Politics and Public Higher Education in New York State: Stony Brook--A Case History (review)

Sidney Gelber, Vice President for Academic Affairs at the State University of New York at Stony Brook from 1971 to 1981, sets out in this book to tell the story of the political influences on the establishment and early development of a state university system, specifically New York state, and of one of its campuses, Stony Brook. The early chapters set the social, economic, and cultural context for the development of public higher education in New York State in the period during and just following World War II. A middle section presents events surrounding "the birth pangs of a university: 1955-1956," and continues through exchanges between successive governors of the state, different executives in the state system, particularly its educational sector, and various interested parties, business and political, in the local communities in which the State University of New York at Stony Brook was evolving. The last third of the book details the particulars of the events in and around the inception and growth of the Stony Brook campus itself. This review is addressed to several issues: (1) the contribution of the book to our knowledge of the period, (2) the aim of the author as historian, and (3) the quality of the writing itself.

The book is ambitious. It purports to review the politics of New York State, the emergence of public higher education in the state, and the intersection of the two. Further, it attempts to deal with historical phenomena both macrocosmically and microcosmically—providing a perspective on the successes and failures of the integration of "system" at large with actions at the level of one campus. In general, Dr. Gelber is quite successful, though not in all the dimensions one might expect of an historical treatise. For example, his review of the antecedents of public higher education in the United States prior to and during the 1940s, particularly as those events may have presaged the development of higher education in New York State, is competent, but not particularly ground breaking, having been comprehensively and well-covered in other publications (Graham & Diamond, 1997; Carmichael, 1955; Abbott, 1958). There have also been many books about the politics of education in New York State (e.g., Glazer, 1989; Hines & Hartmark, 1980; Hines, 1988; Milstein & Jennings, 1973), many about the competition between public and private higher education (Riesman, 1980; Gardner et al., 1985), a considerable number on the impact of the federal government (Parsons, 1997; Neusner, 1995; Rudy, 1996; Furniss & Gardner, 1979), a very large number about the impact of U.S. foreign policy on college campuses in the 60s and 70s (e.g., Altbach, 1973). Gelber's assiduous and conscientious pursuit of relevant data does, however, provide a moderate and most useful increment in what we know about these periods and events.

Gelber's method is to present us with a full cast of characters to play out the political scenes over the period. These include the many components involved in educational policy decisions in a state (e.g., institutions, interest groups, community organizations, commissions, state agencies, executive, legislature, statewide boards, parents; see Crosson, 1984) as well as its major players (e.g., Frank Moore, one time Chair of the SUNY Board of Trustees, Oliver Carmichael, Vice Chair of the Temporary Commission to Study the Need for a State University, Alvin Eurich, President of SUNY, Samuel Gould, President of SUNY, Harry Porter, Provost, and, of course, the officers of the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Gelber has done an exceptionally fine job of garnering the documents that reveal the intricacies of the relationships among these participants. That there should be conflict among such powerful persons is to be expected. Executive leadership positions at the state government, the legislature, the governorship, the board of regents...