Hi Neighbor,

It was a visit to Wagner College not long ago that brought back the memories.

There wasn’t much talk about going to college in New Dorp High School back in the ‘60s. At least for kids like me.

Talk centered more around who was giving his girlfriend an engagement ring for graduation, where we were going after senior prom – or who was going to Vietnam.

The closest a lot of us came to college counseling was in the beginning of senior year when the grade advisor, who shall remain nameless, stuck his head in the doorway of homeroom one morning and said, “Anyone who wants to go to college, come see me.” Then he left

I didn’t see much reason to pay him a visit. He was no help when I had issues with a geometry teacher the previous semester. Plus, I had no plan. I considered becoming a cop, took the written test and then the physical. All was good – till I got to the eye test. Requirements were pretty stringent and you needed 20/40 vision to pass. I was more like 20/100.

Then I found out Mom and Dad had other plans. I was going to college. It was what parents did in those days. No one in our family went to college, so me and my cousin would be the first.

Wagner College was not on my undergrad list, although I did get a master’s there after college. Nor was Staten Island Community College, the precursor to the College of Staten Island. Maybe my parents wanted me out of the house, because the few schools where I did apply were out-of-state.

I wound up at a school Mom found – LaSalle in Philadelphia, where I majored in English. Why English? No clue. Career path? No clue.

I got more career guidance from a movie star than that nameless New Dorp guidance counsellor, and my parents.

Sidney Poitier was starring in a film called “To Sir, With Love” during my freshman year at LaSalle. It was about a guy who couldn’t get a job doing what he wanted to do – engineering – so he became a teacher in a tough high school in London’s East End. After a rough start, he won over all the kids.

Home from school for the weekend, my girlfriend and my aimless 18-year-old-self took in the film on a Saturday afternoon in a theater by the Mall.

“Hmmm . . . teaching,” thought I. “Maybe I could do that.” Plus, I liked the theme song.

“If you wanted the sky, I would write across the sky in letters that would soar a thousand feet high, “To Sir, With Love,” sang Lulu. (“Sir” was what the teacher – Poitier – insisted the kids call him.)

So Monday morning, back in Philly, in I marched to LaSalle’s registrar’s office and added education as a minor. Before I knew it, I was student teaching English to juniors in a tough high school in northeast Philadelphia. (How I landed in journalism is another story for another time.)

I was reminded of all this as a few colleagues and I shared lunch with Wagner’s new president in his office a few weeks ago. There’s a lot to say about Jeff Doggett.

One, he’s transparent. Wagner has its troubles, and he’s not reluctant to tell you.

Two, he’s got vision. He’s not reluctant to turn the school upside down, eliminating 21 majors that see very few students enroll, concentrating school resources on majors that attract the most students.

English is one of the casualties. Sad as it is that freshmen won’t be enjoying “Beowulf” in Old English (Ha!), it’s now about saving a school that has seen operating losses for a couple of years, enrollment drop every year for the past nine, and its endowment shrink for the past two years.

Wagner has been down this road before. It was a troubled institution when a young and very confident dean named Norman Smith left Harvard for Grymes Hill in 1988.

We dubbed it “The Norman Smith Experiment.”

Norman recognized that perception was reality, and took on the simplest challenges immediately,

He beautified the campus. Simple things, like painting rusted chain fencing white and sprucing up the landscaping. He ordered the property at the foot of Howard Avenue and Clove Road be cleaned and landscaped, so prospective students and their parents wouldn’t be put off as they turned uphill to the campus.

Then he took on the hard things. He cultivated donors, raised a lot of money, rebuilt the admissions program, put together a strong administrative team and faculty, and built a spanking new sports center.

Enrollment went from under 1,000 to 2,300.

Norman left Wagner 23 years ago – but you’d never know it. He has tracked the college’s progress, or lack of it, ever since, not shy about letting anyone who’ll listen know that Wagner was heading in the wrong direction.

His “I Saved the College and You’re Not” attitude has irked many along the way, but he’s right about this . . .

“What destroyed the college was to heavily focus on liberal arts and community service while ignoring the very programs that most of today’s college students seek,” Norman wrote me recently. “During my tenure, upwards of 90% of all students majored in business, health professions, education, performing arts/theatre and, to a lesser extent, psychology and sociology.”

President Doggett seems on the same page, to the point he is ripping the “liberal arts” label off the school. Dumped will be philosophy, anthropology, sociology, English, history, modern languages, physics, math and chemistry.

Some will be combined, like film and media transitioning to digital design, and accounting into business analytics.

“We’re going to evolve over time and grow more unique programs,” said the new president. That means expanding popular programs — nursing, physician assistant, psychology, theater, computer science, health sciences and education.

Staten Island students have two options if they opt to stay home — private education at Wagner, or public education at the College of Staten Island. Wagner needs to flourish to keep those two options alive to serve our neighbors in ways that work best for them, fostering growth, empowering them and maximizing their capabilities

To state the obvious, doing business is changing dramatically. No one knows that better than those of us in the news business. So we get it.

Same’s true in the education business. Jeff Doggett gets it.

Brian

Oh by the way: But there’s always a “but . . .” Another casualty in the reinvention of Wagner is the English Department’s journalism program, and the student newspaper. Accuse me of bias. Guilty as charged. By my bias is the critical importance of a free press in our society, a free press that’s one of the pillars on which American was built, a free press under attack in our country. And the attack is by the president of the United States. This is no time to send a message to our young people that a free press is not important enough to find a way to make it work. I’m told that Wagner’s student newspaper has been practically dormant for the past year. I’ve also been told that the reason has much to do with the pandemic, and then scant support from the college. Young Americans flocked to journalism as Dick Nixon targeted the press, and then the Watergate fiasco of the ‘70s. They saw a government out of control, a government in need of checks and balances. As that old saying goes, history is repeating itself. Wagner should take notice.