I’ve had a chance to work with the board of trustees and appoint many new presidents. I think I’ve been on 21 searches, and we’ve totally changed our presidential team. Half are women. And they come from the racial and ethnic identity groups that our students come from. It has totally changed the conversation around the table because they bring a set of experiences and views to policy issues that others can’t bring.

I commissioned the first study in the country on food insecurity and housing issues, which has now led to policy and food pantries and state funding. That’s part of student achievement. The issues around DACA and immigration are also tied to student success.

I’m proud of all of those things.

You’ve faced pushback over the move to reduce remedial education requirements before students could make progress toward a degree, as well as a proposal to increase high school math or quantitative reasoning class requirements for students.

Some have said that those could make things more difficult for lower-income or underrepresented students, and that you haven’t consulted enough stakeholders in undertaking the changes.

Can you respond to those concerns?

With respect to changing the remedial education, when we look back at the data, the very first semester when that policy was in place, we had 7,000 more students making progress to a degree than would have been before the change. And the vast majority of them were first-generation, low-income students of color. So it’s actually done exactly the opposite of what the critical voices said.

The quantitative reasoning issue is another one that is still active. We have been consulting broadly outside the university and we’ll be having more conversations with our public school leaders in the weeks and months ahead. If the board does agree to that policy change, it won’t go into effect probably for six or more years. There’s plenty of time, and we’ve committed to increasing the number of STEM teachers in California.

I want to ask you, from the C.S.U. perspective, about the college admissions scandal. What was your reaction? How do you think C.S.U. students felt?