While I know for a fact that some of my classmates didn't like Professor Commins, I really enjoyed his class. I took IDS 100B with him over the summer, and it was by far one of the best classes I've taken at UCLA. He is an incredibly smart and charismatic person... his lectures were really interesting! On top of that he has all this experience (he worked at the World Bank for a long time) and is able to tie in personal anecdotes into a lot of the material that he's teaching. At times he can be a "hardass" but he taught one of those classes that you actually want to work hard for.