I’ve never been good at predictions.
But when my community engagement professor asked a 25-student seminar how many of them felt UCLA cared about what they had to say, I knew almost no one would raise their hand.
The UCLA administration must change its approach to students, faculty and staff feedback to incorporate Bruins’ voices in its decision making to achieve true community engagement.
Community engagement is a process that must involve local populations in all aspects of policy implementation. UCLA ought to aspire to that standard by making a more concerted effort to understand its community’s needs, face to face.
Administrators not only depend on strategies incompatible with students’ realities, but they also disregard student and faculty concerns. As a result, UCLA distances itself from community engagement and veers toward a performative effort to appear attentive to student and faculty perspectives.
Bruins often receive emails asking them to comment on policies under review. There are also options to participate in town hall meetings and attend the Chancellor’s Office Hours. Given their busy schedules, students may not have the capacity to engage with these channels for feedback.
Caroline Nuñez, a fourth-year international development studies and labor studies and student, said the UCLA administration sends long emails about opportunities for engagement, but she often stops reading after the first few sentences.
She added that being a student is so time consuming that when students receive emails unrelated to their commitments, they just stop reading.
The limited availability of some of the channels for direct communication with administrators is also an obstacle to student engagement.
For example, students must fill out a form to be selected at random for a 20-minute meeting with Chancellor Julio Frenk. The lack of certainty that such a process entails can discourage them from signing up in the first place.
The UCLA administration holds the responsibility of working around students’ circumstances and facilitating participation.
There are multiple formal channels for the UCLA community to provide feedback on university operations, such as through student government or the Academic Senate, a UCLA spokesperson said in an emailed statement.
Nonetheless, listening to student and faculty concerns is not enough. Incorporating these concerns into the administration’s decision-making process is essential for effective community engagement.
“There’s a lot of communication and a lot of listening, but maybe not a lot of paying attention to what people are really saying they want,” said Randall Kuhn, a professor at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health.
Anna Markowitz, the president of the UCLA Faculty Association, said in an emailed statement that recent UCLA actions feel misaligned with the UC’s values and mission and fail to provide an appropriate response when concerns are raised.
“Real consultation means that plans and actions will change based on feedback” she said. “I think folks don’t feel that the campus listens to their feedback.”
Students and faculty also feel a disconnect from the administration because of a perceived difference in priorities.
Nuñez said she feels that students and faculty care about issues relevant to the campus community, but that the administration seems to be more concerned with engaging with external actors.
“We don’t feel like we’re heard or like they really care,” she said.
The bureaucratic nature of UCLA administration might make it more prone to disingenuous engagement with students and faculty.
“Sometimes it can feel like everything is run through four or five filters, in terms of legal, in terms of communications, and that creates very few opportunities for genuine engagement,” Kuhn said.
The need for UCLA administrators to cover all their bases is understandable. However, doing so must not replace genuine engagement with students and faculty.
Instead, the administration must make an effort to meet students and faculty where they are and interact in less formal ways.
Kuhn said arranging unscripted visits to spaces that students and faculty frequent, such as labs and housing communities, is the best strategy to promote engagement.
“What I find is once you get into the room in a sort of candid balanced setting, and sort of the guard comes off, administrators can be quite candid and quite engaged and quite thoughtful,” Kuhn added.
Most importantly, UCLA administrators must hold themselves accountable to the Bruin community by documenting and publicizing the specific ways in which they have implemented student, faculty and staff feedback.
Despite any pressures that it may be facing, the university has a duty to prioritize the Bruin voices that shape it.
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