San Jose State President Cynthia Teniente-Matson talked to members of the SJSU community about what plans they wanted to see in a new draft for Transformation 2030 during a campus summit on Monday afternoon.
Transformation 2030 is a framework the university developed to create a roadmap to map its future ambitions, according to the strategic plan.
“The goal is to assess and recalibrate the strategic plan Transformation 2030 in the local, regional and statewide contexts of 2023,” said Alison McKee, chair of the Academic Senate at SJSU.
Teniente-Matson said she is focused on recalibrating and aligning the new draft of Transformation 2030.
“I want us to have a fresh look at that as we go forward in my first 100 days here on campus,” she said.
SJSU Provost and senior vice president Vincent Del Casino said he and the university’s staff want to make sure the university is still pushing itself to get to the right place.
“We had not stopped and reflected on where we were in relation to our overall goals and the outcomes underneath them to make sure that we’re still heading in the direction we want to head,” he said.
Del Casino said the campus was most likely very different in comparison to what the university is like now.
Teniente-Matson said she wants to invite everyone into the conversation of what the recalibration will look like.
“I think it’s really important that we have [a] common vocabulary, common understand[ing] of our language, our common language,” she said.
Del Casino said university staff are going to collect feedback that was given at the summit, use different tools to look for themes and to do analysis.
Teniente-Matson said to collect feedback during the meeting, the university staff placed QR codes during their presentation, allowing audience members to access surveys.
Del Casino said university staff will look into any patterns in the feedback that was given back.
He said the university has seven more years to evaluate the feedback.
“Strategic plans should be living documents anyway,” he said. “They shouldn’t be set in stone and not reassessed.”
Teniente-Matson said the university staff will send out the same surveys to the rest of the campus community for students and faculty who were unable to attend the summit.
“We’re going to do everything we can to broadcast it out to others,” she said. “Those tools are really cool. That you can move outcomes around and comment on the goals.”
Senior nutrition student and Associated Students President, Nina Chuang, said this was her first time attending the summit.
She said the summit was one of the many small chances where the campus comes together to talk about working together and what the university’s values and missions should be.
“It was amazing to see not only administrators, faculty and students come together, but [a community] coming together,” Chuang said.
She said she thought it was empowering when she saw the audience at the summit participate to provide feedback to the university.
“I just thought that was so empowering to see that we had a voice at the table when it comes to the future of our university,” Chuang said.
She said it's good seeing the administrators, faculty and staff attending the summit, but Chuang said she is more excited to really see the student’s voices show when it comes to the mission that the university has.
Political Science junior and Director of Legislative Affairs for Associated Students, Dominic Treseler, said he saw there were important discussions happening at the summit, but he was disappointed about the lack of students participating in those conversations.
“I was really disappointed that there wasn’t more [students],” he said.
Although lack of student involvement was a concern for Treseler, he said there were a lot of institutional and psychological barriers.
“It’s hard for them to be able to commit time to, you know, coming to these university events, engaging with our community,” he said.
Treseler said he’s still happy to see the university making an effort to progress from where it currently stands.
