California State University, Long Beach President Jane Close Conoley jumped right into 2015 with a convocation speech that detailed several changes for students and faculty.
The Daily 49er spoke with Conoley before the start of this semester about her goals for the year, making campus smoke-free and upcoming faculty negotiations.
You mentioned in your speechbeing a smoke-free campus within a year from right now – August 2016.
There’s been a great taskforce working for a whole year looking at best practices across other campuses, what people need to quit, how we should organize it. What we’ll do starting now is roll out a really robust educational campaign offering cessation programs through our health center for members of the community who want to do that. We’ll also be offering other training programs…
We’ll have a three-year period of implementation, so next year on this day we will be smoke and tobacco free. We’ll have cards to remind people: ‘You’re smoking and we’re not supposed to.’ People clapped when I announced it, and we did focus groups and we had 70 percent strongly in favor of going smoke free so that’s pretty awesome. I would have expected maybe 50 percent… We had smokers on our taskforce too so they were letting us know what some of their challenges would be.
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Would you say that will be one of the larger projects you’ll have coming up for the next year or is there anything else that you think will take most of your focus? What should we be looking for?
You know we’re rolling out to another level of what we call student success 2.0 – kinds of tools that we hope students will use to keep themselves on track. That has meant re-training advisors, getting the e-advising tool spread out to almost all the majors now and some additional programs for students who may need help in time management or study skills. So I think we should expect to see our graduation rates go up again. Our persistence rates from [year to year] have gone up dramatically. That of course takes a big, big focus.
We’ll also be working hard with our faculty and colleagues – they have an open contract, they’re negotiating, they’re at impasse right now and so it will be a little tense, so we’ll be working hard to try and keep the climate here as positive as we can and be always sending the message of value and care even though I don’t control the negotiations.
How do you expect to see that play out?
Faculty were asking for five [percent] – clearly faculty deserve five. I mean it’s not a question of should they get it, you know, it’s how do we pay for it? I also think faculty will experience a richer environment, there’s more money to help them with their research, for service learning projects with their students, for research with their students…
We’ll be in deep planning for student success building that will be a big renovation of Peterson 2. The freshman this year won’t experience that, but I hope by junior year, students who came in today will have a bright shiny new building from the inside out that will be air conditioned and seismically okay and we’ll have all student services in one spot so that students have a chance to really take advantage without hunting around for what we have to offer.