The Personal College

Suffolk County Legislator Anthony Piccirillo is seeking to have Suffolk County purchase the abandoned 25-acre Dowling College campus, along the Connetquot River in Oakdale, and preserve what was its main structure, Idle Hour, once the mansion of railroad heir William K. Vanderbilt.

For decades, Dowling and Southampton College were two four-year liberal arts colleges in Suffolk College that provided an exceptional education. Southampton College is now Stony Brook Southampton, part of Stony Brook University, which took it over after Long Island University shut Southampton College down in 2005. But Stony Brook Southampton is only in limited use.

The situation with Dowling is even more dire.

Piccirillo, a Holtsville Republican, has decried the “shameful condition” of what was once Dowling College.

The abandoned campus is now owned by Delaware-based Mercury International, a subsidiary of Beijing investment firm China Orient Asset Management Co. Ltd., which bought it in 2017 for $26.1 million in a bankruptcy auction. It’s the scene of regular break-ins and vandalism. Last month, a pair of teenagers were arrested after stealing property and scrawling graffiti at the campus.

“Neighbors of the vacant college campus, which closed in 2016, have said that break-ins, vandalism and other incidents continue to be a weekly or even daily nuisance despite the efforts of police and a neighborhood watch group to deter trespassers,” reported Newsday in an article about the arrest of the teens. Police recovered items they allegedly stole from the campus and a backpack containing cans of spray paint.

Dowling College was started as Adelphi-Suffolk College, an offshoot in Suffolk County of Adelphi University in Garden City in Nassau County. Established in 1959, Adelphi-Suffolk was the first four-year liberal arts college in the county. It initially was based in a former public school building in Sayville — “Old ’88.” Then Adelphi purchased the former Vanderbilt estate in 1963, and the college shifted to the picturesque riverside setting.

In 1968, after Robert W. Dowling, president and chairman of the board of City Investing Company and a real estate developer and philanthropist, provided an endowment of more than $3 million, Adelphi-Suffolk became independent and was renamed Dowling College.

Dowling had residences in Manhattan and Suffolk County. He had a reputation for attacking what he termed “squalor” in the city. He also owned theaters and produced plays, including “Orpheus Descending,” and movies, among them “The Captain’s Paradise.” He died in 1973.

Dowling College closed in 2016 after declaring bankruptcy. It could not pay off more than $50 million in debt. A 92-page lawsuit charging “negligence” was filed in U.S. Bankruptcy Court on behalf of Dowling creditors.

The lawsuit — later settled — alleged years of “waste, mismanagement and breach of fiduciary duty.” It claimed the college’s trustees “accepted the cockeyed optimism of their presidential hires and continued to operate Dowling as if its problems would simply disappear.”

As for presidents, Dowling has quite a number, at one point four in four years.

I attended Adelphi-Suffolk. There, I launched the first newspaper at a four-year college in Suffolk County, which I named The New Voice. But after a year and a half, in 1962 I took a job as a reporter and finished college later.

My son, Adam, graduated from Dowling in 1987 and went on to law school. He became Riverhead Town attorney and is chairman of the Southampton Town Zoning Board of Appeals.

As an adjunct professor, I taught a journalism course at Dowling. Dowling advertised itself as “The Personal College,” and that was my experience. It featured, like Adelphi-Suffolk before it, and Southampton College, small classes and close interaction between students and teachers. It truly offered “personal” education.

To see if I might help when, in the 2010s, Dowling was undergoing financial difficulties, I thought I might organize a conference featuring some alum who made significant marks in journalism. I wrote to the Dowling administration saying that I would do this gratis and suggested a panel of Mike Jahn, Joe Demma and Bryan Boyhan.

Mike, who had written for my New Voice (he was also the son of our advisor, Joseph Jahn, editor of the Suffolk County News), was one of the first rock writers for any major daily newspaper in the United States. He became The New York Times’s first rock journalist. Joe headed an investigative reporting team at Newsday that received a Pulitzer Prize and also was Newsday’s national editor. Bryan was editor of The Sag Harbor Express and turned it into one of the best weekly newspapers in New York State. And, I explained, I’d contribute what I could.

It didn’t happen. The administration of the college was quite a mess. I wrote to the head of the Faculty Union, and she tried to get movement by the administration. That didn’t work.

A decade later, it would be a shame for a college named for a person who fought “squalor” in New York City to have his name and that of the college he endowed attached to “squalor” in Suffolk County.

Hopefully, there’ll be action by Suffolk County government on Legislator Piccirillo’s initiative, and this college campus restored and brought back to life.