Latest news with #SonomaStateUniversity
Yahoo
14-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
This ex-Silicon Valley engineer served as AOC's chief-of-staff. Now, he's challenging Nancy Pelosi
The Brief Saikat Chakrabarti launched his campaign to challenge Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. The former chief-of-staff for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is frustrated with how Democrats have responded to the 2024 election. He says Democrats need to have a "transformative economic agenda." OAKLAND, Calif. - Saikat Chakrabarti is trying to accomplish something no one's been able to do for nearly four decades. "The biggest challenge in this campaign for me, is trying to get out that I'm running first of all, and that I'm running on a real message," said Chakrabarti. "I'm not just running to try and be the next person in there for another 40 years." The backstory Chakrabarti isn't just running to represent San Francisco in the House, he's running against one of the biggest names in American political history: Nancy Pelosi. He said he's been driven by his disappointment with how the Democratic Party handled its loss to President Trump in November. "She gave an interview, where he asked her point-blank, 'what did Democrats do wrong,' and her answer was basically nothing, Democrats don't need to change," said Chakrabarti. "I really disagree with that." Before turning to politics, Chakrabarti found success as a Silicon Valley engineer. He launched his campaign in February, 21 months before the 2026 midterms, understanding the tall task ahead of him. Pelosi was the first female Speaker of the House, a position she held twice, as part of her ongoing trailblazing career. "There's no comparison to the power that Nancy Pelosi has, and what she brings," said David McCuan, political science professor at Sonoma State University. What's next Pelosi, who will be 86 when her current term ends, has not said whether she'll seek another term or retire. She has filed a statement of candidacy, which allows her to raise money. Her campaign spokesperson declined to comment for this story. Her supporters will tell you she's been on the front lines of challenging President Trump, but Chakrabarti disagrees. "I think people want to see leadership that's fighting the current administration," said Chakrabarti. "This is the reason there are tens of thousands of people coming to these rallies that Bernie and AOC are doing all over the country." Chakrabarti is well-acquainted with the progressive power players. He worked on Senator Bernie Sanders' 2016 campaign and helped recruit and guide Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to victory in 2018. He went on to serve as her chief-of-staff. He talks about issues like universal healthcare, universal childcare and ending corruption in politics. But, he says the top priority for Democrats should be a focus on a rapid change of the economy. "The Democrats actually need to have a transformative economic agenda that shows people a route to improving their lives," said Chakrabarti. Chakrabarti is working on getting that message out to as many voters as he can, because he knows, like many others do, this is a tall mountain to climb. "She will outraise him," said McCuan. "She will out-endorse him, she'll probably even outwork him in some ways, because that's Nancy Pelosi."
Yahoo
11-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Court ruled Sonoma State can axe athletics program
(KRON) – A Sonoma County Superior Court ruled that Sonoma State University (SSU) can proceed with its budget-reduction plan despite some students' wishes, according to the university. SSU's budget is designed to address a projected $23.9-million deficit in this school year by discontinuing several academic programs and ending its NCAA Division II athletics program. A motion for a preliminary injunction and two writs of mandate were filed on behalf of seven SSU students to prevent the university from moving forward with the budget plans. The dismissal of the preliminary injunction was predicated on the court's belief that the university did not make a random decision without evidence. Freed Palestinian student accuses Columbia University of inciting violence '… This Court cannot conclude that the decision to eliminate the athletics program amounted to an abuse of discretion,' the ruling reads. 'Accordingly, the portion of the petition for writ of mandate challenging defendants' decision to terminate the intercollegiate athletics program is denied.' A temporary restraining order that instructed SSU to pause the academic discontinuation process last month was lifted due to the ruling, according to the university. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
San Francisco Chronicle
10-05-2025
- Business
- San Francisco Chronicle
Sonoma State can proceed with cutting athletics and academic programs, court rules
Sonoma State University can proceed with eliminating six academic departments and ending its Division II athletics program to address a projected $24 million dollar deficit, a court has ruled. The ruling, Sonoma State University said, denied the motion for a preliminary injunction and two writs of mandate filed by seven university students. The lawsuit alleged that the school exaggerated its budget deficit, failed to consult with the Academic Senate and other interested parties as required by law, and continued to recruit athletes and other students without telling them that their programs would be canceled. The school had previously been halted by a temporary restraining order from enacting the budget on April 15 until Friday evening's ruling by the Sonoma County Superior Court. The university said in a news release that the court ruled Sonoma State was within its discretion and that its plan 'was not made arbitrarily, capriciously, or without evidentiary support.' The ruling also said the university 'substantially complied' with procedures to discontinue programs. 'This Court cannot conclude that the decision to eliminate the athletics program amounted to an abuse of discretion,' the ruling said. 'The law affords (Sonoma State) great deference in making decisions that impact the school's survival and solvency.' The budget, released in January, included plans to end 13 intercollegiate sports programs — including basketball, soccer and baseball — and fire more than 60 faculty and staff members, including tenured professors. Sonoma State University has seen a declining population, from 9,408 students in 2015 to 5,784 students in 2024, with the worst enrollment loss in the California State University system. The cuts will also end programs awarding students bachelor's degrees in 15 subjects — including physics, environmental sciences and French — or a master's degree in six areas, including English, Spanish or history, the proposed budget shows.
Al Jazeera
24-04-2025
- Business
- Al Jazeera
The great collapse of US higher education has begun
There is no other way to say it. The American university as the United States has known it since the 1960s is at an end. The spate of college closings and consolidations that began 15 years ago is certain to increase over the next few years. Overall college enrolments peaked in 2010, but have fallen consistently since then, as the cost of college, the COVID-19 pandemic and other trends have curtailed students from attending higher education institutions. But with the recent crackdowns against protests on college campuses, the anti-DEI climate and the US government's persecution of foreign students, American universities are truly up against a tsunami. The trickle of institutions closing or on the margins is all but assured to turn into a flood between now and the end of the 2020s. Sonoma State University (aka, California State Sonoma) is among the latest universities facing budget cuts. Despite a Sonoma County court ruling that has temporarily put the university's plans on hold, Sonoma State still faces a budget shortfall of $24m. Even if the order holds beyond May 1, Sonoma State can and likely will work in good-faith negotiations with staff, faculty and students to eliminate upwards of 22 majors, six departments, and more than 100 faculty positions. Specifically, the art history, economics, geology, philosophy, theatre/dance, and women and gender studies departments are on Sonoma State's chopping block, mostly liberal arts and the social sciences. The most expansive retrenchment in the past decade, though, occurred at West Virginia University in 2023. That August, after a six-year campaign to increase enrolment, West Virginia announced that it incurred a $45m budget deficit, and that enrolment had dropped from roughly 29,000 in 2017 to just under 26,000 in 2023. The austerity plan was to cut 32 majors– including all of their foreign language programmes and its maths doctoral programme – and 169 faculty positions. But after weeks of student protests, the number ended up being 28 majors (nearly one-fifth of its undergraduate majors) and 143 faculty (a 13.5 percent reduction) instead. The sudden shift towards austerity has led to a steady stream of faculty and administrators resigning or taking retirement buyouts to leave West Virginia. Again, the undergraduate liberal arts majors and small academic graduate programmes were the main targets for cuts. Stories like what is happening at Sonoma State and has already occurred at West Virginia are part of a larger and terrible trend. As college matriculation for women has incrementally increased over the past 50 years, there has been a more drastic decline in men attending college, especially among white men. Since 1970, men have gone from 58 percent of all undergraduate college enrollees to only about 40 percent as of the early 2020s. Fully 71 percent of the decline in college attendance since 2010 coincides with the decline of men as students in higher education. Perhaps sexism disguised as disinterest in higher education in the wake of a women-dominant student body might be at least part of the explanation for this steep fall in enrolment. But other higher education institutions are worse off: Clarion University of Pennsylvania, California University of Pennsylvania, The College of Saint Rose in New York and Independence University in Utah, for example. These are among the 76 colleges and universities that have either closed their doors or have merged with other higher education institutions in the US, affecting the lives of tens of thousands of students and several thousand faculty members. Nearly all of these institutions have cited budget shortfalls and lower enrolment as reasons for their demise or mergers. Nationally, the number of students attending US colleges and universities fell from a peak of 18.1 million students in 2010 to 15.4 million in 2021, including a drop of 350,000 students after the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. As of this past fall, enrolment had climbed to 15.9 million students, a 4.5 percent increase, but hardly enough to stem the tide of closures, austerity and consolidations. According to the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia's financial stress test model for American higher education institutions, as many as 80 colleges and universities in the US could permanently close their doors by the end of the 2025-26 school year. They based their findings on 'the worst-case scenario predictions com[ing] to pass from the upcoming demographic cliff (or a 15 percent decline in enrolment).' Demographers have also foreseen an imminent drop in the numbers of college enrollees starting this fall, a consequence of the economic distress that began the Great Recession of the late-2000s. Then there is Trump 2.0 and his administration's persecution of foreign college students. The recent crackdowns on academic freedom under former President Joe Biden, with pro-Palestinian college faculty and student protesters, and under mostly Republican governors like Greg Abbott in Texas and Ron DeSantis in Florida over Critical Race Theory and DEI, have escalated under President Donald Trump. The Trump administration's move to revoke the visas of more than 1,700 foreign faculty and students, and kidnap and deport many others, mostly over pro-Palestine activism and other political stances deemed against the interests of the administration, threatens the one area of sustainable growth in higher education. Neither Alireza Doroudi, Rumeysa Ozturk and Mahmoud Khalil, nor any of the hundreds of other victims of this injustice, have committed any crimes under US laws. Unless going to a funeral or writing an op-ed or exercising the First Amendment right to protest is criminal behaviour. In 2023-24, more than 1.1 million international students attended US colleges and universities at the undergraduate, graduate and professional levels. But with the Trump administration threatening, arresting and deporting foreign students and scholars in their dozens, it is all but certain that international student enrolment from the Middle East and South Asia will drop in the coming year. There will also likely be a drop in students from China as a consequence of the ongoing tariff fight between the two nations. One-quarter of all foreign students in the US are from China. After decades of universities hiring armies of part-time professors instead of full-time, tenure-stream instructors and researchers, and college presidents running their campuses like for-profit businesses, the implosion of US higher education has been almost inevitable. Despite Harvard recently providing the Trump administration opposition to their repression of colleges and universities, top-down hierarchies and disempowered workforces have rendered higher education's responses to conservative and far-right movements in the US utterly impotent. Add to this the conservative assumptions of liberal arts fields as 'immoral,' 'indoctrination,' and 'libtards' instead of what they really mean: an expansion of one's knowledge of people and the world. There has also been a decades-long overemphasis on STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics). The possibility of Trump's Project 2025 gurus privatising the federal student loan programme would pretty much be the straw that broke US higher education's back at this point. Liberal arts departments especially will continue to consolidate, or university administrators will continue to find reasons to jettison them as a cost-saving measure. Ever larger numbers of senior faculty will take severance pay, early retirement, or will end up sacked. Non-tenured faculty and junior staff will simply be unemployed and, in many cases, unemployable in a shrinking US higher education landscape. Most of all, those students who find themselves at any institutions outside of the top 136 elite universities or the top 50 flagship public colleges and universities may no longer be able to afford college, with tens of thousands unable to complete their degrees. American higher education is not just staring into the abyss – it has already fallen into it. The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial stance.
CBS News
15-04-2025
- Sport
- CBS News
Judge issues restraining order against Sonoma State cuts
A Sonoma County judge has issued a temporary restraining order against Sonoma State University over recent cuts aimed at addressing a budget shortfall. The order gives the university until May 1 to show cause for their planned cuts to academic programs . In the meantime, the university can not take any action on the cuts until the preliminary hearing. The order did not address the planned closure of the athletic programs. Back in January, Sonoma State administrators announced that the school was facing a $23.9 million deficit in the 2025-26 fiscal year. To make up for shortfall they said they would stop funding all athletic programs, implement layoffs, and eliminate academic departments and majors. Tuesday's ruling is part of a lawsuit brought by seven student athletes against the school. The athletes claim school officials knew they would have to make cuts but recruited athletes anyway. In their complaint the athletes say the university defrauded them by "pulling the rug out from under them." CBS News Bay Area has reached out to the school for comment on Tuesday's ruling and haven't received a response. Earlier this month the school released what they are calling "A Bridge to the Future," . In it the school claims they have lost 38% of student enrollment since 2015, which has led to a "significant loss" of revenue. The document presents six goals with the following metrics: Sonoma State has until April 21 to file opposition to the temporary restraining order.
