SUFFOLK CLOSEUP
By Karl Grossman
Unflattering light has been cast in recent times on the shutdown of what had been a major private college in Suffolk County: Dowling College. Meanwhile, there have been developments involving a main figure at another private college in Suffolk that closed: Southampton College.
Dowling was the first four-year college in Suffolk County when it began operations in 1959 as Adelphi-Suffolk College in a former public school building, “Old 88,” in Sayville. In 1968, after a donation of more than $3 million by real estate investor Robert W. Dowling, it was spun off from Nassau County-based Adelphi and renamed Dowling College.
I know it well having been a student at Adelphi-Suffolk in 1961 and 1962 during which I launched and was editor of the first newspaper at a four-year college in Suffolk which I named The New Voice. Decades later I would teach journalism at Dowling as an adjunct professor.
Dowling had much going for it. In 1963, as Adelphi-Suffolk, it moved to Oakdale with the former mansion of William K. Vanderbilt the centerpiece of its campus along the Connetquot River. Its faculty was terrific—and included my all-time favorite professor, the late Dr. Charles Raebeck, a brilliant teacher. With small classes, it billed itself as “The Personal College.” Nevertheless, in 2016 Dowling went bankrupt and shut down.
A 92-page lawsuit charging “negligence” was recently filed in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court on behalf of Dowling creditors. The lawsuit alleges years of “waste, mismanagement and breach of fiduciary duty.” It seeks $50 million in damages to pay creditors.
Dowling, it states, launched a second campus at Calabro Airport in Shirley as an aviation school “although it was obvious that Dowling could not sustain two campuses.” Dowling’s trustees “never streamlined Dowling’s operations, never underwent any significant self-examination to improve Dowling’s academic or support services, and never directed Dowling’s available resources toward selected programs intended to enhance Dowling’s success.” It charges the trustees “accepted the cockeyed optimism of their presidential hires and continued to operate Dowling as if its problems would simply disappear.”
As for presidents, Dowling had quite a number, at one point four in four years. They included Robert Gaffney, a former FBI agent, Suffolk County executive and state assemblyman. And there was Scott Rudolph, a trustee switched to being the college’s president although, says the lawsuit, he was “potentially the only college president in the United States who had not graduated from college.”
There’s been a “tentative settlement” of the lawsuit, Newsday has just reported, “that would nix a public airing of the institution’s 2016 bankruptcy and closure.”
I knew Southampton College well, too, serving as an adjunct journalism professor at it for 25 years, until it was closed by Long Island University in 2005. Opened in 1963, it was a fine teaching institution.
A key figure in Southampton’s last two decades was Robert F.X. Sillerman who became its chancellor in 1993. Mr. Sillerman “had amassed a huge fortune in the radio business by buying poorly performing stations, improving their management, and then selling them at a considerable profit,” notes Dr. John A. Strong, long-time Southampton history professor, in his excellent book, “Running on Empty, The Rise and Fall of Southampton College, 1963-2005.”
Mr. Sillerman had no background in education. He contributed millions of dollars to keep the college going. Still, his push to establish “a new curriculum with an emphasis on innovative interdisciplinary courses” did not help. As a professor, I believe strongly in interdisciplinary education—not compartmentalizing academic areas but integrating them.
But most Southampton students preferred specific disciplines: English or art or business and so forth. The Strong book relates Professor Robert Pattison, long chair of its Humanities Department, dismissing Mr. Sillerman “as someone who may have read an article on interdisciplinary education in a Brandeis alumni magazine or had perhaps seen a program on PBS.” Still, Mr. Sillerman kept pushing this “core” concept declaring it would “revolutionize and redefine a liberal arts and sciences education in the 21st Century.” Southampton College didn’t make it far into the 2lst Century. And Mr. Sillerman’s personal fall in recent times was as extreme—from being a billionaire to corporate bankruptcy.
As Newsday reported last month, “A onetime billionaire from Southampton has agreed never again to serve as an officer or director of a public company.” This was in settlement of a securities-fraud case brought by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Mr. Sillerman’s SFX Entertainment went into bankruptcy in 2016. He has sold his waterfront estate and other properties in Southampton and moved to New Hampshire. As an article in Forbes magazine put it, his “blueprint to take over the electronic dance music world is in shambles, the result of poor management, suspect financial planning and a certain hubris…”
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.