“Our undergraduate education is enhanced by the fact that our students learn in a context of serious research; it is increasingly difficult to separate learning into discrete little boxes.”
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That newfound commitment to undergraduate education has certainly paid off. The most astonishing thing about our enrollment is that at the same time that it has grown by 36 percent, SAT scores have risen dramatically. Although we cannot compare data before 1996, the year the SATs were recentered, since then we have witnessed an increase of 128 points at the same time that our freshman class has grown by 1,050 students, or 60 percent. Let me repeat that: Although our Stony Brook freshman class has increased by 60 percent, from 1,750 to 2,800 students, our SAT scores have simultaneously increased by 128 points. Our applications have almost doubled since 1994—up 91 percent in 2008—to the highest number of any SUNY campus. Only 37 four-year institutions in the country had more applications in fall 2007 than Stony Brook; we had more applications than Stanford, Harvard, or Yale, among others. Out-of-state freshman enrollments have almost quadrupled from 117 to 424, or 15 percent of the freshman class, and added to upstate New York enrollments bring the total to 28 percent of all freshmen. This fact helps explain why the old canard that “no one is here on the weekend” is history. This campus is alive and well, all week and on the weekend. The only decreases we show—I report with pride—is in our percentage of applicants admitted, down from 55 percent in 1994 to 43 percent now; according to U.S. News & World Report, we tie with UC San Diego at 46th out of 260 doctoral granting institutions. And our diversity ranks very highly both in SUNY and nationally.
One of the best things about Stony Brook is those times when the graduate and undergraduate missions merge. One sees that these days in research projects that involve undergraduate researchers as well as graduate assistants, and learning is improved for both groups. Our undergraduate education is enhanced by the fact that our students learn in a context of serious research; it is increasingly difficult to separate learning into discrete little boxes.
And that, of course, is tied to the fact that learning, from the freshman experience to advanced research, occurs in interdisciplinary enterprises. Such an area as Biomedical Engineering, for example, thrives at Stony Brook because our campus hosts researchers in medicine, biology, engineering, and other scientific fields who can join together in applying their disciplines to problems. Our campus is blessed by the fact that our Health Sciences schools and Hospital are contiguous to the rest of campus rather than separated off. Given the interdisciplinary nature of research now, that proximity time and again provides us advantages other campuses don’t have. Applied research is enhanced by the fact that our Hospital is so closely linked to the rest of campus so that we truly can move science from the bench to the bedside. And increasingly those links extend further—for example, the Center for Medical Humanities, Compassionate Care, and Bioethics is linking with the social sciences and humanities for important new work.
Those interrelationships are what will distinguish Stony Brook in the years to come as a home to state-of-the-art research. They will make a profound difference in the education of our students, graduate and undergraduate, for the ability to think in interdisciplinary ways will be all-important. The Boyer Report emphasized interdisciplinarity as one of the Ten Ways to Improve Undergraduate Education, but if I were to chair Boyer Commission 2, I believe our top goal would be greater interdisciplinarity in learning. The transition from those of us whose Ph.D.s fit neatly into academic departments and the younger generation who will acquire knowledge through very different means never available to us will be one of the most interesting issues of today’s and tomorrow’s universities. It will affect every element from the classroom to the administrative structure.
Stony Brook is now engaged in an interdisciplinary experiment at Southampton, where the theme of sustainability is explored in every aspect, from the majors and courses to the decision-making process for campus life. Here at a new campus, unaffected by tradition and, in fact, creating its own traditions, faculty and students together will be able to explore new modes of learning constructed in the computer age to deal with contemporary issues, always within the context of the age-old values. Once again Stony Brook has that spirit of adventure and innovation that led to the birth and rapid ascent of our research university, a spirit reborn for a new time with new agendas.
Southampton provides a great location for faculty and students to immerse themselves in the very specific local ecological issues, both coastal and marine. Our School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences has just added the Institute for Ocean Conservation Science to tackle pressing threats to the marine ecosystem. The Stony Brook fleet has blossomed from the lowly Frump of years past to a group of 12 vessels, headed by our research vessel, appropriately named the Seawolf. We’ve come a long way by sea as well as by land.