Is Sonoma State University (SSU) Too White and Too Wealthy?
Heaven forbid… No one’s denying the nub of a report roiling the political waters on Sonoma State University’s tidy, green campus: The 48-year-old state school has become a Wine Country destination for well-to-do white students, many of them women from Southern California. But the report’s conclusions and the intentions of its author, sociology professor and activist Peter Phillips [peter.phillips@sonoma.edu] are at the center of a maelstrom set spinning two years ago when a 73 percent faculty majority approved a vote of no-confidence in Ruben Armiana, SSU’s president since 1992. […]In the new report Phillips, a vocal critic of Armiana’s administration and a 15-year faculty veteran, holds the president and the California State University’s top leadership responsible for policies that Phillips maintains made SSU the “whitest and likely the richest” school in the 23-campus CSU system.Peter Philips Students say the evidence of Phillips’ report — a 37-page paper by his investigative so