Turning the Lights On: Stony Brook's Long Road to Safety Began in 1971

By Matthew Weinberger

Stony Brook University has an illuminated campus. These days, it’s difficult to find a path that isn’t lit. Streetlights shine from sundown to sunup, and even some of the worst problem spots on campus have been lit up, shadows chased away and leaving only a faint impression of the danger that these locations once held.

But the lights weren’t always on. A construction accident early in the university’s history had cut off power to many of the streetlights on campus, and the powers that be in Administration never saw fit to repair the problem. As a result, the campus was plunged into darkness when night fell. No one was willing to do anything about it. Finally, by
1971, a Political Science major named Bill Stoller had had enough, and wrote a series of articles that forced the illumination issue into the limelight and effected real change.

In 1968, Stoller began writing for what was then only known as Statesman, putting stories out on a manual typewriter. Even then, he had been getting frustrated at the safety hazards the darkness created.

“As soon as the sun went down, you were on your own,” Stoller recalled in a recent telephone interview.

In those days, campus was under constant construction. Enormous patches of mud covered walkways and living areas. Precariously placed plywood boards were the only way over them to the Stony Brook Union and beyond, and were placed straight across from H-quad and G-quad (now known as Mendelsohn Quad)—right through the active construction zones. Drivers didn’t have better luck, either—the roads weren’t lit or marked and were very poorly maintained. In fact, one stretch of what’s now Circle Road was termed dead man’s curve by students, for its notorious lack of lighting, guard rails, and traction, though it’s important to note that, at least according to Stoller, no one ever died there.

“Designers and architects didn’t care how people used things,” Stoller said.

As a reporter, Stoller was quite accomplished. He had several sources within the administration of then-University President John S. Toll. Toll would hold biweekly news meetings with student media outlets, and he personally was on good terms with Stoller, and would often arrange “leaks” from his office to the young reporter. As a result of his willingness to work with authority, he was labeled a “right-wing infilitrator” by certain political elements on campus.

Toll himself, a physics professor when not performing administrative duties, is described by Stoller as a “force,” and as a true politician who “knew how to play the game in Albany.” Toll, Stoller said, was dedicated to doing his part to improving campus. Despite Toll's idealism, he simply didn't know what campus conditions were actually like.

Stoller's frustration grew and grew.

“I got sick and tired of walking to my dorm in the dark,” he said.

\Stoller’s frustration finally led him, in the November of 1970, the first semester of his senior year, to publish a short article, now lost to time, in Statesman on campus dangers. The main message of his article, in his own words:

“Turn on the damn lights!”

Toll came across this article while reading the paper. Almost immediately, he decided that he and certain of his staff were going to take a tour of campus and check the veracity of Stoller’s claims. Stoller himself covered the story, and opened his article by saying that Toll and his team of administrators were “trying to obtain firsthand the knowledge that many students have found with their feet.”

Toll’s tour had an immediate effect. Signs warning of construction-related danger were finally put up, there was talk about paving over what would become the stadium parking lot, and, possibly most importantly, they started illuminating the campus. A story that Stoller likes to tell begins with him, after repairs had started, walking along the academic mall with his friend and mentor, university administrator Ron Siegel, when the latter noticed the spotlights that had been placed on the administration building to light the academic mall at night.

“That was you,” Siegel told Stoller. “You did that.”

Things seemed to be changing for the better. The metaphorical light bulb had come to life over the collective heads of administration.

Or so it seemed.

It soon became apparent that not all was right with the improvements. According to Stoller, even the most cursory inspection would reveal something had gone wrong with the wave of repairs. Freshly activated streetlights burned out bulbs that were never replaced. In the most extreme cases, the new lights were pointed in the wrong direction to be of any use at all.

“It was two steps forward, one step back,” Stoller recalled.

After three months of this, students, and Stoller, had had enough. He decided to take matters a step further and spend a Tuesday night just touring campus, noting every single thing he saw that needed fixing, mending, or replacing. His tour was facilitated by a special parking pass that allowed him to park anywhere on campus he liked—even walkways. With this in hand, what could have been a major endeavor was finished in one night. Stoller drove around for those three hours, getting out of his car whenever he saw something worth noting.

“Stony Brook: The Ugly Campus,” his article, titled The Ugly Campus, opened. “It's more than just physically repulsive, it's also unsafe and impractical in many respects. This story made waves when it was published in Statesman on February 17, 1971. The story was clearly a culmination of Stoller's absolute frustration at those in power, featuring only a couple of paragraphs of introduction, in which he chastised the Toll Administration for its inaction, before jumping right into a laundry list of problems on campus.

At the end of his introduction, he declared his intentions for writing the article: “Perhaps now a reversal might begin. Perhaps the Toll Administration will look out its windows and really see its campus. It might mean the beginning of the end of this aspect of The Ugly Campus.”

Among the worst infractions on safety noted by Stoller were the omnipresent lighting issues, the poor, sad state of what passed for bus shelters in the South P lot, and various traffic dangers, long since resolved. Extreme examples of campus dangers included “absolutely inadequate” bus shelters in the South P lot, and a “muddy mess” in front of the Administration building. Streets weren't marked, roads were too narrow to handle the flow of traffic, and mud was everywhere one wouldn't expect it. In fact, mud covered the entire campus. In addition, several of the new lights were aimed to illuminate the buildings they were mounted on, rather than the dark pathways they were constructed for in the first place.

The immediate reaction to the article among Administration was a negative one. Stoller himself covered the response, in which officials claimed that severe budget restrictions limited their ability to fix the hazards. In fact, one official reportedly told Stoller that students would have to learn to live with the inconveniences.

When Toll saw this article, however, he mobilized his administration. He had the issue of Statesman cut up and photocopied in such a way that every one of Stoller’s points fit on two stapled pages, then handed them out to various campus officials under him to make a kind of checklist of what still needed doing on campus. He repeated his tour on March 10, 1971. The initiative to fix campus was regained.

Campus was improving.

“I had an immediate impact,” Stoller said. “and it was great, that I had an immediate impact.”

Stoller graduated from Stony Brook University in the spring of 1971, and went on to work for local news station 1010 WINS. He became a part of the Buskin scholarship committee, which gives awards to campus journalists, but he was never quite as involved at Stony Brook as once he was.

Twelve years ago, after some time working in radio journalism, Stoller decided it was time for a change and moved to Pleasantville, NY. He is now self-employed as an Information Technology consultant to small businesses and nonprofit organizations. Despite his leaving the field, Stoller still holds a torch for reporting.

“I still care about journalism,” he said. “And I care about journalism at Stony Brook.”

Two or three years after his graduation, everything Stoller wrote about in The Ugly Campus was proven to be as dangerous as he said it was. A student named Sherman Raftenberg fell down an open manhole and died when the steam vents at the bottom seared him to death. This, finally, was the last straw for campus safety, pushing the issue to the forefront of everyone’s mind.

“I didn’t want the university to wake up because a student walks into a manhole,” Stoller said. “When I wrote the article, did I think a student was actually going to die? I never harbored that thought.”

A recent recreation of Stoller’s tour reveals that things are much different now. Every single pathway, from H-Quad all the way to Tabler Quad on the other end of campus, is lit, and, in most cases, well lit. The South P bus shelters are vastly improved, and the lot itself is brightly illuminated. Many of the lights across campus are newly built, it’s important to note, coming off rumors of sexual assault in the vicinity of Roth Quad in the Spring semester of 2006. It's more well-lit than ever. Regardless, many students who walk alone without a second thought during the day still travel in twos and threes once the sun goes down.

“This campus is terrible for chicks walking alone at night,” said Kimberly Ehret, a junior majoring in applied math and sciences. “There aren’t enough blue light phones from Circle Road to the South P lot.”

Alison Baldassano, a senior majoring in anthropology, hesitates before even walking from her dorm in the West Apartments C building to the Kelly Quad dining hall, a very short walk away. Why?

“Because I have a brain,” she said. “There’s still no good way to walk through [to Kelly]. Paths go through trees and parking lots.”
Despite such concerns about safety, campus seems to be as safe as ever. One advantage students now have that didn’t exist in Stoller’s time at the university is the Residential Safety Program, or RSP. The RSP provides escorts on request around campus so no student has to walk alone when they’re not comfortable doing so, in addition to late-night security in most of the residential buildings on campus. According to RSP partners José Lee and Vlad Boguslavskiy, any given RSP agent can expect to do three or four escorts a night.

Of the three zones that comprise RSP service, H-Quad and Mendelsohn Quad account for the most calls, which is not unusual considering that’s where freshmen are housed. Other than the usual security duties, RSP agents are expected to respond to emergency calls made on the “blue light” phones. However, things have been fairly quiet at Stony Brook University. To the best of Lee’s recollection, there had never been a call on the emergency phone, and no assault of any kind reported in the last year. Despite this, he still thinks RSP is important as a deterrent towards those who would break the law.

“People will behave if they see us,” Lee said.
It’s hard to argue that campus is safer now than it was. In early November of 2006, Stoller returned to his alma mater for a brief visit, the first one in years. He said that there had “definitely been improvement.”

Stoller had come for a brief meeting with Howard Schneider, dean of Stony Brook University’s School of Journalism, as well as fellow old hands from Statesman. While he didn’t have the opportunity or inclination to repeat his 1971 tour, he did get to see some of the illuminated campus.

“The central campus mall looks a lot different. There are real walkways, there’re live trees in the planters,” Stoller said. “I hope that it’s safer.”