Emily Merz: Bike safety education should come before violations, not after

UCLA’s campus is not known for being bike-friendly. While many other college campuses such as UC Santa Barbara and UC Davis overflow with bicyclists, UCLA students might only see one or two bicyclists going down Bruin Walk each day. The valley between campus and the Hill, the abundance of stairs and lack of bike lanes make […]

Jonathan Friedland: Fewer stops would increase Santa Monica Big Blue Bus ridership

Taking the bus to Santa Monica from UCLA can take upward of 45 minutes, not including the walk to the Westwood bus stop. When students have the option of saving time while paying slightly more for an UberPool, it’s no wonder Santa Monica Big Blue Bus ridership has dropped 12 percent in the last fiscal […]

Arman Sharif: UC must assemble task force to interpret disaggregated ethnicity data

Campus communities that felt invisible in the past are finally seeing some change in how university data represents them. The University of California Information Center released enrollment and graduation data in April disaggregated by ethnicity. This data includes enrollment statistics for individual ethnicities, like Vietnamese or Armenian, as opposed to only reporting information for the […]

Abhishek Shetty: UCLA should look at undergraduate TAs as short-term fix to TA shortage

The instructed may soon become the instructors. At least, that’s what UCLA might look like if the UCLA Academic Senate was to take a stronger approach to the campus’ teaching assistants shortage. It’s no secret the UC is in need of more graduate students. While the undergraduate student population has increased over the past few […]

Mariah Furtek: UCLA must improve professor accountability, accessibility for students

UCLA boasts a faculty roster almost as impressive as the starting lineup of its men’s basketball team, but these faculty members aren’t necessarily accessible to their students. The UCLA Academic Senate expects faculty members to hold office hours, yet it allows them the freedom to choose how to make themselves available to students. Unfortunately, some […]

Andiver Castellanos: UCLA must consider creating resource center for campus black community

Imagine navigating a public university in which students of your ethnicity make up less than 5 percent of the undergraduate student body. Imagine your university experience plagued by things like parties centered around racially insensitive costumes and a photograph of your undergraduate student government president throwing up a gang sign like it means nothing. And […]

Gael Adrien Mbama: Transgender students should be able to have preferred names on BruinCard

UCLA offers a very progressive environment to its students, with various programs and resources dedicated to marginalized students. Our university still has a long way to go to be fully trans-inclusive, however. UCLA’s transgender students who decide to go by a different name than their legal names are not allowed to put their chosen names […]