Catch your token Bruins on campus

  Doug Lief Lief is a fourth-year English
student who is 100 percent Russian Jew. Whoop-dee-doo! Contact him
at [email protected]. Click
Here for more articles by Doug Lief

UCLA is quite possibly the single most ethnically diverse campus
in the entire world. How have we allowed ourselves to fall so far
behind?

Over the last year or so UCLA students have done everything in
their power to try and encourage diversity, but you can see the sad
results for yourself just strolling down Bruin Walk.

We here at UCLA open our doors wide to all races and creeds,
welcoming them just long enough to list off their atrocities.
“Wow, you’re from Holland? That’s so totally
awesome. Now get the hell out of my face, you imperial Dutch
bastard!” In the spring the swallows come home to Capistrano,
and the Muslim Student Union and the Jewish Student Association go
at each other to increase awareness, namely awareness of how bitchy
two minorities can be. Hooray for diversity.

This warm reception is usually followed by the standard
anti-fill-in-the-blank rally and the ignored Meyerhoff Park
speeches, e.g. “Hot Beef Injection O’ Jesus: Why
Everything You Believe Sucks Ass! Part 3 of Our Lady of
Pestering’s Ongoing Lecture Series.” Kofi Annan could
juggle flaming barracudas in that park and no one would even glance
over.

Illustration by JARRETT QUON/ Daily Bruin Senior Staff
It’s a Viewpoint columnist’s job to provide
inflammatory statistics, so here are mine. Did you know, and I
remind you these numbers are only preliminary, that there are at
least 71 confirmed black people not enrolled at UCLA?

Furthermore, completely unsubstantiated rumors that I just made
up reveal that Caucasian students have been skulking at night,
gorging themselves on the flesh of minority students. OK, not all
Caucasian students, just the Republicans.

This dilemma is why I’m forming a new organization,
“Now is the Time for Diversity Now!,” which will
explore new methods of ensuring the heterogeneity of our student
populace.

Seeing as we can’t recruit more people from the races we
already cater to, one proposed solution is to send expeditions to
uncover new races to invite to the showcase. This campus is devoid
of even one centaur, although I’ve seen a few girls who could
pass for Amazons (“I’m so hungry I could eat another
horse”). Certainly we could do with a cyborg or two. Now at
last we can assimilate them (note: if you get this reference to
Star Trek’s Borg and there is a member of the opposite sex
nearby, don’t let them catch you laughing and/or
snorting)!

I propose the expedition be sent by balloon to the farthest
corners of the realm to find and locate new specimens. These would
be returned to UCLA and taught to hold a sign and complain about
something irrelevant, preferably whatever other race one likes the
least. The golem we found last year fared decently, that is until a
member of the Awaken a-capella group (the golem’s natural
enemy) asked it the musical riddle, “Can I get a whoop
whoop?”

The problem with bringing in new students from yonder is that we
subject them to the ongoing race war we like to call diversity
networking. Clearly the campus’ breeding program is not
receiving enough funding. By breeding the already diverse student
population in a controlled manner, we can create races they
don’t even have words for yet, like octajewlattos (sounds
delish!). It’s time to innovate.

Perhaps we can somehow coax a gay man and a lesbian to mate,
creating a child no sexual orientation can contain or even hope to
describe. Of course, there is the chance that such a child would be
made of anti-matter and annihilate itself at birth, but
that’s the inevitable march of science. Were quasi-homosexual
positron babies not the implied ultimate goal of Leonardo da
Vinci?

So why aren’t we as diverse as we could be? What is
holding us back? I place the blame squarely on Chancellor Albert
Carnesale for a lack of leadership in this area. First of all, what
kind of name is Carnesale? He must stand forth, and return the
accents to his name like the traffic guy on Channel Two. The
Chancellor shall become Cäârnèsålé, and
stand as a shining unpronounceable example of whatever he is, be he
Spaniard, Polander or Muppet.

In all seriousness, this quest for diversity has gotten out of
hand. Should World War III occur, the UCLA student body will not be
called upon to repopulate the earth, and even if we were,
we’d rebuild it just as territorial as it had been
before.

Instead of declaring all men are created equal and ignoring race
for the accident of birth it is, we’ve chosen something
closer to Bulworth’s program of “procreative racial
degeneration” where we treat people like Pokemon cards.
Collect them all and win a prize! That prize: we get to feel
slightly less guilty about our European selves.

I look around UCLA and see a school that has succeeded far
beyond anyone’s wildest dreams, a place of prestige and
empowerment. But that success is threatened by our best intentions,
for in demeaning those we mean to include, and for including them
only for their showcase value, we undermine our credibility as
champions of pluralism.

Then again, I have a friend who is Swedish and really hot, but
she’s graduating this quarter. If we could do something to
get a few more of them in here, I’d really appreciate it.