Cynthia Teniente-Matson, San Jose State’s new president, was inaugurated on January 16, replacing former Interim President Steve Perez.
Teniente-Matson said part of her plan for her first 100 days as president is listening to many constituent groups, including students.
“I'm wanting to understand and maintain the momentum of things that we're doing well, for our students,” Teniente-Matson said.
The newly appointed president has a vision for SJSU.
Teniente-Matson said the juxtaposition of being the oldest campus in the West, in an area with the newest innovation and technologies made SJSU attractive.
She also said SJSU’s commitment to justice, social justice, racial justice, equity and inclusion were all important to her.
“What that means for the students who come here and the experiences that you have and the chance we really have to shape the world,” she said.
Perez said the newly nominee president knows what she needs to do in order to be successful at SJSU.
“She's a tremendously intelligent and accomplished person already,” he said in a Jan. 20 interview with the Spartan Daily.
Prior to being hired at SJSU, Teniente-Matson was president at Texas A&M University - San Antonio for eight years.
Teniente-Matson led a successful transformation of the university becoming a designated Hispanic Serving Institution, according to her Texas A&M biography.
A Hispanic Serving Institution is a designation for eligible schools when at least 25% of its full-time undergraduate students are Hispanic, according to the Department of Education’s “Hispanic-Serving Institutions” webpage.
On Jan. 17, at the National Day of Racial Healing event held on campus, Teniente-Matson said the Texas A&M University she worked at had been created in an area which had previously been redlined, making the communities around the university primarily Latino and poor.
Redlining is the discriminatory practice of systematically denying services – like loans or mortgages – to residents of certain areas based on their ethnicity or race according to an April 2022 article by Cornell Law School’s Legal Information Institute.
“That's where I chose to live,” she said at the same event. “I built the house in that same community so that I could be reminded on a daily basis of the importance of serving students, and serving families who are reliant on the bus, or might be unhoused, or may have food insecurity in their livelihoods.”
Teniente-Matson said she feels like she had a life-changing experience leading an institution in a previously redlined community.
At Texas A&M, Teniente-Matson created the President's Commission on Equity. The commission was charged with creating “a culture of excellence that values equity and inclusion,” according to the commission’s equity statement webpage.
Business administration junior, Alexandra Puga, said it’s nice to see someone like her in that type of position.
She said she thought it was cool to hear Teniente-Matson talking about supporting first-generation and underrepresented students, but still is awaiting to see the President’s plans for the future.
“I'm just waiting to see, like, how it plays out,” Puga said.
