Philosophy Major and Department at Risk in Sonoma State Budget Bloodbath (updated)
The philosophy major at Sonoma State University is among several degree programs slated for elimination at Sonoma State University, and the philosophy department is one of six that will be closed, according to a plan proposed by the university’s aptly named interim president, Emily F. Cutrer.
In her proposal, President Cutrer notes that the university faces a $23.9 million deficit:
The University has had a budget deficit for several years. It is attributable to a variety of factors—cost of personnel, annual price increases for supplies and utilities, inflation—but the main reason is enrollment. Student tuition and fees, combined with enrollment-based funding from The California State University, are the major sources of revenue in the university budget. Sonoma State’s enrollment has dropped 38% since its peak in 2015.
Her plan is based on information from the university’s “Current and New Programs Working Group” and data provided by Gray Decision Intelligence, a consultancy that, among other things, provides AI-generated reports that summarize “metrics on the markets for academic programs.” The plan is to:
- Cut 46 faculty positions
- Not renew several term lecturer appointments
- Eliminate several degree programs, including undergraduate majors in philosophy, physics, economics, art history, geology, French, Women and Gender Studies, and others, and some master’s programs
- Close the Philosophy, Art History, Economics, Geology, Theater/Dance, and Women and Gender Studies departments
- Merge several other departments and consolidate schools
- Eliminate all Division II athletics
The cuts will, she says, “not only to close the deficit, but also to reorient the university’s operations and workforce” so that it fits with the problematic but nonetheless popular vocationalizing trends in higher education:
They will help us… meet the changing needs of future generations of students; align with the CSU’s career-focused mission of producing graduates ready to contribute to California’s economy, culture, and schools.
The Chancellor’s office has approved the plan, but the state budget is not set until summer, so it is possible that funding changes could result in changes to the plan.
Additionally, between now and March 30th, faculty may submit feedback on the plan, though it is not clear what weight, if any, it will be given.
UPDATE: According to one source, the entire Philosophy faculty, as well as those of some other departments, are scheduled to be laid off as of this summer.
UPDATE (4/18/25): A judge has issued a temporary restraining order to stop the cuts to academic programs, reports Inside Higher Ed.
Related: Philosophy Departments Under Threat: Information, Pro-Active Strategies, Defense
Philosophy throughout higher education is under pressure from ignorance and anti-intellectualism due to its abstract nature, on the one hand, and on the other, culture-war political backlash against perceived-left relevance to contemporary social and political issues. Academic C-suites do need to address budget shortfalls but, and in the process, some may find it easier to cave from these pressures instead of asserting and protecting the core values of higher education. Historically, philosophy is a core component of higher education, but it is easy to lose sight of that during budget cuts.
Academic philosophers need to be aware of such trends within their own specific institutions and pre-emptively take protective measures for their departments: make alliances with related departments that are less threatened (e.g., business, computer science, stem fields, public health, medicine, law) by creating new minors and encouraging more “Philosophy of” and “Philosophy and” courses; assert the value of teaching students how to think; develop strategies to attract more majors, including the expansion of online options.
Our greatest teaching contribution is teaching students how to think. But we need to show that we ourselves are willing and able to contribute to wider academic life on our campuses though service, showing up for important events, engaging our administrators in meaningful conversations about academics generally, our institutions, the problems they face, and what we can do to help. If, as departments, we mainly criticize and complain, that will not be received as valuable, practical, contribution. Outside recognition of our individual research and publications brings credit to our institutions and philosophy departments and we need to keep administrators, students, and colleagues in other departments informed about that. All of this goes beyond normal service obligations and rules concerning faculty governance because it involves lived intellectual and social-collegial life on campus.
Of course, many individual philosophers are already interacting in these ways and in the end, such efforts may not save us under conditions of exigency. But like the mitigation of other disasters, good preparation before the fact is the best we can do to avert the academic erasure of philosophy in our own particular contexts.
Naomi Zack
Lehman College, CUNY
The more disturbing part is that this wasn’t a moribund program; it graduated 86 majors in the past 4 years. That’s more than a number of other majors that were kept.
What made it a target? Probably that there were 5 tenured professors. In the future, look for them to go after departments with expensive tenured profs.
Missed opportunity to change that slogan, deservedly, to “tenebra mentis – tenebra orbis”
Three thoughts in no particular order.
1. According to the quote from Cutrer above, enrollment at Sonoma peaked in 2015 and has decreased by almost 40% since then. Surely there were people at Sonoma who noticed this trend. Based on Cutrer’s remarks in the link, it sounds like there were at least some measures made to stave off faculty contraction over the last few years. How much power does the APA have for public outreach and mediation in situations like this? Might a full-throated defense of the philosophy program at Sonoma 10 years ago, pitched in the context of the CSU system and public education in the state of California, made a difference? Has much attention been given to the prevelance and success-rates of forward-looking proactive interventions in situations like this?
2. In her report and proposal Cutrer writes:
She then reports that 46 TT and adjunct faculty will be let go, additional lecturers will be denied work in the fall of this year, while 4 managers and 12 staff will be let go. So something close to 3 times as many faculty jobs are being cut over administrators and staff, and over 10 times as many more than administrators alone. I wonder what the ratio of administrators to faculty at Sonoma looks like in 5-year increments from 1960 (the year it was created by the California legislature) to 2024, tracked both in number of employees and in salary ratios, and where TT and non-TT faculty are distinguished.
3 In the proposal, the program mergers and schools identified for consolidation seem reasonable, at least at first glance (do there need to be three different programs in ethnic studies, or two different liberal studies degrees? how many people are taking these degrees?). But I wonder on what basis departments were selected for closure, particularly if M.E. is right and philosophy was graduating more majors than some programs that weren’t cut. Can the APA or the AAUP step in if the decision to close the department was owed to the number of high-salaried faculty there, as opposed to a relative deficit with the department’s function in the academic community? Is this a point where pushback could be mobilized, or collective action better implemented?
This is devastating for Sonoma and the CSU. In the meantime, the CSU Chancellor’s Office is spending over $70 million this year hiring Deloitte to find out what makes students succeed. The amount spent on just this consultancy alone could have floated Sonoma’s deficit for three years while other mitigating factors were put in place. This comes only a couple of years after the Chancellor spent many millions hiring the consultants Cozen O’Connor to find out what’s going on with sexual harassment. On top of the legal consultants, they have spent millions and millions on a raft of other para-academic consultants (“futures thinking,” an endless stream of diversity consultants, many PR firms to write 2030 strategic plans, and so many leadership trainings). These consultancy contracts and the interminable hiring of new administrators are all ongoing this year — while they’re cutting programs and firing faculty. The Chancellor has no academic background — having gone straight from the for-profit sector to university “leadership.” She doesn’t appear to think that academic programs have any value at a university. The Board of Trustees will only fire her if she becomes a major legal liability like her predecessor.
The Chancellor used to be the President of CSU Fullerton. She has academic experience but no people skills. She did not have a good reputation at Fullerton while there, and frankly, I question the CSU Board of Trustees’ wisdom in hiring Garcia. I can’t believe this was the best of the best in a national search. She is the 3rd chancellor from the CSU in the last 4 years. First, there was Joseph Castro from Fresno, second was Interim Koester (past president of CSU Northridge) after Castro resigned due to scandal, and now Garcia.
Dear Colleagues, I am attaching a link to a petition to save the Philosophy department at Sonoma State University. Please could you read it and sign it and circulate it far and wide. We (SSU Philosophy) are reeling from the news and are fighting the closure using multiple fronts. Your help with the petition will help create the impact we need. If we go down, then we will go down fighting. If you want to private email me about the situation please feel free to do so at [email protected]
Thank you.
https://chng.it/DCvB75cRkN
This is a good conversation and the fight here is for more than just one philosophy department but instead it is a fight for tenure rights across the CSU. As this discussion shows, there are no metrics to show that the Sonoma State philosophy department was a poor performer. We were doing just fine. To Professor Zack’s comments, we indeed did create perhaps one of the most unique and applied programs in philosophy. Our students choose among four different concentrations: 1) Pre-Law and Applied Ethics; 2) The Good Life; 3) Science, Technology and Ethics; and 4) Social Justice. I head the science, technology and ethics program where I have built twenty years of connections to the computer science department, Electrical Engineering, physics, biology, chemistry, mathematics, etc. I teach science and technology students professional ethics, logic, and I even run a robotics class where we explore AI and robot ethics and topics in minds and machines all while building and programming simple robots in our universities makers space. So we have done the hard work of aligning philosophy to more pragmatic concerns and it has not moved the dial. This leaves us with only one conclusion, this was only based on removing 5 tenure positions. Expensive, is another proposition. We each make the university three times what we cost give the numbers of students we serve and in my case I have a project working on AI ethics with the department of defense that pays 3/4 of my salary and 1/4 of the salary of two co PIs! I really do suggest that the APA look into this. We are a successful department so this is simply targeting of tenured professors.