California State University trustees named Michael Spagna permanent president of Sonoma State University effective Jan. 20 as the campus confronts a steep enrollment drop and a multimillion-dollar budget gap. Spagna arrives from CSU Humboldt amid earlier controversies that led to last spring’s president resignation and sweeping cuts that included program eliminations and athletic reductions. An independent arbitrator delivered a separate, consequential rebuke of administrative process at Portland State University, ordering the reinstatement and back pay for 10 nontenure-track faculty laid off after budget cuts. The arbitrator’s ruling emphasized contractual shared-governance obligations and serves as a cautionary signal for campuses pursuing rapid retrenchment without faculty engagement. Both developments underscore two concurrent governance challenges for public institutions: fiscal triage driven by enrollment losses and legal limits on how quickly administrators can implement staffing and program changes without faculty buy-in.