Ex-UCLA student Alexandra Wallace
By C.G. Seymore, Co-contributor
A large qualm I have about higher education as of late (or at the very least at my university UC Berkeley) is the lack of diversity on campus. Universities attempt to artificially create diversity by accepting different raced people to create a façade that masks the real problem: a lack of diverse ideology. Besides the blind hypocrisy of initiating justice through injustice, the concentration on racial diversity, is the not diversity issue we should be dealing with.
A true utopian school is a school where young adults are able to discuss a diverse surplus of different ideologies and are encouraged to stray from the norm. Schools where the professors don’t have a reputation for being “liberal” or “ultra-conservative”. We go to universities for an abundance of reasons, but one of those reasons comes to the idea of entertaining and exploring the mind, probably more than we ever will for the rest of our lives. So what happens when all we hear is biased political rhetoric without any real or encouraged conversation? We get a bunch of young adults that are well versed in professor dialect and terminology.
Schools that pride themselves on set political stances should be embarrassed. They take the very thing that universities are supposed to supply and wall it off. This creates a polarization effect, in which students know these reputations and will polarize to their most comfortable political and ideological destination. This is where students know they will be patted on the back for re-edifying their own beliefs, and rarely does it encourage them to test the status quo. Students become complaisant and rarely challenge the status quo; this is wrong, this is not what our youth needs to be absorbing and making a habit of. When we students (or our parents) borrow or fork out $100-200,000 for education, nothing seems more problematic than getting an education that only reinforces current ideals and fails to challenge the mind.
This is a plea for schools to take into consideration the idea that maybe their emphasis on diversity has been skewed. It is a plea for students to stop being complacent and demand that their schools challenge their current ideology and encourage diversified political and ideological identities; not perpetuate the ones they already have. If there is a concentration on diversity of the mind, then the problem of diversification of universities between race and other various qualities will level itself out, since there are no innate differences between different races and people.
Cheers
A large qualm I have about higher education as of late (or at the very least at my university UC Berkeley) is the lack of diversity on campus. Universities attempt to artificially create diversity by accepting different raced people to create a façade that masks the real problem: a lack of diverse ideology. Besides the blind hypocrisy of initiating justice through injustice, the concentration on racial diversity, is the not diversity issue we should be dealing with.
A true utopian school is a school where young adults are able to discuss a diverse surplus of different ideologies and are encouraged to stray from the norm. Schools where the professors don’t have a reputation for being “liberal” or “ultra-conservative”. We go to universities for an abundance of reasons, but one of those reasons comes to the idea of entertaining and exploring the mind, probably more than we ever will for the rest of our lives. So what happens when all we hear is biased political rhetoric without any real or encouraged conversation? We get a bunch of young adults that are well versed in professor dialect and terminology.
Schools that pride themselves on set political stances should be embarrassed. They take the very thing that universities are supposed to supply and wall it off. This creates a polarization effect, in which students know these reputations and will polarize to their most comfortable political and ideological destination. This is where students know they will be patted on the back for re-edifying their own beliefs, and rarely does it encourage them to test the status quo. Students become complaisant and rarely challenge the status quo; this is wrong, this is not what our youth needs to be absorbing and making a habit of. When we students (or our parents) borrow or fork out $100-200,000 for education, nothing seems more problematic than getting an education that only reinforces current ideals and fails to challenge the mind.
This is a plea for schools to take into consideration the idea that maybe their emphasis on diversity has been skewed. It is a plea for students to stop being complacent and demand that their schools challenge their current ideology and encourage diversified political and ideological identities; not perpetuate the ones they already have. If there is a concentration on diversity of the mind, then the problem of diversification of universities between race and other various qualities will level itself out, since there are no innate differences between different races and people.
Cheers
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