Interim President Richard L. McCormick hosted the annual State of the University Address on Wednesday, Sept. 25 to a large crowd at the Staller Center For the Arts.

Before McCormick walked onto the main stage of the Staller Center, an announcement played acknowledging that the land the University sits on was stripped from Indigenous tribes.

“In offering this land, we acknowledge and affirm indigenous sovereignty, history and experiences,” the announcement said.

McCormick then proceeded to walk onto the Main Stage of Staller Center and was met with a loud round of applause from those in attendance. 

Immediately upon starting his speech, a group of pro-Palestine demonstrators wearing keffiyehs stood up in the middle of the seating area and held up signs that read, “FROM PALESTINE TO TURTLE ISLAND NO PEACE ON STOLEN LAND.” 

The group of demonstrators stood up for the first 10 minutes of McCormick’s speech while holding up the signs. No one from the Stony Brook administration nor the University Police Department asked the protesters to lower it. 

In a statement posted on SB4Palestine’s Instagram after the State of the University Address, the group wrote, “These performative claims were made only to paint a palatable picture of progress – for [Stony Brook’s] ‘honoring’ of Indigenous rights to life and sovereignty are made null and void by its complete lack of effort to acknowledge and divest from the Palestinian genocide.”

McCormick did not acknowledge the demonstrators and began his speech with a “history lesson” on the expansion of public higher education in America.

During his speech, he recited how American public universities experienced an era of growth after the conclusion of World War II. With an increasing number of community colleges and universities, government investments led to more scientific research coming out of the world of higher education. 

According to McCormick, America ultimately “[led] the world” in the creation of new knowledge in every academic discipline. 

“Stony Brook University today exemplifies dramatically all the most important developments in modern American higher education,” McCormick said. “I am confident that years from now, observers can be reciting this same history lesson now with many more chapters about Stony Brook’s leadership and its exemplification of all of the values of modern American higher education.” 

He then highlighted several of the University’s accomplishments, mentioning the socioeconomic diversity of the student body, Stony Brook’s growing research fund, the University’s fundraising efforts and its commitment to expanding its areas of study — including the recent creation of the Native American and Indigenous Studies initiative.

McCormick highlighted how the University’s designation as a flagship institution raised the question: “How do we become a true flagship university?” 

In an interview following the address, Vice President for Student Affairs Rick Gatteau said that the answer to McCormick’s question is to further support students, especially those at the graduate level.

“We do a lot for undergraduate students, but we want to provide even more support for graduate students, in terms of career advising, community building [and] connections — that kind of spirit and pride about what it means to be a Seawolf,” he said. “We want to let that permeate across every student.”

McCormick also cited three primary challenges that the University is currently facing, the first one being the lack of interdisciplinary research. 

“We are a very good research university, but we have the opportunity to be great,” McCormick said. “[We have] invested too little in shared research facilities and in the advanced labs and computing facilities our sites need. We have given insufficient encouragement to the interdisciplinary research that is essential to tackling the most difficult problems.” 

He cited the Collaborative for the Earth program — an initiative which brings together experts from different fields to work together on climate change solutions — as an example of interdisciplinary research that should be happening more often on campus. He also highlighted Stony Brook’s role in the New York Climate Exchange as another collaborative partnership that the University should strive to model. 

“There is almost no limit to what can happen when researchers from multiple disciplines explore new directions together,” McCormick said. 

He then discussed the second main challenge the University faces: its facilities. 

McCormick revealed the University currently has spent $2 billion in deferred maintenance, more than any other campus within the SUNY system. 

He emphasized how this is a problem that the University cannot address on its own, promising the audience that he will use his time as interim president to “persuade state leaders to meet our need for new and better facilities.” 

“I will advocate tirelessly for the resources to construct [four new modern facilities for chemistry, interdisciplinary health sciences, earth and climate systems and engineering, artificial intelligence and computational sciences] and to repair others,” he said. 

The University’s problems with its facilities connect to McCormick’s third problem: enrollment. 

Stony Brook enrolled its largest incoming class in the University’s history with a total of 5,376 students. Because of increased enrollment numbers, McCormick said the campus does not have the infrastructure to support the growing student population.

During the summer, the University implemented a policy that barred incoming students who lived within a certain distance from campus from living in a dorm. The flash flood on Aug. 18 only furthered the problems the University has with its facilities and led to a housing crisis, with some students being put in tripled dorms or displaced to a Holiday Inn located off campus. 

McCormick acknowledged the University’s problem with housing accommodations but announced that it plans to add a new residential area called the Seawolves Village that will allow 500 more students to live on campus by fall 2025. 

“One of our students pointed gratefully to her excellent academic experience, but said that she wished Stony Brook’s housing was as good as her education,” McCormick said. 

He then ended the address by calling for Stony Brook to improve as an institution to become a “true flagship.” The audience then stood and gave McCormick a standing ovation. 

Assistant Chief Diversity Officer Usama M. Shaikh said after the address that he felt “really good” about the future of Stony Brook.

“Knowing that we have such great leadership at the University, I was actually walking in with a sense of purpose and really looking forward to what those visions were going to be because I felt really good with who we are [and] where we are,” he said. “I felt really positive walking out of that meeting.” 

Gatteau told The Statesman that he felt the pro-Palestine demonstrators did not disrupt the address and that as part of his role, he wanted to prioritize freedom of speech on campus.

“I knew something was being held up [and] I looked over and it didn’t interrupt the presentation,” Gatteau said. “I always said in my role as the [Vice President for Student Affairs] that we highly value freedom of speech, we want freedom of expression … So far [this year] … we’ve still had marches, we’ve had events on campus, a lot of programs around it, but I also feel there’s been a change in tone about respect, and I think a lot of this comes from the [interim] president.”