Long before the State University of New York at Stony Brook had a Division I football team, a homecoming, a marching band, or a recreation center, long before its athletics teams were called the Seawolves, Jerrold L. Stein had a dream, he said in a talk this year: “that one day we could have a stadium filled with students, all wearing the same color, all rooting for their team.”
Mr. Stein, who retired last month as dean of students and associate vice president for student affairs, did not dream small. When he got an offer to go to the university as assistant director of residence life, in 1976, Stony Brook was considered to be so held back—with little expression of school pride, a limited undergraduate program, and a commuter-school image—that his mentors urged him to turn down the job.
But Mr. Stein saw a challenge, and a chance to apply his passion for building community.
When students wanted to help him improve campus life at Stony Brook, Mr. Stein gave them as a guide Malcolm Gladwell’s book The Tipping Point, which explains how social phenomena take root.
“Changing culture is not easy,” says Mr. Stein, who is 62. “I think it’s doing it one student at a time, one group at a time, that actually changed the macro experience.”
During his 12 years as dean of students, the number of student organizations on the campus doubled, to nearly 370. He helped found or nurture dozens of university traditions and programs.
One of his most noted contributions was coining the phrase “What’s a Seawolf? I’m a Seawolf” during a 2007 speech to alumni. Students picked up the chant. The following fall semester, T-shirts printed with the phrase were ubiquitous across the campus, he remembers.
In May, as Mr. Stein looked out over a sea of red robes at the university’s largest commencement ever, with nearly 6,000 degrees conferred, he gave the talk that described his dream and concluded, “That dream is now a reality.”
In his job, Mr. Stein made it a point to be there with students whenever possible, at occasions both sad and joyful. He hoped that his phone would not ring in the middle of the night, but too often it did, with news of an emergency, and he drove back to the campus.
“Nowadays things become so viral” because of social media that “if I go over to the hospital and visit a student, I know by the time I walk out of the hospital, five of his friends know about it,” he says.
The transformation of Stony Brook has been gradual, Mr. Stein says. He introduced professional staff to the residence halls in 1978, but students considered the move administrative overreach, and they rebelled. He championed the system of six undergraduate colleges built around academic themes, a structural change that Dallas W. Bauman III, assistant vice president for campus residences, compares to “building a 747 in flight.”
Another effort Mr. Stein promoted, creation of the marching band, got off to a slow start, with just 17 members in 2006. The band now is over 200 strong.
“We didn’t have illusions about this being an easy place to work,” says Mr. Bauman, who has been a colleague of Mr. Stein’s in student affairs since 1982. “The fact that he would be here and be present in a whole range of circumstances, any time of the day or night, that’s no small thing.”
The marching band’s prominence on football Saturdays has been one sign of the campus’s evolution, even as complaints about overcrowding in the dormitories and a scarcity of students on campus during weekends have persisted. Stony Brook is among the largest residential campuses by number of beds in New York, Mr. Bauman says; 62 percent of its undergraduates this fall live on the campus.
Mr. Stein says he will continue to push for progress in campus life. He will still teach courses on higher-education administration and work part time in student affairs. He will also give the “What’s a Seawolf? I’m a Seawolf” speech to the marching band.
“You’ve got to continue to get the word out there,” he says. “It’s preorientation, it’s orientation, it’s the message you send out when you’re first trying to recruit them to the university—it’s all bundled together.”
