By admin 
A year after her resignation from the post of chief diversity officer at Sacramento State in May 2024, Mia Settles-Tidwell filed a lawsuit against President Luke Wood and the California State University’s board of trustees over discrimination based on age, gender and race that she said she faced at the workplace.
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In the complaint filed in the Los Angeles County Superior Court, the Black woman leader said she was humiliated in front of her colleagues, offered a lower pay raise than her peers, excluded from teams and documents she should have had access to, and slowly stripped of her full responsibilities. When Settles-Tidwell raised concerns, the situation worsened, her lawsuit states.
As a result of “pervasive, adverse, and severe discriminatory treatment” at the hands of Wood and other unnamed individuals, she was no longer able to perform her duties and eventually had no choice but to resign, she says in her suit.
“We believe we have a very meritorious case,” said Mainak D’Attaray, who is representing 56-year-old Settles-Tidwell in the case. “It was a campaign of harassment and retaliation against my client and we’re hoping to be vindicated in court.”
Still in a preliminary stage, the case is set for a hearing on Sept. 8 over a motion filed by the CSU board and Wood to transfer the case to the Sacramento County Superior Court. This, they say, will be more convenient for witnesses. Settles-Tidwell plans to oppose that motion, her attorney said, fearing that the jury pool in Sacramento may be biased.
According to a spokesperson for the university, CSU was not served Settles-Tidwell’s lawsuit until March 2026 — 10 months after it was first filed.
“CSU believes the claims asserted by Plaintiff Settles-Tidwell are entirely baseless and devoid of merit, and CSU is prepared to vigorously defend against these claims,” the spokesperson said.
Earlier this year, the CSU system ended a three-year legal battle with two former Cal State San Bernardino administrators who alleged they were fired or pushed to resign after reporting gender inequities, discrimination and harassment. In what is believed to be the largest publicly reported employment discrimination settlement against the system, the CSU will pay Clare Weber and Anissa Rogers $12 million to resolve those claims.
For Sacramento State, allegations of discrimination at the highest level present a strong contrast to the school’s positioning as a diverse and welcoming campus. Since he took over as president in 2023, Wood has highlighted Sacramento State’s commitment to diversity initiatives — even as some universities pulled back amid an anti-DEI push from the Trump administration.
Recruitment and early days
Settles-Tidwell was recruited to the role of chief diversity officer and vice president for inclusive excellence in November 2021 by then-President Robert Nelsen.
At the time, he said she was “just what the Hornet Family needs.” Before joining Sacramento State, she had served as assistant vice chancellor and chief of staff for equity and inclusion at UC Berkeley.
In her role at Sacramento State, Settles-Tidwell was in charge of staffing, budget, policy and programs for the inclusive excellence division. It included implementing an antiracism plan on campus and planning the CSU-wide Juneteenth Symposium in 2024.
During her tenure, she hired the school’s first Universal Access and Inclusion director and Asian American Native Hawaiian Pacific Islander Student Achievement Center executive director. She led the campus’ efforts to strengthen its response to sexual harassment cases, created taskforces to address antisemitism and Islamophobia, and worked toward the expansion of resource groups for employees.
According to her lawsuit, Settles-Tidwell’s working relationship with President Wood — who took over in July 2023 — was initially very positive. He even wrote her a recommendation for a leadership program without her asking in November that year, she states in her suit.
Souring relationship
However, by early 2024, circumstances had taken a turn for the worse, the lawsuit says.
In February that year, university leadership attempted to move the Office for Equal Opportunity out of her portfolio, according to her lawsuit. Members of the president’s cabinet also excluded Settles-Tidwell from the Black Honors College leadership team even though she had written the original proposal for it, she states in the suit, and later added her to the advisory council after community members asked Wood about her absence. She was “restricted” from her authority to hire staff for her division and direct its programming, her lawsuit says, and excluded from the budget planning process. Compared with her peers’ minimum 2.5% merit pay raise that year, she only received a 1.5% increase, the complaint states.
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In a March email that year, Wood told Settles-Tidwell her leadership was “perceived as not effective” and “berated her in front of cabinet-level peers,” the lawsuit says. When she requested a meeting to discuss the email, she did not receive a response, her lawsuit states.
Finally, on April 11, 2024, due to “continuous, disparate and adverse actions that created a hostile working environment,” she felt she had no other choice and submitted her letter of resignation. There was no attempt from the leadership to discuss her resignation, Settles-Tidwell states in her suit.
A few days later, Wood sent her a text sharing his disappointment and “differential expectation of her based on her protected classification as a Black woman of his ‘community,’” the lawsuit says. On a group text with two other colleagues, he asked Settles-Tidwell not to attend any more cabinet meetings, per the lawsuit.
The same day that she said she resigned, President Wood publicly announced Settles-Tidwell’s resignation effective May 1, 2024. In his message to the campus community, he called her a “strategic thinker” who was “strongly committed to student success and equity in education.”
In that statement, Wood also announced that Michael Nguyen would jump from his role as executive director for the office of cultural transformation to fill Settles-Tidwell’s shoes while the campus engaged in a national search to fill the position permanently. Nguyen continues to serve in that role.
A farewell letter and a book
In May that year, Settles-Tidwell sent a farewell letter to the student newspaper The State Hornet in which she thanked the Sacramento State community for partnering with her on the mission to transform the campus into an antiracism and inclusive one that was unafraid to ask tough questions.
“Words cannot accurately express the complexity in my decision to choose to leave this park-like campus environment and this amazing community at this time,” Settles-Tidwell said in the letter. “As you can imagine, some things must remain unstated to protect the innocent and the guilty. Therefore, I will say this, at this stage in my career, and as a seasoned Black woman in leadership, modeling self-respect, integrity, self-preservation and ethics are acts of the greatest activism.”
A month later, Settles-Tidwell launched a book titled “Unscathed: A Harm Reduction Strategy for Women of Color in the Workplace.” In the book’s blurb, she writes that women of color and “women for social justice” who held leadership positions experienced high rates of “institutionally sanctioned violence, impostor syndrome, and work-induced stress.” Drawing on her personal experiences, the book sought to give women of color a playbook to navigate “workplace political landmines” with a “renewed sense of confidence.”
In an interview in March 2025, Settles-Tidwell said she decided to write the book because she had begun to see a pattern of institutional violence against African American women in particular and women of color in general.
“In the same moment, it was happening to me and I recognized it,” she said.
When Antoinette Candia-Bailey, a Black woman who served as vice president at Missouri’s Lincoln University, died by suicide in January 2024, Settles-Tidwell said she saw herself in Candia-Bailey.
“I said I do not want to go down that pathway of feeling like I need to take my life,” Settles-Tidwell said in the interview. “And I’m not going to allow someone to take my stellar 32-year career. But what I am going to do is talk about people being unharmed and speak life into women to let them know that someone is justifying and verifying what they are experiencing. And so, I wrote the book in four weeks.”
What next?
Now, to compensate her for her alleged loss of income and the emotional and physical stress she said she endured, Settles-Tidwell is seeking damages of an undefined amount through her lawsuit.
Meanwhile, she is running a consulting organization called Set Up for Success that aims to build the capacity of leaders to thrive in an “ever-evolving educational, social and political landscape,” according to her LinkedIn profile.
And Sacramento State, which has denied all allegations, is getting ready to prove its side of the story in court. The first fight is the issue of transferring the case from Los Angeles County — where the CSU board sits — and into the Sacramento County Superior Court where they say most relevant witnesses reside.
The parties in the lawsuit will come together for a case management conference set for June 24 followed by a hearing on the motion to transfer the case on Sept. 8.
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