A little over a month ago, in “Is ‘Diversity’ A Neologism?“, I discussed the latest iteration of a periodic debate at UCLA over whether to add a course on diversity to the general education requirement. Two days ago, by a vote of 224-175, the faculty of the College of Letters and Science voted down the proposal.
The requirement would have required students entering the College as early as fall 2013 to take a GE class that covers both conflict and collaboration that can emerge through differences in communities.
You do not have to have a vivid imagination to imagine the sorts of courses that would be created to satisfy this requirement.
Meanwhile, as long as we’re looking at UCLA, we should note that our friends in BAMN orchestrated a a protest (occupy?) of the admissions office.
Thirteen people were arrested Friday evening during a protest by high school and community college students inside the UCLA admissions office that they called an occupation to demand that the campus “immediately” double underrepresented minority enrollment….
At around 4 p.m. the admissions office closed, but several students continued to stand inside, chanting in Spanish, “We are here, we are not going anywhere.”
Chanting in Spanish was a nice, diverse touch. Perhaps, however, the protesters should have set their sights on Berkeley, not UCLA. If accepted there, as I noted in discussing A Department of Diversity at Berkeley (quoting a piece from the Daily Caller),
the “University of California, Berkeley is offering students college credit to work for an expressly political organization fighting for affirmative action and immigrant rights.”
And not just any “political organization” but BAMN, the Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, Integration & Immigrant Rights and Fight for Equality By Any Means Necessary, an organization whose rowdy followers have literally stolen from the blind and violently disrupted official state agency meetings (“The testimony table was knocked down. Chairs were kicked over.… high school students, spurred by BAMN organizer Luke Massie worked themselves into a near riot … chanting … standing on chairs waving their middle fingers”) — behavior that was described by a columnist for the Detroit News as “Fascism on the Left.”
Query: if, as I suppose, the vast majority of Hispanic students at UCLA are from families that came to California from Mexico, and if all of the protesters chanting in Spanish are from families that came to California from Mexico, in what way would admitting more of them add to the “diversity” at UCLA?
