From Southampton College to Stony Brook University, Marine Science Has Led the Way

This three-part series will examine the history of the Shinnecock Hills campus, its current status as the Southampton campus of Stony Brook University, and its future. Part I this week focuses on the history as Southampton College under Long Island University.

Southampton College was still a tiny liberal arts college of little particular note — other than it sat at the gateway to “The Hamptons” — when a handful of marine science professors put it on the national map.

Today, the undergraduate marine science students and professors at Stony Brook University play an integral role in pioneering scientific discoveries that have had impacts on environmental science throughout the world.

Within just a handful of years after establishing the college’s undergraduate marine science program, led by John “Ral” Welker and William Burke, the school had become widely recognized as one of the top such programs in the country. It was the biggest draw to the tiny seaside campus — accounting for as much as 60 percent of most incoming classes.

“We used to say that if a student anywhere in the country was going to major in marine science, they had to at least look at us,” recalled Tim Bishop, who started working at Southampton College as an admissions counselor in 1978 and rose to be the college’s provost.

“Ral Welker was like The Godfather. He really personified the whole program and the college’s commitment to it. And he was aided by our access to this incredible natural laboratory: We had two bays, a barrier beach, tidal inlets, and ponds and marshes that our students could study in a hands-on way — and Ral made sure they did. That was the anchor of his vision when he started the program and what really set it apart.”

It was still relatively rare at the time for a college to even have an undergraduate study program dedicated to marine science, and even rarer still for it to quickly be as robust as the one in Shinnecock Hills became, thanks largely to its dedicated and talented faculty, and its perch in the saddle between Shinnecock and Peconic Bay and the region’s marine-rich environment and history. Where other schools’ marine science students often had to drive hours to do field research, Long Island University’s only had to walk five minutes down the hill from their dorms.

Early on, Welker, who died in 2012, put an emphasis on using the undergraduate program to teach students not just the book learning of marine science, but also, through courses like “Marine Operations and Research,” the technical, in-the-field skills they would need to move on to graduate and doctorate programs and careers in marine science. From scuba diving and gathering water samples to seining and trawling for marine creatures in an estuary, the program became known for producing students with the skills to work in advanced research programs on day one.

“Ral set it up with this focus on experiential education — getting out in the field,” recalled Stephen Tettelbach, who taught marine science at Southampton College from 1986 to 2005. “For me, it was a dream place to work. It was small, and you got to know the kids really well. And you had all these programs set up for real world, hands-on education.

“I taught a tropical marine biology course. We had six weeks between the fall and winter semesters, so we’d take students to study coral reef ecology in the South Pacific for a month. Academically, the course was really strong, and we’d do a ton of scuba diving and field research and give lectures on blackboards hanging from palm trees. It was a dream come true.”

By the 1980s, some of the program’s faculty were starting to do the sort of research projects in conjunction with their teaching that is more typical of graduate programs and research universities. Tettelbach was among the first, in the wake of the devastation of the Peconic bay scallop and clam stocks by the first “brown tide” blooms in 1985, to use the school’s undergraduate students in pioneering research.

“I easily had 50 students who worked directly on those studies of scallops and hard clams in the early days of the scallop restoration,” said Tettelbach, who would go on to lead the Bay Scallop Restoration Program for Long Island University and the Cornell Cooperative Extension. “We made some very important discoveries along the way. We did thousands of dives, so we got to see and know the bay quite well. We watched the disappearance of eelgrass. And many of those students have now gone on to careers at the [New York State Department of Environmental Conservation] or the local towns or research at Stony Brook, and they’ve brought all that local knowledge with them.”

When Stony Brook University took over the Southampton College campus from Long Island University, it brought with it both an influx of funding and the expectations of a large university that its professors would lead and publish independent research — and the Southampton campus became the home base for groundbreaking environmental discoveries.

Tettelbach moved to Long Island University’s C.W. Post campus, but three of Southampton College’s top marine faculty — Christopher Gobler, Brad Peterson and Joe Warren — made the move to the university and embraced the new levels of expectations it brought with it.

“Stony Brook is an R1 university, and if you are on faculty there, you are expected to be bringing in research grants, publish several times a year, support graduate students and establish yourself as an international scientist, which were goals that I had and others at Southampton had already,” Gobler said. “And Stony Brook is an institution that has a medical school and chemistry department and the ability to collaborate with faculty and scientists and their instrumentation. From the very first semester, I was spending time on the main campus and discovering other departments. That in and of itself opens a whole world.”

With state funding secured by State Assemblyman Fred W. Thiele Jr. and then-State Senator Kenneth P. LaValle, the university built a new $10 million, state-of-the-art marine science lab building on the site of the first marine center.

“There’s fin fish species and crabs and crustaceans — we’re cultivating every bivalve that you can think of, from larval to adult — and we bring in sea grasses and can experiment on the interactions of all these species and how environmental conditions affect them — and it’s all possible because of that lab,” Gobler said. “It’s generated some data sets that have transformed, literally, the way the planet thinks about some environmental conditions.”

Led by Gobler and Peterson, in particular, student research teams have generated the data integral to discoveries that have had worldwide implications in the understanding of harmful algae blooms, ocean acidification and how the warming climate is impacting estuaries and marine species.

Chris Paparo is an alum of the Southampton College marine program and is now the manager of the Southampton Marine Station, as the Stony Brook marine laboratory is known, as well as a naturalist who spearheads much of the university’s marine science outreach to local communities.

“When I started 10 years ago, we had a few hundred students come through our research program. Now, it’s 1,500, and we do a summer oceanography course for high school students and other schools that is full every year,” Paparo said. “Classes are limited by the size of the boats — how many schools can say that — so we’ve had to expand to second lab sessions.

“They are seining, they’re trawling, they’re diving,” he continued. “We have three dive classes: intro to scuba, scientific diving and the tropical class in Jamaica where they do research on a coral reef. Our students are well boiled into the research world by the time they leave undergrad.”

And the program is still looking for new horizons — and over them. The burgeoning offshore wind industry has introduced a new frontier of concern for the marine environment and the need for data sets about how the ocean is changing. The marine program is looking at bigger vessels to carry its students beyond the near-shore environments they ply now, Paparo said.

While the campus as a whole is still lightly used by Stony Brook, the university sees the Southampton outpost continuing its tradition as a gem in the crown of marine science training throughout the region and the world. The university’s provost, Carl Lejuez, says he thinks the absorption of Southampton College undergraduate program into the university’s School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences and other programs has been “a true success story,” and a perfect merging of place and need.

“It’s an authentic place — the modern research labs, the classrooms that tie into it, the researchers doing the work with their students on things that are having real impacts on the community they are in, and showing students firsthand how they can build their research and have it mean something,” Lejuez said. “Any time you can really merge the value of a place with the goals of a discipline, that’s when you have something that is going to really work well for students.”