In a move that will devastate student recruitment, retention, learning, and success, Sonoma State management announced this week deep cuts to faculty, staff, and instructional and support programs. This decimation of a CSU Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI) is unconscionable and immoral in every way one might imagine it, especially in a CSU system with billions of dollars in reserves and investments that are supposed to be used to prevent the very actions taken by the Sonoma State University Administration, where an entire campus and its academic and educational mission are left unrecognizable.

“I feel like this tore the heart out of this campus. I feel like what we do here that’s so valuable is so compromised. It’s hard to imagine that the place is really the same place anymore,” said CFA member and long-time Sonoma State professor Mary Gomes. “These cuts will also compromise our ability to recover our enrollment. It just feels like potentially the death knell of this campus, and there has to be another way of dealing with it. We will be missing so much of what makes our campus the beautiful place that it is.”

The reductions include the laying off of upwards of 130 faculty (including tenured faculty, lecturers, Coaches and Faculty Early Retirement Program faculty); the elimination of 23 academic programs and six departments, and another seven departments would be consolidated to three. All NCAA Division II athletics programs would be eliminated.  Impacted faculty have rights and should reach out to their chapter leaders for support.

 With these cuts, the Sonoma State Administration is cutting the faculty by over 25%. Layoffs are set for May for temporary faculty and July for faculty on the tenure track.

These cuts follow previous cuts to lecturers in previous years. Across the California State University system, management is claiming the need to cut course sections and faculty work due to budget shortfalls. Many campuses started experiencing cuts in the Fall 2024 term.

“I feel devastated for my community,” said CFA member and Sonoma State lecturer Rebecca Addicks-Salerno. “For my students, my child, the future generations, I am genuinely really worried about what Sonoma State is going to look like, about what kind of community they are going to be able to foster and really about the tone, the feel, the safety our students will feel on campus when they hear about these things but there is a lack of clarity about it.”

Management at Sonoma State has given up on finding solutions that don’t hurt students, faculty, staff, and the community. First- and second-year students in eliminated departments will need to change majors, according to CSU Chancellor Mildred García. Chancellor, is this the best your leadership can do: tell students to change their majors and their dreams because you refuse to use reserve funds when they should be used?

Cutting courses and programs is a direct attack on student success by increasing class sizes, expanding faculty workload, and reducing support programs that help students achieve, particularly first-generation and immigrant students, and those from marginalized communities.

“It makes me angry these cuts will even happen because they shouldn’t have,” said HT Townes, a Third year Sonoma State student. “I think that the people that made these cuts don’t know students at all. They don’t know what we want. They don’t know what we are interested in.”

We’ve seen this before and we won’t fall for the administration’s premature austerity nonsense. Current funding from the state legislature is at historical highs, CSU trustees approved a student-tuition increase of 34 percent over the next five years, and CSU reserves are some of the healthiest the university has experienced.

The proposed cuts, department and program eliminations, and faculty job loss are not inevitable. Chancellor Garcia and the Board of Trustees can reverse these changes and demonstrate a leadership that privileges students, instruction, academic and educational integrity.

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