SSU’s Elimination of WGS:

Despite all of these accomplishments and Women's and Gender Studies’ central role in upholding the university’s stated mission through feminist, anti-racist, and queer/trans-centered teaching and research, the campus administration eliminated the WGS and Queer Studies Department and all its tenured faculty lines during the 2025 campus budget cuts.

What followed was a collective movement that WGS people were poised to lead: Over a year of sustained student, alumni, and community protest reached the CSU Chancellor, the Trustees, the California Legislature, and local and national media. The alumni-led organizing group, Save WGS, mobilized supporters to write over 150 detailed letters of protest which were then circulated to campus and CSU leadership, legislators, and the media. WGS Faculty, students, alumni, community members, and allies showed up, spoke in public forums, and engaged the press. We testified before the California Legislature, wrote countless emails, demanded meetings with decision makers, and made our voices heard in the media and in our communities. Together we strategized, focused our efforts, and built coalitions. This overwhelming outcry was a major force in prompting the Legislature to take the unprecedented step of holding three public hearings at SSU on the budget cuts. In response to the strength and unanimity of opposition, the Legislature and governor provided SSU $45 million, and the CSU system allocated an additional $45 million. This brought SSU an unprecedented $90 million distribution in 2025.

Even after this once-in-the-life-of-a-university funding, and every conceivable effort by supporters to resist the permanent destruction of WGS and Queer Studies, each level of SSU administration has lacked the political will, insight, and courage to support the department. It has failed to retain or rehire any of its four award-winning tenured faculty members. The last straw was when the University Budget Allocation Committee (UBAC), charged with advising the campus president on matters of university-wide importance, only allocated $75,000 in one-time funding for the future of WGS at SSU. Out of the $90 million given to SSU to revitalize, zero was allocated toward queer studies. Budgets are values statements. We all know exactly what the campus and statewide CSU administration were saying. In their refusal to fund WGS, they ignored the overwhelming support from every possible constituency (SSU faculty, WGS alumni, current WGS and SSU students, parents, and local state legislators).

As feminist scholars, we know how to contextualize these administrative decisions within this wider historical moment when LGBTQ people, healthcare, civil rights, and education are under attack from the highest levels of the federal government. Our elimination has happened while immigrant families are being torn apart by militarized forces on our streets; when women are being denied basic rights to bodily autonomy; when trans and queer people are being targeted by policies and legal decisions aimed at their erasure from public life and even life itself; when colleges, universities, and K-12 schools around the country and the world are being forced to censor, erase, and eliminate Gender Studies, LGBTQ studies, and related scholarship and knowledge. Sonoma State will always carry the awful legacy of being one of the institutions that, in this era, made the short-sighted and cruel decision to eliminate the department and faculty most able to intervene. In this time when we desperately need feminist critiques of patriarchy, misogyny, and racialized sexism and to study social movements that resist racism, anti-immigrant sentiment, censorship, transphobia, fascism, genocide, and war, Sonoma State turned off the lights and turned its back.

After those who initiated the demise of WGS at SSU failed upwards, a new president and provost promised a different outcome. But actions speak louder than words. While the new administration claimed they were “concerned” about students no longer having access to WGS, the only proposal on the table was to construct a “new” WGS minor (as if WGS had not had two highly successful minors–WGS and Queer Studies). This “new” WGS minor would have no permanent funding and no WGS faculty–effectively taking WGS back, structurally, to the 1970s. In addition, the new president publicly floated the idea of SSU students taking WGS courses at other CSUs, as a potential pathway to a WGS minor. The WGS faculty have been unanimous in saying “no” to any Administration schemes to offer SSU students a virtual WGS “minor” without any trained WGS faculty on campus. We see this for what it is: a testing ground for future CSU consolidations that will further erode academic freedom, erase institutional knowledge, diminish community and solidarity, and lead to more feminist, queer, trans, and BIPOC faculty being fired. The scheme exposes what we have always feared, namely that administrations have undervalued and refused to understand the transformative power of what WGS and Queer Studies brought to SSU, Sonoma County, and generations of students. Administrators’ actions show us that they just don’t care enough to use their outsized privilege and power to take a meaningful stand for justice-centered knowledge and praxis. All of us gathered here today, all of the wisdom and action and relationship and community we have built, do not matter to them.

We know better. We know how incalculable the loss is. Today we say goodbye.

Women’s and Gender Studies and Queer Studies, lovingly and painstakingly built over more than five decades, no longer exists at Sonoma State University.