Monday, October 26, 1998
On-campus herding cramps Bruin breathing space, style
CROWDED: University should accommodate enrolled students first
before accepting even more
Dear Admissions Committee,
First off, I’d like to thank you for accepting my application
four years ago and allowing me to come to UCLA. I know I would
never get in here now, with the recent grade inflation and
unbelievably high "average" SAT scores.
So I’m thrilled to have barely made it.
You guys have been doing a great job in the past few years. I
know it must be tough to look through so many deserving
applications and to hand-pick only the finest students. But pray,
do tell, what happened this year? I’ve got to be honest: I think
you guys screwed up. Someone up there can’t count.
Why did you let so many students in, more people than we can
accommodate? Thirty-six thousand students thick and I can’t breathe
here, folks! I can’t get to class without smacking into 300 people.
I kill the grass to avoid the crowds that come pummeling down Bruin
Walk. I sit cramped on the floor because my classrooms weren’t
built for the poor, tired and huddled masses yearning to be
seated.
Just walking to class feels like a crappy mosh pit without the
music. Like Big Betsy in a cattle crossing, I try to break on
through to the other side. Thousands of students shuffle their feet
in front of me, seeming to move but getting nowhere.
At first I hope it’s only a minor delay, such as someone
kneeling and tying his or her shoe and tying up traffic. Then it
doesn’t let up, and I get annoyed. Frustrated. One of those bad
dreams where you feel like you can’t move your legs.
I know, I know … you never expected so many students to
actually enroll once they were accepted. But someone’s
guesstimation skills are way off. Our campus has a finite amount of
land, and when it’s gone, it’s gone. Perhaps when your own already
cramped offices become minute cubicles you will stop squishing
students into every last available crack.
Compare UCLA’s 86.6 students per acre to UC Davis’ 6.4 students
per acre. Suddenly, cow patties seem quite palatable.
Listen, wise guys, it’s not even about large lectures anymore.
I’ve overcome that grudge after four smooshed years. (And don’t
give me the "go to office hours" argument because that’s just one
more line to be herded through.) We wade through all sorts of
manured inconveniences caused by too many students and too few
resources.
For example, let me share a true-life scenario that took place
at my apartment the other night. I had just changed my degree
expected term over URSA, and it cost $13. "Doesn’t your tuition
cover that?" my roommate asked. "Don’t your reg fees entitle you to
change your graduation date free of charge?" Apparently not. I then
reflected upon (obsessed over) what my tuition fees had entitled me
to that day.
The fees had entitled me to go to a bookstore where half of my
books were sold out. They had entitled me to go home to a cramped
Westwood apartment that has no dishwasher, where I share a small
room for way too much money. They entitled me to a lecture in Rolfe
1200 that was so full of students that there were no seats left, so
I sat on the floor outside in the foyer.
They entitled me to wait first in the honors office for a
drop-in appointment, and then in the Student Health Center, despite
my previously scheduled 4:40 appointment. They even entitled three
girls who had 5:00 appointments to be seen before me. Last, my
lovely reg fees entitled me to be nearly run over by a woman
driving way too fast down the narrow Westwood streets as I walked
home to my humble abode.
And of course, they entitled me to wait in lines, lines, lines.
And I’m not just talking Murphy. Lines for the computer labs, for
the media lab, for the CTO, for Taco Bell are longer than ever.
There are lines to print, to Xerox, to staple. Logging onto Bruin
Online from off-campus is impossible. Heck, I even wanted to get
tickets to the Whirling Dervishes, and they were all sold out. The
Whirling Dervishes were sold out? Most people don’t even know what
a "dervish" is!
And then there’s the housing situation, a topic which, even
though it’s been beaten to death, requires me to affirm that the
horror stories are true. I got back from Europe a month before
school started and frantically searched for an apartment every
single day, up until 10 hours before my first class!
Not only were the dorms overcrowded, but all of Westwood was
fully packed. Why didn’t I look elsewhere? Oh, but I did. I looked
south of Wilshire, in Brentwood and in West Los Angeles. But oops
 once I left Westwood, I had no way to get back, since 4,000
students are ahead of me on the waitlist for on-campus parking.
Even the $5 a day parking, besides being ridiculously expensive, is
not always available. Is mass transit reliable?
Is our university reliable?
I don’t know. But I think it should be responsible. It should be
responsible for me, for my degree, for my thinking and my
well-being in any and every way that relates to and affects my
education. Can we actually learn when we’re cramped, stuffed,
squished like a bulging burrito in an already too small city?
Can we explore and breathe and absorb and achieve without
sufficient space to think?
It’s time for UCLA to take care of her student bodies, to
accommodate those of us who are here before letting other people
in. How else will fifth-year seniors graduate and make room for the
16-year-old freshmen, if they can’t even enroll in the classes they
need? Let us get out of here with as little trouble as possible so
we can become alumni and start donating money already!
And dearest admissions committee, I know everyone wants higher
education.
We go to college like our parents went to high school. And we
will go to graduate school like our parents went to college. And
our kids will go to graduate school like we went to preschool. And
so it goes. And we all want to learn, and we all deserve to learn.
But what if we can’t? What if we have the opportunity but lack the
environmental necessities?
I do not want education to become less accessible. I want
everyone to have the opportunities that we do. But how much are we
willing to reduce the quality of our education to increase the
number of students that get it?
I’m also not suggesting we decrease our numbers so dramatically.
None of us want to go back to the stifling intimacy we knew in high
school. But there is a lot of room between high school numbers and
UCLA numbers. Can’t we find the right nook in that vast range?
Sound like privatization? Maybe it is. So what? How upset would you
really be with a Harvard-like reputation accompanying you on an
interview?
Admissions committee, dear, dear darlings, come on, be humane.
Keep the numbers down to a reasonable count so UCLA can truly offer
students what they need.
Otherwise, all we’ll learn is how to adapt to an overcrowded,
aggravating way of life. I think our reg fees entitle us to a great
deal more than that.
Staphanie Pfeffer
Pfeffer wishes there were fewer students so that everyone would
come to her Halloween party instead of having their own. E-mail her
at [email protected].
Comments, feedback, problems?
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