UCLA Celebrates 75th Anniversary

Your May 21 article, “Address Marks Start of UCLA Celebratory Year,” was another example of your bias against UCLA. Despite the headline, 80% of the article bashed UCLA by reiterating a list of challenges that UCLA has faced in the recent past. Why can’t a small part of your focused and undivided attention be devoted to the good in the news? The fact that one of the top-10 universities in the world is celebrating a milestone anniversary with the President of the United States is newsworthy. Yet, your “higher education reporter” was assigned to the Rose Bowl ticket issue. How can you justify putting that story on the front page while relegating the President’s speech to an inside page? It now appears that your editorial, “A Gem on the Rim” (May 19), was merely a bone thrown to UCLA in light of your true journalistic priorities.

When something good happens in Los Angeles that directly affects more than 25% of your readers, then can’t your talented staff devote a similar quantity of their energy to that story? More than 25% of your subscribers have been educated at UCLA. Maybe it makes financial sense to start thinking about a significant audience who is continuing to grow weary of your monopolistic negativism.

Regardless of your UCLA bashing, we will move ahead with our anniversary celebration with greater enthusiasm to raise the important banner of higher education and the role that UCLA can continue to play in the health and well-being of Los Angeles.

JOHN E. KOBARA, Chair

75th Anniversary Committee

Assistant Vice Chancellor

Alumni Relations, UCLA

* I was disappointed that your article on UCLA’s 75th anniversary celebration was unable to focus on the many positive contributions of the university. UCLA faculty, staff, students and alumni serve a broad range of constituencies in Los Angeles through their involvement in the Venice Family Clinic, Unicamp, Christmas in April and myriad other community service programs. UCLA has contributed countless innovative research projects in fields as widespread as biotechnology, film preservation, education and physics.

It was also unfortunate that the contributions of UCLA’s outstanding alumni were overlooked. Accolades and awards have been given to many UCLA alumni, from the public servants such as Nobel Peace Prize laureate Ralph Bunche, former Mayor Tom Bradley and Supervisor Yvonne Brathwaite Burke, to athletes such as Arthur Ashe and Jackie Joyner-Kersee, from artists Francis Ford Coppola and Agnes de Mille, to astronauts Walter Cunningham and Anna Lee Fisher. They represent just a few of the many who work daily to contribute to the success of UCLA and the greater community.

KIM KOVACS SAVAGE

UCLA, Class of ’83

Northridge

* Your May 19 editorial remarking on UCLA’s 75 years poured it on much too thickly, for my tastes. There has long been an inconsistency on campus, bordering on deep political hypocrisy.

For recent evidence, we note Chancellor Charles Young’s sell-out to Angelo Mazzone, wherein Mazzone gets 4,000 Rose Bowl tickets, many ticket seekers get frozen out and UCLA picks up a “gift” of $100,000 from Mazzone (May 21). This is certainly a major scandal, and renders moot much of what UCLA purports to be all about. You would do well to at least acknowledge such problems.

ROY ROUDINE

Los Alamitos

* Re “At UCLA, Clinton Calls on Students to Rebuild Nation,” May 21:

So Clinton is upset over “the pessimism, the negativism, the destructive tone of public discourse in America today.”

Has this man ever thought that perhaps the reason for our pessimism and negativism might, just might, have something to do with the fact the country needs a leader in the White House? A good leader could silence us faster than any presidential blaming and whining. In my opinion, the man just doesn’t “get it.”

MIMI VILLAREAL

Santa Ana