SUFFOLK CLOSEUP
By Karl Grossman
The two top figures in higher education in Suffolk County—Samuel L. Stanley, Jr., president of Stony Brook University and Dr. Shaun McKay, president of Suffolk County Community College—are leaving.
Dr. Stanley was for a decade at the helm at Stony Brook, one of SUNY’s four university centers (the others are at Albany, Buffalo and Binghamton) with 25,000 undergraduate and graduate students. Dr. Stanley will on August 1 be taking a post as president of Michigan State University in Lansing. It has 50,000 students and its president resigned last year after a sex-abuse scandal involving the campus doctor Larry Nassar’s molestation of female university athletes for which he was convicted and sentenced to from 40 to (a whopping) 175 years in prison.
Dr. McKay, at the top of Suffolk County Community College also for a decade, tendered his resignation in May. Suffolk Community has three campuses (in Selden, Riverhead and Brentwood) and 26,000 full and part-time students. On its website, it describes itself as the “largest community college in the State University of New York system. SCCC is a comprehensive publicly-supported, two-year, open enrollment institution.” Dr. McKay and the college are not revealing his reasons for leaving but, it was learned, they involve personal issues.
Dr. Stanley in his tenure picked up on the early focus of Stony Brook presidents having the school stress science and research, although the state’s original plan under then Governor Nelson Rockefeller—a pivotal figure in developing the SUNY system—was for Stony Brook to be “the Berkeley of the East.” It was to become a counterpart of the University of California, Berkeley, a well-rounded university center.
But under its early presidents, Dr. John S. Toll, a nuclear physicist; his successor, acting president T. Alexander Pond, also a nuclear physicist; and then Dr. John H. Marburger, III, a theoretical physicist, the overwhelming emphasis was on science and research.
Stony Brook ended up looking in many respects more like Caltech — the private California Institute of Technology — rather than a well-rounded institution like Berkeley.
A humanities-focused period came when Dr. Shirley Strum Kenny was Stony Brook’s president. Starting out as an English professor, she became chair of the English department, then provost of the University of Maryland’s College of Arts & Humanities, and then president of Queens College. During her tenure at Stony Brook from 1994 to 2009, Dr. Kenny tried to change Stony Brook’s culture and have it emphasize far more teaching and the needs of students. She had no choice. She told me that the Middle States Commission on Higher Education threatened to lift Stony Brook’s accreditation unless it paid greater attention to teaching and students rather than its activities dominated by research.
Dr. Kenny was succeeded by Dr. Stanley, who had been vice chancellor for research at Washington University in St. Louis. An M.D. long involved in research, he returned Stony Brook to focusing on science and research.
A most destructive act by Dr. Stanley, one of his first actions when he became president of Stony Brook, was ordering the virtual closing of the Stony Brook Southampton campus, founded as a teaching institution emphasizing the environment and sustainability.
In recent years under Dr. Stanley, Stony Brook suspended student admissions into its theatre arts, comparative literature and cinema arts departments, part of a series of cuts in liberal arts. In 2017, hundreds of students joined in a demonstration on campus — a “March for the Humanities” — that culminated with a sit-in.
Meanwhile, there has been, slowly, some more use made of the Stony Brook Southampton campus and plans are underway for the now Stony Brook-affiliated Southampton Hospital to move to the campus with linked health sciences programs.
Stony Brook University was established in 1962.
Suffolk County Community College was established in 1959. At the start of 2019, the trustees of the college directed Dr. McKay to take a paid leave of absence from his post. This came after Dr. McKay spent 77 days on medical leave in 2018 and when he returned sought a 10-year contract extension. In announcing Dr. McKay’s “voluntary resignation” as president, Suffolk Community in a statement quoted Theresa Sanders, chair of its board of trustees, as saying “there were no findings of wrongdoing, incapacity, or misconduct on the part of Dr. McKay.”
According to Newsday, “potential successors” to Dr. McKay include former Congressman Tim Bishop of Southampton who since losing a re-election bid became a professor and is now also the head of the Center for Community Solutions at St. Joseph’s College in Patchogue, and State Senator Kenneth LaValle of Port Jefferson. Mr. LaValle, an educator who subsequently received a law degree, was first elected to the Senate in 1976 to represent a district that encompasses most of eastern Suffolk. When Republicans controlled the Senate, he was chairman of its Higher Education Committee.
Karl Grossman is a veteran investigative reporter and columnist, the winner of numerous awards for his work and a member of the L.I. Journalism Hall of Fame. He is a professor of journalism at SUNY/College at Old Westbury and the author of six books.