The View East

Assemblyman Fred W. Thiele Jr. doesn’t mince words when he has a message to deliver that he feels isn’t landing as it should. Stony Brook University officials might have gotten their first taste of that last week, when Thiele blasted the university as “the biggest slumlord on the East End” because of the condition of the Stony Brook Southampton campus.

A surprising number of buildings on the campus have ominous markings designating them as uninhabitable, including a cluster of student housing that seems like a stunning waste of resources in a market desperate for affordable places for people to live. But the biggest sticking points seem to be the absence of an official to even oversee the campus — the university has never filled a key post since it was vacated in 2020 — and the fact that Stony Brook didn’t even bother applying for state funding to renovate historic Southampton Hall at the campus’s heart. It was funding put on a tee by Thiele and State Senator Anthony Palumbo, and Stony Brook’s lack of interest was, it seems, the final straw.

What does Stony Brook see when it looks east to the Shinnecock Hills campus? It appears committed to the vision for a new Stony Brook Southampton Hospital, which has regional significance. Coming on the heels of the new emergency room facility to open in East Hampton in the summer of 2024, it will mean an exciting upgrade of health care on the South Fork.

The hospital project seems to have changed the narrative about the Southampton campus, for better and worse. Remember that Stony Brook, as recently as 2009, saw the purchase of the campus a few years earlier as a mistake. After listlessly nudging ideas around the plate like cold mashed potatoes for a few years, the plan for a state-of-the-art hospital sparked a clear direction.

Dr. Maurie McInnis, who became president of the university in the summer of 2020, spoke a year ago about identifying “unique alignments” for both Stony Brook and the local community, via the Southampton campus. She spoke of maintaining a “vibrant arts program” there, rebranded recently to honor Southampton supporter Dorothy Lichtenstein. She also said the plan is to maintain the School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences, which could have growing importance in a time when coastal resiliency requires research.

But improving health care was at the heart of the vision, as well as the “educational opportunities for people who are interested in health care careers.” Those opportunities include related professions, not just medicine and nursing but a host of related fields.

McInnis is cagier about what the campus will look like, and whether it ever will return to its Southampton College level of activity. There are still a few hundred students attending classes at Stony Brook Southampton, but the campus resembles a ghost town most of the time — as Thiele’s chiding points out. Empty, neglected buildings are never a sign of vigor.

The new president backed away from projections, at the time of its purchase, that there could be 2,000 students enrolled full-time there. McInnis said a year ago that the university was beginning a strategic planning process; presumably, it must be closing in on a long-term plan. What it is, so far, remains a mystery — to Fred Thiele, and to any local observer.

Stony Brook Southampton is 80 acres of prime real estate, but it’s so much more. As the legislators noted, the local campus has a significant impact on the local economy. But its true value is exponentially higher. A collegiate presence on the South Fork has intrinsic value, but it also provides academic support — to the arts community, to environmental concerns and to health care. In the next decade, both Southampton and East Hampton towns will reap enormous benefits from a teaching hospital, a satellite providing emergency care, and so many ancillary resources.

We need Stony Brook Southampton, badly. But, right now, badly is the way it currently exists. Stony Brook officials promise that they have big plans. It’s time, long past time, to hear more specifics about what they see when they look east, and look into the future. Because the present looks anything but promising.