Sonoma State Can Move Forward With Cuts for Now, Judge Rules

Updated 10:14 p.m. Saturday

Sonoma State can move forward with its broad academic and athletic cuts temporarily, a superior court judge ruled Friday.

Judge Kenneth English denied a preliminary injunction requested by six students who are suing the school over its decision to cut more than 20 degree programs, six academic departments and all 11 of its NCAA athletics teams. Their attorneys allege that Sonoma State failed to follow the California State University’s protocol for discontinuing academic programs and failed to provide meaningful evidence of the amount of money that discontinuing athletics would save.

Citing the university’s budget crisis, English ruled that maintaining its current athletic program “would interfere with Sonoma State’s academic mission as further budget cuts would need to be made regarding academic programs and student services.”

In a statement on Saturday night, a spokesperson for the university said they appreciated the court’s “thoughtful and detailed order.”

“These decisions are never easy and have a significant impact on our entire community,” Jeff Keating, a Sonoma State spokesperson, said in an email. “As we move forward, we remain committed to supporting our current students through this transition while ensuring that Sonoma State University is positioned to thrive as a dynamic campus, offering a diverse range of relevant majors and programs for our current and future students.”

David Seidel, one of two lawyers representing the students pro bono, said in an email on Friday that he thought the judge “got it wrong.”

“We are assessing next steps in this important litigation to protect the students and student-athletes of Sonoma State from the destructive and unlawful conduct of the CSU,” Seidel said.

The school announced the sweeping cuts in January in the face of a $24 million budget deficit brought on by declines in enrollment and state funding. The decision — revealed in an all-school email — spurred protests, civil rights complaints and the lawsuit against the university.

In March, six student-athletes filed a suit against Sonoma State, Interim President Emily Cutrer and CSU Chancellor Mildred García in Sonoma County Superior Court, alleging that they reached the decision to make the program cuts in violation of the CSU’s policy, which requires that the school engage with its academic senate and educational policies committee and proposes plans for current students to finish their discontinued degrees before making a final decision about program changes.

“They have to show their work,” attorney Ross Middlemiss said after English issued a temporary restraining order in April that forced the school to halt actions to eliminate academic programs. “These policies and regulations are in place to require that, and [the administrators] just blatantly ignored their own rules and went ahead and issued this really broad and harmful decision.”

The university contends that it did follow the school system’s process for discontinuing programs. David Kesselman, the lead attorney representing the university, said in court last Thursday that Sonoma State’s Jan. 22 email from Cutrer announcing the cuts to students and staff was a proposal, not a final decision.

After the email announcement, he said, the school attempted to engage with the committee and senate, and in March, the senate voted to reject the cuts.

“They’ve chosen not to engage. That’s fine, that’s their right,” he said in court at a hearing last week.

With English initially skeptical of the school’s argument that the decision announced in January was a proposal, not a done deal, Kesselman argued that the first concrete execution of the cuts came in April, after the senate’s vote in March.

“Actual enrollment for fall didn’t open until April,” Kesselman said during last week’s hearing. “Senate and [the educational policies committee] weighed in before fall enrollment would start [and] wasn’t limited by the school until fall enrollment opened in April — after the March senate vote.”

In his ruling, English said the argument that the school-wide email was a proposal, not a decision, “is not persuasive nor does it square with the evidence presented.”

“The plain reading of that email indicates that a decision had been made to discontinue academic programs and that steps would be taken to implement that decision,” the ruling states.

Seidel argued that the athletic cuts should be stopped for a different reason — a lack of evidence that it will save the school money.

“When you look at [Sonoma State’s] citation of the $3.7 million that could be saved by cutting athletics, that’s a restatement … not a citation,” he said, referring to the two documents he said Cutrer and her staff have supplied as evidence for the savings. One of the documents is Sonoma State’s public budget.

“It’s an assumption … simply a line item,” Seidel said. “There’s no evidence of how they calculated that.”

He also said the school failed to account for the money that athletics bring into the school through tuition.

“When a student leaves [Sonoma State], which student athletes will … and they don’t have to pay their athletic scholarship … they are also going to lose all of their enrollment money,” Seidel said.

But Kesselman said the students’ attorneys needed to provide proof that the school had no evidence to back up its estimated savings, otherwise, “deference has to be given to the campus.”

“The question is ‘Is there no evidence in the record?’” he said. “A vice president of the campus submitted a declaration explaining how we got here. This isn’t a huge math assignment, he explains how we got here.”

English ultimately agreed, saying in his ruling that the university “acted within their discretion to eliminate the athletics program if they have a reasonable belief that doing so would assist in their attempts to balance the budget,” which, he said, the evidence submitted in court supports.

“Given the certainty that at least $3.7 million in expenses that can be saved by eliminating the athletics program and the uncertainties as to how much ‘revenue’ student-athletes would contribute towards the 2025–2026 Operating Budget if the athletics program continued operating, it cannot be said that [the university’s] decision to terminate the athletics program amounted to an abuse of discretion,” English wrote in his ruling.

In April, Sonoma State’s enrollment for the fall semester opened without the option for students to enroll in classes across most of the programs being cut, and the school has pulled its teams from their respective leagues for next year.

“This decision really truly is destroying the academic and athletic lives of many students … and that’s why we’re here,” Middlemiss said at the hearing last week.

Court records show English has set the next hearing in the case for July 11.

KQED’s Brian Krans contributed to this report.