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Rawness with Class. What unifies S.U.N.Y. is a sense of dynamic incompleteness—"rawness with class," as one educational analyst puts it. Almost every campus is torn up by construction; professors frequently teach in incomplete facilities that suggest the primitive educational ideal of Mark Hopkins at one end of a log and a student at the other. At the state college in Plattsburgh this fall, 350 girls had to sleep on the floors of their doorless new dorm for more than a week. New York, observes University of Missouri Vice President Charles Brice Ratchford, "is trying to compress into ten what every other university has taken 100 years to do."
Under the benevolent guidance of Gould, however, the goal of S.U.N.Y. is not a chain of uniform institutes cast from a single mold. "The worst thing that could happen to this university," he says, "is that one campus would become like another." Today, at least, that is far from the case, and the variety of S.U.N.Y. is amply exhibited by the different mood and spirit of its four university centers.
Lustrous Stars. At Stony Brook, which has so many bulldozers at work that students call the campus "mud with purpose," a major goal is excellence in science, especially physics. With Brookhaven National Laboratories only a few miles away, President John Toll, who built the University of Maryland's physics department into one of the best, has been able to attract lustrous stars. Brightest is Nobel Laureate C. N. Yang, formerly of Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study, who happily accepted a $45,000 salary to take a state-endowed chair in theoretical particle physics. He thus earns $5,000 more than Chancellor Gould, $15,000 more than President Toll. Another catch: Johns Hopkins Biologist H. Bentley Glass.
Toll, whose temporary office still lacks a ceiling, also sees Stony Brook as an academic servant of growing Long Island. It already has a full-time staff assigned to providing technical advice to the island's maritime, electronics and aircraft industries. Other experts provide nearby towns with much needed advice in long-range community planning. By 1975, its enrollment of 5,000 will swell to 17,000, 40% of whom will be in graduate work—another lure for top professors. Literary Critic Alfred Kazin, a professor in Stony Brook's excellent English department, finds a "tremendous excitement" in its "happy, creative looseness—this is a place where the time is right."
Shaking up the Structure. Stony Brook is a campus built from nothing in woods and meadow, now surrounded by housing tracts. Buffalo, by contrast, was an established private university (founded in 1846) that was verging on bankruptcy and was taken over entirely by S.U.N.Y. in 1962. President Martin Meyerson, a former acting chancellor at Berkeley, is trying to shake up the traditional academic structure to create "a public model for higher education."
To that end, Meyerson has divided the university into eight major interdisciplinary faculties: Arts and Letters, Educational Studies, Health Sciences, Natural and Mathematical Sciences, Applied Social Sciences and Administration, Engineering and Applied Sciences, Law and Jurisprudence, Social Sciences and Philosophy. Each is headed by a provost who has full authority to hire, fire and plan budgets.