MINDY ROSS/Daily Bruin Senior Staff Former Vice President
Al Gore, Chancellor Albert
Carnesale and more than 20 faculty members met Wednesday
at a faculty symposium on family-centered community development
issues.
By Karen Albrecht
Daily Bruin Reporter
Former Vice President Al Gore will join the UCLA School of
Public Policy and Social Research spring quarter as a visiting
professor.
Gore convened with faculty and members of the community in a
closed meeting at the James West Alumni Center Wednesday to discuss
a new curriculum of family-centered community development. Two
graduate students also sat in on the proceedings.
Presentation topics included early childhood development,
schools as centers for lifelong learning, and housing and community
planning.
“We are delighted that Al Gore has joined UCLA as a
visiting professor in the pathbreaking field of family-centered
community development,” said Chancellor Albert Carnesale.
“Our faculty and students will benefit greatly from his
expertise and his strong commitment to this important emerging
discipline.”
 MINDY ROSS/Daily Bruin Senior Staff Professor of
Pediatrics and Public Health Neal Halfon and Dean
Barbara Nelson broke from a meeting with Al Gore
to hold a briefing. The new multi-disciplinary curriculum will
incorporate educators, public health officials and public policy
authorities. It is intended to bridge the differences between all
parts of campus.
“We are trying to bring people together who are really
interested in the same issues, but come from different planes and
different languages,” said Dr. Neal Halfon, director of
UCLA’s Institute for Children, Families and Communities, and
professor of pediatrics and public health.
The three-hour meeting was very productive, according to Halfon.
A list of 18-20 course sections was narrowed down to 10.
Gore will also participate in similar programs at Cornell
University in New York and Fisk University in Tennessee. Within
several weeks he will begin a 10 session lecture of 250 students at
Fisk University, Halfon said.
Once Gore begins teaching at UCLA in the spring, he will be
interacting with both graduate and undergraduate students, said
Barbara Nelson, dean of the UCLA School of Public Policy and Social
Research.
“His visits to UCLA will be organized around developing
the curriculum and will be episodic,” Nelson said.
Gore recently contacted UCLA, expressing his interest in family
policy issues and a new curriculum promoting the development of
healthy communities.
“Universities have not been doing a whole lot to send
people into communities to work,” Halfon said.
In the United States, more than 17,000 youth development
organizations exist, Halfon said, but formal training for adult
supervisors is lacking.
Traditionally, economic issues have been the focal point of
family and community development, but Halfon said this new
curriculum would also encompass more than that.
“We also need to focus on human and community issues, not
on just bringing in jobs,” he said.
Over the past several years, Gore has presided over a series of
family development conferences focused on family policy issues and
healthy communities,” Halfon said. “I think what Gore
brings is an extraordinary breadth of knowledge from his experience
in the last years.”
Halfon also described Gore as a “horizontalist living in a
vertical world,” capable of thinking across categories.
“Gore has it right in that each part of the program is
important but that we need to, in his words, “˜work across the
membranes,'” said Adam Long, second-year public policy
graduate student who participated in the meeting.
“I would like to see him interact with the students. He is
very motivating when he speaks,” Long continued.
But a group of primarily Muslim students, some of whom carried
posters calling Gore a Zionist, protested Gore’s new
professorship. Citing his foreign policy record as hypocritical to
the new project at UCLA, these students chanted “Al Gore has
got to go” and some chased the former vice president’s
motorcade out of Ackerman turnaround.
“While he was in office, the administration was
continually bombing Iraq, where more than 5,000 people under the
age of 5 were dying every week,” said Reem Salahi, a
second-year international development studies student. “Now
he wants to help children here. He is a huge hypocrite.”
But some students were more enthusiastic about Gore’s
presence.
UCLA Gore fans Ramona Cruz, Brittney Reuter, LaRita Williams,
and Ariel Hankin greeted Gore after the meeting with loud cheering
and a poster saying “We love you Al, can we have a hug
please?”
Gore expressed his regret for not being able to fulfill their
request, as the students were on the second story of the building,
and were not permitted to come down.
“They are forcing us apart,” he said.
But, as Gore walked to his limousine several minutes later, he
shook each of the girls’ hands, and gave them their hug.