The Faculty Senate recognized President Alexander Gonzalez just before his retirement with a standing ovation during the senate’s weekly meeting on Thursday.

“The Faculty Senate of California State University, Sacramento extends its best wishes to President Alexander Gonzalez and his family, and wishes him success in whatever challenges and adventures he undertakes from this moment on,” said Faculty Senate Chair Reza Peigahi.

The president was there to accept the recognition with gratitude and expressed his thoughts before faculty.

“I am very honored for the recognition, I am very happy to be here, I am very happy that I’m retiring,” Gonzalez said. “I just really want to thank all of you, despite the disagreements and arguments … rest assured, whatever I have done, I’ve always done it with students and faculty in mind, thank you very much.”

Gonzalez spoke in appreciation to his years as president and reminded the faculty of the great ventures they have accomplished as a campus community and spoke on future ventures that need to happen to the campus, like establishing a science building for Sac State.

After recognizing the president, NCAA Faculty Athletics Representative and Economics Professor for Sac State Stephen Perez gave an athletics presentation on the academic progress of student-athletes.

The academic progress of student-athletes is measured with the Academic Progress Rate and has a maximum score of 1000.

Perez asked the faculty to think of the APR as a forward-looking measure of graduation rates.

“All of our students, the most recent data that’s published and publicized from a year ago we are about to have some more that are published, but all of our teams are above 945 (APR rate) and more,” Perez said. “Most of our teams are about 950 and are doing fantastic and this year will be pretty similar.”

As of 2014 the statistic of student-athletes, who are in good standing, is at about 93 percent. In terms of student-athletes’ GPA, the grade point average has increased from a 2.96 to a 3.002, which Perez said is a great triumph and accomplishment.

“We have a lot to be proud of for our students-athletes … there are a lot of reason why our student-athletes do well academically, a lot of it has to do with our student-athletes, they work very hard–as I’ve talked about this over the last several months to you, they work very hard, they are very driven, they are very directed, they are very goal-oriented,” Perez said.