DAN'S PAPERS, May 8, 2009 Page 34 www.danshamptons.com
College
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ited 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 sixmonth 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 aca-
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demic 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.)