Office of the President, Shirley Strum Kenny

Online commentaries from President Shirley Strum Kenny

SPEAKING OF ...
Our Fiftieth Anniversary

One of the most amazing facts about Stony Brook is that it has come so far so fast.

It began 50 years ago, when, on September 18, 1957, the first class was taught at the State University College on Long Island. Every printed record I’ve seen cites the opening date as September 17, but I know from Dr. Frank Erk, Professor Emeritus of Biochemistry, that the first class was taught on the 18th. He ought to know — he taught it.

SUCOLI was to be a college for teachers of math and science. There were 148 students, 14 faculty, and three administrators. The fledgling college was temporarily located at Planting Fields, in the magnificent Coe mansion. Francis Bonner, Professor Emeritus of Chemistry, describes it in his memoirs as “an authentic Tudor mansion, whose Great Hall includes a fireplace large enough, as one visitor presciently remarked, to roast a faculty member whole.”

Classes were taught in the ornately formal mansion, and the stables served as men’s dormitory space. Early on, geodesic domes were constructed to serve as classrooms.

Sixteen days after that first class, the world changed — Sputnik was launched by the Russians and the Space Age dawned. Immediately there were calls for more scientific research at universities and more graduate study of science. In 1960 Governor Nelson Rockefeller recommended that a major new public research university “to stand with the finest in the country” be built on Long Island. The shoe magnate Ward Melville provided 480 acres of land. SUCOLI changed both location and mission; on September 17, 1962, the Stony Brook campus opened with 780 students, including the first graduate students.

Those 50 years have been filled with drama and achievement. The drama included the building of the Bridge to Nowhere, the Tent City on the mall created in protest of graduate student stipends, and the infamous drug raid of January 17, 1968. Dr. Sidney Gelber, former Provost, in his history of the campus described the drug raid, which Time magazine called “the largest crackdown so far on drug users at any university”:

Following three months of undercover work by agents planted on the campus and disguised as hippies, a set of plans … filled a 107-page book entitled “Operation in Stony Brook.” … It was bolstered by 42 pages of dormitory maps.

… 198 Suffolk County policemen carrying guns … arrived on campus in a caravan of 68 police vehicles. They arrested 35 people, 24 of whom were students, and collected 10 pounds of marijuana, one pound of Hashish, some drug paraphernalia, and 2,000 pills, some of which turned out to be vitamins. …

So powerful were the images of this night, so well covered by the press, that the mythology of that raid lives on.

If the drama was intense in those early years, the achievements were even more remarkable. Our most profoundly influential appointment was Chen Ning Yang, who won the Nobel Prize in 1957 at the age of 35, and who left the Institute of Advanced Study at Princeton in 1966 to come to Stony Brook. He set the standard for excellence in research.

The institution was virtually built top down, starting with excellence in research and graduate study even before there was a firm undergraduate base on which to build. Only much later, after a warning from the Middle States accrediting agency, did the University declare special attention to the undergraduate experience.

The truly remarkable fact about Stony Brook was how quickly it grew from a brand new teacher’s college to one of the great research universities in the world, recognized as in the top 2 per cent by the London Times Higher Education Supplement and the Shanghai Higher Education Institute. All in just 50 years.

In those 50 years, we have:

Evolved from a teacher’s college to a member of AAU, the top 62 public and private research universities in North America
Opened the School of Medicine in 1970, and the Hospital in 1980
Grown from an enrollment of 148 to 23,300
Increased freshman applications from 365 to 24,000
Developed a remarkably diverse community with students from many ethnicities and from 107 other countries
Enlarged our faculty from 14 to 2,000
Increased the all-funds budget from $2.7 million to $1.8 billion
Left the stables for on-campus housing for almost 9,000 students, to increase by 770 beds in the next two years
First moved near Brookhaven National Lab, much later became co-managers of it
Risen from no athletic teams to Division I Athletics, and yes, even a red hot marching band
Become an international institution, with student programs and research sites around the globe
Departed the borrowed buildings in Oyster Bay for a multi-campus site comprising 222 buildings on 1,600 acres, including the Main Campus on both sides of Nicolls Road, the Veterans Home, the Manhattan site, the Research and Development Park, three incubators on campus and at Calverton, and the new Stony Brook Southampton campus.

Not bad for our first 50 years.

Shirley.Kenny@stonybrook.edu