Bulldozing a publicly funded classroom at one of the nation’s best public universities to make room for a corporate hotel is another matter entirely.

Salamanders like this one are a part of the living laboratory that will be torn down when construction of the hotel begins.

But in a manner of speaking, that is exactly what is being proposed here at Stony Brook. The “classroom” doesn’t have walls or desks, but the woods by the main entrance of the university do serve as a living laboratory for thousands of students.

Caitlin Fisher-Reid is one of those students. She is a PhD candidate in the Department of Ecology and Evolution whose dissertation on the evolutionary processes of the terrestrial woodland salamander will be significantly impacted should construction on the property begin before she completes her research in two years.

The 13-acre plot of land appropriated for the hotel is one of Fisher-Reid’s most successful field sites for her research, out of 30 other locations across Suffolk County.

“I consider it one of my high quality sites because every time I go there I find salamanders,” she said.

For two years, from March to mid-November, Fisher-Reid has been taking expeditions into the forest twice a week to find salamanders and take various measurements of environmental factors and the creatures themselves.

The focus of Fisher-Reid’s dissertation, color variations (or morphs) within the same species, makes the site even more valuable. That particular forest is home to one of the best contact zones between two color morphs of the species, she says.

“My project has the potential to generate a lot of long term monitoring of these salamanders and of the environment in general,” said Fisher-Reid.

While Fisher-Reid may be the biggest beneficiary of the forest, its educational significance is felt by many more students and faculty on campus.

“Beyond the scope of my dissertation, the forest is used,” she said. “Once I leave, the forest is still going to be used.”

Catherine Graham, a professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolution, is constantly looking for ways to provide students with real world examples of what is discussed in class, and the forest provides the best window for doing just that.

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.

Think Magazine sat down with former university president and science advisor to George W. Bush, John H Marburger.

Think Magazine scored an exclusive, hour-long interview with former Stony Brook University President and former science advisor to President George W. Bush John H. Marburger.

In Think’s office, he discussed a wide range of topics, from the planned hotel to his time in the Bush White House. Watch the videos here, only with Think.

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.”