President Lynn Mahoney - 2026 Convocation Remarks
Welcome to fall 2026!
Convocation provides us a moment to welcome back those who have been off campus this summer and to thank those who worked hard over the summer to welcome new students and prepare our campus for the new academic year. It also provides an opportunity to highlight the year’s priorities and align our work. The hard work we have engaged in over the last few years is bearing fruit and we start 2026-7 with wind in our sails and good news.
This fall, we are anticipating welcoming 6,000 new incoming students with sizable increases for freshman, transfers andgraduate students. With registration still underway, this is likely to be around 700 more incoming students than last year. As other universities begin to experience the enrollment challenges that we have faced for a decade, our intensive strategic enrollment planning and the city’s growing reputation have combined to shift the tides and provide an opportunity to once again envision SFSU as a destination campus. I am deeply grateful to each and every one of you who worked hard to achieve these enrollment gains and to all for making us a welcoming and innovative academic space.
The CSU also start the year with a healthy state budget allocation thanks to advocacy from every one of our constituent groups. Working together, the CSU, our students, our faculty and staff, our unions and our alumni successfully lobbied for much needed support. The CSU has committed the bulk of the new funding to employee compensation. I am hopeful that the CSU and its unions will soon come to agreements that provide much needed and well-deserved compensation increases.
Locally, we continue to work hard to align our costs with our enrollment. I am deeply grateful to all who are working to reduce costs while maintaining our services to students. And, while this has been hard, there are indications we are doing it successfully. Average unit load which measures student access to classes is up, our 2-year grad rates for transfer students and 4-year grad rates for freshmen are at or near all-time highs. This is remarkable and reflects the deep commitment all here have to students.
In this spirit, we begin this year by doubling down on our work to attract, retain and graduate students. The challenges confronting higher education abound, but our careful planning and collaborative work leave us poised to succeed. Our strategic plan focusing on educational equity, student success, and community engagement continues to guide us in ways that meet today’s challenges.
Our foundational commitments:
- to access, degree attainment and upward mobility;
- to a relevant education; and,
- to provide SF and the Bay Area with a talented, committed, well-educated workforce and citizenry – ensure that we will thrive.
Our work is echoed in the CSU’s ambitious strategic plan which aligns the entire system behind sustainable affordability, economic mobility, statewide impact and support for employees. I am particularly excited about the launch of the CSU Student Success Framework. Its focus on affordability, teaching & learning, and the student experience are very much aligned with the work we have done and will guide further improvements. We have long been leaders in all these areas, and it’s very exciting to see 22 campuses with more than 471,000 students and 61,000 employees line up in support.
Our commitment to access and upward mobility is deep. As the world around us changes, we will continue to evolve our work to ensure that students have access to career and graduate school pipelines that lead to rewarding careers. As part of our student success work, we will prioritize post-collegiate outcomes. This is about infusing what we do well with what will help students when they leave us. We will bring new intentionality and better coordination to that work, just as we have to enrollment planning and to meeting the GI 2025 goals.
And we must do this in the context of rapid technological change. Our commitment to access and upward mobility requires we engage critically in the ways that AI is reshaping higher education and the workforce. We need not blindly embrace AI nor naively celebrate its touted gains. Instead SFSU is uniquely positioned both by its geographic location amid AI companies and its decades long embrace of critical engagement with society’s thorniest problems to shape the dialogue around and the uses of AI in higher ed. And we are already leading the way.
The CSU recently adopted SFSU’s AI Literacy Essentials, a free, asynchronous, self-paced Canvas course created at SFSU now available for all CSU students. The course builds our capacity to critically evaluate and use AI tools with intentionality and accountability.
Last spring, the SFSU Student AI Commons celebrated the first annual SFSU Student AI Awards promoting original student projects that thoughtfully explore, apply, critique, or innovate with AI. Winning projects included platforms that demonstrate AI’s ability to help us work but also a study that examined how artificial intelligence systems often inherit and amplify social biases. Through critical study and adoption, we can shape AI and serve our students well.
Faculty research is also centered on this, embracing topics like AI ethics and digital responsibility, as well as developing innovative AI-driven research and methodologies. And the Center for Equity and Excellence in Teaching & Learning and Academic Technology developed a “Sense Making through Community” bottom-up approach to creating awareness and campus discussion about AI and community practices in teaching.
SFSU has never sat idly by and allowed others to shape the world around us. And we will not now. We will continue to demand that education be relevant, that education fuel critical, even radical, engagement with the world and that education remain the key source of upward mobility and equity for our students and communities. As always, I look forward to this work together.
I conclude by encouraging all to take time this fall to celebrate what makes SFSU special, enjoy walks on campus, attend events, find time for coffee with colleagues and students and join me in welcoming the newest members of the Gator family.