THE SAG HARBOR EXPRESS
ISSUE DATE: 11/02/06 November 2006

At Stony Brook/Southampton Campus, a New Dean and a New Direction

By Beth Young

Martin Schoonen has been working for Stony Brook University for 17 years, and for the next two years, he's been charged with the tremendous task of bringing life to the university's new campus where Southampton College used to stand.

Schoonen, whose days are filled with the minutiae of fixing dorms and putting together a curriculum, took time between meetings last week to share some of his vision for the next two years with The Express.

The curriculum that has been touted at the new campus is one that focuses on the concept of sustainability, but it won't be until next fall that that curriculum is actually implemented at the school. This spring, a number of graduate and continuing education programs, including a nursing program, are scheduled to begin with a limited number of classes.

For Schoonen, sustainability is not just a catch phrase to define campus life, but the central focus of a series of innovative classes that will be integrated into a place that honors green technology, the agricultural nature of the East End and the importance of interdisciplinary science in solving the major environmental challenges facing the world today.

"There won't be a chemistry major. The things we bring out there will be new innovative majors," he said last week. Campuses devoted to sustainability have become a trend nationwide, and Stony Brook University President Shirley Strum Kenny has long been a believer in this innovative new way of educating students.

Where those students will eventually get jobs is equally innovative.

"You can think about it on different levels," said Schoonen. "We'll train people to work for the U.N., for UNESCO, or to work somewhere in the world in developing countries, and we'll train people to work in the planning department of a town like Southampton."

Before the students can be trained, though, the campus will need a major overhaul, the details of which have still not been worked out.

"We're now selecting a firm to develop a master plan and do a study of the state of the buildings and needs," he said. "It's all to be determined over the course of the next 18 months."

Schoonen is planning to impress on the firm that is hired that it use innovative sustainable architectural designs.

"If you develop a theme like that you have to walk the talk," he said. "The buildings would have to be energy efficient and meet or exceed architectural standards - including integrating efficient boilers and solar power."

Until this year, Schoonen had been a geochemistry professor and an associate vice president for research at the Stony Brook campus. He's been appointed the interim dean at the Southampton campus for two years, while a national search for a permanent dean of the campus is conducted.

Though Schoonen wants to create research opportunities for students at Southampton, he stressed that the campus won't have the engineering or heavy science with which Stony Brook has made a name for itself.

Three research faculty are now working in the marine science department. Currently, 150 students from Stony Brook are bused in to take classes at the marine science center. That center has been under operation by Stony Brook since last fall, complementing an already complete marine science program at the main campus, which does not have the luxury of access to the waterfront.

None of the students on campus now can use the dorms, which aren't up to fire code, and that's one of the first priorities at the school this year.

"We could have 800 beds available [next fall] but that's not going to happen," said Schoonen. "We're hoping to have 200 available by August of next year."

In the fall of 2007, he hopes to have 400 students on campus beginning to integrate their lives into the program. Those students will pay $5,574 in tuition per year, which is the same tuition rate as Stony Brook.

The school still needs to plan how it will house next summer's Writer's Conference, which was held at the Stony Brook campus this year because the state had not yet gotten the keys to the new campus.

Schoonen is asking community members who are concerned about the future of the college to become involved with the town's ad-hoc committee devoted to helping integrate the college's presence into the community. He hopes that the new campus will provide interns to serve the community, which had long been a strength of the Long Island University campus at the site.