Shirley Strum Kenny, first woman to serve as president of Stony Brook University, dies at 92

Shirley Strum Kenny, a lifelong university professor and administrator and the first woman to serve as president of Stony Brook University, died Thursday in her hometown of McLean, Virginia. She was 92.

Kenny came to Stony Brook in 1994 following a decade as president of Queens College. While at Stony Brook, she oversaw a makeover of the campus, boosted its research standing and steered the university’s athletic program into Division I. She was also instrumental in creating other programs.

“While Shirley rightfully gets credit for so many transformative changes at the university, one lesser known fact was her role in creating what is now the School of Communication and Journalism,” Howard Schneider, a friend and the school’s founding dean, said in an email. “It was Shirley who called me in 2005 after I departed Newsday and said, ‘How would you like to help me start the newest journalism school in the country?’” 

Schneider, a former editor of Newsday and now the executive director of the Center for News Literacy at Stony Brook’s School of Journalism, said Kenny’s initial career aspiration was to become a journalist.

“But as a woman in the 1950s, her opportunities were confined to the ‘women's pages’ of most newspapers,” Schneider said.

She would eventually tack to academia.

A prolific scholar of 18th century British Restoration theater and literature, Kenny taught at the University of Texas, Gallaudet University in Washington, the University of Delaware and the Catholic University of America in Washington.

Kenny then joined the faculty at the University of Maryland in 1971, where she was appointed chair of the English department in 1973 and also served as the provost for the Division of Arts and Humanities. She left Maryland in 1985 to take the post at Queens College.

A few years into her Stony Brook tenure, Kenny launched and chaired a commission to address what she thought were shortcomings in undergraduate education at research universities, according to a Stony Brook University biography from 2006. The resulting report, “Reinventing Undergraduate Education: A Blueprint for America's Research Universities,” issued in 1998, pushed for more student involvement in universities’ research interests.

John B. King Jr., the chancellor of the State University of New York, of which Stony Brook is part, said Kenny was instrumental in developing Stony Brook as “a premier research institution” and noted her dedication to students, faculty and staff.

“She knew the power of an excellent higher education for students,” he said in a statement.

Kenny was born in Tyler, Texas, in 1934. She attended the University of Texas at Austin, graduating with two bachelor’s degrees in 1955. She then attended the University of Minnesota for her master’s and the University of Chicago, receiving her doctorate in 1964.

She met her husband, Robert Kenny, while both worked at The Daily Texan, the University of Texas’ newspaper. They would marry in 1956.

“They were very, very tight,” said her daughter, Sarah Kenny Azzara. "They had been best friends for 70 years, basically."

The couple would encourage their five children to explore, academically and otherwise, Azzara said.

“Both of them really, really instilled in us a love of learning and of acquiring, seeking new knowledge, discovering things about the world,” said Azzara, who recently retired from her teaching post at Stony Brook’s Program in Writing and Rhetoric.

“She's really a big glass-ceiling shatterer. And she just never thought about not doing it because she was a girl, she just never thought about that being an issue,” Azzara said. “I'm so proud of her.”

Azzara said her mother had a sharp wit.

“She had a real sharp tongue when she felt like someone deserved it,” she said. But Kenny was diplomatic in public and loving to her children.

“Mom loved us so fiercely and so completely, no matter what we were going through,” Azzara said.

Patrick Calabria, who was Stony Brook’s chief media relations officer, reporting directly to Kenny, from 2000 until 2007, said Kenny was “a woman of great vision.”

“She put Stony Brook on the map, not just nationally — but internationally,” Calabria said by email. “She was smart, shrewd, tough and incredibly charming. And not formal. She wasn’t pretentious. She preferred that everyone just call her Shirley.”

He noted that Kenny brokered the deal that made Stony Brook a partner in the management of Brookhaven National Lab and was also instrumental in recruiting both C.N. Yang, a leading physicist, from Princeton, and Richard Leakey, the renowned paleoanthropologist and conservationist, to teach at Stony Brook.

Kenny published numerous books, among them "The Works of George Farquhar," "British Theatre and the Other Arts" and "The Plays of Richard Steele."

But her first love was journalism, Azzara said.

Schneider said Kenny always retained an admiration for journalism and its place in society.

“She never lost her abiding faith in the importance of the press, or its role in a democracy,” he said. “In the years since, scores of our students have gone on to journalism careers, and I think of all of them, in part, as Shirley's children.”

Her husband, a historian, died last year. A son, Joel Kenny, died in 1999.

Besides her daughter, Kenny is survived by sons David Kenny, of Frederick, Maryland; Dan Kenny, of Alexandria, Virginia; and Jonathan Kenny, also of Alexandria.

Services will be held Wednesday at 1:30 p.m. at Temple Rodef Shalom in Falls Church, Virginia.