This is as liberal as it gets, folks.
The University of California-Los Angeles (UCLA) is paying 18 students $13 an hour to fight “social injustices,” “privilege,” and “oppression.” Students involved in the Diversity Peer Leader internship program will be tasked with helping others “navigate a world that operates on whiteness, patriarchy, and heteronormativity as the primary ideologies.”
Students involved in the program will “create change within their spheres of influence” by hosting group dialogues with other students on issues like race relations, cross-cultural communication, toxic masculinity, and gun violence. In exchange, interns will receive training in dialogue facilitation, leadership, and conflict resolution.
Depending on the number of hours put in by each intern, the program will cost UCLA between $28,000 and $42,000 per year.
As UCLA student Arik Schneiderman points out, “The cost of the program alone could have gone to multiple scholarships, and potentially given a disadvantaged student a full ride through college.”
Funding for the Diversity Peer Leader internship program comes from UCLA’s mandatory “Student Services Fee,” which costs each student $1,128 every academic year.
The program is a “waste of student funds to address the leftist agenda,” says Schneiderman. “Students should only be forced to subsidize programs which are necessary. It is the perfect example of the worst of Big Government, Big Bureaucracy. It does nothing and turns into a bottomless pit for money.”
In March, the leadership program hosted “SolidARiTy: Plural Identities,” an event in which students were encouraged to create art to represent intersecting identities such as class and race.
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A similar internship at Miami University pays up to seven interns each year to promote “social justice and radical feminism” on campus. In March, intern Elisabeth Dodd pointed to the architecture of the student center as one of the major social justice issues on campus.
“In our student center, everything is glass. And it kind of felt like students are on display…Miami definitely advertises its students, in a way that isn’t comfortable for everybody.”
Editor’s note: Perhaps the conservative leadership will one day realize how biased our universities are, and actually do something about it.