Since its founding in 1965, SUNY Old Westbury has stood as a beacon of higher education for all people, especially the disenfranchised.
“We were born out of the tumult of the ‘60s to respond to, at that time, cities burning and people feeling disenfranchised,” said Dr. Timothy E. Sams, president of SUNY Old Westbury. “And understanding that education is a beacon for the disenfranchised and its role in helping every member of every community gain a life-changing experience for themselves.”
As a liberal arts university, SUNY Old Westbury delivers transformational education that leans into workforce development and stays acutely responsive to the emergent needs of society.
“You will see us providing students that enhancement to their core academic work that renders them not only relevant, but more powerful and impactful leaders,” Sams said.
Embracing the challenges
Under the current state of flux within the U.S. Department of Education, SUNY Old Westbury, like other institutions of higher learning, faces several noteworthy challenges.
“The first is the uncertainty that is being caused sometimes by the flurry, sometimes by the confusing nature of these orders or expectations coming out of Washington,” said Sams, noting that figuring out how to address those changing expectations can be particularly vexing.
The second test facing everyone from SUNY Old Westbury’s leadership to its students is the uncertainty and chaos caused by the flurry of orders.
The third challenge: uncertainty about the future.
Prior to this new administration, many universities and colleges were facing financial concerns due to lower enrollments, dwindling revenue streams and increased competition among universities, noted Sams.
“Now you bring this added layer of potential changes, the rhetoric about reducing support from the federal level for higher education, and that level of uncertainty about the future of our institutions becomes magnified,” said Sams, who credits New York’s governor, attorney general, SUNY chancellor and board of trustees with their unwavering commitment to the state university system’s academic excellence.
To meet these challenges, SUNY Old Westbury pays utmost attention to delivering the best educational product to its students.
“That in and of itself takes a lot of psychic work, a lot of internal leadership, in order to make sure that we are doing that at a very high and consistent level,” Sams said. “When you put all these other concerns inside the mix, it undermines our effort to maintain excellence and maintain our commitments to seeing our students thrive and be successful.”
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Fostering Service to Community
Six decades ago, SUNY Old Westbury was formed with a mission to provide access in the broadest sense, and ensure that it would be open to students from every walk of life. Today, the university boasts a diverse community from every economic stratum, background, gender and experience.
“And we pride ourselves in being that way,” Sams said. “We believe that’s important to creating and shaping a person who can make a major play in society particularly around leadership and leadership through a justice lens.”
Under the aegis of fairness and opportunity for all along with a focus on environmental sustainability, SUNY Old Westbury expects its students to take those interests and skills back to their respective communities in a meaningful way, to help uplift those communities.
“That’s a 60-year-old mission for us that we’ve never wavered on and we remain as committed to it as today as we’ve ever been,” Sams said. “In fact, we assert that not just our mission, but the work of our university is needed now more than ever.”
On a typical weekend, the SUNY Old Westbury campus bustles with community-based organizations that are woven into the very fabric of the school.
SUNY Old Westbury’s School of Education stays closely linked to the local school community, providing pipelines into the university as well as to higher education more broadly and its Future Ready program introduces students to the premise that they belong on a college campus.
“Our education students are continuously providing meaningful engagement with local students,” said Sams, noting that they reinforce the idea that college is both attainable and expected of them.
SUNY Old Westbury’s STEM-based pipeline programs help get pique high school students’ interest in STEM education, Sams said, “and get them to see themselves as burgeoning, promising scientists.”
For marginalized communities, higher education is a social equalizer.
“We tap into that, we reinforce that message and, most importantly, we make it very clear for them how they can access higher education, particularly at Old Westbury,” Sams said.
At the same time, the university’s Social and Environmental Justice Institute produces about 50 programs each year on subjects in and outside of the university, for both students and community members alike.
Preparing Students for Success
Since the COVID-19 pandemic became a major public health concern, SUNY Old Westbury’s Public Health program has grown exponentially.
“We saw an uptick in interest, but we also saw an understanding from our students to our faculty, looking at public health as a right for all citizens, as well as an environmental issue,” Sams said. “We have gotten even more public health majors, and have taken those majors and sent them out, fanned them across the region – throughout New York City and Long Island – with an understanding that public health has to better serve communities that are marginalized and better serve Americans in general.”
To address the shortfall of between 10,000 and 15,000 teachers across New York State, SUNY Old Westbury has stepped up its efforts to graduate students, who consistently outperform the state averages on board exams.
“We’ve attracted more students to our School of Education,” Sams says. “We’ve opened our master’s level program to more students, all in an effort to try to meet the need that the state has for more teachers,” Sams says.
Like the rest of the university, SUNY Old Westbury’s School of Education’s student body stands out for its diversity.
“We are arguably among the most diverse campuses in the country,” Sams said. “I’m not just talking about ethnic background; I’m talking about economics and the variety of backgrounds to include students with neurodiversity, disabilities, as well as our veterans. We pride ourselves on defining diversity in a very broad sense.”
Founded to respond to societal challenges, SUNY Old Westbury remains deeply committed to weathering the current climate in the field of education.
“The latest spate of challenges that we find ourselves with, while difficult, are not necessarily a shock to our system because we’ve always in some manner defined our brand of excellence in our ability to respond to emergent social challenges,” Sams says.
On a nationwide basis, investing in higher education is a solid investment in the future.
“The more we pour into higher education, the better the future will be of this nation,” Sams says. “On our campus and every SUNY campus, we’re going to work very hard to enable our students to get excellent academics to thrive and to be successful with the understanding that that translates into a brighter future for our state and country.”
SUNY Old Westbury is located at 223 Store Hill Rd. in Old Westbury; 516-876-3000. For further information, visit oldwestbury.edu
