Welcome back! can we talk?

STAR // Nicholas Roth

Students are back at Sonoma State and the campus is bustling with life and energy with orientation week, the start of classes and the start of many of SSU’s sports teams’ seasons starting.  A feel of normalcy has fallen over campus due to the higher percentage of in-person classes with the fading of Covid and more students returning to campus. 

As incoming freshmen drove with their parents down Redwood lined Sequoia way to enter Sonoma’s campus they were greeted by construction vehicles and metal plates all over the road.  According to an email sent out by the University: the construction is: “...the work includes an underground electrical switchgear conduit that will extend from the existing utilities tunnel (south of Veterans’ Grove), through the flagpole median and crossing South Redwood Drive and East of the Sequoia Way road section.” This construction will run through Sept. 24.

Sonoma State sports are back in full force this fall which include volleyball as well as mens and womens soccer.  Volleyball has been off to a strong start going 7-1 in their first games including a 4-0 weekend here at SSU for the Seawolves/Penguins Classic tournament.  Mens soccer picked up its first win of the season beating St. Martins University 3-0.  Women’s soccer is also coming off a big win against tenth ranked Western Washington 2-1, their first victory against them in four years.  

In addition to returning to campus for a new year, we also have a new interim president at the helm for Sonoma State, Mike Lee, who jons SSU after the fallout of complaints about former SSU President Judy Sakaki and her husband, Patrick McCallum.  The Press Democrat and Los Angeles Times as well as the STAR reported on the the $600,000 settlement that was paid to former Executive Vice President Lisa Vollendorf for retaliation after Vollendorf reported McCallum’s sexual harassment.  This also led to former President Sakaki and McCallum splitting up, it also led to a vote of no confidence by SSU faculty late last spring that passed with ease. 

Another large story that we may still see the ramifications of was the leaked budget advisory group document that proposed drastic funding changes that would cut funding for many of the programs and schools within Sonoma State.  When this story came out the STAR received pushback from many levels of the university on why we ran a story about something that wasn’t necessarily going to come to fruition even though the title of the document read “Final Report.” This story and more so the document scared a lot of staff as well as students on campus who had come here hoping to stay in their program for four years. 

One lesson we as a campus should have learned after last semester is that transparency and the truth are of the utmost importance on a college campus.  Not being transparent allows for speculation leading to misinformation, and for a place that molds minds it’s not a good practice.  Avoidance of difficult topics and subjects creates the issues that arose last semester because in this day in age if something is covered up it will more than likely be discovered.  We as a student-run paper are going to work hard to find relevant and important stories again this semester.  We hope that with the new energy and student presence as well as more conversations among the SSU community, we’ll see more of the transparency that was missing last semester and that current times demand.