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Red Hot
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 past 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 $184 million in 2007, the most federal dollars of any institution in SUNY. You can see it in the number of patents, 710 patents worldwide over the past ten years. And in the royalties from Stony Brook inventions, some $137 million over the past ten years, about 95 percent of all SUNY royalties in that period, money that is reinvested in research on our campus.

You can see it in the role we play in economic development on Long Island. As the only research university on the Island, we have a special responsibility to connect with the business, cultural, and governmental needs of our population through research, incubation, collaborative ventures, and meeting the educational needs.

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.

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. And there will be more surgical miracles attributable to our remarkable new da Vinci robot, the only high-definition system on Long Island and in New York City, which will provide unprecedented surgical precision and greatly reduce the loss of blood, scarring, and the chance of infection.

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 under 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 in its first year.

And in our writing program at Southampton, with faculty like Frank McCourt, Billy Collins, Roger Rosenblatt, and Alan Alda.

You can see it in the six freshman colleges and the freshman seminars that make Stony Brook a leader in first-year education.

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

You can see it in the world-class programming at Staller Center, some of it provided by our own world-class faculty.

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 Red Hot Marching Band, new last year and already 80 strong.

You can see it in the creativity, artistic elegance, and engineering genius of the Roth Pond Regatta—the teamwork, often in adversity, and the dignity and decorum of our sailors as they abandon ship.
You can see it in the diversity of our students, graduate and undergraduate, and the strength and collaborative spirit of our religious ministries on campus, serving these diverse groups.

And you can see it in the five Habitat for Humanity houses and the volunteers who spent spring vacation helping to rebuild New Orleans. In the student volunteer ambulance corps and the Student Ambassadors. And in the fourth-year dental students who went to Madagascar to treat patients who had never seen a dentist, to pull hundreds of teeth that could not be saved, to repair those that could. They worked without electricity, without running water, without dentist’s chairs. Doctors from Stony Brook treated children there. And you can see it in world-class researchers like David Krause and Patricia Wright, who helped impoverished villages by making wells for clean water and building schools where there were none, for children who had never learned to read.

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 you can see it 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 it is time to think about where we are going. We begin with our third Five Year Plan, which started with six task forces, and has since been vetted by many groups, most recently including faculty, students, and staff at two Town Hall meetings this past fall. The plan lists 12 goals to be achieved in the next five years, and we will carefully monitor to make sure the goals are met on a timely basis. But that is a mere beginning.

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