Letters and Emails

Women's, ethnic studies courses should be required of all majors

JESSICA ALWAY'S OTHERWISE nice front-page article "Fighting for feminism" in the Feb. 13 issue of The Santa Clara contained a significant error when it said, "The university core curriculum requires all undergraduate students to take a women's/gender or ethnic studies class before graduation." This requirement is only for students in the College of Arts and Sciences, not those in business or engineering.

This limitation has always seemed strange to me, since a case could be made that students in the two professional schools should be the first to have an ethnic studies/women's studies requirement.

Today's Mercury News mentioned that only seven percent of the engineering workforce consists of blacks, Latinos and American Indians. And, consider the glass ceiling in industry, especially the computer industry. As someone who has taught courses cross-listed in computer engineering I'm quite aware of how few electives engineers have, but sometimes higher purposes have to take precedence.

As an aside, I have a pet peeve related to the feminism issue, which can be summarized by a dictum: "women won't be treated like women until they stop referring to themselves as 'girls.'"

Dr. Peter Ross

Department of mathematics and computer science