‘Nothing Will Be the Same’

One morning in January, Marcus Ziemer sat in his office at Sonoma State University, working on travel plans for the men’s soccer team’s upcoming fall season. Ziemer, the team’s head coach, was absorbed in his paperwork, so he missed an email when it flashed across his screen.

But a text message from a player caught his attention.

“Are we done?” the player wrote.

At first, Ziemer was confused. He checked his inbox and found an email from Emily F. Cutrer, the interim president, which had been sent to everyone on campus at the same time.

It relayed “sobering news,” she wrote. Some 46 faculty members, both tenured and adjunct, wouldn’t be renewed for the next academic year. Twenty-three academic programs would be eliminated and six departments closed.

And then this: “We also have made the decision to eliminate NCAA Division II athletics.”

Ziemer was stunned. Just moments ago, he had been planning travel for the next season. Suddenly, that next season had vanished.

“Do you have any information? Is this new to you? Is it effective immediately?” Ziemer’s player asked. For a moment, the coach could only respond with one word: “Wow.”

Sonoma State has long been Ziemer’s home. He started there as a player in the 1980s, returning soon after graduation as an assistant coach. He became head coach a year later, when he took the team — which included his three younger brothers — to the national championship game. They lost, but his team went on to win a national title in 2002. Now 62, Ziemer knows he’s nearing retirement age. But he’d hoped to be able to step away on his own terms.

Ziemer’s father and several other extended family members also attended Sonoma State. He grew up half a mile from the university, often riding his bike to campus to buy candy bars at the bookstore. But in recent years, Sonoma State has become unrecognizable to him in some ways. Ziemer has grown frustrated by what he views as a series of poor decisions by college leaders.

Sonoma State, which is part of the California State University system, is among many colleges nationwide that are navigating dire financial trouble, the painful calculations that come with it, and impossible conversations about what a university is and what it should be. Sonoma State also isn’t alone in taking an ax to some of its liberal-arts programs, like art history and philosophy, in favor of a greater emphasis on career-oriented programs — even though it has historically emphasized its liberal-arts core. But the decision to eliminate all intercollegiate athletics is striking, especially as many other small colleges use sports to boost enrollment.

Cal State leaders have long touted their institutions’ focus on aligning degree programs with work-force demands and promoting students’ social mobility. Sonoma State’s plan to transform its academic offerings and revamp recruitment is in keeping with the system’s vision. And it says changes are necessary to restore enrollment and “assure a strong and vibrant future.” The cuts also follow years of operating losses, and were made to satisfy the system’s requirement that Sonoma State balance its budget. Since at least the 2011-12 fiscal year, when the CSU system started publicly posting each campus’s financial statement, Sonoma State’s revenues from operations have fallen short of its expenses each year.

Now, faculty and staff like Ziemer — who have built careers here, who feel they’ve helped mold this place into what it is — are confronting a painful reality: There might not be a place for them at Sonoma State anymore.

There are still some unknowns. Several athletes in March filed a lawsuit alleging the university sidestepped some of its policies and procedures for making budget decisions, but a Sonoma County Superior Court judge ruled against them last week, giving the university the go-ahead to implement the cuts. Lawyers are considering an appeal, while athletic-department members are working with local legislators to propose a way to save the program.

Also yet to be seen is the impact the sweeping cuts will have on the campus. So far, they’ve stoked outrage and backlash. Students say their educational experiences won’t be the same without faculty members who are being let go. Coaches say the campus will be hollow without the community engagement fostered by athletics. Others point out that without programs like theater and dance, which were also caught up in the purge, the university could lose its spark. But the president says the overhaul is necessary to lift the university out of a $24-million budget deficit.

Many in and around campus are left to wonder: Will reinvention pay off? Or will the university become a shell of itself?

The tidy, green campus about an hour north of San Francisco was once billed as the “public ivy” of the state system. Its residential complexes pay homage to the local wine industry, with stucco-roofed “villages” named Tuscany, Sauvignon, and Verdot.

In its heyday, Sonoma State received a surplus of applications, leading it to ramp up admissions standards and turn away qualified students. It was regarded as a jewel of the state system, the only college in California with membership in the Council of Public Liberal Arts Colleges (it still is).

It may have also been the “whitest and likely the richest” CSU institution, according to a 2009 paper produced in an investigative sociology class taught by Peter Phillips, who retired in 2021. BMWs and Lexuses rolled through the campus, where minorities were “few and far between,” students at the time told The Press Democrat, which covered the report. The university had become “a Wine Country destination for well-to-do white students, many of them women from Southern California,” the article says. In 2009, the university’s fall enrollment was 67 percent white and 12 percent Latino, with much smaller shares of Asian, Black, and Native American students, according to data from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System.

By 2015, those figures had shifted. Total enrollment remained above 9,000, but the percentage of white students had decreased by nearly 20 points, and the share of Latino students had more than doubled compared with 2009, according to state data.

Nationwide, talk of higher ed’s demographic cliff was gaining urgency. At Sonoma State, Judy K. Sakaki took over the presidency in 2016. Faculty members generally welcomed her with open arms; they had voted no confidence in the previous longtime leader, Ruben Armiñana, years earlier. Armiñana touted what some viewed as the institution’s “country club” image and prioritized spending on capital projects, transforming it from what some used to call “Granola U.” (“Once we wore sandals. Now we wear Armani suits,” he once said in an interview.) In contrast, Sakaki championed diversity and a students-first approach. Her vision was widely accepted as a worthy cause: to make the university not elite, but accessible, as she told The Press Democrat.

That required a strategic shift. The college pulled recruiters out of Southern California, where it had previously lured wealthy students from Orange County and the Los Angeles suburbs. Instead, Sonoma State focused on serving local students from more diverse backgrounds. In 2017, the college was federally designated a Hispanic-serving institution. The shares of Latino students, Pell Grant recipients, and students who are what the CSU calls “traditionally underserved” have increased over the last decade, state data show. But some who spoke with The Chronicle say the trouble started with that shift, when the university put the brakes on its traditional areas of recruitment. Around that time, enrollment began to decline.

The wildfires that swept the region in 2017 didn’t help. The campus was shaken after the homes of some students and staff were destroyed. Then came the Covid-19 pandemic, followed by one presidential controversy after another: Sakaki’s husband was accused of sexually harassing university employees, and her successor, Ming-Tung (Mike) Lee, abruptly retired after cutting a deal with pro-Palestinian student protesters last spring.

By the time Cutrer took the helm as interim president last summer, trust in the university’s leadership was running low. Enrollment had plummeted 38 percent since 2015, the sharpest decline of any Cal State university. What was once the system’s liberal-arts gem was now forced to confront what it had rapidly become: a struggling campus with fewer than 6,000 students and a budget problem.

Some athletes say it feels like they’re the only ones around campus nowadays.

When Emily Morandi, a junior on the women’s soccer team, transferred to Sonoma State last fall, she expected a more traditional campus experience than the one she’d had at her community college in Washington State. But Sonoma State is “like a ghost town,” she says. When she goes to the library, there’s hardly anyone there. Many students live off campus and commute or attend class on Zoom.

The bright spot in Morandi’s year at Sonoma State has been her coaches and teammates. Without athletes, “there’s gonna be nobody there,” Morandi says. “Nothing will be the same.”

Sonoma State residence halls had the lowest occupancy rate in the system, at 64 percent, according to Cal State financial statements for the 2022-23 fiscal year. The percentages of students who live on campus and of those the university classifies as commuters have hovered around one-third and two-thirds, respectively, since at least 2015, according to university data. Technically, that makes Sonoma State a commuter campus. But while “a majority of our students live off campus,” a university spokesperson said in an email, “we also have a significant 24-hour student presence.”

But lately, Ziemer, the soccer coach, rarely feels that presence. Even on Saturday nights, the campus “sounds as quiet as a church,” he says.

Over the past decade, Ziemer watched helplessly as enrollment crept further and further down. He knew the university had budget problems. There had been signs elsewhere on campus: a suspension of nonessential travel, hiring freezes, and academic restructuring. During past crunches, coaches were merely asked to work with less and fund raise more. He never imagined all athletics could be on the chopping block.

The department was largely allowed to operate as usual, Ziemer says, all the way up until the second day of the spring semester, when the cuts were announced. In total, 50 new athletes transferred to Sonoma State this year, starting in either the fall of 2024 or the spring of 2025. This year also saw the installation of a new scoreboard for the gymnasium, and the hiring of a new athletic trainer, Joseph Smith, who moved across the country and bought a house in Sonoma County for the job.

Now, Smith is one of 36 people on the athletics staff who will soon find themselves out of work. Most of the 200-plus athletes across 11 teams are looking to transfer out. All but three of Ziemer’s players have committed to other programs.

Cutrer, the interim president, knows the value athletics can bring to a campus. In her previous post, as president of Texas A&M at Texarkana, she started the university’s athletics program. The teams helped enhance campus life, recruit a diverse population of students, and bolster academic success for athletes. “This is not about any sort of dislike or disapproval of athletics,” she says. But “ultimately, we’re an academic institution, not an athletic institution.”

When it came down to it, the cuts were painful but necessary, Cutrer says. The university had chipped away at its losses here and there in recent years, but now the budget deficit was even higher than originally projected. The cuts she landed on were those that would close that $24-million gap while directly affecting the smallest number of students possible.

“Every option was explored,” Cutrer said in an interview with The Chronicle. “I wouldn’t cut any of these programs if we didn’t have the kind of financial situation that we have. They’re all valuable, they’re all good, but at the end of the day, after five years of cutting, you finally have to balance your budget.”

Eliminating all intercollegiate athletics “seems, and is, pretty dramatic,” she acknowledged. But a college must sponsor at least 10 teams to maintain Division II status, according to National Collegiate Athletic Association rules. Cutting just one of the current 11 teams wouldn’t have made enough difference in the budget. Reducing to even fewer teams and reclassifying wasn’t a viable option either, Cutrer said. Division III doesn’t allow athletic scholarships, and the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics (a separate association from the NCAA) has restrictions against transgender athletes that Cutrer said could conflict with state laws.

“If we didn’t cut athletics, we would have to be cutting a lot more academic programs, or some really big academic programs,” Cutrer says, “and that was just not a tenable situation.”

Ziemer’s soccer team will no longer be able to chase another NCAA championship. But any remaining athletes can still play for the university’s “robust” and “vibrant” intramural and club-sports teams, Cutrer says, including soccer, equestrian, and lacrosse.

It’s a “very different thing from Division II in some ways,” Cutrer says. “In other ways, it gives students an opportunity to be part of a team, which we all think is important.”

It’s also less expensive for the university. The athletics cuts will save Sonoma State $3.7 million, Cutrer said in her January announcement. (The lawsuit against Cutrer and the university argued that that figure is inaccurate and lacks evidence.)

Cutrer also tried to sell the changes in athletics as an opportunity. Since students organize club sports and find ways to fund their own teams, she says, they will “really get to test their entrepreneurial acumen.”

If there’s a cost to maintaining the status quo, there are also risks in making changes.

Shuttering the athletics program will mean the loss of many current and prospective athletes. Students in academic departments that are closing may also transfer out — philosophy, art history, economics, geology, theater and dance, and women’s and gender studies — though some who have reached a certain credit benchmark may stick around to complete their majors through a teach-out plan.

But, Cutrer says, “we’re also moving the institution forward.” She thinks enrollment losses in those areas will eventually be made up in others. Such moves are “investment decisions,” the university wrote in its turnaround proposal, which it calls “A Bridge to the Future,” unveiled in April after local lawmakers demanded a concrete comeback plan.

The $10-million proposal aims to reimagine Sonoma State and restore enrollment. It says the university will develop career-based learning and create at least four “new, high-demand” academic programs in health sciences, business, data science, computer engineering, and possibly other subjects within three years, yielding a projected 1,000-student enrollment boost down the line.

The university will also make tactical changes, like revamping its marketing efforts with artificial intelligence. And it will restart recruiting everywhere, including in Southern California once again, Cutrer told The Chronicle.

The new plan sells Sonoma State not as a liberal-arts haven, but as an incubator to prepare students for the work force, more like the rest of the CSU system. The shifts reflect the changing tastes of students and of the nation’s broader views on the purpose — and the value — of a college education.

The CSU system chancellor, Mildred García, instructed state colleges to cater to those changing tastes by focusing more on career paths. “To paraphrase Chancellor García,” the university’s plan says, “our students are seeking a pathway to social mobility and an economically independent life for themselves and their families.”

To Ziemer, the university’s proposals didn’t seem like a serious plan. Save Seawolves Athletics, a group of current and former athletics students and staff, reportedly called the plan a “bridge to nowhere.” Some lawmakers and faculty members have joined the criticism, saying it slashes existing programs that have long defined the university in favor of vaguely outlined speculative ones.

“They keep saying we’re still going to be a liberal-arts college. But how are you going to be liberal arts without philosophy, without theater, dance, art history, women’s and gender studies?” says Tim Wandling, chair of the English department. The emphasis on vocational programs is misguided, Wandling says, because it’s based on the erroneous assumption that specific majors have to equate to certain jobs. The value lies more in the degree itself, Wandling says, and less in what the degree is in. Most students “want to major in what they want to major in,” he says, not what they think will lead to the highest-paying career.

But students may be more career-focused when choosing a major than Wandling suggests. Nearly one-fifth of the two million bachelor’s degrees conferred in 2021-22 were in business, which was by far the most popular field of study between 2011 and 2022, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Over all, 58 percent of the bachelor’s degrees conferred in 2022 were concentrated in six fields of study, a group that included business, health professions, and engineering — areas to which Sonoma State is redirecting its attention.

Cutrer says the university is still committed to the liberal arts, and that budget decisions were based on the number of students in certain majors, not on content. But it’s important to consider, she says, “how we balance our dedication to the liberal arts and move forward with programs that maybe sound more like a career.”

But some professors argue that the programs being cut bring in essential revenue. Faculty, students, and staff also emphasized the roles that arts and athletics play in campus life. The college’s plan says it will revitalize the campus community by promoting club engagement, offering more events, and developing an outdoor park, among other proposals. But athletics were “the biggest community engagers on campus,” Ziemer says.

The university might add a new park and a new sound system and lights at a campus plaza, as outlined in the plan. But “we [already] have a beautiful theater,” Wandling says. “What are we gonna do with that?”

Sonoma State plans to make money from its athletic facilities through rentals and memberships, and will “seek additional revenue opportunities” with the music center, it says in its plan.

Faculty, staff, students, and alumni have rallied against the cuts since January.

They hope their efforts can force the university to reverse course. Many maintained optimism throughout much of the spring, buoyed by high energy at protests, thousands of signatures on petitions, and support from local lawmakers, who have held two in-person hearings to investigate the cuts.

Some of those hopes may have been dashed last week. After seven athletes in March filed a class-action lawsuit against Cutrer, García, the university, and the CSU Board of Trustees, a Sonoma County judge on Friday denied their request for a preliminary injunction and ruled that the university can move forward with the cuts. Lawyers had argued that the university and the CSU system violated their own policies by failing to follow required procedures before announcing the cuts. The university engaged in “fraudulent conduct,” the suit argued, bringing in new students and allowing athletic recruitment to go on without disclosing the cuts sooner.

Ziemer calls the ruling a setback but says “we’re still fighting” to save athletics. That fight will run up against a university plan to reallocate student fees for what CSU calls “instructionally related activities” and broader upcoming budget cuts from the state. Ziemer says he thinks the program has a good case to appeal the ruling. But if the fight can’t be won in the courts, they’re turning to local legislators, forming a proposal for state lawmakers to bring to university and CSU leadership. The proposal, Ziemer says, includes raising $1 million per year for three years for the athletic department. Logistics for the fall of 2025 season are already in full swing, so the plan would look to revive athletics the following year. That would likely require Ziemer and other coaches to recruit and rebuild all-new teams, since most current athletes will have transferred out.

“I would love to stay and play for my coach, and I love this program so much,” says Taylor Hodges, a sophomore on the women’s soccer team. “But I just can’t stand to … play for a school that doesn’t respect me as a player or a person.”

Some faculty members have sought to restore programs and cut management. Wandling, the English chair, wrote an opinion essay in the local newspaper in February calling for a complete administrative overhaul. He and other faculty members argued that vice president positions should be eliminated and faculty leaders should be elected. The Academic Senate voted no confidence in Cutrer and the university’s provost, Karen Moranski, as well as in García, the chancellor, and then passed a resolution to nominate a faculty member for university president, Wandling says.

Otherwise, he and others are left to reckon with what the campus stands to lose. With an enrollment problem, a budget gap, and a contentious plan to close it, some say the university is barreling down a path that looks quite different from where it came.

“It feels,” says Don Romesburg, who chairs the department of women’s and gender studies, “like the heart of the university has just literally been torn out.”

John P. Sullins III, a professor of philosophy, once felt integral to the university but now feels betrayed. He was helping to develop ethics training for a new data-science major and was recently named Sonoma State’s nominee for a CSU outstanding scholarship award. Then, he was effectively fired, along with the rest of the philosophy department.

“I don’t understand any of this,” he says.

Ziemer is similarly disillusioned.

“I’ve been nothing but a positive ambassador to this university,” he says. It pains him that this may be the end of his family’s long relationship with Sonoma State, dating almost as far back as the college’s founding in 1960. He’s considering moving to Germany, where his daughter plays professional soccer.

But he’s not ready to let go just yet. First, he’s doing everything he can to fight the cuts. He’s not sure what will be left if he doesn’t.