Submission: EngageWell initiative overlooked in addressing college campus loneliness

UCLA, like any university, has a loneliness problem.

Loneliness is a problem experienced by people of all age groups, but it is most prevalent among adolescents. This is a result of adolescence being a period when acceptance and kinship are paramount to the formation of our identities.

This loneliness is only exacerbated by the stress of college and the homesickness that comes from moving away from our families. Ignoring this issue can lead to increased susceptibility to major psychiatric disorders, including depression, Alzheimer’s disease and personality disorders – disorders which have protracted periods of rehabilitation.

Addressing loneliness should clearly be a priority for our university.

UCLA has made attempts to tackle this issue through its EngageWell campaign, which is a part of its LiveWell campaign. According to the website of LiveWell, which is also known as the Semel Healthy Campus Initiative Center, the objective of the EngageWell pod – or focus area – is to foster “healthy and strong social relationships at UCLA through increased social connection, quality, and civility.”

However, the pod isn’t doing as well a job as it could to help combat loneliness and forge relationships. The LiveWell initiative itself doesn’t seem to be well-known among the student body. In fact, I only learned of the LiveWell initiative through a research project I undertook that involved examining loneliness and what colleges, including our own, have done to combat it.

The EngageWell pod also feels neglected in comparison to other pods. The LiveWell campaign has seven pods, each focusing on a different aspect of health and wellness. And while a pod like MindWell, whose goal is to promote better mental health, has an incredible amount of events every month, EngageWell has few events each month, sometimes even none – hardly a way to increase awareness of the initiative and its programs.

Some people would underestimate the damage that loneliness can have upon not just the student body, but the university itself. They may argue that the mental health agenda of MindWell deserves more attention than the creation and enrichment of personal relationships does. However, the lack of these relationships can lead to the same mental health problems we’re trying to prevent in the first place.

And even ignoring such a severe problem, having a university like UCLA be considered a lonely place is the opposite of what we need. The reason UCLA continually receives the highest number of applicants every year is because it is considered a school where you’d love to be – a school with an amazing academic reputation, yet lacking the cutthroat and lonely atmosphere other institutes at its level may possess. No student should have to spend these college years in solitude. This is one of the last institutions students will attend before joining the workforce, and if they are unable to make friends here, they may have serious crippling social problems follow them throughout their lives.

It is paramount the EngageWell pod is granted more events that can specifically aid students in developing relationships with others, and that the LiveWell initiative is given increased awareness through means such as weekly emails. Such promotion of the initiative could result in a sizable improvement in the mental well-being of our student body, especially those still acclimating to campus life.

Charkupalli is a first-year computer science student.

USAC is pursuing another pointless project with revival of Spotted on Bruin Walk

You know it’s a problem when your elected officials are scrounging for ways to make themselves relevant.

Especially when it involves creating anonymous forums.

An anonymous forum, it turns out, might just become the calling card for UCLA’s undergraduate student government.

The Campus Events Commission is reviving Spotted on Bruin Walk, an online platform developed in 2010 that allowed students to post anonymously about missed connections. The platform has been dead for four years, but it’s not like students are missing out on much, save for a near endless display of misogyny, hookup attempts and spelling mistakes.

And that’s me putting it nicely.

Alley Madison, the Undergraduate Students Association Council’s campus events commissioner, said her office is resuscitating the platform to allow students to post their observations about their peers, or interesting things they see at CEC events or on campus. She added the aim is to connect with students after the commission’s programs and solicit more organic feedback. The forum is slated to launch in early February, ahead of a Valentine’s Day concert.

The truth is, students don’t need another Spotted on Bruin Walk. But they’re getting one whether they like it or not.

Say hello to perhaps the most worrisome development in Kerckhoff Hall: USAC fabricating more work for itself.

Council members for years have sought out ways to make an increasingly disinterested student body care about their student government. Be it concocting more events to entice students or posting a flurry of exclamation mark-laden Facebook messages, student leaders who aren’t busy advocating for campus needs have found themselves taking up nice-to-have projects that are redundant or unnecessary for the campus community. Council members have tried everything from building mobile apps to solve nonexistent problems, to using campus spaces to host dinners that students care little for to assert their utility at UCLA.

For example, Vivy Li, the 2017-2018 USAC internal vice president, heavily invested her time and office’s resources to work with the university to update its UCLA Mobile app. Li vied to have the app include class schedules, a customizable dashboard and dining hall schedules. Her many months of work resulted in UCLA updating the app months after she left office. UCLA Mobile’s usage doesn’t seem to fare much better than before – it still has yet to receive enough iOS App Store ratings to display an average rating from users.

The year before, Ashly Mohankumar, the 2016-2017 USAC academic affairs commissioner, coordinated networking nights to better help students connect with fellow Bruins. Her endeavor involved inviting speakers to talk about empowering women to participate in STEM and organizing dinners involving Q&A and trivia sessions. The turnout for those events were dismal – a predictable result given some student groups already dedicate themselves to the task of networking and women empowerment.

Spotted on Bruin Walk is just the latest in this trend.

Arguably, it’s even worse. The original version of the forum offered a cesspool of disparaging comments about women on campus – hardly a reasonable price to pay for the occasional heartwarming post about a helpful Bruin.

“Saw you on the way back from your fashion show,” one such post reads. “I have a nice big package for you, if you know what I mean.”

Luckily for students, Madison said the submission process for Spotted on Bruin Walk 2.0, while still not finalized, will include a CEC staffer monitoring the platform periodically throughout the day to moderate posts and restrict verbiage that resembles hate speech or identifies someone.

Yet the need for such a platform is far from pressing. The UCLA Secrets Facebook page has taken up the mantle of offering students anonymous yet civil comments and questions from students. Mobile apps such as Tinder and Grindr allow students to connect with others near or on campus. Google Forms are a readily used and accepted method for getting feedback from students. And social media platforms like Twitter and Instagram have taken off as a means for students to express themselves, even anonymously.

Devoting student fees and resources to an all-in-one, mashed potato platform is just another instance of student government cooking up needs the student body doesn’t have. CEC certainly needs feedback about its events, but bundling in a venue for students to post anonymously about each other isn’t necessary. And if recent history has taught us anything, it’s that these nonessential endeavors result in little benefit to the student body.

Of course, it might seem student leaders are free to do what they want with discretionary fees appropriated to their respective offices – especially considering a majority of USAC’s staffers work for no pay. But students pay more than $200 in student fees for their council members’ time – time their elected representatives should spend advocating for their needs, organizing quality events and representing their interests with the administration.

Efforts like Spotted on Bruin Walk might be entertaining for the student body. But at a time when student groups are struggling for funding, students are shackled by university fees and aid money is drying out, USAC should be offering up solutions to salient problems, not seeking out ways to meme-ify itself.

Council members shouldn’t need an extraneous technology project to figure that out.

At the very least, they don’t need an anonymous platform to tell me they disagree the next time I’m spotted on Bruin Walk.

Men’s basketball interim coach shakes up routine, picks up players from bench

Under former coach Steve Alford, sophomore guard Chris Smith never started a game.

Freshman guards David Singleton and Jules Bernard combined for 9.5 points per game and shot 35.7 percent from 3.

Enter interim coach Murry Bartow.

UCLA men’s basketball (9-6, 2-0 Pac-12) started conference play with back-to-back wins, but the Bruins’ winning ways aren’t the only things that changed. Smith started both games, making Singleton and Bernard the two lead guards off the bench.

“When you give great players confidence, you never know what they can do,” Bernard said. “Yes, we’ve had a long, hard week of practice, but we see the results and that just makes us want to work harder.”

Bernard and Singleton averaged a combined 22.5 points per game on 60 percent 3-point shooting between the two games. Singleton’s scoring outputs of 13 and 14 were both career highs, and his 2.5 assists per game in conference play is a step up from his 0.6 mark in the nonconference schedule.

“The more people we get going, the more it opens up for everybody else, including me,” Singleton said. “(Ball movement) has been an emphasis, because when everyone plays good, when … everybody touches the ball, swings it, moves it, we all look good, and that’s what we want.”

UCLA ran a full court press for the majority of the Stanford and Cal games last week, something that rarely happened under Alford. Bernard said that pressuring opponents and moving the ball in transition helped the Bruins’ offense live up to its potential.

“This pace fits our style a little bit more,” Bernard said. “We’re active scorers – we like to get the ball out and run and get quick buckets. When we have that sort of freedom, we play more like ourselves and that means we produce more.”

UCLA scored 24 points off turnovers and 24 on the fast break against Stanford on Thursday, and followed up that performance with 21 points off turnovers and 19 fast break points against Cal on Saturday.

While Singleton and Bernard’s playing time did not see a significant bump this week, Bartow said that he loved the way they stepped up.

“I love David (Singleton) as a shooter,” Bartow said. “Long ago, (I) nicknamed him Sniper. He’s a heck of a shooter. … Jules (Bernard), I just call him a bulldog. He is a tough, ornery guy.”

Bartow said that the Bruins had two practices a day Tuesday through Thursday and lifted weights every day after Alford was fired.

Redshirt junior forward Alex Olesinski returned from a foot injury on Thursday, and freshmen forward Kenny Nwuba and guard Russell Stong were given more playing time than they had been all season.

While Alford tended to use an eight-man rotation, Bartow said he prioritizes using the Bruins’ depth.

“We think we’ve got 11 good players, and we’re going to try to play all 11,” Bartow said.

American literature and culture major revised to include more specialized courses

The department of English revised the American literature and culture major fall quarter to offer new preparatory classes that allow students to focus directly on American literature instead of starting their major with a general English core curriculum.

The revisions of mainly focus on differentiating it from the English major. Prior to the revision, the two majors shared the same preparatory courses, so the department created two new preparatory courses specifically to prepare incoming American literature and culture students.

Other changes to the major include the addition of lower-division seminars that introduce students to the major in a small classroom environment. The major also offers several new upper-division courses.

Yogita Goyal, an associate professor of English, said the department did not intend to create a lot of new coursework for the revised major, but rather to repackage courses that are already offered so the major better examines three themes: origins, identities and media.

The focus on these three themes allows students to analyze the different conceptual, ethnic and technological aspects of literary works, said Lowell Gallagher, chair of the English department.

Gallagher said the major originally focused on the historical aspect of literature, which the department tried to move away from with the latest revision.

“We wanted to enlarge the shape of the major so that it is not just based on historical periods,” Gallagher said. “We wanted our students to think in ways not mapped onto a historical sequence.”

Goyal said she thinks many people believe the study of literature refers to the study of English literature, not American literature, but that she thinks there should be a greater focus on the study of the Americas.

She added she believes students could benefit from a major that focuses on the United States and delves deeper into topics such as race, gender and the struggle of indigenous peoples.

The revision process began three years ago, when eight faculty members, along with a few graduate students, revised the major. The group pitched the revision to the College of Letters and Science Faculty Executive Committee, which passed the resolution to revise the major last year.

The decision to revise the major stemmed from a previous revision of the English major in 2011.

“Since they revised the English major, people felt the time would come for a review of the American literature (and culture) major as well,” Gallagher said.

Gallagher added he thinks the American literature and culture major has always been overshadowed by the English major. He said he thinks the new courses and repackaged themes will allow the American literature and culture major to distinguish itself from the English major.

Michael Colacurcio, a distinguished professor of English, said he also thinks American literature is an important but underrepresented field of study.

“The American literature and culture major is a sign of an inferiority complex – that American literature is not yet old enough – or complex enough, or good enough to be studied as such … that it needs ‘and culture’ as a crutch,” Colacurcio said.

Despite the recent revisions, Colacurcio said he is still not fully content with the current condition of the major.

Colacurcio currently teaches upper-division classes specializing in the topic of American literature. He said he is disappointed to see fewer students are taking his classes and others because of the high number of prerequisites. Only one student decided to take his class after completing the prerequisite.

Colacurcio said he thinks the department needs to implement more required classes for the revised major.

He added he thinks the revised major should require a six-course series that surveys American literature.

Despite his dissatisfaction over specific aspects of the major, Colacurcio said he is glad the major has successfully determined America as its focal point of study.

“Our basic idea is that it’s worth studying the place we live in and that many of us are from as a specific object of inquiry,” Goyal said.

Governor appoints talent agency co-president as new UC regent

Gov. Jerry Brown appointed the co-president of a Los Angeles talent agency to the University of California Board of Regents on Friday in one of his final moves as governor of California.

UCLA alumnus Jay Sures has been an executive at United Talent Agency since 1998. Sures, who joined UTA in 1991, currently oversees over 200 agents and 500 employees. Sures has represented the likes of Chuck Todd of NBC and Jake Tapper of CNN, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.

Sures has remained active at UCLA since graduating, serving as co-vice chairman of the UCLA Jonsson Cancer Center Foundation and teaching as an assistant visiting professor in the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television, the UCLA School of Law and the Anderson School of Management.

As the governing board of the UC, the board of regents is responsible for selecting campus chancellors, determining tuition and generating academic policies. The board is comprised of 26 regents, including 18 governor-appointed regents, a student representative and seven ex-officio members, including some California government officials.

UCLA researchers suggest water crisis prevention techniques in paper

UCLA researchers suggested ways to prevent water crises in Los Angeles in a paper based on 10 years of research.

The paper, published in the Journal of Environmental Management, suggests that eliminating outdoor landscaping and lawns could reduce water waste by 30 percent. Landscaping strategically, by placing plants under tree canopy shade, could help improve the problem as well.

Currently, 60 percent of Los Angeles’ water supply is imported from hundreds of miles away, which is inefficient and can destroy ecosystems. The article recommends importing water only when Los Angeles is not in a drought, to build a surplus of water for dry years.

The paper also argues for the use of local water to reduce the environmental impact of imported water. For example, groundwater basins that catch stormwater could be used to recycle water. However, making these improvements would require the cooperation of more than 100 agencies, many of whom don’t want to risk losing funding by changing the way they handle water resources. The paper suggests that creating a new system of authority among agencies could help manage water resources in Los Angeles.

In November, Los Angeles passed the Safe, Clean Water Act, which funds projects that focus on catching stormwater and improving water supply in California. The paper published by UCLA researchers could guide how the city uses these funds.

UCLA report finds federal ‘public charge’ rule changes would hurt state economy

This post was updated Jan. 7 at 4:57 p.m.

A UCLA report found California’s economy could be negatively affected by proposed changes to federal immigration policy.

The report, which was released in December by the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research, the UC Berkeley Labor Center and California Food Policy Advocates, found that California’s economy could lose $2.8 billion and up to 17,700 jobs because of changes to the “public charge” rule proposed by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security in September.

U.S. immigration officials conduct a public charge test when people apply for legal permanent residency or temporary visas. A “public charge” is an individual who is likely to become primarily dependent on the government for basic needs.

An individual who is likely to become a public charge is not eligible to become a legal permanent resident or receive a temporary visa. Prior to the change, people would only be considered public charges if they receive welfare payments and long-term institutional care.

The proposed rule change will make the public charge regulation stricter by also taking into consideration whether individuals have received health care, housing and nutrition assistance. With the proposed changes, noncitizens could be denied lawful permanent residence or temporary visas if they have received these benefits.

The rule change will also restrict entry into the U.S. by gauging English proficiency, education level, income and age.

The changes to the public charge rule could cause about 765,000 immigrants in California to disenroll from nutrition assistance and health care programs due to fears about the possible impacts the programs could have on their ability to gain status as legal permanent residents. This could lead to job losses in health care- and food-related sectors of about 47 percent and 10 percent respectively, according to the report.

Ninez Ponce, a public health professor and an author of the study, said changes to the public charge rule would directly hurt immigrant students enrolled in federal benefit programs. The changes could also hurt students indirectly through a ripple effect of job and revenue losses in California’s economy, she said.

She added students could also be indirectly affected if their family members are enrolled in public programs due to effects on the family finances.

“I don’t think students are going to be affected from enrolling or disenrolling from school, but it will have trickle-down effects,” Ponce said.

Ponce said she believes students who are not U.S. citizens but use Medicaid assistance or food stamps could be prevented from acquiring lawful permanent residency.

Students enrolled in federal programs for basic need assistance may disenroll and pay out of pocket for the benefits they received and school material fees previously paid for by the government, Ponce added.

Laurel Lucia, director of the Health Care Program at UC Berkeley Labor Center and co-author of the study, said the rule change could lead to a lot of fear and confusion about the consequences of applying for federal benefits.

“UC students who have the opportunity to apply for a green card in the future through family sponsorship or other special circumstances might be affected by the rules change,” Lucia said.

Lucia added many UC students participated in a Nov. 7 seminar about the changes to the immigration policy because they felt afraid and confused about the changes. She said many students were worried their family members would be negatively affected.

She said the change would only affect legal immigrants because undocumented students are already barred from federal benefits. However, if undocumented individuals have a chance to apply for permanent residency in the future, these rule changes could prevent them from doing so.

Tia Shimada, director of programs at California Food Policy Advocates and co-author of the study, said citizens and noncitizens alike are likely to be adversely affected by changes to the public charge rule.

“There is a wider circle of noncitizens and citizen children with noncitizen parents who will be affected by the fear, misinformation and confusion being generated by the proposed changes,” Shimada said.

Shimada added the proposed rules changes will likely drive eligible students away from nutrition assistance and Medi-Cal, creating a reverberating effect on students’ finances.

Abel Valenzuela, a representative of the UCLA Advisory Council on Immigration Policy, said the public charge rule changes could affect students and their families.

The council has put up comments in the federal registry for the proposed rule changes, which closed Dec. 10, he said. Students have not come to them to voice their concerns about this issue, he added.

Valenzuela, also a professor of Chicano studies and urban planning, said there is a lot of concern that students and their relatives will be negatively affected.

“Most experts and analysts have pointed to the wide condemnation of the rules change,” Valenzuela said.

Valenzuela and the council said they believe there will be many legal challenges to the proposed rule changes, similar to the challenges to the rescission of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, a program that deferred deportation for undocumented individuals brought to the U.S. as children.

“I believe that the pushback would not be from just California but will be part of a larger legal coordination,” Valenzuela said.

Homeland Security is reviewing all comments pertaining to the rule changes before implementing them. A decision to enact the changes probably will not be made until well into 2019, according to the report.