UCLA limited by focus on sports

North is a first-year undeclared student.

By Peter North

While watching the football bowl games over break, it struck me
as amazing how much the American public pits colleges against each
other in competitions.

Most zealous about the sporting event are the students
themselves, who donned their school colors in pride in the crowded
stadiums. The fever of competing in sports extends even to schools
who didn’t make a bowl game, like UCLA, where talk of failure
and lost Rose Bowl hopes abound among disappointed Bruins.

This is very disconcerting. Football, and sports competition at
large, has made athletics seem like the only valuable competition
in which UCLA participates. While athletic competition is
important, it seems like no one cares about UCLA’s academic
and intellectual competition and reputation as much as sports.

When people think of the “top universities” or the
most “prestigious schools,” they instantly think of
Harvard, Yale or Princeton — which, ironically, are not too
respected as sports contenders, at least in football.

UCLA should be among those schools that come to mind along with
Harvard and Yale. It certainly has the resources to engage in this
type of competition: an excellent School of Medicine, a top law
school, and a large student body that, without a doubt, boasts a
tremendous amount of talent.

With is unbridled amount of potential, why don’t we have
this prestige?

Perhaps it’s just a matter of time: these Ivy League
schools have been around for hundreds more years than UCLA. This
early institutionalization has given them an upper hand in terms of
name recognition, which has in turn made it more appealing for the
top American scholars and professionals. As a result, it’s
expected for them to perform at a high level.

The fact that UCLA has comparable academic resources (whether or
not they’re exploited to fullest capacity) and is a more
recent school, is perhaps a good sign that at some point UCLA may
be No.1.

But the best way for UCLA to get in the spotlight is by taking
it. Instead of relying on sports for name recognition, UCLA should
challenge other schools at both the student and faculty level.

At the student level, this means more than just simple mock
trials or quiz games. Bruins should challenge students in other
schools to competitions that involve a more sophisticated
intellectual commitment, such as major research or technology
development competitions. Not only could UCLA acquire prestige, it
would also produce knowledge and technology that could be used for
the betterment of society.

I’m sure many students and departments at UCLA probably
already do this, but no one knows about it. It’s something
the media probably considers unimportant, since UCLA’s
collective attention is on watching Bob Toledo and Steve Lavin and
commenting on what they’re not doing right.

Having students beat students from other major universities
could boost the name “UCLA” to more feared heights in
the academic world; but students need to be interested and focus
their attention on these types of activities. When the students
care, the media will come. And UCLA will be depicted as the
academic powerhouse that it is and can be.

Our faculty, too, can engage in similar activity. They, after
all, define the quality of UCLA’s education. If their
research is top-notch and overshadows the research of faculty or
departments at other universities, it could mean more kudos for
UCLA’s academic wealth.

It’s true that professors are already engaged in a de
facto competition with other universities, but again, their success
and results are not being made public enough as they should be; at
least not to students.

Think of the possibility of UCLA being No.1, and the California
public having access to a top notch university. The name
recognition would give students better job opportunities after they
graduate; not to mention all the talented people who would come
here as out of state students.

But it’s all up to the students to change. As long as they
don’t care about UCLA academics and the potential for
groundbreaking intellectual work, dreams of Ivy League notoriety
will not be reached. This may take a long time to correct, but
it’s worth the wait.

Sports aren’t everything UCLA can do, and the university
shouldn’t limit itself. Otherwise we might start looking like
the Rose Bowl champion Miami: great athletics, shoddy
academics.