Student Diversity at Cal State Campus

This is in response to Randall Ishino in “Letters to The Times” (Sept. 10) about the “broadest, most (ethnically) diverse, culturally rich student body in the nation” at Cal State Los Angeles, and his difficulty in seeing how the “university capitalizes on that diversity.”

While there may be a few programs that deliberately “structure intermingling,” I would suggest that this intermingling does take place, and most effectively, in the classrooms.

As a sociologist, I have found the ethnic and age diversity at Cal State enormously stimulating and enriching in all the courses I teach. In open discussion, students are encouraged to express their points of view, which are frequently startlingly different from “mainstream” ideas. Blacks, whites, Latinos, Asians, Armenians and others disclose their thoughts on many aspects of society, sometimes provoking hostility, sometimes hilarity, but, ultimately, I feel, coming to a better understanding of the many worlds existing concurrently in our community.

This is part of what education is about, surely, and the intellectual and emotional lives of students, and of faculty, are profoundly affected and informed by it.

MONICA B. MORRIS

Professor, Sociology

Cal State Los Angeles