1 year after sex harassment scandal, Sonoma State University still faces big problems

Spring had most definitely sprung at Sonoma State University.

With temperatures in the low 70s on a recent afternoon, students opted for short pants, short sleeves, no sleeves. Under bluebird skies, a smiling woman roller-skated on the sidewalks between Darwin and Stevenson halls. A couple walked past with ice cream cones.

Taking in the view from his Salazar Hall office, interim university president Ming Tung “Mike” Lee spoke of spring as a season of “renewal.” Meanwhile, the 61-year-old is working overtime on a different kind of renewal at Sonoma State, where he’s been on the job just eight months.

A year ago this week, The Press Democrat broke the news that the California State University System had paid $600,000 to then-Sonoma State University provost Lisa Vollendorf.

That payment, in January 2022, was made to resolve a dispute related to complaints by at least two female Sonoma State employees against Patrick McCallum, husband of then-SSU President Judy Sakaki. The couple have since separated.

Vollendorf accused Sakaki of retaliating against her for reporting those complaints to the CSU Chancellor’s Office, an accusation that McCallum and Sakaki continue to dispute.

“I want to say this as strong as I can,” stated McCallum, who returned a reporter’s call Wednesday from a boat on the Nile River in Egypt: “[Sakaki] never retaliated against anyone, and I never sexually harassed anyone.”

Eight tumultuous weeks after that payment was reported, and after losing a no-confidence vote of the faculty, Sakaki announced that she would step down. Her six-year presidency ended July 31.

Twin crises

Sakaki’s resignation capped a saga that had become a massive distraction to a university already beset with two major interlocking problems that are now Lee’s to deal with.

Enrollment at the Rohnert Park campus plummeted from 9,323 in 2016 to 6,271 in the fall of 2022, according to university data. That 33% drop — driven largely by wildfires and the COVID-19 pandemic — is joined at the hip with SSU’s other primary dilemma. Lee walked onto a campus with a $16 million “structural deficit” — a budget shortfall that had to be immediately addressed.

He counts it as one of his foremost accomplishments that, despite those looming storm clouds, the university has been able to insulate students from the drama, “to maintain a very calm, stable learning environment.”

While there was “a tension” on campus during the fall semester, said Olivia Keeler, a junior, “now no one mentions the scandal anymore. People have moved on. It’s no longer something that looms over everybody.”

Despite the “budget and enrollment crisis,” said Steve Estes, a history professor who was chair of the department when the scandal broke, “I do feel morale is better.”

Keeler, who has written about enrollment for the student newspaper, the Sonoma State Star, credits Lee with implementing an aggressive, promising campaign to jolt enrollment after the pandemic.

“He’s doing a great job at making the campus feel full and lively,” she said.

Sharing that positive impression of Lee, apparently, is CSU Interim Chancellor Jolene Koester, who talked him out of retirement.

His story, she knew well, is a powerful testament to the benefits of public education. Like many of the students he meets on campus, Lee was the first person in his family to attend college — and to earn a master’s degree and then a doctorate.

His father fled mainland China to Taiwan in 1949, to escape Mao Zedong’s communist rule, then married a native Taiwanese woman. Lee grew up speaking Mandarin Chinese with his father and Taiwanese with his mother.

His father had three years of schooling, total. His mother was illiterate. But their son loved books, so they sacrificed to buy them for him. On his first day at Tunghai University, Lee went to the library.

“To this day, as I sit here talking to you,” he told a reporter last year, “I still remember the smell of all those books. Never in my life had I seen so many books in one place, that I could touch, and pull off the shelf. It was a wonderful feeling.”

While his original appointment was to run through the 2022-23 school year, his presidency is now likely to be extended another year.

The search for his successor, said SSU spokesman Robert Eyler, “will commence sometime before the end of 2023” and conclude by June 30, 2024.

That’s a good thing, said David McCuan, who is chair of the university’s political science department and was a vocal critic of Sakaki. After all, he said, “It took [Lee] six months to get the lay of the land.”

To execute change, the president needs all the time he can get, McCuan said. “Universities often lack the agility to do things we need right now. I mean the condition of rocks changes faster than decisions are made in the halls of academia.”

Now, as Lee settles into his second six months, “he’s going to have to make some hard decisions” around those looming budget cuts, McCuan said.

A program inviting faculty and staff to depart voluntarily closed $5 million of that gap. Other measures, including laying off some staff and putting certain underused buildings in mothballs, saved another $3-plus million.

But the pain is coming.

The university has been hosting town hall meetings, where potential cost-savings — administrators favor words like “efficiencies” and “reorganization” — are discussed.

Those meetings share the goals, and cover much of the same ground, as a team of faculty and administrators that met last spring — the notoriously secretive Academic Affairs Budget Advisory Working Group, or AABAWG, an acronym one professor dubbed “Balrog” — after the monster who pulls Gandalf into the abyss in “The Lord of The Rings.”

The difference, says Stefan Kiesbye, a novelist who now chairs the university’s department of Art and Art History, is that while the advisory group “worked in secret, didn’t report to anyone, didn’t consult with anyone,” Lee has insisted on far greater transparency.

“We’re doing much the same thing, but with much more consultation,” he said. “It’s been a much better process.”

Sakaki pushes back

A year later, Sakaki still pushes back against her critics.

“I did experience a difficult personnel situation which unfortunately impacted my presidency,” she wrote in a recent email to The Press Democrat. “However, I believe that one incident should not negate all that was accomplished during my tenure.”

Sakaki did rack up some wins, especially early in her presidency. She succeeded in disentangling the university’s finances from those of the resource-gobbling, $145 million Green Music Center.

She presided over marked upgrades to the quality of student life and overhauled her predecessor’s recruitment philosophy, resulting in a more diverse student body.

And she 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.

Sakaki pointed out she was recognized last September by the CSU Board of Trustees and Chancellor as President Emeritus, “an honor conferred to show respect for a distinguished career.”

Emeritus status “is not automatic,” she said, “and is a lifelong designation that recognizes the achievements of those with meritorious records.”

Sakaki said she is staying busy, serving on a host of education-related commissions and boards, and recently was interviewed for an upcoming book titled, “Women in the Higher Education C-Suite: Diverse Executive Profiles."

“And finally,” she concluded, “I now have more time to spend with my three wonderful grandchildren. They bring me incredible joy!”

In a resignation agreement reached with CSU, Sakaki was to be paid $254,438 in a yearlong administrative role. At the end of that year, according to the agreement, she would transition to a faculty job.

Sakaki didn’t respond to questions about where and what that job might be.

Nor did she reply to an email asking about the status of her relationship with McCallum. The two separated April 18, 2022, after he sent a late-night, 1,200-word email to “family and friends” alleging that Vollendorf reported the harassment allegations against him to cover for her own poor job performance.

McCallum also declined to provide an update.

“I talked to Judy about it,” he said Wednesday. “We’re just not gonna go there on this” topic.

For decades, McCallum was a prominent higher education lobbyist in Sacramento. He sold his two companies “a couple years ago,” he said, but stayed busy “consulting and doing other things.”

Following last year’s scandal, “a brutal time,” he recalled, McCallum decided to take a year off to “hang out with family and friends and travel.”

Regardless of the status of their marriage, he remains Sakaki’s staunchest advocate:

“It was remarkable, what she did in her time,” McCallum said. Yes, she upset some powerful people — but only in the course of “doing right for the students.”

For all the criticism she took from some faculty and students, “they’re all better off for the job Judy did.”

Relentless outreach

Until it burned in the Tubbs Fire, Sakaki and McCallum lived in their upscale Fountaingrove home, where they often entertained, and where artwork owned by the university hung on the walls. By contrast, Lee and his wife, Fei, live on campus, in a modest, two-bedroom apartment he calls “my dorm room.”

Living on campus has made it much easier to meet students, Lee said.

“I walk the campus all the time. It’s very nice because it allows me to really learn and know the students very well. They come up alongside me, say hi, invite me to all kinds of events” — including the recent Alpha Gamma Delta Lip Jam, where he served as a judge.

One criticism of Sakaki came from faculty, who questioned her commitment to their side of the house — Academic Affairs.

It’s not a coincidence that Lee’s relentless, indefatigable outreach has extended to professors. He’s been to every faculty senate meeting and joined them at their recent retreat.

During the fall semester he visited “every single unit and office of this university,” to shake hands and talk to professors — “to know more about what they do, what’s important to them, what projects they’re doing.”

This topic draws him back to his office window. “In that building,” he said, pointing to Darwin Hall, just west, “our professors in the science area are conducting outstanding research right now.

“We have professors looking into the structure of the chromosome and researching how that impacts the characteristics of the DNA,” he said, awestruck by the very notion.

Better still, that research is happening as students stand close by and assist.

That’s something he hadn’t seen “on a big campus, like Sac State,” he said. “This is very unique to Sonoma State.”

Small class sizes aren’t always a good thing, however — such as when they’re the result of declining enrollment — an existential threat that has the full attention of Lee and his team.

Resuscitating enrollment

Sonoma State is now signing agreements with area school districts. If high school students meet certain academic requirements, they are guaranteed admission to the university.

“We’re doing something similar with all the community colleges in the area,” Lee said.

Since taking this job, he’s been to Southern California, along with other SSU administrators, to sit down with the presidents of the nine colleges in the Los Angeles Community College District, to promote Sonoma State.

Lee and members of his team also meet regularly with city officials from Rohnert Park, and Cotati. For all its natural beauty, Sonoma State can sometimes feel isolated — apart from the cities. Among his goals is to rediscover, or develop, a “college town concept” that is missing today.

In a further quest to find school spirit, to put more people in what Lee calls “a Sonoma State of Mind,” he is moving the university’s athletic department from under the umbrella of the “administration and finance area” over to Student Affairs.

The move isn’t being made for budget reasons.

“We want athletics to be a more integral part of student life, campus life,” he said. “We want more of our students to be excited about going to ballgames, going to events.”

Lee can often be seen at those events, in bleachers at baseball and softball games. Eight months into his presidency, he still pulls out his phone to snap pictures during his peregrinations around campus.

One of those photos featured a crab apple tree, “blooming heartily in the aftermath of so much rain,” Lee wrote in his March “Update” to the campus. Those blooms served as a reminder “that spring is on its way, with its promise of renewal and reward.”

Staff Writer Andrew Graham contributed to this story.

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