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EDITORIAL BOARD Editor in Chief  Timothy Kudo

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The Undergraduate Students Association Council met with faculty this week to discuss including a diversity requirement to the proposed changes to the general education curriculum being considered by the Academic Senate.

The current proposal before the Academic Senate requires students to take three courses in a Foundations of Society and Culture group – one in social analysis, another in historical analysis and the third an elective in either of these subgroups. Rather than have third course be an elective, USAC would like the Academic Senate to make this course a diversity requirement.

A diversity requirement would obligate students to take a class in race, ethnicity or gender studies. Currently, UCLA is the only University of California campus that does not have a diversity requirement.

While having a diversity requirement would provide students with many benefits – such as increasing awareness of issues affecting underrepresented communities, developing tolerance for other groups, and preparing students to communicate effectively with other social groups in the real world – the costs of requiring students to take these classes cannot be ignored by the Academic Senate.

The impact of forcing more than four thousand incoming students to take an ethnic, gender or lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender studies course by the time they graduate would greatly tax the resources of each of these departments. The departments would have to hire more professors, increase the enrollment capacity of classes and provide more teaching assistants to accommodate the increased demand for these courses. This situation is complicated by the budget cuts looming over the UC – if UCLA can’t afford to hire the necessary faculty and provide the requisite resources to accommodate the changes a diversity requirement would bring, departments offering race, gender and LGBT courses would either be overworked or experience an erosion in quality.

Beyond just the logistical issues of enforcing a diversity requirement are the actual courses themselves, specifically the way they are taught by the current professors and lecturers.

Most students who have taken an African American, Asian American, American Indian, Chicano/a, women’s or LGBT studies course will admit that the courses are geared directly toward students who represent the group of course study. If a student does not fit the gender, race or sexual orientation the course deals with, not only will that student be a minority in the class, but he or she may be put in uncomfortable and even inflammatory settings.

Unless this problem is addressed, the good intentions of implementing a diversity requirement could prove counterproductive. In order to become successful, the change has to start with the professors and lecturers who teach these ethnic and gender studies courses. Hopefully having a diversity requirement will make classes more diverse and challenge professors to be more critical of the curriculum they teach.

If the Academic Senate decides to bear the risks of adopting a diversity requirement, it needs to make sure the requirement brings about worthwhile change. Surveys demonstrate most students oppose a diversity requirement – and whether they will have a productive mindset when entering these classes is questionable. When deciding what courses fulfill the GE requirement the university should include courses that can still provide a wide range of choice, which includes offering classes in both the social sciences and humanities – if students have more choice of what classes to take, they’re less likely to oppose what has already been depicted by many as “indoctrination.”

The Academic Senate should approve the diversity requirement, but in doing so, they need to be prepared to provide solutions for the problems it will raise.

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