As Cal State East Bay Slashes Budget, Theater Students Push to Save Their Program

Victoria Mannah has loved being on stage since fourth grade choir.

“It’s been my whole life at this point,” she said. “My dad is a choir teacher, and so I grew up, and I always wanted to be on stage and sing with my dad.”

Mannah is in her final semester at Cal State East Bay, where she’s studied theater and arts since 2023. She plans to graduate this spring, but she’s worried that other students won’t be able to do the same if the department is shut down due to campus budget cuts.

“We were informed by almost every teacher in the department that they were concerned about the department being dissolved,” she told KQED. “They were encouraging students to start looking for other schools to complete their degree.”

The entire California State University system is facing an 8% funding reduction from the state, and some Bay Area campuses have struggled to maintain enrollment, bringing revenue down further. Cal State East Bay is facing a budget deficit that totaled about $14 million in the fall. And after major athletics and degree program cuts — including to dance and theater arts — were announced at nearby Sonoma State in January, many in the East Bay program are on edge.

On Thursday, a dozen students working toward theater degrees climbed the spiraling stairs to University President Cathy Sandeen’s office, hand-delivering a petition signed by more than 900 CSU East Bay students, faculty and community members to her staff. Chanting “East Bay arts,” they urged Sandeen to continue funding the department.

The school said that as of now, “the theatre and dance program remains intact.”

“It would be speculation on my part to talk about what cuts could be made to account for the budget deficit next year or when we might release more information,” university spokesperson Kimberly Hawkins said in an email.

So far, the university said it has been able to save about $10 million throughout this budget year.

Richard Olmsted, head of the Department of Theatre and Dance, is worried about the small-but-mighty program’s odds.

Olmsted said the program graduates 14 to 20 students a year on four separate degree tracks.

“Whenever it’s numbers they’re looking at, we’re never going to look good on that,” he said.

The program is losing a lecturer, one of its four faculty members, at the end of the semester, and Olmsted is worried the department as a whole is on a list of under-enrolled programs currently eyed for discontinuation.

In February, Sandeen sent a message to the university community saying that CSU East Bay was preparing to form a new advisory committee to “continue to closely review all degree programs, minors, and concentrations that have consistently low enrollments, and we will recommend a path forward for those programs.”

Eleven degree programs were suspended in the fall, and over the last 18 months, 165 lecturers who taught part-time or up to four classes a semester lost their appointments.

Theatre and Dance has proposed merging with the Music Department to consolidate resources, according to Olmsted, but he isn’t sure what will happen at the end of the year.

“We’re not going to look good on any spreadsheet ever. Our value comes from other metrics,” he said.

Olmsted believes that the Theatre and Dance Department provides a path for some students to get their bachelor’s degree who might not otherwise. It also gives students who might not be eligible to study in other performing arts programs a shot.

“We’re not a super competitive theater and dance program,” he told KQED. “We include everybody in our auditions, in our plays, and we really try to find jobs that are appropriate for people.

He continued: “We open our auditions to everyone — faculty, staff, students in any department. We’ve had all of those people in our shows.”

The department’s accessibility helped George Amaras come back to the university in the fall. Amaras originally enrolled in theater at Cal State East Bay in 2014 but took a break before their senior year to focus on mental health.

“After that, the pandemic happened, so that kind of added on to the break, and I was really trying to find healing before I came back,” they told KQED.

Last fall, Amaras joined one of the department’s dance troupes open to alums and community members.

“I was trying to find my ground and see where the campus was currently standing,” they said. “Since then, I started back in school this spring, and I’m here to finish now. I should be walking [at graduation] in the spring of 2026.”

Amaras said theater is a way to filter through their emotions and be creative.

“During my break, I was trying to just live and struggle with the economy and rent, but I came back because it’s something that I enjoy, and it’s more fulfilling than just a paycheck,” Amaras said.

Amaras, like most of the students in the department, hopes to continue performing after school — even if it isn’t professionally.

“We’re not just job training students to work in theater or performing arts,” Olmsted said, adding that the department has alumni working full-time in the arts — from the Bay Area’s theatre circuit to Broadway — but it also produces students who go into all fields.

CSU leadership, at East Bay and elsewhere, has said they are prioritizing high-demand and career-focused majors. Arts programs are often the first to go, despite Olmsted’s assertion that the degrees do prepare students for the workforce.

“We teach students how to work on creative projects together, how to research material, how to present themselves and their ideas,” he said. “All of these really good, soft skills that will help them throughout their lives.”

He said that in this limbo period, he doesn’t know what to say to students, whether they are currently enrolled at the school or considering attending in the future.

“I’ve had a number of prospective students that I’ve talked with, and it’s really hard to just say, ‘Come on over here, it’s going to be great,’” he told KQED. “I used to be full-throated — ‘You’ll do well here, we’ll make sure of that.’ Now, I’m hesitant.”