Writing on the Walls: Southampton College Struggled Financially From the Outset

In the weeks before Southampton College first opened its doors for the fall semester in 1963, administrators and other staff members pitched in to help workers paint walls and lay floor tiles to complete the necessary renovations on the estate house at the Tucker Mill Inn. It would be renamed Southampton Hall and serve as the centerpiece of the new campus, housing the new school’s cafeteria, provost’s office and several classrooms.

That kind of hands-on approach was a hallmark of the perennially cash-strapped school for the remainder of its 42-year history as a satellite campus of Long Island University.

“If there was a problem that could be solved with hard work or ingenuity or skill, we were all over it,” said Tim Bishop, who worked at the college for three decades and served as provost from 1986 to 2002, before resigning to run successfully for Congress. “But if there was a problem that required money to solve it, we’d get nowhere.”

Long Island University, which itself had a troubled financial history and faced the prospects of being forced to close its own doors during both the Depression and World War II, finally pulled the plug on the East End’s only four-year college at the end of the 2005 academic year.

In making the announcement in 2004, LIU President David Steinberg cited a projected $12 million deficit for the school’s final academic year, which contributed to a total debt of $77 million run up by the school over its lifetime.

The college would find new life the following year when State Senator Kenneth P. LaValle and Assemblyman Fred W. Thiele Jr. brokered a deal by which Stony Brook University took over the campus, rechristening it Stony Brook Southampton.

But problems would endure, and today, the campus — with a limited curriculum, a skeleton staff and a limited number of students — remains on the brink, with Stony Brook’s long-term goal of transforming a portion of the approximately 82-acre site into a new regional hospital seemingly on hold.

Promising Beginnings

When LIU showed interest in opening a four-year college on the East End in the early 1960s, the idea was greeted enthusiastically by businessmen, politicians and educators, who had long championed the idea of offering a post-secondary education to local students.

LIU was not the first university to look eastward. Adelphi University, which successfully launched Dowling College in 1960, had also considered an East End campus but abandoned the idea in 1958 when its research concluded Southampton was too far east of Long Island’s population center to draw enough students.

More ominously for Southampton College’s later prospects was that Adelphi’s research also showed that members of the village’s wealthy summer colony were not particularly interested in helping to underwrite the cost of a local college.

“It was a lesson that the Long Island University administrators ignored over the decades as they fruitlessly pursued the illusion of a pot of gold somewhere in the estates along the Atlantic shore,” wrote retired history professor John A. Strong in his book “Running on Empty: The Rise and Fall of Southampton College, 1963-2005,” which chronicles the history of the school.

Despite the lack of money from deep-pocketed sources, a fundraising drive that relied largely on relatively small donations raised enough money for LIU to put down about half of the $325,000 asking price for the former Tucker Mill Inn property in Shinnecock Hills that would serve as the new school’s campus.

Initially, the number of students interested in attending was overwhelming. Southampton College had projected an initial enrollment of about 150 students, most of them commuters. Instead, that first fall, about 300 students enrolled — and about half needed lodging. That forced the school, which had yet to build any dormitories, to find temporary quarters for them in local motels that were empty in the offseason.

Early Successes

Dr. Edward Glanz, who came from Boston University, where he was chairman of the Psychology Department, served as Southampton’s first provost.

According to Strong’s book, Glanz had a vision for the new school that fit the New England college mold and would offer an interdisciplinary approach, with students exposed to both natural sciences and the humanities, while focusing on Southampton’s culture and geography.

With Shinnecock Bay a stone’s throw away, and the Atlantic Ocean not much farther, Glanz wanted to establish a marine science department and enlisted John “Ral” Welker from the University of Washington to lead it.

He also wanted to take advantage of the East End’s reputation as a haven for artists and writers to focus on the arts and humanities, and envisioned a school that would educate students with a social conscience.

“We were going to turn out kids who were social activists, who would try to make America a better society,” said Don Baker, who was hired by Glanz from Skidmore College, where he led the political science department and served as an advisor to the recently formed Peace Corps.

“It was like my City on the Hill,” Baker said of being enlisted to work at Southampton.

When he was hired, Baker said he was assured by LIU administrators that money would not be an issue. “After about a year, Glanz got a letter from the new president of LIU informing him, ‘All your money has got to come from the students. Period,’” Baker said. “That was the beginning of the end already — almost from the beginning.”

Strong said that throughout Southampton College’s history, LIU clung to “the illusion that wealthy people, if you somehow got next to them, would give you money for the college.”

He described the situation as a “Greek tragedy.”

“Everybody knew what was happening,” he said, “but they just kept doing it.”

But the college struck gold with marine science, a discipline that was not widely offered on the East Coast at the time it opened in 1965.

“That’s a big part of the story,” said Strong. “We got a few very imaginative, young science professors, who realized what an advantage they had over their colleagues at other universities. We had the ocean. We didn’t have the kind of equipment you needed — microscopes, boats and motors, and so forth — so our faculty was borrowing the stuff from local high school science classes that were getting new stuff.”

The marine science program attracted top-level students, Strong said, who likely would have gone to much more prestigious schools if they had been able to take the same type of program.

But by the late 1980s, schools up and down the East Coast were launching their own marine science programs. “They did not have used microscopes and battered boats — and they had money to give these students scholarships,” he said.

Because Southampton’s revenue came from tuition only, when the number of students enrolling in marine science began to decline, it spelled broader trouble, because marine science students in 1980 represented about 600 of the school’s total enrollment of about 1,300.

“It was a struggling, under-financed, under-resourced, facilities-poor institution, almost from the moment it opened,” Bishop said of LIU’s Southampton College. “It was built on the cheap, and then it was never properly maintained. We never really had the resources necessary to invest in new programs or make our programs better.”

A Losing Battle

The college had no savings and no endowment, Strong said. It couldn’t afford to improve the “spectacularly successful” programs it had. In short, “we couldn’t compete,” he said.

But even so, Southampton College had its share of success, Bishop said.

“Despite some real restrictions in terms of what we were capable of doing, given our resources, we did, in my opinion, a really great job of providing a first-rate education to students on a shoestring,” he said. “We had a great faculty and staff and lots of students that many schools would be proud to have.”

Besides developing a marine science program with a national reputation, the school also developed a well-regarded writing program and an award-winning writers conference, had successful internships, launched the Seamester program — where students spent the semester aboard a boat conducting research — and other innovative programs, Bishop said. The school also produced 34 Fulbright Scholars during its lifespan.

Bishop insisted that faculty and other staff members were completely dedicated to the success of the college and frequently went the extra mile.

“Take, for an example, all the time and the amount of work the faculty and staff put into pulling off those concerts,” Bishop said of the “All for the Sea” fundraisers. “It was an incredible amount of work for the well-being of the school. You don’t normally find tenured professors handing out T-shirts at a concert, but they did.”

Still, money was always an issue, and Bishop said Southampton almost always operated at a deficit, in part, because LIU insisted on aggressively paying off the capital debt it accrued at the school directly from its operating income.

“It prevented us from investing in the kinds of things we needed to build an academic program,” Bishop said. “We never had sufficient resources to market the college. Attracting students was tough, except during that period when students were trying to avoid the draft in the mid ’60s and early ’70s.”

Thiele, the state assemblyman, who graduated from Southampton College in 1976, said when he attended the school, it had about 1,000 students, evenly divided among locals and those who lived in the dorms, most of whom came from New York City and points west on Long Island.

“Being able to save on room and board and go to college close to home was a really good option,” said Thiele, who had started his college education at Cornell University but had to withdraw and take a job at a shoe store when both of his parents lost their jobs.

Although he said he enjoyed the experience and interest his professors took in his success, he said, “It was well established that the college was always the stepchild for LIU. It had its main campus in Brooklyn, C.W. Post — and then Southampton College.”

In spring 1993, the college named Robert F.X. Sillerman, a broadcasting magnate, its honorary chancellor. Sillerman pledged $4 million for a new library in 1999. Just a year later, he made an even larger gift of $15 million, with $5 million earmarked for the library and $10 million for scholarships.

But the writing was on the wall, and Sillerman balked at making further donations as the clock wound down.

“Through most of the ’90s, the campus was a money loser for LIU,” said Thiele. “There were various attempts to resolve that, but to no avail.”

Final Years

In autumn of 2001, James Larocca, who had been chairman of the Long Island Power Authority and held several other important positions in the private and public sectors, was appointed dean by LIU President David Steinberg.

“The place was in serious financial trouble,” Larocca said. “Everything I saw in my first quarter there told me it would not survive five years. It turns out I was wrong. It was hemorrhaging students, and, therefore, hemorrhaging revenue.”

Larocca, who only served for about a half a year as dean, said that LIU had been “very loyal to Southampton for a very long time, even though it was a burden on the university.”

By June 2004, LIU had decided it was time to drop that burden.

In an open letter to the college community, Steinberg announced that the 2004-05 academic year would be Southampton’s last. After that, students would be allowed to transfer to C.W. Post.

Steinberg, who had once referred to Southampton as “the jewel in the Long Island University crown,” later described it as an albatross tied around LIU’s neck.

Although it was well known the school was in precarious financial shape, Thiele said the announcement that it would, in fact, be closed the following year, “left local elected officials, as well as alumni and those on the campus, scrambling. It wasn’t like this was an orderly transition and everyone was in the loop.”

But within a year, thanks in large part to the efforts of Thiele, LaValle and the organization Save Southampton College, Stony Brook University agreed to pay $35 million for the campus. It would open again, in the fall of 2006, with an enrollment of about 150 students and undergraduate majors in marine science and marine vertebrate biology, and a graduate program in creative writing.

And they called it Stony Brook Southampton.