This story was written in collaboration with Edsource’s Student Journalism Corps.

55 years ago, the Sonoma State Women’s and Gender Studies program was founded. It was the second-oldest women’s studies program in California after San Diego State, with some of its early founding faculty and students among the women who jump-started Women’s History Month nationwide.

Yet as the campus moves to celebrate Women’s History Month in 2026, a shadow hangs over the spirit of the month, as the program enters its last semester at SSU.

The program may receive a minor going forward under the budget allocations established by the University Advising Budgeting Committee (UBAC), and the campus is planning to open a feminist center on the 3rd floor of Stevenson Hall. But the program, as it exists right now, with a major and 2 minors, and faculty with years of experience, ends this May.

How did we get here?

Last January, under Interim President Emily Cutrer, tenured faculty from across 6 different academic programs lost their jobs after their entire programs were cut, with estimates showing this affected upwards of almost 25% of the university’s faculty.

Lena McQuade, one of such professors, recalls when she was teaching a Women’s and Gender Studies class to first-year students, when she noticed almost every student checking their phone. Then one student started to cry. After asking what was going on, a student broke the news to her. Her program and job were gone.

“I had the class go on break, and I had to read the message myself,” McQuade said, “I found out I was fired while in the middle of teaching.”

The Sonoma State Commitment, a bill passed this June by many of the legislators who have taken note of what is happening at Sonoma State, granted the school $50 million to reinstate the cut programs, more than twice the deficit that originally prompted their closure. The original 8% cut to the CSU budget was also reduced to 3% in May. Yet the university went forward with the cuts.

And the cuts don’t just affect faculty, as students from 24 different degrees had a year to complete a “teach out program” before their degree was permanently closed. As of this semester, the number of available degree programs dropped from 59 to just 35, and was followed by a drop in enrollment of nearly 50% of first-year students.

Now, SSU has appointed a new president, their fifth in four years, Michael E. Spagna. With the teach-out programs for the cut majors entering their final semester, his administration has a huge decision to make – with one last chance to try and restore these programs, or to cut them for good.

“I’ve completely lost trust in the administration that they’ll ever look out for me,” Eli Nadler-Block told the Star this summer, a nonbinary student using ny/nym pronouns who was studying queer studies, a minor offered by the department. “My women’s and gender studies classes were a safe space for LGBTQ+ people. Without those classes, there may not be opportunities like that.”

Nadler-Block was also headed to class on Jan 22 when nyr professor, Don Romesburg, suddenly cancelled class for mental health reasons. Not because he was sick – but because the program had vanished.

Nadler-Block said ny was concerned about the timing of these cuts as they correspond to a recent shift in politics with laws and executive orders targeting LGBTQ+ people’s rights. “We can see all the political action right now to erase, ignore, and destroy LGBTQ+ people,” says Nadler-Block.

Nadler-Block described the cut to nyr program as a “combined attack”.

“The [administration] seems to be following the agendas of people in power and caring more about their paycheck than the students that it is their job to support,” said Nadler-Block.

Interim President Emily Cutrer, the one to announce the cuts, told the campus community in a press conference she had no intention of harming minorities with the programs being closed. “For me, what higher education is all about is about providing access and transforming lives for the better. [That] means diverse opportunities, diverse thoughts.”

However, she also confirmed that she had received a “red letter” from the U.S. government, threatening to pull federal funding if diversity, equity, and inclusion programs were not cut. “All of us in higher education are getting this letter,” says Cutrer, “a lot of us are very, very perplexed about how to handle it.”

When asked about why she was cutting these programs, she said “Everybody hates the decisions that we had to make… It’s a simple matter of economics.”

This answer isn’t enough to comfort many students though, including Mallory Field, a senior at SSU studying women’s and gender studies. Field told the Star she has “completely lost faith” in the campus and CSU administration over this decision.

“You cannot eliminate a program like Women’s and Gender Studies in this political climate,” said Field. “You cannot leave your most vulnerable students out in the cold.”

Field is one of many students from the program that mobilized to form the Save WGS movement, which has organized protests and community movements.

“Through this work, I was able to put into practice everything I had learned about activism in my WGS classes,” said Field. “Women’s and Gender Studies gave me a strong foundation to draw from—especially when thinking critically about how to make our voices heard and how to advocate effectively for change.”

The movement was supported by professors, including McQuade, who claims the program’s roots in activism helped them mobilize. “I think in some ways, we were prepared,” said McQuade.” I mean, you’re never prepared for something like this, but we’re activists.”

The program’s slogan, “The major you use every day”, shows that being an activist is an ongoing career you always have to be prepared to use, McQuade said. “We were immediately able to start a campaign and to figure out exactly who to target in the legislature.”

The Save WGS team sent a series of letters from the community to state legislators, and attended forums on campus wearing yellow and pink T-shirts captioned with the words: This is what a feminist looks like; Save WGS.

Senate President Mike McGuire, Representative Mike Thompson, and more legislators took an interest in Sonoma State, some of whom were SSU alumni, including Assembly Member Chris Rogers, who studied political science at Sonoma State. Assembly Member Damon Connolly called the cuts a “failure and mishandling of the university’s budget.”

Assembly Majority Leader Cecilia Aguiar-Curry expressed concern about this particular department. “When our women’s caucus heard that there was not going to be women’s studies, we were appalled,” Aguiar-Curry said at a budget forum held on Feb. 21.

After the first meeting, administrators were forced to procure a “comeback plan”, which included Women’s and Gender Studies as one of several ‘high priority’ programs for reinstatement. However, the administration has still proceeded with the cuts.

Charlene Tung, the professor currently leading the teach-out program for WGS, and the only professor left in the department, added that she was concerned the funding for the UBAC recommendations for the department was too low – with the proposed minor notable receiving only $75,000 – which is less than the salary for one full-time tenure track faculty.

With these numbers, Tung is concerned that the minor will be taught by professors outside the department, and that it will lose some of the expertise it has now. “It would be like if I taught a cross-listed course for Computer Science called ‘Gender, Race, and AI,’” said Tung. “It’d be a great WGS course, but it’s not Computer Science.”

“They can say they heard and responded to the legislators, students, and alumni by saying they ‘created a new WGS minor,’” said Tung. “Of course, this neatly bypasses the reality that SSU long had a WGS major, 2 minors, and, at the time of dissolution, 4 full professors.”

The Save WGS movement also talked to the STAR this spring and has been cynical of the UBAC recommendations proposed, with Save WGS coalition member Megan Izen claiming that the recommendations are not enough, stating, “We are deeply disappointed by the woefully inadequate new UBAC recommendations that do not reflect local community and legislators’ commitment to fully restore WGS.”

“We hope that Dr. Spagna fulfills his promise to work with us,” said Izen, “to create a plan and break the cycle of dictating from the top down what SSU needs.”

Legislators aren’t the only alumni who were brought back to Sonoma State. Lianna Hartmour, an alumni of 2007, returned to campus to join the Save WGS team for a program she studied almost 20 years ago.

Her former professor, Charlene Tung, contacted Hartmour to inform her that the program was cut – and they needed help. Hartmour, a board member and former board president of Verity, a Sonoma County organization that provides resources to prevent sexual assault and counseling for victims, said she couldn’t have gotten where she was without the Women’s and Gender Studies program in her community.

“The department was life-changing,” said Hartmour, “It profoundly affected my personal life, helping me to overcome internalized homophobia and gain more confidence as a woman.” Hartmour and her partner had decided to have their wedding officiated by a former WGS professor, Cindy Stearns, in 2012, a time before gay marriage was legal.

“It also impacted me professionally, including leading me to study gender in graduate school,” said Hartmour. “The program has changed over the past 20 years, but it still prioritizes feminist praxis, queer studies, and social justice.”

Hartmour’s case was a prime example of how the women’s and gender studies program trains students to be successful in more ways than one. “WGS has had a strong internship program since its inception, a career lecture series, and a new professional development special studies class,” says Hartmour. “If the president truly values what is laid out in the comeback plan, she will reinstate WGS.”

“As women’s and LGBTQ+ people’s rights are being assaulted every day, we’re fighting back on a local level to ensure that students and our community can still benefit from the life-changing education provided by the department,” said Hartmour. “It is more than a department to students, it is a home.”

Nick Moore, another member of the Save WGS team, was an alumni of 2015 and one of the first students to graduate with the queer studies minor, which was added to the department in 2010. “Though I was already out by the time I came to SSU, I didn’t have a community of queer people, or an understanding of our history,” Moore said. “By the time I graduated, that had all changed.”

Although Moore no longer lives in Sonoma County, his experience in nonprofit design enabled him to contribute to the cause of saving WGS remotely. He purchased the savewgs.com domain and established a site to advocate for the team. “We built an email listserv, a social media presence, and used the skills we learned in our WGS program to forge a coalition of engaged community members who were ready to take action.”

“The WGS program at SSU changed the course of my life,” says Moore. “I landed a job at the organization I most wanted to work for – and they flagged my WGS major and Queer Studies Minor as contributing factors to choosing me over other candidates.” Moore currently works as the marketing manager for OpenHouse, a nonprofit organization that provides services for LGBTQ+ seniors in San Francisco.

Moore was one of the key figures who made the community letters campaign happen. Yet he was still taken aback by the amount of community support for the program. “The outpouring of support has been overwhelming,” said Moore. “It shows that this program is more than an academic discipline; it’s a community.”

The chair of the department last spring, Don Romesburg, was personally inspired by the student movement, telling the STAR this summer, “I have been so moved by the hard work of our students and alumni, as well as the broader community speaking on our behalf,” Romesburg said.

Romesburg taught a majority of the queer studies classes and was personally responsible for the addition of the queer studies minor. He was appointed to be the chair for the 2024-2025 school year with no idea that the program he added would be cut.

“To be at this moment, when Sonoma State’s administration is dismantling not just women’s and gender studies but also queer studies at Sonoma State,” said Romesburg “it’s incredibly painful.”

Every member of the Women’s and Gender Studies program has won at least one award in the past, with McQuade winning Sonoma State’s ‘Excellence in Teaching’ award in 2016 and Romesburg having an award named after him, the Committee on LGBT History’s Don Romesburg Prize. .

He also managed to publish a book during his last year at SSU. His book, Contested Curriculum; LGBTQ+ History Goes to School shares his experience battling to have queer studies taught in K-12 education, which he used to teach with the education school, working with college students studying to become teachers to be LGBTQ+ friendly in both approach and curriculum.

“We’re one of only two CSUs who have a faculty member working with the schools of education,” said Romesburg. “To lose [this] at the very moment this field is under attack… It is a tragedy.”

The 25-26 academic year has been difficult for students from diverse backgrounds, and Romesburg believes programs like WGS are the only way to combat recent political trends. “This is a time when not just LGBTQ+ people, but all people and all students need to be equipped with the tools of queer and trans studies so that we know how to respond.”

Romesburg is no longer working with SSU this spring. Instead, he taught this fall at Cal Poly, but mentioned the commute has made his position “difficult”. He was later offered to become the Dean of Social Sciences and Fine Arts at Clark College in Vancouver, Washington this spring.

Professor Tung is all that is left of the award-winning faculty. She might lose her job this summer, and she fears that might mark the end of the legacy of a historic program.

“The students have been wonderful,” stated Tung. “It is a privilege to be here for them and to see them through not only their degrees, but to co-create an academic space to examine and discuss the myriad of current challenges facing LGBTQ communities and BIPOC folks.”

“Departments were eliminated and careers ended by the careless metrics. That has never been addressed,” stated Tung. “Having a new President on board, however, is an opportunity–to correct past wrongs and rebuild trust.”