Working Group Improves Dynamics

Senate voices students’ opinions at educational meeting

Anthony Alegrete
Associate Reporter
February 21, 2019

The Week 7 Senate meeting focused on the university explaining their plans to increase diversity and student happiness in order to recertify regional accreditation.

The Western Association for Schools and Colleges (WASC) is a regional university accreditation.

In order to achieve WASC accreditation, universities are evaluated on the holistic experience of the university and how they work on integrating their students into the community.

The Santa Clara WASC working group is a collection of campus advisors and faculty consisting of representatives from the university coordinating committee, the Dean’s Office and the Office of Student Life.

The WASC working group studies the university’s strengths and weaknesses regarding areas such as student happiness, diversity and campus involvement.

The WASC working group highlighted the university’s success and challenges through the voice of Ed Ryan, vice provost for Planning and Institutional Effectiveness.

“Even though we know that there is a lot of work to do, we believe that we have made great strides in this category,” Ryan said. “The 90 percent graduation rate we have is true in all races and genders.”

This group then opened the floor to questions at the meeting, attempting to tie-in the student voice, despite the lack of a constant student voice on the committee.

Several Registered Student Organizations (RSOs) also presented budget proposals at the last Senate meeting.

The organizations proposing possible budget plans for upcoming events included RSOs wanting funding for culture shows such as the Japanese Student Association for their Matsuri festival and the Vietnamese Student Association for their culture show.

Proposals were also made to fund  organizational competitions as well as other bonding events such as Theta Tau, a co-ed professional engineering fraternity, for their Western Regional competitions, Her life, His glory for their upcoming retreat, Lambda Pi Eta, the communication studies honor society, for their senior banquet and SCU Hipnotik in an effort to fund their dance competition in Las Vegas.

The next ASG meeting will be held Thursday, Feb. 21 in the Williman room at 7 p.m.

Contact Anthony Alegrete  at aalegrete@scu.edu or call (408) 554-4852.