Alicia Nguyen elected as the new MCC director

By Winston Yu

The Multicultural Center welcomed its new director, Alicia Nguyen, after two elections and a night of deliberations. The MCC executive board met Monday to choose a new director from a field of three candidates. A first vote last Thursday failed when no candidate received the necessary two-thirds vote.

The interest in this year's election stands in stark contrast to last year's director search, where no suitable candidate was found until current director Judy Kuo was chosen several weeks into the school year.

Nguyen's election places her with the all-female group of leaders heading the eight chartered student organizations on campus, which include associated students, the activities programming board and the Santa Clara community action program.

As of now Nguyen said she is familiarizing herself with the roles and responsibilities of her new office, so Kuo will serve until the end of this year.

"I feel that her vision is really good," Kuo said. "I'm definitely supportive of her."

She said education on diversity is important to her, even more so now as she assumes the director's position within the coming year.

"A lot of times things are said, things are done, merely out of ignorance," Nguyen said. "They just simply don't know that what they're saying or what they're doing might hurt someone. So if we educate people about diversity, then maybe those things can be prevented."

As director of the MCC, Nguyen will be heading up an organization that was a key figure in the response to last year's theme party, which provoked nationwide media coverage and sparked both student, faculty and community outrage. She said she believes the march was a great idea.

"We had something very strong where we had a lot of people, including the outside community come together for support," Nguyen said. "But we didn't really follow through and we kind of laid low after that."

Next year, Nguyen said she plans to focus on building relationships with other campus organizations.

"It'd be nice if we could work together a little bit more."

Nguyen also plans to expand existing partnerships with the other CSOs, such as the Global Village event, where they worked with SCCAP.

In addition, one of Nguyen's priorities will be to increase campus involvement in the MCC.

"They don't even know the MCC exists," she said. "They might pass by us on the way to Benson, but they don't really know what we do or who we are, and I think that's important."

Nguyen said she also wants to reach out to the incoming freshman class by possibly presenting the MCC at orientation.

Contact Winston Yu at (408) 554-4546 or at wyu1@scu.edu