I had the opportunity to sit down with Cal State Fullerton’s President Mildred García yesterday alongside my co-editor Brandon, our Managing Editor Harrison and our Editor-in-Chief Zack.
While it has been an event I’ve been invited to take part in throughout my last few semesters as a News Editor, time constraints have always inhibited my ability to go. Being able to be a part of the small panel this time around was wonderful, both because the team I got to go with was great and because we got a lot of really solid stuff just from some brief conversing on current affairs. It’s the sort of thing I definitely want to see happen more in the future.
Though we only got about a half hour of her time (as it is safe to say that being the President of a University can be a busy job), I feel like we managed to get a hell of a lot of questions in to sustain a rather beefy little interview. At least 3,500 words worth of content from my last count.
Basically about as long as one of my wordy video game postings but with a subject matter that actually means something more substantial.
In regards to topics, we mainly talked about five things with García:
- The recent decision to rescind DACA.
- The possibility of Milo Yiannopoulos coming to campus later this semester.
- Current plans for the University’s next Strategic Plan, given that the last one is set to end this year.
- Issues with parking on campus – one which I tend to experience frequently, I might add.
- Her thoughts on the issue of Lecturer Eric Canin.
Rather than writing a story specifically about these elements, we decided to do something a little different by offering readers a Q&A formatted piece so they can see everything that was said. With only some minor editing for things like grammar and clarity, the full transcript is available in print (on shelves for this weekend at least) and online (for presumably all weekends until the internet collapses).
Oh, and for those of you looking to appreciate some extra behind-the-scenes flavor, the picture we have as a featured image on the website actually has me sitting to the left of García with my freshly shaved beard and more dress-y shirt. Harrison and Brandon are to her right and Zack is taking the picture, so naturally I was on my own at that side of the table for just about the whole interview. Made things both engaging and perhaps a smidgen more intimidating when she focused her attention to my side and didn’t have to split her gaze between a number of eyes.
I was going to have a similar photo cameo in our print edition, but the transcript is so long that we had to eliminate a lot of that visual flair just to make room for it.
What you would have seen, however, was kept alive thanks to our Instagram post in which you can still very clearly see the back of my head:
Looking good there, scamp. Looking good.
If you want to see the interview in its entirety, you can check out the article here. You can also see my full catalog of work for the Daily Titan over on the right!
Jason's Blog - Work in Progress 