Letter

GE requirement is unnecessary

Jonah Lalas writes in his column “Campus
should oppose GE changes,” (Daily Bruin, Viewpoint, Nov.
9) that “the lack of a diversity requirement forces us to
question the makeup of the GE curriculum and whether or not it
reflects what students want to learn.”

If students want to learn about race, gender, sexuality or
religion, why do they need a requirement to enforce that desire?
They are perfectly free now to take those courses and, in fact, I
took many classes dealing with the history, art and language of
other cultures in my time at UCLA. What Lalas really means, I
suspect, is that a requirement is needed to force students to take
the kind of courses he would like them to.

He goes on to cite hate crimes committed in the wake of
September’s terrorist attacks. From the occurrence of a few
such crimes, he extrapolates that “the American public is
largely oblivious to the other countries outside of their
Eurocentric realities.” I would counter that the small number
of crimes shows that in fact the vast majority of Americans do not
conform to such a blanket categorization. Are some members of the
Indonesian public to be classified as bloodthirsty villains because
of the roaming bands who sought out Americans staying in hotels in
the days after the bombings of Afghanistan began? I see Muslim
students walking freely around UCLA’s campus daily, yet if I
were to walk onto a campus in Pakistan today, I wonder how I would
be treated?

Edward Rhodes UCLA alumnus Class of 1999