Stony Brook University celebrates 50 years

Celebrating 50 Years: A Message from President Shirley Strum Kenny

Shirley Strum Kenny Time flies. Fifty years ago, 148 students came to the William R. Coe estate in Oyster Bay as the trailblazers for the new State University College on Long Island, or SUCOLI — later to become SUNY Long Island Center, later still SUNY Stony Brook, and now Stony Brook University.

And where have we come in those 50 years?

From a teachers' college to a member of AAU, the top 62 research universities in North America
From a total enrollment of 148 to 23,300
From a freshman class of 148 to 2,700
From a freshman applications pool of 365 to 24,000
From 14 faculty to 2,000
From an operating budget of $2.7 million to $1.8 billion
From geodesic domes to the Centers for Molecular Medicine
From the horse stables to up-to-date campus housing for almost 9,000 students, including many new apartments, to be increased by 770 more beds in the next two years
From locating near Brookhaven National Lab to managing the Lab
From a few borrowed buildings in Oyster Bay to a university 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.

The fact is, Stony Brook really is "red hot." You can see it in just about every aspect of campus life:

You can see it in the numbers of applicants just mentioned; you can see it in the growing number of out-of-state freshmen, which has doubled in the last three years.

You can see it in the fact that we are regularly cited, along with Harvard, Yale, MIT, Berkeley, Stanford, and some others, as one of the top institutions for undergraduate research.

You can see it in the growth of our research expenditures, from $878,000 in 1965 (the first year for which we have figures) to $83 million in 1994 to $184 million in 2007, the most federal dollars of any institution in SUNY.

You can see it in the number of Stony Brook doctors listed by New York magazine as the Best Doctors in New York — 24 this year.

Inset quote You can see it in our medical miracles, year after year, the successful delivery of sextuplets, the reattachment of a workman's two severed hands, the delivery of triplets immediately followed by open heart surgery for the mother, the saving of a little boy whose head had been run over by an SUV-and day after day other miracles that are not reported in the press.

You can see it in the three Nobel Prize winners connected to Stony Brook, the Fields medalist, winners of United States Presidential medals, MacArthur genius awards, members of the Academies and the Royal Society, most recently Richard Leakey, who became a Fellow of the Royal Society this year. You can see it in our new state-of-the-art computer, one of the five fastest outside the Defense arsenal, located at Brookhaven National Lab.

You can see it in our three incubators and our new 246-acre Research and Development Park, where a 100,000 square foot Center of Excellence in Wireless and Information Technology is in construction and the Center for Advanced Energy is in design.

You can see it in our brand new School of Journalism, the first in SUNY, with its Newsroom of the Future and remarkable feat of raising $2.25 million dollars in its first year.

You can see it in the new Southampton campus, and the 191 students this year with their trail-blazing spirit, an echo of the 148 that came to Oyster Bay 50 years ago.

You can see it in the increasing importance of athletics on this campus, with football, soccer, and lacrosse games now filling the Kenneth P. LaValle Stadium. We are beginning to have winning teams, such as our women's lacrosse team championship winners. And yes, in the Marching Band, new last year and already 80 strong.

You can certainly see it in the quality of the outstanding new faculty who have joined us this year-the largest influx of faculty in many years.

And in our alums, who include many distinguished scientists, doctors, lawyers, CEOs, investors, professors, teachers, writers, artists, inventors, performers, journalists, ambassadors, statesmen, and winners of such awards as the Pulitzer and the Oscar.

It has truly been an amazing 50 years. Now our 50th anniversary provides us the perfect opportunity to look ahead.

When I came to Stony Brook, I said that to be a great national university, we must be a great local university. That is a truth that seemed far more controversial then than it does now. Our economic development responsibilities through research, educating the leaders of the future, and providing world-class health care to the citizens of Suffolk County is more important than ever. We must design the new products, develop ecological sustainability, find the cures, and create the arts that make Long Island a desirable and productive home to all its citizens.

inset quote At the same time, we must protect our nation through our interconnections with Brookhaven, our BioLevel 3 Lab, our work on sensors and material science and other engineering initiatives, sophisticated research for the public good. And we must continue to build our international initiatives, through outstanding research such as what we are doing in Kenya and Madagascar, through continuing to build relationships as we are doing in China and Korea and India, through our exchanges with great European and Asian universities-the planet is also our neighborhood now.

But we cannot oversimplify to believe that the world's ills will be solved by science and technology alone. The issues of sustainability, for example, are not just matters of biology and chemistry; protecting our planet will involve political science and economics and philosophy and psychology and the arts.

We must understand that interdisciplinarity in research and in education is the key to the future, that interuniversity research will increasingly be necessary to discover the answers to the big questions, that we must educate our students to live and prosper in a world of complexity and ambiguity. This year, with a host of public lectures, conferences and symposia, will be the perfect time to look at the long-range future of universities in general and particularly of Stony Brook University in as clearheaded and far-reaching and inventive ways as possible.

And from that point of view, this, our 50th anniversary year, is really the beginning.

The above is excerpted from remarks delivered by President Kenny at the Stony Brook University Convocation, September 19, 2007.