OUR OPINION: Students need to stay involved with the task force’s decisions regarding diversity education classes.Student Senate passed a Free Expression Tunnel Response Act Wednesday night. It condemned the actions of the four students responsible for the incident in the Free Expression Tunnel Nov. 5 and pushed for reform of University regulations regarding threatening speech.It also called for the University to punish and educate the four students with cross-cultural community service, counseling and diversity education, which ties in with Vice Provost fosr Diversity and Inclusion Jose Picart’s plan for required courses in diversity.While diversity education is important and would help to prevent incidents like the one in the Free Expression Tunnel on Election Day, adding diversity courses may not be effective. The incident in the Free Expression Tunnel demonstrated how far we have to go to deal with prejudice and threatening speech on campus. We cannot ignore these events and hope the problem goes away.As the University is already cutting existing classes due to budget cuts and students are already required to take a number of general education courses, expanding existing required courses to include more diversity education and offering optional, more focused courses on the subject would make more sense than making them requirements in students’ general education requirements.The final bill did not advocate for suspension or expulsion and only supported punishing the students responsible for the threats they wrote in the Free Expression Tunnel with diversity education and counseling.This doesn’t solve the problem.The University is right to seek to educate both the students responsible and future students in diversity awareness.But simply adding classes is impractical. How does the University intend to pay for the new diversity classes when it is already in the process of cutting courses? Further, how does it expect the classes to have an impact without student feedback?Students already view some of the general education requirement courses as yet another hurdle the University throws in front of them in order to graduate. And diversity is not something students can learn in the classroom — it is a product of interacting with people from other backgrounds.The chancellor’s task force needs to keep this in mind as it debates policy changes — getting student involvement should be a top priority, as they are the ones who will see the biggest changes from any policy changes. The task force should consider making the diversity programs like the AlcoholEDU online course all incoming students are required to take.It should also use existing resources to provide diversity education and include more extensive diversity programs in current general education classes.