CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY, LONG BEACH
VOL. LXVIX, ISSUE 66 | APRIL 9, 2018
Photos by Hunter Lee | Daily 49er
I think we have to be prepared to reach out to more audiences. I hope that the future brings us opportunities to renovate and really do some new building.”
“
I learned a lot once I got here. I just never put any brain cells on Prospector Pete at all, or [the] 49ers. It wasn’t even, you know… I’m embarrassed to say I was just not awakened.”
“
D49er
E xclusive Q: A:
Menʼs basketball head coach Dan Monson recently got his contract extended, what are your thoughts on that?
“I am satisfied. I delegate that decision making to the athletic director [Andy Fee]. The athletic director has the best understanding of who else is out there, what they [would] cost, what’s the state of the team now, and [while] I was listening to a podcast that Andy [Fee] does with sports writers JJ Fiddler and Mike Guardabascio, [Fiddler and Guardabascio] made the comment that when Andy Fee and Dan put out the [news of the contract], they acknowledged that we hadn’t met expectations for the past number of years. And Dan has agreed to a pretty significant salary reduction. There’s still incentives that he could earn, but if he doesn’t win then he doesn’t get the money. We hope he wins because that’s good too. I’m kind of looking at it from a little detached, not expert opinion... [and] I think that winning is very important, but an honest game is also. We have no violations, no NCAA concerns about the way we do business, our graduation rates are really high. So anybody that judges a coach just on wins, I think, is missing the point that these are student athletes.”
Q: A:
I kind of messed that up by trying to be funny about disaster and also talking about money, which wasn’t really the real reason [for changing commencement]...If I had to do it over again, I would have announced it sooner.”
“
UP CLOSE w i t h
C o n o l e y
By Miranda Andrade-Ceja Editor in Chief
Whatʼs it like being the president of a university in this political climate?
“It’s multi-modal in a sense. I’m just horrified at the increase in hate crimes...I’ve been proud of our students for standing up. My current biggest worry that really makes my job not fun is [rescinding of] Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. And so we’re involved with many many other universities in any legal action we can take. So that part of the job has been hard, being that people who we have elected to represent everybody have ignored the plight of, in our case, hundreds of hundreds of students who are really good students. So that’s hard. We [also] get much more praise than we get criticism...I don’t forget the criticism but it wouldn’t be healthy for me to just think about that all the time. Sometimes it comes late at night. I got criticized last night for doing something and unfortunately I read the email like at 10:30 p.m., so that was bad. So I went to bed with it. But I try really to remember that this is a balance. I really love the job. Working with students and [working with] generally great faculty and great staff.”
Q: A:
Whatʼs your opinion on our mascot, the 49er? Do you prefer LBSU or CSULB?
“You know, I don’t care that much about 49ers, [and] there are so many 49ers, we could have attached that “49ers” to anything... but it just so happened we did to miners, and now that is an unfortunate truncation of history to have done that. There’s big teams, professional teams, that are the 49ers. It would be nice if we had a different name. And as a general move, in the CSU I understand, they try to get away from human mascots, generally. I don’t know who we would have...Some of the nice animals in the ocean are taken. The dolphin is taken. The otter is taken. I like otters, otters are cute. I was thinking next year we should have a big student referendum on names or mascots. Mascots, you know. You meet some of the local alums and they have a chant that they have ‘nothing could be finer than to be a forty-niner.’ They’re very attached to that. There is definitely a push and pull [on the current mascot]... [and] I prefer Long Beach State, just because I’m a New Yorker. Long Beach State, it’s easy.” But I get [the conflict], there’s feelings on both sides.”
FUNDING
President Conoley addresses budget deficit The shortfall will be mitigated by increased enrollment and online class opportunities, some departments will face tenure track-hire slowdowns.
By Miranda Andrade-Ceja Editor in Chief
An $11 million Cal State Long Beach budget deficit may result in an increased availability of online classes, a delay in new renovation projects and a “strategic chilling” of the number of tenure-track
hires, according to President Jane Close Conoley. The university is developing ways to mitigate the shortage for the 2018-2019 school year. Conoley sat down with the Daily 49er Thursday, where she explained that the university had learned the severity of the budget shortfall last week from Provost
Brian Jersky and Chief Financial Officer Scott Apel. Originally, the university predicted a worst-case budget shortage of $7 to $8 million for the 2018-2019 school year if Gov. Jerry Brown allocated the $92.1 million to the Cal State University system after the May Revision. According to Conoley, the cur-
rent deficit is a combined result of Brown’s proposed funds to the Cal State system and a lower amount of revenue from tuition costs over the 2017-2018 school year. While no definite plan for hansee SHORTFALL, page 2