Mixed legacy: Sakaki’s SSU presidency marked by wildfire, pandemic, scandal

One of the ways Judy Sakaki shook things up back in 2016, after being named the seventh president of Sonoma State University, was to move graduation ceremonies indoors, to Weill Hall in the posh Green Music Center.

On May 19, the embattled 69-year old announced that she would not be attending this year’s commencement.

Those bookend vignettes chart the trajectory of a star-crossed presidency that will soon come to a close. Sakaki on Monday announced her imminent resignation, following two months of tumult triggered by reports of sexual harassment against her husband, Patrick McCallum, and her alleged retaliation against Lisa Vollendorf, the former provost who’d filed those complaints.

Appointed in January of 2016, her reign began with immense promise and a historic glow. The daughter of parents who spent World War II in a remote Utah internment camp, Sakaki was the first Japanese American woman in the nation to become president of a four-year college or university.

It ends 6 1/2 years later under a cloud of scandal as the university struggles with sagging morale, a critical budget shortfall, rapidly declining enrollment and an identity crisis.

“I love Sonoma State, it’s a really cool school with a lot of great programs,” said Stefan Kiesbye, a novelist who chairs the English department. “But we’re not in a strong position right now. We have a problem telling students across California exactly who we are.”

Ten days after a divided faculty voted in favor of a resolution expressing no confidence in her leadership, and the North Bay’s two state senators called on her to step down, Sakaki emailed graduating students, letting them know she would steer clear of their commencement ceremonies.

“You deserve an uninterrupted celebration of your achievements,” she wrote, “and a total focus on the potential of your bright futures.”

Part of a pattern

Sakaki’s own future was dimmed by her handling of those harassment claims against her husband. One accuser, Kevin Wenrick, former managing director of the Green Music Center, said he’d warned her about McCallum’s behavior as early as 2016.

Sakaki said through a spokesperson she had no recollection of any such warning. McCallum denies “any allegation that I engaged in any wrongful conduct toward anyone.”

This much is beyond debate: The missteps that led to a $600,000 settlement to Vollendorf are part of a pattern, a wider pathology afflicting the California State University as a whole.

Sakaki isn’t to blame for all the school’s current woes. Her presidency can be viewed as a series of Job-like trials, a string of personal and professional misfortunes, most beyond her control: wildfires, smoke, more wildfires; a pandemic that depressed enrollment at many universities, not just Sonoma State.

She chalked up some victories despite those headwinds. Sakaki succeeded in uncoupling the university’s finances from those of the money-siphoning Green Music Center, at once a world-class performing arts center and money pit that cost $145 million.

Sakaki presided over major upgrades to the quality of student life, and overhauled her predecessor’s recruitment philosophy, resulting in a more diverse student body, racially and economically. She also oversaw significant increases in Sonoma State’s graduation rates: SSU now boasts the highest on-time graduation rates for transfer students in the 23-school California State University system.

None of that was enough to save her job. Even as they sympathize with Sakaki for the tribulations she endured, her critics found fault with her response to them.

Lost leadership

After running barefoot for her life in the 2017 Tubbs fire, which torched her Fountaingrove house, Sakaki was still traumatized when she returned to the job.

“I would be too,” said Laura Watt, a former Sonoma State environmental history professor and faculty chair, “after losing everything and nearly dying.”

Sakaki compiled a mixed record, “some highlights and some weak points,” said Watt, who retired from Sonoma State in June 2021 and now lives in Iceland. Watt expressed concern in an April interview with what appeared to her, at times, to be a “rush to judgment” to punish a woman of color, “blaming her and taking her career down for some stupid things her husband may or may not have done.”

Having provided that context, Watt went on: “I do think that there’s been a continuing sense of [Sakaki] being missing in action,” in recent years, of “not having a presence.”

“She kind of lost that leadership presence, and never got it back,” agreed another faculty member, who asked that their name not be used, for fear of retaliation.

Under COVID-19, observed David McCuan, chair of the political science department, “everything has changed” for students: “their relationship to work, to their friends, their educational institute.

“And we have not been able to keep up with that. We have lost our way, and that’s a reflection on leadership.”

In like a lion

Sakaki succeeded Ruben Armiñana, who had “an incredibly abrasive, combative relationship with faculty,” recalled Watt, and whose most lasting legacy was the $145 million Green Music Center.

Among Sakaki’s most herculean feats was one of her earliest: She made sure that the university’s finances were disentangled from those of the center. That venue had been losing money and was covering expenses by drawing from the university’s general fund, including state appropriations and tuition, according to John Welty, a former Fresno State University president brought in by Sakaki to review the music center’s finances.

While Armiñana was busy building his “monument to the self,” recalled kinesiology professor Ellen Carlton, “the rest of the campus was starved. And so we were glad to be rid of him and very optimistic about a new regime.”

Sakaki was welcomed warmly, upon her arrival, by a faculty eager for meaningful collaboration with its top administrator. “We all felt like we were coming out of a cave, it really had been that bad,” recalled Carlton. “Everybody was so demoralized. Judy came in saying she was going to be very collaborative, and wanting to hear from us. We really felt listened to.”

Like a young Mike Tyson, Sakaki came out swinging. “She showed a lot of leadership that first year,” recalled Watt.

Armiñana had laid plans for a $10 million outdoor concert pavilion for the music center. Sakaki pulled the plug on that project, and wasted no time announcing the retirement of the center’s co-executive director, Larry Schlereth, a vice president of administration and finance who’d long been viewed as Arminana’s right-hand man.

She brought in a dream team of interim cabinet members with national reputations, to help her transition, and vowed to hire more full-time faculty. Graduation ceremonies would be moved to Weill Hall, she decided, with commencement ceremonies split up by departments.

Sakaki made major moves to beef up the student affairs division. Under her leadership, the school added therapists and career counselors, and opened the DREAM Center, which offers resources to undocumented students.

The student affairs division had become “kind of a mess” under the previous president, said Watt, so Sakaki’s push to overhaul and make it more welcoming to students, was “really important.”

It was also in her comfort zone. While a majority of college presidents have a background in academic affairs, Sakaki had spent her career in the area of student affairs.

If you build it, they won’t come

That gave some professors pause. For all her talk of shifting the university’s focus from facilities to students and faculty, they weren’t sold on Sakaki’s commitment to “the other side of the house,” as McCuan describes the school’s Academic Affairs division.

One constant, from the last six years of Armiñana’s reign through the first six year’s of Sakaki’s, said McCuan, was “a lack of funding for the primary mission of the university: education.”

That is a consequence, he believes, of “a series of expenses around treating students better, developing their needs,” and investing in “more buildings,” including “the apartments in Petaluma where nobody lives.”

Hoping to attract faculty, Sonoma State in 2018 spent $40 million on a 90-unit apartment complex in Petaluma to house university employees.

From the time Marina Crossing Apartments opened, it took nearly two years before half of its units were rented. Even then, fewer than half the occupied units housed SSU faculty or staff.

Occupancy rates at the complex have improved since October 2020, when the university decided to open units to the general public.

Sakaki and McCallum hosted weekly dinners in their home for students, faculty and staff. While that was difficult for “a reserved, Japanese American woman,” said McCallum, it reflected her desire to “make genuine, human connections,” to let her new community know that “she cared.”

Many of Sakaki’s critics, McCallum contended in a recent interview, are “old, white” faculty carrying, he believes, an “implicit bias” toward a “soft-spoken Asian woman” whom, he adds, is “brilliant” and “sophisticated.”

Married in 2016, the couple separated on April 18, after McCallum released a rambling email to “friends and family” in which he claimed that Vollendorf, the former provost, exposed sexual harassment allegations against him, which were never substantiated, to cover for her own poor job performance.

Power vacuum

The halcyon, honeymoon phase of Sakaki’s presidency ended abruptly, and tragically, on Oct. 9, 2017, as the Tubbs fire swept over the Mayacamas Mountains. Awakened at 4 a.m. when a smoke alarm sounded in their home, Sakaki and McCallum were forced to flee — she in a robe, him in his boxers — flying embers singeing their skin.

Running barefoot for their lives, they “almost died five times” before they were rescued, he recalled in 2019.

In the following months, “everyone pretty much said, ‘Yeah, she gets a pass,’” recalled Watt.

With Sakaki in trauma and working to rebuild her life, a power vacuum opened in the administration. Into the breach stepped Vollendorf, who’d been hired the previous March as the university’s new provost.

“She suddenly, in a way, had to run the university,” recalled Watt, “almost as if she was president. I think she kind of liked that approach.”

After Sakaki returned and became more engaged in day-to-day business of the college, “there was then this tension,” said Watt, who became faculty chair around this time, a role entailing frequent interactions with both women.

“They had very different management styles, and it was almost a tug of war as to who was going to run the university.”

One downside of Sakaki’s collaborative, team-oriented approach, said Watt, is that “she doesn’t really have a backup plan if someone isn’t a team player.”

Once there was tension with Vollendorf, Sakaki’s responses were “kind of minimal, incremental.” She would appeal to people’s “team spirit,” said Watt. “But that doesn’t work in all circumstances.”

According to McCallum, Sakaki would go on to say that hiring Vollendorf was a huge mistake. “She knew it after two months.”

Vollendorf has repeatedly declined to discuss the settlement or her role at the university, and she did not immediately respond to a request for comment for this story. Next month she will take over as president of Empire State College in New York.

Radical change in recruitment

Under Sakaki, Sonoma State became the 21st of the CSU’s 23 campuses to be designated a Hispanic-Serving Institution, qualifying the school for millions of dollars in federal funds.

She also undertook what McCallum described as a “radical redirection” of the school’s recruitment philosophy, away from “white, wealthy kids from Orange County.”

Under Armiñana, Sonoma State was intensively recruiting Southern California. Watt recalled the campus vibe, during his presidency, as “a country club in disguise.”

“A resort that offered classes,” was Carlton’s description.

At Sakaki’s direction, the university has focused more on serving what the admissions office calls “our local six-county service region,” and building transfer pathways from regional community colleges. The university increased support for transfer students by creating a Transfer Center, “and is proud of having the distinction of having the best on-time graduation rates for transfer students in the CSU,” provost Karen Moranski shared in a recent email.

Moranski credited Sakaki for her tireless efforts “to build strategic partnerships with community colleges throughout California,” adding that Sonoma State boasts “the best on-time graduation rates for transfer students in the CSU.”

None of those steps, to date, have reversed the downward trajectory of enrollment, which has declined by 23% — from 9,323 to 7,182 — since Sakaki arrived, according to university data.

Wildfires, COVID-19 and California’s demographics factor largely in that trend. During the pandemic, many students made the choice to hunker down, live at home and take classes at the closest campus. That’s resulted in swollen enrollments in Southern California and fewer students applying to CSU schools in the northern part of the state.

There’s another reason that only 7.7% of students who were accepted to Sonoma State for the 2020-21 school year ultimately chose to enroll at the Rohnert Park campus. It gets back to the university’s identity crisis. As Kiesbye the English professor noted, the school hasn’t settled on a distinct brand; doesn’t know exactly what it is.

“I totally agree,” said McCallum, when asked for his take on that topic. “Sorry Judy, but I do.”

He pinned part of the blame for the university’s fuzzy identity on Vollendorf, the ex-provost who co-chaired the task force that came up with “Building Our Future @ SSU — Strategic Plan 2025,” which, in McCallum’s opinion, lacked both strategy and vision.

Sakaki, he said, had been in the process of making Sonoma State “a go-to campus around climate change.” The idea was to put out “a real strategic plan, asking what are the jobs needed around climate change. And then get the resources to recruit the faculty to develop these programs and expand them.”

Cheered by an enthusiastic crowd at Seawolf Plaza on April 5, 2019, Sakaki had signed the President's Climate Leadership Commitment, pledging to achieve, among other goals, carbon neutrality for electricity-powered campus operations by 2045.

Attending the ceremony was Logan Pitts, a field representative for state Sen. Bill Dodd, D-Napa. Pitts presented Sakaki with a Certificate of Recognition from the California Senate, commending her and the university.

That was then. Three years and a month later, following the Sonoma State faculty’s approval of a resolution expressing no confidence in Sakaki’s leadership, Dodd and Mike McGuire, D-Healdsburg, issued a joint statement calling on the president to step down, “to let the healing process begin.”

You can reach Staff Writer Austin Murphy at austin.murphy@pressdemocrat.com or on Twitter @ausmurph88.