With an enrollment of approximately 22,500 students on campus and a ratio of 24 students to every one faculty member, waste management is a major issue. One could argue that there is more trash on campus due to the surplus of students. But after facing millions of dollars in budget cuts, the pile of trash is not because of messy students but rather the decrease in frequency of trash pick-up around campus.

With this year’s $34 million budget shortfall, maintaining proper waste disposal and the changing of garbage cans has reached a heavy decline. President Samuel L. Stanley said, “Filling the gap cannot be done without cutting jobs.”

According to a Facilities and Services Department e-mail, trash pickup was not the only thing hurt by the budget cut. The cleaning of public spaces, classrooms and hallways by custodial services has been reduced to once a week, while the cleaning of offices, suites and cubicles has been diminished to once a month.

The amount of ground service cleaning has also decreased. Lawn mowing frequency, landscaping and street sweeping have been reduced in order to save money.

Throughout all of these cuts, Stony Brook has implemented a new solar trash compactor as a part of its green initiative, joining more than 650 institutions in initiating the development of a comprehensive plan to achieve climate neutrality. The university plans to achieve a 25 percent reduction in greenhouse gas.

The new trash cans, made by BigBelly Solar, compact approximately four to five garbage cans worth of waste into one. BigBelly, as advertised on its website, drastically lowers the operating costs, fuel consumptions and green  house gas emissions by up to 80 percent.  Self-powered and requiring no outside electricity to operate, the cans save on labor costs and are energy efficient.

There are currently solar trash compactors outside the SAC, the Javits Lecture Hall and the Student Union (which is located in the shade).

The cans, priced at roughly $4,000 each, help bridge the gap between the budget shortfalls by reducing the amount of attention that needs to be given to the changing of garbage cans. Though the vast majority of garbage cans still require frequent pick-ups, the introduction of the solar compactors will lead to a decreased need to maintain at least a few spots on campus.

These trash cans, which require fewer costs to maintain, are implemented to both manage the necessity of constant garbage changing while saving the University excess spending on custodial service.

What will Judge Bailey's decision mean for the Southampton Campus, and for Stony Brook?

A New York State Judge has ruled that Stony Brook University wrongly closed most of its operations at the Southampton campus.

The ruling stated that Stony Brook should have sought the approval of the 10-member Stony Brook Council, an independent board that must be consulted on “major decisions,” including, according to Judge Paul J. Baisley, the Southampton closure.

The decision marked more of a symbolic win for the six Southampton students who filed suit back in April when the decision was announced. The campus officially ended most operations at the start of this month, and most Southampton students are already taking classes at the main campus. It’s unclear what practical impact Judge Baisley’s decision will have, since resuming classes there would be all but impossible now that faculty, students and staff are gone.

From Newsday:

Katherine Osiecki, 18, a sophomore majoring in environmental design policy and planning who was a lead plaintiff, said she cried when she heard about the ruling. “We still don’t know what it all means, but just that we put all this effort into it and it paid off is awesome,” she said.

Assemb. Fred Thiele (I-Sag Harbor) and State Sen. Kenneth LaValle (R-Port Jefferson), who helped the students, said the students scored a major victory.

The university “tried to do it behind closed doors and tried to do it in secret,” Thiele said.

Look for more from Think on the decision and it’s impact in the coming days.

PREVIOUSLY: Administration Announces Decision to Close Most of SB Southampton

Why does it seem as if Stony Brook students are unaffected by measures which so clearly impact them in a direct way?

There are three areas in which our campus is clearly deficient: awareness, community and opportunity. Organizers on campus, though well intentioned, have by-and-large relied on cookie cutter techniques and quantity-based recruitment efforts which have resulted in disappointing event turn-out and a greater deal of stress and responsibility falling on the shoulders of a few, dedicated activists.

Awareness

In the hectic college environment it’s difficult enough to figure out which classes you still need to take in order to graduate, let alone to understand the full ramifications of our campus’ food service contract. Part of the problem is that there exists an information bubble living alongside an information vacuum. Details tend to float around the activist community via word of mouth. Someone from the Press will tell someone from the Dems about something she heard from someone from Think Magazine. That guy at Think Magazine learned about it from a group of kids in SJA who were talking about it with some of the Stony Brook Freethinkers. This is the information bubble. Rarely is the rest of the student body made privy to the information and when they are it is not in the same, meaningful way. This is the information vacuum. And so, we find ourselves engaging in incestuous activism. Certainly there are the occasional tagalongs and recruits but for the most part the people at the rally in front of the SAC are the people you eat lunch with.

There needs to be a concerted effort to reach out to non-active students in a real and engaging way. Handing out an informational flyer may be effective, if the framing is right, the information is succinct and the content is pertinent in the context of the students’ daily life. Addressing entire classes is a more personal and effective method of disseminating information. Awareness raising events, too, can be effective but beware of soap-boxing with a tiny group of supporters. Five people holding signs and shouting about something at the fountain can actually work to marginalize your cause, raising awareness only of the fact that you couldn’t mobilize more people to help out.

Whatever the process, we need to work on bursting the exclusive information bubble.

If done right, a grassroots campaign at a university with over 20,000 students can do a world of good.

Community

Have you set up a Facebook event, invited people en masse, gotten a positive response but been sorely disappointed at the actual turn out? The problem is that we’ve learned to try to reverse engineer the inspiring social action we’ve seen in the past. We see thousands of people flooding our nations capitol and we want to emulate it. The problem lies in the way we attempt to do so.

Quantity-based recruitment efforts have been the priority of recent social movements. Large scale social network soliciting, mailing list sign up and indiscriminate outreach have mostly resulted in one hit wonders, unreliable recruits and most of all: frustration. The reason? A lack of interpersonal responsibility. We are not drawing recruits from a community built on trust and interconnectedness. It costs no social capital to accept an event request and never show up. There is no motive for a faceless recruit to follow through and for that reason we must never expect the person who took two seconds to write down their e-mail address to ever read them, let alone to act upon them.

If our first function as social actors is awareness raising, our other first function is community building. We must facilitate the construction of horizontal connections among students and faculty. One very effective example of this has been the interconnectedness of organizations such as the Stony Brook Press, Think Magazine, the Stony Brook Democrats and the Stony Brook Freethinkers. While there may be no official relation between these entities, the students involved have developed an intricate network through which information is quickly and efficiently disseminated and acted upon.

Another great method of community building is through interactive, non-action based events. The Freethinkers have successfully built a non-religious community by gathering individuals with a common interest and simply asking them to engage in conversation. You may not be filling out petitions or writing letters to your Congressman but you are establishing a personal and emotional foundation which is indispensable.

Resource allocation is something to consider when community building. People arrive if you announce that there’s free food but if you give that food too freely you fail to take advantage of the circumstance. Forcing people to listen to a little speech before getting their food, too, is hardly effective as it’s simply the delivery of information with no personal engagement. There needs to be an element of mutual exchange.

Opportunity

Finally, informed students in the Stony Brook activist community must feel that there is a real ability to effect change. This means retooling our strategy to what is effective rather than what is habitual. Protests are neat exercises in community building but without direct action do very little to actually change the status quo. Even the most apathetic students understand this. Letter writing and petition signing can be effective but is also quite difficult to mobilize considering that they’re, to be honest, boring.

Most of all, though, opportunity entails having a say. Top down “astro-turfing” may be easier for an organization but will lack the fire and effect that grassroots action will have. There needs to be a democratic way in which activists participate in planning.

The current proposal calls for a five-story building to accommodate 135 rooms, a 5000 square foot conference center, an indoor pool, and a restaurant, exercise facility and sundry shop.

The hotel will be built on a ground lease from the state, as indicated by the blue outline.

The structure itself would be a predominantly brick building much like the Humanities building, and located nearby. It will be built opposite the Administration building parking garage, on the far side of Circle Road.

A private company, like Holiday Inn or Marriott, would run the hotel, but exactly which company will be operating the hotel has yet to be formally announced. Because the hotel would be on state property, a ground lease had to be acquired before any private corporation could pursue building.

Plans for a hotel on campus have been discussed and debated for years, but have never been actively pursued until now because of various concerns raised by faculty, staff and community members over the environmental and aesthetic impact a new structure would have.

The Campus Environment Committee was informed of the decision, made formally by President Samuel L. Stanley at the University Senate meeting on October 5, on Tuesday, and the reaction was largely negative.

“We’re disappointed in the decision,” said newly elected committee chair John Robinson.

The committee has been keenly aware of the proposal to build an on-campus hotel for years, and has fought the plans on several fronts. Malcolm Bowman, another member of the committee, addressed the concern surrounding the location of the hotel.

“It seems like there was never a serious effort to get another ground lease,” he said, speaking of the current lease that has already been approved by the state. “[The committee] has consistently opposed a hotel at the entrance to the university.”

Unless the university files for another ground lease elsewhere on campus, the current location will be the only possible option for a privately owned hotel.

Amy Provenzano, Executive Director of Environmental Stewardship at Stony Brook University, assured the committee members that their concerns had been taken into account when the floor plans for the hotel were drawn up and approved by President Stanley.

“The university has been very supportive and has listened to the committee,” she said.

The university indeed has commissioned an environmental impact study for the proposal, and Provenzano says that the hotel “[would] be built sustainably.”

But the current plans do not call for the hotel to meet LEED standards, a rating system that measures the environmental sustainability of construction projects. Former President Shirley Strum Kenny had previously stated that all new university buildings—though not necessarily non-university buildings like a privately owned hotel—would be built to LEED Silver, the lowest rating in the system.

The hotel would be accessible from Circle Road, directly across from the back entrance of the Administration building parking lot. At five stories, it would likely be visible from Nicolls Road and certainly be visible from the main entrance to the West Campus, a fact that concerned members of the Campus Environment Committee.

While the hotel plans will be moving forward, smaller details about the new building are still being debated, including the placement of signage and the exact amount of open space provided. A parking lot that circles the hotel would be buffered by green space.

When asked just how far along the plans are for the new hotel, and whether the hotel will be happening one way or another, Provenzano responded simply: “yes.”