News and Announcements
SF State received three out of the five major awards at “Igniting Creativity – Elevating Stewardship,” part of the CSU Facilities Management Online Conference Series.
The Best Practice Awards recognize outstanding achievements in facilities management, highlighting the most innovative and impactful practices implemented across the CSU system. The Architecture and Engineering and Energy Efficiency awards honor the new Science & Engineering Innovation Center. The Construction Delivery Methods award acknowledges the West Grove Commons and Yerba Buena Dining Hall/Health Center.
For more information, please email Barry Jodatian, associate vice president for Capital Planning, Design and Construction and Facilities Services, at jodatian@sfsu.edu.
Photo: Students and families prepare to move in to the new West Grove Commons residence hall on Aug. 21. Photo by Juan Montes.
Advocacy for diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) in society has been growing in cultural industries such as filmmaking. But how do viewers react to the increased presence of racial minorities on screen? More importantly, how do social movements for equality — specifically the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement — shape public attitudes toward racial minorities in starring roles? To answer these questions, Assistant Professor of Psychology Shiyu Yang conducted a series of studies published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, finding that after the advent of BLM, movies with minority stars receive more favorable evaluations, especially when the movement garners more public attention and support.
This work underscores the powerful role social movements play in driving social change. It also indicates how collective actions — both online and on the streets — can advance equality for marginalized groups, such as women, Indigenous peoples and sexual minorities. Yang’s work supports SF State’s mission to promote and understand its diverse community and offers insights for business and public policy on when and why diversity-related changes in products and practices are devalued or appreciated. Findings from this research can be applicable to other cultural products (e.g., TV shows, video games) and domains beyond entertainment by advancing understandings of the importance of navigating and embracing workforce diversity.
Photo: SF State students film on the School of Cinema soundstage in June 2014. Photo by Steve Babuljak.
Curious about generative artificial intelligence (GenAI), but not sure where to start? Join Academic Technology for a hands-on workshop on Thursday, Nov. 21, 11 a.m. – noon, via Zoom. It will cover the essentials of GenAI chatbots like ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot, including how to use them effectively and responsibly, and identify and discuss the best applications for academic and administrative needs.
Academic Affairs is conducting a search for dean of the College of Health & Social Sciences. The position will be filled by July 2025.
The search committee was selected per SFSU Academic Senate Policy S18-180. Detailed search information will include a position description and search profile. Application procedures will be shared on the Academic Affairs website’s College of Health & Social Sciences Dean page as information becomes available.
Search committee members:
- Christopher Bettinger, professor of Sociology
- Erica Bosque, chair and assistant professor of Social Work
- Elizabeth Brown, chair and professor of Criminal Justice Studies
- Rachel Flynn, associate professor of Child and Adolescent Development
- Allison Gilchrist, assistant professor of Nursing
- Jenny Lee, graduate student in Social Work
- Laura Mamo, professor of Public Health
- Rita Melendez, chair and professor of Sociology and Sexuality Studies
- Eureka Soriano, undergraduate student in Race and Resistance Studies/Sociology
- Samantha Ward, space and facilities specialist in the College of Health & Social Services
- Jackson Wilson, chair of the SFSU Academic Senate and Professor of Recreation, Parks and Tourism
- Grace Yoo, dean of the College of Ethnic Studies
John Kim will step down in mid-January as interim vice provost of Academic Resources. During his year-and-one-half tenure, he aligned the Academic Affairs budget with reduced enrollments.
Michael Scott will take over as interim vice provost until June 30, 2025, when a permanent vice provost will be selected. As interim vice provost, Scott will manage the Academic Affairs budget, class schedule production, University space assignment and Academic Technology.
Scott has been the associate vice president for Research and Sponsored Programs for eight years. He has served on the Academic Senate and worked closely with faculty, staff and administrators across all colleges. Before joining SFSU, Scott held program and budget officer roles at the National Science Foundation. He was a Chemistry professor for 14 years at the University of Florida. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley, and a Ph.D. in Chemistry from Harvard University.
Join the Institute for Civic and Community Engagement (ICCE) in spreading cheer this holiday season with a toy drive. Donations will be accepted through Wednesday, Dec. 11. ICCE welcomes donations of new, unwrapped toys and gift cards.
All donations will be distributed to youth and families in the Lakeview, Oceanview, Merced Heights and Ingleside communities of San Francisco at the annual OMI Holiday Extravaganza. This community-led event, hosted by Youth First, Invest Black SF and the OMI and Lakeshore Community Collaborative, will serve over 1,200 families.
The University Police Department (UPD) hosts its annual toy drive to benefit the San Francisco Fire Department Toy Program. To make a donation, please bring a new, unwrapped toy to the UPD lobby on North State Drive through Thursday, Dec. 12.
Information Technology Services (ITS) seeks feedback from the campus community on the award-winning SF State Mobile App to make more improvements for an even better experience. The redesigned app enhances the student experience with interactive maps, an updated class schedule, simplified enrollment and seamless payments.
The SF State Mobile App won an award for Best App Redesign at the 2024 Appademy Awards, presented by Modo. The app also received nominations for Best Personalized Experience and Best Use of Communications. More than 100 submissions were submitted from universities nationwide.
ITS congratulates the Web and Mobile team, Office of Strategic Marketing and Communications and Disability Programs and Resource Center for their roles with the SF State Mobile App.
Please submit feedback via the app or Qualtrics survey.
Image courtesy of ITS
When hired by SF State, faculty members have been granted a personal web page to showcase work, contact information, office hours and other information. However, the faculty website software has reached the end of its life and requires updating to meet security and accessibility standards.
Academic Technology (AT) and Information Technology Services (ITS) will host a series of feedback sessions for users of faculty sites to provide feedback and requirements for how to best meet user needs in providing a platform to showcase SF State faculty and their work. During these sessions, AT and ITS will solicit feedback and collecting requirements to best accommodate the needs of SF State faculty.
Please visit the ITS website for details, the session schedule and the feedback survey.
The Office of Strategic Marketing and Communications continues its efforts to increase search engine optimization (SEO), improve user journeys on SFSU web pages and provide the content that potential students are seeking.
Key metrics for October:
- Increase in ‘Apply’ clicks on multiple SFSU sites: In ongoing efforts to enhance user experience and drive conversions, clicks on “Apply” have increased across all sites.
- Future students: +16.27%
- SFSU home: +24.78%
- Division of Graduate Studies and Career Development: + 21.26%
- ‘Discover SF State’ web support: “Discover SF State” is the annual fall event for prospective students to tour campus, meet students and faculty, and explore their academic journey. The website supported over 3,000 users in the past month to help students navigate the campus and find programs and sessions to help them say yes to SF State.
Students, staff and faculty are invited to meet with Provost Amy Sueyoshi during her open office hours in spring 2025 to discuss any topic. Meetings will occur 8 – 9 a.m. on varying Thursdays, January – May, depending on the provost’s availability. All meetings will be in the Office of the Provost in Administration 455. Breakfast refreshments will be provided.
The SF State Academic Senate met on Tuesday, Nov. 12, via Zoom. A summary of the meeting follows.
The Senate:
- Adopted by general consent the following:
- B.A. in Broadcast and Electronic Communication Arts: substantive decrease in units
- Academic calendars for summer 2025, fall 2025 and spring 2026
- Passed:
- Resolution in Support of Affirmed Names
- Resolution in Support of Affirmed Pronouns
- Assigned time for Temporary Faculty Unit Employees Performing Institutional Service, new policy
- Revision to S19-230 Grade Appeals Policy
- Did not have quorum to discuss the following they will be presented at next plenary:
- Multilingual and International Tourism Competencies: new certificate
- Multilingual and International Business Competencies: new certificate
- Master of Arts in Cinema and Media Studies: name change
- Graduation requirements for baccalaureate students
- Academic calendar policy
- Heard a presentation Katie Lynch, senior associate vice president for Enrollment Management; Suttee Sujitparapitaya, associate provost for Institutional Analytics; and Lori Beth Way, vice provost of Academic Planning and dean of Undergraduate Education: “Enrollment Updates and Projections”
Please view the full agenda, meeting materials and minutes on the Academic Senate website.
Expand your generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) toolkit. Academic Technology hosts “Beyond Chatbots: GenAI Images and Meetings,” a hands-on workshop to harness the power of GenAI for image creation and virtual meeting transcription and support. Open to both beginners and advanced users, this event is an opportunity to elevate GenAI skills in a supportive environment.
Please visit the SFSU GenAI website to learn more and register.
The Center for Equity and Excellence in Teaching and Learning (CEETL) presents its monthly Graduate Writing Assessment Requirement (GWAR) Brown Bag meeting on Wednesday, Nov. 20, 12:30 – 1:30 p.m., in Library 242. Brown bags are open forums for GWAR faculty to discuss challenges and opportunities in teaching GWAR courses. Lunch will be provided.
CEETL encourages participants to attend the Writing and Reading Across the Curriculum workshop on Monday, Nov. 18 (before the Nov. 20 event). Please email CEETL Budget Analyst Cynthia Chu at cchu4@sfsu.edu for the Zoom link.
The School of Theatre and Dance presents “New Moves 2024,” featuring new student choreography, on Thursday, Dec. 5, at 6 p.m.; Friday, Dec. 6, at 6 p.m.; and Saturday, Dec. 7, at 1 p.m. and 6 p.m.
Drawing on a wide range of movement vocabularies including jazz, lyrical, hip-hop and modern dance, the seven choreographers offer stories from their lived experiences. Showcasing works that explore themes of love, isolation, and connection, the choreographers invite audiences on an exploration of the human experience.
Paulina Marmolejo-Brown explores a woman’s journey shaped by traditional values as she faces the crossroad between performing for the expectations of men or embracing her own self-expression. Clarissa Saunders portrays a coming-of-age experience of growing up queer in a religious environment and the anger, sadness and, finally, self-acceptance that comes with the journey. Samuel Iversen-Browne asks what happens to the self when there is a void of human connection: Does the soul cry out in anger, or does it simply wither and fade away from lack of care? Sam Espinosa takes on the concept of trust and how easy it is to lose trust in others and oneself and proposes that trusting oneself to accept the past and move forward is the needed step toward a brighter future. Anika Gautam illustrates the journey to self-growth and overcoming hardship caused by negativity. Ty Stevenson uses doors as a metaphor to capture the moment of a life changing event that signifies a new stage of life with new opportunities. Jasmine Miller creates portraits of joyful love expressed in its many different forms- familial love, romantic love, love between friends and love for oneself.
General admission is $12; student tickets are $9. Please visit University Tickets to purchase tickets. For more information, please email Michael Schweikardt at mzs@sfsu.edu.
Photo by Michael Schweikardt
The English Language and Literature Department presents its 14th Graduate Student Conference on Friday, Dec. 6, 10 a.m. – 1:30 p.m., in Humanities 485 and adjacent rooms. Each semester, the department hosts this event to showcase the work of M.A. students, representing the graduate disciplines in Composition, Linguistics and Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages.
I am a former staffer and columnist from the Hearst-owned San Francisco Examiner. My father, Daniel J. Langton, died in his Haight-Ashbury home on Nov. 3. He was 97.
My father was part of the celebrated inner circle of 1950s Beat poets in San Francisco’s North Beach. He was also a professor of Creative Writing at SF State for 50 years, retiring in 2017 at age 90. He contributed book reviews for the San Francisco Chronicle for years, and was a notorious wit and raconteur whose bon mots frequently appeared in Herb Caen.
There is a famous San Francisco Chronicle group photo of a Beat reunion that took place at City Lights bookstore in the mid-’60s where my father appears nearly dead-center, directly to the right of Allen Ginsberg, right below Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s umbrella. My father is the one looking very stern in horn-rimmed glasses. If I’m not mistaken, following the fairly recent deaths of Michael McClure and Ferlinghetti, my dad was the last surviving person in that photo.
He used to call that photo, “Fourteen Poets and Their Accountant.”
My father was an eminently quotable, profoundly funny guy. When asked recently if he wanted to be cremated, he thought for a moment and replied, “Surprise me.”
A memorial is being planned for mid-January at the San Francisco Beat Museum.
Obituary by Mark Langton
Photo courtesy of Mark Langton
SF State Spotlight
A Nov. 5 article in Diverse: Issues in Higher Education highlights institutions that have earned the Seal of Excelencia from Excelencia in Education this year. The article makes mention of several SF State initiatives supporting Latinx students. It also notes that SF State’s enrollment of Latinx-identifying undergraduates increased from 19% to 39% between 2010 and 2022.
“The Seal of Excelencia is emblematic of our commitment and the California State University’s commitment to eliminate equity gaps,” SF State President Lynn Mahoney said. “All of this reflects our commitment to serve our students and also our community by addressing the Bay Area’s need for a highly skilled workforce.”
Kishani Kirubaharan-Smith (M.S., ’22) presented her Kinesiology graduate thesis research at the Southwest American College of Sports Medicine’s annual meeting in Irvine. Professor Jimmy Bagley, Associate Professor Kent Lorenz and Professor Maria Veri from the Department of Kinesiology served as co-presenters.
Kishani’s work, titled “Comparing Body Composition Measures in U.S. Army Soldiers,” was published in the International Journal of Exercise Science: Conference Proceedings.
Master of Science in Quantitative Economics students Chin Ting Wong and Marcus Nogueira, under the mentorship of Professor Anoshua Chaudhuri, completed a service-learning project for the San Francisco International Arts Festival this year. They created participant and community surveys, collected data and wrote a report on the festival’s economic impact. The report was presented at the Mission Merchants Association and San Francisco Planning Department.
Recreation, Parks, Tourism and Holistic Health Professor Erik Peper gave an invited webinar for the RSI-vereniging (Dutch RSI Association) on Nov. 7. It is titled “RSI-klachten: bevrijd jezelf van pijn (Repetitive strain injury (RSI) symptoms: Free yourself from pain).”