Dr. Calvin O. Butts III will be retiring in 2020 after serving as SUNY Old Westbury’s president for more than twenty years. However, his retirement as president does not mean his time at OW is over as he will be transferring to a faculty position. Starting on January 21, 2020, he will be engaged in a study leave and on June 15, 2020, he will return to the classroom as a tenured professor in the School of Arts and Sciences, reportedly in the American Studies Department where he began teaching many years ago.
While Dr. Butts is aware of the positive impact his presidency has had on this college, he said in a recent interview: “The shelf life of a president is about seven years. When I leave, I will have been here twenty-one so I’ve outlived three presidents in this job, but its time to go. You know the same way divine guidance kind of brought me here, divine guidance kind of says it’s time to go.”
Dr. Butts attributes his assuming the presidency at SUNY Old Westbury as an act of God. He said: “I see the whole scenario as a hand of divine guidance because I didn’t pursue it, it came to me and the move into the position was easy and unobstructed, it moved right along.” He told the story of how three men from the State University of New York showed up at his church one Sunday and shocked him when they asked him to become the president of SUNY Old Westbury. You can imagine his surprise when he thought they’d come to ask him about his teaching career at Old Westbury as he had been a visiting professor here and gave lectures on black history. However, they had come to ask for much more. “I said yes, I was shocked, I thought I could do the job, even though I had no prior academic administrative experience,” he said.
He added that at first it was hard convincing people that he did not just accept the role for political advantage. He said that he heard statements such as: “‘He’s just going to be here for three months or a year or two then he’s going to go back to the city and run for office.’”
Dr. Butts added that at the time running for office was not his intention and that he was here to help the college. He recalled one of his interviews with Newsday early on in his career when they questioned why he would want to come to a dying college and laughingly he said, “You’ve got the right one because I’m in the resurrection business.”
Dr. Butts refers to his work at SUNY Old Westbury as a labor of love and says it taught him a lot about patience, long-suffering, and kindness. He also learned a lot about Long Island that he did not know.
As President of Old Westbury he has been responsible for the total administration of the affairs of the college — for securing extra money and fundraising to supplement what the state provides to the college. He also is required to maintain relationships with political leaders, including state senators, state assembly persons, the governor and even the federal government, just to name a few of his key roles.
His major responsibility, he said, is “to keep on the mission to make sure that people of all races, all ethnic origins, all sexes, and sexual orientations are brought together in a learning community that will benefit not only them individually but the community collectively and the world around them….” All of which, he added, has been challenging but doable only with the help of the faculty, the student body, the political leadership, and others.
Remembering his arrival at the school, Dr. Butts found an Old Westbury wildly different than the one today. “When I arrived at this school it was on the verge of being closed, the faculty had been disrespected, the foundation that is largely responsible for raising money for scholarships and faculty development was under investigation for nefarious activities…. When I arrived the dormitories were in terrible repair as was the Academic Village.”
Under his presidency SUNY OW has seen the building of new dorms, a new academic building, a student union (which did not exist prior to Dr. Butts becoming president), new parking lots, a new police building, graduate programs, and as Dr. Butts puts it “restored cooperation between administration and faculty to the level that anyone can expect.”
He proudly continued, “We’ve got the largest enrollment in the history of the college, we’ve improved technology 100-fold…we’ve become a model for many of our sister and brother schools in the state system as far as turn around and success.”
As his time as president is coming to an end, Dr. Butts shed light on some projects that he still hopes to finish before he leaves: “So now I’m working on, (I don’t know that it will be finished before I leave but I’ll try) a new science building, we need one, that is a 130 million dollar project, we need faculty housing so that we can attract diverse faculty who will not have to wrestle the high costs of living on Long Island.” He mentioned also the need for the building of more dorms which he believes is important for the comfort and accommodation of Old Westbury students.
With a hopeful expression, Dr. Butts realized that this opportunity was given to him when he was younger and that he must now help younger men and women have similar opportunities. He believes that someone can follow him and take the college even further than he ever dreamed. He also mentioned that he might run for mayor in the future, something he says he always mentions for good measure as people have assumed he’d run for the past forty years.
Dr. Butts ended the interview with this statement:
“I wish from this point that I could turn back my biological clock twenty years and start from here and go forward. I think that Old Westbury has an extremely bright future and when I arrived, I had nothing…there were no instructions…and with literally no academic experience. I sat down in a chair not as comfortable as this one and I sat back and waited for the phone to ring, and that’s how I started my presidency. I pray that the next person who comes to lead this college will have a calling and they will know what their assignment is even before they get here. If they keep the faith, they will have even greater success and I will be praying from the sidelines of the classroom.”
