Fund the Classroom, Not the Boardroom: Meet Your CSU Execs, Part 1

Following our series on members of the CSU Board of Trustees, CFA is profiling current and former CSU executives.   

To start, California State University campus presidents are officially titled “chief executive officers (CEOs),” according to the CSU administration’s own terminology. They also represent the public faces of their campuses and function as the primary liaison between the universities and the campus plus the broader community. They report to the CSU chancellor and work closely with the CSU’s systemwide office.   

CFA chapters have different relationships with their campus presidents, so we don’t want to suggest they’re all the same. However, as the CEOs of the campuses, CFA chapters similarly call on them to work with us as partners, and sometimes call on them in struggle, as we organize faculty, staff, and students to push for policies that support the best learning environment for students.  

Just as we’ve highlighted Board of Trustees’ members, we now move on to CSU executives, including campus presidents/CEOs as well as at the records of other CSU executives, like a former campus chief financial officer (CFO). Distinct from campus CEOs, campus CFOs oversee and direct the short and long-term financial goals of CSU campuses. CFA members recognize the power and privilege that comes with the CFO position and call on them to partner with CFA in improving the learning and working conditions on our campuses.”   

Here’s information you should know about a few current and former CSU executives.  We want faculty to pay attention to executives’ actions, inactions, and messaging because it affects our working conditions and student learning conditions.  

Jeffrey Armstrong, President/CEO of Cal Poly San Luis Obispo   

Armstrong has been the campus president since 2011. His annual base salary is $611,203, or $50,934 per month, making him the highest-paid CSU campus president. He also has housing provided and receives $12,000 a year in car allowances on top of his base salary. He is eligible for a 15% performance-based bonus of $91,680 if he meets budgetary and strategic priorities, as well.  

Before he began serving as SLO’s president, Armstrong was the dean of the College of Agriculture and Natural Resources and professor of Animal Science at Michigan State University.   

He has a Ph.D. in Physiology Interdisciplinary and a M.S. in Physiology Biochemistry from North Carolina State University. He also has a B.S. in Animal Science Biology from Murray State University.   

In April 2025, Armstrong faced criticism for declining to sign a joint statement opposing “unprecedented government overreach” in higher education. Over 400 presidents and leaders at institutions of higher education signed the statement from the American Association of Colleges and Universities. CSU presidents that signed the statement included those from Northridge, Long Beach, Los Angeles, San Bernardino, San Marcos, Dominguez Hills, Chico, Stanislaus, Fullerton, Sacramento, and Channel Islands.   

A university spokesperson said, “the university has no role in determining public policy and therefore will not be signing on to the letter.”   

Armstrong testified before Congress less than a month later about alleged antisemitism and handling of pro-Palestinian activism on campus. Clearly, by speaking to federal lawmakers, Armstrong and the university are influencing public policy.  

In February 2026, Armstrong made questionable comments to EdSource regarding how Cal Poly SLO has the CSU system’s highest mandatory student fees. While he said he favored alternative consultation, such as seeking feedback from student groups and elected student leaders, he did not allow students to vote on student fees.   

“Why would I want to have a referendum of the students, who are a population that’s more affluent than most public universities in California, in order to make changes to really better represent the full state of California?” Armstrong said. In other words, instead of having the allegedly affluent students vote on fee increases, he and other very affluent executives decided to just increase the fees themselves! 

Lynn Mahoney, President/CEO of San Francisco State   

Mahoney has been the campus president since 2019. Her annual base salary is $520,143, or $43,345.25 per month. She also receives an annual housing stipend of $80,000 and $12,000 a year in car allowances.   

Before she began serving as San Francisco State’s president, Mahoney was provost and vice president for academic affairs at CSU Los Angeles.  

She has a Ph.D. in History from Rutgers University and a B.A. in American Studies from Stanford University.   

San Francisco State has seen decreasing enrollment since 2019, the year she began leading it, according to KQED. Enrollment hovered around 30,000 throughout much of the 2010s, but since the Fall of 2019, it has been declining quickly. In Fall 2024, SF State had just over 22,300 registered students.  

Mahoney declared a fiscal emergency in December 2024, the same month faculty held a funeral march to call attention to colleagues who were laid off or faced layoffs. The fiscal emergency came after Mahoney cut courses, increased class sizes, and reduced staff numbers in recent years.   

Mahoney also oversaw the announcement of the elimination of three sports teams, men’s soccer, baseball, and women’s indoor track and field, in March 2025.   

In December 2025, Mahoney’s administration offered a faculty buyout option to tenured and tenure-track faculty. At the time, she signaled more unnecessary austerity measures would follow.   

“There’s only one thing I can guarantee right now — pretty much everything has to change,” Mahoney told the Golden Gate Xpress. “We have to restructure ourselves.”    

Mahoney has a track record of pushing austerity measures when she should focus on increasing enrollment and preserving instruction and faculty jobs.  

Emily Cutrer, former Interim President/CEO of Sonoma State  

Cutrer was the interim campus president from August 2024 until January 2026, when Sonoma State got its new president, Michael Spagna. We’re including her in this roundup because of the devastating cuts that were enacted under her watch. Deloitte, one of the Big Four accounting firms that CSU management hires for private consulting, named her and Sonoma State as ones to watch in its 2025 Higher Education Trends report, suggesting that her tenure will be a model for the rest of the sector and consulting companies making recommendations for similar institutions.  

Her annual base salary was $381,408, or $31,784 per month. She also received an annual housing stipend of $60,000 and $12,000 a year in car allowances. 

Before she began serving as Sonoma State’s interim president, Cutrer was the president of Texas A&M University-Texarkana and prior to that, the provost of California State University San Marcos. 

She has a bachelor’s degree in American studies and a master’s and Ph.D. in American civilization from the University of Texas at Austin. 

Cutrer is known for making deep cuts to Sonoma State in 2025, eliminating 23 academic programs, six departments, and all NCAA Division II athletics programs.   

In an interview with The Press Democrat, Cutrer justified not having a plan after layoffs by saying, “You don’t want to go to a funeral and ask the widow who her next husband is going to be, right?” The Sonoma State Academic Senate in April 2025 passed a vote of no confidence in Cutrer’s leadership. 

State legislators announced a $45 million investment designed to grow and stabilize the campus’s key programs, including Division II athletics. Cutrer declined to commit to restoring these important athletic programs, saying the next campus president will make that decision, despite how the plain budget language for the Sonoma State Commitment says the intent of the funding is to reinstate athletics in the next three years. 

Ironically, Cutrer served on the board of the California Collegiate Athletic Association as recently as June 2024 before proceeding to gut Sonoma State athletics. 

Cutrer and her husband Thomas have made several contributions to Republican political candidates over the years, including $500 to Texas Governor Greg Abbott in 2018 and $500 to Senator John Cornyn in 2017. 

Debbie Adishian-Astone, former Vice President of Administration and CFO of Fresno State 

Debbie Adishian-Astone is the former Vice President of Administration and Chief Financial Officer of Fresno State, former Executive Director of the Fresno State Foundation and current special assistant to the campus president at San José State. We’re including her in this series because of a damning January 2026 CSU internal audit of the Fresno State Foundation.  

She retired from Fresno State at the end of 2024, and her total pay in fiscal year 2024 was $461,319, or $38,443 per month, which included $97,213 in “other pay,” a one-time cashout from paid excess vacation, holiday or sick leave. With the one-time cashout, she was the highest paid, non-president administrator anywhere within the CSU system, according to The Fresno Bee. 

Adishian-Astone directed the Fresno State Foundation, a nonprofit that manages hundreds of millions in donor gifts and endowments. A January 2026  CSU internal audit found the foundation had egregious weaknesses in its operations that increased its exposure to financial fraud. 

The report, which examined foundation practices over the 2024 fiscal year, cited 46 areas that require action, including incomplete documentation for some foundation payments, such as wire transfers to the university from scholarship and trust accounts that ranged from $2.2 million to $5.3 million.   

During her time as CFO at Fresno State, Adishian-Astone oversaw the Title IX Office, which came under scrutiny after Fresno State was found to have mishandled sexual misconduct allegations against Frank Lamas, the university’s former vice president of student affairs, and to be deficient in its record-keeping, documentation and investigative processes. Former CSU Chancellor Joseph Castro resigned for how he mishandled the sexual harassment allegations.   

Adishian-Astone was also the project coordinator in the development of the Save Mart Center, the multi-purpose arena at Fresno State. The bond debt on the center is not amortized, effectively bleeding extra money via debt service payments. Fresno State paid $10.3 million in just one year for it, and is still on the hook for $35 million.  

Even given the considerable job performance issues while at the CSU, she received a golden parachute to work as a special assistant to San José State President Cynthia Teniente-Matson, who previously served as the Vice President of Administration and Chief Financial Officer of Fresno State from 2004 to 2015. Adishian-Astone knew Teniente-Matson from that time, as Adishian-Astone had worked for Fresno State since 1983.