Students at California State University, Long Beach stepped into the boss’ shoes on Thursday as they sat down with University President Jane Close Conoley to address campus-wide issues.
The impromptu meeting addressed the concerns of 19 randomly invited students in the President’s Conference Room last week.
The day before the meeting, Associate Vice President and Dean of Students Jeff Klaus walked around campus asking students to attend the meeting. Klaus said that he did this at Conoley’s request so that university officials could get firsthand knowledge of what issues are affecting students.
“I’m planning on doing a pretty big, broad scan of the entire campus,” Conoley said. “I thought it made sense to start with the students since they’re on the ground and that’s why we built the place. We’re looking for what’s best that we should do more of, what are hassles we can get rid of and what are the major misunderstandings and who should be connected to who.”
Conoley’s efforts to improve CSULB this semester have focused on making connections with the students and faculty through emails and small, personal meetings such as this.
Freshman information systems major Chris Chhouk said that he thought the meeting was well received for the most part.
“The president was really down to earth and she was able to connect with us on a really good level,” Chhouk said. “She gave us a lot of information, and she also learned a lot as well, so it goes to show that we’re all here learning and part of this community that’s growing and taking steps to make changes to the current issues at hand.”
Tanuja Ramanujam, a junior communications studies major, said that she mainly enjoyed the meeting but that she still had a little more of a critical take.
“I thought the meeting was good and had a lot of constructive criticism, I just thought it could have been a little more geared towards major problems on campus and less trivial ones,” Ramanujam said. “I understand people want to get their bowling on, but scholarships, that was one issue we discussed which was huge, and there are tutoring centers on campus that aren’t being announced, which was huge. It’s bigger things like that that we need to be more focused on.”
The meeting covered a range of problems, including spotty Wi-Fi, parking, scholarships, campus pride and diversity, communication between the university and the students, commuter student problems and university employees.
Conoley said that though the issue will not all be fixed immediately, the meeting did offer some insight into which problems can be taken care of in the near future.
“We need to do a better job at communication,” Conoley said. “We’re working on a new approach to first year experience that I hope will help this, especially to the commuting students because they don’t have the advantage of the infrastructure of the dorms and having second year people around to mentor them.”
Along with that changes discussed in the meeting, Conoley mentioned that Peterson Hall will be renovated in two years so that student services will be offered in one place instead of being dispersed around CSULB. Conoley also said that the university’s scholarship site would be updated to make scholarships easier to find and access.
Conoley said that she plans to hold more meetings like this in the future.
Editors Note: John Broadway was included as one of the randomly selected students to meet with Conoley.