Vice Provost for Diversity and Faculty Development and Professor of Law and Women’s Studies at UCLA, Christine Littleton, spoke at Pacifica Institute, Los Angeles. Prof. Littleton started her talk by saying that at UCLA the belief is that diversity is an important educational value and Los Angeles itself is advantageously diverse to fit UCLA’s belief. Prof Littleton said that many people used to belive that it was either diversity or the top but in fact the diverse group is the best. When you bring different groups of people together you get better results.
Open-mindedness, understanding, compassion and inclusivenes are values that the University is committed to. Prof. LIttleton pointed out that many institutions in the US are going backwards on the issue of diversity, where UCLA has made a modest progress of 2% in terms of diversity. Other institutions across the country have gone backwards and lost diversity points.
Prof. Littleton told the audeince that budget cuts at the universities have led to cuts in diversity courses so that the “core” courses can be offered. This is an unfortunate trade off because this way students are not given a diverse education. At UCLA the faculty has tried to overcome this by creating interdisciplinary courses in diversity given the budgetary contraints. Thanks to programs like this one UCLA was able to offer a course of transsexuality this year through the combined efforts of the History and Women’s Studies departments.