Dan's Papers - May 8, 2009 - Look What's Happening!

Much of the effort of this newspaper during the last five years has been aimed at coaxing the State University system to take over what had become the crumbling wreck of the Southampton campus of Long Island University.

LIU, out of money and ideas, was about to abandon the 200-hundred acre Southampton campus upon which, with high hopes in a previous era, it had built nearly 40 brick buildings to house 1,500 students. Its new and last idea, now, was to sell the failed school to a real estate developer. Everything would be bulldozed down. There would be 20 residences, all with ocean views. The life and times of this school, whose population represented a significant component of the economy of Southampton Village, would be no more.

Of course, this newspaper was only one among many who fought and banged the drum to get SUNY to come in and take this mess over. Among the many leaders who led this effort were Congressman Tim Bishop, who had been the provost of the old college, State Assemblyman Fred Thiele, State Senator Ken LaValle and so many civic, business and media leaders I could not possibly name them all.

The person everyone wanted to persuade was Shirley Strum Kenny, the longtime chancellor of the State University of Stony Brook, a 15,000-student university campus 50 miles to our west. Kenny needed no persuading. But she needed to get all her ducks in a row to persuade the State of New York to fund the effort. It would cost a $100 million or more.

Well, as I am sure you know, there is no housing development. One and a half years ago, the sale was made. LIU was gone, its leaders tarred and feathered and tied to an outbound railroad train. And in came the people from Stony Brook, filled with ideas and energy and the means to make them come true. Construction crews were on the campus as they cut the ribbon.

Last Tuesday, for two hours, I was given a tour of the premises by officials from the school. The tour would end with my meeting the new dean, Mary C. Pearl, in her office for lunch. Then I would go home.

To say what has happened here is beyond my wildest dreams would be an understatement. The impact this place is going to have on the Hamptons is extraordinary. I almost cried with joy when I completed this tour. For the rest of this article, I willll tell you what I saw. SUNY has hit the ground running. The new freshman class will arrive in just five months. The school will be ready.

Our first stop was the huge, but never completed, college library. Construction on it had begun four years ago by LIU. And then it was abandoned.

Whatever LIU had intended to do has been torn out. The new college started the inside over, and when I toured it with a hardhat, here at the end of April, there were probably 60 workmen inside, putting together what the new college had in mind at a sort of fast trot. The building will be done before summer is out.

I was walked through the college by construction project manager, Lou Spero. The first floor features an enormous classroom 40 by 80 feet, which, using moving partitions, can be divided into either two or three smaller classrooms. There is a computer room and some back offices.

On the second floor, there is the entry from the college lawn, a glass lobby, a café, reception, and behind it, a big open study area with a high ceiling and a balcony running above it along one long wall. This third floor balcony is adjacent to a lounge, more classrooms, offices and conferences rooms for faculty. Books and reference? This is the 21st century. Other than the private papers from the Pollock-Krasner House in East Hampton and other important collections, all will be accesse by computer, with Stony Brook's enormous 1 million-book library 50 miles away.

In front of this big library was the old original library for LIU that was now being replaced. It has been remodeled and is open and functioning as Atlantic Hall. It is the student resources center and inside there is the dean of students, a counseling and planning center, career services, health services and other student facilities.

We went to the Avram Theatre, where I met Leonard Ziembiewicz, the theatre manager, and Mark Fasanella, the gallery curator. The entire 300-seat theatre has been completely remodeled. Where there was cinderblock, there is now polished wood. Where there were antiquated audiovisual lighting with projection done from a booth, there is still the booth, but the heart of the operation now is a state-of-the-art remote controlled projection computer that hangs over the audience from the high ceiling. It consists of two digital 4000 lumen video projectors, which create one extremely sharp and bright image on the big silver screen that can lower from the top of the stage. The stage itself and back stage are all new and shortly there will begin summer theatre - there will be a troupe in residence - and then all sorts of performances and shows almost every night during the school year, including a literature conference, Pianofest, a lecture series (climate change and marine science prominently) a Southampton children's literature playwriting studio (with a grade school in Southampton), an ensemble studio theatre group doing new works, film festivals and the annual Writer's Conference, held every summer for the past six years, one of the few bright spots created for this school by LIU.

The lobby gallery has been redone. There is a new gallery now, created just off it. All the classrooms are refurbished and in the theatre itself, the old seating is gone. Now there are 300 new seats. There is also a new stage.

The Student Center is another surprise. Two years ago, the directors of a play I wrote held a rehearsal in this filthy, dimly lit, loud, cinderblock establishment offering hamburgers and hot dogs. It has been completely remodeled, and the overriding feeling in it now is openness, glass, light, foliage and wood. Gone are the hot dogs and chips. Now the cafeteria steam tables, overseen by a chef with a degree from the Culinary Institute, produces wraps, hummus, freshly baked goods and smoothies.

Welcome to the world of healthy food and green recycling. (What look like disposable plastic knives, forks and spoons were in fact spudware, reusable utensils made from potatoes.)

A lounge area featured a Ping-Pong table, a pool table, a TV and some sofas. Behind one glass wall is the wellness center, weights and barbells and exercise machines. Behind another glass wall is the bookstore. The school is pondering sweatshirts that might read Stony Brook Southampton, its new name.

Everything new being built is "green." We visited a greenhouse, all new, where the flowers and plants grown will be shortly put around the property. Fans cool the place. An overhead wind powered propeller provides power. A recycled wood pellet furnace provides heat.

Outside, a baseball field built to major league specifications is being constructed. Bulldozers were spreading out the baseline dirt as we watched. The new field will be for the students nine months a year and in the summer the site of the new semi-pro baseball league team from Southampton, the Southampton Breakers. Other fields are set up for softball, soccer and lacrosse.

The new dean, appointed March 9 after a six-month search, is Mary C. Pearl, an energetic young woman who for the last 15 years has built the non-profit Wildlife Trust from an office of three clerks and herself into a global organization with projects in 20 countries.

Lunch was wraps and black bean salad and what we thought was iced tea, but which, when sipped, turned out to be diet Coke. Bah! We opted for a pitcher of ice water. That will be corrected.

The entire concept for this school, as envisioned by Kenny, is environmental studies, and Pearl has been charged with the job of making it a reality. There had been 300 students on campus during the transition year, last year. This September there will be 500 new students. "President Obama is changing the direction of the country," Pearl told me. "There will be thousands of green jobs. We will be training students to fill those jobs."

The college is not being organized around academic departments. It is being organized around majors. In the undergraduate school, there are to be people majoring in marine science, ecosystems and human impact (one could go on to be an environmental lawyer, Pearl said,) sustainability (nutrition, social science and art), coastal environmental science, environmental humanities, marine vertebrate biology and environmental design, policy and planning. There will also be a B.S. degree offered in business management with a specialization in sustainable business.

Studies in marine science were the greatest strength of the old LIU campus. But there was also a strong literary and writing component. At the new Stony Brook Southampton, in addition to the annual Writers' Conference, there will be a master degree in writing and fine arts.

There are only a few places in the country that offer such an array of green courses of study. Southampton, which had such trouble getting itself a proper name under the LIU regime, could properly be called an institute, if the powers that be had a mind to call it that. But it will remain Stony Brook Southampton.

I told Pearl the story of President Harry Marmion's attempts with the LIU board in Brooklyn to get Southampton a proper name 15 years ago. When Marmion was hired, the place was called the Southampton Campus of LIU. Marmion wanted to have it renamed Southampton College of LIU. He proposed it to the wealthy Gold Coast millionaires who controlled LIU from its headquarter offices in Brooklyn, and they thought him uppity and threatened to fire him. This was just one of their four campuses after all. Some called it a twig. Brooklyn suggested it be called the Southampton Center of LIU as a compromise. Marmion told them this was not a shopping mall. Compromise having not been reached and the new name Southampton Center put on all the stationery, they then demoted him from president to chancellor. Then they fired him. After that, things went downhill. If you needed a roll of toilet paper, a pencil pusher in Brooklyn had to approve. Soon, all the steam went out of the Southampton Center of LIU.

I thought it a fair story to tell an incoming leader. But I could sure see that everybody was on the same page this time around. And the energy everywhere on the campus was contagious.

What can I say? When Pearl told me that the County Health Department had approved the sewage plant that they will shortly build - something that Marmion could never get LIU to agree to - she said that actually they are going to build both the regular sewage plant, and in addition, a SECOND sewage plant, entirely green and biodegradable.

"We'll build both, get licensed with the first one, then try the other and, if they don't like it, we'll go back to the first. But we think they will like the new environmental plant. Stony Brook Southampton will be a model for the future. And we will teach those to tell others to spread the word."

Could any of this have turned out better?

The dedication of the newly refurbished college windmill will take place on June 14.

(Tragically, Lou Spero was in a fatal car accident the day after this tour. See article, page 18.)