Wednesday, June 3, 1998
Letters
Wake up,
professor!
I was laughing hysterically as I read the absurd apology of
professor Michael Allen on the whole Queen of Sheba quarrel (May
28).
Dearest professor! How can you be so naive as to imagine that
UCLA undergraduates ever heard about the story of Solomon and
Sheba? Are you still under the impression that an average Bruin can
tell Aristophanes from Aristotle, or Hegel from Heidegger, or
Montaigne from Montesquieu, or Rublev from Rubens? Do you really
think that people in your classes know that Claude Levi-Strauss is
not a founder of the jeans empire? That Milton Babbitt is not the
husband of Lorena, the Warrior Princess?
Do you expect to find enough students who would know the area of
expertise of Stravinski and Sibelius, not to mention Shnitke and
Sessions? Who would be at least marginally familiar about the
Descartes-Pascal debate? Who would know that the general theory of
relativity does not mean that "everything is relative"? Who has
heard the names of Stephen Hawking or Peter Kapitsa or Richard
Feynman?
Dear Dr. Allen! You have to understand that, as a rule, UCLA
undergraduates do not really care about all the boring stuff you
are trying to feed them in your classes. As a recent UCLA alumna, I
can testify that this school is not about education. It is about
socializing. About reaching out and helping in. About diversity.
About social justice. It’s all about student activism, community
service, semesters in Washington and studying abroad. It’s about
feeling good about ourselves.
Quit your rhetorical figures, Dr. Allen, and welcome to the
undergraduate UCLA!
And yes, let’s all support the new multiculturalism requirement!
Let’s create new academic disciplines for the students and by the
students who cannot succeed in any established academic discipline!
It’s not like any real knowledge is acquired in this place
anyway.
Kate Litvak
Class of 1996
Prop. 209 just bitter medicine
Implementation of affirmative action at the University of
California brought to the forefront the urgent need for equal
opportunity and access to higher education in our public
institutions of higher education. As a consequence of affirmative
action, the UC system is now far more diverse than when affirmative
action began, even though the gains in diversity have not been
equal for all ethnic groups. Today the question is not whether
there should be diversity in the university reflective of the
diversity in the state’s population, but how to maintain diversity
in the wake of Proposition 209.
Affirmative action is not a long-range solution for the goal of
diversity. Affirmative action was designed, among other things, to
address the consequence of disparity in levels of academic
achievement by ethnicity in our public schools but presumed that in
time the root causes for the disparity would be identified and
corrected.
Proposition 209 has sped up the time scale and is forcing us to
deal immediately with this disparity in levels of academic
achievement. Achieving the goal of diversity in the wake of
Proposition 209 challenges the universities, the public schools,
the communities and the state to recognize and resolve the
injustice we impose on our public school students when there is
academically inadequate public schooling. All too often the quality
of our public schools decreases as the proportion of African
American and Latino students in the student body increases because
we do not provide the resources needed to ensure comparable levels
of academic achievement. Through Proposition 209 we have lost a
short term solution to achieving diversity but if the shock of
losing affirmative action translates into a long term commitment to
ensure that all of our students in public schools have an education
which brings out each student’s potential, then we may well look
back on Proposition 209 as bitter medicine that forced us to
address the root causes of disparity in academic achievement, not
just the consequences of those root causes.
Dr. Dwight Read
Professor of anthropology