currently structured, it passes some policy and expects staff and faculty to follow it. It’s the opacity of this process that is especially frustrating to those affected. The most recent example of this is the office’s requirement of faculty candidates for hire or promotion to submit EDI statements. This has led to pushback from faculty members confused about how exactly this is going to affect their departments, internal mobility and academic freedom.

UCLA needs to restructure the EDI office from the ground up, drastically expanding its influence and opening up its governance to a council comprising administrators, staff and professors. A broader structure would bring in more faculty voices to the decision process and create a campus body more invested in the office’s operations – something necessary to truly bring about equity, diversity and inclusion.

The difficulty is in pinning down what exactly the EDI office is doing and seeing how a wide variety of faculty and staff feel included in the policy-making of their university.

Take, for example, the office’s work on revamping the faculty hiring process. It has put concrete policies in place, including approval from Kang at certain steps in the selection process. However, it’s not clear how effective these measures have been. At the end of the day, UCLA’s faculty is still primarily white and predominately male.

“People running faculty searches are conscious of the oversight and are trying to be more conscientious,” said Ted Porter, a distinguished professor and vice dean of personnel for the history department. “It’s affecting hiring implicitly, rather than anything I’ve actually directly seen.”

While the EDI office only came into being in 2015, a radical problem deserves a radical solution. If such an entrenched issue like biased hiring is ever going to be surmounted, we’re going to have to do better than making faculty a little more conscious.

Moreover, the EDI office’s top-down administrative structure makes it difficult to design catch-all policies while ensuring departments’ specific needs are respected.

“Hiring happens locally, which is why it’s hard to change – it’s done at the department level since they have the expertise,” Kang said. “To have administrators second-guessing, that would be inconsistent with the knowledge being decentralized and shared governance between academic programs and administrators.”

Ultimately, it comes down to an administrative office trying to craft broad policy for a process which really requires special, department-based knowledge.

“I didn’t have any role in crafting the policies,” Porter said. “Certainly some people (in the history department) had a role in crafting these policies.”

If individual departments are involved in the EDI office’s leadership structure, it would have the instructional knowledge necessary to draft stronger policies tailored to each department’s specific needs, while also having the power to implement real changes.

The David Geffen School of Medicine’s recent bungling of the search for a new chair of the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior aptly demonstrates the need for a broader EDI office. The school had to pause the search, which otherwise seemed to adhere to the EDI office’s policies, after outrage from faculty about the lack of diversity in the selection committee despite the institute’s diverse patient body. Including more faculty voices in the EDI office’s decision-making could have anticipated this criticism with real, actionable solutions that make sense for the specialized institute.

Certainly, as Kang put it, much of his office’s work is not forward facing and won’t be truly seen for at least a couple of years. But while groundwork is important, doing it behind the scenes just doesn’t cut it when dealing with problems like lack of diversity and inclusion. These changes need to be upfront and scrutinized. If not, there’s no way to know what we are seeing isn’t just more of the status quo.

Including an array of campus members in policy deliberation is a good way to start doing that. In fact, it might just make the EDI office a little more diverse and a lot more effective.

Beyond the Reports

Editor’s note: The following website may contain graphic depictions of sexual harassment and sexual assault.

Every year, UCLA’s Title IX Office receives reports related to sexual harassment and assault, with outcomes of investigations ranging from written warnings to dismissals. However, there are many stories that never get reported to the Title IX office. The Daily Bruin wants to provide a space to anonymously share these stories.

Younger members propel women’s distance team into promising season

Christina Rice said there’s been a culture change in the women’s distance team.

“There’s a lot more positive attitude,” said the sophomore distance runner. “I think some people were having a hard time last year so it’s nice to see people having a healthy, positive mindset towards running again.”

UCLA track and field lost roughly 2/3 of its women’s distance runners, but its underclassmen logged several probable NCAA regional qualifying marks last weekend. The underclassmen posted two first-place finishes and two runners finished within two seconds of victory at the Bob Larsen Distance Carnival and Jim Bush Legends Invitational.

“You have more than 2/3 of the group that is brand new,” said assistant distance coach Devin Elizondo. “We knew we were going to take our lumps early with a young group, but we knew we had just enough top talent.”

The only members of the 2016 UCLA cross country team remaining on the roster that qualified for nationals are senior Taylor Taite and juniors Claire Markey, Jackie Garner and Cassandra Durgy.

Elizondo more than doubled the number of athletes under his wing once he inherited the coaching duties of the 21 women’s distance runners last summer. Junior Robert Brandt said he’s noticed a change since then.

“(The women’s distance team has) made huge strides from last year,” Brandt said. “They’re kind of figuring it out (with) a new coach. … I think they’ve really honed in on their culture and they’re really starting to see a big momentum shift in their performances and last night was just the start of it.”

Assisting Elizondo with the women’s distance team is coach Austin O’Neil, who served as a volunteer coach last season. O’Neil was alongside Rice when she broke the UCLA freshman record in the 10,000-meter last season and played a role in helping sophomore Erika Adler qualify for the 2018 NCAA Cross Country Championships.

“(O’Neil) is definitely someone you can go to for sound advice and guidance,” Rice said. “When (the race) starts to get tough at the end, he always knows what to say to keep you motivated.”

In the 5,000-meter – the first outdoor track event of Adler’s UCLA career – she posted a time of 16:16.22, good for fifth best in UCLA history. Rice won the 10,000m at the Jim Bush Legends Invitational for the second consecutive season with an improved time of 34:25.25. Adler and Rice’s marks are within the top-50 in the country.

Freshman Sophie Scott bagged a first-place finish in the 1,500-meter in the first outdoor track event of her UCLA career as well. Sophomore Paige Carter and freshman Kira Loren crossed the finish line just seconds after in second and third place to complete the Bruins’ underclassmen sweep of the event.

Carter ran roughly 20 seconds faster since than she did at last year’s Jim Bush Legends Invitational. Loren in the 1,500m, Markey in the 3,000-meter steeplechase and freshman Gwyneth George in the 800-meter all logged new personal records.

“It’s really exciting to see girls coming out and running (personal records) and opening outdoors with improvements already in the first race,” Rice said.