Diversity requirement continues to receive mixed responses

The diversity requirement has met both student praise and criticism since it was instituted a year ago in fall 2015.

To satisfy the diversity requirement, current first-year, second-year and transfer students need to take one course from a list of courses from various diversity-related topics.

There are 184 approved courses that fulfill the diversity requirement and dozens of others are pending review, said Corey Hollis, director of academic advising, in an email statement. Hollis said the diversity requirement committee has met every quarter to approve new courses and often solicits new courses campus-wide.

Diversity courses for fall 2016 include “American Literature, 1865 to 1900″ and “Perspectives on Civic Engagement.

While many students find the diversity requirement to be a positive addition to the curriculum, others find it to be either superfluous or insufficient.

There was a great support initially for the diversity requirement to pass even after the vote was recalled after dissent, said Alexandra Miller, a fourth-year political science and psychology student. Miller, who served on the Academic Affairs Commission when the requirement was voted upon, said she helped others on the committee push for the diversity requirement to pass, both before and after the recall vote.

[Related: UCLA faculty approves diversity requirement]

“I think that we’re going to start to see how the general student body feels as it becomes a bigger part of the curriculum and once more of the student body has to abide by it,” Miller said.

She said most of the opinions she has heard are positive.

“Most of the people that I’ve talked to about it agree that it will help improve the campus climate and allow students to have a better understanding of how everyone has a different story coming to UCLA,” Miller said.

She added she hopes more classes are added to the list of courses fulfilling the diversity requirement. By doing so, students are more likely to take multiple classes with a diversity focus, rather than taking one class to fulfill the requirement and steering away from any related courses in the future, she said.

More classes should be mandatory to satisfy the requirement, said Annika Karody, a second-year English student. Otherwise, she said, the diversity requirement may be less likely to fulfill its role as a lifelong, eye-opening educational tool.

“(The diversity requirement) would probably be more in-depth and delve deeper into different subjects if there were a series rather than single course required,” Karody said.

She added she thinks the definition of “diversity” is unclear.

“I don’t know what kind of ‘diversity’ they’re going for,” Karody said. “Is it diversity of knowledge, opinion, background?”

She added the ambiguous definition of diversity made it so that more classes could technically fulfill the requirement than those currently offered. She said that sometimes made it unreasonable that one class, like “History of China: 1000 to 1950,” fulfilled the requirement while another course, like “Introduction to Asian Civilizations: History of Japan,” did not.

She added she thinks the general education courses, especially the highly interdisciplinary freshman cluster courses, are often sufficient to fulfill the diversity requirement without needing an extra course.

Additionally, there’s a perception that diversity just encompasses sociology, like racial or ethnic backgrounds, said Wes Armstrong, a second-year biochemistry student. He said he found this reflected in the courses offered when he was looking to fulfill his diversity requirement, which tended to be sociology-based.

“The diversity requirement shouldn’t just be about sociology,” Armstrong said. “It should try to broaden someone’s views in multiple ways.”

Last year, a committee tasked with approving classes for the requirement aimed to include more south campus courses that would fulfill the requirement.

[Related: Diversity initiative pushes to be inclusive of South Campus courses]

However, Armstrong said he thought the science class he took to fulfill the diversity requirement, “Stem Cell Biology, Politics and Ethics,” didn’t necessarily gear towards diversity.

Armstrong added he found the requirement to be especially burdensome because courses at UCLA are often difficult to enroll in due to space and because requirements often are not geared to the students’ interests and strengths.

“I don’t want to just be stuck taking requirements,” Armstrong said. “I want to take what I want to take, (especially) when there’s difficulty getting other classes and (a need to be) fulfilling so many other requirements.”

Hollis said the administration has received little information about student feedback, popularity of courses and enrollment trends, and hopes to generate informative updates later in the fall.