Looking Forward to the Future
Please mark your calendar for Sunday, September 19 when we will have an in-person event to launch the year-long Centennial Celebration of MJC! This journey started exactly a century back, on the 19th of September, 1921. MJC has been inspiring students and the community for the last one hundred years. We will commemorate this landmark event with the inaugural celebration in the quad of MJC East Campus starting 1 pm. This celebration will take place outdoors. I urge upon all of you to come out and join me to cheer for the 100th birthday of the college! Very soon, a formal invitation will go out providing a detailed agenda.
Although we celebrated the unofficial end of summer last weekend, looking at the temperature, it seems that the heat of summer will continue for a while! On the Labor Day Weekend, we have reached the census for Fall semester. We did see a decline in the FTES during the second week of the semester. Going by the trend, it appears our Fall semester will be marginally smaller than last Fall, unless we can make up on some of the enrollment through the late start classes. Impact of the prolonged pandemic on enrollment continues to baffle us. At the beginning of Fall semester, we did have seats available and a reasonably long waitlist of students. Such an observation leads us to consider the possibility that we have the opportunity to improve matching the demand for seats with availability. We have invited a Partnership Resource Team to come to our campus this semester to help us develop a Strategic Enrollment Management Plan with a special focus on Guided Pathways. Additionally, we are expanding our course offerings at local high schools to increase access.
We will have a special emphasis on planning during this semester. Apart from the Strategic Plan and Strategic Enrollment Management Plan, we will embark upon developing our Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) activities this semester. This will be an Advisory Committee to the President, informing him about the campus environment as it relates to DEI and strategies to support an inclusive campus where dialog across differences can occur in a non-threatening manner. The Committee composition will be as follows:
- 4 representatives each from Faculty, Classified
- 3 representatives each from Students and Administrators
- 1 President’s Liaison
I will encourage you to get involved and contribute to the critically important work that this committee will undertake. We, as a system, are committed to eliminate the achievement gap among our students in the next five years. The Strategic Plan and the DEI activity will be crucial as we move the needle on equity across campus.
The Pirates won their first Football game (35-28) in the season opener last Friday against Laney College at Oakland! This was the first game for our team in well over a year! Our women’s Volleyball team has begun the 2021 season with a 5-0 record! Please come out to cheer for our teams when you have the opportunity!
Go Pirates!
