.The War on Art, Sonoma State University Cuts Strike Blow

Anyone in the tri-county area within earshot of an academic has probably heard about the dramatic cuts occurring at the North Bay’s only state college—Sonoma State University.

Due to a colossal budget deficit precipitated by declining enrollment, years-long administrative woes (including a sexual harassment scandal in 2022) and inflation, the beleaguered school is eliminating several academic and athletic programs.

As reported in the campus newspaper, the Sonoma State Star, several “departments identified for closure” include the departments of art history, philosophy, theater and dance, and women and gender studies.

These bloodbath cuts are consistent with the general cant of the Trump agenda and underscore the broader culture’s consistent devaluation of the arts and overvaluation of everything from meme coins to TikTok dances.

Colleges are traditionally the intellectual nerve centers from which the rest of an area’s culture radiates. But Sonoma State? It’s had an uneven track record at best. Sure, there were the brief, shining moments in its history—like the time the fledgling experimental psych department dabbled in “butt paintings” and earned the school the moniker “Granola U.” But as a whole, the school never fully gripped the local imagination.

The surrounding environs—the burbs—could never authentically claim the coveted status of a “college town.” And without most of SSU’s liberal arts programs, it never will. Sure, it still has its wine program (for now). But if global wine sales continue their decline, that department may eventually dry up like the rest of us during Dry January.

Cutting liberal arts—or, frankly, anything preceded by the word “liberal”—is par for the course in this Brave New World. Squint hard enough, and one can make an economic case for these cuts. CollegeNPV, an online service that helps users browse the potential ROI (return on investment) of different schools, recently circulated an infographic (via social media, where people really get their news) showing that an engineering degree yields a $571,000-lifetime return, while a visual or performing arts degree results in a negative $104,000. 

The math is stark, but this spreadsheet logic ignores a key fact: Many working artists also teach. Except now, at SSU, they won’t have that option—particularly since the school also axed its education leadership master’s program.

If BFAs and MFAs are going extinct, then another acronym, AI, may be the future. That’s the line we’re all being sold. The World Economic Forum’s annual Jobs Report recently suggested that “content development roles,” including quaint relics like writing, are “highly exposed to automation.” Generative AI, they claim, can “augment” these roles, turning human creatives into “hyper-productive” machines because nothing captures the human condition like a chatbot.

When the arts have to justify their existence to the bean counters, they become collateral damage in a broader culture war. The axing of liberal arts programs at SSU isn’t just about dollars and cents; it’s about a more profound cultural shift prioritizing utility over beauty, metrics over meaning, and productivity over soul.

So where does that leave us? A college stripped of its creative core becomes little more than a diploma mill with better branding. A community without artists becomes a cultural wasteland. And a society without the arts? It’s not just poorer in spirit—it’s doomed to repeat its mistakes without the mirror of art to reflect what we are otherwise unable to see.

The arts will survive, of course—they always do. But in this climate, they’ll increasingly move underground into spaces where they can thrive, where their real ROI isn’t measured in dollars.

If the academies don’t carry the torch, the artists will take it—igniting hearts and minds faster than anyone can say, “You’re fired.”

Weekly ravings of media-making madman Daedalus Howell are available at dhowell.substack.com.