The American Academy of Arts and Sciences is the most distinguished scholarly organization in the nation. It is dedicated to the advancement of the arts and sciences. It is decidedly nonpartisan. I was elected to membership many years ago. AAAS rarely issues a statement. Its board did so in April because of unprecedented attacks on higher education, scholarly independence, and the rule of law.
A statement from the Board of Directors of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. Approved April 2025.
Since its founding in 1780, the AmericanAcademy of Arts and Sciences has sought “to cultivate every art and science which may tend to advance the interest, honor, dignity, and happiness of a free, independent, and virtuouspeople.” We do this by celebrating excellence in every field of human endeavor and by supporting the unfettered pursuit of knowledge and its application to the common good.
The Academy fosters nonpartisan, deliberative discourse on pressing issues facing our communities in the United States and the world.Our founders were also the founders of our nation. From them, we inherit a deep commitment to the practice of democratic self-governance. Our constitutional democracy has been imperfect, but almost 250 years since its inception, it remains an inspiration to peoplenear and far. Ours is a great nation because ofour system of checks and balances, separation of powers, individual rights, and an independent judiciary — as the Academy’s founder JohnAdams put it, “a government of laws, not of men.” And we are a great nation because we haveinvested in the arts and sciences while protecting the freedom that enables them to flourish.
These values are under serious threat today.Every president of the United States has the prerogative to set new priorities and agendas; nopublic or private institution is above criticism or calls for reform; and no reasoned arguments, from the left or the right, should be silenced. But current developments, in their pace, scale, and hostility toward institutions dedicated to knowledge and the pursuit of truth, have little precedent in our modern history.
We oppose reckless funding cuts and restrictions that imperil the research enterprise of our universities, hospitals, and laboratories, which contribute enormously to our prosperity, health, and national security. We condemn efforts to censor our scholarly and cultural institutions, to curtail freedom of the press, and to purge inquiry or ideas that challenge prevailing policies. We vigorously support the independence of the judiciary and the legal profession, and opposeactions and threats intended to erode thatindependence and, in turn, the rule of law.
In this time of challenge, we cherish theseprinciples and stand resilient against efforts to undermine them. The Academy will continue to urge public support for the arts and sciences, and also work to safeguard the conditions of freedom necessary for novel discoveries, creative expression, and truth-seeking in all its forms. We join a rising chorus of organizations and individuals determined to invigorate the democratic ideals of our republic and its constitutional values, and prevent our nation from sliding toward autocracy.
In the coming months and years, the Academy will rededicate itself to studying, building, and amplifying the practices of constitutional democracy in their local and national forms, with particular focus on its pillars of freedom of expression and the rule of law. We call on all citizens to help fortify a civic culture unwavering in its commitment to our founding principles.
Cal Maritime is the smallest campus in the California State University system.
Credit: Cal Maritime / Flickr
This story has been updated to include reporting from the Board of Trustees meeting on Tuesday.
A steep drop in enrollment has put Cal Maritime, the smallest of the California State University’s 23 campuses, on a path to merge with Cal Poly San Luis Obispo.
Under the plan, which went before the Cal State board of trustees Tuesday, Cal Maritime’s 761 students would blend into San Luis Obispo’s 22,000-person student body with the goal of saving on overhead and ultimately attracting more students to the maritime academy.
Recruiting out-of-state students and competing for federal dollars are two pieces of the turnaround plan, according to newly released details about the proposal.
But faculty at both institutions said they have received little guidance about how the plan would impact their day-to-day jobs. And CSU officials’ proposal to the board does not address what one investigation into sexual harassment at Cal Maritime called a “history of pervasive male toxicity.”
The CSU board of trustees opened discussions on the proposal on Tuesday and plan to raise the subject again in September. A vote on the proposed integration is set for November. If approved, CSU officials estimate bringing the two institutions together will cost $35 million over seven years. The plan would go into effect in July 2025 and affect students in the fall of 2026.
Cal Maritime Interim President Michael J. Dumont appealed to the Board of Trustees to support the proposal on Tuesday, saying the campus has already made deep budget cuts that include leaving positions unfilled. Without dramatic improvement in the campus’ enrollment and revenue, Dumont said he does not “see the maritime academy continuing.”
“Quite frankly, we’ve taken a chainsaw to every expense on our campus,” he said. “We are working drastically to save money everywhere we can. I don’t know how much longer that can continue … I have cut muscle, bone, and I’m now down to tendon and arteries.”
In response to questions seeking more information about admissions, degree conferral and recruitment strategy under the proposal, CSU spokesperson Amy Bentley-Smith said it would “be speculative and premature to respond to questions about details yet to be determined.” Bentley-Smith said privacy concerns limit what the university can say regarding incidents and reports related to Title IX, the federal sex discrimination law. She said Cal Maritime responds “appropriately with measures aimed at holding individuals accountable for their actions and providing equity to affected members of the community. The university has placed a great deal of focus, energy and commitment on creating a stronger culture of safety and inclusion on campus and on cruise.”
Cal Maritime, which has a campus in Vallejo and operates a training ship, serves a strategically important niche in higher education. Six state maritime academies together educate most of the nation’s merchant marine officers, the civilian workforce that operates commercial shipping vessels and supplies U.S. military ships and bases. Almost 80% of Cal Maritime students are men, according to fall 2022 enrollment data.
Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, located 250 miles south, is known for its architecture, agriculture and engineering programs. The campus has increased enrollment by 13% over the past decade and receives more qualified applicants than it can accommodate.
Merging the campuses would bolster both institutions’ academic strengths in areas like engineering, oceanography, logistics and marine science while allowing degree programs that lead to a merchant marine license from the U.S. Coast Guard to continue, according to the CSU proposal. Cal Maritime would also enjoy access to Cal Poly’s marketing and fundraising resources — a leg up to recruit prospective students and right the school’s finances.
If the marriage of the two schools goes forward, the maritime academy would be led by a superintendent who is also part of Cal Poly leadership, according to documents describing the proposal. Maritime academy faculty and staff, similarly, would become Cal Poly employees.
Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo campus.Credit: Ashley Bolter / EdSource
Righting the ship
Cal Maritime’s finances are so dire that last spring the university projected that it would have only $317,000 in operating reserves at the end of June 2024 — less than it would need to run the university for three days, according to the merger proposal.
Declining enrollment is a major culprit. Student headcount fell 31% between the 2016-17 and 2023-24 school years. Even if Cal Maritime meets future enrollment targets, Cal State officials write, a growing budget deficit “is inevitable.”
The campus has already slashed spending to save money, CSU officials say, but further cuts would threaten the university’s ability to carry out its educational mission. As it is, CSU officials acknowledge that falling enrollment and budget woes may have had “an impact on the quality of essential student support services such as housing, dining, health and counseling.”
The hope is that maritime academy students will benefit from plugging into Cal Poly’s student services.
Other changes would be subtle. The maritime academy would keep its Vallejo campus during the integration, though additional majors with maritime industry ties could be located there in the future.
Kyle Carpenter, who graduated from Cal Maritime in 2014, said he hopes the proposal can save Cal Maritime. But depending on whether and how majors are folded into Cal Poly, he said, he worries that students who are now required to understand the maritime application of their education could lose that important focus.
“We need to maintain a strong maritime presence, so any bit of maritime education is a great thing,” Carpenter said.
The proposal flags possible benefits for Cal Poly students, too. First among them: Cal Poly students would get access to Cal Maritime laboratory space and, crucially, a $360 million training vessel the campus is set to receive in 2026.
The chance to take advantage of the Vallejo campus is welcome news to Yiming Luo, a sophomore city and regional planning major at Cal Poly. He said he hopes the proposal would expand course offerings and give Cal Poly students from the Bay Area like him the “possibility of taking classes at Maritime over the summer for credit.”
Faculty react
Faculty at both campuses said they have lots of questions about how the proposal could impact them.
Steven Runyon, an associate professor of chemistry at Cal Maritime and vice president of the campus California Faculty Association chapter, said the proposed integration “came out of nowhere” and has garnered mixed reactions.
“Many faculty are very optimistic,” he said. “If we’re going to be integrated with any other university, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo is probably top of our list in terms of who we would like to be associated with.”
But Runyon said a lack of clear communication from the university’s leaders makes him worry about how the proposal would impact colleagues, especially those who do not work in a tenure track position, such as lecturers and librarians.
Faculty learned of the merger plan when it was announced on June 5. They can comment “both individually and through their represented body” before the board acts, a Cal Maritime spokesperson said.
Jennifer Mott, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Cal Poly, said she has heard little about the proposed integration.
“Will we have to teach more students? Will they be teaching more students?” she said. “Will it not affect anything? We just don’t know any information.”
Mott also questions whether her department would remain independent or merge with Cal Maritime’s mechanical engineering department — a process that would impact her department’s gender makeup.
“We made a huge push in mechanical engineering to hire more women faculty,” she said. “I looked at the faculty (at Cal Maritime) and it’s only men, and so I don’t know how that would affect us going forward.”
Cal Maritime is one of six state maritime academies in the country.Credit: Cal Maritime / Flickr
A reckoning with sexual misconduct
Reports of sexual misconduct in both the maritime industry and the California State University system have put pressure on Cal Maritime to do more to address sexual misconduct on its campus.
In 2021, an outside investigator commissioned by Cal Maritime reported “several instances of inappropriate, discriminatory, vulgar or offensive writings or other imagery, especially toward female cadets” as well as “concerns over anti-LGBTQIA+ behavior and language used frequently aboard cruises and on campus.”
The resignation of Joseph I. Castro as CSU chancellor in 2022 over his mishandling of a Title IX sexual harassment case involving an administrator when he was president of Fresno State resulted in a system-wide reckoning. Cal State retained the law firm Cozen O’Connor to assess programs at each of its 23 universities to deal with sexual harassment and assault complaints under the federal Title IX law that prohibits sex-based discrimination. The probe found that the system lacks resources and staffing to adequately respond to and handle sexual harassment or discrimination complaints from students and employees.
At Cal Maritime, a July 2023 report by the firm found “significant improvements to process, responsiveness, training, and prevention programming” over the previous two years. But Cozen O’Connor reported that those improvements were overshadowed by a lack of a permanent Title IX coordinator, distrust of former university leaders and a culture that discouraged reporting misconduct.
In March 2023, Cal State hired Mike Dumont to serve as the maritime academy’s interim president. A 2024 profile of Dumont in the San Francisco Chronicle names several recent reforms at the campus, including improving training on sexual harassment, hiring a full-time victim advocate and updating uniform, naming and housing policies to meet the needs of nonbinary and transgender students.
In a statement, Bentley-Smith said the work of improving campus safety and inclusion “continues and will continue, both at Cal Maritime and throughout the CSU. One of the CSU’s highest priorities is ensuring all students and employees across our 23 universities are protected from discrimination and harassment.”
This month, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a law requiring CSU to implement the recommendations of a state audit into its handling of sexual misconduct. CSU officials say the system is already in the process of meeting the audit requirements.
But Mott, the Cal Poly professor, said reports of sexual harassment and assault at Cal Maritime give her pause.
“I know it’s an issue across a lot of campuses, not to say that we don’t have issues here,” she said. “But if it is a more toxic culture up there (at Cal Maritime), that is definitely a concern that we don’t bring that here, or that the students aren’t forced to go up there if they don’t feel comfortable going to that environment.”
Funding from fees, feds and more
The proposal anticipates a combined institution could raise more philanthropic and federal dollars. It is possible Cal Poly’s fee model — increasing one fee and levying a second on out-of-state undergraduates to pay for more financial aid — could be applied to the maritime academy.
The proposal also argues that Cal Maritime has a great story to tell prospective students and can use San Luis Obispo’s “unquestioned expertise in strategic enrollment management, marketing and brand-building” to tell it.
One draw is graduates’ future earnings. An analysis by the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce found that a Cal Maritime degree had the highest return on investment of any bachelor’s degree from a public university in California as measured by its net present value.
Under the proposal, increased outreach would extend to prospective students in Oregon, Washington, Alaska, Hawaii and U.S. Pacific territories.
Michael Fossum, the superintendent of the Texas A&M Maritime Academy, said maritime academy graduates are in high demand. But schools like his don’t always have the marketing budget to pitch prospective students on pursuing the career.
“It’s a massive industry that people don’t know about,” he said. “We don’t have the reach to help educate people on how important the industry is and what great opportunities there are working in this industry.”
‘A nationally known name’
If the integration proposal wins board approval, Cal Maritime’s future might look a little more like Fossum’s institution, Texas A&M Maritime Academy.
The Texas maritime academy is not an independent institution, but is part of Texas A&M at Galveston. In terms of leadership structure, Fossum, the school’s superintendent, is also chief operating officer at Texas A&M University at Galveston and a vice president at Texas A&M University. That structure reduces some overhead on his campus.
“I don’t have to replicate every single vice president and every single function that’s on the main campus,” Fossum said.
The Cal Maritime integration proposal suggests the two campuses could experience similar consolidation in areas such as facilities maintenance, information technology, cybersecurity and administrative services like payroll and accounting.
Fossum said he hopes that if Cal Maritime links up with Cal Poly, it will enjoy some of the same reputational benefits his campus experiences from its close association with Texas A&M.
“Cal Poly has got a nationally known name,” he said. “When you get the power of Cal Poly, just like me having the power of Texas A&M University, that absolutely helps. The association is good.”
Ashley Bolter, a recent graduate of Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, is a member of EdSource’s California Student Journalism Corps.
Fabian Debora uses art as a tool for gang prevention at Homeboy Art Academy in LA.
Credit: Courtesy of Fabian Debora
As a restless eighth grader at Dolores Mission Catholic School in Los Angeles, Fabian Debora often drew pictures at his desk. One day the teacher confiscated his artwork and ripped it up in front of the whole class. Debora, who cherishes his drawing, felt betrayed. He lost his temper, threw a desk at the teacher and got expelled.
The incident led to an epiphany. Debora was summoned before Father Greg Boyle, the beloved parish priest who runs Homeboy Industries, a renowned gang intervention program in East Los Angeles. Instead of chastising him, Boyle asked Debora to draw him something and later persuaded his probation officer to let him work as an apprentice to Wayne Healy, a pioneer in the city’s Chicano mural movement. Art became his lifeline.
“I realized that I’m an artist,” said the soft spoken Debora, 49. “I discovered it young enough to know that this is something that belonged to me, and no one’s gonna take that from me. And I held onto it.”
That drive led him to co-found Homeboy Art Academy, a group that uses arts education to empower formerly gang-involved and incarcerated youth.
“Man, as a formerly incarcerated, gang-involved individual, there aren’t many spaces for me,” he said. “I don’t have the means to go join an art school of some sort. So I’ll have to create a space where these kids can come and all services are free.”
A mural titled “The Power of the Woman,” by Fabian Debora.Credit: Courtesy of Fabian Debora
Part sanctuary, part vocational training center and part studio, the academy resists the notion that art is a precious and rarified pursuit for the elite. Here art is raw and real. You learn to paint your truth, to be unblinking about what you see, but also to feel the freedom of a blank canvas.
“They are the absolute best, completely authentic, devoted to helping people,” said Diane Luby Lane, founder of the poetry education group, Get Lit. “Fabian teaches people to be artists. He respects and utilizes real life experiences and perspectives.”
The recipient of the prestigious National Endowment of the Arts Heritage Fellowship, Debora believes art has the power to change lives. In addition to working as an artist, he is also a teacher and mentor to others seeking to find purpose through art.
“Let’s flip arts education on its head,” said Debora, as he walked around his studio at the art academy. “Let’s take the language and the vocabulary of the arts and tailor it to the lived experiences of this population while introducing relevant information such as in hip hop and street art.”
Born in El Paso, Texas, Debora first discovered art as a little boy weathering a tumultuous childhood in Boyle Heights, which he describes as “one of the roughest projects east of the Mississippi.” The tension bled into his family life, he said. He remembers hiding when his parents fought.
“I used to blame myself,” he recalled wistfully. “I would go and hide under a coffee table, and I would start to sketch, and I would just create my own world to escape my reality. That’s when I found art to be more than just a gift. It was almost like a big brother who held me.”
Violence was embedded in the ecosystem he grew up in, with eight gangs jostling for supremacy and few safe spaces from crime and addiction. By 12, he joined a gang, began to deal drugs and got addicted to them. He wrestled with substance abuse for years before trying to commit suicide at 30, by running across the freeway. That’s when he found his spiritual center and his salvation, his cause.
Now he tries to bring the succor of art to young people who feel hopeless to shape their own destiny.
Artist Fabian Debora teaches the art of painting, graffiti and street murals to students at LA’s Homeboy Academy.Credit: Courtesy of Homeboy Academy
“Art is a vehicle for healing, art is motivating,” says Debora. “It gives you a sense of breathing room, you’re escaping from your realities, as you’re creating. You feel inspired when you realize what beautiful work of art has come out of this. It opens up senses in the brain that haven’t been tapped into.”
While Debora specializes in visual art, the academy also offers classes in everything from creative writing and photography, to coding and poetry. He takes on those who believe they have nothing to lose. That’s who he used to be.
“I want the kids who are hanging out in the basketball court smoking weed all day, kids who are overlooked,” he says, lingering in front of the academy’s altar to indigenous gods. “If you’re gang related and struggling with a drug problem, if you’ve been incarcerated, that’s what qualifies you for this program.”
The impact of Debora’s work resonates throughout the Los Angeles arts community. It’s been a formidable example of how creativity can transform the arc of a person’s life.
“It’s astounding what they do at Homeboy,” says Austin Beutner, former LAUSD Superintendent and author of the arts education mandate, Prop. 28. “It’s hard work but they save lives, one by one. It shows you the power of art. You can be 8 or 28 and the arts can change your life.”
As a young man in ‘80s Los Angeles, Debora responded to the siren song of hip-hop music and graffiti art, the vibrancy of youth culture. The murals became portals to often forgotten Chicano history and culture.
A portrait of the Madonna by Fabian Debora. credit: Fabian Debora
The ancient meets the now in this audacious body of work, from graffiti to fine art. Debora delights in juxtaposing the eye of the masters with a modern urban vibe. Some of his most well-known paintings are fashioned after the manner of Italian master Caravaggio but rooted in the grit of Boyle Heights, such as a portrait of a girl from the barrio striking the pose of the Madonna. He’s now working on a project that deconstructs the Sistine Chapel.
“We are reclaiming the universal language of art,” he said.
Troubled souls often find solace in the universality of dark feelings, the way a painting from the Renaissance can capture how we feel today. That is the power of art as activism.
“Carravagio was also an outcast,” he said. “He was a thug, a killer, a murderer yet he found his spirituality through art.”
Debora uses art like a scalpel to cut away the layers of posturing and pretense that many of his students protect themselves with. He uses art to get at the truths they try to hide, even from themselves.
“The work of Homeboy Art Academy is transformational in providing youth a pathway, learning how to take ownership of their own stories, which are often negated by others who deem themselves more powerful,” says Merryl Goldberg, a veteran music and arts professor at Cal State San Marcos. “Lifting up voices at risk of being suppressed could not be more fundamental to a just and compassionate society.”
Art opens a window to another life, Deborah says. In addition to his work at the academy, he also teaches drawing to inmates at Tehachapi state prison. He cherishes his work with “the lifers,” because they need the solace of art the most.
“People need to be seen, they need to be heard,” he said. “It’s a sense of hope. When we come in, we paint windows on those ceiling walls so they can escape for the time being.”
