Long Beach State students voiced disappointment and frustration over President Jane Close Conoley’s latest commencement email during public comment at the ASI Senate Meeting on March 9.
Xiomara Santos, a CSULB student, said she was disappointed to hear that ASI collaborated with university officials in drafting the commencement survey.
“It just feels like we were not getting the transparency that we were requesting from Conoley and now we’re not getting transparency from ASI,” Santos said.
Santos questioned the ASI student body’s intent in creating the survey in the first place.
“Why were we not told that [ASI] would be working with the university to write that survey?” Santos said.
Gena Faranda, a CSULB student, said attended ASI meetings in relation to the spring commencement since February in “hopes for ASI senators who are our voices in all of this to be our voices all and all.”
“In the end, we the student body were given promises that weren’t kept, being told by [senators] of doing a resolution that was never followed through,” Faranda said.
Faranda said that she and her fellow students have been in discussions with ASI senators that made “promises to make change.”
“You want our vote, but you don’t want to put in the work and effort in what it takes to earn our vote,” Faranda said.
The ASI senator at large, Fidel Vasquez, said he understood the students’ reactions to the way the survey was conducted, alongside university officials’ response to it.
“[In the] commencement email, students feel that their voices were not heard,” Vasquez said. “They felt it was just a slap in the face to have a survey sent out and the university chooses to go ahead and move along with their original plan.”
ASI will hold its next meeting on Zoom at 3:30 p.m. Wednesday, March 16.