“It is great to be home,” Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass said as she took the stage at the Presidential Distinguished Lecture Series in November. Bass, a 1990 graduate, spoke about civic engagement and leadership in a wide-ranging speech and panel discussion.

The mayor focused on some of her team’s accomplishments in her first year as mayor, and urged students considering a career in public service to dial in on solving problems, not just talk: “Do you want to make a point, or do you want to make a difference?”

That distinction has animated the mayor’s term in office so far, as she remains laser-focused on tackling the city’s homeless crisis and other boots-on-the-ground issues. Her visit to CSUDH came amid the shutdown of Interstate 10 following a massive fire beneath a downtown overpass. Caltrans and city workers had the freeway open less than 10 days after the fire, after initially estimating it could be shut down for months.

“I hope that many of you, especially students, think about public service as something that you want to dedicate your life to,” Bass said. “There are so many issues that we have in our city and in our country to deal with, and you bring all of the talent.”

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Toros celebrated the opening of new or renovated spaces across CSUDH in 2023, cutting ceremonial ribbons and gathering to memorialize those improved locations. In March, the Asian and Pacific Cultural Center unveiled its home on campus in Welch Hall, creating a hub for students to meet, study, and learn about API culture. The Toro Esports Academy officially opened its doors in April, showcasing their state-of-the-art facility to a large crowd and the media.

September saw the grand opening of the redesigned Toro Guardian Scholars office, which has transformed their space into a welcoming home for students enrolled in the program, with plenty of resources and staples available for them. In October, the Toro Dreamers Success Center completed its transformation into the CSUDH Immigrant Justice Center with a festive re-opening of its space in Loker Student Union.

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Research shows that the number of incarcerated people who re-offend or violate their parole after release goes down when they participate in educational opportunities. A 2019 RAND Corp. study estimated that every dollar spent on higher education in prison could save the state five dollars by reducing the number of former inmates who return.

CSUDH is playing a key role in this process with the newly launched Master of Arts in Humanities program. The program, abbreviated as HUX, was developed in partnership with the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. It’s the first fully accredited graduate degree exclusively for incarcerated individuals in California.

The first HUX cohort started in September, with 33 students across multiple facilities. They committed to two years of coursework, focusing on subjects within the field of humanities that reflect their own interests and goals. Coursework can be completed via a combination of email, letters, phone conversations, and independent study.

CSUDH originally established HUX as a series of correspondence classes in the 1970s, and hundreds of students earned their degrees before the program ended in 2016. When HUX Program Director Matthew Luckett began working with the state to reboot it four years later, the timing was right: Congress passed legislation later that year making incarcerated people eligible for federal Pell Grant funding for the first time since 1994.

That’s provided a boost to prison education programs around the country, and Luckett says the investment should pay off, especially for an institution dedicated to social justice like CSUDH. “Few programs, academic or otherwise, have as high of a return on investment as prison education programs,” he says. “Our students don’t just stay out of jail—they become leaders in
their communities.”

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Many Toros through the years have gone on to earn doctoral degrees after graduating from CSUDH, but they always had to go somewhere else to do it. Until now, that is.

The 17 students who began the Occupational Therapy Doctoral program this school year are the inaugural cohort for the first doctorate offered at CSUDH.

Historically, the CSU system only offered bachelor’s and master’s degrees, with doctoral programs reserved for UC campuses. That changed when the state legislature authorized a select number of doctoral programs at CSU institutions, with the caveat that they can’t duplicate existing degrees offered by any UC.

Gaining approval for such programs requires meeting a high standard, said Vice Provost Ken O’Donnell. “You need a more vigorous research agenda than you did before, and faculty have to be ready to pull students up to a level that they may have been at themselves not that long ago. That perspective shift is really the hard part.”

Students in the OTD program come from different backgrounds, but they all share a drive to succeed, both as individuals and as trailblazers in a new institutional program. Alyanna Paulino graduated from UCLA and considered becoming a doctor, but after working as an EMT, learned about other health specializations. “Listening to patients talk about how OT had improved their lives really showed me that as a discipline, it offered so much of what I was passionate about.”

The OTD is just one of several new doctoral degrees CSUDH plans to launch in the next few years, including a Doctor of Education (Ed.D) program in Summer 2024 and a Doctor of Nursing Practice (DNP) in 2025.

Mi-Sook Kim, dean of the College of Health, Human Services and Nursing, said the OTD program represented a significant milestone. “It not only provides a pathway for students from diverse backgrounds to achieve the highest level of expertise in OT, but also contributes to the advancement of the field.”

Part of that advancement lies in the contributions the OTD can make in creating greater diversity in the field, said Sheryl Ryan, an assistant professor and capstone coordinator for the program. “We’re currently in a moment where there’s a lot of change happening in the profession. We want to build greater cultural, sexual, and gender diversity so that future leaders in the field can break new ground, and I think CSUDH is uniquely placed to be a conduit for that.”

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The Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education just awarded CSUDH a Gold rating in its Sustainability Tracking, Assessment, and Rating System (STARS). Sustainability Manager Ellie Perry credits CSUDH’s success in this area to the university’s commitment to social justice. “If we care about people, we should care about the planet we all live on,” Perry says.

We’re not just doing it for the awards, though. Sustainability is a core feature of the university’s Strategic Plan, which recognizes that communities of color are inordinately burdened by the effects of climate change. The university’s Climate Action Plan commits CSUDH to carbon neutrality by 2045.

Perry has also kick-started a campus-wide food recovery program and sustainable food production at the Campus Urban Farm. With the help of student volunteers and interns, the farm produces hundreds of pounds of fresh produce each year, which is distributed free of charge to students experiencing food insecurity.

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