Editorial

The Graduate Student Association has withdrawn its support for
an on-campus pub because it wants to ensure it has graduate
student-only hours.

This approach to incorporating graduate students into the campus
community is somewhat counterproductive. Graduate students
currently feel unattached to the campus because they’re
segregated by department; now they want to bond together but remain
segregated from everyone else.

Graduate students cannot argue they share too little in common
with undergraduates to interact with them socially. A microbiology
undergraduate student is no less interested in microbiology than a
graduate student studying it. And a pair of graduate students
studying dentistry or English, respectively, don’t really
have more in common than a graduate and undergraduate in similar
departments. Also, most graduate students and undergraduate
upperclassmen are in their early to mid-twenties, so there’s
no generation gap to speak of. There’s certainly no bar off
campus that segregates people by age or profession.

By refusing to facilitate the approval of an on-campus pub
everyone would enjoy together, and by hypothesizing about
potentially nonexistent “problems,” GSA’s
decision will only help perpetuate the sense of campus disunity at
UCLA ““ a disservice to the students it represents.