Tuesday, April 7, 1998
Protest targets professor
ENVIRONMENT: Zuckerman supports Sierra Club’s initiative against
immigration
By Mason Stockstill
Daily Bruin Senior Staff
A UCLA professor’s stance on the impact immigration has on the
environment led five protesters to cluster outside his class Monday
and hand out flyers to students entering the class.
Students in Benjamin Zuckerman’s Astronomy 5 class were met
outside of Knudsen with propaganda decrying Zuckerman’s position on
the issue.
"When your professor leaves class, he goes to fight
immigration," read the flyer handed out by members of the
Environmental Coalition.
The issue that has caused this debate is an initiative on the
ballot for the internal elections of the Sierra Club. It calls for
the organization to condemn immigration.
If the initiative passes, the Sierra Club leadership will begin
to address the environmental consequences of U.S. immigration
policies.
The initiative is based on numerous reports published by such
think tanks as the Center for Immigration Studies, in Washington,
D.C., and the Rand Corporation.
These studies hold that increased immigration leads to
overpopulation, which is a major contributor to environmental
destruction.
However, opponents of the initiative claim that a change in most
Americans’ consumption practices will reduce the threat to the
environment more than creating harsher new immigration laws.
It was Zuckerman’s stance on the issue that led the students to
hand out flyers to students entering Zuckerman’s class.
"Basically, we feel students have the right to know about their
professor," said Garrick Ruiz, a fourth-year American literature
student.
The flyer also had excerpts from an op-ed article that Zuckerman
wrote for the Los Angeles Times on March 15, in which he wrote that
"to mitigate our impact, we must … stabilize the U.S.
population."
Zuckerman, though, felt that the Environmental Coalition had
been acting improperly toward him in dealing with this issue.
"Sadly, this has been an example of anti-intellectual,
anti-democratic, anti-collegial slander," he said.
"I’ll be happy to discuss this issue in a reasonable forum,"
Zuckerman said, "but they didn’t want to do that."
Ruiz said that they wanted to engage Zuckerman in a debate about
the issue during his class some time, but Zuckerman was opposed to
this idea.
"It’s completely inappropriate in front of class," Zuckerman
said.
Most students in Zuckerman’s Astronomy 5 class felt that the
protest was misguided.
"We’re here to learn, not start a debate," said Danielle Mendez,
a fourth-year art history student.
"None of us want this, none of us need this," she continued.
"We’ve got enough to worry about as it is."